Does she have the ingredients to make it work?
Scream queen. Convention staple. Fanboy fantasy. Destroyer of worlds. Okay, she hasn’t gotten around to that last part yet, but there’s still plenty of time. In the interim, add one more job description beneath Tiffany Shepis’ IMDB page: Director.
This June she sits at the helm of The Devil’s Pies which reunites her with Rolfe Kanefsky (Nightmare Man) and producer Esther Goodstein. Filming begins in June under the Nightmare Works SKG production umbrella (original announcement here).
“I’ve worked on projects where it’s kids making movies straight out of film school, they don’t know what they’re doing,” Shepis laughs, talking to ShockTillYouDrop.com about cutting her teeth in the director’s chair. “By no means am I smarter than anybody but when you’re on 40 or 50 low budget film sets, you have to pitch in. So, going from set to set half of the time – it’s like the distribution company I [once] ran – you pick up stuff along the way and I did well. So I thought, why not try directing? It’s not a $5 million film, it’s small.”
And by small, she’s referring to the film’s $300 thousand budget. Shooting will commence in Arizona on what Shepis is describing as a mix of American Pie, Porky’s, “but with lots of blood and guts and lots of T ‘n A.” Inspiration for the story hit her during a stint on one movie in Georgia where she met two dim-witted co-stars. “These two were so funny and I thought, I’d love to make a movie around these two characters. I talked to Rolfe and told him, Let’s have the two stupidest girls on the planet just save the day. “
Kanefsky got a-crackin’ on the script and Shepis supervised. The script they hatched concerns two college blondes who uncover a devilish pact made by their sorority sisters. “I just want to have fun with it,” Shepis says.
Helping realize some of the demonic creations you’ll see in Pies is FX artist Michael Peterson and Hack/Slash‘s Tim Seeley who will be assisting on character design. “When I talked to [Tim] at Comic-Con about doing this project he was like, ‘Oh, I want to create the creature!’ He was just as excited to come on board it as I was. I have an idea of what I want my creature to look like but I’m going to let him go as far as he can within my budget range. I’m going to hook him up with our FX guys in a few weeks and see what we can do.”
Casting has begun via the film’s official site (actresses, scream queens and strippers are welcome!), although Shepis tells us casting breakdowns going out to agencies for some of the key players. “You can look at somebody’s resume and they may have done only one [other film] but that doesn’t scare me,” she adds. “They could come to the table and be hot, but also act decent. What it comes down to is if someone is not going to go out and promote a project or be excited about it, movies don’t go that far. I want girls who are entering their first movie, excited to do this and will tell everybody and their brother about the film when it’s done. If any crazy hot girls read ShockTillYouDrop.com…”
We presume there are, so submit your resume and pic to Shepis now! And stay tuned for more from the set of Pies in the near future.
Source: Ryan Rotten
