Fantastic Fest Interview: A New Invite to The Birthday

Corey Feldman in a scene from The Birthday. The lost 2005 Fantastic Fest selection returns to screens this week for one night only in a restored version of the original festival cut with a special one-night event on Oct. 1 at select Alamo Drafthouses ahead of wider release on Oct. 11 (Image Courtesy of Drafthouse Films)

Ladies and gentlemen, actor Corey Feldman and filmmaker Eugenio Mira would like you to receive the gift of their film, The Birthday. Sorry it’s taken 20 years, but it was not their fault.

The supernatural comedy of manners premiered in December 2004 at the prestigious Sitges Festival Internacional de Cinema Fantàstic de Catalunya, and made made its U.S. debut the following September in Austin at the inaugural Fantastic Fest. It immediately became a defining part of the festival, with its mixture of genre and character elements all focused through the precise yet wild lens of Mira. At its heart is a quirky but captivating central performance from Feldman as Norman, a bumbling nice guy invited by his girlfriend, Alison (Erica Prior) to a family celebration at an expensive hotel. As the evening goes along, Norman finds his social anxiety is a lesser issue than the literal end of the world …

The Birthday was a smash at its U.S. premiere – and then it disappeared without a trace for 19 years.

Corey Feldman and Eugenio Mira on the Fantastic Fest red carpet for the screening of the restoration of their 'lost' 2004 film The Birthday (Photo by Wes Ells, courtesy of Fantastic Fest)

Now a 4K restoration has played at the 2024 Fantastic Fest, ahead of special screenings on Oct. 1, and a wider release on Oct. 11. It’s the completion of a circle that began in 2005, and Mira credits longtime Alamo Drafthouse and original Fantastic Fest programmer Kier-La Janisse for starting him on that journey. At that point, she was running the CineMuerte Film Festival in Vancouver and also happened to be a big fan of veteran genre character actor Jack Taylor, who plays Norman’s future father-in-law. Mira recalled, “She found out about the film and when she saw it, she went, ‘Maybe this checks all the boxes for Fantastic Fest.’” She reached out to Mira and asked if he wanted the film to scheduled as part of this new festival in Austin: As with everyone else, he knew nothing about the fest “but I knew about the Alamo Drafthouse, and Quentin Tarantino going to the original Alamo, and Robert Rodriguez and all that, I went, “oh my god, of course we have to do that. I was like a kid. I couldn’t believe it. Imagine a Spaniard coming to the heart of Texas and finding this community of amazing, crazy people.”

The film itself was a meeting of film geeks. Mira was 27, a Spanish indie filmmaker with a couple of shorts under his belt. Only six years older, Feldman was an icon from a cavalcade of eighties smashes like Stand by Me, The Lost Boys and The Goonies, and had even spoofed his childhood fame as an adult in 2003's Dickie Roberts: Former Child Star. Yet in 2004, the two artists saw in each other a connection to an older form of filmmaking. Mira said, “[Feldman] belongs to an age as an actor where showing range and capabilities was a thing.”

Hollywood veteran Feldman returned the compliment. “When I met Eugenio, what I saw was a young Spielberg. I met Spielberg at the same age – Steven was 25, 26 when I met him – and it was very much the same energy. That starburst happening of just pew-pew-pew-pew, firing on all synapses.”

Mira and Feldman immediately became fast friends and collaborators because of this shared connection. Feldman said, “There was a direct love for his appreciation of the art, his appreciation and knowledge of filmmaking, his knowledge of pop culture. He was on a par with all the guys who were film geeks from my world.”

Feldman had fallen in love with the script by Mira and Mikel Alvariño, which Mira described as being very influenced by the British drama Upstairs Downstairs. Norman wanders between the different floors of the hotel, from the ballroom to the boiler room, and that reflects how he doesn’t quite fit with any group: the blue-collar hotel workers, his middle-class college buddies out partying, or Alison’s blue-blood family. “It’s about class,” Mira said, “this guy who doesn’t belong here from a status point.”

The other vital element that Feldman saw in the script was that, while Norman looks like the central character, and the camera always follows him, it’s not his story. “The story is about the hotel, but it’s seen through the eyes of Norman.” Indeed, Norman is fairly oblivious to the occult terror taking place around him because he’s so fixated on his girlfriend and impressing her family. It’s only in the final act that he realizes what’s going on. “That’s what makes the pivot so impactful,” said Feldman. “Everyone’s been there at some point in their life where they go into a situation thinking one thing and they come out of it completely differently.”

While retaining those elements, Feldman was eager to help root the script more in the eighties Americana of the setting. The actor explained, “They’re coming from the perspective of Spain in the now, and not really aware of some of the pop culture references and what the common phrases were of the time.”

Eugenio Mira with the program from Fantastic Fest 2005, where The Birthday received its first US screening (Photo by Wes Ells, courtesy of Fantastic Fest)

Feldman’s conviction that he was working with a Spielberg-esque talent was confirmed on his first day on the set, which he compared to first night of a play – all the prep had been done, and it was just time to do the show. It comes back to Mira’s mantra that “there’s no such thing as overpreparing when it comes to directing.” As an accomplished composer and musician, his filmmaking has elements of choreography and composition to them, where the formal style is woven into the structure and the filming process. Mira eschewed traditional coverage for The Birthday, and instead uses long, single takes to construct scenes and emphasize the real-time elements of the story. To facilitate that length of shot, Mira said, “we built that whole set according to distances, so it makes sense. He walks in, he goes to the bar – that’s five steps. Mikel and I would change or add lines before we started production to make sure that it felt geographically accurate.”

However, that didn’t mean he was completely locked in before the camera rolled. Mira said, “If you do the homework, when you get in on the day you’re aware of what you can replace or what you can finesse. It’s like, if you have A-B-C, his B is ‘Wait a minute. What if instead of this I do that?’ and you go, ‘Wait a second. His B is, not only in the worst-case scenario as good as what I had before, it’s fresh, it’s coming from him, and as a whole is going to be more organic. I’m not missing anything, we’re adding something, and it’s not affecting our ability to get to what I’m building.’”

It’s a good thing Mira left that space for discovery as he had no clue what to expect from Feldman in this part – because the actor kept his prep secret. Feldman called it “the big bomb,” the ultimate test of his working relationship with Mira. “’You’re not going to know what I’m going to do with this character until I get to the set,’ and he goes, ‘What? Don’t I need to hear it, don’t I need to see it, so I know what I’m working with?’ I said, ‘No. I don’t want you to, because I don’t want you to have some predisposed idea of what Norman should be, because if you have a predisposed idea of what Norman should be, then suddenly it wipes away my idea of what Norman should be.’”

There was method to the seeming madness. What Feldman saw in Norman is an empathetic but fundamentally awkward character who never quite fits in anywhere. So when Norman arrives at this very swanky party, dressed in an ill-fitting tuxedo with a blue ruffled shirt, speaking with a high-pitched lisp, of course he looks completely at out of place. All bold choices, but for Feldman it was all already in the script. The first time he read it, he said, “I know who Norman was. I felt him, I saw him. … Man, you feel for this guy because everything’s going wrong, no one cares, everyone’s shunning him. And everyone’s been there. Everyone’s been that odd man out, so it’s something everyone can relate to.”

However, for all the prep work this was a Spanish indie horror, and the experience of filming was a long way from Feldman's Hollywood background. Shot on sub-$1 million budget, Mira said, “It’s no secret that we didn’t have money.” So he had to call on every possible resource to get the movie made, such as calling fellow filmmaker Nacho Vigalondo to play a waiter in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it performance. “He’s the guy with a moustache and slicked, greasy hair, but he’s showing his back most of the time,” said Mira.

Vigalondo’s casting was a sign of how small the budget was, that anyone could be dragged in as an extra. Feldman recalled, “There weren’t enough guys, so we had to dress the up the dialogue coach [Alison Hughes] as a waiter. She had to dress up with a ponytail and a fake moustache.”

Corey Feldman and Eugenio Mira (right) with C. Robert Cargill, who wrote one of the very first reviews of The Birthday, at the 20th anniversary screening at Fantastic Fest (Photo by Jack Plunkett, courtesy of Fantastic Fest)

In many ways, The Birthday was a pivotal film for Fantastic Fest. In his review at the time, Massawyrm (aka future The Black Phone and Doctor Strange writer C. Robert Cargill) called it "a magnificently shot, brilliantly designed film that just gets stranger and stranger as it progresses – and will either delight you or drive you right up the fucking wall,” which may be the very definition of a Fantastic Fest movie. It also opened the door to bring Spanish genre cinema to the festival, leading two years later to The Birthday extra and future FF regular Vigalondo bringing the breakout Timecrimes to the fest. (No coincidence, Mira composed the score for that film under his cinematic nom de guerre Chucky Namanera). Moreover, coming to Fantastic Fest was a game changing experience for Mira, who called it “the first time that I experienced validation.”

But The Birthday never really got a chance for further validation, and Mira knew there were problems with the release even before he got to Fantastic Fest in 2005. He and Feldman were baffled about the producers’ sales strategy. Finally after its initial festival run it was only released in a handful of European markets in a bastardized 95-minute cut that lost the real-time flow. No U.S. release at all – until now.

After all these years, Mira was able to get hold of the rights and the raw materials for the film. Fully restored to its original 117-minute run time, and in 4K for the first time, after its Fantastic Fest screening it will get a special one-night celebration at 20 Alamo Drafthouses around the country, followed by a wider release on Oct. 11. But as with everything about The Birthday, it was a long, slow process. Mira said that there had been offers on the table for years, and around a decade ago he started to think about it seriously – but then he found out that the only materials available were mini-DV tapes that wouldn’t be high enough quality for any kind of release. “I started this Indiana Jones thing,” he said. “I started going into warehouses between Barcelona and Madrid, making phone calls. It’s been an exhumation.”

“A funny little thread of film over here, a little sound reel over there,” added Feldman, “and that’s what puts him in the league of Kubrick and Spielberg. They care the same way.”

Now the hunt is complete, and after months of restoration work overseen by Mira, and the support of Feldman superfans like Jordan Peele, The Birthday is back on the big screen. For Feldman, it’s a fulfillment of a prediction he shared with Mira back in 2005. “Whether it's today, whether it's a year, or whether its 20 years from now, I guarantee you that, whether it's because your career finally blows up the way it should, whether my career has a resurgence, or maybe a little bit of both, somehow, someway this movie will find its way into theatres.”

The Birthday screens at Alamo Drafthouses around the country Oct. 1, including the Alamo Lakeline, South Lamar, and Village in Austin, followed by a release on Oct. 11 at select cinemas. Find more info at drafthousefilms.com.

The Birthday

Spain, 2004, 117 min.
4K restoration anniversary screening

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