In Conversation: ‘Crumb Catcher’ Director Chris Skotchdopole
by Nirica Srinivasan
In Chris Skotchdopole’s 2024 debut feature film, Crumb Catcher, newlyweds Shane and Leah (played by Rigo Garay and Ella Rae Peck) are in for the honeymoon from hell. After a rocky start to their marriage—Shane wakes up the morning after their wedding with little memory of the previous night—they make their way to a tucked-away house, perfect for a cozy getaway (or a horror movie). But they’re surprised by John (John Speredakos), the overzealous waiter from their wedding, and his wife Rose (Lorraine Farris), who are excited to have an unwilling audience to their latest invention—the titular crumb catcher.
Crumb Catcher works with an absurd premise—what if a business pitch went really, really wrong?—and pushes it as far as it’ll go, exploring rocky relationships, the nature of blackmail, and the anxieties underlying American society. I spoke with Chris Skotchdopole about the inspirations for his debut feature film, writing from a place of character, and what goes into a great car chase scene.
This interview has been edited for clarity and may contain spoilers.
What was the seed of Crumb Catcher? Did you always know you wanted to do a home invasion movie?
No, not really—someone said it in a review, and that was the first time I had thought about it as a home invasion movie. I do like Funny Games and I like being compared to it, because I love that movie, but it wasn’t necessarily a thought when I was writing it.
I usually start from a place of character and then let things build. I don’t really have a grand scheme as to what’s going to happen. With the actual crumb catcher of it all, I feel like there’s an anticipation of, “Oh, you had this idea of this invention.” But it really wasn’t like that. It sort of came from John’s voice and his intense energy. I just thought that he was a dreamer, and he would have had some kind of mission that was not money-based—that was a bigger idea that was essentially going to fix the way he interacts with people because I feel like he’s so overbearing as a person talking all the time. I like that this product is in some way course-correcting—you know, like, “Oh yeah, that pesky waiter doesn’t need to bother you anymore.” He’s aware of his presence enough to put all those anxieties into this thing that he’s doing.
So that’s kind of where it comes from. And then you just start having fun with that idea, and it keeps growing. But I do think there’s a fallacy that you have some eureka moment where you get the big idea thing. For me, when I’m working on stuff, it’s always little ideas that then retroactively feel significant. More often than not, I have a bunch of piles of ideas, and I’m just trying to string them together in some sort of coherent way.
All of the characters are in some ways sympathetic—there are axes of race and gender and class in how they interact with each other. How did you balance that—making them all feel real, while also not painting anyone out to be the villain in a big way? (Until, I guess, a certain point where it tips over.)
I feel like, for anyone in your life that you feel is an antagonist or has done you significant harm, if you sat in their shoes, you would kind of understand where they came from. A lot of times in my personal life, I’ll have so much hatred for someone, but then when you talk to them and you see things from their perspective, you think, “Oh, okay, I see how you came to that conclusion.” I feel like that’s always what I’m trying to get at—I just don’t think that there are real bad guys. I think that there are people who are misunderstood, and then once they feel the pressure of the outside world being like, “You’re bad, you’re bad,” it becomes like, “Oh, right, I’m fucking bad, great.” And that’s sort of where John is at the end. But I always think of it as, this is John on his worst day, but on his best day, he’d be fine. He’d be like your uncle that says weird jokes. It’s just always trying to see things from their perspective.
Was that hard to do with these characters?
I feel like it’s just where I start from—I need to understand why they’re even standing in the room. There’s this book that I always reference, a big screenwriting book that people talk about, Save The Cat. There’s this anecdote in it: At the beginning of every movie, you should have a character save a cat in some way, because that puts the character on the side of the audience, to make them likable … And I’ve always found that particular thing to be obnoxious—it feels like you’re catering to the audience, and I never want to feel like I’m catering. I want to feel like I’m just showing them something that is.
When speaking of characters, I always have this thought—when you’re walking on a beach, and you find driftwood or something, and you see the beautiful crevices where the sand and the ocean have been breaking it down. You look at it and you don’t really question why it’s like that. It’s just this kind of beautiful artifact. For me, the movies I always aspire to be like, are those movies where they’re just these artifacts that are. I try to do that with characters where this is just who they genuinely are, and this is what they would do, and you’re just watching something that is as opposed to something that was designed.
It takes the audience seriously.
Yeah, exactly. One of my thoughts of this movie was that I always wanted it to be from Shane’s perspective. So you don’t really ever get Rose’s side of it. You only see what he sees of Rose’s side. It’s not till the end that he gets closer to her, that you see what she’s actually going through. She seems like a villain the whole movie, and then it’s revealed through his eyes because of his understanding of her. I’ve always been really interested in when you’re on a subway or you’re in a grocery store and you see a couple arguing. You only get this little bit of information, but they have a whole life and a whole set of issues that you’re unaware of. That’s sort of how I wanted to put everyone in the story. When the story moves in these absurdist movements, it’s really important to keep a grounded perspective, so that you buy it. If you cut to Rose in the car talking about something, and then you went back [to Shane’s perspective], you would have broken the spell.
That’s actually connected to my next question—Crumb Catcher pushes an absurd premise further and further. How did you balance that with keeping it believable?
Through that perspective. I think it’s like with dreams. They normally start out where I’m with a group of friends, and then they leave, and then I walk outside, and then there’s this house on fire, and then I walk into the house, and then there’s this woman inside. It looks like my mother. She’s on a refrigerator … It’s not until you wake up from a dream that you’re like, “What the—what was that!”
I think a lot of times as people are seeing the film, they’re like, “What the fuck was going on?” And I think, “But you bought it the whole way as you were watching it!” It’s like a dream in that way. I think that I’m always trying to stretch that. I thought of David Lynch, not directly in relation to this movie, but I love how he’s able to do that, like with Blue Velvet, when he finds the ear in the ground. You’re like, “Okay, I buy that.” You’re brought into this strange world that you didn’t know existed. Charlie Kaufman as well.
I love the car chase in this movie so much—the way it puts you in the perspective of a drunk driver, but also there was something so menacing about the approaching headlights behind him. I’d love to hear more about how that was to film.
What helped us, on a smaller scale, to keep it terrifying, was that I never break perspective from Shane. I think if you were to cut to John, and then cut to Shane, and then you see the headlights, you wouldn’t really be that scared of those headlights. I think even when we cut outside of the car, I’m always trying to do something that reflects where his mind is, or what he’s feeling—he looks outside, and the camera whips out to see the thing, and then it comes back into his perspective. That was sort of a rule that I kept the whole movie and I really tried never to break it.
More technically speaking, one of the most difficult things was the search for roads with lights! I feel like it’s such a staple of horror movies that when you’re driving on a road, there’s lamps, and in upstate New York where we shot, they just don’t exist. And if they do exist, there’s a Walmart on that block. I spent a good couple weeks on Google Maps, pointing the camera up, and just scrolling, scrolling, scrolling, going through all of the roads in the area. We ended up finding this one, and we were able to shut down that road for the whole night, which was amazing. We had a lot of control. We shot it over three nights, and I went through this process of deciding how to shoot it. There’s three different processes of what we used—one was a Russian arm, which is kind of like a jib arm, that you can use to do all the fancy stuff. And then we did a day of pulling them in a car as they’re driving with stunt drivers behind. And then we did a day of Poor Man's Process where the car is static and you’re just having lights go by. That was another reason why we really needed the lights, to create a sense of speed. It’s sort of the Jurassic Park way of going about it, where there’s CGI, then there’s puppetry, and you don’t really know what you’re looking at because the magic trick changes all the time. Before you even have a second to think, “Is that Poor Man’s Process?” you’re already jumping to something that clearly is not.
The Poor Man's Process stuff was amazing because you can be extremely specific in what you want, whereas with the other stuff, you’re dealing with a lot of heavy objects. I spent a good three months, or something like that, making this 30-page document that I gave to everyone, and it detailed every shot. Obviously, things change and you have to adapt, and beautiful things happen, but there was a lot of preparation. I don’t think I’ve ever been more prepared than I was for that day because I just knew how much was at stake in terms of putting a lot of money towards something. Sometimes you constantly feel like you’re dealing with chaos and nothing ever goes your way. I really like the car chase—it was one of the days where it was like everything worked out. It was a rare exception in filming.
You cite Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf as inspiration. How did that come to be? How did you approach using that influence in whatever way you did?
I’ve always loved that movie—from a story perspective. I love the writing, but I also love the way Nichols moves the camera so much. It’s about this younger couple who is, I think, on the verge of a toxic relationship. And then we have this couple that comes in, and they’re clearly just not working as a married couple. I like this thought that it was this funhouse mirror version of who they could be.
I think what [Crumb Catcher] at its core really is, is about a man, Shane, who can’t accept love from anybody. He can’t accept love from the people who are publishing his book, from his wife, from his father, who wants to love him. He can’t. He rejects all support of himself because he doesn’t feel like he deserves it. And then you have John, who knows he deserves it, but gets no love from anybody, and he’s just begging for it the whole movie. Then there’s Rose, who’s done with her husband—her whole thing is she just wants to get out of here, get the money and get out and leave this guy and be done with this part of her life. And Leah is the opposite of that. I liked this idea that they’re getting a glimpse of what life could be if you don’t start talking about your issues … I think if I’m thinking about the movie as simplistically as possible, which is a great way to think about something when you’re directing it, is it starts as a movie about these people on their wedding day taking pictures, and this should be the moment of their life where they are the truest and the most happy and the most in love. It’s the picture that’s going to be on the mantle. It’s the picture that your family is going to have printed. But they’re oceans apart from each other.
And then at the end of the movie, you find them tortured by this device, and this night, to finally find them actually in love. The journey for them was to accept each other’s love, and now, actually, the truest that they are to each other is when they’re dying. It took all this insanity to break them down to finally be like, “Look at what you’ve got.”
It’s an incredible last shot.
I love it. It was something that was found when we were shooting. I just remember being like, “I think that’s the end of the movie.” I always knew it was about them finding each other, but I really love that shot. There’s something so poetic about it.
