Turning a maybe not quite beloved but certainly important cult object like 1978's faux-snuff/faux-documentary Faces of Death into a multiplex-friendly narrative film with aspirations of taking on major social media companies is no small endeavor, creatively or culturally.
That's part of why it's taken director/co-writer Daniel Goldhaber and co-writer/producer Isa Mazzei's new Faces of Death almost two full years to make its way to public screens after being completed in early 2024.
So when I had the chance to sit down with the creatives, there was a lot I was curious about. With Faces of Death in particular, and within the context of their other films, another of which similarly brought a more obscure source to larger audiences, and all of which seek to say something about, to quote Goldhaber, "the way we live now."
[The interview has been edited for length and clarity.]
ScreenAnarchy: So for both HOW TO BLOW UP A PIPELINE and now FACES OF DEATH, y'all are sort of adapting these non-narrative works into narrative films and I'm curious what that process has looked like for you. I know they're very different sources, but were the processes similar? And which one did you write first? Because I know you were attached to FACES OF DEATH half a decade ago at this point.
Daniel Goldhaber: You did your homework! Yes. Faces predates Pipeline. We wrote Faces of Death during the pandemic in 2020. And then that process got slow. And then I read Pipeline and was like, "I think I can make this quickly" and wrote that with Ariela and Jordan. And I want to be a contemporary filmmaker. I think for both Isa and I, that's the case.
I think that IP is the domain of the contemporary filmmaker right now, by and large. And so I think that a lot of what we've thought about is like, "well, how can you make IP work for you? How can you do things with IP that other people aren't doing? How can you find IP where other people aren't finding IP?" Because I'll tell you this, if either of these movies we tried to make ... Like, if How to Blow Up a Pipeline was just an eco-terrorist thriller, I know of like 15 different eco-terrorist movies that didn't get made.
But we were able to say, "Well, this isn't our idea. This is: Andreas had this crazy
idea and we're just adapting it into a movie. I take no personal responsibility." That
worked, you know? And then everyone's like, "oh, there's an audience for this crazy radical thing." And I think it's not dissimilar from Faces.
We wouldn't have a 2,000 screen-wide release behind this movie if it wasn't about this thing that other people could understand and and connect to and so I think that that's the thing. At the same time like we were excited to like make a movie about Faces of Death. it was a really interesting assignment to [consider] where is Faces of Death today?
So you just touched on this, you're getting a multiplex release for FACES OF DEATH. And you invoked IP. But I do think it's very interesting that by making these last two films, I would say that the sources are "breaking containment." This book about "we should be doing sabotage," becoming a movie gets it on way more people's radar. And I know that you've talked to some press who have been like "So what is FACES OF DEATH?"
What has that been like for y'all both in terms of writing something that is this cult object for a wider audience and also what it's been like having these conversations with press writ large, not just press dedicated to horror. And also if there have been any parallels between conversations you all had about HOW TO BLOW UP A PIPELINE becoming a more, I'm going to use a scary word here, "mainstream" thing, and now FACES OF DEATH becoming more of a mainstream thing?
Isa Mazzei: I think what's interesting is that "faces of death" is incredibly mainstream. And I mean that in the term, "the faces of death." Like, you see death all the time online now, more and more and more every day. It's all over the internet.
Whether you seek it out or not, it will be pushed to you on a feed somewhere. You will see it. And you will see it in a super bizarre context. You're going to see an ad. Then you're going to see a thirst trap. Then you're going to see a picture of your friend's wedding. And then you're going to see a dead body. And it's kind of like that relationship to death that we want to talk about.
Because oftentimes people do ask, "oh, should I go seek out the original? I'm so scared." And my response would be like, "Why? You see worse stuff on your phone every day than the original Faces of Death." And I think that's the reality that people are still struggling to grapple with. This reality that back then you had to go seek it out. You had to find someone who had this VHS tape so you could watch it. And now, whether you want to or not, you're going to be seeing these things all the time.
Daniel Goldhaber: I think the biggest parallel also between the projects is just lthe censorship that we've faced with both of them. And I think I think on some level it's difficult making movies and telling stories that I think poke the bear of -- like with Faces for instance, we took three years to get into production after we finish the script, we make the movie, it tests well with audiences, we get pulled from South by Southwest three days before the festival lineup is announced.
Then it takes two years to find a distributor that's willing to champion the movie for what it is without watering it down, IFC picks up the movie, they're willing to give it the biggest release in the company's history. Then our trailer gets taken down off YouTube, our posters are pulled out of theaters. I think that it's just been indicative of -- despite the fact that this is a very entertaining and very scary and very fun movie -- I think there are things that the film says that people in positions of power don't want audiences to hear.
At the risk of being cynical, has any of the YouTube takedown of the original teaser and the "you're not allowed to have this poster in the lobby," has any of that been drummed up by PR on y'all's end or is all of that genuine?
Daniel Goldhaber: That's all real. And to be clear because I think that this was not 100% clear when it happened, the "censored" posters were not allowed in movie theaters. Like, it was not that we tried to put these bloody posters in movie theaters. The art was censored posters and the MPAA said, "no, thank you."
And we had this exact same thing happen when we were editing the movie. The MPAA took issue with doing the hammerhead scene with the scalp getting peeled back. They didn't like that part of it. And they forced us to cut about a second and a half off of that scalp scene.
The thing is, it reappears 15 minutes later when Charli [XCX] shows the exact thing on her phone to Barbie [Ferreira]. And the thing is, what did the MPA have a problem with? Seeing that material in a censorship context. Did they have a problem with the actual image? No, not at all. And I think that it's just indicative of the fact that people don't necessarily want the disproportionate, "oh, we allow violence, we don't allow sexual content in our media" to be pointed out. And they don't want this kind of hypocrisy of censorship to be indicted.
Isa Mazzei: I think another anecdote to that same point is the fact that we have real death in the movie. We went out and licensed real content that we put in the movie. And in order to do that it was all of these logistical hurdles of contracts and releases and lawyers and "how do we do this? How can we possibly do this?"
Then the reality that, when I open my phone, you know boom there's real death on my phone. And it's kind of the same thing where we're like "why are you censoring our trailer, why are you censoring our posters when I can just Google dead people?" It feels like a hypocrisy.
Not to get too in the weeds on industry stuff but I am very curious, given that it has been such a long road, what's that been like having the backing of a studio like Legendary? Because I know that they brought this to you and they're a big deal. So what has it been like being in this weird space of having a pretty major production company behind you and still struggling to get distribution?
Daniel Goldhaber: What I would ultimately say is that the movie is about a psychopathic serial killer who realizes that Faces of Death is valuable intellectual property and goes out and decides to remake it to generate as much attention as he can. I think the movie was financed by a major studio that also felt that there was exploitable IP in Faces of Death and maybe ultimately, at the end of the day, realized that there were some thematic things being explored in the movie that they found unpalatable.
And that can sometimes make bringing these things out into the world a very challenging venture. So more than anything, we're just very glad that IFC has championed the movie the way that they have and that they've really stood behind it to the fullest. And all that really matters is that audiences are able to see the vision as we initially intended it.
Turning more specifically to the movie, did y'all ever toy with the idea of creating a new narrative around a new Dr. Gröss? Or was it always going to be this meta thing where FACES OF DEATH (1978) exists within the universe?
Isa Mazzei: We kind of always knew that. We knew that when we went and watched it for the first time. We're too young to have grown up with Faces of Death. We actually had to go watch it for the first time. And I think we immediately recognized parts of it from things we had seen on the internet growing up. And recognizing that all of these kind of iconic videos were actually from the same source was very cool for us.
We kind of wanted to play with that, "what if someone our age, someone who also grew up seeing these little pieces wanted to kind of remake the movie? And what would that look like? And what would they do with that?" Looking at films like The House That Jack Built, for example, where a killer is kind of viewing themselves as some type of artist, some type of filmmaker. What does that look like? And that was kind of our starting point, so we always knew that it would be a film -- more than a remake or more than an adaptation- - it's really a film about Faces of Death.
So to that sort of remake within the universe quality. I think my favorite thing about the film is the mannequins being used for the recreations, which adds this really nice eerie quality and then also touches upon the themes of dehumanization. So was that there from the get-go? Or did y'all have other ideas about the stagings? How did the mannequins become these key figures in the recreations?
Daniel Goldhaber: It's really the first thing that we wrote in the movie. And because it comes from like, "Arthur is ultimately an alienated young man, so we can't have any accomplices. Right? But he's got to stage murders that require other people. So who are those people? Well, they're mannequins."
And I think that what was also very fun about Arthur is Arthur is a very horror literate guy. He is someone who has thought deeply about his own iconography. And part of that is he's putting little pieces of other horror movies in this. He's thinking about Manhunter. He's thinking about The Silence of the Lambs. He's thinking about Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer. Thinking about Maniac. He wants to be a part of that horror legacy.
And I think that it was fun to create a movie in which, even when we are homaging or nodding to other horror films: One, I think it's fairly subtle. And two, it stems from a character who's kind of being thoughtful about all these things.
Bouncing back to a more broad view, all three of the films y'all have made have been about the internet or social media in some way. And Daniel you already kind of spoke to this, but being a contemporary filmmaker. Do you think if you are a contemporary filmmaker there's a necessity to have social media be a part of your narrative?
Isa Mazzei: I don't feel like social media has to be a part of your narrative, but I feel like social media should exist in your films. If the characters aren't using it that's one thing. But I think ignoring it or pretending that it doesn't exist, pretending that phones don't exist, pretending that screens don't exist is kind of disingenuous to our everyday lived experience.
If you're making a film about the real world and the way people actually interact with each other, the way I interact with people is mostly on my phone. So I think avoiding screens completely feels a little bit like not being true to reality. If you're trying to portray reality, which not everyone is.
Daniel Goldhaber: Yeah, I don't think anybody needs to have anything in any movie. But as Isa's saying, I think that life and the fabric of our social life has changed so much over the last 15 years. And yet film has seemingly tried to remain ignorant of that and has not taken it seriously. And then movies are wondering why they're not taken seriously.
Well, movies are best when they're reflections of our world. And when they're not trying to interrogate the way we live now, when the way we live now is kind of a crazy sci-fi dystopia, then of course people are going to go elsewhere for the meaningful moving images.
The film opens April 10, 2026, only in theaters.