Duncan Skiles on The Clovehitch Killer

I think it is. Were you or anybody involved from the South because I thought that it captured the whole Middle America Southern Baptist vibe very well.
Yeah, I’m from Northwest Arkansas, so that’s sort of South/Midwest hybrid. The Bible Belt, a lot of churches. So I grew up in that kind of environment. I don’t come from a religious family but I grew up around it. When we were trying to figure out where to shoot, Upstate New York was an option but I was pretty set on doing something authentically Middle America because it has a totally different vibe.

Did you guys do the casting out of L.A.? Also did you have certain people in mind for the characters before they were cast?
We worked with Billy Hopkins who’s based out of New York and his partner Ashley Ingraham. They were great. A lot of the cast came through CAA, who kind of packaged the movie. They represented both Charlie Plummer and Dylan. I didn’t have anybody in mind, necessarily. I had some people in mind for Don, which was very difficult to cast. We got a lot of passes, either because the material was too dark or I didn’t have enough cache as a director. We spent a couple of years trying to get the movie to come together, people coming in and dropping out and Dylan got the script through his agent and was very excited about doing it. He recorded an audition tape for me to prove that he could convincingly transform into a Midwestern dad. I had my doubts because he’s a very handsome guy.

“He was in character the whole time so you had to call him Don on set…”

Yeah, I LOVE HIM so much so I wanted to ask how was it working with him.
Well he’s a very friendly guy, when meeting him, and very open. I was a little nervous because he’s a TV star and I’ve got a lot of respect for his acting. He’s also open to talking about ideas.

Once the project got going, he became very intense. He was in character the whole time so you had to call him Don on set and it took us a couple of days to get used to that; people accidentally calling him Dylan and he would remind us to call him Don, so he would walk and talk as Don for the entire shoot.