Interview With Filmmaker Richard Burgin

Writer/Filmmaker/Visual Artist Richard Burgin has launched his website Burgin World, featuring Interviews, Episodes of The Cinesin Show, Shorts, Art and visitors can also purchase copies of his award-winning film “Fang” on BLU-RAY and DVD.

Writer/Director Richard Burgin’s horror thriller “Fang” has received 13 wins and 15 nominations at film festivals around the United States. Writer/Director Richard Burgin is a passionate, dedicated filmmaker with an obsessive work ethic and wild imagination, which can be seen in his feature length psychological thriller debut “Fang”.

“Fang” – After living with the stress of his mother’s chronic illness, and getting bitten by a rat in his house, a young autistic man starts slowly turning into a rat.

Plot Summary

 It’s winter in Chicago and Billy Cochran (Dylan LaRay) can’t stop alienating the people around him. His mother Gina (Lynn Lowry- The Crazies, Shivers, Cat People) is in and out of the hospital and her mind is breaking down, caught between her glory days as a Southern belle and her current state of decay. One night, Billy gets an unexpected visitor: a rat that springs out of his bathroom and bites him. At first, everything seems okay. Billy comes home, drowsy from the tetanus shot, and bonds with Gina’s lovely new caregiver Myra (Jess Paul). Then the rat fur appears. It grows out of Billy’s skin, then goes away like it was never there. The more Billy looks in the mirror and scratches, the more he’s forced to face the unthinkable: he might be turning into a rat. Billy is plunged into a waking nightmare where he slowly discovers the truth about himself as he unleashes the ferocious depths of the human and rodent soul.

We had a chat with Richard Burgin about his influences and his hit movie ‘Fang”.

Which directors have influenced you most of all and why?

It’s funny because I try to watch as many different kinds of movies as possible, not just horror, but I still end up being influenced the most by horror.  When I was 14, I watched The Shining for the first time.  I had never seen anything like that before.  It was something I had wondered about for so long, seeing Jack Nicholson’s crazy looking picture on the cover.  I remember thinking, “What is this movie?”  Then I watched it, and it started me down a path of discovering directors.  I would say that Kubrick, Lynch, Hitchcock, Scorsese, and David Cronenberg have influenced me the most after watching their movies so many times.

What interested you in the horror genre of films?

I guess my imagination did.  I can imagine terrible things very easily.  For me, horror movies are more about entertainment than actually getting scared.  I used to get scared pretty easily when I was a kid, before I had seen over 1,000 movies.  It’s still exciting to see characters in life or death situations, and I think horror can be really creative.  Writers, directors, musicians, and special effects artists keep having to come up with new ways to make it fresh.  Horror is like a creature with many heads, like Medusa trying to seduce you to go down to the underworld.  When one of the heads gets stale, another head sprouts up with a new nightmarish twist.

What do you hope people will walk away with after seeing FANG?

I don’t have a specific message that I wanted Fang to have.  I want people to watch Fang and have their own ideas about what the movie means, or what they think of the movie.  It’s been really interesting for me to meet people who watched Fang and talk to them about it.  So many times, people look at it in a very different way from me.  I hope Fang has some kind of impact on everyone who watches it.  Even when someone hates the movie, I like that more than if they were indifferent about it.

What were your biggest challenges in filming FANG? What was the most fun?

Post-production was definitely the longest and most challenging part, especially dealing with the audio.  I’m really grateful for everyone who worked on the Fang audio to get it right, when that can be one of the most tedious and frustrating jobs.  There’s also the uncertainty of post-production.  For Fang, it was two and a half years of not knowing when exactly it would get finished.  The most fun part for me was being on set with the incredibly talented cast and crew of Fang.  It was 23 long days of filming in January and February 2020, with very cold weather, right before the pandemic started, and it was the most I’ve had in 23 days.  There’s a wonderful kind of energy on set when everyone is working together to make the movie.  It’s a major adrenaline rush to watch the movie come to life through the camera monitor.

You have a podcast? Please tell us about the premise of it ?

Oh yeah.  My podcast is called The Cinesin Show.  My girlfriend Isabela Rangel hosts it with me, and she does an excellent job writing the intros for each episode.  The Cinesin Show is a movie discussion podcast where we pick a movie and talk about it, sometimes with a guest.  We’ve mostly talked about horror movies on Cinesin, but we’ve been branching out more into sci-fi in our episodes this year.  It’s a very fun project for me.

What will you be working on for the remainder of 2024 and in 2025 and beyond?

I have a pretty wild experimental feature in the works now called Mal Somnia.  It’s about a man who gets brought back to life with the power of electric light in a very questionable science experiment.  He gradually remembers more and more things from his past life.  When he remembers his traumatic memories and the full story of why he died, he starts to go insane.  I’ll be working on more short films, videos, and I’ll be writing, painting, doing marketing work, and developing more feature film ideas that I have in the works.  I’m planning out ideas for a TV show, too, which I have to keep under wraps for now.  2025 will be a very busy year for me!

What advice would you give someone who would like to accomplish what you already have?

You have to start somewhere.  I think for anyone who wants to make movies, it’s good to start making short videos at home.  Film with your phone horizontally or any other camera you have.  If I’ve learned anything from making Fang, it’s that you don’t want to get carried away when you’re starting out.  There’s a beauty in just making movies – or any other art form – because you feel like it, not because of dreams of getting rich and famous from it.  There are much easier ways to get rich, and probably easier ways to get famous, so doing it for that reason won’t get you too far.  Do what you feel passionate about, and find ways to stay passionate about it when things don’t go the way you want.

The official website for Richard Burgin may be found at https://www.burginworld.com