Prince Bagdasarian is a Los Angeles based filmmaker, writer-director of the award winning action crime features, Abducted (2018) and Abstraction (2013), and the co-producer of the acclaimed sci-fi film, 5th Passenger (2017). All of Bagdasarian’s films have garnered dozens of award nominations and wins at various festivals, and have secured worldwide distribution. For over a decade, Bagdasarian has also operated his own production company and worked extensively in production and post, on over a hundred feature films, such as Sylvester Stallone’s Rambo (2008) and Werner Herzog’s Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (2009).
His latest movie Dashing Through the Snow is a Christmas set action comedy starring Gillian White, Scottie Thompson, David Koechner and Isaiah Washington.
Prince stopped by to chat with us about the film.
Today we’re going to be talking about your new movie Dashing Through the Snow. I watched the trailer and this looks awesome. It feels like a throwback to a classic old school action movie. What was it about it that made you want to direct?
Dashing Through the Snow pretty much came on my lap after I had my last production shut down in 2020 because of COVID. As we know, it shut down the planet and unfortunately, I couldn’t do my last film. And my previous one had just come out on Showtime Networks. It was a good premiere and had a bit of momentum, but I lost that momentum because of COVID. One of my friends was like, “hey, did you ever read that script that I sent you called Dashing Through the Snow? It’s a Christmas movie!” I’m like, “I don’t do Christmas movies”. He knows I just do action. He’s like, “yeah, but it’s a pretty cool all women cast, cool script”.
I hadn’t seen that script so, I looked through my emails, found it, read it. I thought it was great because it had these cool biblical undertones of some religious characters in there. But like kind of subtly just hidden within action type of villains and whatnot. It was an all-female cast, so my partner Hunter Ives and I got the script and with the writer, Stephen, we just pretty much hashed it out, and just kind of came up with new ideas. Then Stephen wrote a new version of the script with more male characters, more supporting characters and then it just grew from there. I thought it was hilarious. I thought the chemistry between the two lead female characters was insane. I’ve never seen any characters on screen like that. Buddy comedies are not my favorite, but now they are, so it was fun. It was cool. We started developing it and started piecing together.
I’m a huge fan of Gillian White and her husband, Michael Jai White. I know he choreographs the fights in this, but Gillian is no slouch when it comes to the fighting either. Can you talk about getting her involved?
Gillian White got attached and she was elated to read the script. She loved the Mary character and she’s pregnant the whole movie. She’s not only pregnant, but she’s also handcuffed for, I don’t know, about 75 percent of the film to the other lead character, the U.S. Marshall, played by Scottie Thompson. Gillian’s character, she has a lot of physical characteristics. She knows Krav Maga. She knows all these things and she hides herself in this cabin and she’s kind of like this cool character that did some bad business with her ex-husband and he’s a wanted fugitive. But she also becomes a fugitive because she’s hiding out for a year in this cabin and nobody knows where she is… until they do and then hence the U.S. Marshall shows up to take her. And so, she not only is protecting herself and her child, but she’s also protecting now the other character. She’s pretty much handcuffed to who came to protect her, who came to take her in and now she’s protecting her in a way. So, it’s kind of like this crazy dynamic and there’s all these twists and turns and comedy and whatnot. But yeah, Gillian was awesome. She took that role and ran with it. And she brought this whole POV, this whole thing that she implemented. She brought this whole metaphoric kind of like character dialogue in there also. They did a lot of improv, some of which you see in the trailer. Michael Jai, he was there every day supporting her and supporting me and the small crew we had. And so, we were kind of like a family crew together in a cabin. We stayed up in the mountains and shot the movie. Woke up in the morning. We made breakfast and hashed out the script ideas and came up with some cool stuff and then went and shot it. And did it again the next day and over again and it was amazing. The fact that Michael was willing to help me out on that aspect as well was a great advantage too.
What’s his approach to putting fight scenes together? I’ve spoken to him a few times before, so just from another person’s perspective.
Yeah. So, Mike, look, he has a lot of experience. He’s a veteran in the industry and there’s a lot of things that are done a certain way over the years. And he’s accustomed to certain things, but he likes breaking the rules as far as doing things creatively and doing things differently and so we improvised. We improvised on what we had because it’s a small budget, right? So, you have to come up with creative ideas and creative angles, creative this, and just put minds together and do all that stuff. And at the same time, he has stories.
Mike has a lot of stories. He’s sitting around a lot and he’s telling us all these stories and whatnot, some of which get implemented to what we’re shooting. Some of the things that he has experience from come and it impacts how we shoot the film. One major thing that he helped out a lot on, Mike did, was the elf fights. We had a lot of little people running around and doing these crazy action sequences with these little guys flying everywhere (laughs). But we had to make sure the angles are right. How do you fight little people with sticks? And then two girls are handcuffed at the same time simultaneously in confined spaces. So, there’s all these elements and stuff. It was cool. Mike definitely put his expertise to use on the film, for sure.
What I saw from the trailer is that you look like you had some good stunts. It looks like there’s some practical stuff going on there. Because you’re not dealing with a huge budget, you’re forced to do things for real rather than using big effects. Would you say that was the case?
Yeah, for sure. Look, I’m a big fan of practical stunts as much as possible and we grew up on action movies. I grew up on action movies and it was one of my favorites. My dad used to watch all these cool action films that inspired me and whatnot. So, they didn’t have VFX. They didn’t have muzzle flashes. They didn’t have a lot of these AI tools now that we have. So, sometimes practical just works much better. And if we add a little bit of VFX and sizzle it up and enhance it, great. It adds that much more. But I’d like to do everything as practical as possible. And so, yeah, the stunts were definitely a part of that. Including some of our car stuff outside, inside.
That’s what I saw. It was like somebody climbing onto a car from the trailer.
Yeah, there’s also an airplane scene towards the third act of the film where we have a pilot flying the plane, driving the plane by the runway. And we also have one of the actresses climbing up on the side as the plane is moving. She’s turning around and firing a gun back at our lead actress. Then we have a lead actress afterwards as the plane makes a turn. As it’s lining up to take off, our lead actress is chasing the plane now parallel to the runway. So, we have this whole crazy third act piece together like that and we did it practically. We got permission from the airport to let us do all that stuff and it was pretty crazy.
Oh, that’s great. Because you know it’s just going to look better every time. It’s just going to look more convincing. It’s not going to date the way CG effects can within five years.
I mean, you can do that, right? But yeah, like you said, years later, it might not hold up.
It looked from the trailer that David Koechner is playing a villain which is cool. I just picture him from Anchorman and comedy movies in general. But I always thought there was great potential there for him to play a bad guy. Can you tell us a little bit about his character without any spoilers?
Without any spoilers. So, David Koechner ‘s character is the lead of those elves that come in. So, he comes in with his henchmen of elves and he’s a hitman hired to take out our lead Gillian White’s character. And so, as Joe is there protecting Mary, they are confined in this house and David’s there. He gets into some crazy stuff with one of our other Bounty Hunter characters played by Hunter Ives. And the thing with him is he’s funny, right? Like he’s funny. So, we kind of implemented his comedic characters and his undertone of comedy. And we implemented it into his hitman serious character. Because, again, it’s a comedy but it’s also action. So, without giving too much away, I would say he’s just a bad shot. He’s really a bad shot (laughs). But it’s cool. It’s definitely a different role for him and I think one that everybody is going to definitely admire.
I think they will because we’ve seen comedians playing villains before and they’re always very good at it. They’re used to showing the light side but they get to show some darker sides of their personalities playing these kinds of roles. I’m looking forward to seeing him. I always thought he would be good in this kind of role.
Yeah, you’re right. Like Robin Williams, right?
Yes. Ends up being much better sometimes.
You mentioned that there was improvisation. How important is improvisation for your creative process in general?
I’m not married to the script. I think improv is very, very important because sometimes that’s where you get the best stuff. And in my experience, this would be my fourth feature film directed and done tons of projects over the years and stuff. I think what I’ve seen from improv has been it usually ends up in the edit, as opposed to a lot of the scripted stuff sometimes gets put on the cutting room floor.
Even though I haven’t seen the film yet, I am a huge fan of how music plays a part in movies like the score and songs. What role does music play in shaping the film’s atmosphere?
I think that’s super important. Just as much as improv plays a key factor in production, I think during post-production, music drives the film. Look, I say there’s three times you make the movie, right? Once you write it, once you direct it, and once you edit it. And fortunately, and unfortunately on this film, I did it again for all three of those. Not so much on the writing side, but we let Stephen handle that. But on the edit, because it was a low budget, I was like, OK, well, we got to piece it together. We got to get it out by Christmas this year. So, I had to do what I have to do. But then I have a team that comes in and does the colour and does all these things. And then once it gets to music, it becomes kind of like you can ruin the movie. You can really ruin the movie if you don’t get it right. And from the likes of having people; I have a friend who’s a composer of mine. He composed my other scripts, other films. He admired and he worked under Hans Zimmer a lot. So, he got a lot of inspiration from that and I think at the time that we did my first film, he had done Dark Knight, if I’m not mistaken, around that time. He brought a lot of the Dark Knight ticking clock kind of like countdown scenarios from my heist film that I did. And funnily enough, Dark Knight had a heist film opening, so it was like a perfect example of how we want to do this, right? So, I’ve been working with him a lot. His name is Ramin and Ramin was not available to do this film on this round. So, he referred his co-composer on my other films as well, Navid Hejazi. And so, Navid came in and just knocked it out.
It was pretty crazy because on this one; it’s kind of like bringing in that Hans Zimmer-ish undertone of the little ticking time, the thriller aspect of the music. But it’s also like we have to remember it’s a comedy as well. It’s also a Christmas comedy. So, not only are we going to do another level layer of Christmassy jingles and this and that, we have to kind of make it a little bit comedic without going and losing the action thriller aspect of it. When you hear it, you’ll definitely know what I’m talking about. It’s almost like some of the characters even have their own themes, like the elves, for example. Every time you see the elves, they have a little theme of like this kind of thing.
The leitmotif.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, it’s pretty amazing, pretty epic and when you hear it in a theatre, it’s even better.
Who would you say are the biggest directors or filmmakers that have influenced you and this film?
I think I want to say from the top of my head, I’d say Michael Mann has been a pretty big influence. Ridley Scott has been a big influence. A lot of my films that I initially started, the reason I started making these films, like when I started writing these films, I started on heist films. And so, I don’t know what led me to write one heist film, then another heist film. It’s just it’s like these characters in heist films usually think they’re doing the right thing. And sometimes there’s villains in films where they think they’re right. They don’t think they’re doing the bad thing. They don’t think they’re villains. Most of them.
That’s when they’re interesting.
Right. So, heist films kind of rub me that way. Growing up on movies like Thief with Michael Mann directed and then he later did Heat which is one of my all time favorites.
Thief is maybe one of my all-time favorites. I love Thief. I think it’s underrated.
It is underrated. Yes. I keep forgetting that actor’s name. What’s his name?
James Caan.
James Caan. There you go. Godfather. How could I forget? (laughs) I was a big fan of that film and then I’ve just been following his work.He worked with Tom Cruise later and whatnot. It’s just that the feel of those films and the characters. I don’t know. I just admired him. So, I’ve been a big fan of that and obviously Ridley Scott later. But there’s so many directors but those are a few that have been my fave and kind of inspire me to make these films because I’ve already made the thrillers, I’ve already made the action thrillers and stuff like that. Now I’m leaning more towards, for some odd reason, action comedy. Maybe it’s because I have kids now, so it’s like I want them to see these films as well. And maybe I don’t want them to have those headshots and gunshots and blood splatters and those explicit scenes and F-bombs round every corner. Just want to make the action cool, fun, not family friendly, I would say but to a certain degree, kids can still watch it.
How would you like the film to resonate with audiences?
I think if I had to sum it up, I think it should be a film that everybody should watch every Christmas and it would be a favorite for people. How they tune into A Christmas Story or Elf. I don’t know if you guys watch A Christmas Story or Elf?
I watch Violent Night or Die Hard…
Right. Yeah. So, think of it this way. If you’re watching that, this is pretty much the PG-13 version of Violent Night in a way. So, the way I would say this film is, it’s kind of like a Die Hard meets Violent Night meets Home Alone. That’s pretty much how I would sum this up. And it’s all self-contained, like Die Hard or like Home Alone and there’s threats, outside threats coming in. But it’s all Christmas. It’s all happy dandy. It’s supposed to be a holiday that everybody loves. But it just gives you a different perspective of what Christmas is and it’s just badass. It’s just cool. Another thing is like Christmas in July. I don’t know if it’s if it’s a thing out there…
I’m in Toronto.
Yeah. Do you guys have Christmas in July?
Not that I know of (laughs).
Apparently, people watch more Christmas films in July than they watch Christmas.
That’s a thing in Scotland back home. My mum watches them all the time on the Hallmark channel or whatever. She watches the Christmas in July movies. So, it is a thing. Yeah.
I don’t know. I just found this out because we just got distribution for this film and we’re doing worldwide streaming. It’s coming out November 13th on transactional VOD. So, it’ll be on Apple TV, Amazon and a couple other platforms. And then around Christmas, right before Christmas, it’s going to be available on like ad-based VOD video on demand.
Is there likely to be a chance for physical release? I’m a DVD, Blu-ray, 4K guy.
They talked about it. But the deal we made with the streamer; they’re strictly doing streaming. And they want to do that only because they can hit all the targets all at the same time because of a small window of opportunity of release that we have for Christmas. I think they would have considered that or we would have had more distribution considered on physical aspects. I think one of them mentioned this, but because there’s no way to do it in a short period of time, they wouldn’t even been able to hit that target.
I think like five years ago, maybe also physical media is just not quite what it once was as well.
I was a big fan, too, because my first film, Abstraction, with Eric Roberts and Ken Davitian, that came out in 2013. I think I still have a box of DVDs.
Oh I have bookcases full of movies (laughs) OK, I will let you go. Thanks very much for taking the time to chat.
Thanks very much.