Finn Wolfhard, Billy Bryk talk “Hell of a Summer”

Photo Courtesy of Mira Kwon

“From the very inception of this movie, Finn (Wolfhard) and I had talked about this picture of Jason Schwartzmann and Wes Anderson in front of a ‘Rushmore’ tour bus, and they took it around and screened it places,” Billy Bryk said. “We were like, ‘Dude, if we could make a movie and go around with a bus and screen it for people, that would be the dream.’” 

Six years later, Bryk’s dream became a reality. Working with NEON, the studio known for recent releases like “The Monkey” and the Best Picture-winning “Anora,” Bryk and his co-writer and co-director Wolfhard acquired a bus to tour their new comedy-slasher film “Hell of a Summer” and present it to audiences. 

On Monday, March 31, The Panther participated in a college publication roundtable interview with Wolfhard and Bryk. During the discussion of all things “Hell of a Summer,” the writing and directing duo led the college journalists through their journey of conceiving, producing and presenting their debut feature film.

Wanting to create their own coming-of-age ensemble film or teen comedy, the creative duo tried to use horror to elevate comedy and create a film that meshed the two genres. Both filmmakers had experience in crafting comedy-slasher stories; they even discovered that two of their personal projects shared a premise about a person getting offended that they were at the bottom of a killer’s kill list. 

Why? Because the killer was killing their victims based on their level of hotness. 

“We both had written comedy-slashers also before we met each other, and it just felt like kind of the perfect place to start as a writing duo,” Wolfhard said. “(And it) allowed for us to have an opportunity to write parts for a younger cast, like a teen ensemble.” 

In “Hell of a Summer,” a group of summer camp counselors come face-to-face with a masked killer stalking their bunks and mess halls. In creating that problem for their characters, Bryk and Wolfhard faced problems of their own, including location scouting for the film’s “Camp Pineway” summer camp location. Wanting to film on the East Coast of Canada — but being disadvantaged by funding constraints and the COVID-19 pandemic — Bryk spent weeks searching for camps around Toronto after he and Wolfhard began cold-calling locations.

Why set a slasher at a summer camp? The decision came down to multiple desires, including their want to isolate a young ensemble cast of characters and their own romantic ideas of summer camp. With the project, they also desired to eliminate the idea of a divide between young and old generations. 

Bryk cites the difficulty in trying to write about generations you don’t understand. 

“We were sort of sick of reading scripts that felt like older people talking down on younger people and trying so hard to appeal to younger audiences,” Bryk said. “I think if you try so hard to write a story about some generation that you ‘don’t understand,’ you’re going to fail.” 

He continued: “The best way forward in our opinion is just to write something that feels relatable to you, and just trust that young people today still have these experiences that you had as a teenager.” 

Camp Pineway is an expansive setting, and that size is felt as characters traipse across grassy hills, run between bunk cabins and lounge around outdoor installations. Like the genre in which the film takes place, the duo wanted a mesh regarding how the camp was portrayed — they sought to make it generic yet also give it a history. 

Photo Courtesy of NEON

Both directors have always harbored dreams of being filmmakers, and they have experience in the industry as actors. Wolfhard and Bryk have roles in “Hell of a Summer,” playing camp counselors Chris and Bobby, respectively. When considering their characters, the two reviewed each one as if they were going to play that character. 

“We would take a pass at the script as if we were going to be playing each character, so then that way, selfishly you’d be like, ‘Oh, if I were to play this part, what would I want out of this? How could I make this a more dynamic and interesting character? What’s funny about them?’” Bryk said. “We sort of did that as an exercise with each part in the movie… just to be like, ‘Would this satisfy me as an actor? Does this satisfy me as a writer? Does this satisfy me as a filmmaker?’”  

How can you consider a script to be “finished?” It’s not a certainty, according to Bryk, but more of a feeling. After all, you can’t alter, continue or finish anything until a first draft exists — an answer that validated this screenwriter who has a 134-page coming-of-age “Dazed and Confused”-inspired first draft thesis screenplay in his files. 

“That idea of, ‘Of course you can kind of tinker with something forever…’ I think that is a dangerous side of that,” Bryk told The Panther. “At some point, you just have to trust yourself. When you feel happy with it, and other people have read it and they’re responding in ways that you feel like your intentions are reading for them, then I think you just have to let go of it.” 

To Bryk, looking back on a project is kind of like looking back on a poorly chosen tattoo. 

“I have this tattoo that I’m not really crazy about on my chest that’s stupid that I got when I was 18 years old,” Bryk said. “And I was like, ‘I want the movie to be a tattoo.’ This tattoo meant a lot to me at that time, and even though I don’t like it now, I like it as a symbol of something that I really cared about enough at that time to put it on my body forever.” 

He continued: “I feel the same way about films. It’s like, even now, this isn’t the film that I would make if I was making a film right now. But at that time, that was a story that we wanted to tell. That was the film that we could make in those circumstances. Just trusting that, even if you ‘grow up’ and you’re like, ‘Oh man, I shouldn't have done that,’ it doesn’t matter because at the time you wanted to.”

Wolfhard shared a similar sentiment towards the two’s collaborative process. 

“I think we had a pretty great experience collaborating together on this,” Wolfhard said. “It’s something that I feel like, especially for this movie, what’s really nice about the film but also for Billy and I and our friendship, we’re able to look back on this movie and think, ‘Oh, this is an artifact of who we were at this time and what our relationship was’ and continues to be.” 

He continued: “I just think a lot of it is having the wherewithal to just, at the end of the day, want to make each other laugh.” 

At the end of the roundtable, Wolfhard and Bryk provided kind parting words to the college journalists locked in on their computer screens. While their advice may have been personal, Wolfhard’s sentiment should be shared with all Chapman film student readers of The Panther. 

“When we were editing the film, I was really unsure about how it was going, and I really was like, ‘I don’t know if this is working’… and I called these (directors) and they basically said, ‘That never goes away, even if you’re a really talented filmmaker that’s making gigantic stuff for millions of dollars, you’ll still have doubt.’” 

He continued: “Just giving yourself grace to go through the motions of that and coming out of it the other side I think is really important.”