I got back nearly 10 years with filmmaker Ryan Prows, whose 2017 debut film Lowlife is one of the most substantial calling-card movies I’ve seen in my years as a film critic. I caught Lowlife when it world premiered at Fantasia, the genre film festival in Montreal, and aside from an entry in 2021’s V/H/S/94, his latest film, Night Patrol, is his first feature since then. Night Patrol incorporates multiple storylines concerning LAPD, gangs, family connections, legacy, and even vampires, all of which collide in the film’s final act, with standout performances from the likes of RJ Cyler, Jermaine Fowler, Justin Long, and Lowlife highlight Nicki Micheaux. It’s a violent work, for certain, but it also takes unexpected shifts in the plot and tone, while presenting a solid, in-your-face social commentary, and the result is a grounded, incredibly relevant work that is both inventive and troublingly familiar. Read my full review here.
The film currently has a limited run in theaters and should be on Shudder before too long. I had the chance to sit down with Prows last September at the Fantastic Fest in Austin, Texas, and we went through the various elements of Night Patrol and what it took him and his talented collection of writers to get this movie made. Please enjoy our conversation…
So you have the same group of writers that you had on Lowlife. How does that work, when you have so many people working together and throwing ideas out. Where does it begin? Who came up with the idea of Night Patrol, and how did it go from there?
It’s a cool process, because I write solo stuff as well. We equate it to the Wu-Tang model. It’s almost like a TV writers room. We get together and break story, go away, and two of the writers are a writing pair, and the other two are solo writers, so everyone goes and takes a bit. This is different than Lowlife, which was more about segments we could take away and work on, like short stories, and then we came back together and put them together. This time, we each took an act and would come back together and massage it as a team. The initial genesis of it—I’ve been writing my section of it since when we were doing all the festival stuff for Lowlife, so it’s been since then. We wanted to know what the next thing was, and the initial pitch was for a cop slasher movie or cop monster movie. How do you do them as the monster? Naturally, one of the other guys threw out the idea of doing vampire stuff, and then we started thinking about having fun with the mythology and start making your own rules, and it all flew from there.
Let’s dive into the mythology part of this. You have two different mythologies that feed off of each other. How much of the Zulu myth is legit and how much did you come up with?
It’s all based on some kind of foundational myth. It’s wasn’t specifically Zulu; it was more Afro-centric or different regions of vampire myth that goes around, different versions of vampires. When we landed on western Africa, their vampires have iron teeth; that’s where we came up with that.
It’s a great visual, especially for the poster.
Yeah, yeah. We knew that would be cool, so we started thinking about how you would visualize that and what that would look like now versus the myth version of it. And then we layered it with the mother character. What she has seen and researched and get her hands on, she’s not like an archeologist, so it’s about what she could pick up at a swap meet or order online to build the armor and weaponry. It was a fun challenge for our costumer and props people. It would be cool if it was all stuff we could source in LA and she could have access to.
Initially, we’re supposed to think she’s crazy with all of her conspiracy theories, plus she hates the police and white people. But it doesn’t take long for us to see her go from crazy lady to expert, to the one you go to for answers.
It’s all there, presented up front. And it’s interesting to me how the audience reads it and how accepting they are of the knowledge she’s giving. She literally prints pamphlets up saying “This is the answer to what we need to do,” and no one is listening to her.
It’s one of the reasons I can’t wait to see this again, so I can listen to her because she’s speaking truth the whole time. There’s also this idea, on both sides of this story, of generational trauma and the way that these younger people were raised to respect their parents and elders but also, they have issues with that. We always assume it’s the younger generation that is going to fix everything, but they end up falling back into old patterns. Talk about weaving that into your story.
That’s one of those subtextual, thematic things that I need to go to way more therapy for . As we were building the story and script, that was always a big part of it. It’s not just coming at it from all sides, but how do you humanize all sides as well. Everyone has their family beef and personal issues, and then there are greater systems that are in place of that, whether that’s familial, the patriarchy, the criminal justice system. But then you can’t make a movie about all that stuff, so then it’s like how do you get specific and have anchor characters you care about in the middle of the stew of everything else.
I wouldn’t say you were hiding any of these more important messages behind the genre stuff.
Genre sure is nice, though .
It does help, for sure. With that in mind, are you concerned that some people might see Night Patrol as Sinners adjacent, not just because of the vampire stuff but because both start out as one thing and turn into something different by way of a complete left turn.
In feels in the same space as what people were saying about Lowlife as well, comparing it to early Tarantino stuff, and I’m not going to fight that. If you’re going to tell me that this reminds you of Sinners or that it gives you context coming into what we’re doing, that’s awesome.
One of the best things about entering the genre world is that you get to make up your own rules, especially about the vampire stuff…
That’s the funnest part!
You mentioned the iron teeth earlier, but at one point, Justin’s face just opens up. Tell me about that process and how much fun that was.
Yeah, I’ve always been a fan of vampire movies and horror movies in general. Part of the fun is introducing experts on all sides of it, and we hear from the vampires setting rules and the vampire hunters setting rules and everything in between. And it comes down to how do you up the expectations, keep it fresh, keep it fun. When we were shooting and prepping for it, everyone was throwing in ideas, and we were like “Are we bringing in contact lenses or fangs? What are we doing?” And it became a question of how do you push it and find our way into it that doesn’t detract or become doing something for the sake of it. How does it underline everything and how does it make it feel fresh?
It also looks cool; you shouldn’t undersell the value in that.
For sure. CM Punk in cop body armor and fangs is a pretty rad image, for sure.
Seeing Nicki show up in this was such a thrill. She was my favorite part of Lowlife, and when she pops up in this, I thought “That’s what I wanted to see.” And she’s so good. How much did it mean to you to be able to have her come back into a world you created?
It was everything. We wrote the character for her. And what I’m so excited about is truly getting to play and do something different with her as an actor. We built that character together, even to the point where she’s got her dreads and she wanted them up on one side in this mohawk, tough-ass look when it’s wartime. All of those little choices she made, she inhabited that character twofold: she was building a lot of stuff, and we got the opportunity into the community, Watts specifically, and meet folks and introduce her to this incredible woman who’s the queen-pin of her area, and Nicki got a lot of character beats and pieces from her. It was super important to the whole team to make it authentic and make these feel like real flesh-and-blood people who are in the most supernatural, weirdest thing. But even that feels grounded and organic too. I can’t say enough about her. I love working with her; we have such a cool rapport. This is our third thing we’ve done together. When we did Lowlife and everyone met her on the festival circuit, people were like “You aren’t anything like your character; you’re just a rad actor.” So how do we give her the scariest, exact opposite of that character and let her go off and shine?
Getting Justin in this, this is an image-shattering role for him. Even in his more serious roles, he still tends to be funny. How do you talk him into this, and was he at all concerned? Or was that the reason he took the part?
Yeah, I think so. He’s an incredible actor, super professional. He loved the script, and when he came on, we had a conversation about it, and he was letting all of his reservations out. The character’s background is former military and he’s a top cop. I knew he could inhabit it, but also the actual type of that person that’s been in those situations, and he’s the one I would personally be scared of—kind of unassuming and in the background. He saw it as a cool challenge and rose to it; it was hard to shoot emotionally, but he swings for the fences, and as we were shooting, he went to places that were like Apocalypse Now levels of scary. And I didn’t say anything, I just let him go there and do that. It’s the same things as the creatures and Nicki, I’m just excited for audiences to see him because I don’t think you’ve ever seen him like this in a movie. It’s so cool that he has this body of work and that this flies in the face of all of that.
In general, you have musicians in here, comic actors, wrestlers. Why did you pull from those worlds than more traditional actors?
It excites me when you can see someone like Justin nail it and come with something so fresh and different. That’s the stuff that stands out. And just being a fan, especially of the musicians or growing up watching wrestling. Justin is our new scream king, so having him respond to the script and wanting to be brave enough to not depend on his fallback tools of humor. That stuff is in there, but not that much. You could feel it when we were shooting it; it was exciting because we knew it would translate into an exciting piece.
One of the most shocking moments is when the cop that interrogating RJ basically says that everybody knows about the vampires but nobody cares because they aren’t bugging police and they’re only going after gang members.
It’s a version of the thin blue line. For a vampire movie, it might be a thin red line . Again, the systemic forces that be that are at work, that was born out of Justin’s character inserting himself in a mission. He’s found out about it; everybody is talking about it or at least knows about it. When we were designing it, we knew, of course, they would protect their own or use it to their benefit.
What are you going to do to make sure we don’t have to wait this long for your next feature?
I’m trying! This is a super-challenging, hard movie. I think it’s fun, it’s got all that stuff in it. I am definitely proud of the team. It’s been hard to push to boulder up, but it’s been worth it. It always felt like something that was worth the time that it took to get it going, and I’m super excited that it’s here now. Who knows what the future is because I’m probably not going to make anything easier next time.
Do you have stuff you can jump into right away?
Yeah, I’ve got scripts I’m also reading other folks’ work.
Do you envision yourself as a director of someone else’s work if it seems to align with what you’re into?
For sure. There was a recent Ridley Scott interview that I heard where he said “If I do it, it’s going to be good.” Those are words to live by .
Well you’re two for two. Thank you so much much, man. Good to see you again. Best of luck,
I’m so glad we got to do this, thanks.
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