Even if you don’t know who Joseph Kahn is, you’ve seen one of his music videos.
Since getting into the business in the early 1990s, he has directed nearly 200 videos for some of the industry’s biggest stars – everyone from Willie Nelson to Backstreet Boys to U2 to Taylor Swift. Eminem’s “Without Me” clip? That was Kahn. Janet Jackson’s “Doesn’t Really Matter?” Also Kahn. Britney Spears’ “Womanizer?” Well, you get the picture.
Typically, a director as talented and prolific as Kahn would transition to an equally lucrative career in feature films, just as countless have done before him – people like Michael Bay, David Fincher, Spike Jonze and Antoine Fuqua.
But Kahn’s output as a feature director has been frustratingly few and far between. His fourth film in 20 years, “Ick,” oozes into 800 theaters nationwide on July 27, 28 and 29, as part of a Fathom Events special presentation. Like Kahn’s other movies, “Ick” is extremely entertaining – a PG-13-rated horror comedy that is also a cuddly story about family; a creature feature that doesn’t explain the creature and instead lets its metaphoric possibilities simmer; and a scary movie that isn’t quite scary but is very fun.
Quite frankly, it’s the most commercial movie Kahn has made since his debut, a son-of-“Fast and Furious” motorcycle movie called “Torque” that he did for Warner Bros. Kahn’s earlier films felt decidedly ahead of their time, the kind of movie that, years after their release, Kahn will be stopped on the street to discuss. But “Ick” feels perfect for today. Not only is it plugged into all of the social and cultural concerns of our decidedly mixed-up era, but the filmmaking feels contemporary and now. Kahn wants people to watch “Ick” when it’s released – on a big screen, with great sound, surrounded by other folks who appreciate the movie it is.
The king of music videos
Kahn was born in Busan, South Korea, and grew up in Italy and Texas (in a suburb outside of Houston). After high school he attended New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. “I feel like I am part of the first generation that didn’t view music videos as a stepping stone, but as an actual career,” Kahn said. He had never listened to rock music until he saw music videos on television in America. He went to film school “thinking I’m going to be a music video director.” At NYU, Kahn said, “everybody laughed at me.” The other students told him, “That’s not filmmaking.” Kahn didn’t understand. “Does filmmaking have to be two hours? Can it be three, four minutes?”
While he became obsessed with music videos, he also became enamored of who he described as “the masters” – Stanley Kubrick, Martin Scorsese and Alfred Hitchcock. To him, it was all cinema. “I didn’t see a delineation between four minutes and two hours. The language was what was most important to me,” Kahn said. He dropped out of NYU after a year and started making music videos.
Eventually, he was directing for some of the world’s biggest artists, with access to untold sums. His video for Jackson’s “Doesn’t Really Matter,” from the soundtrack to the second Eddie Murphy “Nutty Professor” movie, cost $2.5 million. At the time it was the most expensive music video ever made. It features several Kahn trademarks – Japanese iconography (Jackson appears to be in a Japanese-style apartment, with a small robot dog), dazzling camerawork (including a shot that zooms around the inside of Jackson’s refrigerator) and a myriad of impressive visual effects techniques, including a sequence where Jackson and her girls dance on an elevated, completely computer-generated platform. But for all of its delirious eye candy, it also has an easy-to-follow narrative, about Jackson and her girls going out for a night on the town (the town here is a quasi-futuristic Japanese coded city).
Kahn said that he was always in “panic mode.” “Even when people think you’re at the top, what you realize, at least from my perspective, is that it’s a competition to get there. There are small bursts of wins, but you still get tons of rejections,” Kahn said. “You’re losing tons of jobs, no matter what.”
He said he found success in music videos because he listens. “I’m very malleable. I don’t necessarily have a style,” Kahn said. People who say that he has a style usually only pick out a few videos, at least to him. He said some people will only know him from the Taylor Swift videos. Or the U2 videos. Or Aerosmith. Or Muse. Or Blink-182. “What I am is the best karaoke music video director in the world,” Kahn said. “No matter the song, I can sing it.” Kahn still makes music videos, even if they are more scarce (and without the astronomical budgets he used to command). “Whether or not there’s a market for it, there is an intrinsic need for people to see visuals with songs,” Kahn said.
He makes a connection between music and storytelling as being connected as long as we’ve been around. “I’m certain that when they were painting in caves, there was some music going on. Music is the oldest form of storytelling, because it’s communication,” Kahn said. “Whether you can make money at it or whether it changes form doesn’t matter. The actual art is as old as human beings.”
To the big screen
In 2004, Kahn got his big break directing the motorcycle movie “Torque” for Warner Bros. It was part of a slew of film that looked to cash in on the “Fast and Furious” formula. In fact, there was another motorcycle project, “Biker Boyz,” that DreamWorks had released a year earlier. The movie is bright and colorful and extremely self-aware and is worth watching for an early, incredibly over-the-top performance by future “Severance” star Adam Scott.
Kahn was handed a healthy budget for a first-time filmmaker, around $40 million, but the movie only made $47 million globally. And while a few critics understood what Kahn was going for (Kevin Thomas’ review in the Los Angeles Times called it “assured, energetic and fleet-footed”) most dismissed it (A.O. Scott in the New York Times described it as a “monotonously macho action-adventure”).
“It’s weird, because it’s very avantgarde, but in my mind, I was just making a big pop flick using the language that I knew and the sense of humor I had in my life,” Kahn said. He imagined himself as being Spielbergian – an artist working on a big canvas, with intentional blocking and dynamic camera movements, to tell popular stories. “But on that movie I realized I’m not Spielberg, I’m fucking weird,” Kahn said. The movie ended up, he said, being 70% of what he wanted. “For a lot of directors, that’s good,” he said. But he was used to getting his way, of making 100% of what he wanted. That 30%, he said, was re-edited by producers. It ate at him. “You can’t live with it. It literally rips you apart,” Kahn said.
Looking back, Kahn said that he “mistimed” “Torque.” “I made it 20 years too early, because eventually the ‘Fast and the Furious’ films became ‘Torque,’ like they are completely absurd,” Kahn said. When they were making the movie, his mandate was to embrace the absurdity. One critic called the movie an 81-minute soda commercial. But that was part of Kahn’s design. He said that the sequence where two characters are standing in front of giant ads – one for Pepsi, the other for Mountain Dew, was not product placement. Pepsi, which owns both, didn’t pay a dollar. “That was the joke. But some of the audiences are so intent on being smarter than the film, they go into self-defense mode,” Kahn said.
When they tested the movie, it dawned on him. “I realized that I made a movie that the audience distrusts,” Kahn said.
Kahn said that he was offered other movies and pitched on some big ones, including a “Justice League Dark” project (“I liked the weirdness of it and it felt different from the superhero genre at that time”) and an adaptation of William Gibson’s 1984 novel “Neuromancer.” But inside he knew that the final product would maybe be 50% his. He couldn’t do it.
“I still think I can work within the system,” Kahn said. “I’m just waiting for a time that the system and I can align.”
He’s still waiting.
Indies ahoy
For his next film, Kahn wondered, What if I got 100% [of what I wanted] – what would that movie feel like? He started talking with film critic Mark Palermo (“one of the few people that actually liked ‘Torque’”), first about Kahn’s work, which led to more philosophical discussions on cinema and structure. Eventually, the two decided to make a movie together. At first, it was much more of a conventional slasher film.
“I wasn’t happy with it. And then one morning, I had this epiphany – I should do all genres,” Kahn explained. “My skill set has always been being able to take disparate ideas and fuse them together and kept tonally in sync.” Kahn and Palermo started talking again, “throwing all genres together.” He describes the eventual movie, “Detention,” as a “multi-genre movie.”
Kahn self-financed “Detention,” which he would do for the following two films as well. The movie’s $10 million budget? It came out of Kahn’s pocket.
“My relationship with money has always been fearless. If I were scared of money, I would have never gone into the business in the first place,” Kahn said. He started his career when there were no cellphones or internet. “All you have are the yellow pages to contact anybody,” Kahn said. He also never saw other “Asian dudes in cinema.” In the early days, Kahn said, he would hide the fact that he was Asian. “They wouldn’t know I was Asian until I walked on set,” Kahn said.
Sony picked up “Detention” almost immediately after they saw it. “I don’t know why, because it’s such a weird movie,” Kahn said. When the movie was released, Kahn said, “it didn’t have the best reaction.” It premiered at the South by Southwest Film Festival in March 2011 and had a marginal release a month later. Once again critics were dismissive (The New York Times said “Mr. Kahn ultimately loses control of his referential plate-spinning, in what might be another illustration that catering to short attention spans leads only to mutually assured distraction”) but when it hit home video more than a year later, it finally found its audience.
“12 years later, it’s a cult film and there’s so much discussion about it,” Kahn said. ”Especially the newer generation really seems to get this vibe. But I remember when it first came out and people were like, What the hell is this?”
Kahn said that he thought the audience would understand – and embrace – “Detention” when it was initially released. Just like he was confident that “Torque” would perform well. He came to a realization – when he pitched music videos, he did so knowing that he was attempting to give people something they hadn’t seen before. “When you pitch your record company an idea that even remotely feels like something someone has seen before, they go, ‘I’ve seen this before. Give me something else,’” Kahn said. But when he would pitch a movie, he would get the opposite feedback. People would tell him, “That’s not the way this genre works.” “It’s a completely different way of thinking,” Kahn said. “I still haven’t figured that out.”
Audiences, to Kahn’s way of thinking, “have built a scaffolding of culture and expectations and movies have to reflect that.”
After “Detention,” Kahn said that he flirted with studio projects but never committed to anything (“I’m constantly flirting but we never got into bed”).
“The irony is that I genuinely love blockbusters,” Kahn said. “In my mind, life isn’t worth living unless there’s a good summer coming up full of great blockbusters to look forward to.” When it comes to making a big summer movie, though, Kahn asks himself, “What can I contribute to this? I know myself. I’ll be very ambitious and have very specific ideas and want to do things that are a bit different. But I don’t aim to do it in a way that is trying to lose anybody money.” Kahn said that he’s always felt very lucky to be in the business. “I always feel like I’m on borrowed time. I’m the guy that shouldn’t be in the business. Every time I get an opportunity, I have to make the most of it,” Kahn said.
His next project ended up being “Bodied,” a deliriously funny comedy set in the world of underground rap battles. He said that the movie was born of his love of rap battles and his observation that “battle rap started getting taken over by white guys from Canada and farms and small towns – they spoke the vernacular and with the edginess of a Black guy from New York. I saw this performative element that was interesting. But then sometimes you would have some real creativity coming out of it.” When he would watch these white kids battle Black rappers, he noticed that “there’s one thing they couldn’t do – say the N-word.” He wanted to make a movie about speech “at a time when speech was becoming increasingly regulated.”
The movie, again financed by Kahn, is extremely entertaining but struggled to find a distributor. He heard a story that a Netflix executive said that “we will never air this movie with a white guy saying the N-word.” “My movie got canceled,” Kahn said. The movie premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2017 and wasn’t released for more than a year. When it finally did come out, it was via YouTube Premium of all things. The deal with YouTube only lasted seven years. Now he’s got “Bodied” back and is going to try to shop it elsewhere.
As soon as Kahn finished “Bodied,” he started thinking about his next film project. He knew he wanted to do a creature feature “that is the most dangerous type of horror movie of all – a PG-13 horror movie.” And from that, “Ick” was born.
Why “Ick?”
“I wanted to make an ‘80s throwback film that didn’t feel like an ‘80s throwback – that had elements of it but the language and culture of today,” Kahn said. He started thinking about what a creature feature would mean in today’s world. Kahn wanted to make a monster movie instead of, say, a slasher movie, because they are “much deeper.”
“Those monsters always mean something,” Kahn said. He pointed out that “King Kong” is the fear of “the primitive,” “Godzilla” is the fear of “the atom bomb,” “Dracula” is the fear of “the foreign guy coming in and fucking your life.”
Kahn started to think about contemporary catastrophes. “My observation is, for two weeks, the world freaks out about Godzilla and then we movie on and you live your life,” Kahn said. “That’s either a flaw in human beings or it’s a survival instinct. I don’t know where that line is – is it stupidity or is it intelligence? I thought the idea of having a big monster there, and everyone ignores it, was pretty funny.”
He’s cagey about what the oozing ick is meant to represent – is it the apathy created by constant social media usage? The rise of dangerous MAGA ideology? The woke mind virus? COVID? Or a combination of all? At one point a government official in the movie says that they’ll get to the problem “in four or eight years,” pointing to a change in presidential leadership. Kahn said he had no interest in explaining the monster in the movie, either. It’s mercifully free of a complicated backstory or unnecessary lore.
Kahn started pitching “Ick” around 2019 and into 2020. “Everybody’s pitching from their homes on Zoom and no one’s going to green light anything,” Kahn said. Not that he could have made it then anyway.
The way he tells it, the prohibitions and safety precautions associated with producing a movie during the pandemic were too high for a movie of this budget. Kahn was paying for this one himself (again), although he had some financing. He found himself getting nervous. “All my heat off of ‘Bodied’ just started to go. Every year that goes by, people are wondering, What’s your last film?” Still, he waited until 2023 and found “the cheapest way to make the movie.” “It was a magic trick getting this film done,” Kahn said. He shot the movie in Texas, where he had moved during the pandemic, at a school during the summer, using what he called “the John Hughes technique,” building the sets inside of the school. The school charged him an insanely low fee to shoot there.
Beyond a creeping, otherworldly menace, Kahn was interested in exploring the idea of millennials aging. The movie starts off around the turn of the millennia and then flashes to today, where the rest of the movie plays out. Kahn’s “Detention” “was about millennials when they were young and they were dealing with their time frame.” Kahn is in his 50s now. He’s seen the culture change. “I’m interested in the similarities that all these cultures have, time period to period, but also the differences,” Kahn said. Specifically he was interested in pop punk, a musical genre that dominated the 2000s. “What happened to that music and what happened to the guy that listened to that music? I wanted to make a movie about that,” Kahn said.
“That guy” is a character played by Brandon Routh, a former football star who suffered an ick-related injury as a kid, plateaued as a person, and is now a science teacher at the high school where he was once considered royalty. (There is a biographical dimension to this; Routh’s big break was as Superman in “Superman Returns” but he never had a big starring role again.) “When you make indie movies on this scale, which is like the lowest you can possibly make, you get to cast whoever you want,” said Kahn. He described Routh as “one of the most underrated actors – he’s funny, he’s charming, he’s emotional and he’s great looking.” The director found himself pondering, Why is this guy not a superstar?
The incredible, pop punk-filled soundtrack, Kahn said, was only achieved thanks to a lot of “Joseph Kahn begging.” If you’ve done music videos for decades, you have a long list of people to beg. Still, not everybody obliged him. Green Day said no. That’s OK – even for a reduced fee, it probably would have blown his budget.
“Ick” toured festivals in late 2024, like Austin’s genre-focused Fantastic Fest. Kahn thought that they had a hit – “it’s a truly amazing, family-friendly film that nobody has out right now.” But nobody, pardon the pun, bit. Hardcore horror fans might have been turned off by the movie’s pop mentality. “Ick” is much broader than, say, “Terrifier 3.” And, to Kahn’s reasoning, the person paying $80 for a film festival ticket is not the average teenager who is going to the multiplex on a Friday night. “People are going there for a particular reason,” Kahn said.
Potential distributors were confused by the festival reactions. “Ick,” he said, is “starter horror,” which is hard to address. “I think it completely flipped people,” Kahn said. He still thinks there’s an audience for it, but he has gone to meetings with big streamers, who told him, “We absolutely do not know how to sell to young people.”
“I’ve been to film festivals and this film has blown the roof off of screenings,” Kahn said. “It really has.”
Finally, Fathom Events came to him with a proposal. They told him they could give him 800 screens. He was thrilled. Then they told him it was going to be on a Sunday, Monday and Tuesday, with one screening per day. And they had no marketing budget either. “I’m like, ‘OK, deal,’” Kahn said. He asked if they could put the movie in the trailer rotation for other movies.
“I think the film is great. And I’m just happy for the people who show up and watch it. I do think there are great rewards for people that will take the time out,” Kahn said. But he also acknowledges that Sunday, Monday and Tuesday is a hard sell. “And I do know that in today’s economy, it’s tough to ask anybody to go out and pay for parking and a babysitter and all of that,” Kahn said. “I get it.”
Still, he said he designed it to be seen in a theater, with a kick ass sound mix. “We may not be able to compete with other studios in terms of the biggest set pieces in the world, but the film isn’t designed that way,” Kahn said. “They’re emotional set pieces.” His advice? “Bring friends.”
When I asked if he thinks “Ick” will find its audience one day, he said that he knows he hit the target this time. “It’s like ‘American Graffiti’ for millennials. And then the starter horror elements for anyone who is in their teens. A 15-year-old has not watched ‘Terrifier 3,’” Kahn said. They did a test screening in Iowa for teenagers and it did gangbusters, he recalled. “I’m confident that I have hit my thing. Whether or not people see it and know about it, that’s out of my control. But I made the movie and I know it works.”
As for what’s next, Kahn said that he bought “Bitter Sweet Symphony,” a script by Matthew Keats and Mike V. Sorce that appeared on last year’s Black List. It’s about the making of the Verve song. He’s got Kodi Smit-McPhee attached to star as Richard Ashcroft. “The story behind making that song is incredibly crazy, because it got sued by the Rolling Stones,” Kahn said. “It’s all about him and him maneuvering it and his life falling apart and achieving his life goal and getting destroyed by it.” Kahn said he’s fascinated by “the Englishness of it,” since this was the time of Oasis and the Brit pop explosion. In short, it sounds like the perfect Joseph Kahn project.
The problem?
“I don’t have funding. I’m still trying to put that together,” Kahn said. “But it’ll be different. There’s no blood. There’s no guts.”
And there is, of course, that elusive return to studio filmmaking. He’ll get there. If he wants to. “The problem is that sometimes I see things that don’t seem like they’re made by people who love the material,” Kahn said. The movies he grew up loving felt, to him, like they came “from a genuine spot.” “You can’t make ‘Back to the Future’ by faking it,” Kahn said. You couldn’t make “Ick” by faking it either.
Towards the end of our conversation, Kahn reflected – on the movies that got him here and the movie that is finally coming out.
“I don’t make these movies thinking they’re going to be little indie things. I think each of these are genuinely great and that should have bigger audiences. They all end up finding audiences later. And they live in a way that other movies don’t. And now I’ve got this reputation as this Mr. Weirdo Guy that makes all these cult movies. But that’s not so happening here,” Kahn said. “These are populist movies that just weren’t marketed at the time they came out.”
“Ick,” he said, “specifically, I feel, is a very populist movie.”
For his entire film career, he has made audience-friendly movies. The only thing missing was the audience.
