Amblinesque.
It is a word routinely trotted out to describe things that evoke a very specific time and place – chiefly the movies that Steven Spielberg and his partners at Amblin produced in the 1980s that casually mixed real-world problems with otherworldly awe and terror. These were the movies that seduced you at the video store with their eye-catching box art and were best watched in the living room, six inches from the TV, sitting cross-legged in your favorite pajamas. “E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial.” “Poltergeist.” “Gremlins.” That kind of thing.
“Stranger Things” has, rightfully, been described as Amblinesque, as has Disney+’s recent “Star Wars” series “Skeleton Crew.”
But “Dust Bunny,” which opens this week from Roadside Pictures, is the rare Amblinesque movie, capturing the spirit and tone of those earlier films brilliantly, to actually begin life as a Steven Spielberg project.
It started in 2016 with Bryan Fuller, the prolific writer and producer behind beloved series like “Pushing Daisies” and “Hannibal.” He had been hired to revamp Spielberg’s classic series “Amazing Stories,” an anthology show that delivered new, Amblinesque episodes every week (its two-season run featured episodes directed by Peter Hyams, Robert Zemeckis, Bob Balaban, Clint Eastwood, Joe Dante, Brad Bird, Martin Scorsese and Spielberg himself). Fuller didn’t ultimately stay with the show, which eventually ran for a single season on Apple TV, but he did pen three episodes that he took with him. One of them was “Dust Bunny.”
“It felt like such a simple, clean, clear idea that was a high-concept gateway horror – children in danger, yet becoming their own heroes, type of story that I was like, this should be a movie if we can’t make it as a TV show. And it’s high time that I stepped into the directing chair,” Fuller said.
“Dust Bunny” follows a young girl named Aurora (Sophie Sloan), who hires a hitman who lives in her apartment building to kill the monster who lives under her bed (and has eaten several sets of stepparents). Does the monster actually exist? Or is it a figment of her imagination?
For the role of the hitman, known only as Resident 5B, Fuller turned to a familiar face – his “Hannibal” star Mads Mikkelsen.
Fuller said that he approached the actor in 2016 at the premiere of “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.” It was held at the Pantages Theater in Hollywood. Back then it was still going to be an episode of “Amazing Stories.” Fuller remembers telling him, “I am writing this story about a hitman who’s hired by a little girl to kill the monster under the bed. And I would love for you to do it.”
Mikkelsen joked, “He stole me and he talked to me for 15 minutes, and I was like, ‘Yeah, I’ll do it. I’ll do it. Leave me alone.’” The actor was immediately interested in reteaming with his “Hannibal” director.
“It’s always lovely with his pitches, because you know that even more is coming once you see the story, and then once you start shooting it, that’s even more coming,” Mikkelsen said. “His is a brain that works in a manner I’ve never seen before, and I love working with him.”
As for what spoke to him about the script, Mikkelsen said, “I think it was the banality of a little girl, and she thinks there’s a monster on her bed, and she gets this neighbor in, and then a lot of things happen, and he looks under the bed, and there’s a monster. It goes from one kind of film to a different kind of film and I like that.”
“When it became a feature, it lived and died and lived and died and lived and died in various studio iterations. Some of them saw value in Mads. Some of them did not. And bouncing from one home to another, until finding somebody that believed in Mads as much as I did as a leading man,” Fuller explained.
“Dust Bunny” finally found its home with Thunder Road, the producers of the “John Wick” franchise, and Lionsgate, who releases all of the “John Wick” movies (among other things). Filming got underway in Budapest in 2023, and since it is not part of the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, it was one of a handful of films granted an interim agreement to continue filming during the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike.
When you watch “Dust Bunny,” you might be surprised by just how ambitious it is – the set pieces, creature design, production design, costumes – it’s a lot of movie, in the best possible way. Fuller used the word “bespoke.” The whole movie feels like nothing you’ve ever seen before, while harkening back to the touchstones from the past. But Fuller stopped short of calling himself (and the movie) ambitious.
“I didn’t see it as ambitious, as much as it felt so contained, and it felt like it was a small enough movie that would allow me to get my arms around it and also give me an opportunity to do something interesting with the camera and the style of the film,” Fuller said.
Not that the production was easy. Fuller remembered asking a member of the camera team to build him a crane every day. “We had a crane a couple of days and but my storyboards indicated crane use every day and I would show up and he would say, ‘Okay, how long does the crane need to be today?’ And I was like, ‘60 feet.’ And he would start strapping scaffolding together with belts and build me a crane every morning that we couldn’t afford, but he had the ingenuity and the wherewithal to create.”
The key difference between showrunning and directing a feature, Fuller said, “is showrunning is you’re directing the directors, you’re constantly rewriting and running from production meetings for the next episode and the episode after that. There was never really the opportunity to live in and be present in a way that I got to on this feature.”
Fuller said that he would nap on the set during his lunch break. It got to the point that production took away his trailer because he was never using it.
Mikkelsen echoed his sentiments.
“He’s got his hands on everything this time. That also means that that he loves details and there’s a lot of details, whether it’s me in pajamas that he chose he for me to be in. It was a different world for him, of course,” Mikkelsen said. “I think he made that transition very, very fluidly. It was nice and a big honor to be part of his debut as a director, for sure.”
Not that everything was smooth sailing.
“For all of the supporters that you have in an indie movie, you have just as many detractors,” said Fuller. “It was about finding the core group of supporters and everybody crawling into the boat and rowing the same direction.”
When we asked what the biggest challenge was, Fuller said, “The biggest challenge was other people’s perception of what the movie should be, as we were making it, as opposed to the sort of central group of crafts people and artists that knew what the movie was and were dedicated to delivering that. It wasn’t always a shared vision where people understood what we were trying to do, but the important people understood.”
Mikkelsen joked that, “I think production had gray hair. He’s a demanding man. And when you want something, he wants that, and he will fight for it. But it’s also when you lift the film up to this universe – he creates universes – then all of a sudden everything is possible as well. And you know, the acting style, it’s not that we’re going crazy directions, but we have to find the tonality of his universe. And once we all found that, it’s a nice ride, but it takes a while just to have the right pitch for everyone.”
During production, Mikkelsen said, Fuller knew who he could trust. “He leaned up against me with certain things, and then leaned up against other people with certain things. And I think he’s a smart man in that he allies himself with people that know this and know that, and then he will steal all the best from everyone,” Mikkelsen said. “That’s the way you should do it.”
After the movie was completed, though, the second-guessing and cold feet returned. Lionsgate let the movie languish on a shelf for more than a year. Finally, Roadside Attractions partnered with Lionsgate and devised a plan to release it.
“I think partly it’s because we all set out to make a family movie for children of all ages. I know it sounds like a cliché,” Fuller said, about the reason why the movie took so long to find a home after being shot in 2023. “I wasn’t really seeing a movie represented in the marketplace that was just as good as for adults as it is for kids.”
Fuller admitted that it is for a certain type of kid, but that “Dust Bunny” in general is “more in alignment with the more aggressive fairy tales of classic German lore, where really bad things happen.” But he stresses that there’s no nudity and no foul language. There is some cartoonish violence (he said that there was a stabbing-by-toothbrush late in the film that really had the ratings board clutching their pearls), but nothing beyond what you’d see on primetime television and even tamer than what you’d witness on any cable channel or streaming giant.
“I think folks were like, ‘Who’s this movie for?’ And I was like, ‘It’s for kids.’ And they’re like, ‘But it’s rated R.’ And it’s like, I would love adults to go see it first and make sure it’s for their kids,” Fuller said.
A friend of his has an eight-year-old daughter who is absolutely in love with the movie. “The MPA has other ideas,” Fuller joked, although he did note that they are more strict with independent movies than they are with big studios. “There’s discourse about what a big studio movie can get away with and that they won’t allow an independent movie to have the same rules applied,” Fuller explained.
The damage of the R-rating had already been done – he suspects that the fact that it’s “a really violent children’s movie, but there’s a lot of stuff for adults too,” added to the confusion. “It may have been a part of the, What do we do with this? Who do we market it to?” Fuller said. “Marketing is such a singular focus and doesn’t commit to multiple demographics as efficiently. A lot of the head-scratching is, Who is this for? My feeling is that it’s for really groovy kids and parents who still remember what it was like to be a groovy kid.”
Mikkelsen was never worried about it coming out.
“Everything is a timing thing, right? And how you want to launch it? I knew that he had created something that was absolutely worthwhile,” Mikkelsen said. “We just had to be patient and figure out which kind of home we should live in. And then he found it now and it’s great.”
“Dust Bunny” finally premiered at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival in the Midnight Madness program. It was quickly followed by a slot at Beyond Fest in Los Angeles. It played in the historic Egyptian Theater to a hugely enthusiastic crowd. Now, on the eve of its release, it is receiving warm reviews from people like The New York Times’ Manohla Dargis, who said, “One of the pleasures of “Dust Bunny” is that for all its dark corners, its looming shadows and violently descending multitudes… it retains a sense of wonder, including about the world and other people. Terrible, awful, scary things happen, yes, but while life can be a phantasmagoric (or banal) nightmare, it is also filled with marvels, sumptuous beauty and eccentric charms, like the neighbor’s hen-shaped lamp that’s laying a lightbulb egg.”
Fuller, who is working on two more original movies (both based on other unused, very Amblin-y “Amazing Stories” ides) and a host of franchise projects that he was forbidden to talk about, said that he hasn’t quite settled into the idea that, with “Dust Bunny,” he’s delivered something special.
“It’s a funny dysmorphia. I am so hyper critical of myself that whenever anybody says, ‘Do you feel good about something?’ Never do I feel good about something. It’s always like, Is it good enough? Was there a better idea that I didn’t find?Those types of things. It’s hard for me as a creative to sit back and enjoy fruits of labor, because I’m always terrified that it’s going to be mediocre,” Fuller said.
Then he added: “I wish I were Madonna and I could say I have no regrets and I move through life with confidence but I’m an artist who always fears that I’ve missed the better idea.”
The better idea, like the monster under your bed, remains elusive, even for Bryan Fuller.
