A massage should be a luxurious moment, aimed to relieve stress or for you to at least come out feeling like a piece of aggressively kneaded dough, but while LA-based writer/director Dave Paige didn’t find the easement he so desperately needed following a treatment, he did come away with inspiration. Deep Tish is a profoundly hilarious dive into what happens when you allow someone else’s comfort to come before yours at your inconvenience and the results of comedically flipping toxic masculinity on its head. Paige finds a self-confessed twisted satisfaction to these types of encounters and has mashed up some of these into one guy’s really uncomfortable day. With an amped sound design serving to immerse you in his protagonist’s increasing anxiety and camerawork highlighting the clumsy progression of his day, Deep Tish will make you cringe while entertaining the hell out of you. Now available to watch below for your maximum discomfort, we speak to Paige about how quickly all the elements came together, embracing those strange moments which happen to all of us in our lives and using a low angle prism to shoot those essential disconcerting massage table scenes.
Who gave you a terrible massage?
A few years back I had a newborn in the house and hadn’t slept in months. I finally had just enough time to get a massage – my shoulders were fucked up from holding the baby – so I snuck out for a few hours, looking for some deep tissue work. A few minutes into the massage, I had this awkward interaction with the therapist and suddenly the idea for this movie just unfurled in my brain, fully-formed. For the remaining 78 minutes I was trying so hard to not laugh that I was basically shaking. It was torture! I drove home from that massage cracking up, opened my laptop and wrote the film, still cracking up and just laughed through both production and the edit. It may have begun as an extremely uncomfortable massage, but it mutated into the most joyous film experience of my life, so IMO it was well worth it! The production came together pretty quickly thanks to my good friend Josh Cohen, who came on board to produce. It was the dead of the WGA/SAG-AFTRA strikes (we had waivers to shoot) so we lucked out with a lot of the best of the best in terms of the crew. Slumming it on my short was, for some, more interesting than hanging around bingeing Love Island or whatever we were doing back then.
Initially, the ending was much more…anticlimactic.
You clearly know your craft with regard to awkward comedy. How many rewrites did the script have after that first blitz until you had the right film to move forward with?
The initial script came together very quickly. I shared it with a small group of peers for some feedback, then maybe did one or two more passes. Honestly, not that much changed if I remember correctly. The biggest adjustment was probably the final scene. Initially, the ending was much more…anticlimactic. My producer Josh Cohen suggested the current ending, which – after a few arguments – I grew to realize was a more satisfying conclusion.
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Being British I very much understand putting yourself through something uncomfortable for the sake of someone else’s comfort but you went deep! How did you write and then translate the guy in the floor to screen? I find him so uncomfortably funny but maybe not as perverse as I should have!
Nothing perverted about a subterranean man looking out for you! The man in the floor’s line was a suggestion from my friend Eric Gosselin; I’d called him as I drove home from this brutal massage and explained the idea for the film. He suggested that and I lost it and knew it had to go in. Shortly thereafter, I was at the mall looking for some Crocs. The Crocs store had this…like…concierge type guy who greeted me when I got there and answered some Croc-related questions. He had such a strange energy – strained, friendly, a little desert-y. In casting, costume and performance we modeled the character after this man.
Did you just happen to come across a small rug which protects against the evil eye?
Our production designer Rachael Ferrara found that eye rug, which I currently stand on every night while I brush my teeth. It was such a great, voyeuristic flourish on her part; it inspired the eyeball motif that occurs several times throughout the film.
Strange moments happen to us in life; they can come out of nowhere, occur quickly and then normalcy returns, and we just dwell on it forever.
I love Zack Fox, who we have featured on DN in Jonathan Salmon’s Life of Brad James. How did you build your cast?
The massage therapist, Corey Podell, was someone I’d worked with on my last short film; I was very impressed by her work and was excited to imagine her in this role. Zack Fox as the lead was a suggestion from a casting director friend, Angela Demo. Zack and I met up over Zoom, where he told me an anecdote about a time he was having trouble folding a chair on the beach while a bunch of teenagers laughed at him. His fiancée kept saying to him, “Come on, let’s just go”, but instead of just carrying it out as it was, he spent half an hour trying to fold it up right, worried what these kids would think of him. As soon as I heard that I knew he’d be perfect for this role. And he was! All of the actors in this just totally brought it and frankly, it made my job pretty easy.
You have flipped the script and the norms in so many ways which all add up delightfully. How did you find the balance of those nuggets poking fun at modern masculinity without being absurd or too obvious?
Few things make me laugh so much as a bit of a doof just…doofin’ around. Zack and I modeled his character off a certain type of guy who made us chuckle but approached the performance empathetically. Despite certain limitations, most people are just doing their best, so we kept that in mind while creating A.J. And with the date scene, I wanted to show what 90% of people would do after going through a situation like that: not much. Strange moments happen to us in life; they can come out of nowhere, occur quickly and then normalcy returns, and we just dwell on it forever. The idea of that as a sort of show-*and*-tell anti-scene really made us laugh.
Your camerawork is playful throughout, with a lot of panning into our subjects from wider shots and playing with many angles, especially during the massage. What equipment and gear did you have for the shoot?
We shot on Sony Venice with the Cooke Anamorphic 35-140 zoom and Atlas Orion prime lenses for the car shots and crazy wide angles. To get the angle as low to the floor as we could for shooting A.J.’s face in the massage table face cradle, we used a low angle prism, as our DP Eric Bader put it: “An ancient piece of technology that never goes out of style.” We used a dolly for the opening shot and during the date, and a Dana dolly for other moments where we were more spatially challenged. Eric is one of the fastest DPs in the biz, which I suppose happens when you come up in music videos; we got an insane amount of coverage in a pretty small timeframe.
We had hacked in so tight that there wasn’t room enough to live in some of the discomfort we’d been going for.
Considering your DP was able to get so much coverage how did you and Kirsten Zastrow keep it snappy and tight in the edit?
The edit was a lot of fun and also a lot of work. Kirsten did a really great job in terms of shot selection for the massage: I think we had 60 set-ups for that scene or something deranged. We fell in love with a lot of performances, expressions, angles, etc., then had a bit of a kill your darlings bloodbath when a few friends we showed the initial cut to suggested we bring it down by three minutes. We did so, then took a week off, and when we revisited we found ourselves missing some of the ‘air’ of the initial cut: we had hacked in so tight that there wasn’t room enough to live in some of the discomfort we’d been going for. So we ended up sort of splitting the difference and I’m very happy with how it turned out.
Dark comedy suits you. What else are you working on at the moment?
I’ve spent the majority of my time since Deep Tish executive producing Season 2 of The Rehearsal on HBO, which we’re excited to share with the world next month. Otherwise, I have a feature that’s exploring financing and another short I may try and make this year.
