Lee Roy Kunz on ‘Deliver Us’ & The Drive Behind His New Religious-Horror Film!

Lee Roy Kunz, an incredibly talented writer, director, and actor, delves into his new religious-horror film, Deliver Us, discussing his experiences in the industry, his influences, inspirations, and upcoming projects.

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Stephanie:

I’m Stephanie Young, Senior Associate Writer for Just For Movie Freaks here with multi-talented Lee Roy Kunz to talk about his new horror movie Deliver Us. Thank you so much for being here!

Lee Roy Kunz:

Thank you for having me.

Stephanie:

I want to discuss a little bit about you and the film. So to start off, can you give us a summary of what your film, Deliver Us is about?

Lee Roy Kunz:

Okay. So it’s about an ancient Zoroastrian prophecy that the Catholic church has been looking into the past few centuries and it seems to be fulfilled when a nun becomes pregnant with twin boys, which she claims is a virgin birth. I play a priest that goes off to investigate and I’m skeptical the entire time, but eventually help her escape and we explore what’s going on with these two boys.

Stephanie:

Getting a film made can be an extremely long process so can you briefly take us through the process from the idea of Deliver Us to the final product?

Lee Roy Kunz:

Yeah. So the idea actually came from my father when I was visiting home and he pitched me this idea when we were just drinking, having a few beers at a brewery about a nun who’s pregnant with twin boys. One is the Messiah and the other is the Antichrist. I thought it was one of the best ideas I had heard. I started writing a script. I brought my brother in to help and within six months we had put together enough financing to do a pretty low-budget film and shoot it in Estonia.

Stephanie:

That’s great. It’s so crazy when you say low-budget because when I’m watching this movie, I’m thinking, these are like the effects I’m seeing at the movies in theaters. So I wouldn’t even have expected that because you guys did such a great job!

Lee Roy Kunz:

Well, thank you. Yeah, we had a great team. The guy who did our special effects Anders [Bratas] he’s from Sweden and he does all the best. So I think what I learned from it is, it’s better to do effects practically because you can do them cheaper as long as you’re ready to just be a little slower on set than trying to do CGI, which really costs a lot of money.

Stephanie:

Right. Right. But the practical effects were great. So, you directed, wrote, and starred in this film. In your career, which of these paths did you see yourself in first and then how did the others fall into place?

Lee Roy Kunz:

So it was always writing and filmmaking. I started writing my first screenplay when I was 16 and wanted to go to film school. I eventually went to USC where I met Isaac, who’s the DP producer, one of my best friends, he just shot Season 2 of Marvel’s Loki. We dropped out together to make a low-budget film when we were 21 called A Beer Tale and that did really well on Redbox, and was enough to get my career started.

I had agents from CAA (Creative Artists Agency) reach out to me and then tried to push me down the acting path, all the while trying to get my film career going, while exploring acting and learning about it, which has helped me in the filmmaking for sure.

Stephanie:

Did you find that directing and writing came a lot easier for you than acting or did you start to realize that acting was something you were great at as well?

Lee Roy Kunz:

You know, it’s always been writing and directing. One thing as a low budget filmmaker, you’ll realize having yourself to act in it, you can keep the budgets down, you can do reshoots, you can even in post-production have yourself there for, whether or not it’s voiceover or ADR. It goes a really long way. I didn’t even wanna play Father Fox in the Deliver Us. We just didn’t have a big enough budget to meet the quotes of the actors that would have been interested in playing Father Fox because I just had so much invested in it that I was worried we wouldn’t get distribution if we didn’t have at least a somewhat well known actor.

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Stephanie:

So this film dives deeply into religious concepts like original sin, Adam and Eve, the origin of good versus evil, and so much more. I was interested in your background in Catholicism and just your outlook on religion as a whole. Can you speak a little about that?

Lee Roy Kunz:

Yeah. So definitely my Catholic background and faith play a lot into making this movie. When I was in film school at USC, a film professor, he was an ex-Jesuit priest, he said to the class that horror was the only genre of film where you could make a film where God and divinity is the subject and have mainstream audiences accept and engage with it. And so when it came to actually then making this movie, it was really cool to explore a lot of the deeper, darker elements of my faith or what I’ve struggled with in it.

It was definitely inspired a lot by the Grand Inquisitor, Dostoevsky’s chapter where Jesus comes back. The second coming in the Spanish inquisition in the Catholic church actually captures him and imprisons him and tells him everything he’s done to fail humanity and how they’re in control. And so that informed the bad guys of our film.

Stephanie:

It’s interesting, obviously, you brought up horror, it’s a horror movie. So I wanted to ask, this is your 3rd film I saw. Your 1st was A Beer Tale, which was a comedy. And then I saw you did Delirium, which is kind of like a mystery/thriller. What made you want to delve into horror? And do you see yourself continuing in the genre?

Lee Roy Kunz:

I actually really do. And what’s funny is that Delirium, it technically hasn’t been released. It’s part of a film called Devil’s Fruit because as a filmmaker I shot in sections, it’s like Boyhood. We just had to do that and now it’s on IMDb forever, but that will be coming out soon. It’s like a Russian crime thriller.

Stephanie:

Oh, okay. Yeah, because I was looking at that and was honestly seeing if I could watch it before I interviewed you and I couldn’t find it. And I was like, oh, maybe I just can’t find it. But yeah, that’s interesting because I saw you were doing a Boyhood type movie which is incredible.

Lee Roy Kunz:

Yeah. So it’s just the best thing I think, filmmakers do what you have to do to get a film made or in pieces. It just became a Boyhood and then we worked it out so that it could just make it on the scale that we wanted to. But yes, I am gonna continue down the horror path. My next film will probably be another horror, detective/thriller.

Stephanie:

Very cool! And have you always grown up as a horror fan?

Lee Roy Kunz:

You know, I liked horror, it wasn’t my number one genre for sure. But now I think it’s probably one of the most interesting genres to work in now because there aren’t the same kind of limits on what you can do. You can really be as expressive and far and go into really taboo subjects.

Stephanie:

Yeah, definitely. I totally agree. So horror films often take on real human fears regardless if it’s based in reality or not. Does Deliver Us touch on any of your personal fears that ended up making it into the script?

Lee Roy Kunz:

Yeah, I think the whole theme of the film that I’ve kind of been obsessed with, it might answer the religious question a little bit better, is the problem of evil in the world. Why it’s allowed to exist and why there’s so much injustice. And so I think that something within the two brothers is me trying to reconcile that kind of existential fear of trying to meet people at a place where the world has all of this in it, but it actually is a good place and the creation is good. If that makes sense, it’s been a while since I’ve done these interviews *laughs*

Stephanie:

Oh no, not a problem!

Lee Roy Kunz:

I feel like I’m out of it. I apologize. *laughs*

Stephanie:

Oh no, you’re good! So tell me if I’m pronouncing this, right? Your composer Tóti Guðnason, he also composed Lamb in 2021, which is awesome, but he composed the score for this film. What was it like working with him? And what was your collaboration like to find the perfect sound for this movie?

Lee Roy Kunz:

Yeah. So usually when you’re cutting the film, you have a temp score and there’s a joke within post-sound that people are always using the same music, especially for horror films. Under Your Skin is one that’s used, Sicario. And a lot of times the composers are brought on and you’ve basically edited the scenes to the music that was edited for other projects. So, it doesn’t even match perfectly and then composers end up almost creating something that’s kind of similar to it.

And what we did with Tóti, it even seemed like that was the path we were on for a little bit. But then I said, like, let’s stop. Let’s do individual pieces of music because Tóti, I think he’s one of the most interesting composers out there in terms of just pure artists and having his own vision. And so I wrote a paragraph for about six different pieces of music of what a theme of the film was whether or not it was the character of Laura or if it was the Vox Dei, the organization and to then compose individual pieces that he was interested in doing that had nothing to do with what was happening on screen. And then once we found those pieces of music, we would weave them into the film and that’s what we ultimately ended up doing.

Stephanie:

Wow, that’s incredible. Is that a really long process because it’s individual scores?

Lee Roy Kunz:

You know, Brent Kiser, he did our post-sound so he definitely helped them craft that. He’s almost doing a little bit more of an arrangement as well. And then sending it back to Tóti which he’s familiar with since he was the arranger for Joker. His sister did the score for that. And so, you know it takes a lot of different voices and people. Then it’s almost like, take that work and then, ok, what? We’re gonna mess it up just so it works for this scene and so it is back and forth. But to me, it seems like it happens a lot quicker than when you just do it the right way from the beginning, like that, rather than trying to craft or basically copy someone else’s work, which then I can’t imagine is very fun for Tóti or any composer.

Stephanie:

Yeah, because this score was great and I’m so happy he got nominated for the Hollywood Music in Media Awards.

Lee Roy Kunz:

Yeah, that was a big deal. We did it right. We can do it in the future.

Stephanie:

Yeah. So just two more questions for you. Can you tell us about anything that you’re working on at the moment? I know we were kind of talking before about one of them. But anything else you can talk about?

Lee Roy Kunz:

Yeah. So the Inuit horror film, it’s a detective, horror/thriller. It’s much in the vein of True Detective and I realized True Detective season four is actually gonna be set in the Arctic but it’s centered around using, Inuit mythology combined with Christianity. For the most part, they practice Christianity but have a lot of Inuit mythology kind of infused in it the same way that, in Mexico, Catholicism has a little bit of infusion of Day of the Dead and their own kind of fair from their own history.

And so we’re following this detective as she’s investigating a crime. And it’s a classic supernatural detective thriller, a little bit like Seven. It’s something that I know that I can get made because as a filmmaker it’s like, I just did this, it’s religious horror. It’s not too far out and I can get a financier to give me a bigger budget to work with.

Stephanie:

Yeah, that makes sense. That’ll be so interesting. I’m gonna love to see that eventually when it comes out. And then the last question I had for you, it might be the toughest. What are your top three favorite movies?

Lee Roy Kunz:

Okay. I think I would have to go with Goodfellas first because you can watch it a million times. It’s funny but then it’s also dark and profound, again dealing with the banality of evil and how these people are so likable and yet they commit the most horrible crimes. There Will Be Blood is another one that’s just like, I can watch it over and over again, and I’m gonna have to go with the comedy like The Big Lebowski or Groundhog Day. I kind of go back and forth between those, depending on how I’m feeling.

Stephanie:

That’s great! Thank you so much for being here and having us interview you. Everybody should go see, Deliver Us. It was so good. I loved it. And you were amazing. Your directing, your writing, acting, everything was fantastic. So thank you so much for being here and we look forward to seeing the rest of your work coming out!

Lee Roy Kunz:

Thank you. And I loved your article. I could tell you really got it in a way that a lot of people, you know, sometimes it goes over their head. So probably whatever background you come from I was like, OK, we are similar.

Stephanie:

Oh yeah, thank you so much. It means a lot! Well, thank you so much. It was good to have you!

Rent Deliver Us (2023) on Amazon or Apple TV

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Listen to the audio version of the interview