James Cullen Bressack has had an interesting and prolific career, and he's only 30 years old. Directing movies before he was even 20, Bressack rapidly established himself as an efficient and extremely quick filmmaker able to release movie after movie. This hasn't changed a bit over the past decade, with the director literally shooting his new film, Hot Seat, in only seven days.
Hot Seat is part of Bressack's recent genre turn, moving from horror to action. In the process, he's attracted a variety of big names to star in his films - Chad Michael Murray and Bruce Willis in Survive the Game, Steven Seagal and DMX in Beyond the Law, Shannon Doherty and Tom Green in Bethany, and now Mel Gibson and Kevin Dillon in Hot Seat. The new film follows a former computer hacker, now a struggling family man putting his past behind him, who is taken hostage and forced to perform difficult hacks.
James Cullen Bressack Turns to Action
Hot Seat is one of four recent action movies Bressack has released in just three years, after nearly a dozen horror films. The genre switch has seemed to invigorate the filmmaker. "I consciously made a decision back in 2017 or 2018 that I was done making horror movies," Bressack says. He continues:
I directed horror movies since I was 18 years old. So, you know, after close to 10 years of directing horror movies and doing consistently a couple movies a year, I just kind of felt like there wasn't anything new I could do. Like, I kind of did all the things, and I was just doing it slightly better each time, arguably, or maybe slightly worse, who knows, but I was just doing it again. And so I kind of wanted to do different genres, to do something different and challenge myself. I didn't want to stick with what I had been doing, you know, I tried all the sub-genres.
"From there, I did my first action movie, which was Beyond the Law, which starred DMX and Steven Seagal, and after that I've just been kind of gearing towards action," Bressack says. "We'll see if I stick with the action. It looks like the next thing I want to kind of dabble in is comedy. So I might go to comedy for a few years, we'll see." Still a relatively young director, it's almost like Bressack is finding himself and his style in real-time, for all the world to see. Working on each genre until he feels satisfied, honing his craft along the way, the director is a genre adventurer, giddily exploring the facets of each new world he discovers.
The Challenge of Creating Suspense in Hot Seat
Hot Seat presented its own unique adventure, a set of challenges particular to the logistics of the script. So much of Hot Seat features Kevin Dillon sitting at a computer - his office chair is rigged with explosives and is pressure-sensitive, so a massive bomb will be detonated if he stands up. While seated, Dillon's character has to perform a variety of complicated hacks. "I was really attracted to the idea of, like, how do I make a guy sitting in a chair interesting?" Bressack says. "When I read it and realized that, on the page it's interesting but, you know, it really lives and dies on how its shot, and how that guy performs it. I really thought it seemed like a good challenge and something that I really enjoyed the idea of being able to do."
So how does a man typing at a computer become suspenseful? "One thing I realized," Bressack says, "was to keep the pace up. I had to really play with how long I would linger on shots and have a certain amount of coverage to move around. So at certain moments, we're staying on him and not moving and then, you know, we created the device of this electric magnetic fence that was around him [and would trigger the bomb]. So, if he tried to roll around anytime and got close to the edge, that's tension for the audience. So I think creating these moments and beats of tension that existed in that space, and knowing the rules of the space, is what really creates it. I wanted to create this feeling that the bomb could go off at any moment. Anything could go wrong at any moment."
Kevin Dillon and Mel Gibson Are in the Hot Seat
An obviously huge part of selling that tension, though, relies upon the performances in Hot Seat. "Kevin Dillon did an amazing job of making a very connectable character. I feel like the audiences will connect with him, and he's very natural and relatable," Bressack said. "I went to Kevin intentionally, and I was really excited to work with him. He's just a great guy. He and I became really good friends in the process, and we keep in touch. Great dude all around, and he's a very talented and committed actor. It was really great to show this side of him, because I feel like, he's done a lot of acting, but most people know him as Johnny Drama [from the HBO TV show Entourage]. And so it was fun to explore him outside that character."
In addition to Dillon, Shannon Doherty does a good job displaying frustration and compassion simultaneously as Dillon's wife, and Sam Asghari, the model and husband to Britney Spears, also brings his best to a role as a trigger-happy police sergeant. "Sam is really good in the movie," Bressack says. "He's really natural, and he's just such a nice human being, and I think people will be surprised ,like, he can really act, and so I'm excited for people to see that side of him here."
One of the best parts of Hot Seat is Mel Gibson's performance, which is charming and truly endearing, bringing a lot of humor to the role of a bomb squad expert in the film. "Mel's one of the greatest living directors there is, and he's unbelievably talented," Bressack says. "He elevates everything that he touches and is just a phenomenal actor and collaborator." He continues:
Mel felt very strongly that his character should have this comedic aspect to him, and so we went in and kind of tweaked up the dialogue to give him these one-liners [...] Mel does it so convincingly and naturally that it doesn't, you know, derail the intensity of the scene. It just shows how his character deals with tension, and I thought that was really a really great choice.
James is Honoring His Father, Gordon Bressack
After directing many of his own horror scripts, Bressack transitioned into directing scripts from different writers which he enjoyed and found challenging. The reason for this is incredibly poignant. "It's a difficult thing, because I used to write all my own scripts, and then I started directing other people's scripts. Because the last script that I was writing, I was writing with my dad, and he passed away, so we never finished it. And, you know, I promised him that I would finish it, so it's been kind of difficult to do that." Gordon Bressack was an Emmy-winning writer who focused largely on animated television, working on influential and popular programs like the 1991 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and two of the best animated shows of the '90s, Pinky and the Brain and Animaniacs.
Gordon Bressack passed away in 2019, fundamentally changing his son's approach to scriptwriting and filmmaking. "Instead of stopping, what I've been doing is directing other people's scripts. But I've finally just recently started writing again," Bressack says. "My dad was a writer himself, and he'd written a lot of scripts before he passed away. And so I took the first of those scripts and shot it. It was a play that he wrote, and I shot it as the movie, and I'm going to kind of start going through each of his scripts and turning those into films as well. Because, you know, I have a mission to keep his words alive, and I think that's important for me."
"It's a strangely cathartic but painful process at the same time. You know, he was my mentor, my father, and really just my best friend. So he influenced all aspects of my life," Bressack continues. "I'm just very grateful that he was my dad, although I only had him as a father for, you know, 27 years. I'm 30 now, but I'd take those 27 years with my dad over, you know, 100 years with somebody else. So, I miss him, and I'm very fortunate that I've at least gotten to a place where I'm able to turn some of his works into movies myself."
Audiences will be fortunate to see them. From Lionsgate, Hot Seat was released July 1st in select theaters, digital, and on demand, and will be available on Blu-ray and DVD August 9th.