Modern horror filmmakers Dan Berk and Robert Olsen have worked with the most extraordinary current and up-and-coming scream royalty. Whether they’re working with Pennywise the Clown himself, Bill Skarsgaard, or pairing up once more with Maika Monroe of It Follows and Longlegs fame, Berk and Olsen always have something special up their sleeve. Once again, they pull from a talented pool of modern horror heroes as they shift from terror to fast-paced action in the directors’ latest effort, Novocaine, starring Companion’s Jack Quaid, Prey’s Amber Midthunder, and Smile 2’s Ray Nicholson.

Quaid’s mild-mannered Nathan Caine lives with a rare disorder that leaves him feeling literally no pain. He lives a mundane life, by day working as a bank executive with his crush Sherry (Midthunder), and by night e-gaming with his pal Roscoe (MCU Spider-Man’s Jacob Batalon). After his bank is robbed and Sherry is kidnapped by the relentless Simon (Nicholson), Caine ventures forth to save her, ultimately using his rare disorder to his benefit. The film also stars Matt Walsh (Veep) and Betty Gabriel (Get Out).

Ahead of the film’s release, Collider’s own Joe Schmidt had an absolute ball interviewing Berk and Olsen. In this interview, which you can watch in the video above or read in the transcript below, they discuss Quaid and Midthunder’s exceptional chemistry, why they chose to make the leap to a differently daring and complicated genre, and how the film was directly inspired by Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicles and David Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises.

Why Would Horror Directors Make An Action Flick?

“If we wanted to get into action, it had to be something that felt really unique.”

COLLIDER: You are primarily known for the horror movies that you’ve done in the past, and this is a pretty big departure, especially the comedy elements for it. What inspired this direction that you set?

DAN BERK: Listen, we’ve always wanted to make action movies. We loved action movies growing up. It was a point of bonding for us creatively when we first started working together, when we first met each other as randomly assigned roommates at NYU.

ROBERT OLSEN: We watched Commando a lot.

BERK: Yeah, we watched movies like Commando quite a bit. But it’s really hard to make action movies. It’s very hard to do it earlier in your career. They tend to cost more money, so it’s hard for a first time filmmaker to go, “Hey, can you give me $20 million to go make an action movie?” So, we finally built up the cachet that we could potentially think about doing an action movie, but all the scripts that we were seeing and the scripts that were being submitted to us all felt a little too down the middle for us. We always want there to be something unique and something surprising about the movies that we come onto. When we read the script for Novocaine, we realized that it was perfect for us because it has such an unexpected protagonist in Nate, someone who can’t fight, someone who does not belong in an action movie at all, and that juxtaposition of putting this innocent person who has no skills whatsoever in the ecosystem of an action movie up against these really dangerous adversaries just had so many opportunities for humor and for a really fun, original set-piece design. It had kind of all of the stats that we needed to get excited.

OLSEN: We needed something that we felt would stick out, and I think so many action movies are similar in that your protagonist knows how to fight, and they’re kicking ass, and they kick eight guys’ asses, and then the next fight they kick 12 guys’ asses and all that stuff. So, this felt so different to us because he is getting his ass kicked for the majority of every fight in the movie, and it’s only at the very end of each of them that he comes up with some quirky way to win. We always said that if we wanted to get into action, it had to be something that felt really unique, and this was exactly that.

Jack Quaid Trained Never to Flinch While Getting His Butt Kicked

“You’re having such a good time watching these bones being broken.”

It’s interesting because he doesn’t feel pain. You can’t do that like you do any other action movie. What were the challenges of doing something like that? It’s probably pretty intense to figure out.

OLSEN: Honestly, Jack had to train himself to be able to get punched and not flinch. Your whole life as an actor, you’re getting punched and flinching. That’s part of the job. I think he had to kind of disconnect those two things and do something different with his face than the rest of his body was doing, and that’s something that takes practice. It’s something that we worked on a lot with our stunt coordinator. And yet, it’s a balance because you don’t want to look like the T-1000 like there’s no reaction at all. He’s still worried. He’s still anxious about what might happen to his body, but it’s not pain. He’s never wincing in the movie. So, yeah, that’s absolutely a difficult thing.

Then taking that and extending it and being like, “Okay, how can we utilize this in each fight scene? What is a way that he can create a painful environment that his body can handle, but his opponents can’t, and yet it’s not going to kill him? Obviously, you can’t just light the whole room on fire because you’re going to burn to death. It’s like, what can it be? How can he utilize this to his advantage? And that was just a really fun thought exercise that we had.

BERK: Then we were very concerned about the idea, when we were prepping the movie or taking our pass on the script, we were like, “Alright, well, one huge Achilles heel is what if the fact that he’s not wincing when he gets hit means that the audience isn’t going to wince? So, what if the audience is like, ‘Well, I don’t feel a fucking thing because this guy doesn’t either?’” The whole movie would fall apart if that was the case.

We were watching a lot of movies in prep and references and just good movies and stuff just to get ourselves in the right mindset, and we were watching Eastern Promises. There’s a scene where there’s a frozen corpse, and a finger is cut off of the corpse, and we both were like, “Ugh!” And then we looked at each other. We were like, “Wait, it works! If a frozen corpse getting their finger cut off makes us cringe, then, of course, it’s going to work when it’s a living, breathing character.” So, that was actually very validating thought.

OLSEN: Unlike Eastern Promises, this movie is really funny, and so it allows it to be more gory because there are jokes built into it. The audience gets a second to kind of laugh about it as it’s happening, whereas if this movie was dead serious and had as much gore in it as it does, I think you’d have people walk out because they’d be like, “This feels like violence for violence sake.” And this is so much more fun. There are plenty of torture porn-style movies out there if you’re into that kind of thing, and so we wanted to differentiate ourselves and be like, “Yeah, there’s some torture stuff, but it’s fun. There’s gore, but it’s funny.” So, hopefully, the people who would normally be a little turned off by the gore can still enjoy this movie because you’re having such a good time watching these bones being broken and flesh being torn open.

Jack Quaid and Amber Midthunder’s Crucial Chemistry

“The most courteous, warm relationship between two actors.”

The heart of it is this romance between Jack and Amber Midthunder’s character, and that kind of drives the entire narrative. The chemistry that they have is so good. What made them perfect for this film in this pairing?

BERK: I mean, they were both perfect in their own ways for each of the roles. You never know if the chemistry is going to be there, but once we all got down to Cape Town and had our first dinner, and once we had really gotten to know each of them and realized what incredible people they both are, in addition to being amazing performers—they’re both so kind and generous—and once we put them in a room to start rehearsing, we realized they were just puzzle piece actors where they have the same exact approach to scenes. They’re both very cerebral. They’re both very generous scene partners. They were always constantly checking on each other and making sure, “Was that cool in that take when I did that?”

It was the most courteous, warm relationship between two actors, and that chemistry was essential, like you said. I mean, if you don’t believe that Nate is going to risk his life for Sherry, the entire movie falls apart and you’d have people walking out for an entirely different reason. “This isn’t believable. Why the fuck is this guy doing this? You’re just doing this to tell the story that you want to tell.” But it really did work because they both are just so magnetic for one another. By minute 25 of this movie, you’re like, “I am dying for these two to get together.”

Novocaine opens in theaters on March 14.