5 Things Kane Parsons Learned Making 'Backrooms' for A24

Have you been obsessed with the Backrooms since the beginning? I certainly have, so I am among the fans who are absolutely hype for the feature-length adaptation of the Internet’s favorite analog horror series to hit the big screens.

The person behind it, Kane Parsons, is about to become A24's youngest-ever feature director when Backrooms opens theaters on May 29. He's 20 years old. Three years ago, he was a teenager uploading found-footage horror to YouTube using free software and whatever camera he could borrow. As we covered on No Film School, Hollywood took note fast.

The scale-up landed him Chiwetel Ejiofor, Renate Reinsve, 30,000 square feet of hand-built set, and James Wan producing.

He recently sat down with Wan on the A24 podcast to walk through the whole journey. Here are the five things he said that are great filmmaking lessons.

• YouTube www.youtube.com

What Do You Want to Watch?

Parsons describes his early creative process as entirely vision-first. For him, it wasn’t about following rules. He wasn't learning software for its own sake or making films to practice structure, although those things are certainly important too. He just had a cool idea and did what he needed to, acquiring whatever skill or tool he could, to make it real.

"I would get excited about a scene or a visual or a moment in my head that I wanted to see exist, but there was nothing surrounding it, supporting that moment. So it's like, okay, so now I’ve got to learn how to do these things so I can make that moment," he said.

This is actually good proof-of-concept thinking, even if Parsons wasn't framing it that way in junior high.

Build toward the thing you'd want to watch. Let that moment, visual, or idea drive you.

Master What You Have Before You Add More

Parsons talked practically about scope in his work. The instinct for a lot of newbies is always to want more. You made one thing, so now you need more crew, better gear, more locations, right? Not necessarily.

Parsons went the opposite direction. He got very good at doing a lot with very little, and he refined that until it became its own thing. All he had was Blender, After Effects, and himself. He kept making simple, faceless videos, working around his weaknesses.

Overall, his small creative footprint didn’t restrict his vision. In fact, it often stunned people when they realized that what they were watching in his early videos wasn’t real sets or actors, elevating the work even more.

“What can I do there?” he said. “If I just keep working on that, refining that, until it becomes the best version of itself, it becomes a unique product.”

He found his lane and made that into something distinctive rather than treating it as a ceiling to break through.

It's a discipline we talk about a lot around here when it comes to ambitious shorts. Your constraints can become your aesthetic if you let them.

Know Everything About Your Project First

Parsons is upfront about the fact that he has a hard time with uncontrollable variables. He describes prevising the entire Backrooms feature in Blender, shot-listing from those files, and designing the physical sets in 3D before any crew members did any work. The construction crew built what he'd already built digitally.

“I enjoy a certain level of run-and-gun, but I think I am the kind of person who needs to know every single thing about the thing I'm making before any other people are even involved with it, or before there's a chance for something to get away,” he said.

Wan, for what it's worth, called this "a breath of fresh air" on set. A director who knows what they want and can communicate it makes everyone else's job easier and faster. So be as prepared as you can be.

We've said this before. The luxury you actually have on a low-budget shoot is time. Use it in pre-production.

• YouTube www.youtube.com

Know Your Audience

Parsons grew up as exactly the kind of fan who would have consumed something like Backrooms. He’s all about the YouTube ARG world, web series with dense lore, content that rewards multiple viewings, and obsessive analysis.

"The audience that I speak to is the audience that I'm also a part of, which I think is maybe why I've had a decent rhythm with them for as long as I have."

This is the same path the Philippou brothers took with Talk to Me —RackaRacka made videos for horror fans, made by horror fans. You can't fake that familiarity, and audiences feel when it's missing. Make the thing you would actually watch for the people you already know.

Tell People What You Want and Why

When Parsons first showed up to work with a real crew (gulp, actual department heads), he spent a lot of mental energy dreading what he didn't know. Then he got on set and realized the job description was simpler than he'd built it up to be.

"I just need to tell the people around me what I want in a concise manner and explain why we want it so they can also be personally motivated to achieve that thing,” he said. “And then we're just doing that in a few different ways, and then the day is done, and we got what we wanted, and boom, and then we do it again.”

Yep, that’s the process, simplified (even though the work is really, really hard). But the big point is that you don’t need perfect technical knowledge of every department, nor an answer for every question. You just have to have clarity of vision and the ability to share it.

As he already established, preparation matters, obviously, and Parsons had done his homework obsessively. But the actual act of directing a crew came down to communication.

Know what you want. Know why you want it. Say it out loud. Your crew will do the rest.