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Interview by Jeff Hayes
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The following is the original 1999 interview with Daryl Wilcher; His first ever online "Riff" interview with some newly added video content...
After watching Sleepaway Camp 3: Teenage Wasteland, It's hard to imagine "Riff" to be anything but a tough talking, foul-mouthed gangster... But this was not the case when talking to Daryl Wilcher, the very friendly and well spoken man who portrayed the character. In the following interview, Daryl returns to a camp full of good memories, cold shoots, and shares insight about what it was like camping with our favorite slasher, Angela at a place called Sleepaway Camp!
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| JH: | |
How did you get involved with Sleepaway Camp 3? Did you just go in for an audition when the movie came into town? |
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| DW: | |
Yeah, the film-makers put out a call to all the agents for the series...I heard about it briefly when they were filming the second one and I was really surprised when they had auditions for the third one because they were using like all the talent in the area just about...and they said they were gonna start part 3 as soon as they wrapped production on part 2 since they were shooting them back to back...so as soon as part 2 was finished, they immediately began casting for part 3... |
Daryl as Riff in the late 80's, and now, just over a decade later!
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| JH: | |
How old were you when you worked on Sleepaway Camp 3? |
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| DW: | |
Somewhere in my late teens or early twenties... |
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| JH: | |
Did you shoot the movie at an actual camp? |
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| DW: | |
Yes. We went out to a location on the outskirts of Atlanta...about 30 or 40 miles outside of Atlanta...in the hills and mountaintops of Georgia. I guess the person who scouts locations here found this site. The site was in one area but the different locations were like scattered about this area so it kept shifting depending on which scene we were shooting. It was a real campsite. I guess they wanted to get as far away from the city as possible |
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| JH: | |
Tell me your inspiration for RIFF. |
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| DW: | |
Well, I just tried to make him as thuggish and foul as I could since he was supposed to be a bad guy. Actually, I lived during some of my teens and my childhood for a little while in Detroit, Michigan and there were some tough areas there so just from my school experiences and people who I knew in my neighborhood, I based him a little bit on them. I think the character was supposed to be from Detroit so I was like OKAY this works because I could actualy model him from some people I went to school with [when I was in Detroit]. I just tried to make him as menacing and tough as I could. It was kinda like a caricature but it was fun. |
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| JH: | |
Did you do a lot of ad-libbing with the character? |
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| DW: | |
Well I guess we did. You didn't really have to adhere to the script. Like they said, This isn't Shakespeare (laughs) so we were fine tuning it and changing things. From what I remember, when I was looking through the script [at Riff's character] I was like wow, this guy just spouts obscenities all throughout the whole thing! So I was like, This is gonna be EASY (laughs). I mean how hard can it be to remember to insert M.F. here and FUCK THIS there. My friends to this day tease me about that fight scene where I jump up and I'm like, "Suck my d*ck, Spic!" They love that! They're like, that's the pinnacle of your acting career (laughs). |
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| JH: | |
That was a fun scene. |
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| DW: | |
We had a lot of fun with that because it was the first time that I had actually done anything resembling a stunt or choreographed fight scene. |
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So we had like little arm pads and elbow pads under our clothing so we wouldn't get hurt. And Mark Oliver ("Tony") he was a really cool guy to work with, I remember when we did the first take and we were on this table that was rigged to fall over when we were fighting on it...the stunt co-ordinator coached us through and said DO THIS, DO THAT, do exactly as I say so you dont get hurt...so we were like OK...and when we finally did it, we threw ourselves into it physically and had a great time going through the motions and we crashed onto the table and they yelled CUT! And both Mark and I jumped up at the same time and said at the same time to each other, "ARE YOU KIDDING??!!" (laughs). |
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| JH: | |
What was it like being on the set of Sleepaway Camp 3? |
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| DW: | |
When we shot it, it was like in the fall or beginning of winter; I remember it was just freezing! Since it was a low budget film there wern't a lot of honeywagons or little campers or mobile homes or anything that is usually made available to talent so we were like all hanging out around these little heaters, shivering waiting until the next shot came up... |
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| JH: | |
Did you like to stick around and watch the movie being made even when you wern't in it? |
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| DW: | |
I tried to. I tried to watch as much as I could. A lot of times if you're on call and you're out there all day, you may show up at like 7 or 8 in the morning and they might not get to your scene until like 1in the afternoon. You didn't have much choice but to stick around and watch what was going on or atleast try to prepare yourself for whatever scene was coming up. |
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If It was really really cold, usually I'd just stay in...I would try to stay as close to heat as possible. But If I got an opportunity to watch something to see what was going on I would...I hung around a lot with Bill "SPLAT" Johnson [the special make-up effects guy]. He was really cool, a really really talented guy, and when he was putting together special effects, whenever they were pulling something out, I wanted to see what it was or how it looked. At one point I saw these charred skeletons...somebody got burned up...they just had all these props laying around...all these decapitated bodies and what not (laughs) and I was always like, Where's this from? Is this gonna be in our scene? So, that was fun. |
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| JH: | |
It seems like a lot of the gore and make-up effects were cut out of part 3 when comparing it to part 2. Was a lot of that stuff cut out? |
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| DW: | |
When we were doing some of the effects where the characters were getting killed off...when we were on the set and we were initially doing them, some of them seemed kind of crude, kind of ridiculous the way they staged them...but when they screened the dailies the next day, the rough cut of the stuff...some of the stuff looked so realistic, so violent, that they had to tone it down or cut some of it out. |
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| JH: | |
One thing that always bothered me about Sleepaway 3 was toward the end where Angela had the remaining campers play a "Trust Game" in which they had to go into all the cabins to find "Marcia." This was a great idea and great scene but when they entered the cabins, they were very darkly lit, almost to the point where you couldn't see the dead bodies piled up inside each cabin...yet in part 2, all the dead bodies in "Angela's Cabin" at the end were very well lit so you could see them in all their gruesome glory. Do you have any idea why it was shot like that? |
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| DW: | |
That's a good question...I don't really know if that was intentional...if he was trying to heighten the horror effect by keeping everything in the shadows...or maybe it was just to try and hide the shoddy speical effects (laughs), I don't know, but what I do remember about that last scene is that the crew was rushing through it, it was sort of like a roadrunner cartoon the way they set it up and shot it...they were trying to meet the deadline...they had to stay on budget and if they didn't dismiss the talent by a certain hour then they were gonna run into overtime and they really couldn't afford to do that. SO all I really remember is that they were just rushing and everybody was like, OK everybody get in here, do this, lay down, please dont move cuz we really can't afford second takes...and the special effects guy was running back and forth with this portable fog machine and they were fogging the place up...and it was really freezing cold and they were just like We gotta go. All they were yelling was, We gotta get this finished before the time runs out. They were really just in a race with the clock. That might have had something to do with why it was filmed that way, but I don't know. |
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