[Watch the video interview on YouTube here]
Film Courage: This is a harder question to bring up. If you’re not comfortable talking about it, please stop me. You have a filmmaking partner that you’d work with for years and you wrapped Malum September 1st, 2022?
Anthony DiBlasi, Filmmaker: Yeah, it was a few days, it was August 27th I think is when we stopped.
Film Courage: Then 3 days later or a week later your co-writer and longtime production partner passed away?
Anthony: Yes.
Film Courage: Can we talk about that?
Anthony: It’s an interesting story because…so Scott [Scott Poiley] he came from a dance background. He started as a dancer when he was a kid. He had to stop dancing because he had a heart condition. He had an enlarged heart.
When I met Scott, they came down to Los Angeles. They had seen my film Dread, him and his producing partner at the time, they came down. I remember the day. We were in pre-production and I punched Scott in the chest, like joking around, we were playing around or something. I hit something hard on his chest. He’s like That’s my pacemaker and I’m like Oh man, I didn’t mean to punch you in your pacemaker. That’s when I learned that he had this heart condition.
Even then it was always part of the conversation. He had this pacemaker. He had it for many years. When I met him he was in his 30s and the first film we made together was called Cassadaga. He wrote it with his producing partner and when we did Last Shift that was our third film together. We’re like Let’s Write together. We started writing together and we wrote quite a bit around that time, quite a few screenplays together.
Scott and I had so much in common and we got along so well but this condition was always part of the narrative of my relationship with him. After Last Shift he got a heart transplant and I was in LA and I remember talking to his wife and it was a very tense time but he had that heart transplant…(Watch the video interview on YouTube here).
About:
Anthony DiBlasi graduated film school at Emerson College in Boston MA. Upon moving to Los Angeles he became a protégé of filmmaker/novelist Clive Barker. DiBlasi partnered in Barker’s production company Midnight Picture Show for nearly ten years, serving as a key executive & producer on films such as “Midnight Meat Train” (2008) and “Book of Blood” (2009). DiBlasi made his directorial debut with the psychological thriller “Dread” (2009), a feature film he wrote based on the Clive Barker short story of the same name. “Dread” was released theatrically in January of 2010 and went on to win Best Independent Feature at the 2010 Spike Scream Awards. He directed and co-wrote “Last Shift” a critically acclaimed supernatural horror film released by Magnolia Pictures in 2015. And directed “Extremity” a psychological thriller based on Extreme Haunts, released in 2018 by Epic Pictures.
CONNECT WITH ANTHONY DIBLASI
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