Afraid of Unsettling Stories from the Set of Nefarious

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Tonight we get Nefarious with Steve Dace. Steve is a conservative Blaze TV host who authored the novel A Nefarious Plot that inspired the film Nefarious. Oh, I am here with a person I am very excited to be with. His name is Steve Dace. Steve, did I say the last name correctly?

SPEAKER_00 0:23

You got it right, man. Thank you.

SPEAKER_01 0:24

Yes. Perfect. So Steve is someone who there's a movie I watched called Nefarious, and I've watched it. Steve, I'm not, I'm not exaggerating. I've watched it like five times. Whatever I can't find anything, I like I can't find anything I'm surfing for. It's late at night. Sometimes I'll put that movie back on because you just learn so much every time you watch it over and over and you appreciate it even more. And you were a producer on the film, and your book, A Nefarious Plot, was the inspiration for the movie. And what's kind of interesting is A Nefarious Plot is, you know, the movie Nefarious is a prequel to your book, A Nefarious Plot, which is pretty unique. I hadn't heard that before. So, you know, would you mind? I guess first things first, introduce yourself very quickly. I mentioned you as an author, but introduce yourself very quickly to our audience, and then we'll get into the book and the movie.

SPEAKER_00 1:11

Sure. I I host a daily two-hour show uh after Glenn Beck over on The Blaze each weekday. Um my 14th book is coming out in uh in May, uh, why Independence Day? So I've done a lot of writing. Um I I produce on average about 240 podcasts a year uh for The Blaze. Um I've been involved in political campaigns from local school board all the way to president of the United States on a couple different occasions. So um, you know, I've I kind of it's weird. I'm a kid born to a 15-year-old mom. I still live in the same West Des Moines suburban home. That's where I'm talking to you from today. Wow. Than I than my my kids were raised in, you know, and I've kind of had this uh odd Walter Mitty-like, Forrest Gump-like experience where I I just have just I guess we'll say it randomly, maybe providentially, just ended up in all these situations and scenarios and meeting all these people and famous people and getting to do stuff, um, you know, like uh writing best-selling books, producing movies, doing a show on a big national platform that um a lot of guys born to 15-year-old moms don't get to do, but especially uh while living in Des Moines, Iowa.

SPEAKER_01 2:28

Well, you know, and just the producers who produced Nefarious and Writers Produce is Did God Is Not Dead? And it's almost like your book is The Devil is Alive. And did they have we're gonna talk about the supernatural stuff later on? Did they have any experiences on God Is Not Dead? Because your your film we'll talk about later. There's a lot of people that were affected.

SPEAKER_00 2:49

Uh, from a supernatural perspective, no. Um uh and they had never experienced anything. In fact, when we began pre-production for this movie, uh I grew up uh in a uh uh non-Christian home. My my my nana, my grandmother, my mom was 15, so my her mom, my grandmother played a heavy hand in raising me when I was a little kid to, you know, because my mom was so young. My mom and I literally grew up together. Uh, and so um she was huge into the occult um horror movies. Uh one of my earliest memories is my mom went out uh on bowling night with my stepdad, where I got my last name, and my grandmother and I watching the original Salem's Lot on TV, and I can still remember how I felt as a five-year-old uh when uh the vampire comes in through the kitchen floor, uh, you know, one of the great, you know, scenes in uh uh 1970s television of that era, you know, and so I was very familiar with uh with every genre of horror, with very much of the occult. I was very much interested in spirituality and uh mysteries and things of that nature that I inherited from my grandmother. And uh after I got converted to Christianity, this this interest carried over, but now it was more of um I'm not interested in a um perpetual mystery um like a modern-day Gnostic. I'm I'm more now I want to know what are the answers to these things? Are these things real? Are they demonic deceptions? Are they hallucinations? Um, and so I think of uh um podcasts like blurry creatures or haunted cosmos. I I you know I I get fascinated by tuning into some of that stuff sometimes that attempts to look at this from an you know an explicitly Christian um you know angle. Um because I and I've always felt like um if if uh we we are the people of the most successful supernatural work in the history of literature, the Bible. So it never made any sense to me why we wouldn't have something to say about this realm. Now, as I've gotten uh further into my faith, you know, uh I don't watch slasher flicks or anything like that anymore, uh, but I am still very interested in in uh horror movies that touch on spiritual themes because I think you can tell a lot about a culture by what it's scared of, by what frightens it. And the and the first time I really thought, frankly, it was a horror film that convinced me that I'm gonna have to even be more overtly biblical in how I do my show than I even pretended to be or wanted to be, because I I went and saw a horror film called Paranormal Activity. And I was I was writing movie reviews for WorldNet Daily at the time, and so they sent me to go review that film. And as I sat there opening Friday night, packed house, packed theater here in suburban Des Moines, um, and and it was the first time that I can remember watching a major demonic possession film where there's no religious component or answer at all.

unknown 6:00

Wow.

SPEAKER_00 6:00

And and it wasn't, and and if you if you remember in that story, her and her boyfriend, they go, they do Google searches, they talk to her dad, uh, they go to the they to a local academic on demonology, they go everywhere for answers on what is haunting them, except the one institution that claims it has the answer. Yeah and when it and of course, because they didn't go there, they end up losing to the demon and getting overrun by it at the end of the film. And one of the more, I think, truly uh frightening closes to a movie I can ever remember. And and I walked out of there thinking, okay, if we're at the point now that we're kind of no longer doing secularism, but now we're gonna acknowledge there's a supernatural realm, but there is no godly light component to it at all. And so it's just we're we're victims of nihilism. This culture is even worse off than I than I thought that it was. And and so that movie uh had a did have an impact on me on on how I've done my show. Um I've always been intentionally a biblical worldview guy, but that movie uh had uh ever since I saw that film, I think it was 0809. Yeah, um I mean it's been even more uh prevalent in in what I do. Um because it I I do, like I said before, I just think you can tell a lot about a culture by what frightens it.

SPEAKER_01 7:24

Yeah, I um you it you mentioned the Bible. A lot of people forget that one of the first exorcisms recorded, or the first exorcism recorded, was with Jesus in the Bible, and that there's actually ghosts mentioned in the Bible. People don't, you know, forget that.

SPEAKER_00 7:35

Um Saul goes and seeks the witch of Endor to call up the ghost of the great uh judge Samuel, right? The Bible doesn't say that's not Samuel, it doesn't say that's some demonic uh bastardization of it, it doesn't say that at all. And doesn't say the witch didn't have the power to do that. In fact, the the reason why God's people throughout the Bible are told to steer clear of such influences is not because they don't have any power, but because they do. Uh but the source of that power is darkness, and it leads, like you see, ultimately that's the the last saddest chapter of Saul's life, um, and it leads to his you know uh tragic ending not just a few pages later in the Bible. And that's typically where a lot of those sorts of things lead. I I think the best horror film made so far this century uh is Heredity.

SPEAKER_01 8:21

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 8:22

And uh, I mean Heredity is just almost a flawless film. Well, what's the storyline of that film? A grief-stricken family seeks out powers of darkness uh that do have some form of power, and it ends up leading to uh uh the unraveling and destruction of that family to the point that their son now becomes a vessel for bringing forth a high lord of hell. And then what does he say at the end of the movie? That they are that he is here to rebuke the Trinity. He says that right there at the end of the film, right? You know, and so I I think that um that modern day Christian storytelling of Frank Peretti aside has has done a disservice by making it look like the the you know that maybe the battles we do fight are against flesh and blood. Yeah, maybe it's just our own hypocrisy. And maybe if I have this tear-filled, you know, Jesus conversion while gazing longingly out a patio window on a sunny day, everything will get better. And no, we're fighting principalities, uh dark forces in a hidden realm. And um, and I think that uh we have done a disservice in in Christian storytelling in this last generation by by not acknowledging that. And so uh both on my show and then in the novel and then in the movie I produced, I wanted to address that.

SPEAKER_01 10:32

Well, I think you did, definitely. And I gotta tell you, podcasts are great because I'm the guy that needs to go watch a podcast to explain a movie to me sometimes because I don't quite miss stuff, you know. And there's a lot of podcasts that explain the Bible as well that helps me things that you miss, right? So I think that's I think this format is excellent. It's got some, you know, bad people on it, but it's got some very positive things that it does as well. Um, let's talk about a nefarious plot. Uh, I think the inspiration came from a voice in your head in the shower, and that voice might not have been yours. You want to talk about that?

SPEAKER_00 11:03

Yeah, I was I was in uh Washington, D.C., the first time I've ever visited our nation's capital, where I got the inspiration for the book because there's no better place to get inspired about a demonic takeover of America than going to Washington, D.C. And uh I went there to do publicity for my first wide-release book I had ever published early in my career. And so I uh get off the plane, get to my hotel, I hop in the shower, and while I'm in the shower, uh I hear this voice in my, you know, little voice in the back of my head say, This book is dedicated to all the useful idiots out there for um, especially those of you who had no idea you were being used all this time, for you proved to be the most useful idiots of them all, nefarious. And I thought that is a very weird thing to randomly have pop up in your head in the shower, you know, and so I had it, I kind of just filed it away in the back of my head. And then DC is a place with lots of temptation and lots of blackmail material, and I'm there with that with my wife and kids at home, and I'm like, I'm a I'm I'm uh I'm staying in my room and staying out of trouble, you know. And uh and I'm gonna sit down on my keyboard here and play around with this a little bit. And I I started thinking about it, the screw tape letters.

SPEAKER_01 12:14

And could you explain, could you explain, uh Steve, the screw the basic premise of the you know, it's CS C. S. Lewis, right?

SPEAKER_00 12:20

And it's basically C. S. Lewis is one of his most famous works. He wrote it in World You know, for for the Brits anyway, the heights of World War II. Um, the Americans had just gotten in, but were not uh really organized yet as a fighting force. Um Hitler is ten minutes away from uh adding the UK uh to his empire. He has he has spent over a year and a half now bombing the Brits on an almost nightly basis into smithereens uh to try to break them down. And it's in the midst of this that C.S. Lewis writes his book, The Screwtape Letters, and read it as an audio drama first on the BBC. And uh and it's a book about uh it's a hidden manuscript uh that has been leaked, where a senior tempter from hell named Uncle Screwtape is uh he is um mentoring a young demon named Wormwood on how to take down individual people with their um deceptions. Is and so in the midst of a grand world war, Lewis brings the the fight between good and evil down to the granular level, monoimano, soul to soul, right?

SPEAKER_01 13:25

Yep.

SPEAKER_00 13:25

Well, I thought, what if now we actually go even f take it now back up here to the meta? And instead of um a demonic manuscript that describes the takedown of how we're how we're taken down as individuals, what about the takedown of an entire culture? And so I um I thought about let's make Nefarious a high lord of hell who has been tasked by the devil with the destruction of the United States of America. And um, and and and he's gonna reveal his plan, but not kind of in the you know, the handlebar mustached villain. Okay, you know, now that I've got you, let me tell me your tell you my plan. No, the plan is successful, it's already been enacted, it's already been implemented. You know, he listened to Seth Green and Austin Powers. Just shoot him, just shoot him, don't just stop talking and just shoot him. He doesn't. He's not he's not gonna tell you what he's gonna do, he's already done it, it's already over. And he needs to convince his master, the devil, that he's been successful, and so the way that he will do that is to put it all in writing under his own name and put it out in the open, and America will be so far gone it won't take it seriously, and that's how he convinces Master the Devil that he succeeded in his mission. And so I I started writing the introduction and uh and and that introduction to this to ended up being about 90% of what was made into the final book. And I called two theologian friends of mine, one charismatic and one reformed, because I wanted two different perspectives on this. And to both of them I said, Hey, I'm not gonna tell you what this is, I'm just gonna read it to you, right? And then don't interrupt, and when we get to the end, tell me what you think. And I read it to each of them, the introductions, and they were both blown away by it. And they they both thought that uh this is something, especially once I told them what I intended to do, uh, that could flip be fleshed out into um um uh you know an important work. And I normally write pretty fast. This book took me a full year to write. Um and it's because I had to take weeks, if not months, away from the character at a time.

SPEAKER_01 15:28

Yeah, I was gonna ask a quick question. Um the making of the film had a lot of nefarious things going on even afterward. Did anything affect you while you were writing? Oh, definitely.

SPEAKER_00 15:38

I mean, I I had to stop writing it at night. Um, and that's normally my time. You know, my show's during the day, at night is when I have time. Yeah. Um, and so uh I I just could not go to bed and have this be the last thing is trying to because I I I need this to be an external character, not not an anti-hero extension of my own personality. Right. Okay. And um, and you know, when you when you you know, when you dance with the devil, devil don't change, he changes you. You know, I mean you stare in the abyss long enough, that sucker will start staring back at you, you know, and so and then I and then I really struggled with how to end it. Uh I tend to be, I'm fine with how dark the material is if it's redemptive at the end.

SPEAKER_01 16:22

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 16:22

But I couldn't come up with a way to have a book written by a demon where he destroyed my country be redemptive at the end. And and I even contemplated getting some you know, some major ministry people I know to write like an afterward, you know, some kind of cop-out. And then finally my wife is like, hey, is the book written by a demon? And I said, Yeah. Then she said, then it should end like a book written by a demon. And so that's why the the last words of the book are mene, mene, take a parson, which is uh right out of the Bible from the book of Daniel. The the words in Farsi that are written on the wall by the hand of God uh to the ruler of uh Persia. You have been weighed, measured, and found wanting. And that's why the uh final words, the final words that Nefarious speaks in the film as a character, are those are the exact as he sits there in the electric chair, same words. Those are the that's the last time Sean speaks in the film uh is when he says, Mene, mene takeil up parson. Okay.

SPEAKER_01 17:14

And when you say Sean, you mean Sean Flarey?

SPEAKER_00 17:16

Sean Patrick Flannery, who played our who played our demon in the film.

SPEAKER_01 17:19

Amazing actor. Um, yeah, that is that is incredible. Unlike the screw tape letters, which has like a happy ending because he fails and the demons eat wormword, I think, or something. Yep. You're realistic. It's kind of like where we're at. We're at a flashpoint right now. And kind of have you ever seen the movie The Cleansing, by the way? The cleansing. I've seen The Cleansing Hour, but I haven't seen The Cleansing. The cleansing hour probably is it. Yeah, that's the movie that was on like Shudder that has kind of that same thing where it takes place in a studio, and at the end, everyone that's watching.

SPEAKER_00 17:47

So the filmmaker that made that, Damian Levesque, is a good friend of mine.

SPEAKER_01 17:50

Okay, wow.

SPEAKER_00 17:51

And uh that I love that movie.

SPEAKER_01 17:54

That's a great movie. I loved it too. I was surprised. I was like, okay, I'll watch it. But then it just totally grabbed me. In the end, I thought it was brilliant. It was brilliant. What was it like once you had the book written? It got funding very quick. You want to talk about how funding, how you got contacted, and how funding for the film came like almost like it's preordained.

SPEAKER_00 18:12

The book came out in March of 2016, and my show was my national show, it was pretty new still, and kind of had a modest audience. And I think we sold about 52, 5,500 copies. You know, not great, but not terrible. And um, and I thought, well, okay, that was a nice little exercise and moved on with you know what I was doing next. And then um about five months later, out of the blue, I got a call from Glenn Beck. And I did not know Glenn Beck yet. Uh, I was not working with The Blaze yet. And uh he called me and said, Hey, a mutual friend of ours gave me your book and it just blew my mind. You know, I'd love to have you on my show to talk about it. So I came on that Friday. Uh he was gonna have me on for a segment, ended up being the entire hour, and we went through the book and where it came from and and some of the things it points out about where we are in history. And listening to that interview uh that day was a uh a guy named Chris Jones who's driving to work in Bur in uh in Burr Bait, California. And um he's just formed an independent production company uh with two guys, Carrie Solomon and Chuck Conselman, who had uh written the script for God's Not Dead, which was the the film that made Pure Flick Studios basically. And they had they they were they wanted to do a little bit more serious material from a from a Christian perspective. They had just signed a deal with Abby Johnson for her Planned Parenthood memoir, um, and they were getting they were in pre-production for that film. And so they were looking for like really good uh material, and Chris got to the office before them that day and got my book on Kindle after hearing me talk about it on Beck and just couldn't put it down. And so when the guys came in that afternoon uh from uh location scouting and stuff, he he said, Hey, I think I've got our next movie after this one. Just pick a page number out of this book, any random page number. And one of the guys picked the page number and Chris read that page, and they're like, That could be a movie.

SPEAKER_01 20:09

Wow.

SPEAKER_00 20:09

And so that night I'm down here in this basement actually, and uh my kids were still little at the time. I put them to bed. My wife's at a church retreat, and um I uh just fired up the Madden to wind down, you know, some me time, and I get I get an alert on my phone uh of an email, and I open it up and it says, Hey, you know, we want to buy the movie rights to your book. And I thought, man, Nigerian print scams are getting really specific nowadays, you know?

unknown 20:39

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 20:39

And I thought I thought it was a joke, a troll. I deleted it, went back to playing Madden, and that little voice in the back of my head said, You might want to take a look at that, you know? And so I I did a little Google search to find out that these names were legit names, um, and it was a legit offer. And uh we ended up signing the deal at Christmas uh the next year, Christmas of 2017, yeah, is when we signed the deal for it. And then um they went off and did unplanned the Abby Johnson work. Uh, and then it was uh we started pre-production for Nefarious, right? And I think I was gonna say this earlier and I forgot. Right as we were starting pre-production for Nefarious, because I watched all these horror films growing up, and to this day I still think The Omen, the original Omen, is one of the greatest films I think literally ever made. Not just the greatest horror films ever made, one of the greatest movies ever made. And a lot of people don't know that movie is actually what inspired George Lucas with licensing. He that was the first movie. So Jaws comes out in 75, that kicks off the summer movie season. The Omen comes out in the first kind of traditional summer movie, Blockbuster, and then um The Omen came out for 76, and and Warner Brothers wanted to capitalize on the success of The Exorcist, and so that was the first time that a year advanced publicity for a film was done. And in all in every major bookstore in America, Warner Brothers put a sign with the creepy kid and it said the world ends 6676 because the movie came out June 6, 1976. And so Lucas saw Warner Brothers doing all of this, or 20, sorry, he saw 20th Century Fox doing all of this, and that's what that's when he went to the studio and said, tell you what, you guys can keep all the tickets. I want the merchandise, I want the licensing, the merchandising. And that's essentially what inspired Lucas to do that and and you know funded what became his film empire. And uh, and so I I've watched all the making of of these movies. I kind of knew the backstory of the plane crashes and everything that else, everything else that the the the that went on in the filming of This and The Exorcist. And so I went and found these uh DVD special features on YouTube and I sent them off to my filmmakers. And I said, Hey, this is not a world you guys are accustomed to. You guys from the pure flix world, things are about to get wonky. You might want to watch a couple of these. I meant this somewhat half tongue in cheek. I had no idea that this was actually going to be what occurred. And um I ended up uh raising the money for the film. We started pre-production uh in June of 2020 when Gavin Newsom first opened California. I flew out there to Burbank to meet with the guys. We storyboarded the film over the next four days. Um and then um I went about raising the money for the film. Uh they took our storyboards and then took the next nine months putting uh the formal script for the film together uh while I went out and raised the money and everything else. And then um we were gonna start filming the movie. We were doing set construction and stuff in Oklahoma City, and both of my directors in their 60s got uh Delta variant COVID pneumonia and were nearly hospit and had to be hospitalized and nearly died. And so then I had to go get another million dollars to secure our sets and stuff before the deadline. Other productions were waiting for this soundstage to take our place. Um and so we were gonna start filming the movie in August of 2020. We had already done some casting conversation. We I and I won't tell you who it was. We actually had an Academy Award-nominated actor agree to play Nefarious, uh, provided he could have final say on the script. And the first thing he wanted to do was get rid of the abortion scene. And I said, No way, as the executive producer, no way. If we start making these compromises now, it'll just it'll be nothing like the film we intended to make by the time we're done. And uh, and so now my guys, though, our sets are constructed, but we're not doing anything, and I'm not sure my guy, my directors are even gonna get out of out of the out of the hospital. They got out at the end of October, and we've got a deadline, we've got to be out of this space by the by by the start of uh the SAG Christmas calendar, which was December 23rd, I believe.

SPEAKER_01 24:39

Otherwise, we lose about the space. Um, yeah, the space is kind of what you shot with uh, you know, the main part of the movie, but there was also a penitentiary that was probably we filmed on site, that's right.

SPEAKER_00 24:50

We were the first film ever to shoot on site at a prison, an active prison in Oklahoma. It never happened before.

SPEAKER_01 24:54

I was gonna say that must be very difficult to get clearance on.

SPEAKER_00 24:56

Yeah, and that was a medium security prison, so there's like legit criminals in there. Yeah, and a funny thing happened when we went to shoot there, uh, is we were negotiating we were experimenting with some drone cameras and some other stuff. Stuff never happens on time. You never keep to the minute schedule. And so by the time we got to filming Sean's Perp Walk to the electric chair, uh, and we had some rain coming in, we thought this is gonna add to the atmosphere, so let's wait, wait till it starts raining, you know. And so by the time it's raining and everything, and we're filming uh the scene with uh James and the warden, and then uh Sean's perp walk, well, there's been a shift change, and the night, the overnight warden is in. And and he doesn't know that we are still there. He was he was told that we would be out of there before he came in, all right? And so when we start staging this perp walk of Sean in an orange jumpsuit with security guards, the the alarm gets sounded, thinking something's wrong, someone's trying to escape, the whole thing goes on lockdown, okay, because the overnight warden doesn't know what we're doing. This was just one of many situations and and this can be kind of, I don't know if anybody's been in a prison. All right, now I was not there for these filming days, but I heard about it. This is an active prison. There are rapists in this prison, there are drug dealers in this prison. It's it's a when it's when we said it's a lockdown, it is a lockdown, right? Okay, guy, guards with guns, billy clubs, they're ready to do their jobs. And we're just and my guys are just sitting there like, uh just filming a movie here. You know? So um uh but we but most of the the scenes that most people remember were filmed on uh a massive sound stage in downtown Oklahoma City where the Thunder used to play. Uh and we rented that facility out. They shot the movie Reagan there, and then the second production to get into that soundstage was us after that movie.

SPEAKER_01 26:44

And wasn't there a huge uh accident or or uh weather thing that tore off the roof on that facility?

SPEAKER_00 26:50

That happened, yes. Well, I mean the so the the the the first day we went to filming in downtown Oklahoma City, and now I'm getting ready to come from Des Moines with my family to watch the movie get the rest of the movie get filmed. And my directors call me in a panic, hey, we're done here. We can't make the movie. I'm like, what is going on? All right. Um, our lead cinematographers, so Oklahoma is a right to work state.

SPEAKER_01 27:14

Yep.

SPEAKER_00 27:15

Um, my directors, their their previous movie was a non-union production, but they always pay better than union scale of the workers. They just don't want to pay a bunch of left-wing communist unions. Grift. I mean, we we paid people very, very well. I'm so our chief cinematographer organized a uh a strike against our film to try to use our movie to organize a union. And IATSI, the um the stage um union, you know, these are the cinematographers, the key grips, the the the people that actually make your movie. Yep. Uh that they wanted to make an ex an example out of our film. Um they didn't want it to be the Reagan film because I think obviously there's political connotations there. So let's they had no idea who I was or anything, probably just looked at our budget and thought we were an easy target and thought, all right, we're gonna we don't want to set an example now that everybody can come to Oklahoma and make a non-union film without you know Greece in our palms. So they staged a strike. Um, you know, 75% of our crew walks out, and we have no means by which to make this film. So um IATI picked the wrong independent film to do this with. Okay. Most movies with a$3 million budget don't have someone as politically connected as I am as your executive producer, you know? And so I just so happen to know high-ranking members of the Oklahoma State government, like the Secretary of Education and others. All right. So I got on the phone with those guys. I told my directors, I said, we will be making this film. Let me do my job. And so I got on the phone to the people I know politically, eventually got the attorney general of the state to issue a uh public letter to any members of the crew that crossed the picket line. Uh, I'll defend you in court if the unions try to come after you, blacklist you. We got just enough of our crew, and I mean just enough of our crew, to cross the line and film the movie. Our cinematographer was was the understudy of the cinematographer, had never made a movie before, only documentaries. Um we didn't we were under constant threat that they were gonna get a uh a Biden-friendly judge, federal judge, to put an injunction on our film. And so much of the movie you see, like the assembly cut of our film, the totality of everything you filmed, is like barely two hours.

unknown 29:32

Wow.

SPEAKER_00 29:33

Many of the scenes you see in this movie were done in one two takes top. Uh or two takes tops because we were just we gotta get done. We we and and we're and at the same time, we've got this deadline of we started shooting, all right, the the the Monday after Thanksgiving, and we've got to be done by December 23rd. We're already gonna lose our sets if we're not, and then we're threatened with this idea that an injunction we would probably beat, but that would take weeks or months to beat. We ended up actually beating AyATse in the in the labor union court. The Biden magistrate judge actually ruled in our favor, if you can believe that. Okay. Um, but that didn't happen for another year. And so we were under a constant threat that this movie was never going to get made. Um the sound the my uh my crew was making the film on one end of the soundstage in this massive arena. Every day I'm on the other side of the arena, literally yelling at politicians to do their job to make sure we can make our film. Okay. So um that's just one uh one of many challenges.

SPEAKER_01 30:33

But Steve, I gotta tell you, I I made one small film and then a documentary. You work much harder than any executive producer I've ever usually that credits like, oh, they gave money or something, you know. But you've like worked your tail off, and plus you had some elf, some health impacts, which we'll talk about in a little bit as well. So you really uh paid the uh paid the rent for this one.

SPEAKER_00 30:53

So uh and then um we had numerous uh spiritual issues while making the film. Um one of the things that occurred is uh our my director's very, very devout, charismatic Catholic, and they have a lifelong friend who's a Vatican uh exorcist certified priest who goes with him wherever they go. Great guy, he was on set with us every day, blessing the set and everything else. And they're all in this Uber together, or in this Uber, in this verbo together, staying together, right? Yeah, and so they they wake up one night and there's a massive commotion in there in their house. And it sounds like an animal has gotten in, and they're thinking, you know what, we did the bachelor thing, left all the pizza boxes and everything out, you know? Yeah. And then we got all the windows open, it's kind of warm here, and an animal just got in to get our trash, kind of our bad, right? So they go downstairs to get get rid of the animal, and they realize that uh the animal's not downstairs, and none of the pizza boxes or anything they've left out have been touched. And so they they now hear this massive commotion upstairs, they go upstairs, and in one of the bedrooms of this of this, uh, of this uh of this verbo, they had set up an altar with their priests so they could do the mass every morning before they came to the set to film. And it's and and so this the this this squirrel got into their house, left all the food, everything else completely alone, went right up into the room where they were doing the mass every morning, turned over, desecrated all the idols, the entire altar, urinated and defecated all over it, and then ran and then left the house. Absolute true story. And also, there were a ton of car rack, not a ton, but there were many car accidents. There were numerous car accidents.

SPEAKER_01 32:38

Nobody died, right? And so nobody died.

SPEAKER_00 32:41

Um the Chris Jones I mentioned to you before, uh uh he called me one afternoon the week after the movie came out, and he's with his kid in Costco, and he he noticed as he's in the parking lot that his his son unbuckled his car seat. And so he bends back into the car to rebuckle the car seat, and out of nowhere, this car comes down the parking lot, takes the door of his car off, because he had it open to buckle his kid in, yeah, and takes the door of his car off and misses him by inches. And he's like, if I did not bend back down to put my kid's car seat back on, I'd be dead right now, right? Oh my. The next day, one of our other producers, John Sullivan, calls me. He's like, You're not gonna believe this. My car was parked outside. I hear this, I'm getting ready to get up and go to work in the morning. I hear this mass. It's he lives in LA, so a lot of times there's no driveways and people are parked in the street, right? Okay, in front of their house. Yeah, there's this massive commotion outside, and I hear this loud crash. I look outside, it's my car. And I run outside and I asked the cops when happened. He goes, You're not gonna believe this. Somehow, this nursing student was driving through your street residential area, fell asleep, crashed into your car, totaled your car. You know? And a few minutes later, he might have been, he might have been in that car going to work or on his way there, who knows? You know? So those, those, we, those kinds of stories we we heard quite a bit.

SPEAKER_01 34:08

Now there was a priest, was it Father Carlos Martin? Uh that had some interesting experiences. Do you mind talking? Before we get to that, the gentleman who wrote the script, they're from like like New Jersey or something, and they're like, wow, this script, we did it, but it wasn't us. Something kind of like fueled us to write this. Is that is that accurate?

SPEAKER_00 34:24

Do you whenever you hear Christians talk about spiritual warfare today, a lot of times it is from the perspective of things being done by darkness to them. I will tell your audience the most faith, other than having and raising kids, the most faith-challenging and rewarding experience I have had in my life is the making of this film. Because if if if if you're just getting picked on, that's not a spiritual war, that's just a spiritual bullying. But I mean, I I saw I saw God open up doors we could have never opened on our own, made things happen we could have never made happen on our own, uh, gave us inspirations we would have never simply had on our own. And and I'll give your audience one example because it's it's it's maybe my favorite example of how God made this movie happen. And so we get done uh with principal photography in uh February of 22. February of 22. And the last scenes we shot were the very beginning where um James's mentor commits suicide at the beginning. Those are the last scenes we shot there. They were and and then the interview with Beck, those were shot in Dallas in the winter of 22. So we get done around February of 22, and um my my filmmakers are like probably six to eight weeks until we get you a rough cut to see if you know you like where we're going, and we'll talk about you know where we are from there. I'm like, okay, cool, you know. So I go back to just do my show and get back to normal. And um, and about six weeks later, I get an email out of the blue in the middle of my show during a commercial break from a guy named uh Brian Jeremiah Smith. And he says, Hey man, love your show, never miss an episode. I've been waiting years. I love this book, I've been waiting years for this movie to finally get made. I cannot wait to see it. I it's probably too late, you know, you're probably too far in the post production, but just in case, here's my resume. And, you know, if I can if I can be of any assistance, man, I, you know, uh, I work for Netflix. I'm the only um uh I'm the only editor at Netflix that did not take the jab. And they were gonna fire me, but then the Supreme Court overturned the Biden jab mandate, and now they can't, but they don't know what to do with me because they don't want to reward me for defying them. So they just put me on indefinite paid leave. So I've got free time. You know, if I can help, let me know. And I opened up this guy's resume and he worked on like get out. Uh, he worked on uh The Haunting of Hill House, uh, one of the editors for that for Netflix. He was supposed to be one of their editors for The House of Usher, but that's when they took him off because he wouldn't take the jab. Um, he worked on Dr. Sleep, the Shining sequel. So I mean, this guy has worked in a lot of major productions in this very genre. I'm like, snap, man. I wish I'd have known this guy existed six months ago. We could have used him, you know. So I sent his information off to my uh filmmakers. I'm like, yeah, I know it's too late now, but maybe this might be a good contact for you guys for future projects, you know? And I go back to do my show. And then the next commercial break, I look and I've got an email from one of my filmmakers. And he's like, Yeah, uh funny timing here because um the first editor we hired, and we hired a guy, the only editor in Oklahoma, because everything we did in Oklahoma was for the tax credit.

SPEAKER_01 37:37

Yep.

SPEAKER_00 37:38

And this guy turned in a rough cut that's so bad, we're pretty sure the movie is ruined, is can never be released, and we don't want to show it to you. So on the off chance that this guy could save our film, we're gonna call this guy like today.

SPEAKER_01 37:51

I was like, okay, you know, and um I was thinking the you only had a couple takes on most of the uh on most of the shows, and then um I thought the finished product was so tight, was so well edited, you know, without even being prompted.

SPEAKER_00 38:08

Our filmmakers would credit Brian for for a lot of that. Yeah, and so I like the analogy I always give for so they go meet with Brian, and you know, Brian is available, but this is a top-end editor for the number one streaming service at the time in the world. And we can't afford him with the budget that we have left. We're almost down to pennies to get it this far.

SPEAKER_01 38:27

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 38:28

And he goes, Well, don't worry about it. Netflix is paying me. So you guys pay me what you can, you know. But I'm getting paid well by Netflix. I got the time, let's do this. And uh yeah, you know, if if Carrie and Chuck were here, they would agree with me that Brian basically saved our movie. Uh we we called we called Marion Mariana Rivera out of the bullpen, the bases were loaded, nobody was out, and we're only up by one run. Yeah, we can't even we can't even afford a sack fly because that'll bring the tying run in. Okay. We need him to strike out the side. Just throw that famous cutter, strike everybody out, okay? That's what Brian did. And Brian found test footage, like when you guys see the scenes, the cutaway scenes with the birds, right? Okay, that's test footage. We did that was not that's not footage for the film. He literally took all our test footage, everything to come up with transitions, uh, to help the pacing and stuff of the film. Um, I mean, he saved it. That's what he did. He came out of the bullpen in the ninth inning and saved it uh and struck out the side. And uh we would not be here today. Pardon me, we would not be here today without Brian. We had no idea this guy even lived, existed, uh, had our belief system, let alone, you know, the amount of people that know this genre and have our belief system is not immense. And so that was just simply a door that God opened right when we needed it and dropped it right in our lap. Did he have anything kind of diabolical happen while he was editing any equipment problems? He really didn't. The rest of us did. Brian got off scot-free. All right. So apparently the the Lord said, uh, you're being you're you're suffering enough at the for the low rate they can pay you to do all this. Right. All right. We're gonna make everybody else go through the suffering that you are exempted from. All right. And so uh Brian ended up uh moving his guy, he his wish was to take his, he was him and his wife had a young family and about to have another baby, and uh his hope was to get him out of LA and to uh to Georgia and friendlier territory, and that's where they live now. And uh he's a very busy man um and uh uh just an overall pretty cool dude. All right.

SPEAKER_01 40:29

So let's talk about Father Carlos Martin pretty quickly. What happened to him? And then I'm gonna talk about what happened to you when you get the golf ball size uh cyst that you had, and then we'll we'll close out with a couple quick questions, okay? So let's talk about Father Carlos Martin if you don't mind.

SPEAKER_00 40:43

So Father Carlos hosts uh a very popular podcast called The Exorcist Files. He's considered among the the leading kind of in the Father Rippiger class of the leading exorcist in all of Rome. Uh and uh um I'm an evangelical, but I was very aware of his work. And Carrie and Chuck, you know, he's almost a heroic figure to my filmmakers. So, you know, there was definitely some consultation with him about we want to make this real. Like, what is this really like? I mean, we we want to we want to make the evil real, not a cartoon, but real. And uh Father Carlos loved our our our final film so much he agreed to come to the uh premiere and he gave the invocation at the beginning of the premiere. Well, that morning is when we decided we were gonna film all the special features for the DVD release later in the year and get into some of the one of the special features specifically gets into all the spiritual warfare and all the various issues we had and challenges to make this film. The problem was for hours we could not get our equipment to work. We would start, it wouldn't work, it or we think it would be good for 20 minutes and it would die on us. And we're running out of time. And uh one of my filmmakers said, you know what? Father Carlos is just sitting in his room right now, just maxing and relaxing, waiting for the premiere tonight. Let's call in. Let's call in the heavier artillery here and let's see what we got, you know? And uh, and so Father Carlos walks in and like right away he's like, something's not right. And he uh there is uh and he points to one of the walls and he says, uh behind that wall, uh, there is a persistent voice and whisper that is essentially cursing your efforts. And and he goes through this like cleansing ritual and liturgy right there in this hotel room where we're filming all this stuff. And then shortly after he's done, we start filming again, and everything worked. The rest of the time we got it all done. I I saw these things with my own eyes. I was there for these things. I saw them.

SPEAKER_01 42:44

So that's amazing. Uh unfortunately, you experienced some things health-wise too. Can you just quickly cover what happened to you? Uh and what was the timing? Was it right before the premiere or something? It was right after. Right after.

SPEAKER_00 42:54

It was right after. And I I get back from well, we had our premiere in Dallas, uh, and it's so that uh the executives at Cinemart could come because they were instrumental in uh giving our making our theatrical release happen because they really believed in the movie. And um, when I got back, I started noticing my armpit was just itching really bad. But you know, I did the whole guy, Jesse Venturain, got time to bleed thing, and maybe I've just been too aggressive with the deodorant, I'm just gonna let it go, you know. And um a couple nights later, I wake up in the middle of the night, I'm in so much pain, I can't even sleep, I can't put my arm down, you know. And um, as soon as the urgent care clinic opens that morning, I go in right away, and uh the guy's like, Well, the doctor says there's two options of what's wrong with you. One is that you did overdo it on the deodorant, and the other is something you don't even want to contemplate. So he goes, I'm gonna give you a quick little uh, you know, anti-inflammatory shot right in the rear end, like a cortisone shot, and in the hopes that that's gonna work. Because if that doesn't work, then we're talking about something that you don't want to talk about. So I felt instantly better after the shot went in my show, and then as I got home and as the rest of the afternoon went on, I am feeling even worse than I was before. And now the pain is essentially overwhelming. I'm having a hard time staying conscious. Um and uh my wife rushes me to the ER that night. I essentially slip into you know, the stage of unconsciousness before you're into a coma, essentially, like a form of delirium. Um my temperature and everything is off the charts. And um it turned out it was the other thing, and that I had a severe life threatening MRSA infection of a quote unknown origin, and uh said that in my chart, and um and the kind of thing that maybe if I would have addressed It three days prior, maybe one or two really crappy shots and a dose of doxycycline would have fixed it. But because I let it go, because I've you know I've got I've got too many things, I'm just too important to go to the doctor, of course. Yeah, I let it go to the point that it was one step from sepsis getting into my bloodstream. And so they had to operate right there in the ER. Um, they had to put me under because they had to open up my armpit and literally take a spoon and scoop this bacteria out of my armpit.

unknown 45:21

Wow.

SPEAKER_00 45:22

And I thought I was, and then so I I felt so much better the next day, but I had to go to my doctor for post-op evaluation uh 48 hours later, and by that time I'm feeling really good, and a lot of the swelling has gone down, and so I'm thinking I'm good, I made it, right? And he goes, I have some very, very bad news for you. I said, Oh no. He said, Well, now that the swelling has gone down, they would have not been able to see this before because the swelling was too prevalent. But now that the swelling has gone down, the bacteria actually uh dug a series of like uh paths in your armpit. There's two or three other, there's at least two other infection planes in that armpit. And then if I don't take them out right now, we're gonna go through this all over again, and it might this time it might kill you again. And he goes, I got even worse news for you. This will be the this is the most painful procedure we do without putting somebody under.

SPEAKER_01 46:14

Why can't they put you under?

SPEAKER_00 46:15

Is it just uh Um it's I don't know he explained it, but I it's um I can't remember why he said this. Yeah. Um that's okay.

SPEAKER_01 46:26

It's just a matter of yeah, it just it it goes with the story where the devil wants to give you as much pain as possible anyway. And it worked.

SPEAKER_00 46:32

And I I mean they I mean the amount of screaming that that hallway at that urgent care clinic heard where my doctor's office is, all right, and words that I didn't know I knew anymore. Okay. Okay. And uh and I had to go back and do this three days in a row. Wow, oh my god. Okay, and and so and and the thing was he he's like, you know, a lot of doctors won't even give you a local because there's a decent chance it won't the that the nerves are so shot from the bacteria, it won't numb it anyway. Yeah, and so a lot of doctors won't give you a shot because they don't want to cause you twice the pain by putting a needle in you that won't work and then doing it anyway, you know. So it this was it was like I was in a night in a you know a Civil War era field hospital. They literally gave me something leather to bite down on, and and they didn't ask me if I wanted any whiskey. All right, like you're gonna need to bite down on this.

SPEAKER_01 47:25

I think that would have been worse if is if your doctor was called Dr. Payne or Dr. Damien or something like that.

SPEAKER_00 47:31

So and then the they give you um, there's only one grade of antibiotic that when MRSA gets to the sepsis point will kill it. And it's called like um a nuclear-level antibiotic or something, I can't remember. Most people cannot tolerate it orally, and so they have to stay in the hospital for the four the full 10 days of the course because you can only get it intravenously. So, so because he because I'm stubborn, he agreed to let me have 24 hours to see if I could tolerate it. And if I could, then they'd go ahead and just let me work and take it orally, and I could take it, actually. I was fine with it. So I get down to the last two days of the antibiotic course and I go for my final checkup, and he's like, dude, you're looking great. It's healing, you're good. Well, I mean, we're gonna take the pack patches out. Uh, I got okay to go do this um um speaking engagement in New York I had scheduled for the last year. And I fly out there, and my wife, and I'm and as I'm as we're as I'm flying out there, I'm like getting really warm and hot and stuffy, and I'm thinking, oh man, what a terrible time for my annual sinus infection. You know, it is spring. Um that night I wake up and my wife says to me, Honey, it relax, the ambulance will be here in a minute. I'm like, what? And I turn around, there's like this pile of sweat, puddle of sweat behind me in my head. She goes, uh, baby, your temperature is 105. Wow. And I checked it three times. The ambulance will be here in a second. You are delirious again. Well, what happened now is now that the meds had killed off the MERSA, they're now attacking my immune system. And I'm having an another uh death-defying reaction to the meds. The problem is though, because my MERSA was so recent, they couldn't automatically do that because they had to make sure I wasn't sepsis because I could be contagious. And then that's a that's like a Center for Disease Control, you know, quarantine level event. So they have to keep pumping these meds into me until the the the bacteria uh sample comes back, the blood sample to show that the bacteria is gone. So I'm still being fed this allergic, uh, this this medicine that I have, this allergic reaction to at the exact same time in this hospital in New York. So it's a race to see which one of these two things is gonna kill me first, the Mercer and the med. And uh, but I'll tell you what, I'll I I won't take that event back for anything. I had an incredible prophetic event uh with the Lord that night that um uh changed my life the rest of the way that I'll never forget. And and and and I think the Lord put me in that situation, knowing that I would just think I'm too busy and too important, he couldn't, that I wouldn't. How do you shut me up? All right, that did it. Okay, and and that made me available to hear what uh the Lord had to say to me that night.

SPEAKER_01 50:13

Oh, that's amazing. That's amazing. I have one last question, if you don't mind, and thank you for your time for shaking with me. So if Lord Nefarious had to do like a progress report, your book was written eight years ago, right? If Lord Nefarious had to like get in front of the devil right now and give him a progress report based on how things are going, what do you think it'd say? See, I told you so.

SPEAKER_00 50:34

Yeah, is what I think he would say. And I I had some hopes that this last election uh would be at least a giant speed bump. And I think the first last year was a tremendous first year. But I I I think you're seeing now between the courts, between the do nothing Congress, not to mention, you know, the president is a person. This the White House is full of people, people make mistakes, make errors. It it it it sort of feels like we've lost a lot of the momentum that we thought we had suddenly captured um in that election and afterwards. And and even when we win, we're still arguing on on his terms, you know. Yeah. So um I think he would say, see, I told you so, sadly. And I hate saying that, but that's what I think he would say.

SPEAKER_01 51:24

Is where can people follow you, your podcast and your next book that you're writing, Independence Day? Give us a quick blurb about that before we sign off. Sure.

SPEAKER_00 51:31

Easiest thing to do, and and everything I catalog is on my X feed at Steve Dace Show, D-E-A-C-E, at Steve Dace Show on X.

SPEAKER_01 51:40

Perfect. All right, all right, Steve, thank you so much for your time today. I appreciate it. I appreciate your work on Nefarious in the book A Nefarious Plot. What a tremendous film. I'm not exaggerating. I've watched it five times. I'll probably watch another four or five more times when I nothing else is good on TV. Such a tremendous job. Appreciate all you do and all that you've been through.

SPEAKER_00 51:58

Thank you, brother. Appreciate it. Thank you. God bless.