Sometimes a movie rises or falls on its relatability, and Dust Bunny, which arrives in theaters on December 5, appears, for all its heightened action and over-the-top villainy, to have an incredibly relatable premise: the monsters hiding under our beds.
Multi-hypenate actor and author David Dastmalchain is, in a way, one of those monsters, playing an assassin in the film, which revolves around a young girl (Sophie Sloan) who believes the monsters under her bed killed her parents. Dastmatchian is, it seems, one of those assassins, though the intended target might’ve been Mads Mikkelsen, who becomes the girl’s unlikely savior.
“It’s like The Professional meets The City of Lost Children. It has all those fantastical elements of films that we don’t get to see anymore.”
The film, which should arrive on your best streaming services soon after its theatrical run, reunites Mikkelsen with his Hannibal writer Bryan Fuller, who has an eclectic filmography running from sci-fi stalwarts like Star Trek: Discovery to fantasy like Pushing Daisies.
“[Fuller] is a masterful craftsman of story and world-building, and he’s telling a story about a young person who has seen and experienced something so utterly terrifying and yet? No one seems to be willing or able to listen,” said Dastmalchian.
It’s this relatability to a common human experience that gets Dastmalchian.
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“If we don’t, even for me as a 50-year-old man, feel the same way sometimes….I’m sitting here looking at my phone or looking at the news and going – looking at the world around me – and it doesn’t even have to be stuff on the global or national scale, there’s stuff in my personal life, where I’m like, ‘Is anybody else seeing this? Am I crazy?’ and, often, the world will try to convince us that we are alone.”
Cognizant that he was talking to TechRadar, Dastmalchian tied this back to how technology affects us.
“Technology is a medium for propagating, you know, the necessities of the functionality of capitalism. The driving force underneath all of it is to make each of us feel like we are missing something,” he said.
And then together we arrived at the idea of “Engineed FOMO.”
In Dust Bunny, even though there’s the real chance that the little girl might get revenge through Mikkelson’s assassin, this is, Dastmalchian told me a layered story, and that’s mostly thanks to Bryan Fuller.
“You get into the mind of Brian Fuller and the world that he builds around that concept and all of the layers and all of the nuance and all of the ways that your imagination can be tickled…”
Dastmalchian said he’d like more people like Fuller to get the chance to make movies, “because I can’t with the formula anymore, it’s. It feels heartless, it’s soulless, and a lot of times you see a film that, even if it has a giant budget to do spectacle with explosions and…buildings toppled or crazy monsters? If there isn’t a beating heart underneath it? Come on! Hey, what’s the point?”
Making your own stories
Perhaps Dastmalchian connects so deeply with what Fuller does because he, too, is a writer and has penned comics for DC like Creature Commandos and Count Crowley for DarkHorse Comics. His new graphic novel, Through, is out now at z2comics.com and set to arrive in bookstores early next year. It revolves around Alix, a somewhat compulsive perfectionist who enters a fantasy world that was apparently built just for her. It’s a personal story for Dastmalchian, who told People earlier this year, “Over the years, the story evolved into a labyrinthine mystery that overlapped with my own ongoing struggle for mental wellness.”
I was curious, though, about the creative process. Comic book writing is a fairly specific thing. Does he do it panel-by-panel, or write an entire story and then work with the artist to bend each panel to fit the narrative?
“It depends on the artist,” explained Dastmalchian. For Knights vs. Samurai, he sent the artist Frederic Mele details (action, dialogue) about what would happen on each page and let Mele work out the rest. For Creature Commandos, he got down to a specific number of panels per page, but the artist Jesús Hervás “would just go in his own direction.”
For Through, Dastmalchian told me he took everything he learned up to this point and was, under artist Cat Stag’s direction, as specific as possible.”So, I would say, ‘Page 16, panel one. … Alix wraps her hand in cloth to smash the window while peering through. Her face is filled with both anger and a certain dread over what she might find on the other side of this door.’ Then Cat takes all that direction, and she does her magic.” As for how she does it, Dastmalchian told me she usually sketched on paper and then works on an iPad.
I noticed that in Dastmalchian’s description, there was enough detail in there to, perhaps, direct a film. Turns out he’s way ahead of me. “This year, I made my first directorial debut on a short film, the first time I’ve ever directed anything. I’m so proud of it. It’s called Yeti or Not. And it is a story focused around a group of hikers on a snowy mountain top that captures a Yeti.” He added that it’s coming to Shudder and AMC next month (December).
The tech he uses
A self-described “App Hound,” Dastlmalchian is always on the hunt for new apps, but he’s also fairly intentional in his tech habits, especially because he understands the risks.
It’s like, he tells me, food. We’re constantly surrounded by it, and in the right hands and with the right balance, it’s beneficial, he explained, adding, “When it’s exploited, it’s overrun. When it’s, you know, unregulated. When it is addictive, [it] can be so dangerous.”
For him, he turns to meditation apps and an app called Everying AA, which helps him find support meetings when he’s on the road.
While not a “massive gamer,” Dastmalchian calls out one game he likes. “Roblox has been a really great opportunity for me to, wherever I am in the world, be able to log on when my son is playing, and we can join each other in whatever game of the week he’s hyped up on.”
Tech is also part of his daily habits.
“I wake up – and many people may think this is unhealthy – but the first thing I do is I genuinely, I pick up my phone, I open the saved files that I have on my phone, which include a checklist of mindfulness activities and gratitude lists, and setting goals for the day.”
That actually sounds like a pretty good habit, and considering all Dastmlachian has on his plate, including his YouTube interview series, Grave Conversations, and playing Mr 3. in the upcoming One Piece Season 2 on Netflix, it sounds like he’s getting through those goals. too.
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