Ethan Hunter’sjourney onSuicide For Beginnersstarted with a five-hour pitch from director Craig Thieman. “He came over to where I was staying at the time,” Hunter says in our interview ahead of the film’s release, “and he was bouncing off the walls and [acting] out his ideas. His enthusiasm is really infectious when it comes to things like that. I mean, at that point, if he had said, ‘I want to remakePlan 9 From Outer Space, but I want to do it inFrench New Wavestyle and all with hamsters,’ I would have said, ‘Let’s go.'”
Of course, Hunter and Thieman’s relationship goes further back thanSuicide For Beginners. The two, in fact, met in college and made short films in film class together. They had always had conversations about working on feature-length movies together, but life, as it always does at that age, kept getting in the way. “I wanted to produce my first feature that I wrote and produced while I was still in college, and he ended up getting called to overseas to serve in the second Iraq War.”
A dark comedy, the official synopsis forSuicide For Beginnersreads: “Writing the perfect suicide note isn’t easy. Murdering a garage full of people is also pretty hard. But getting your victims to like you while you kill them, that’s the really tricky part.” The film stars Wil Daniels, Sara Tomko, Nate Panning, Julia Lehman, and the late Sid Haig inone of his final roles. The film ultimately came about after Thieman’s short filmLove Letterreleased to high success in 2007.
Suicide For Beginnersis actually based onLove Letter, and, immediately, Thieman knew he needed Hunter to help him turn his short into a feature. “[He had] so many ideas, but he couldn’t seem to find the ways to work them the way he wanted to work them. He knew that he needed a professional writer. That’s why he came to me.”
A Kickstarter Campaign Helped Suicide For Beginners Happen
Suicide For Beginnershas been almost a decade in the making and was, Hunter says, a “pretty challenging shoot” because of a lack of resources. “[We had] something like $20,000 to shoot for 30 days, [which] is not a lot of money. We were constantly trying to make it work, but it was still a lot of fun. It was out first time making a feature together, and we worked really well together.” And then, with a laugh, he says, “For the most part. I mean, we screamed at each other a lot, but we always talked it out afterward.”
What’s more, Kickstarter, the public crowdfunding platform, helped makeSuicide For Beginnershappen. “Kickstarter was still fairly new at the time, and we took a shot. We made what I think was a verygood pitch video. That was pretty funny, and we threw it out in the world.” To Hunter and Thieman’s surprise, they met their Kickstarter goal with two days left to go until the campaign’s deadline. When asked if knowing that strangers, essentially, had helped fund their film brought a special kind of pressure, Hunter says, “Yes. Pressure because, when people believe in you, you want to repay that trust and give them something of value. Most of the people [who donated] have been really enthusiastic, even throughout the ridiculous delay [in] getting this thing out there. I think they’re going to be really happy. Hopefully. We’ll see.”
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Indeed, they will be. What’s most remarkable aboutSuicide For Beginnersis the way it balancescomedy and horror, leaning into one genre, at just the right time and at just the right amount, before pivoting entirely towards the other. “I did, I would say, close to 30 drafts on this picture, which is about 27 more than I usually had to do on a feature film. Part of that is because it was such a tricky vibe, and Craig had specific ideas for what he wanted. The script was always in my hands, but he was always the quarterback.”
Suicide For Beginners’s mix of light-hearted humor and dark themes isn’t new territory for Hunter. Throughout his previous works — like his short filmDeath Cat’s a Cutie, which follows a house cat on a murder spree, and his featureMadam Massacre’s Quiet Evening at Home, which sees a supervillain going to great, catastrophic lengths to spend an evening watching her favorite television show — there’s a clear pattern of pairing comedy and tragedy. Typically, as perInverse, humor is often used as an “effective” coping strategy in the face of tragedy. However, Hunter’s writing — and, by extension,Suicide For Beginners— offers something more nuanced than that. “I always try to write for moments that will stick with you on both the light and dark side,” he says. “It’s about trying to balance it into a place that gives you tension, but then gives you that release, but then gives you that tension so that the whole thing keeps you, hopefully, engaged.”
Suicide For Beginnersis available in select theaters and VOD on June 01, 2025.
