Landon Liboiron discusses the Bigfoot thriller’s strange tone, Bobby’s dangerous charm and its unforgettable pancake scene
Sawtooth Mountain begins with a Bigfoot hoax designed to rescue a struggling rental business. It does not stay harmless for long. The 84-minute thriller follows Bobby and Clint, paranormal-obsessed brothers played by Landon Liboiron and Gabriel Carter. Desperate to attract guests to their Bigfoot-themed cabin, the pair stage a sighting during a guided tour.
Their plan begins to collapse when three college students arrive for a weekend getaway and stumble into a situation the brothers never expected. Written and directed by Matt Kincses, the movie mixes cryptid folklore, psychological tension, and a streak of dark comedy. Sydney Scotia, Jude Wilson, and Matreya Scarrwener also star.
Liboiron told Nerdtropolis that the unusual balance was clear from the earliest pitch. It was enough to win him over before he had even opened the screenplay.
Landon Liboiron Joined Before Reading the Script
Liboiron said his initial invitation came from longtime friends involved with the production. All he needed to hear was that the story concerned two Bigfoot-obsessed brothers and would lean into the uncanny.
“I was in from the pitch before I even read anything,” Liboiron said. “So it was an extra pleasure and surprise when I read Matt’s script, because I didn’t know Matt before, and just how good it was. I mean, the whole script was just a really, really fun, entertaining read.”
That tonal uncertainty is built into Bobby. Liboiron saw him as someone whose magnetism could quickly become unsettling.
The character is a hustler with big plans, fierce loyalty to his brother, and a growing fear that everything they built could fall apart. “He teeters, I think, back and forth between a very charming individual and also a very scary individual,” Liboiron said. “And he’s a con artist, he’s extremely ambitious, and he loves his brother very much.”
As the brothers lose control, their desperation becomes the movie’s true source of danger. Liboiron did not need to force a sudden shift in his performance. Instead, he followed the pressure already rising within the script. “Bobby and Clint just get very desperate, and that becomes very threatening,” he said.
The Vancouver Wilderness Made the Horror Feel Real
Although Sawtooth Mountain unfolds around an isolated cabin deep in the woods, Liboiron does not consider himself a natural outdoorsman. “I grew up on a farm, but I’m a city boy at heart, I think,” he said. “I like the romance of being out in nature and everything.”
The production found a massive property near Vancouver that contained both the brothers’ cabin and the rental cabin. That allowed the cast and crew to spend most of the shoot in a single remote location.
Liboiron said only a small portion of the production moved into a studio near the end.
“The location that they got was this massive property, and we basically had the run of this whole property,” Liboiron said. “Both those cabins, like the Brother Kerwin’s cabin and the Airbnb cabin, are all on the same property. So we basically were kind of like camping out in this location for most of the shoot.”
The location gave the movie its natural isolation, but it also created practical challenges. Vancouver rain, limited lighting, and a tight schedule shaped the filming experience.
At night, Liboiron sometimes followed a distant beacon of production light through the darkness while bats swooped overhead. “The elements definitely were the most challenging aspect of the film,” Liboiron said. “But I think what they did with it is a feat, and I’m so proud to have been a part of it.”
Working on the film also pushed Bigfoot to the front of his mind for several months. Liboiron remains uncertain about cryptids and ghosts, but he has no interest in shutting down the mystery. “I’m still unsure if ghosts are real, but I want to believe that they’re real,” he said. “I would love to have a haunting so that I can say ghosts are indeed real. And I feel the same way with Bigfoot.”
For Liboiron, the imagination inspired by those unexplained possibilities is valuable on its own. “Anything where it inspires the imagination is a positive thing,” he said. “So, you know, just the belief in Bigfoot is enough for me.”
When asked whether he would rather encounter Bigfoot or see a UFO, the actor chose the UFO. Bigfoot, he reasoned, might be too much like meeting a bear without knowing the proper survival protocol. “I think I would be more afraid of Bigfoot because it’d be akin to just running into a bear,” Liboiron said. “It’s like, is it gonna maul me? What’s the protocol? Do I go into the fetal position? Do I make myself as big as possible to scare it away?”
A UFO would feel miraculous to him. He compared it to the otherworldly experience of watching a total eclipse from the top of a mountain.
The Pancake Scene Captures the Movie’s Strange Tone
One sequence involving pancake mix has already become the moment viewers want to discuss with Liboiron.
The scene’s full context is best left unspoiled. However, its length, commitment, and sudden absurdity capture the movie’s ability to move from tension to comedy without warning. “It makes me so happy,” Liboiron said. “I’ve never been a part of a film or a project, I don’t think, where there’s a specific scene in it that everybody wants to talk about.”
Liboiron jokingly compared the attention surrounding it to the famous milkshake scene in There Will Be Blood. However, he quickly admitted that the new sequence may not be quite as iconic.
He credited Kincses’ script and the filmmakers’ commitment to letting the moment unfold in one extended take.
“I think it was a combination of Matt and Gabriel and the commitment to making it one take that just kind of goes on for way too long,” he said.
The scene does more than provide one of the movie’s strangest laughs. For Liboiron, it represents the entire experience of Sawtooth Mountain. “The whole script is, to me, that scene,” he said. “I mean, that’s kind of what the whole script is to me, is this strange, ‘Oh, we’re doing this now? Okay. Yeah.’”
Those comic beats gave Liboiron room to exercise a side of his performance that audiences may not have seen as often.
The actor has spent much of his career in horror, supernatural drama, and heavier material, including Hemlock Grove. He said genre labels matter less to him than finding the truth of a character, but horror often offers the strange, macabre, and uncanny roles he enjoys. “There’s just such great characters written in horror,” Liboiron said. “They’re strange, and you can kind of push out into the more macabre and the uncanny and kind of bizarre, which I like playing with.”
Next, he would like to move in the opposite direction with an outright comedy made simply to make people laugh.
“I haven’t really gotten the opportunity to do just an out-and-out comedy where the purpose of it is to make people laugh,” he said. “Sawtooth Mountain actually has a lot of comedic elements that I really enjoyed playing with that I haven’t had the opportunity to play with before.”
Why Sawtooth Mountain Could Find a Cult Following
Liboiron has watched older projects find new audiences years after their original releases. He described his three seasons on Hemlock Grove as formative and said the show’s odd qualities may have made it better suited for later discovery than immediate success.
“It has all the potential for being such a culty little watch,” Liboiron said of Hemlock Grove. “It’s such a strange show, and it wasn’t well received in the beginning. I think by its nature, it needed to be found later.”
He believes Sawtooth Mountain could travel a similar path as viewers discover its unusual combination of Bigfoot obsession, brotherly loyalty, human desperation, and sudden comedy. “I think Sawtooth Mountain really has the potential to be like one of those movies that has a little culty following to it,” Liboiron said. “It just has such a strange tone, a unique tone.”
The close-knit production also left him eager to reunite with the filmmakers. He praised the cast and crew’s shared commitment, saying everyone appeared to be making the same movie despite the difficult schedule and conditions. “It was one of those unique experiences where you make a movie, and everyone is there making the same thing,” Liboiron said. “It comes through in the final piece of it.”
Although the production was not easy, Liboiron hopes the creative team gets another opportunity to work together. “It was such a great crew,” he said. “Everyone worked so hard. I would love to work with all of them again. I know it wasn’t easy, but I hope they do it again.”
Where to Watch Sawtooth Mountain
The thriller is available to stream on Tubi and Plex. It is also available to rent or buy digitally through Apple TV, Amazon Prime Video, Google Play, and other TVOD platforms.
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Sean Tajipour
Sean Tajipour is the Founder and Editor of Nerdtropolis and the host of the Moviegoers Society and Reel Insights Podcast. He is also a member of the Critics Choice Association. You can follow on Twitter and Instagram @Seantaj.
