Latest / Bulletproof Screenwriting™ Podcast / BPS 328: How to Make a Kick-Ass Low-Budget Zombie Film with Eric England

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BPS 328: How to Make a Kick-Ass Low-Budget Zombie Film with Eric England · Bulletproof Screenwriting™ Podcast

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  You are listening to the IFH podcast Network. For more amazing filmmaking and screenwriting
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  podcasts, just go to IFH podcast network dot com. Welcome to the Bulletproof
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  Screenwriting Podcast. Episode number three, twenty eight falls When things Change, I'll
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  be happy True when I am happy things will change. Kyle Sea's broadcasting from
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  a dark, windowless room in Hollywood when we really should be working on that
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  next draft. It's the Bulletproof Screenwriting Podcast, showing you the craft and business
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  of screenwriting while teaching you how to make your screenplay bulletproof. And here's your
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  host, Alex Ferrari. Welcome, Welcome to another episode of the Bulletproof Screenwriting
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  Podcast. I am your humble host Alex Ferrari. Now, today's show is
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  sponsored by Bulletproof Script Coverage. Now. Unlike other script coverage services, Bulletproof
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  Script Coverage actually focuses on the kind of project you are in the goals of
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  the project you are, so we actually break it down by three categories micro
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  budget, indie film, market, and studio film. There's no reason to
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  get coverage from a reader that's used to reading temp powl movies when your movie
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  is going to be done for one hundred thousand dollars and we wanted to focus
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  on that. At Bulletproof Script Coverage, our readers have worked with Marvel Studios,
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  CIA, wm E, NBC, HBO, Disney, Scott Free,
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  Warner Brothers, The Blacklist, and many many more. So if you need
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  your screenplay or TV script covered by professional readers, head on over to cover
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  my screenplay dot com. Enjoy today's episode with guest host Jason Buff with Eric
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  England from the movie Contracted. He is the writer and director and he takes
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  us through his journey as a filmmaker, how he started out making low budget
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  films and slowly built up from there. And I think it's really important for
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  you know, first time, second time, whatever, filmmakers to understand that
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  there is a you know, not for everybody, but the majority of people
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  out there who are making films start out small. They make a you know,
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  a movie for a couple of thousand bucks or possibly even less, and
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  then slowly gradually move up after proving themselves with a small feature, then they
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  move up to a slightly larger one. Your first feature shouldn't be, you
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  know, you shouldn't be looking for a movie star and trying to spend,
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  you know, a bunch of money and everything. It really should be just
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  like a test and if for whatever reason it loses money or it becomes a
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  disaster, you can just learn from that. And you haven't burned all those
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  bridges, and you haven't you know, wasted a bunch of people's money,
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  because that's a lot of money. That's a house right there, you know
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  what I'm saying. Let's move on to our interview. I'm really excited that
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  Eric came on the show. He's a young filmmaker and is really out there
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  doing what a lot of us want to be doing. So he has a
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  lot of great advice about how you can become a successful filmmaker. Here we
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  go, Okay, well, I mean, I guess the first thing that
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  I want I usually start out with is is just really talking about your background.
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  Where are you from, How did you get into filmmaking and all that?
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  So could you give us just kind of a little bit of background about
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  you? Yeah, totally. I'm originally from Russellville, Arkansas, which is,
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  you know, really small town in between like Thetville and the rock in
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  Arkansas, right smack dab in the middle of the Bible Belt and uh,
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  you know, in terms of originally getting into filmmaking, there was no you
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  know, really there really was no introduction to film other than you know,
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  my my dad was a big movie nut, and a lot of my family
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  members continue to be, uh, you know, big film fans. Like
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  I was exposed to a lot of you know, especially genre movies when I
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  was younger. My my grandmother actually, for some reason, my grandparents have
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  a really big thing with Stephen King, Like Stephen King novels were always in
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  my house. Stephen King movies were really big in my house, and that
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  that just kind of, you know, opened the door. It was kind
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  of a gateway drug into other horror movies. Like I remember the first really
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  four or five movies I can remember seeing when I was a kid were like,
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  uh, Stephen King's It, the Original Night of Living Dead, Fright
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  Night, Lost Boys, like a lot of vampire movies Near Dark. I
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  think my dad was a big vampire found fan. But my dad was twenty
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  one when he had me, and my mom was eighteen, so they were
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  kind of kids raising a kid, and and so yeah, that kind of
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  kind of allowed me to be exposed to to things I probably shouldn't have been
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  at that age, but kind of you know, created this uh love for
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  the darker side of storytelling that just kind of stuck with me all through,
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  you know, my adolescence and growing up, and I became like an avid
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  movie watcher. My my dad and I, you know, our quality time
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  was always spent like we had movie night every week. So you know that
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  that kind of really started it. And then when I when I got ready
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  to graduate high school and get ready to decide what I wanted to do with
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  my life, I was like, you know, I knew I couldn't.
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  I was a horrible student in school. I want to say horrible, but
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  I was just one of those students where if I if I didn't feel challenged,
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  I just didn't pay tension, you know. And so essentially I knew
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  like if I didn't do something that I wasn't you know, diehard passionate about,
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  I wasn't gonna have a very happy life. So I decided to kind
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  of you know, take the leap of faith, and I moved to LA
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  when I was nineteen. Wow, Okay, so what what was that like
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  when you arrived? Was it kind of you know, what was what it
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  was versus what your expectation was it's very young to just pick up and move.
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  I mean nineteen yeah, I mean I had never set foot on an
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  airplane. Like it was. It was a big culture shock at first,
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  and it took a while to kind of get acclimated. I mean, I
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  I definitely went through, you know, a couple of years of missing home
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  and and uh or not necessarily missing home, but just you know, not
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  feeling like I didn't fit in, especially, which is weird because La is
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  kind of a melting pot of cultures and personalities and things like that. So
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  you know, I think that was really just my own insecurities because every everyone
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  kind of fits in out here, you know, everyone's different. So but
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  essentially, you know, it just took a while. Like it was exciting
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  because every day when I woke up, I could feel like, okay,
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  opportunity was within grasp, you know, like it when you first moved to
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  La you kind of feel like, Okay, there's so much happening around you.
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  How do I get involved? And I think that was kind of the
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  dauncing part, was how do I get involved? You know, It's like
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  I knew it was happening. I knew there, you know, It's like
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  I could go to restaurants and see people that I admired, and I could
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  go grab drinks with filmmakers that I loved, and you know, sometimes I
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  saw actors and stuff that I wanted to work with. But you know,
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  I was like, how how do I find legitimacy and approach these people?
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  Because you know, the worst part was I moved out here to go to
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  school, so you know, you're almost worse off being a film student than
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  just a filmmaker, you know. So so I was like, I was
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  I was below a filmmaker as a film student at the time, so you
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  know, but but at the same time, you kind of can use that
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  to your advantage. You know. It's like being a film student shows that
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  you know, you're you're pursuing it in some some regards. So some people,
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  you know, well we'll lend you a helping hand, so to speak.
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  So yeah, I just started trying to network and you know, really
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  pound the pavements as hard as I could and get get you know, find
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  my way in as much as possible. Yeah, every day it was just
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  waking up and figuring out how to how to climb the wall, so to
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  speak, and get inside. Right, So when you first got there,
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  were you said you're were you going to school or were you just trying to
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  get a job doing like a PA or doing whatever. When I first moved
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  here, I was going to school. So so yeah, I moved here
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  in like June two thousand and seven, and uh and I started school in
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  July. So yeah, it was it was a really quick transition. I
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  think I was here for maybe three weeks just to kind of get acclimated and
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  just kind of learned, you know, the routes and how to drive and
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  all that stuff. So you know, I had a little time to kind
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  of pound the pavement. You know. I wasn't looking for a job immediately
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  because I was getting ready to go to school full time. But yeah,
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  it was it was mainly for education. First. Where where did you go
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  to school? I went to the LA Film Stool in Hollywood. Okay,
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  okay, cool, Yeah, So talk about that a little bit, going
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  to what were some of the key things that you learned in film school that
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  have helped out and maybe some of the things that you learn in film school
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  that didn't really have anything to do with actually working in the film industry,
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  you know, I'd say it's more of the ladder. To be honest with
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  you, I felt I'm not a very big advocate of film school. And
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  that's not to knock film school at all. I just think, you know,
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  the film business, especially when I was going to school, it was
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  changing so rapidly. I mean, I went to film school in two thousand
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  and seven, two thousand and eight, and we were still learning on film,
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  and we were probably one of the last, you know, classes to
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  really focus on film. And when we weren't shooting on film, we were
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  shooting on on mini DV. So like we weren't even really being you know,
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  HD was something that was reserved for like higher level classes and things like
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  that. You know. So it was kind of a weird space because it's
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  like HD was this holy grail of new technology, yet we were still shooting
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  on film, you know, and it's like it was it was bizarre.
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  So the teachers were still trying to learn things. You know. Some of
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  my teachers were film students that had graduated a few years before us who needed
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  jobs, so they came back to work at school. You know. My
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  directing teachers, you know, had agents and they were trying to get jobs,
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  so they would have to step out of class and take phone calls,
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  and you know, it was just a really more than anything. I would
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  say the best thing about film school was it exposed me to Hollywood. And
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  I tend to have a very objective personality. I never really take things for
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  how they're presented to me. I kind of analyze them and and so I
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  think because of that, I didn't buy everything that I was told right away,
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  and I think that was a good thing because you know, essentially I
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  learned really quickly that a lot of my films teachers, uh, you know,
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  we're teaching us ways they would do things, and I think that's the
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  worst way to teach film, like film or art in general. It's like,
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  if you're a teacher, you should be nurturing the instinctive creativity that your
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  student has and not telling them how they should do something, but guiding them.
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  We'll be right back after a from our sponsor, and now back to
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  the show to find their own boys. And so I remember shooting you know,
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  film projects in film school, and almost every single thing, like we
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  had to use the same stats, we had to use the same cameras and
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  all that jazz and so many of those short films ended up looking almost identical.
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  And it was because like the teacher was like, Oh, you should
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  do this shot, or you should do this, or you should use a
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  dolly or you know, and it's like they were just influencing the students in
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  the ways that they would themselves. So you know, I I immediately kind
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  of tried to buck the system a little bit and do things a little differently
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  and and and you know, it kind of pushed me to be my own
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  unique voice. And I mean, especially in film school, you know,
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  every everyone becomes a you know, a genius film critic or you know,
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  they every film student gets snobby. So it was nice for me because I
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  learned to get criticism very early, just because I wanted to stand out.
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  So I think that that prepared me little bit for when I got out of
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  school and started making movies. You're at school, film school, now that
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  then you graduate, what's your kind of next step after that? My next
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  step was freaking out. I basically when I got out of film school,
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  I was like, Shit, what do I do next? You know,
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  the cameras that I had, you know, at my disposal were taken away,
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  the equipment and I had at my disposal was taken away. The collaboration
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  I had with the other film students was taken away, you know, And
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  and I didn't have I didn't have, you know, the money from like
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  school loans and crap like that that that I was I had. So I
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  was kind of like, Okay, how you know, now I have to
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  find a job. But I you know, I made a very strict promise
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  to myself, and I'm kind of stubborn this way, but I was like,
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  you know, I didn't want to go work at Starbucks. I didn't
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  want to go work at Blockbuster or something like that. So you know,
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  I was like, if I'm gonna live in LA, like I need to
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  be focused on making movies. So what I did was I I went back
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  to my hometown and uh for for a few months and worked at the nuclear
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  power plant there, which is kind of a dangerous job, so it pays
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  you a lot of money really fast, and so I used that money to
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  come back out to LA and kind of live on for a while while I
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  was trying to make my first movie, you know. So it was nice.
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  It's like I was able to kind of make a lot of money really
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  quickly. And then you know, move move back out to LA and essentially
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  pay all my rent and stuff in advance. So I didn't I didn't really
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  have to worry about a job, and I could focus on writing and applying
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  to direct things and stuff like that. The worst part about that was,
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  you know, I was getting rejected day you know, day in and day
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  out from people because I didn't really have a great, you know, resume.
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  I only had film student shorts on my on my reel, and you
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  know, so I realized, like, okay, I need to I need
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  to generate my own material. So I wrote tons of scripts. I wrote
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  probably like five screenplays in a year, and and just started you know,
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  hustling and trying to meet people. And eventually that led me to you know,
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  meeting some producers and trying to get a movie financed. And it fell
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  through, and and that was probably the best thing that ever happened to me.
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  Was kind of that that that ticking clock mentality that I had, which
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  was like, Okay, I have enough money to last me x amount of
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  months or a year or whatever, and so it's like I need to do
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  something in this time. And by you know, I graduated in two thousand
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  and eight and By November of two thousand and nine, I had written and
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  directed, and produced and self financed and did basically everything on my first feature
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  film, which was called The Hostile Encounter. And I used that as kind
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  of like just kind of like a you know, a calling card, like
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  hey, look, I you know, I'm gonna invest in myself and and
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  kind of show people that I can, I can you know, make a
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  film. And ironically we never finished that movie. You know, I I
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  kind of put it off to the side because it was my own money,
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  it was my own investment, so I didn't have to repay anyone, but
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  we put it off to the side because I ultimately ended up getting an offer,
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  you know, or a proposition to direct my first real feature film,
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  Madison County, which actually got released and you know did pretty well. But
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  but yeah, it was it was all because of Hostle Encounter. Because I
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  had invested in myself and and proven that I could make a make a movie,
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  and and you know, one of my buddies was like, hey,
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  you know, if I could get some some more money, like would you
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  want to make something that we could you know, potentially try to you know,
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  make something on a bigger scale and that turned into Madison County. So
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  your friend was more of a producer who was looking for a writer and director
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  in that case. Actually he was my my director of photography on Hustling en
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  Counter. The name was Daniel Dunn, and we had met in film school.
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  And at the time when I directed Hustle Encounter, I was twenty one
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  years old and when I made Madison County, I was twenty two. So
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  so essentially on on Houstling Encounter. He graduated film school at the same time
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  I did, and he bought a bunch of equipment to kind of, you
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  know, start renting out and shooting music videos and things like that. And
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  I told him, I said, look, I'll be your first client.
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  I'll you know, I'll rent your equipment from you. I want to shoot
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  my first movie. And I was like, you can come shoot it for
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  me, So he said great. So we had like a five person crew,
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  I you know, we road tripped down to Arkansas, and we started
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  shooting the movie in Arkansas and worked our way back to California and we shot
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  the opening of the film in California. So we shot the movie in like
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  five different states. It was kind of a road trip movie and yeah,
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  you know it was It was just a fun experience, and I think it
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  kind of you know, got the juices blowing for everyone to say, hey,
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  what else can we do? And that excitement is you know, infectious,
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  Like once you get that bug, you know, it's kind of hard
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  to shake. So Daniel immediately was like, you know, he watched the
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  cut that I edited together with my editor, and he was like really astounded
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  by what, you know, what the film had become, because I mean,
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  you know, he was on set every day. We only shot for
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  like five days, but you know, he was like, wow, that
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  that little road trip that we did in five days with Mike camera. He's
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  like, you you turned into like a pretty competent little movie. And he
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  was like and we had nothing. So he was like, you know,
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  if you if I could get like some money, would you want to try
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  and make something a little bigger? And I was like absolutely, if you
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  can do it, I'll start right away. And so he knew that I
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  had the screenplay for Madison County because I'd been talking about it and trying to
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  get a finance and everything. So he was like, what about that movie?
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  And I was like absolutely, So we we instantly started working on that
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  and kind of put a hustle encounter aside. So talk to me a little
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  as much as you can about putting together Okay, first of all, hustle
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  encounter, what are we talking about in terms of just budget and who was
• 16:36
  your crew and how did how did you put all that together? I mean,
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  even though you're saying it was kind of, you know, just like
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  you got in a car and you were driving, but there does have to
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  be a certain amount of organizing to that. Yeah, one hundred persent.
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  I mean, it was honestly the simplest organization possible because at the time I
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  knew it was going to be an experiment, and that's how I wanted to
• 16:56
  treat it was an experiment. So the budget total, I gave myself five
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  thousand dollars, so I said, I'm going to spend five thousand dollars on
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  this movie, and we only ended up spending thirty five hundred. So the
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  budget was three thousand, five hundred, and you know, most of that
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  went to paying Daniel for his equipment and his services, and then gas money
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  to drive down to Arkansas and back, and then you know, whatever whatever
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  meals I had to feed everyone and things like that. So you know who
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  was who was your crew? Was it just uh were you he was shooting
• 17:27
  it right? He was shooting it. Well, actually it's a found footage
• 17:30
  movie kind of. So so the main character, the main character was actually
• 17:33
  filming himself for a lot of the movie. And so, you know,
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  I wrote it around a certain actor who was Ace Morrero, who ended up
• 17:41
  starring and producing Madison County with us. So so my crew was myself,
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  Daniel Nick Bellinger, who was a good friend of mine who helped us produce
• 17:52
  a kind of a Swiss army knife pa named just Jordan Mears who helped out.
• 17:59
  And then and then we had a wardrobe girl who was my girlfriend at
• 18:03
  the time and and her family helped out. My family helped out because we
• 18:06
  shot in my hometown. So it like the crew was literally like five people.
• 18:11
  But you know, we I strategically shot it in my hometown knowing that
• 18:15
  I could get vehicles for free and houses for free and you know, whatever
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  resources that I needed. So we didn't spend any money on props. We
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  didn't spend anybody like we went into you know locations and shot for free while
• 18:26
  people were actually you know, eating in the restaurants and things like that,
• 18:30
  so you know, will stretch a dollar. Was there any thought about,
• 18:34
  you know, what you were going to do with it, or was it
• 18:37
  just purely like, oh, we're just gonna do this for fun. We're
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  we're just gonna do exactly what we want to and not worry about the commercial
• 18:42
  side of stuff. I mean, was that the idea? I mean,
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  I think at the time, you know, we had never sold, so
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  we didn't know what the commercial side was. You know, like we shout
• 18:52
  this kind of hoping it was going to be you know, the Blair Witch
• 18:55
  Project or Parentornac know this. This was actually a four parent om Activity even
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  came out, I think. So, so we were shooting a found footage
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  movie, which was really really ahead of the curve at the time, so
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  you know, we we kind of just wanted to do just just experiment and
• 19:11
  say, okay, let's make a movie. You know, we knew Blair,
• 19:12
  which was popular, we knew Paranoactivity was kind of on the rise,
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  but it hadn't come out yet, and so so we were like, okay,
• 19:18
  let's go make you know, our own movie and we'll try and sell
• 19:22
  it. It was kind of just like we knew we needed to make something
• 19:26
  that was competent, and then once we knew we had something competent, then
• 19:29
  we could figure out the what we did right and what we did wrong.
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  So you know, it was a great learning process because I actually ended up
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  once we got a finished cut. You know, I never went into sound
• 19:38
  design or anything like that, so we never finished the sound on the movie.
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  But I sent the rough cut around to some companies, and you know,
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  it was funny because looking back on it, like I cringed, because
• 19:48
  you know, I sent it to some some reputable people, and it's sure
• 19:52
  some of them I've even interacted with. Now we'll be right back after a
• 19:56
  word from our sponsor, and now back to the show. But you know,
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  at the time, I was just so excited to say, hey,
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  look I made a movie that I wanted anyone and everyone to see it,
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  even if they hated it. I just wanted to learn. So it was
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  kind of like just you know, throwing mud of the wall, seeing what's
• 20:18
  stuck, and so so yeah, you know, we weren't really I mean,
• 20:22
  the goal was to sell it. But you know, thankfully I knew
• 20:23
  that I had made the investment, so you know what whatever financial responsibility there
• 20:29
  was, it was all on me, right, Yeah, And that's a
• 20:32
  big thing that we we always stress, you know, or you know when
• 20:37
  it when it comes to making a film, it's good to just get out
• 20:38
  and especially with all the cameras that are available now. I mean, it's
• 20:41
  ridiculous that people just get out and just start shooting, you know, don't
• 20:45
  look for making, uh, you know, a big movie first. Just
• 20:48
  get out and shoot as much as you possibly can, and don't you know,
• 20:52
  just make all the mistakes before, you you know, have everything on
• 20:56
  the line and have a whole full you know, film crew around you,
• 21:00
  and you know, make a bunch of mistakes. Then do all the mistakes,
• 21:03
  you know, cheaply first, you know. Yeah, absolutely, It's
• 21:07
  funny. I you know, I came from the school of like, you
• 21:11
  know, I like Eli Roth was a big inspiration, you know for when
• 21:15
  I first started out, and I knew Kevin Fever was made for like a
• 21:18
  million dollars, and I knew Reservoir Dogs was made for like a million dollars.
• 21:21
  So like, and Saul was coming out around you know a little before
• 21:23
  then, and so you know, I kept saying, like, all right,
• 21:26
  I wanted to make my first movie for like a million dollars and do
• 21:30
  it legitimately and make it the right way. But then there was the other
• 21:32
  side of me that was like, you know, I had read Rebel Without
• 21:34
  a Crew and Robert Rodriguez, and so it was like there was part of
• 21:37
  me that really wanted to kind of wait for that magic experience of like,
• 21:41
  oh, I wrote a great script and it attracted some investors and you know,
• 21:45
  next thing, you know, I'm on the set of legitimate feature film
• 21:48
  and I'm directing. But I also knew that, you know, no one
• 21:52
  was going to give me that opportunity, and I didn't know if my writing
• 21:55
  was good enough. I just I just didn't know. So I was like,
• 21:56
  the only thing I knew how to do was do it on my own.
• 22:00
  So I was like I kind of had no other choice. And I
• 22:02
  was very stubborn in that regard, and that stubbornness has thankfully carried me a
• 22:06
  long ways. Yeah, and things have changed a lot, you know,
• 22:10
  with the technology. I mean it used to be back and you know,
• 22:14
  I'm kind of in a different generation. So you know, I was making
• 22:18
  you know, independent films back in the nineties with like these people who were
• 22:21
  shooting on sixteen millimeter and thirty five millimeter, and it was like, I
• 22:25
  mean, you couldn't do anything for you know, I mean, you couldn't
• 22:27
  even think about making a film for you know, less than one hundred thousand
• 22:32
  dollars easily, just like you buying the film stock. You know. Yeah,
• 22:36
  so you know, and nowadays it's just so easy to pop ale ins,
• 22:41
  you know, even get a DSLR or something and just get out and
• 22:42
  shoot, you know. Totally. Yeah, let me let's move on to
• 22:47
  Madison County. Now, what was the Can you talk about how that came
• 22:52
  together and give people just a little bit of an idea of, you know,
• 22:56
  what kind of budget range you moved up to, how things were different
• 23:00
  from working on the Hostile Encounter, and just a little bit of insight into
• 23:04
  the filmmaking process for that. Totally. I had written the script based on
• 23:08
  some ideas I had had for a while. I had actually written it before
• 23:12
  hostlingen Counter. I think Hustling Encounter was actually like my six or seventh screenplay
• 23:17
  that I had written, and Madison County was actually the second in the grand
• 23:21
  scheme of things. So I had had Madison County kind of sitting around,
• 23:25
  and then when Daniel approached me about it, I actually didn't want to do
• 23:27
  Madison County because I actually wanted a bigger budget. I wanted around one hundred
• 23:30
  and fifty thousand dollars to make it, and we ended up making the film
• 23:36
  for around like seventy thousand, I think. So I had to tailor the
• 23:38
  script down a little bit. I went through several several rewrites. We you
• 23:42
  know, different investors came in at different times before Daniel, so the script
• 23:47
  had gone through several several versions, and you know, things had changed and
• 23:52
  things had come up and gone away. So you know, it was a
• 23:55
  great experience because I almost went through my own you know, kind of vacuum
• 24:00
  development process because like I, you know, I was from the school or
• 24:04
  the train of thought of like, Okay, I write a script, I
• 24:07
  gonna make a movie, you know, and I wasn't really concerned about like
• 24:11
  development or anything like that. So you know, when I wrote the script,
• 24:15
  I was like, great, this is my movie, and you know,
• 24:17
  and I was ready to shoot it. And you know, I had
• 24:19
  some investors approached me and they read the script and they knew nothing about filmmaking,
• 24:23
  but they you know, they obviously watched movies, so they were like,
• 24:26
  I think you should change this or that, and you know, so
• 24:30
  I kind of, you know, I'm actually really thankful for that process because,
• 24:33
  like, you know, you can actually learn a lot from people who
• 24:36
  watch a lot of movies and aren't necessarily filmmakers because they're they're gonna tell you
• 24:41
  what bumps. You know, not everyone knows how to read a screenplay,
• 24:44
  not everyone knows how to visualize something in their head. But I think each
• 24:47
  and every person that read the script that potentially was bringing money to the table
• 24:52
  kind of brought something to the film that at least made it better than my
• 24:55
  initial draft. You know, I'm still not you know, super happy was
• 24:57
  what I wrote on the on the page, but you know, I was
• 25:00
  young, so but it was much better than the first draft. I mean,
• 25:03
  i'd probably cry if I read the first draft now, so but so
• 25:07
  so Daniel Daniel said he could get like I want to say, like fifty
• 25:11
  to seventy thousand, and you know, but but the idea was, uh,
• 25:15
  you know, he was like, we we can't lose this money.
• 25:18
  This is my my parents' money. So his parents were car dealers and I
• 25:21
  think they'd like taken out a loan force or something like that. And so
• 25:25
  so essentially what happened was we went and took the first scene of the movie.
• 25:30
  Ace Murra, or the staring producer the film, or one of the
• 25:33
  producers, he suggested I basically I wanted to go shoot a scene. I
• 25:37
  wanted to shoot something just for fun, just to kind of, you know,
• 25:40
  sharpen my tools, because the last thing I had shot since then was
• 25:42
  Hustle Encounter, which was the found footage movie. So I wanted to kind
• 25:47
  of prepare myself to shoot a traditional narrative and get acclimated again with kind of
• 25:52
  the camera and stuff like that. So in that format of storytelling. So
• 25:56
  Ace actually suggested that we shoot a scene in the movie to kind of use
• 26:00
  as a promotional tool for the film. And so we went about an hour
• 26:06
  outside of la and shot a little scene from the movie that was essentially the
• 26:11
  opening of film, kind of tailored for that environment, and we released it
• 26:15
  online a couple of months later, and all of the news sites and blogs
• 26:21
  picked it up, and we actually had foreign distributors contacts based off of the
• 26:26
  trailer, and they reached out to us and they said, hey, we
• 26:30
  really like this, we we'd like to make you an offer. And so
• 26:33
  basically people were offering us money for this, you know, for this film
• 26:37
  that they hadn't even seen yet, that actually didn't even exist at this point,
• 26:41
  because this was just a fake trailer that we shot or a fake scene
• 26:44
  that we shot, you know, for like less than a hundred dollars.
• 26:47
  I think it was like fifty bucks we spent on it or something like that,
• 26:48
  like ninety five dollars. So so you know, we used that money
• 26:53
  as almost like a verbal commitment to say, okay, great, we can
• 27:00
  you know, we we know we can at least make this much money.
• 27:02
  Like if these people were the only people to ever buy the movie, then
• 27:04
  we know we can at least make that much money back. And then you
• 27:08
  know, we were just thinking in terms of like you know, punk rock
• 27:12
  garage band style. We're like, if we have to, we'll we'll go
• 27:15
  door to door selling DVDs this movie ourselves to make them money back. So
• 27:19
  we kind of just you know reverse engineered and said, okay, great,
• 27:22
  this is you know, as safe as we can make this investment, and
• 27:26
  you know, started casting the movie and a way we went now the people
• 27:30
  that were you said foreign distributors were interested or yeah, okay, now what
• 27:37
  what sort of things? I mean, first of all, where were they
• 27:41
  just like overall global foreign distributors or were they like specific to it. It
• 27:48
  was like it was like Germany and and I want to say a couple of
• 27:51
  others actually reached out, but I mean it was it wasn't exclusive to form,
• 27:53
  like I think a couple of sales agents and maybe a couple of US
• 27:57
  distributors reached out. But yeah, essentially we just had interest in sales Germany.
• 28:03
  I think Germany and maybe one other country were the only ones to actually
• 28:06
  offer up like a legitimate number and say hey, we'll pay you this much
• 28:11
  before ever even seeing the film. But but yeah, so we we had
• 28:14
  interest in specific people who are actually willing to cut a check, and then
• 28:17
  people you know, who are interested in representing the movie, and you know,
• 28:21
  and and essentially, you know, we got to a point where people
• 28:23
  were like, hey, we want to see the whole film, and we're
• 28:26
  like, okay, great, we'll call it. Well, we'll get back
• 28:27
  to you in a few months. You know. Yeah, it's gonna be
• 28:30
  a good feeling, you know, Yeah, yeah, it was. It
• 28:32
  was exciting. Now is that fake trailer still available somewhere? Yeah? Absolutely,
• 28:41
  I'll ask you for a link. I'll put that in the show notes
• 28:42
  because I'd really be interested to just take a look at that. Yeah,
• 28:48
  So talk to me about the process, like the difference between making Madison County
• 28:52
  versus Hostile Encounter and you know what, like you know, just details like
• 28:57
  what kind of camera you guys were using, how you work with actors,
• 29:00
  what the different I mean, I assume you were working with like a full
• 29:03
  on you know, grip grip crew and you know it was more of a
• 29:08
  professional like film set, right, I mean you'd want to think that,
• 29:15
  but it was actually, you know, we we essentially had you know,
• 29:21
  we had like soccer dads is our grip team and stuff like that. You
• 29:23
  know, we shot, we shot on the We shot on the Red,
• 29:27
  which was you know, a major upgrade from what we shot Hustling Counter on.
• 29:32
  So, you know, I was working with a new camera system I
• 29:34
  was not familiar with, which you know, since I was directing, wasn't
• 29:38
  as big of a deal. But you know, I was working with a
• 29:41
  professional director of photography who had done other things before. You know, so
• 29:48
  I was the youngest person on set essentially, you know, and and I
• 29:51
  was probably the most inexperienced. We'll be right back after a word from our
• 29:56
  sponsor and now back to the show. And you know, and and I
• 30:04
  went from managing a crew of like five people to managing a crew of like
• 30:08
  twenty five people and and and a cast of like five to seven or eight
• 30:14
  people a day. You know, So it was kind of a kind of
• 30:17
  a head first, you know, jump into the pool, so to speak,
• 30:19
  because you know, I, you know, I had never done anything
• 30:23
  of that size. Like I remember seeing the grip trucks pull up on the
• 30:26
  first day of filming or you know, first first day of pre production or
• 30:30
  whatever, and I was like, whoa, you know, like this is
• 30:33
  a this is legit, like the biggest movie set I had been on,
• 30:36
  like if somebody making a movie or yeah, exactly, like this was the
• 30:40
  biggest set I'd ever been on and the movie had even started shooting yet,
• 30:42
  so you know, it was it was very much an eye opening experience.
• 30:48
  And you know, but I looking back on it, I wouldn't have traded
• 30:52
  it for anything, because it really prepared me for the dues and don'ts and
• 30:55
  you know kind of forced me to get get my shit together because you know,
• 30:59
  I was totally you know, I was really prepared, Like I took
• 31:02
  my job very seriously, and I stressed day and day out. I think
• 31:04
  I think by the time we actually start rolling cameras, like I lost like
• 31:07
  seventy pounds. But but like, you know, it was it was,
• 31:12
  you know, a really serious commitment. I took it really seriously. I
• 31:15
  was, you know, we we were extremely underprepared and you can't no,
• 31:23
  sorry, my girlfriend's walking through and she was like, he can't see me,
• 31:26
  Candy. But so, uh so, you know, it was a
• 31:32
  really big undertaking and you know, I was totally unprepared or I was prepared,
• 31:37
  but I think we as a crew and producers and I think we were
• 31:41
  really underprepared in terms of like what we do, what we thought we were
• 31:44
  getting ourselves into. Like we had tons of locations, tons of actors,
• 31:48
  tons of moving parts. So it was just a really big undertaking that I
• 31:52
  think, you know, we we we underestimated, but were you know,
• 31:56
  thankfully we had that willingness to take on challenge. And I think that's a
• 32:00
  lot of what filmmaking is. It's just the ignorance to not be told no
• 32:05
  you know. Yeah, Well, now, looking back, what are some
• 32:07
  of the things, you know, mistakes that maybe you made early on that
• 32:10
  you you know corrected or or you know, learned in your next features.
• 32:15
  I just see you that promotional trailer by the way, Okay, perfect,
• 32:17
  what was that question? Sorry? Well, I mean what are you said?
• 32:22
  It was a bit overwhelming, and you know, you were prepared,
• 32:25
  but it was still like, you know, there was somewhat of a learning
• 32:29
  curve. Can you talk about like for people who might be going into their
• 32:32
  first big budget or you know, higher budget than just like a little you
• 32:37
  know, uh, you know, backyard kind of film going up a step
• 32:42
  from that, What what sort of things they need to do to be prepared
• 32:45
  for that? What did you do as a director mentally to be able to
• 32:47
  do that? And what what sort of things were you doing every day?
• 32:52
  And looking back kind of what what mistakes? What would you have done differently?
• 32:55
  Well, I mean, you know, to be honest, Madison County
• 32:59
  was still very much backyard film. It was you know what I mean,
• 33:02
  yeah, yeah, for sure compared to the other one, yeah, totally.
• 33:07
  Well, I mean what I did mentally was I watched a lot of
• 33:09
  films, and I think that was ultimately my downfall was I got locked into
• 33:14
  a specific vision based on movies that I knew had worked. I became really
• 33:19
  paranoid about, uh, how people would perceive my film, so I didn't
• 33:25
  want to mess it up. And I think that was, you know,
• 33:28
  like I said, my biggest downfall. So I watched a lot of movies
• 33:30
  that had a similar aesthetic, that have used similar ideas and things like that,
• 33:36
  so you know, I almost tried to carve and copy those but do
• 33:38
  it my own way. And I looking back, I wish I would have
• 33:43
  just done what I wanted, because you know, I was imitating them in
• 33:47
  the hopes that I would have success like them essentially, and I think that
• 33:51
  was, you know, the wrong choice. But because of that, I
• 33:55
  was really prepared, like I I you know, I knew exactly how I
• 34:00
  wanted to shoot it. I knew, you know, I knew how to
• 34:01
  execute it. I just think the sights I had set my execution at were
• 34:06
  lower than what they should have been, I guess, is the best way
• 34:07
  to put it. So it's like I achieved what I set out to do,
• 34:10
  I just didn't I didn't set my achievement bar at the right level,
• 34:15
  and so, you know, but to a degree, it's like there was
• 34:16
  a victory in that because it proved to me that I could do what I
• 34:20
  set out to do, and then I could I could pull off what I
• 34:22
  said I could pull off, you know, And so you know, tons
• 34:27
  of research, tons of rehearsal tons of you know, getting to know my
• 34:30
  cast and crew, and just you know, learning to be a leader kind
• 34:34
  of by default. You know. It's like, like I said, I'd
• 34:37
  never been in control of that many people, so I naturally just kind of
• 34:39
  had to learn how to take the reins. We didn't have a true first
• 34:43
  ad, so I was running the set, you know, and I was
• 34:46
  scheduling the film and you know everything. Essentially the responsibilities fell heavily on me
• 34:52
  being a director, but not only a director. I was also one of
• 34:57
  the producers, so you know, we were some young producers that never made
• 35:00
  a movie of this side before, so we were all learning as we were
• 35:02
  filming. So you know, it's really hard to say what we did right
• 35:07
  and what we did wrong because we were basically just surviving. I felt like
• 35:09
  the whole time we were kind of like drowning but keeping our head above walk.
• 35:15
  Yeah that that sounds you know, familiar. I mean, so many
• 35:19
  other directors that I've talked to have really you know, even at you know,
• 35:23
  much higher levels. It's always kind of chaotic, you know. Yeah,
• 35:27
  absolutely, So talk talk about from what ended up and did you ended
• 35:32
  up end up like having the distribution and things that you were looking for at
• 35:37
  the end of that, did you make the deals? I mean, talk
• 35:39
  about what happened to the film after you made it? H Yeah, So
• 35:43
  after we made it, we, like I said, we reached out to
• 35:45
  a lot of those same people who had reached out to us, and we
• 35:46
  started cutting a trailer immediately. We got very fortunate and were able to get
• 35:53
  one of the best trailer editors in Hollywood to kind of cut a trailer for
• 35:57
  us, uh, you know, as a huge favor to one of the
• 36:00
  people on our film. So we had a great trailer and we started shopping
• 36:02
  it around and you know, we we we made a lot of first time
• 36:06
  mistakes. We showed people the movie way before it was ready. We submitted
• 36:10
  to festivals that were way out of our league, but ultimately we got the
• 36:15
  film into screen fest which is you know, we're parent. Our activity was
• 36:19
  discovered, and you know, we had distributors contact us from there, and
• 36:24
  you know, I was able to get a manager, which which was helpful
• 36:27
  in terms of getting the film out about. But yeah, we we kind
• 36:30
  of did took a similar approach to what we did with Hustle Encounter, and
• 36:35
  we just kind of showed it to anyone that was willing to watch it,
• 36:37
  and uh, you know, tried to learn from it. But the best
• 36:42
  thing that ever happened was, you know, we we didn't we didn't use
• 36:45
  a domestic sales rep to sell the movie because we really wanted to kind of
• 36:50
  go through that experience on our own and and kind of learned to look over
• 36:53
  our own contracts and see what would happen and see where we would succeed and
• 36:58
  fail and things like that. So once again, we took a very you
• 37:01
  know, dive in head first type of approach to the whole process. Was
• 37:07
  there any kind of idea about building it was social media? That's still kind
• 37:14
  of before social media or social you know, building a social like having Facebook
• 37:20
  pages and stuff like that, that was kind of before that, right,
• 37:23
  not really, I mean it was twenty eleven, so I mean it was
• 37:27
  okay, yea, yeah, yeah, so it was around that time.
• 37:30
  But you know, the best thing that I think we had to our to
• 37:32
  our you know, availability, was Ace Morrero, who you know, was
• 37:37
  an actor, so he was used to promoting himself and and you know,
• 37:40
  as a as a young actor in Hollywood, like you kind of have to
• 37:43
  be your biggest pr person and biggest cheerleader and champion. So Ace Wood really
• 37:47
  taught us to do that for the film. So, you know, we
• 37:52
  we we had a huge, huge fan base for the movie before the movie
• 37:57
  was even finished, Like we had people buying T shirts from us, we
• 38:00
  had people buying posters. So we almost tried to turn it into an event,
• 38:05
  you know, just hey, come be part of this experience with us,
• 38:07
  like we're learning. Like we took a very like people's filmmaker mentality because
• 38:12
  you know, and that's something that I try to continue now, is like
• 38:15
  I like for my experiences to be kind of an open book and let people
• 38:20
  know, like, hey, this is the reality of it. And we
• 38:22
  kind of did that with Madison County because because we shot in my home state
• 38:24
  of Arkansas, it was very much a you know, a family type of
• 38:30
  environment. And you know, we tried. We we were on the local
• 38:32
  news, and we tried to keep everyone involved and make it just a fun
• 38:37
  experience for everyone, and that kind of translated into the distribution and people talking
• 38:42
  about it and sharing things. So social media was probably one of the biggest
• 38:45
  advocates we had in our corner. Okay, yeah, I mean, because
• 38:50
  that's one of the things we always, you know, talk about, is
• 38:52
  how to you know, this idea that you're going to make your film and
• 38:58
  go to a film festival and all of a sudden everybody will know about your
• 39:00
  film. It's like, you know, is you're going to run into problems
• 39:05
  with that because it's it's much easier to start building up a following as you're
• 39:09
  making your film and even showing kind of behind the scenes and what's going on,
• 39:13
  so that once your film is done, you've already kind of built up
• 39:15
  that anticipation. Yeah. I'm actually not a massive, massive fan, especially
• 39:21
  in the genre world of North American film festivals because at least on the like
• 39:27
  the the top tier side and like south By Southwest and the things like that,
• 39:31
  because it's such an incestuous and fraternal type mentality. You know, they
• 39:37
  bring back a lot of filmmakers, films who've had movies there in the past,
• 39:40
  and things like that. So you know that like Contracted, for instance,
• 39:45
  Uh, you know, Contracted was one of the most successful films of
• 39:46
  that year, and we didn't play one major festival here in America, you
• 39:50
  know, and it was it was because like people didn't know who are who
• 39:53
  are? You know, who I was. They didn't know who our stars
• 39:55
  were, and things like that. We'll be right back for a word from
• 40:00
  our sponsor, and now back to the show. And it's like festivals used
• 40:08
  to be about finding and discovering new talent, but now it's really about attracting
• 40:14
  big stars and bringing back people that they enjoy drinking with at the festival,
• 40:17
  you know, previous years. So it's not really as much about how good
• 40:21
  your movie is as much as it is about how well the jury or the
• 40:24
  you know, the programmers like your movie, so you know it, they
• 40:28
  become kind of a gatekeeper in a way, and I don't like that mentality.
• 40:31
  So I'm actually a big fan of, you know, using the internet,
• 40:35
  using the audience, Like I don't. I no longer worry about what
• 40:38
  festivals will think about my films. Or what critics will think about my films.
• 40:43
  Like, I make movies for audiences now because it's like, ultimately,
• 40:45
  those are the people who have to pay to see your movie, and those
• 40:49
  are the people who are going to keep you in business and keep food on
• 40:51
  your table. But also those are the people who are going to be with
• 40:52
  you through through the thick and thin of it. Like if you support them,
• 40:55
  they're going to support you. And it's like I want to give them
• 40:59
  good material because ultimately no offense. You know, there are tons of critics
• 41:01
  that I love, but it's like critics ultimately see my movies for free,
• 41:05
  so they're just judging it based on you know, the the artistic merit and
• 41:08
  all that staff and that's fine, but you know, at the end of
• 41:10
  the day, I have to make movies and continue making movies if if I
• 41:15
  want to live. So you know, my my job is to please the
• 41:17
  people who are ultimately supporting me. You know. So, I mean what
• 41:22
  is your main way of you know, connecting with an audience on social media?
• 41:28
  Do you have kind of a plan. I mean, are you just
• 41:30
  like getting on Twitter and Facebook or what? What does that? What does
• 41:36
  that look like? Yeah, I mean it's it's a lot of it's through
• 41:38
  Twitter and Facebook and things like that. Like I I'm a big fan of
• 41:43
  interacting with my audience. Like when Contracted came out, you know, the
• 41:45
  reviews were extremely polarizing. People either love the film or they hated it.
• 41:50
  And it's funny because people who hated the movie still talked about it and and
• 41:53
  because of that, the word of mouth was great, and you know,
• 41:58
  so so I would go on Twitter and I would just talk to people who
• 42:00
  were talking about the movie. And some of the biggest supporters I have now
• 42:04
  are people who ultimately were talking shit about my movie when it first came out,
• 42:07
  you know, and and and you know, and it's fine because,
• 42:10
  like you know, living in Hollywood, like I have tons of filmmaker friends
• 42:13
  that I don't necessarily love all their movies, but I don't judge them based
• 42:16
  on what their movies are, Like, I judge them based on who they
• 42:19
  are as people, you know, and for me, like, that's ultimately
• 42:22
  what I like. And I think I've been kind of in tune with that
• 42:25
  since the very beginning, because even even as a young filmmaker, before I
• 42:29
  ever even touched the camera for the first time, I was watching behind the
• 42:32
  scenes on DVDs and things like that because I wanted to know who these filmmakers
• 42:37
  were. And sometimes I wouldn't really like a movie, but I would watch
• 42:40
  the behind the scenes or I would listen to the commentary, and I would
• 42:44
  fall in love with the filmmaker because of their passion and their enthusiasm, and
• 42:47
  it would make me respect the movie that much more. So. It's like,
• 42:50
  I am a firm believer in you know, you can judge the art
• 42:53
  based on its own merit, and that's totally fine, Like that's what art
• 42:57
  is about. But I do believe that art in gen g is a bigger
• 43:00
  medium and it's not just about what it is. It's about the stories behind
• 43:04
  it. It's about the people who make it and and everything that goes into
• 43:07
  it. It's not just this one, you know, nebulous thing, right
• 43:13
  you guys, film like behind the scenes footage and stuff like that to be
• 43:15
  a least totally yeah. I I try to do that on every film.
• 43:21
  Some movies we've had more footage than others, Like on Get the Girl,
• 43:23
  I think we had a guy there. My latest film, Get the Girl,
• 43:25
  I think we had a guy there. Like you know, almost every
• 43:28
  day, and then uncontracted, we didn't have the money to do it,
• 43:30
  so we basically just had you know, my producer, Matt Mercer, was
• 43:35
  doing it whenever he could. And it's funny because Matt Mercer actually, you
• 43:37
  know, he was an actor in Madison County, uh and he filmed some
• 43:40
  little behind the scenes stuff that I think is on YouTube now, but you
• 43:45
  know, he did his own little behind the scenes documentary just as an actor
• 43:49
  from his perspective. So it's always cool, especially now with cell phones and
• 43:52
  cameras so accessible, it's like actors can kind of make their own little documentaries
• 43:58
  and things like that about their experiences on that. And you know, the
• 44:00
  more I make movies, the more I'm gonna try and do my own kind
• 44:04
  of director perspective, and you know, hopefully one day it'll get as detailed
• 44:07
  as you know, maybe someone following me around with a camera, because you
• 44:10
  know, that's the type of stuff that I really enjoyed as a young filmmaker,
• 44:14
  and you know, I wanted to see as much as possibles, like
• 44:16
  how how the life is of a of a working filmmaker from day to day,
• 44:21
  and that's you know, that's a fascinating lifestyle because it's it's so up
• 44:24
  and down and there's so many challenges, and I think as a young filmmaker,
• 44:29
  the best thing you can do is be prepared for it. All Right,
• 44:31
  I'm gonna put you on the spot here for a second. Yeah,
• 44:34
  what what would you say is? Because I'm totally in agreement with you about
• 44:38
  like commentaries and stuff like that. What is what are you like your favorite
• 44:43
  DVD commentaries that you've ever her. I don't know if I have too many
• 44:47
  like commentaries or behind the scenes or whatever. Yeah, but behind the scenes
• 44:52
  I have a ton. I actually really really like the four hour documentary on
• 44:58
  Rob Zombie's Halloween. Have you ever seen that? No, that's one of
• 45:00
  the few I haven't seen. Yeah, it's it's it's incredible because and this
• 45:06
  isn't necessarily based on like I don't I don't absolutely love that movie, but
• 45:09
  I love how in depth the documentary is, Like it literally starts from him
• 45:14
  in pre production, Like it shows him doing camera tests, it shows him
• 45:17
  doing acting, you know, auditions, It shows him like it shows the
• 45:22
  wardrobe person bringing him different options and him doing sketches and location scouts all the
• 45:27
  way up until like the last day of filming and it's literally four like four
• 45:30
  and a half hours long, and and it's like just one of the most
• 45:36
  immersive, you know, detailed, raw experiences I've ever seen captured, uh,
• 45:42
  you know, and a behind the scenes and I'm trying to think of
• 45:45
  some other good ones. There's a few that stand out really heavily. That's
• 45:49
  always kind of one of my big go toos just because of how thorough it
• 45:52
  is. I really enjoyed, you know, Eli Ross Hostel, he did
• 45:58
  a pretty detailed one on a Hustle and Cavin Fever trying to think, uh
• 46:06
  gosh, I'd have to go through and like look at my DVD collection.
• 46:08
  But you know, whenever someone asked me about it, usually Rob Zombie's Halloween,
• 46:13
  Oh, Devil's Rejects. His one for Devil's Rejects was really good too.
• 46:15
  Have you seen that one? No, I've seen the movie, I
• 46:19
  haven't seen the behind the scenes. Yeah, it's like a two two hour
• 46:22
  documentary on the making of Devil's Rejects. And you know, it's once again,
• 46:28
  it's everything from like table reads too, you know, I think even
• 46:32
  all the way into editing. So you know, for me, it's like
• 46:36
  as much as you can get, you know, in the in the nitty
• 46:38
  gritty process of it all. That's that's the stuff that excites me. Right.
• 46:44
  Have you seen Lost in La Mancha? Yes? I love it.
• 46:49
  That's I didn't interview the other day with the producer and he was like,
• 46:52
  you know, I don't get that documentary because you know, you see all
• 46:54
  the stuff that goes wrong on that set, that goes wrong on every set.
• 46:59
  That's like that every film, you know, Yeah, yeah, it's
• 47:01
  like just get used to everything going wrong. And uh, you know,
• 47:06
  he's like, I don't know why the film never got made because that that
• 47:07
  wouldn't have kept anybody from you know, stopping anyway moving along. So after
• 47:15
  Madison County, what happened from there? Let's follow the story after Madison County
• 47:22
  within, uh, within We shot the movie in October two thousand and ten
• 47:27
  or September two October two thousand and ten. By March twenty eleven, we
• 47:30
  had our trailer released, and we had our trailer cut probably before the end
• 47:36
  of the year two thousand and ten. So we started showing early cuts to
• 47:38
  the trailer almost immediately, and so we had people asking us, what are
• 47:44
  you doing next? Are you doing a sequel to Madison County? And this
• 47:45
  was before the movie is even finished, so people were already considering it a
• 47:49
  success, which was nice and very uh presumptuous of them, but but very
• 47:57
  premature. But you know, people were like, hey, what do you
• 47:59
  want want to do next? And I knew immediately I didn't want to do
• 48:01
  another like straightforward horror movie, kind of like Madison County. So I started
• 48:07
  writing this screenplay called Roadside, and we actually started shooting. You know,
• 48:12
  we finished Madison County shooting wise October twenty and ten, and March two thy
• 48:20
  eleven, we were flying to Virginia to shoot Roadside. So you know,
• 48:24
  we we found private investors again, you know, who wanted to get into
• 48:29
  the movie business, and you know, we we convinced them to give us
• 48:34
  the financing based on you know, all the news articles and all the press
• 48:37
  and success that we had had with Madison County. We showed him, we
• 48:40
  said, look like we already had people offering to buy the movie, and
• 48:44
  you know it's like we're we're we're pretty confident that we're gonna at least make
• 48:47
  our money back, if not see a decent profit on Madison County, so
• 48:52
  we kind of parlayed that into Roadside, and Roadside was probably the messiest production
• 48:57
  in my life because it, you know, we were just so on cloud
• 49:00
  nine for Madison County that I think we really underestimated the process of Roadside because
• 49:07
  it was essentially, you know, a very contained hitchcocky and thriller. And
• 49:12
  you know, we we shot the movie entirely at nighttime, where Madison County
• 49:15
  was entirely at day. Like, we just wanted to do something really,
• 49:17
  really different, and you know, we we kind of didn't realize that we
• 49:22
  were still learning, and we kind of had this mentality of like, oh,
• 49:24
  we've done this before, so we weren't prepared for the new challenges that
• 49:28
  laid in front of us. And that was the first time you know,
• 49:30
  it clicked to me. I'm like, shit, going out to make a
• 49:32
  movie. It's it's it's brand new every time you do it, you know.
• 49:36
  So so that that production was a nightmare. We were under scheduled,
• 49:40
  under understaffed, under finance, so it was just a big, big hurdle.
• 49:45
  It was the worst shoot of my life. I still you know,
• 49:47
  I probably lost hair on that shoot, but you know, it was just
• 49:52
  the biggest pain in the ass. And I remember flying home, uh,
• 49:55
  just relieved that it was over, and nervous as hell that we didn't make
• 50:00
  a good movie. We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor and
• 50:08
  now back to the show. And and you know, thankfully when we got
• 50:14
  into the editing room, like you know, we we had most of the
• 50:16
  pieces that we needed. Like I didn't. I didn't get to direct the
• 50:20
  movie the way I wanted to, and I regret that immensely. But but
• 50:23
  I think it was one of those things where it's like there's really not much
• 50:25
  I can do once again, even more so, like this was another one
• 50:30
  just struggling to keep our head above water. But it was it was worse
• 50:32
  because we were just underprepared, you know, like we we kind of were
• 50:36
  like, Okay, we did really well in Madison County. We had you
• 50:38
  know, twenty locations, we had thirty characters, and with Roadside, we're
• 50:44
  gonna have three locations and five characters. We this is gonna be a walk
• 50:47
  in the park. And it absolutely wasn't, you know, So it was
• 50:51
  just kind of a you know, we we we were defeated before we went
• 50:53
  in, but Thankfully, we still pulled out a very very competent film.
• 50:59
  Now you had said something about doing that before, I mean, getting starting
• 51:04
  to shoot that before Madison County had even really gone into distribution, right,
• 51:08
  Yeah, Madison County actually hadn't even finished post production, so our editor was
• 51:13
  actually still working on editing Madison County while we were filming Roadside. So did
• 51:17
  it end up having the success that you thought it was going to have?
• 51:22
  Did Madison County? Yeah? I don't think. I don't think it had.
• 51:25
  I think it had a better success than than what it should have.
• 51:29
  And I think I don't think it reached our expectations. But our expectations were
• 51:35
  extremely high. But I mean, we you know, we we you know,
• 51:37
  my first movie, Right out of the Gate, premiered at the Chinese
• 51:40
  Theater at one of the biggest genre festivals in North America, actually the biggest
• 51:45
  genre festival in North America, and and you know, and and I was
• 51:50
  in there with like, you know, Tye West had a movie there that
• 51:52
  year, and you know, it was just a huge, huge turnout.
• 51:55
  We we were the only movie to sell out. They they gave us an
• 52:00
  on course screening. We got distribution. The movie came out in May of
• 52:02
  twenty twelve, and it was it was decently received. Like it didn't it
• 52:07
  didn't you know, critics didn't you know, you know, praise it,
• 52:12
  and they didn't hate it. It's just very middle of the road. But
• 52:15
  you know, but I think the movie ended up having a success of its
• 52:19
  own, which was you know, good enough for us, Like it was
• 52:22
  our first foot in the door, right the distribution Sorry, I get a
• 52:28
  lot into the nuts and bolts. So, yeah, the distribution deal that
• 52:31
  you made. Was that what what kind of a contract was that? Or
• 52:37
  I mean just what was that for? Like for world distribution? Was it
• 52:42
  for DVDs? How how did that all come together? Was there any sort
• 52:45
  of like talk of video on demand or you know, things like iTunes and
• 52:51
  voodoo and stuff like that, or just to give us a little bit of
• 52:54
  an inside look into that part, Yeah, for sure, it was.
• 52:58
  It was a pretty straightforward contract. Like we we had people approaches about doing
• 53:00
  a limited theatrical run, but they're minimum guarantees, which are the money they're
• 53:06
  gonna pay for the movie up front weren't as high. So we ended up
• 53:09
  going with a company that had a little bit of a bigger reputation than some
• 53:14
  of the others, and and you know, had movies that we had seen
• 53:16
  on shelves and Walmart and things like that, so we we took that deal.
• 53:21
  It was a it was a straight to DVD contract, so the movie
• 53:23
  went into red Box and things like that. The company wasn't really a VOD
• 53:29
  focused company. That this was still like the last year that physical media was
• 53:32
  still pretty relevant. But but you know, so the movie went to to
• 53:38
  Walmart and and got released on DVD and actually made most of its money on
• 53:43
  DVD if I remember correctly. But but yeah, so, I mean the
• 53:46
  contract was pretty straightforward, nothing nothing fancy in terms of promotion or release or
• 53:53
  anything like that. It was it was very standard, and we got the
• 53:55
  movie on shelves and we got a really solid amount of exposure into the marketplace.
• 54:00
  So you know, we we we were happy with that. We were
• 54:04
  happy that people could go to stores and buy our movie and and that uh,
• 54:07
  you know that that kind of gave us a pretty good chunk of legitimacy.
• 54:13
  So who owns the movie though? That's the question I always have,
• 54:16
  like if you the distribution company has the right to distribute it for for how
• 54:21
  long. I want to say it was like fifteen years, okay, and
• 54:24
  then after that you retain the owner, like the producers retained the ownership.
• 54:29
  Yeah, the producer retains the ownership. I actually owned the property, so
• 54:32
  I can do sequels and stuff. No one else can do sequels or remake
• 54:37
  or anything like that, but that one movie is owned by the producer and
• 54:40
  the distributor owns the rights to exploit it for Yeah, I believe up to
• 54:45
  like fifteen years. So you get to retain the rights because you have the
• 54:50
  copyright from the script or how is that? How do you I basically put
• 54:53
  it into my deal, like because it was such a low budget film and
• 54:57
  I literally took no money, like not it's like oh a couple pennies here
• 55:00
  and there, Like I literally took nothing to drop them. So I basically
• 55:06
  was like, look, you know, if we're gonna make this movie,
• 55:07
  I want to own the quote unquote franchise potential of it. So like if
• 55:12
  someone wants to make a sequel, I'll get paid for that one, you
• 55:15
  know. So so that that was kind of the idea, was like if
• 55:19
  someone ever wants to come along and remake it or do a sequel or something
• 55:22
  like that, like I will I will own that because I created the first
• 55:27
  one. But the producer actually owns that that particular film, so you know,
• 55:30
  he if he wants to rerelease it after fifteen years, or if he
• 55:35
  wants to license it to someone else, or you know, if someone comes
• 55:37
  along and they're like, we want to, you know, do a retro
• 55:39
  screening or something like that, like they have to go to him. Okay,
• 55:44
  so you can. Can you do action figures? Uh? Yeah I
• 55:47
  can't. Okay, that's the big one. You know, just learn from
• 55:52
  George Lucas always always keep the action figure rights. Yeah, totally. So
• 55:55
  okay, moving on from there. From Roadside, the next film was contracted
• 56:00
  or was there something between there? I was contracted. Yeah, okay,
• 56:04
  so that's I want to focus on that for a bit. Can you talk
• 56:09
  about how that came about and you know, where the screenplay came from,
• 56:14
  how how producers got involved, just how it all kind of comes together.
• 56:19
  Totally. Yeah, it was. You know, I was kind of frustrated
• 56:22
  with the whole business side of everything because, like with Madison County, the
• 56:25
  movie was exploited. It's kind of like a slasher movie and you know,
• 56:29
  the the idea of the film wasn't really to do it as a slasher movie,
• 56:31
  like I tried to do something it was a little different, and so,
• 56:36
  you know, but they kept focusing on the serial killer in the movie
• 56:38
  because it was kind of this iconic imagery that they were able to mass exploit
• 56:43
  and just grab people's attention, which you know, I knew nothing about how
• 56:46
  they marketed films in that way. So you know, it's a very eye
• 56:50
  opening and learning experience. And then when we went to do Roadside, Roadside's
• 56:52
  this very tense, story driven character movie, and there was no you know,
• 56:59
  iconic imagery in the film that could really sell the movie. No serial
• 57:01
  killer, no you know, nothing for them to exploit, essentially, no
• 57:05
  famous actors. So we were having trouble selling Roadside because everyone was like,
• 57:08
  look, we like your movie, but that we don't know how to sell
• 57:10
  it. And so fed up with that, I was like, Okay,
• 57:15
  you know what, I really I really want to do a movie that it's
• 57:19
  just totally hits the point for the market. Maybe this will get into a
• 57:23
  festival, because like up until that point, you know, we got rejected
• 57:27
  from almost every festival with the first two movies, and so I was like,
• 57:30
  you know, I'm gonna really aim high for festivals and markets and just
• 57:35
  try to do something really really different again, but something that felt more in
• 57:39
  line with the stuff that I saw having success in the genre, and and
• 57:45
  so and also something is really important to point out is like with Madison County
• 57:49
  and Roadside, I was making movies because I could, you know, like
• 57:52
  people were saying, hey, we have money, what do you what do
• 57:54
  you want to make that works in this world? And I wasn't telling stories
• 57:59
  that I necessarily felt needed to be told. So like, you know,
• 58:02
  we shot at my grandpa's farm from Madison County because I had an idea that
• 58:07
  based around his farm. And then with Roadside, you know, I had
• 58:09
  an idea because I knew we could shoot the movie because we could get a
• 58:13
  car, we could do this. So it was like kind of like what
• 58:15
  can we make with what we have? You know what I'm saying. And
• 58:16
  so with Contracted, it was the first time I'd ever written a story not
• 58:21
  thinking about like, Okay, I know this is the one element that I
• 58:24
  can exploit and I'll write a story around it, you know, So I
• 58:30
  wrote I wrote the movie just based on you know, the the initial idea,
• 58:34
  which was, you know, a girl has a one night stand and
• 58:36
  contracts what she thinks is an STD and so, you know, I was
• 58:38
  like, that's a really cool idea. I should write that story. So
• 58:42
  I kind of, you know, plotted out the story and I initially wanted
• 58:45
  to shoot it overseas because I wanted it to happen in a country where,
• 58:50
  you know, where the girl didn't speak the language and didn't you know,
• 58:54
  just had trouble realizing everything that was happening to her. So what happened was
• 59:02
  the producers came to me and said, hey, you know, we want
• 59:06
  to make a movie. This was their first film, and they were like,
• 59:08
  we have financing, we can green light it immediately, but we just
• 59:12
  need to find someone who can make a movie and make something good. And
• 59:15
  they had heard of Madison County. They had seen it. I think they
• 59:19
  even went to the premiere. I'm not sure, but uh, you know,
• 59:22
  I showed them Roadside and they loved it. They were like, wow,
• 59:23
  this is really really good. So they saw that I had versatility and
• 59:29
  and they they greenlit the movie right there, just on a handshake, Like
• 59:31
  I had no script, no anything, I was just like, look,
• 59:34
  you guys are gonna, you know, write a check. And it was
• 59:36
  my smallest movie to date. It was, you know, they had fifty
• 59:39
  thousand dollars and I think we ended up spending like forty five to to you
• 59:43
  know, make the entire film. So so, you know, it was
• 59:46
  kind of like I used it as almost once again, kind of an experiment
• 59:50
  to kind of go back to my my grassroots style of filmmaking. But we'll
• 59:54
  be right back after a word from our sponsor, and now back to the
• 1:00:01
  show. I was going to change one crucial thing, and that was I
• 1:00:07
  wasn't going to write a story just because I had elements in place already.
• 1:00:10
  I was just going to write the story based on what I thought the story
• 1:00:13
  should be, and then and then figure out how to execute it based on
• 1:00:17
  the elements I had. So it was, it was. It was a
• 1:00:21
  completely new style of filmmaking for me, and you know it thankfully it worked
• 1:00:25
  out. It was mostly handheld, right, Yeah, the whole movie's handheld
• 1:00:30
  except for maybe two or three shots. Okay, does that change how you
• 1:00:36
  approach it? I mean, since you're not thinking in terms of, you
• 1:00:39
  know, a camera is like slowly doing a pan or you know, do
• 1:00:44
  you just film it more kind of guerrilla style, documentary style a little bit.
• 1:00:50
  Yeah. I mean Madison County was very handheld. But with Contracted,
• 1:00:52
  I think it was the first time I approached I'd approached the movie with kind
• 1:00:57
  of the aesthetic in mind for the character. With Madison County, I approached
• 1:01:00
  it like, Okay, these other movies did handheld, I should do handheld
• 1:01:04
  or the other these other movies did a dolly here, I'll do a dolly
• 1:01:07
  here, you know. So uh, With Contracted, it was the first
• 1:01:09
  time I was like, you know, I wanted the movie to feel intimate
• 1:01:12
  because the character's story was so intimate, so I was. It was really
• 1:01:15
  one of the first times I was thinking like, Okay, what should I
• 1:01:17
  do as a director? Like in a lot of ways, I consider Contracted
• 1:01:21
  my first real movie because it was the first time I started thinking like a
• 1:01:24
  filmmaker and thought story first instead of Okay, what what do I need to
• 1:01:29
  do to make sure I don't mess this up? You know? So,
• 1:01:31
  I you know, my first two movies, I was thinking very heavily as
• 1:01:35
  a producer and so so with Contracted, Yeah, I approached everything from a
• 1:01:39
  from an emotional or and or a narrative standpoint, so you know, and
• 1:01:45
  and the the handheld aesthetic was based on the story, and both of those
• 1:01:50
  were based on the budget. So I kind of reverse engineered it knowing that,
• 1:01:53
  you know, I didn't need any big crane shots or dolly shots or
• 1:01:57
  anything like that, because I was going to tell a very intimate story that
• 1:02:00
  didn't need a lot of fancy, you know, fancy bells and whistles.
• 1:02:04
  Right. Can you talk a little bit about your process for screenwriting? Uh?
• 1:02:09
  Yeah, I mean my I you know, I don't consider myself that
• 1:02:14
  great of a writer, so I always hate talking about it. But you
• 1:02:17
  know, actually, but a lot of the people that I talked to say
• 1:02:20
  the you know, filmmakers who have made really good movies that you know,
• 1:02:24
  will always tell you, oh, but I'm not a writer, you know.
• 1:02:27
  But it's like, well, you know, you might not be comfortable
• 1:02:30
  with it, but screenwriting is a lot more about, you know, telling
• 1:02:35
  a visual story than it is about being necessarily the greatest writer in the world.
• 1:02:38
  But if you can tell your story visually, you know, it goes
• 1:02:43
  a lot further totally, And I mean, you know, it's it's weird
• 1:02:45
  for me to talk about writing because like I've I never Like I said,
• 1:02:47
  I don't consider myself much of a writer. I write by necessity, like
• 1:02:52
  I I write because I need things to direct. So you know, when
• 1:02:57
  when I write a screenplay, I know that I'm not writing it for like,
• 1:03:00
  you know, a studiohead or something like that. Like I've never I've
• 1:03:04
  never entered into a competition or anything like that. So I read my screenplays,
• 1:03:07
  you know, my my screen play. My screenplays read like any other
• 1:03:10
  screenplay. Like I I my formula and my my structure and everything like that
• 1:03:15
  is is you know, very traditional. But but it's like my my screenplays
• 1:03:19
  are you know, essentially what they're supposed to be. They're they're blueprints for
• 1:03:22
  for my my movie, you know. So it's like I don't necessarily write
• 1:03:25
  in shots like I have some friends who are very just director driven, you
• 1:03:30
  know, and they write like a director. I don't necessarily write like a
• 1:03:34
  director, but you know, I I definitely I write very simply, like
• 1:03:38
  I'm a very efficient writer. So I I what I do. My my
• 1:03:43
  process, for lack of better terms, is like I let the story kind
• 1:03:45
  of marinate in my head for you know, a few days or a week,
• 1:03:49
  or however long it takes. Sometimes it takes months, sometimes it takes
• 1:03:52
  weeks. Sometimes it takes a year. It really just depends on how well
• 1:03:55
  I grasp that story and that concept, and then it kind of reaches a
• 1:04:00
  boiling point where, you know, I don't write down, you know,
• 1:04:02
  I'll write down like the initial ideas so I don't forget it, and then
• 1:04:06
  I'll just kind of let's do like I don't really write much after that,
• 1:04:10
  Like I'll just kind of keep this little notepad or journal, and I'll keep
• 1:04:14
  that logline or that idea or the chicken scratch, you know, I wrote
• 1:04:17
  down to begin it with. And then eventually the all the ideas I have
• 1:04:23
  just kind of boil over and I start writing them down and like almost bullet
• 1:04:27
  point form, and they're not always necessarily in chronological orders, so it's just
• 1:04:30
  kind of the thoughts that generate in my head. Sometimes they're seen ideas,
• 1:04:34
  sometimes they are dialogue, sometimes they're characters, sometimes they're you know, whatever,
• 1:04:41
  and then I kind of just do that for you know, however long
• 1:04:45
  it takes. Usually it's like a few days or a week, and then
• 1:04:47
  eventually I feel like I have a good enough grasp on the story and I'll
• 1:04:53
  start writing. So like, you know, I wrote Contracted in like three
• 1:04:55
  weeks the first draft, so you know, it's like I knew the story
• 1:04:59
  really all. I kind of marinated on it really quickly. And you know,
• 1:05:01
  I get really excited when I know, like I don't, I don't
• 1:05:04
  have a lot of you know, spec screenplays that I've written laying around.
• 1:05:08
  If I if I have any spec screenplays laying around, it's because I wrote
• 1:05:12
  a script for a movie that just ultimately the financing film through, you know,
• 1:05:15
  because like I've never written a screenplay and said hey, here's you know,
• 1:05:18
  except for Madison County. Really, you know, that was the first
• 1:05:21
  time I ever said, hey, I have this script. But every other
• 1:05:26
  time Roadside Contracted, even even my my news film Get the Girl. It's
• 1:05:29
  like I have the producers commit to the movie and say, yeah, we're
• 1:05:32
  gonna you know, they almost pay me to write the script because I know
• 1:05:36
  we're gonna make the movie. Like I want to know what this movie is
• 1:05:39
  getting made or else there's no point in me writing a script, in my
• 1:05:42
  opinion, especially at a low budget level, because things changed so much,
• 1:05:46
  so you know, if I write a script, you know, for one
• 1:05:50
  producer at a certain budget level, and let's say the movie doesn't get financed,
• 1:05:55
  and then that scripts just sitting there and another producer comes along, It's
• 1:05:58
  like the circumstances may have changed, and then I have to go back and
• 1:06:00
  rewrite, restructure and do all that stuff. So it's like I'd rather just
• 1:06:03
  wait until the movie's ready to be made, you know. So that's just
• 1:06:06
  my my personal mentality. But up until recently, like just just this year,
• 1:06:12
  actually I wrote my first uh you know, I got hired to write
• 1:06:15
  a screenplay. You know that I'm ultimately going to direct, but it was
• 1:06:19
  the first time that you know, it was going to bigger producers and studios
• 1:06:24
  and you know things like that, so that that was kind of a new
• 1:06:27
  process for me. But you know, I treated the process the exact same
• 1:06:30
  way is I I did with all my other ones. Like the producers came
• 1:06:34
  to me, I pitched them an idea, they liked it and they said,
• 1:06:36
  yeah, we're gonna pay you to write it. And I wrote it,
• 1:06:39
  and uh, you know, I marinated on it and it took me
• 1:06:42
  like, uh, I want to say, maybe maybe a month month and
• 1:06:45
  a half to finish the entire screenplay, and and you know, we went
• 1:06:48
  through I want to say, maybe five drafts or something like that, and
• 1:06:53
  you know, send it off for feedback and the feedback's coming back great.
• 1:06:56
  So you know, I'm getting a little more confident in my writing. But
• 1:06:59
  yeah, it's it's like, my my process is very much you know,
• 1:07:02
  just what works for me because I don't know how to do it in any
• 1:07:04
  other way. You know, right, are there any where did you learn
• 1:07:11
  screenwriting? Is there any resource that you can point people to. I don't
• 1:07:15
  know how I learned. I actually, I mean that's that's what I'm saying,
• 1:07:18
  is it's kind of in my head. And I was right, Yeah,
• 1:07:21
  it's kind of a learned by learned, trial by error kind of thing.
• 1:07:25
  Like did you read a lot of screenplays when you were in film school?
• 1:07:27
  Idea? That's actually what I was about to say is I've I've actually
• 1:07:30
  read a lot of screenplays. And I actually had a screenwriting teacher who who's
• 1:07:34
  written some books on you know, screenwriting, and she know, she she's
• 1:07:39
  had some success in coaching screenwriters and things like that, and she actually gave
• 1:07:43
  me the biggest, biggest piece of advice I'd ever gotten, and it still
• 1:07:45
  resonates with me to this day. But we were in class one day and
• 1:07:48
  pitching ideas and learning learning to take notes and learning to get criticism, and
• 1:07:54
  learning to develop ideas, and I would always throw out the most bizarre ideas
• 1:07:59
  in her classroom and she would tell me. She would say, you're a
• 1:08:01
  brilliant screenwriter, but you don't know why. And I didn't. I didn't
• 1:08:06
  know. I didn't know what that meant. But now I now that I've
• 1:08:11
  kind of come to terms and kind of come into my own as a filmmaker,
• 1:08:15
  I finally get what she means. And she meant that I have a
• 1:08:17
  very unique voice. I have a very unique perspective on the world, and
• 1:08:20
  I tell, you know, pretty unique stories, especially now now if you're
• 1:08:25
  contracted. But you know, I tell unique stories. But for the longest
• 1:08:29
  time, I didn't know why I told them, and I didn't know why
• 1:08:30
  I wanted to tell them. I just I wanted, uh, I wanted
• 1:08:34
  to get them out. And finally I've kind of learned the discipline that I
• 1:08:38
  lacked when she first told me that. I think it's really been, you
• 1:08:42
  know, a very helpful thing to me. But you know, those words
• 1:08:45
  really stuck with me because it at least validated me to know that I had
• 1:08:47
  something inherently, you know, positive about my work, and I had a
• 1:08:53
  natural ability or talent or whatever you want to call it, but I just
• 1:08:56
  needed to learn how to harness it. And I think I finally, you
• 1:08:59
  know, reached that point. So thank you to her. You don't remember
• 1:09:01
  her name, Yeah, no, I do, Lin Cow. You know,
• 1:09:05
  I just didn't know she Okay, No, I'm sure that that that
• 1:09:10
  praise would be something she would, you know, absolutely ironically. I mean,
• 1:09:15
  if you're if you want to talk, you know, smack about a
• 1:09:17
  teacher, they're probably not gonna want no, no, no, no,
• 1:09:19
  no no. She she was great. She. You know, it's funny
• 1:09:23
  because, like I said, I didn't really fancy myself a screenwriter, but
• 1:09:26
  I love my screenwriting teachers in film school and she was one of my favorites.
• 1:09:30
  And ironically, it kind of came full circle while I was filming and
• 1:09:33
  Get the Girl. We're shooting at the parking garage at my old film school
• 1:09:36
  because I needed a parking garage, and she actually came and visited me on
• 1:09:41
  set. Uh, you know, she was like I heard. She was
• 1:09:43
  like, I heard someone was shooting a movie here, and she was like,
• 1:09:45
  and then someone told me it was you, and I just had to
• 1:09:47
  come by and say hello. So it was really kind of cool for you
• 1:09:50
  know, my old screenwriting teacher to come see me on the set of my
• 1:09:54
  my latest movie. You know, it was really really cool. We'll be
• 1:09:59
  right back after a word from our sponsor and now back to the show.
• 1:10:06
  Yeah, okay, So walk us through the process picking Contracted. If you
• 1:10:12
  can give us a little bit of, you know, behind the scenes of
• 1:10:15
  how how that was working with your actors and and you know, one thing
• 1:10:19
  that's interesting to me is knowing kind of in a twenty four hour period,
• 1:10:25
  what is that like? Okay, you wake up, you have maybe some
• 1:10:28
  coffee, you know, you go to this set. Well, what are
• 1:10:31
  you doing while you're filming? I mean you just like constantly twenty four hours
• 1:10:35
  a day focused on I mean, are you generating new ideas thinking about how
• 1:10:40
  you're going to shoot the scene the next day? What is the mindset that
• 1:10:43
  you're in while you're shooting? And how how long would that sorry, how
• 1:10:46
  long was the shoot? By the way, Contracted with shot in fifteen days,
• 1:10:49
  so three five day weeks. The process actually Contracted was probably the smoothes
• 1:10:55
  shoot I've ever had, and I think it was simply because we didn't have
• 1:10:59
  a lot, and we knew we didn't have a lot, so there was
• 1:11:01
  really nothing to stress about. You know. It's like we planned very efficiently.
• 1:11:05
  It was my third feature film, so I was really really well prepared
• 1:11:10
  for what the challenges were going to be. We shot in Los Angeles.
• 1:11:14
  We used a lot of people's locations that we knew we could get for free,
• 1:11:16
  so people's apartments, people's houses, things like that. You know,
• 1:11:20
  a lot of my friends are in the movie. So Contracted once again was
• 1:11:24
  kind of going back to like my backyard roots. Like it felt very much
• 1:11:27
  like a home movie, but just with a bigger, bigger story, you
• 1:11:30
  know, like whereas Madison County and Roadside were backyard movies, you know,
• 1:11:33
  filmed in the backyard with like very humble roots and kind of like, you
• 1:11:39
  know, we we treated those movies with baby hands because like we didn't really
• 1:11:43
  know what we were doing, and we were making movies because like, oh
• 1:11:45
  my parents can get a car, my grandpa's a farm, Like we just
• 1:11:48
  we were making movies around the elements we had we contracted. We treated it
• 1:11:53
  like a real movie. It's like, okay, let's let's go for broke
• 1:11:55
  here, you know, like let's really go for it. And so,
• 1:11:59
  you know, I think that mentality changed everything. It made us really strive
• 1:12:01
  to make something unique, original and different, exciting. And you know,
• 1:12:05
  every day was kind of kind of a challenge because you know, my lead
• 1:12:11
  actress was in makeup almost every day. We didn't have a lot of time
• 1:12:15
  to shoot. We didn't have you know, a you know, our our
• 1:12:18
  actors were extremely great. The casting process was phenomenal, So we had great
• 1:12:23
  actors. Every it just felt like a family. Like my lead actress and
• 1:12:27
  I really clicked. Uh you know, my other co stars and I really
• 1:12:29
  clicked. A lot of them were my friends and a lot of the crew.
• 1:12:32
  You know, I thankfully I was able to kind of cherry pick the
• 1:12:34
  great crew members from Madison County and Roadside to come along with me to film
• 1:12:39
  Contracted. And that shorthand really helps a lot. Like my you know,
• 1:12:43
  my my sound guy knows where I'm going to shoot the shot, so he
• 1:12:45
  knows where, you know, where he should put the microphones, and you
• 1:12:48
  know, it just it really really helped. So it was a great,
• 1:12:51
  great shoot and really smooth, and you know, every day it was just
• 1:12:56
  kind of like you know, I I show up to set with with my
• 1:12:59
  shot ideas, my list, and then I see you know, the scariest
• 1:13:01
  thing about shooting low budget films is sometimes you show up on set and you're
• 1:13:04
  seeing the location for the first time. So like, you know, I
• 1:13:08
  had ideas of shots that I wanted to do, but I didn't know if
• 1:13:10
  they were if they were possible. So, you know, especially when you're
• 1:13:13
  shooting handheld, you can really adapt to your scene. You can really adapt
• 1:13:16
  to what your actors are gonna do, you can adapt to your environment.
• 1:13:19
  So it made it really flexible, which I think really helped the film.
• 1:13:24
  And we kind of approached the entire movie like we had a great plan,
• 1:13:27
  but we were very adaptable. So you hadn't seen some of the locations before.
• 1:13:31
  You didn't do like a location scout for each place that you shot,
• 1:13:34
  or we did for the key locations like the actual the house party at the
• 1:13:41
  very beginning of the film and the end, like Alice's house was that actress's
• 1:13:45
  house Alice like, so I wrote for her, I mean I'm not joking
• 1:13:48
  when I say it was a backyard movie. You know, I wrote the
• 1:13:51
  role for her. I knew she had a house. I knew she'd let
• 1:13:55
  us use it, and you know, I'd been to our house a million
• 1:13:58
  times. And then you know, the cafe and the bars that we shot
• 1:14:01
  at were places that my girlfriend worked at, you know, or the lead
• 1:14:05
  actor worked at, and I'd been to a million times, and you know,
• 1:14:10
  so it was just writing around things we knew we could get that that
• 1:14:14
  also worked for the story. We weren't forcing them into the movie, you
• 1:14:16
  know. And and then but places like you know, the doctor's office I
• 1:14:21
  had never seen before. The the morgue, you know, was shot on
• 1:14:27
  a sound stage. I had never been to that place before. Trying to
• 1:14:30
  think if there are any others. I think that was actually it. But
• 1:14:33
  but yeah, a lot of those places I had never seen before. Now,
• 1:14:38
  the makeup for the movie was incredible. Did you have to did you?
• 1:14:43
  I assume you didn't shoot everything kind of in the correct order? I
• 1:14:46
  mean, would you shoot one location and do you know the makeup how she
• 1:14:50
  was normal? Then the gradual change every time you would shoot that location,
• 1:14:56
  or did you try to shoot relatively in order we tried. We that that
• 1:15:00
  was kind of the nightmare of the shoot was the makeup, because like we
• 1:15:03
  shot based on location, so like we spent the first week of shooting at
• 1:15:06
  the house location for her and her mother, So like, you know,
• 1:15:11
  at the beginning of the movie, she's fine, and then towards the end
• 1:15:14
  of the film, she's like rotting away. So like we would have to
• 1:15:16
  shoot certain you know, makeup scenes in progression and then go back. So
• 1:15:21
  like the very last scene in the movie with a car crash actually takes place
• 1:15:28
  in front of the location where she goes to buy drugs, like midway through
• 1:15:31
  the movie, so we actually to shoot the ending of the film at the
• 1:15:34
  beginning of the day and then take off the makeup and then reapply it to
• 1:15:39
  shoot a scene in the middle of the movie. So like that that was
• 1:15:42
  kind of we shot based on location, so that that kind of you know,
• 1:15:45
  forced our hand in which makeup scenarios were which, But you know,
• 1:15:48
  and that that was kind of paining the ask just because it took so long
• 1:15:51
  and we had a very you know, minimal makeup grew because we just didn't
• 1:15:55
  have a lot of money, so you know, we were really kind of
• 1:15:58
  tied down to the makeup schedule unfortunately, but we were able to kind of
• 1:16:00
  shoot around it or make it work. And you know, my makeup artist
• 1:16:04
  and I was really involved with the makeup, Like I was very detailed in
• 1:16:08
  the screenplay, and we broke it down into three phases. We said,
• 1:16:13
  okay, this is phase one, this is phase two, this is phase
• 1:16:15
  three, So we were able to kind of have a little bit of a
• 1:16:16
  shorthand knowing where she needed to be with her makeup and kind of you know,
• 1:16:20
  okay, this came after that. We kept really good continuity photos,
• 1:16:24
  so we kind of knew what she looked like and things like that. So
• 1:16:28
  so yeah, it was pretty regimented. Yeah. The thing with the eyes,
• 1:16:31
  I think was the thing that really kind of was just like shocking to
• 1:16:35
  me, you know, because like she would walk around with her glasses on
• 1:16:39
  and then people would want to see her eyes and that just kind of you
• 1:16:44
  know, just having the red eye. It's just freaky to me, you
• 1:16:46
  know. Yeah. Yeah, once again one of those simple, simple tricks
• 1:16:50
  it becomes really effective. Yeah. Well, you know, we we've been
• 1:16:55
  talking a lot with other filmmakers about kind of body horror and the concept of
• 1:17:01
  having a story that's kind of got one foot in reality and one foot in
• 1:17:06
  you know, fiction, which is that there is something very real about what
• 1:17:11
  she's going through. You know, it's like you identify with Okay, it's
• 1:17:15
  like she's deteriorating, and there's some like kind of horrorfic science fiction side of
• 1:17:19
  that, but at the same time, it's told within the context of this
• 1:17:24
  is a real you know, this kind of connects with something that people deal
• 1:17:28
  with in real life, you know, yeah, totally, you know what
• 1:17:31
  I mean. Yeah, Okay, Like I mean I was talking to Adam
• 1:17:36
  Robotel the other day and he did the taking of Deborah Logan. Yeah,
• 1:17:42
  I know, I know, yeah, and so it was like the thing
• 1:17:45
  that I think connects and they connect in similar ways, you know, which
• 1:17:48
  is that you connect with the lead character immediately because it it's based you know,
• 1:17:54
  on something that's real, but it's also you know, horror. You
• 1:17:58
  know, it's also like the science science fiction side of it. Yeah,
• 1:18:00
  totally. I like to call it like relatable relatable horror, you know,
• 1:18:04
  and it's like it's something that's really fascinating to me because like, you know,
• 1:18:08
  you can take like you know, it's something as simple as like Halloween.
• 1:18:11
  You know, it's it's so relatable because who hasn't you know, had
• 1:18:14
  a babysitter or known a babysitter or been a babysitter. You know, it's
• 1:18:16
  like that's that's something that really resonates to a lot of people. And then
• 1:18:19
  you know, you see something like The Strangers. It's like, who hasn't
• 1:18:23
  been home alone at night and someone knocks on the door you don't know who
• 1:18:26
  they are, or you haven't heard of creaky noise outside. You know,
• 1:18:29
  it's like the those are all relatable feelings and scenarios. And then you know,
• 1:18:33
  but something like you know, you watch something like The Thing or The
• 1:18:36
  Fly, which are both body horror films. You know, it's like,
• 1:18:41
  not many people have been trapped inside of a you know, a machine that
• 1:18:44
  turns you into something or tries to teleport you, or you know, not
• 1:18:46
  many people have been stuck in like, you know, an antarctic environment with
• 1:18:50
  a creature. You know, but it's like they find ways to get inside
• 1:18:55
  your fears and things like that, and it's like for me, I think
• 1:18:58
  we're just kind of taking more relatable approach instead of like trying to take a
• 1:19:02
  narrative that's not familiar and make people identify with it. We're taking something that's
• 1:19:08
  very familiar to them and and kind of using that as a shorthand to get
• 1:19:13
  our point across that much quicker, because I think, you know, today's
• 1:19:16
  audiences check out really quickly if they don't relate to the characters right away.
• 1:19:21
  Yeah. I mean, I think one of the things that impressed me the
• 1:19:24
  most is just the restraint. You know, you let it build, and
• 1:19:28
  it does happen very gradually, you know, so that you you really get
• 1:19:31
  to know this character. But it's like slowly things start. You know.
• 1:19:35
  Is there some way that you kind of like paste that out or like could
• 1:19:39
  feel what was the right moment for things to happen? I mean, do
• 1:19:44
  you do you go through your structure and say okay, I mean something like
• 1:19:48
  save the Cat or the Hero's Journey, stuff like that. You go through
• 1:19:51
  your story and say, okay, this is going to be when this happens,
• 1:19:56
  and then we need to have this happen by this moment and stuff like
• 1:19:59
  that. We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor and now back
• 1:20:06
  to the show. Yeah, totally, that's a big part of my process.
• 1:20:11
  But I don't know if I follow like traditional structure like Save the Cat,
• 1:20:15
  Like I've read the book, but it's like I haven't touched it in
• 1:20:17
  years. I really told of a cut. It's more of a gut thing,
• 1:20:20
  you know. It's like I kind of think, like, what is
• 1:20:23
  the audience want at this point? What am I trying to tell them?
• 1:20:26
  Where's my character's journey at this point? It's like, really, it's it's
• 1:20:29
  just a matter of in my opinion, I'm a big fan of ambiguity,
• 1:20:31
  and I'm a big fan of, you know, doling out enough information to
• 1:20:35
  keep the audience invested, but not enough to where they know everything and they
• 1:20:41
  can figure it out. So it's like for me, I want to keep
• 1:20:44
  them, uh kind of on the hook. And if I have them on
• 1:20:46
  the hook, I can I can pull them up and down whenever I want.
• 1:20:49
  That's kind of the idea I was like, you know, mid I
• 1:20:53
  think some of the biggest, biggest moments and contracted like at least in terms
• 1:20:57
  of like effectiveness, are really in the middle of the movie. Because I'm
• 1:21:00
  I'm not a big fan of following the structure of like everything needs to build,
• 1:21:02
  build, build to the climax and then you know, it explodes.
• 1:21:05
  Like that's kind of the uh, that's kind of like the tent pole mentality
• 1:21:09
  of Hollywood nowadays is like, Okay, you know, first we kidnapped the
• 1:21:13
  girl, and then you know, then there's a chase scene in the middle,
• 1:21:15
  and then by the end of the movie they're on top of a building
• 1:21:17
  and someone's gonna die, you know, and it's like or or you know,
• 1:21:20
  like the world's gonna explode by the end of the movie, you know.
• 1:21:24
  And it's like for me, I like the idea of like they're being
• 1:21:28
  and a lot of movies are kind of taking this approach, like if you
• 1:21:30
  look at I don't know why, but this this one always comes to mind
• 1:21:32
  for me. But like you look at like Skyfall, Skyfall, most of
• 1:21:36
  the action in that movie takes place in like the middle of the film,
• 1:21:41
  and then the ending in the movie is contained into one house, you know,
• 1:21:45
  and it's like it's it's almost like an anti climax, you know.
• 1:21:47
  It's it's it's a narratively and emotionally satisfying climax, but in terms of the
• 1:21:51
  action, that's not really where it's at. So for me, I try
• 1:21:55
  to apply that to contract it a little bit, where it's like, emotionally
• 1:21:59
  the movie's building and narratively the movie's building, but like the action so to
• 1:22:02
  speak, of the film, like the grosser moments and stuff like that are
• 1:22:06
  kind of saved for the middle of the movie. Like, yeah, there's
• 1:22:09
  gross moments towards the end, but I think I think they're a little more
• 1:22:12
  spread out than they are in the middle, So it's like, yeah,
• 1:22:15
  I definitely kind of plot and pick and choose where I want my moments to
• 1:22:18
  come for sure. Right, do you feel like it's better to kind of
• 1:22:25
  like, if you have a mystery that's going on in your story, it's
• 1:22:28
  like better to keep that going as long as possible because inevitably, once the
• 1:22:32
  mystery is solved, it's like, oh okay, it's like, you know,
• 1:22:36
  it's not such a big deal, but like keeping people on the hook
• 1:22:40
  that the whole time you know that you're trying to figure it out. I
• 1:22:42
  mean that seems like most most stories nowadays have that like some element that you're
• 1:22:46
  kind of putting things together, you know, yea, but once you figure
• 1:22:49
  it out, it's like whatever, yeah, exactly. I mean I'm a
• 1:22:53
  huge fan of mystery. Like, mystery is one of my favorite genres.
• 1:22:56
  So it's like I try to infuse a little mystery into everything I do if
• 1:22:59
  it all possible. So I that that, to me is part of the
• 1:23:02
  fun. It's like, my favorite movie of all time is Scream and and
• 1:23:05
  it's like the who Done It? The Scooby Doo pulled a mask off at
• 1:23:09
  the end of the movie, Like that element of it is my favorite thing.
• 1:23:13
  Like I I will forever be a fan of the Who Done It?
• 1:23:15
  Subgenre because if you can have a movie with cool characters and horrible things are
• 1:23:18
  happening to them, and then by the end of the movie you have to
• 1:23:20
  figure out who's doing it and why, Like that's that's a that's a formula
• 1:23:24
  that never gets old for me. So I'm a big fan of of incorporating
• 1:23:29
  that and you know, keep keeping the audience on the hook, as you
• 1:23:31
  say, But it's funny because you know, uh, with contracted, it's
• 1:23:35
  like, to be honest with you, I didn't expect for there to be
• 1:23:40
  much mystery, Like, you know, when I was writing the movie,
• 1:23:43
  I was kind of you know, I was like, okay, like people
• 1:23:45
  are gonna get what this is, like what she's turning into. And it's
• 1:23:47
  funny because the movie kind of took on a life of its own when people
• 1:23:50
  didn't realize like what she was turning into until the very end. And it's
• 1:23:54
  so funny because like at the end of the film, after the car crash
• 1:23:57
  and she wakes up at like the you know, I watched the movie in
• 1:24:00
  theaters in Mexico and Spain, I all over the world and and all over
• 1:24:04
  the country, and it's like the gasps at like certain moments of the movie.
• 1:24:09
  I'm like, really, you guys didn't see that coming, so,
• 1:24:11
  you know, it was it was really kind of eye opening for me to
• 1:24:15
  see, you know, how far you can take audiences and what audience has
• 1:24:16
  picked up on and what they didn't, so, you know, it was
• 1:24:19
  it was kind of fun for me that that that people, you know,
• 1:24:23
  found that element of it to be really exciting. Well, you know,
• 1:24:26
  I think people are used to being told what a movie, you know,
• 1:24:29
  what it is, and what how they're supposed to feel, and you left
• 1:24:30
  that open, you know, yeah, exactly. So just fast forwarding a
• 1:24:35
  little bit. I know you've talked a lot and and you know, your
• 1:24:40
  blog. I highly recommend your blog for anybody who's uh, you know,
• 1:24:43
  out there wanting to know about filmmaking. And I was reading through it and
• 1:24:46
  I got you know, it was really nice to get like a perspective on
• 1:24:51
  you know, not like a politically correct written, you know blog, but
• 1:24:58
  a blog that's actually talking about what you actually feel like in what Happened?
• 1:25:00
  Can you talk about what happened with Contracted after you know, after you finished
• 1:25:05
  it and you know, of course, what what has happened with the sequel?
• 1:25:12
  Yeah? I mean, you know, the short version is the movie.
• 1:25:15
  The movie was uh, you know, it's sat it was finished,
• 1:25:17
  and then you know, we we we started trying to sell it and showing
• 1:25:21
  it to people, and everyone thought it was so weird or two two gross
• 1:25:26
  or something. You know, there was always one excuse or another. We
• 1:25:29
  got really close to getting into south By Southwest, We got really close into
• 1:25:31
  getting into Tribeca, but at the last minute just didn't happen. So,
• 1:25:35
  you know, people I was trying to get work. I couldn't get hired
• 1:25:39
  for anything, and so I kind of thought I was a failure. My
• 1:25:44
  producers didn't think they were going to sell the movie for very much money.
• 1:25:45
  And then you know, something crazy happened people. You know, our poster
• 1:25:49
  got leaked, which ironically, the poster initially was something I made with a
• 1:25:54
  guy named Zach Palmazano. You know, he and I just kind of cut
• 1:25:58
  it together really quickly after I sent him a couple of ideas and we were
• 1:26:00
  told it wasn't going to go public, and our sales agent accidentally posted it
• 1:26:05
  on their website when they weren't supposed to, and and a new site found
• 1:26:12
  it and let it slip. So you know, so was that the one
• 1:26:14
  the one that everybody's seen or was that something else? It's the one.
• 1:26:18
  It's the one where only half her face is exposed, and I think it's
• 1:26:23
  like actually the DVD cover now, But but yeah, that that was just
• 1:26:27
  something that you know, I had cut together with Zach on our own,
• 1:26:30
  like just you know. They were like, hey, we need something to
• 1:26:32
  represent the movie, and I was like, look, I don't want to
• 1:26:34
  show her entire face yet, so I'll send them this half cut poster and
• 1:26:40
  uh, you know, we'll just call that like the teaser image for right
• 1:26:42
  now. But I told the company, I was like, look, don't
• 1:26:44
  let this go public, like, we don't want anyone seeing this yet,
• 1:26:46
  And within four hours it was up all over the new site and and I
• 1:26:50
  was like freaking out because I'm not a poster artist, you know, It's
• 1:26:54
  like I I didn't I thought we just ruined our film. But it caught
• 1:26:58
  on and everyone was like I started getting text messages and all kinds of stuff,
• 1:27:01
  and people were like, wow, this is incredible, like we we
• 1:27:03
  love this poster. And and then you know, and then you know,
• 1:27:08
  IFC bought the movie, uh and and you know, the producers weren't happy
• 1:27:13
  with the sale initially, so you know, they were like, all right,
• 1:27:15
  we're never gonna make any money off of this, so let's just start
• 1:27:17
  focusing on what's next. And you know, at the time, they they
• 1:27:20
  had no interest in working with me again. They were like, all right,
• 1:27:24
  you know, you you you made a movie. It's not gonna make
• 1:27:26
  a lot of money, but you know, congratulations, you might get another
• 1:27:29
  job off of it, but we're not ever going to see a dime.
• 1:27:31
  And I was like, I was like, I was like, guys,
• 1:27:33
  I'm not getting hired for anything, Like, no, no one will hire
• 1:27:36
  me, like they think this movie is weird and you know, it's like,
• 1:27:40
  I don't know what's happening. And then, you know, the craziest
• 1:27:43
  thing happened. The trailer came out and everyone started talking about it, and
• 1:27:46
  then the movie came out and every even more people started talking about it,
• 1:27:49
  and Howard Stern was talking about it. It's like, you know, it
• 1:27:53
  was over the course of just a couple of weeks, like every everyone's perspective
• 1:27:58
  change. It's funny. I started getting email from companies that had passed on
• 1:28:01
  me for things or had said no, we don't like your movie, who
• 1:28:03
  were suddenly like, hey, we watched your movie. Did you change something?
• 1:28:06
  And I was like, no, I didn't change anything. The movie
• 1:28:09
  is just the movie's just popular now, so you want to talk to me,
• 1:28:12
  you know. So it was it was really eye opening for me.
• 1:28:15
  And it's funny because I signed with my agent like the day after the movie
• 1:28:18
  came out in theaters, and you know, my agent hates when I when
• 1:28:23
  I you know, this this period of our exchange, but you know,
• 1:28:26
  I told my agent, I was like, look, I don't want to
• 1:28:28
  take meetings with people who passed on my movie initially or they only want to
• 1:28:30
  work with me because because they thought, you know, contracted, you know,
• 1:28:34
  did really well, or you know, they think I can make them
• 1:28:36
  a lot of money. It's like, yeah, this is a business,
• 1:28:39
  and I get that, but it's like I want to work with people who
• 1:28:41
  like what I do, not people who just like me because I made someone
• 1:28:44
  else a lot of money, you know. So and my agent was like,
• 1:28:46
  no, no, no, this is Hollywood. Like you have to
• 1:28:47
  be okay with that, you know. So so you know, it's it's
• 1:28:53
  fine. Now. It's like I've kind of come around to it, but
• 1:28:55
  it's like I still stand by that to a degree. It's like, I
• 1:28:57
  like working with people who like Eric England films. Eric England's films that make
• 1:29:00
  money, you know. So that's kind of that's kind of my mentality when
• 1:29:04
  I approach it. But you know, it was very eye opening because,
• 1:29:08
  like I said, a lot of people who initially wouldn't talk to me,
• 1:29:11
  or you know, didn't think I was good enough or whatever, suddenly you
• 1:29:14
  know, open their arms. We're like, hey, let's have a meeting,
• 1:29:15
  let's talk. What projects do you have? We have some projects,
• 1:29:17
  you know. So it was it was just a very very bizarre kind of
• 1:29:23
  change. Change of pays but you know I wouldn't. I wouldn't trade it
• 1:29:26
  for anything. Okay, so walk us through a little bit of what ended
• 1:29:31
  up happening with the sequel that you know, I'll note that you're you weren't
• 1:29:39
  involved with other than doing the screenplays, right, we're working on a screenplay
• 1:29:44
  for it. Yeah, so I So basically what happened was, you know,
• 1:29:48
  I started writing a screenplay for the movie, and you know, it
• 1:29:53
  was just decided that, uh, we weren't going to you know, make
• 1:29:57
  the movie with the budget I was told that we were initially going to to
• 1:30:00
  get We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor and now back to
• 1:30:08
  the show. So I said, look, I'll still be involved. I'll
• 1:30:14
  you know, I'll continue writing the screenplay, I'll produce the film, and
• 1:30:18
  uh, you know, we'll keep in the family. I'll kind of mentor
• 1:30:20
  the new director who I hired, you know, Matt Mercer to do,
• 1:30:24
  who was a producer and star the first one. And you know, ultimately
• 1:30:28
  what happened was they decided that you know, I was a better director than
• 1:30:31
  I am a writer, which I can't necessarily get and uh, they didn't
• 1:30:36
  want to. They didn't want to pay for me to write the screenplay or
• 1:30:40
  produce the film because they thought I was going to cost more money than I
• 1:30:43
  was worth, which actually wasn't wasn't a lot of money I was. I
• 1:30:45
  was kind of, you know, given them the friend price at this point.
• 1:30:49
  So, you know, it was just a you know a little bit
• 1:30:53
  of you know, Hollywood Hollywood disagreement. You know, bottom lines are important,
• 1:30:57
  and some people think, you know, five dollars is over what they're
• 1:31:00
  willing to spend is too much. So do you do you still have people
• 1:31:04
  coming up to you and talking about how much they liked Contracted Too. Sometimes.
• 1:31:10
  I mean I I have people, I have people, you know,
• 1:31:13
  come up to me and say, hey, I'm about to watch the sequel
• 1:31:15
  and I'm like, look, I you know, I didn't make that one.
• 1:31:16
  And then I have people, I have people who reach out to me
• 1:31:19
  and they're like, hey, I can't wait to see Contracted Too. And
• 1:31:21
  I'm like, you know, I didn't make that. Or I had people
• 1:31:25
  say, hey, why didn't you make Contracted Too? So I mean,
• 1:31:27
  yeah, you know that that That's the whole reason I've kind of been vocal
• 1:31:30
  about my lack of involvement with the film is because you know, when people
• 1:31:33
  think Contracted, they think of two people. They think of Najara, who
• 1:31:36
  played the lead actress, and myself. And so I want people to understand
• 1:31:41
  that, you know, just because I made the first movie doesn't mean I
• 1:31:44
  had anything to do with the sequel. And it's like, I if I
• 1:31:46
  liked the sequel, it would be a different story, because then I would
• 1:31:49
  say, yeah, I don't I don't mind people associating me with that.
• 1:31:51
  But the sequel was it won, it's not a good film. But two,
• 1:31:56
  I even if it was a good movie and I still had no one
• 1:32:00
  all met with it. It's like I would let them know, like,
• 1:32:00
  hey, I like the movie, but I didn't make it, you know.
• 1:32:04
  And but it's like I don't like the movie. I don't think it's
• 1:32:08
  very good. So it's like I don't want I don't want to be represented
• 1:32:11
  or I don't want to be associated with that in any way regardless, Right,
• 1:32:15
  do you have any of that, like copyrighting stuff that you had with
• 1:32:17
  the the other ones that you were talking about. I do not have control
• 1:32:21
  over it or you. That's not part of no. I No, I
• 1:32:25
  don't. I don't own Contracted. I do own part of the franchise,
• 1:32:29
  so like, I will make money off of the sequel, but you know,
• 1:32:31
  it's it's yeah, I don't control what happens with it, right,
• 1:32:36
  is the lead girl? I haven't seen the second one out of respect,
• 1:32:42
  I don't know if that's good or bad, but I haven't seen it yet.
• 1:32:45
  But is the same lead actress in it? Or is it completely it's
• 1:32:48
  completely different? People, she's she's in it for like literally two shots.
• 1:32:54
  Oh that kind of sucks, all right. Yeah, So okay, so
• 1:32:58
  your your latest film. What can you tell us about that? I unfortunately
• 1:33:02
  haven't seen it, so I don't really know have specific questions, but have
• 1:33:08
  you is that? Is it like in the same can you Can you talk
• 1:33:13
  a little bit about it? Uh? Yeah, I mean I can't say
• 1:33:15
  much because the movie's not out yet. It'll be out okay, Oh,
• 1:33:18
  but but yeah, I mean it's it's once again, completely different movie.
• 1:33:21
  It's more of like a dark comedy thriller. It shows a lot of humor.
• 1:33:26
  You know. I wanted to do something a little different tonally, and
• 1:33:30
  uh, you know, it's it's a it's a crowd pleaser. I wanted
• 1:33:31
  to do something that I felt like I would like to watch as an audience
• 1:33:34
  member and something that I thought, you know, fans in this world haven't
• 1:33:42
  necessarily seen before. It's definitely a unique, dark and fun movie. When
• 1:33:45
  is uh what what's the plan with that? Is it gonna go to festivals?
• 1:33:48
  And then I don't know. I mean I I, like I said,
• 1:33:51
  I'm not a big you know, I love festivals, but I think
• 1:33:55
  their mentality is a little different than mine. So we may play some festivals
• 1:33:59
  if if we find the right ones that I think, you know, kind
• 1:34:01
  of fit within the world of what we want to do with the film.
• 1:34:03
  But you know, the goal is to release it next year, just kind
• 1:34:06
  of get it out to the audience. Okay, do you do you ever
• 1:34:10
  go to AFLM or any of that stuff. I don't personally, I mean
• 1:34:13
  my my sales reps and everything like that. Dude, It's it's not really
• 1:34:15
  a filmmaker or friendly place. Okay. It's kind of like going to a
• 1:34:20
  cattle auction and you being a cow. Okay, So you know, I'll
• 1:34:26
  just kind of wrap it up with this. If you could just maybe give
• 1:34:30
  a little bit of advice or what you let's try this. If you could
• 1:34:33
  give advice to yourself. Let's say you know you're you're relatively young director.
• 1:34:38
  One of the things that kind of impressed me when you know, I was
• 1:34:41
  looking through your information was, you know, you're born in nineteen eighty eight,
• 1:34:45
  so like it kind of, I'll be honest, I mean it annoyed
• 1:34:49
  me a little fit. You know. Uh, it's okay, no,
• 1:34:54
  it's good. You know, But if you could go back in time,
• 1:35:00
  so when you were younger, when you were like say nineteen, what what
• 1:35:02
  advice would you give to yourself about filmmaking? You know, the I give
• 1:35:09
  the same advice to everyone, and I think it's the same advice I would
• 1:35:11
  give to myself, which is be as original as possible. You know.
• 1:35:15
  Uh. The craziest thing for me in my career is I started making movies
• 1:35:17
  when the world, uh perspective of filmmaking and also the marketplace itself was drastically
• 1:35:26
  changing. I mean, you have movies now with two of the biggest stars
• 1:35:29
  like you know, like Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence in them, that are
• 1:35:30
  going straight to vod now, you know, so it's it's a completely different
• 1:35:34
  world. And so the best thing you can do is just make the movie
• 1:35:38
  you want to make, but also know that you're making it for an audience.
• 1:35:41
  You know, don't the world of just making movies for yourself is dead.
• 1:35:45
  Like you, you can't be a filmmaker like that's that's now a hobby,
• 1:35:48
  you know, Like if you want to be in a tour and make
• 1:35:50
  films that only you like, then then you know, make it as a
• 1:35:55
  hobby. Filmmaking is too expensive to try and do that on a on a
• 1:35:59
  mass level. I think if you truly want to be a working filmmaker and
• 1:36:01
  you want to be in the movie business, then be original. But know
• 1:36:05
  that your originality needs to be commercial to someone, so if they can sell
• 1:36:09
  your product and continue getting you work. And I think that's the best thing
• 1:36:13
  you can do is be aggressive, be original, and you know, keep
• 1:36:15
  a good head on your shoulder. It'll be objective. Eric Man, I
• 1:36:19
  appreciate it. Thanks for coming on the show, no problem, Thanks for
• 1:36:23
  having me all all right, Man, talk to you later. All right.
• 1:36:27
  I want to thank Jason so much for doing such a great job on
• 1:36:30
  this episode. If you want to get links to anything we spoke about in
• 1:36:32
  this episode, head over to the show notes at Bulletproof Screenwriting dot TV Forward
• 1:36:35
  Slash three twenty eight. Thank you so much for listening. Guys, as
• 1:36:39
  always, keep on writing no matter what. I'll talk to you soon.
• 1:36:43
  Thanks for listening to the Bulletproof Screenwriting podcast at Bulletproof Screenwriting dot tv.