Latest / Indie Film Hustle® - A Filmmaking Podcast / IFH 684: How to Make a Kick-Ass Low-Budget Zombie Film with Eric England

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IFH 684: How to Make a Kick-Ass Low-Budget Zombie Film with Eric England · Indie Film Hustle® - A Filmmaking Podcast

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  You are listening to the IFH podcast Network. For more amazing filmmaking and screenwriting
• 0:08
  podcasts, just go to IFAH podcast network dot com. Welcome to the Indie
• 0:13
  Film Hustle Podcast, Episode number six eighty four. False when things change,
• 0:18
  I'll be happy. True When I am happy things will change. Kyle Sea's
• 0:26
  broadcasting from the back alley in Hollywood. It's the Indie Film Hustle Podcast,
• 0:30
  where we show you how to survive and thrive as an indie filmmaker in the
• 0:35
  jungles of the film biz. And here's your host, Alex Ferrari. Welcome,
• 0:40
  Welcome to another episode of the Indie Film Hustle Podcast. I am your
• 0:43
  humble host Alex Ferrari. Today's show is sponsored by Rise of the Film Entrepreneur
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  How to turn your independent film into a profitable business. It's harder today than
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  ever before for independent filmmakers to make money with their films from predatory film distributors
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  ripping them off to huckster film aggregators who prey upon them. The odds are
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  and of course audiobook. If you want to order it, just head
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  over to www dot film bizbook dot com. That's film bizbook dot com.
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  Enjoy today's episode with guest host Jason Buff with Eric England from the movie Contracted.
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  He is the writer and director and he takes us through his journey as
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  a filmmaker, how he started out making low budget films and slowly built up
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  from there. And I think it's really important for you know, first time,
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  second time, whatever filmmakers to understand that there is a you know,
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  not for everybody, but the majority of people out there who are making films
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  start out small. They make a you know, a movie for a couple
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  thousand bucks or possibly even less, and then slowly gradually move up. After
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  proving themselves with a small feature, then they move up to a slightly larger
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  one. Your first feature shouldn't be you know, you shouldn't be looking for
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  a movie star and trying to spend you know, a bunch of money and
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  everything. It really should be just like a test and if for whatever reason
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  it loses money or it becomes a disaster, you can just learn from that.
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  And you haven't burned all those bridges, and you haven't you know,
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  wasted a bunch of people's money, because that's a lot of money. That's
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  a house right there, you know what I'm saying. Let's move on to
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  our interview. I'm really excited that Eric came on the show. He's a
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  young filmmaker and is really out there doing what a lot of us want to
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  be doing. So he has a lot of great advice about how you can
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  become a successful filmmaker. Here we go, Okay, well, I mean,
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  I guess the first thing that I want I usually start out with is
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  just really talking about your background. Where are you from, how did you
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  get into filmmaking and all that. So could you give us just kind of
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  a little bit of background about you, Yeah, totally. Um, I'm
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  originally from Russellville, Arkansas, which is you know, really small town in
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  between like Feteville and the Rock in Arkansas, right smack dab in the middle
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  of the Bible Belt. Um. And uh, you know, in terms
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  of originally getting into filmmaking, there was no um, you know, really
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  there really was no introduction to film other than you know, my my dad
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  was a big movie nut, and a lot of my family members continue to
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  be, uh, you know, big film fans. Like I was exposed
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  to a lot of um, you know, especially genre movies when I was
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  younger. Um, my grandmother actually, for some reason, my grandparents have
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  a really big thing with Stephen King, Like Stephen King Nobles 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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  Stephen King's at the Original Night of Living, Dad, m Fright, Night
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  Lost, boys, like a lot of vampire movies near dark. I think
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  my dad was a big vampire fan. But my dad was twenty one when
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  he had me and my mom was eighteen, so they were kind of kids
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  raising a kid, and so yeah, that kind of kind of allowed me
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  to be exposed to two things I probably shouldn't have been at that age,
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  but kind of you know, created this uh love for the darker side of
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  storytelling that just kind of stuck with me all through, you know, my
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  adolescence and growing up, and I became like an avid movie watcher. My
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  my dad and I, you know, our quality time was always spent like
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  we had movie night every week. So um, you know that that kind
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  of really started it. And then when I when I got ready to graduate
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  high school and get ready to decide what I wanted to do with my life,
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  I was like, you know, I knew I couldn't. I was
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  a horrible student in school. I want to say horrible, but I was
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  just one of those students where if I if I didn't feel challenged, I
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  just didn't pay attention, you know, And so essentially I knew, like
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  if I didn't do something that I wasn't you know, diehard passionate about Um,
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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
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  LA when I was nineteen. Wow. Okay, so what what was that
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  like when you arrived? Was it kind of you know, what was what
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  it was versus what your expectation was. It's very young to just pick up
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  and move. I mean nineteen yeah, I mean I'd never set foot on
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  an airplane like it was. It was a big culture shock at first,
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  um, and it took a while to kind of get acclimated. I mean,
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  I I definitely went through, you know, a couple of years of
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  missing home and and uh or not necessarily missing home, but just you know,
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  not feeling like I didn't fit in, especially which is weird because LA
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  is kind of a melting pot of cultures and personalities and things like that.
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  So you know, I think that was really just my own insecurities because every
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  everyone kind of fits in out here, you know, everyone's different, so
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  but essentially, m you know, it just took a while. Like it
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  was exciting because every day when I woke up, I could feel like,
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  Okay, opportunity was within grasp, you know, like it when you first
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  moved to LA you kind of feel like, Okay, there's so much happening
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  around you. How do I get involved? And I think that was kind
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  of the dauncing part, was how do I get involved? You know,
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  It's like I knew it was happening. I knew there. You know.
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  It's like I could go to restaurants and see people that I admired, and
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  I could go grab drinks with filmmakers that I loved, and you know,
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  sometimes I saw actors and stuff that I wanted to work with. But you
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  know, I was like, how how do I find legitimacy and approach these
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  people? Because you know, the worst part was I moved out here to
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  go to school, so you know, you're almost worse off being a film
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  student than just a filmmaker, you know. So um so it was like
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  I was I was below filmmaker as a film student at the time, so
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  you know, but but at the same time, you kind of can use
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  that to your advantage. You know. It's like being a film student shows
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  that 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. But yeah, every day it was
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  just waking up and figuring out how to how to climb the wall, so
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  to speak, and get inside. Right. So when you first got there
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  where 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
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  moved here, I was going to school, so um. So yeah,
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  I moved here in like June two thousand and seven, and uh and I
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  started school in July. Um, so yeah, it was it was a
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  really quick transition. I think I was here for maybe three weeks just to
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  kind of get acclimated and um just kind of learned, you know, the
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  routes and how to drive and all that stuff. So, um, you
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  know, I had a little time to kind of pound the pavement. You
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  know, I wasn't looking for a job immediately because I was getting ready to
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  go to school full time. But yeah, it was it was mainly for
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  education. First, Where did you go to school? I went to the
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  LA Film School in Hollywood. Okay, okay, cool, Yeah, So
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  talk about that a little bit, going to uh, what were some of
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  the key things that you learned in film school that have helped out and maybe
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  some of the things that you learn in film school that didn't really have anything
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  to do with actually working in the film industry, you know, I'd say
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  it's more of the latter, to be honest with you, I fel I'm
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  not a very big advocate of film school. And that's not to knock film
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  school at all. I just think, um, you know, the film
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  business, especially when I was going to school, it was changing so rapidly.
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  I mean, I went to film school in two thousand and seven,
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  two thousand and eight, and we were still learning on film and we were
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  probably one of the last, you know, classes to to really focus on
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  film. And when we weren't shooting on film, we were shooting on on
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  mini DV. So like we weren't even really being you know, HD was
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  thing that was reserved for like higher level classes and things like that. You
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  know, So it was kind of a weird space because it's like HD was
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  this holy grail of new technology, yet we were still shooting on film,
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  you know, and it's like it was, it was bizarre. So the
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  teachers were still trying to learn things. You know. Some of my teachers
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  were film students that had graduated a few years before us who needed jobs,
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  so they came back to work at school. You know. My directing teachers,
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  you know, had agents and they were trying to get jobs, so
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  they would have to step out of class and take phone calls, and you
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  know, it was just a really more than anything. I would say the
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  best thing about film school was it exposed me to Hollywood. And I tend
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  to have a very objective personality. I never really take things for how they're
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  presented to me. I kind of analyzed them, and so I think because
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  of that, I didn't buy everything that I was told right away, and
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  I think that was a good thing, because we'll be right back after a
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  word from our sponsor and now back to the show. You know. Essentially,
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  I learned really quickly that a lot of my films teachers, uh,
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  you know, we're teaching us ways they would do things, and I think
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  that's the worst way to teach film, like film or art in general.
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  It's like if you're a teacher, you should be nurturing the instinctive creativity that
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  your student has and not telling them how they should do something, but guiding
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  them to find their own voice. And so I remember shooting, um,
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  you know, film projects in film school, and almost every single thing,
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  like we had to use the same sets, we had to use the same
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  cameras and all that jazz, and so many of those short films ended up
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  looking almost identical. And it was because like the teacher was like, oh,
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  you should do this shot, or you should do this, or you
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  should use a dolly or you know, and it's like they were just influencing
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  the students in the ways that they would themselves. So you know, I
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  immediately kind of tried to buck the system a little bit and do things a
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  little differently, and and you know, it kind of pushed me to be
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  my own unique voice. And I mean, especially in film school, you
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  know, every everyone becomes a uh, you know, a genius film critic
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  or you know, they every film student gets snobby. So it was nice
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  for me because I I learned to get criticism very early, um, just
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  because I wanted to stand out. So I think that that prepared me a
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  little bit for when I got out of school and started making movies. You're
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  at school, film school now that then you graduate, what's your kind of
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  next step after that? Um? My next step was freaking out? Um.
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  I basically when I got out of film school, I was like,
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  shit, what do I do next? Um? You know, the cameras
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  that I had, you know, at my disposal were taken away. Um,
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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. Um, you know,
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  and and I didn't have I didn't have you know, the money from
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  like school loans and crap like that that that I was I had, So
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  it was kind of like, um, okay, how you know, now
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  I have to find a job. But I you know, I made a
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  very strict promise to myself, and I'm kind of stubborn this way, but
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  I was like, you know, I didn't want to go work at Starbucks.
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  I didn't want to go work at Blockbuster or something like that. So
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  you know, I was like, if I'm gonna live in LA like,
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  I need to be focused on making movies. So what I did was I
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  I went back to my hometown and uh for for a few months and worked
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  at the nuclear power plant there, which is kind of a dangerous job,
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  so it pays you a lot of money really fast. And so I used
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  that money to come back out to LA and kind of live on for a
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  while while I was trying to make my first movie. You know. So
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  it was nice. It's like I was able to kind of make a lot
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  of money really quickly and then um, you know, move move back out
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  to LA and essentially pay all my rent and stuff in advance. So I
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  didn't I didn't really have to worry about a job, and I could focus
• 12:50
  on writing and applying to direct things and stuff like that. The worst part
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  about that was, you know, I was getting rejected day you know,
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  day in a day out from people because I didn't really have a great,
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  you know resume. I only had film student shorts on my on my reel,
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  and um, you know, so I realized like, okay, I
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  need to I need to generate my own material. So I wrote tons of
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  scripts. I wrote probably like five screenplays in a year, um, and
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  and just started you know hustling and trying to meet people. And eventually that
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  led me to you know, meeting some producers and trying to get a movie
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  financed. UM, and it fell through. And that was probably the best
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  thing that ever happened to me. Was kind of that that UM, that
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  ticking clock mentality that I had, which was like, Okay, I have
• 13:35
  enough money to last me X amount of months or a year or whatever,
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  and so it's like, I need to do something in this time. And
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  by you know, I graduated in two thousand and eight, and by November
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  of two thousand and nine, I had written and directed and produced and self
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  financed and did basically everything on my first feature film, UM, which was
• 13:56
  called The Hostile Encounter. And I used that it is kind of like,
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  UM, just kind of like a you know, a calling card, like
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  hey look, I you know, I'm I'm gonna invest in myself and UM
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  and kind of show people that I can, I can you know, make
• 14:09
  a film. And ironically we never finished that movie. UM. You know,
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  I I kind of put it off to the side because it was my
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  own money, it was my own investment, so I didn't have to repay
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  anyone UM. But we put it off to the side because I ultimately ended
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  up getting an offer, you know, or a proposition to direct my first
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  real feature film, Madison County, which actually got released and you know did
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  pretty well. But um, but yeah, it was it was all because
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  of Hostile Encounter. Because I had invested in myself and and proven that I
• 14:35
  could make a make a movie. And and you know, one of my
• 14:37
  buddies was like, hey, you know, if I could get some some
• 14:41
  more money, like, would you want to make something that we could you
• 14:43
  know potentially try to you know, make something on a bigger scale. And
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  that turned into Madison County. So your friend was more of a producer who
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  was looking for a writer and director in that case. Um, actually he
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  was my my director of photography on Hustle Encounter. The name was Daniel Dunn,
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  and uh we had met in film school and at the time when I
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  directed Hostel Encunter, I was twenty one years old and when I made Madison
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  County, I was twenty two. So so essentially on Hostling Encounter, he
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  graduated film school the same time I did, and he bought a bunch of
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  equipment to kind of you know, start renting out and shooting music videos and
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  things like that. And I told him, I said, look, I'll
• 15:20
  be your first client. I'll you know, i'll rent your equipment from you.
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  I want to shoot my first movie. And I was like, you
• 15:26
  can come shoot it for me, so he said great. So we had
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  like a five person crew. I you know, we road tripped down to
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  Arkansas and we started shooting the movie in Arkansas and worked our way back to
• 15:35
  California and we shot the opening of the film in California. So we shot
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  the movie in like five different states. It was kind of a road trip
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  movie, and yeah, you know it was. It was just a fun
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  experience and I think it kind of you know, got the juices flowing for
• 15:50
  everyone to say, hey, what else can we do? And that excitement
• 15:54
  is you know, infectious, Like once you get that bug, you know,
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  it's kind of hard to shake. So Daniel immediately was like, you
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  know, he watched the cut that I edited together with my editor, and
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  he was like really astounded by what, you know, what the film had
• 16:07
  become, because I mean, you know, he was on set every day.
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  We only shot for like five days, but you know, he was
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  like, wow, that that little road trip that we did in five days
• 16:15
  with Mike camera. He's like, you you turned into like a pretty competent
• 16:18
  little movie, and he was like and we had nothing. So he was
• 16:21
  like, you know, if you if if I could get like some money,
• 16:23
  would you want to try and make something a little bigger? And I
• 16:26
  was like, absolutely, if you can do it, I'll start right away.
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  And so, um, he knew that I had the screenplay for Madison
• 16:32
  County because I'd been talking about it and trying to get it financed and everything.
• 16:34
  So he was like, what about that movie? And I was like
• 16:37
  absolutely, So we we instantly started working on that and kind of put Hustle
• 16:41
  Encounter to the side. So talk to me a little as much as you
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  can about um putting together. Okay, first of all, Hustle Encounter,
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  what are we talking about in terms of just budget and who who was your
• 16:53
  crew? And how did how did you put all that together? I mean,
• 16:56
  even though you're saying it was kind of you know, just like you
• 17:00
  you got in a car and you were driving, but there does have to
• 17:02
  be a certain amount of organizing to that. Yeah, one hundred percent.
• 17:04
  I mean it was honestly the simplest organization possible because at the time I knew
• 17:11
  it was going to be an experiment and that's how I wanted to treat it
• 17:12
  was an experiment. Um. So the budget total, I gave myself five
• 17:17
  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 um you know most of that went
• 17:26
  to paying um Daniel for his equipment and his services, and then gas money
• 17:33
  to drive down to Arkansas and back and then um, you know whatever whatever
• 17:37
  meals I had to feed everyone and things like that. So you know who
• 17:41
  was who was your crew? Was it just uh were you? He was
• 17:45
  shooting it right, he was shooting it well, actually it's a found footage
• 17:48
  movie kind of so um so the main the main character was actually filming himself
• 17:52
  for a lot of the movie. Um and so um you know, I
• 17:55
  wrote it around a certain actor who was Ace Morrero, who ended up starring
• 17:59
  and producing Madison County with us. So um so my crew was myself,
• 18:03
  Daniel um Nick Bellinger who was a good friend of mine, um, who
• 18:07
  helped us produce a kind of a Swiss army knife pa named just Jordan Mears
• 18:15
  who helped out and then um, and then we had a wardrobe girl who
• 18:18
  was my girlfriend at the time, and and her family helped out. My
• 18:22
  family helped out because we shot in my hometown, so like the crew was
• 18:26
  literally like five people. But you know, we I strategically shot it in
• 18:32
  my hometown knowing that I could get vehicles for free and houses for free and
• 18:36
  you know, whatever resources that I needed. So we didn't spend any money
• 18:38
  on props. We didn't spend anybody. Like we went into you know,
• 18:41
  locations and shot for free while people were actually you know, eating in the
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  restaurants and things like that, so you know, will stretch a dollar.
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  Was there any thought about, you know, what you were going to do
• 18:53
  with it or was it just purely like, oh, we're just gonna do
• 18:56
  this for fun. We're we're just gonna do exactly what we want to and
• 18:59
  not worry about the commercial side of stuff. I mean, was that the
• 19:02
  idea? I mean, I think at the time, you know, we
• 19:04
  had never sold a movie, so we didn't know what the commercial side was.
• 19:07
  You know, like we we shout this kind of hoping it was going
• 19:10
  to be you know, the Blair Witch Project or parentn you know, this
• 19:14
  this was actually before Paranormal Activity even came out, I think, so.
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  Um so, we were shooting a found footage movie, which was really really
• 19:21
  ahead of the curve at the time. So you know, we we kind
• 19:25
  of just wanted to do, um, just just experiment and say, okay,
• 19:29
  let's make a movie. You know, we knew Blair Witch was popular,
• 19:30
  we knew Parentornactivity was kind of on the rise, but it hadn't come
• 19:33
  out yet, and so um so we were like, okay, let's go
• 19:37
  make you know, our own movie and we'll try and sell it. It
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  was kind of just like we knew we needed to make something that was competent,
• 19:44
  and then once we knew we had something competent, then we could figure
• 19:47
  out the what we did right and what we did wrong. Um. So
• 19:51
  you know, it was a great learning process because I actually ended up once
• 19:52
  we got to finished cut. Um. You know, I never went into
• 19:56
  sound design or anything like that, so we never finished the sound on the
• 19:59
  movie. We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor and now back
• 20:07
  to the show. But I sent the rough cut around to some companies,
• 20:11
  and you know, it was funny because looking back on it, like I
• 20:15
  cringe, because you know, I sent it to some some reputable people,
• 20:18
  and it's sure some of them I've even interacted with now. Um. But
• 20:22
  you know, at the time, I was just so excited to say,
• 20:25
  hey, look, I made a movie that I wanted anyone and everyone to
• 20:29
  see it, even if they hated it. I just wanted to learn.
• 20:32
  So it was kind of like just you know, throwing mudical wall, seeing
• 20:34
  what's stuck and so um. So yeah, you know, we weren't really
• 20:38
  I mean, the goal was to sell it. But you know, thankfully
• 20:41
  I knew that I had made the investment, so you know what, whatever
• 20:45
  financial responsibility there was, it was all on me, right. Yeah,
• 20:48
  And that's a big thing that we we always stress, you know, um
• 20:52
  or you know when it when it comes to making a film, it's good
• 20:56
  to just get out and especially with all the cameras that are available now,
• 20:59
  I mean, it's ridiculous the people just get out and just start shooting.
• 21:02
  You know, don't look for making a you know, a big movie first.
• 21:06
  Just get out and shoot as much as you possibly can, and don't
• 21:08
  you know, just make all the mistakes before you you know, have everything
• 21:12
  on the line and have a whole full you know, film crew around you,
• 21:17
  and you know, make a bunch of mistakes, then do all the
• 21:19
  mistakes, you know, cheaply first, you know, yeah, absolutely,
• 21:25
  It's funny. I you know, I came from the school of like,
• 21:27
  um, you know, I like Eli Roth was a big inspiration, you
• 21:32
  know for when I first started out, and I knew Kevin Fever was made
• 21:34
  for like a million dollars, and I knew Reservoir Dogs was made for like
• 21:37
  a million dollars. So like, and Saul was coming out around, you
• 21:40
  know, a little before then, and so you know, I kept saying,
• 21:44
  like, all right, I wanted to make my first movie for like
• 21:45
  a million dollars and do it legitimately and make it the right way. But
• 21:48
  then there was the other side of me that was like, you know,
• 21:51
  I had read Rebel Without a Crew and Robert Rodriguez, and so it was
• 21:53
  like there was part of me that really wanted to kind of wait for that
• 21:56
  magic experience of like, oh, I wrote a script and it attracted some
• 22:02
  investors, and you know, next thing, you know, I'm on the
• 22:03
  set of a legitimate feature film and I'm directing. But I also knew that,
• 22:07
  you know, no one was going to give me that opportunity, and
• 22:11
  I didn't know if my writing was good enough. I just I just didn't
• 22:12
  know. So I was like, the only thing I knew how to do
• 22:15
  was do it on my own. So I was like, I kind of
• 22:18
  had no other choice. And I was very stubborn in that regard, and
• 22:21
  that stubbornness has thankfully carried me a long way. Yeah, and things have
• 22:26
  changed a lot, you know, with the technology. I mean it used
• 22:29
  to be back in you know, I'm kind of in a different generation,
• 22:33
  so you know, I was making you know, independent films back in the
• 22:37
  nineties with like these people who were shooting on sixteen millimeter and thirty five millimeter,
• 22:41
  and it was like, I mean, you couldn't do anything for you
• 22:44
  know, I mean you couldn't even think about making a film for you know,
• 22:48
  less than one hundred thousand dollars easily, just like you know, buying
• 22:52
  the film stock. You know. Yeah, so you know, and nowadays
• 22:56
  it's just so easy to pop ale ins, you know, even get a
• 22:59
  DSLR or something and just get out and shoot, you know, totally.
• 23:02
  Yeah. Um, let me, let's move on to Madison County. Now,
• 23:04
  what was the Can you talk about how that came together and give people
• 23:11
  just a little bit of an idea of, you know, what kind of
• 23:15
  budget range you moved up to, how things were different from working on the
• 23:18
  Hostile Encounter, and just a little bit of insight into the filmmaking process for
• 23:22
  that totally. I had written the script based on some ideas I had had
• 23:26
  for a while. I had actually written it before Hostile Encounter. I think
• 23:30
  Hostile Encounter was actually like my six or seventh screenplay that I had written,
• 23:34
  and Madison County was actually make a second in the grand scheme of things.
• 23:38
  So I had had Madison County kind of sitting around, and then when Daniel
• 23:42
  approached me about it, I actually didn't want to do Madison County because I
• 23:45
  actually wanted a bigger budget. I wanted around one hundred and fifty thousand dollars
• 23:48
  to make it, and we ended up making the film for around like seventy
• 23:53
  thousand, I think, So I had to tailor the script down a little
• 23:56
  bit. I went through several several rewrites. We you know, different investors
• 24:00
  came in at different times before Daniel, so the script had gone through several
• 24:04
  several versions, and you know, things had changed and things had come up
• 24:10
  and gone away. So you know, it was a great experience because I
• 24:12
  almost went through my own, you know, kind of vacuum development process because
• 24:18
  like I, you know, I was from the school or the train of
• 24:22
  thought of like, Okay, I write a script, I gonna make a
• 24:25
  movie, you know, and I wasn't really concerned about like development or anything
• 24:29
  like that. So you know, when I wrote the script, I was
• 24:32
  like, great, this is my movie, and you know, and I
• 24:34
  was ready to shoot it. And you know, I had some investors approached
• 24:38
  me and they read the script and they knew nothing about filmmaking, but they
• 24:41
  you know, they obviously watched movies, so they were like, I think
• 24:45
  you should change this or that, and you know, so I kind of,
• 24:48
  you know, I'm actually really thankful for that process because, like,
• 24:51
  you know, you can actually learn a lot from people who watch a lot
• 24:53
  of movies and and aren't necessarily filmmakers because they're they're gonna tell you what bumps.
• 24:59
  You know, not every one knows how to read a screenplay, not
• 25:00
  everyone knows how to visualize something in their head. But I think each and
• 25:04
  every person that read the script that potentially was bringing money to the table kind
• 25:08
  of brought something to the film that at least made it better than my initial
• 25:12
  draft. You know, I'm still not, you know, super happy was
• 25:15
  what I wrote on the on the page. But um, you know I
• 25:18
  was young. So but it was much better than the first draft. I
• 25:19
  mean, I'd probably cry if I read the first draft now, so um
• 25:23
  but uh so so Daniel. Daniel said he could get like, um,
• 25:27
  I want to say, like fifty to seventy thousand, and um, you
• 25:30
  know, but but the idea was, uh, you know, he was
• 25:33
  like, we we can't lose this money. This is my my parents money.
• 25:36
  So his parents were car dealers, and I think they'd like taken out
• 25:38
  a loan force or something like that, and so, um So essentially what
• 25:42
  happened was we went and took the first scene of the movie. Ace Murrero,
• 25:47
  the Starn producer the film, um or one of the producers. He
• 25:52
  suggested I basically I wanted to go shoot a scene. I wanted to shoot
• 25:55
  something just for fun, just to kind of you know, sharpen my tools,
• 25:57
  because the last thing I shot since then was Hustle encounter within the found
• 26:02
  footage movie. So I wanted to kind of prepare myself to shoot a traditional
• 26:06
  narrative and get acclimated again with kind of the camera and stuff like that.
• 26:11
  So in that format of storytelling. So Ace actually suggested that we shoot a
• 26:15
  scene from the movie to kind of use as a promotional tool for the film.
• 26:19
  And so we went about an hour outside of la and shot a little
• 26:26
  scene from the movie that was essentially the opening of the film, kind of
• 26:29
  tailored for that environment, and we released it online a couple months later,
• 26:34
  and all of the news sites and blogs picked it up, and we actually
• 26:40
  had foreign distributors contact us based off of the trailer, and they reached out
• 26:45
  to us and they said, hey, we really liked this. We we'd
• 26:48
  like to make you an offer. And so basically people were offering us money
• 26:52
  for this, you know, for this film that they hadn't even seen yet,
• 26:56
  that actually didn't even exist at this point, because this was just a
• 26:59
  fake trailer that we shot or a fake scene that we shot, um,
• 27:03
  you know, for like less than one hundred dollars. I think it was
• 27:04
  like fifty bucks we spend on it or something like that, like ninety five
• 27:07
  dollars. So um, so you know, we use that money as almost
• 27:11
  like a verbal commitment UM to say okay, great, um we can um
• 27:17
  you know, we we know we can at least make this much money.
• 27:18
  Like if these people are the only people to ever buy the movie, then
• 27:22
  we know we can at least make that much money back. Um. And
• 27:26
  then you know, we were just thinking in terms of like you know,
• 27:29
  punk rock garage band style. We're like, if we have to, we'll
• 27:33
  we'll go door to door selling DVDs this movie ourselves to make them money back.
• 27:37
  So we kind of just you know, reverse engineered and said, okay,
• 27:40
  great, this is you know, as safe as we can make this
• 27:42
  investment, and um, you know started casting the movie and a way we
• 27:45
  went. Now, the people that were um you said foreign distributors were interested
• 27:52
  or yeah, okay, now what what sort of things? I mean,
• 27:56
  first of all, where were they just like we're all global foreign distributors or
• 28:00
  were they like specific to Europe. It was like it was like Germany and
• 28:07
  and I want to say a couple of others actually reached out, but I
• 28:08
  mean it was it wasn't exclusive tofore and like I think a couple of sales
• 28:11
  agents and maybe a couple of US distributors reached out. Um, but yeah,
• 28:17
  essentially we just had interest in sales. Germany. I think Germany and
• 28:21
  maybe one other country were the only ones to actually offer up like a legitimate
• 28:25
  number and say hey, we'll pay you this much, um before ever even
• 28:29
  seeing the film. But um, but yeah, so we we had interests
• 28:32
  in specific people who are actually willing to cut a check, and then people,
• 28:34
  um, you know, who were interested in representing the movie, and
• 28:37
  you know, and and essentially, you know, we got to a point
• 28:41
  where people were like, hey, we want to see the whole film,
• 28:41
  and we're like, okay, great, we'll call it. Well, we'll
• 28:45
  get back to you in a few months. You know. Yeah, it's
• 28:47
  gonna be a good feeling, you know. Yeah, yeah it was.
• 28:48
  It was exciting. Now. Is that fake trailer still available somewhere? Yeah?
• 28:55
  Absolutely, I'll ask you for a link. I'll put that in the
• 29:00
  show notes because I'd really be interested to just take a look at that.
• 29:03
  Yeah. Um, so talk to me about the process, like the difference
• 29:07
  between making Madison County versus Hostile Encounter, and you know what, like,
• 29:14
  you know, just details like what kind of camera you guys were using,
• 29:17
  how you work with actors, what the different I mean I assume you were
• 29:19
  working with like a full on you know, grip grip crew, and you
• 29:23
  know it was more of a professional like film set, right, Um.
• 29:30
  I mean you'd want to think that, um, but it was actually,
• 29:34
  uh, you know, we we essentially had um you know, we had
• 29:37
  like soccer dads as our grip team and stuff like that. You know,
• 29:41
  we shot, we shot on the We shot on the red Um, which
• 29:45
  was a you know, a major upgrade from what we shot Hostile Encounter on.
• 29:51
  We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor and now back to
• 29:57
  the show. So, you know, I was working with a new camera
• 30:02
  system I was not familiar with, which you know, since I was directing,
• 30:06
  wasn't as big of a deal. Um. But you know, I
• 30:08
  was working with a professional director of photography who had done other things before.
• 30:14
  Um. You know, so I was the youngest person on set essentially,
• 30:17
  you know, and and I was probably the most inexperienced, and um,
• 30:21
  you know, and and I went from managing a crew of like five people
• 30:25
  to managing a crew of like twenty five people and and and a cast of
• 30:29
  like five to seven or eight people a day. You know, So it
• 30:33
  was kind of a kind of a head first, you know, jump into
• 30:36
  the pool, so to speak, because you know, I, um,
• 30:38
  you know, I had never done anything of that size. Like I remember
• 30:41
  seeing the grip trucks pull up on the first day of filming or you know,
• 30:45
  first first day of pre production or whatever, and I was like,
• 30:48
  whoa, you know, like this is uh, this is legit, like
• 30:51
  the biggest movie set I had been on, like if somebody making a movie
• 30:55
  or yeah, exactly, like this was the biggest set I'd ever been on
• 30:57
  and the movie had shooting yet, so um, you know it was.
• 31:02
  It was very much an eye opening experience and um, you know, but
• 31:07
  I looking back on it, I wouldn't have traded it for anything because it
• 31:10
  really prepared me for the dudes and don'ts and you know, kind of forced
• 31:12
  me to get get my shit together because you know, I was totally you
• 31:17
  know, I was really prepared. Like I took my job very seriously and
• 31:19
  I stressed day in day out. I think I think by the time we
• 31:22
  actually start rolling cameras, like I lost like seventy pounds. But um,
• 31:26
  but like you know, it was, um, it was you know,
• 31:30
  a really serious commitment. I took it really seriously. I was, you
• 31:33
  know, we were extremely underprepared and um, you can't no, um sorry,
• 31:41
  my girlfriend's walking through and she was like, he can't see me canty.
• 31:45
  Um but um so uh so, you know, it was a really
• 31:48
  big undertaking and you know, I was totally unprepared or I was prepared,
• 31:53
  but I think we as a crew and producers, and I think we were
• 31:57
  really underprepared in terms of like what we do, what we thought we were
• 32:00
  getting ourselves into. Like we had tons of locations, tons of actors,
• 32:05
  tons of moving parts. So it was just a really big undertaking that I
• 32:08
  think, you know, we we we underestimated, but were you know,
• 32:14
  thankfully we had that willingness to take on a challenge. And I think that's
• 32:17
  a lot of what filmmaking is. It's just the ignorance to not be told
• 32:21
  no. You know. Yeah, Well, now, looking back, what
• 32:23
  are some of the things, you know, mistakes that maybe you made early
• 32:27
  on that you you know corrected or you know, learned in your next features.
• 32:31
  I just see you that promotional trailer by the way, okay, perfect,
• 32:35
  what was that question? Sorry? Well, I mean, what are
• 32:37
  you said? It was a bit overwhelming, and you know, you were
• 32:42
  prepared, but it was still like, you know, there was somewhat of
• 32:45
  a learning curve. Can you talk about like for people who might be going
• 32:49
  into their first big budget or you know, higher budget than just like a
• 32:53
  little you know, uh, you know backyard kind of film going up a
• 32:59
  step from the what what sort of things they need to do to be prepared
• 33:01
  for that? What did you do as a director mentally to be able to
• 33:05
  do that? And what what sort of things were you doing every day?
• 33:08
  Um? And looking back kind of what what mistakes? What would you have
• 33:12
  done differently? Well, I mean, you know, to be honest,
• 33:15
  Madison County was still very much a backyard film. It was you know what
• 33:19
  I mean, Yeah, yeah, for sure compared to the other one,
• 33:22
  Yeah, totally. Um Well, I mean what I did mentally was I
• 33:25
  watched a lot of films and I think that was ultimately my downfall was,
• 33:29
  Um, I got locked into a specific vision based on movies that I knew
• 33:32
  had worked. Um, I became really paranoid about how people would perceive my
• 33:39
  film, so I didn't want to mess it up. And I think that
• 33:44
  was, you know, like I said, my biggest downfall. So I
• 33:46
  watched a lot of movies that had a similar aesthetic, that have used um,
• 33:51
  similar ideas and things like that. So you know, I almost tried
• 33:54
  to carve and copy those but do it my own way. And I looking
• 33:59
  back, I wish I would have just done what I wanted, um because
• 34:01
  you know, I was imitating them in the hopes that I would have success
• 34:06
  like them essentially, and I think that was, you know, the wrong
• 34:09
  choice. But because of that, I was really prepared, like I I
• 34:15
  you know, I knew exactly how I wanted to shoot it. I knew,
• 34:17
  you know, I knew how to execute it. I just think the
• 34:20
  sights I had set my execution at were lower than what they should have been,
• 34:23
  I guess, is the best way to put it. So it's like
• 34:25
  I achieved what I set out to do. I just didn't I didn't set
• 34:29
  my achievement bar at the right level. And so, you know, but
• 34:32
  to a degree, it's like there was a victory in that because it proved
• 34:36
  to me that I could do what I set out to do, and then
• 34:37
  I could I could pull off what I said I could pull off, you
• 34:40
  know, And so you know, tons of research, tons of rehearsal tons
• 34:45
  of you know, getting to know my cast and crew, and uh,
• 34:49
  just you know, learning to be a leader kind of by default. You
• 34:52
  know. It's like, like I said, I'd never been in control of
• 34:54
  that many people, so I naturally just kind of had to learn how to
• 34:58
  take the reins. We didn't have a true first ad, so I was
• 35:00
  running the set um, you know, and I was scheduling the film and
• 35:05
  um, you know everything. Essentially the responsibilities fell heavily on me, being
• 35:09
  a director, but not only a director. I was also one of the
• 35:14
  producers, so you know, we were some young producers that had never made
• 35:16
  a movie of this side before, so we were all learning as we were
• 35:20
  filming. So you know, it's really hard to say what we did right
• 35:23
  and what we did wrong because we were basically just surviving. I felt like
• 35:27
  the whole time we were kind of like drowning but keeping our head above what.
• 35:31
  Yeah, that that sounds you know familiar. I mean, so many
• 35:36
  other directors that I've talked to of really you know, the even at you
• 35:39
  know, much higher levels, it's always kind of chaotic, you know,
• 35:43
  Yeah, absolutely, So talk talk about from what ended up and did you
• 35:50
  end up end up? Like having the distribution and things that you were looking
• 35:53
  for. At the end of that, did you make the deals? I
• 35:55
  mean, talk about what happened to the film after you made it. Yeah,
• 35:59
  So after we made it, we, like I said, we reached
• 36:01
  out to a lot of those same people who had reached out to us,
• 36:04
  and we started cutting a trailer immediately. We got very fortunate and were able
• 36:09
  to get one of the best trailer editors in Hollywood to kind of cut a
• 36:13
  trailer for us, uh, you know, as a huge favor to one
• 36:15
  of the people on our film. So we had a great trailer and we
• 36:20
  started shopping it around and you know, we we we made a lot of
• 36:22
  first time mistakes. We showed people the movie way before it was ready.
• 36:27
  We submitted to festivals that were way out of our league, but ultimately we
• 36:30
  got the film into screen fest which is you know where paran our activity was
• 36:36
  discovered, and you know, we had distributors contact us from there, and
• 36:40
  um, you know, I was able to get a manager, which which
• 36:44
  was helpful in terms of getting the film out about UM. But yeah,
• 36:46
  we kind of did took a similar approach to what we did with um Hustle
• 36:52
  Encounter, and we just kind of showed it to anyone that was willing to
• 36:53
  watch it, and uh, you know, tried to learn from it.
• 36:58
  But the best thing that ever happened was, um, you know, we
• 37:00
  we didn't uh, we didn't use a domestic sales rep to sell the movie
• 37:05
  because we really wanted to kind of go through that experience on our own and
• 37:08
  and kind of learned to look over our own contracts and see what would happen
• 37:14
  and see where we would succeed and fail and things like that. So once
• 37:16
  again, we took a very um, you know, dive in head first
• 37:20
  type of approach to the whole process. Was there any kind of idea about
• 37:29
  building it was social media? That's still kind of before social media or social
• 37:34
  um you know, building a social like having Facebook pages and stuff like that
• 37:37
  that was kind of before that, right, Um, not really, I
• 37:40
  mean it was twenty eleven, so I mean it was okay, yeah,
• 37:45
  yeah, yeah, so it was around that time. But um, you
• 37:46
  know, the best thing that I think we had to our to our you
• 37:50
  know, availability was Ace Morrero, who you know, was an actor,
• 37:53
  so he was used to promoting himself and and you know, as a as
• 37:58
  a young actor in Hollywood, like you kind of have to be your biggest
• 38:01
  pr person and biggest cheerleader and champion. So Ace Wood really taught us to
• 38:06
  do that for the film. So, you know, we we we had
• 38:09
  a huge, huge fan base for the movie before the movie was even finished,
• 38:15
  Like we had people buying T shirts from us, We had people buying
• 38:16
  posters. So we almost tried to turn it into an event, you know,
• 38:22
  just hey, come be part of this experience with us, like we're
• 38:24
  learning. Like we took a very like people's filmmaker mentality because you know,
• 38:30
  and that's something that I try to continue now, is like I I like
• 38:34
  for my experiences to be kind of an open book and let people know,
• 38:37
  like, hey, this is the reality of it. And we kind of
• 38:38
  did that with Madison County because because we shot in my home state of Arkansas,
• 38:43
  it was very much a you know, a family type of environment,
• 38:47
  and you know, we tried we were on the local news and we tried
• 38:51
  to keep everyone involved and make it just a fun experience for everyone, and
• 38:54
  that kind of translated into the distribution and people talking about it and sharing things.
• 39:00
  So social media was probably one of the biggest advocates we had in our
• 39:04
  corner. Okay, Yeah, I mean, because that's one of the things
• 39:07
  we always you know, talk about, is how to you know, this
• 39:12
  idea that you're going to make your film and go to a film festival and
• 39:15
  all of a sudden everybody you'll know about your film. It's like, you
• 39:19
  know, is you're going to run into problems with that because it's it's much
• 39:23
  easier to start building up a following as you're making your film and even showing
• 39:28
  kind of behind the scenes and what's going on, so that once your film
• 39:30
  has done, you've already kind of built up that anticipation. Yeah. I'm
• 39:36
  actually not a massive, massive fan, especially in the genre world of North
• 39:40
  American film festivals, because at least on the like the the top tier side
• 39:45
  and the like south By Southwest and the things like that, because it's such
• 39:50
  an incestuous and fraternal type mentality. You know, they bring back a lot
• 39:53
  of filmmakers, films who've had movies there in the past, and things like
• 39:59
  that. We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor, and now
• 40:07
  back to the show. So you know that like Contracted for instance, uh,
• 40:12
  you know, Contracted was one of the most successful films of that year
• 40:14
  and We didn't play one major festival here in America, you know, and
• 40:17
  it was it was because like people didn't know who are who are? You
• 40:21
  know, who I was, They didn't know who our stars were and things
• 40:23
  like that. And it's like festivals used to be about finding and discovering new
• 40:28
  talent, but now it's really about attracting big stars and bringing back people that
• 40:32
  they enjoyed drinking with at the festival, you know, previous years. So
• 40:36
  it's not really as much about how good your movie is as much as it
• 40:38
  is about how well the jury or the you know, the programmers like your
• 40:43
  movie, so you know it, they become kind of a gatekeeper in a
• 40:45
  way. And I don't like that mentality. So I'm actually a big fan
• 40:50
  of, you know, using the internet, using the audience, Like I
• 40:52
  don't. I no longer worry about what festivals will think about my films or
• 40:58
  what critics will think about my films, Like I make movies for audiences now
• 41:00
  because it's like, ultimately, those are the people who have to pay to
• 41:04
  see your movie, and those are the people who are going to keep you
• 41:06
  in business and keep food on your table. But also those are the people
• 41:08
  who are going to be with you through through the thick and thin of it.
• 41:10
  Like if you support them, they're going to support you. And it's
• 41:14
  like I want to give them good material because ultimately no offense. You know,
• 41:16
  there are tons of critics that I love, but it's like critics ultimately
• 41:20
  see my movies for free, so they're just judging it based on you know,
• 41:23
  the the artistic merit and all that staff and that's fine, but you
• 41:28
  know, at the end of the day, I have to make movies and
• 41:30
  continue making movies if if I want to live. So you know, my
• 41:34
  my job is to please the people who are ultimately supporting me. You know.
• 41:38
  So I mean what is your main way of, you know, connecting
• 41:43
  with an audience on social media? Do you have kind of a plan?
• 41:46
  I mean, are you just like getting on Twitter and Facebook or what?
• 41:50
  What does that? What does that look like? Yeah, I mean it's
• 41:53
  it's a lot of it's through Twitter and Facebook and things like that. Like
• 41:57
  I I'm a big fan of interacting with my audience. Like when Contracted came
• 42:01
  out, you know, the reviews were extremely polarizing. People either love the
• 42:06
  film or they hated it. And it's funny because people who hated the movie
• 42:08
  still talked about it, and and because of that, the word of mouth
• 42:12
  was great, and you know, so I would go on Twitter and I
• 42:15
  would just talk to people who were talking about the movie. And some of
• 42:19
  the biggest supporters I have now are people who ultimately were talking shit about my
• 42:22
  movie when it first came out, you know, and and and you know,
• 42:25
  and it's fine because, like, you know, living in Hollywood,
• 42:28
  like, I have tons of filmmaker friends that I don't necessarily love all their
• 42:30
  movies, but I don't judge them based on what their movies are, like,
• 42:35
  I judge them based on who they are as people, you know,
• 42:37
  and for me, like that's ultimately what I like. And I think I've
• 42:39
  been kind of in tune with that since the very beginning, because even even
• 42:44
  as a young filmmaker, before I ever even touched a camera for the first
• 42:46
  time, I was watching behind the scenes on DVDs and things like that because
• 42:51
  I wanted to know who these filmmakers were. And sometimes I wouldn't really like
• 42:54
  a movie, but I would watch the behind the scenes or I would listen
• 42:59
  to the commentary, and I would fall in love with the filmmaker because of
• 43:01
  their passion and their enthusiasm, and it would make me respect the movie that
• 43:06
  much more. So. It's like, I am a firm believer in you
• 43:08
  know, you can judge the art based on its own merit, and that's
• 43:12
  totally fine, Like that's what art is about. But I do believe that
• 43:15
  art in general is a bigger medium and it's not just about what it is.
• 43:19
  It's about the stories behind it. It's about the people who make it
• 43:22
  and and everything that goes into it. It's not just this one, you
• 43:25
  know, nebulous thing, right, do you guys film like behind the scenes
• 43:30
  footage and stuff like that to be releast totally Yeah. I I try to
• 43:36
  do that on every film. Some movies we've had more footage than others,
• 43:38
  Like on Get the Girl, I think we had a guy there. My
• 43:42
  latest film, Get the Girl, I think we had a guy there,
• 43:43
  like you know, almost every day. And then uncontracted, we didn't have
• 43:46
  the money to do it, so we basically just had you know, my
• 43:50
  producer, Matt Mercer, was doing it whenever he could. And it's funny
• 43:53
  because Matt Mercer actually, you know, he was an actor in Madison County
• 43:57
  and he filmed some little behind the scenes stuff that I think it's on YouTube
• 44:00
  now, but you know, he did his own little behind the scenes documentary
• 44:05
  just as an actor from his perspective. So it's always cool, especially now
• 44:07
  with cell phones and cameras so accessible, It's like actors can kind of make
• 44:12
  their own little documentaries and things like that about their experiences on set. And
• 44:16
  you know, the more I make movies, the more I'm going to try
• 44:20
  and do my own kind of director or perspective, and you know, hopefully
• 44:23
  one day it'll get as detailed as you know, maybe someone following me around
• 44:27
  with a camera, because you know, that's the type of stuff that I
• 44:29
  really enjoyed as a young filmmaker, and you know, I wanted to see
• 44:31
  as much as possible as like how how the life is of a of a
• 44:36
  working filmmaker from day to day. And that's you know, that's a fascinating
• 44:39
  lifestyle because it's it's so up and down and there's so many challenges, and
• 44:44
  I think as a young filmmaker, the best thing you can do is be
• 44:45
  prepared for it. All Right, I'm gonna put you on the spot here
• 44:50
  for a second. Yeah, what what would you say is because I'm totally
• 44:53
  in agreement with you about like commentaries and stuff like that. What is what
• 44:58
  are you like your favorite DVD commentaries that you've ever Um, I don't know
• 45:02
  if I have too many like commentaries or behind the scenes or whatever. Yeah,
• 45:07
  but behind the scenes I have a ton. Um. I actually really
• 45:10
  really like, um the four hour documentary on Rob Zombie's Halloween. Have you
• 45:15
  ever seen that? No, that's one of the few I haven't seen.
• 45:19
  Yeah, damn it, man, it's it's it's incredible because and this isn't
• 45:22
  necessarily based on like I don't I don't absolutely love that movie, but I
• 45:25
  love how in depth the documentary is, Like it literally starts from him in
• 45:30
  pre production, Like it shows him doing camera tests, it shows him doing
• 45:35
  acting you know, auditions, It shows him like it shows the wardrobe person
• 45:39
  bringing him different options and him doing sketches and location scouts all the way up
• 45:45
  until like the last day of filming. And it's literally four like four and
• 45:47
  a half hours long, and and it's like just one of the most immersive,
• 45:52
  you know, detailed, raw experiences I've ever seen captured, uh,
• 45:58
  you know, and up behind the scenes. And UM, I'm trying to
• 46:00
  think of some other good ones. There's a few that that stand out really
• 46:04
  heavily. UM. That's always kind of one of my big go toos UM
• 46:07
  just because of how thorough it is. UM. I really enjoyed UM.
• 46:12
  You know Eli Ross Hostile, he did a pretty detailed one on a hostile
• 46:15
  and cabin fever. UM. Trying to think, uh gosh, I'd have
• 46:22
  to go through and like look at my DVD collection. But you know,
• 46:25
  whenever someone asked me about it, usually Rob Zombie's Halloween, Oh, Devil's
• 46:30
  Rejects. His one for Devil's Rejects was really good too. Have you seen
• 46:32
  that one? No, I'm seeing the movie. I haven't seen the buying
• 46:37
  the scenes. Yeah, it's like a two two hour documentary on the making
• 46:42
  of Devil's Rejects. And you know, it's once again, it's everything from
• 46:45
  like table reads to um, you know, I think even all the way
• 46:50
  into editing. So you know, for me, it's like as much as
• 46:53
  you can get, you know, in the in the nitty gritty process of
• 46:57
  it all. That's that's the stuff that excites me. Right. Have you
• 47:00
  seen Lost in La Mancha? Yes? I love it. I did an
• 47:06
  interview the other day with the producer, and he was like, you know,
• 47:08
  I don't get that documentary because you know, you see all the stuff
• 47:12
  that goes wrong on that set, that goes wrong on every set, and
• 47:15
  it's like that's every film, you know. Yeah, yeah, it's like
• 47:19
  just get used to everything going wrong. And uh, you know, he's
• 47:22
  like, I don't know why the film never got made because that that wouldn't
• 47:24
  have kept anybody from you know, stopping anyway moving along. Um, So
• 47:30
  after Madison County, Um, what happened from there? Let's follow the story.
• 47:37
  Um after Madison County within uh within We shot the movie in October two
• 47:42
  thousand and ten or September two October two thousand and ten. By March twenty
• 47:46
  eleven, we had our trailer released, and we had our trailer cut probably
• 47:52
  before the end of the year twenty ten. So we started showing early cuts
• 47:54
  to the trailer um almost immediately, and so we had people asking us,
• 48:00
  what are you doing next? Are you doing a sequel to Madison County?
• 48:01
  And this was before the movie has even finished, so people were already considering
• 48:05
  it a success um, which was nice and very uh presumptuous of them,
• 48:10
  but um, but very premature, but um, you know, people were
• 48:15
  like, hey, what do you want to do next? And I knew
• 48:16
  immediately I didn't want to do another like straightforward horror movie, kind of like
• 48:21
  Madison County. Um, so I started writing this screenplay called Roadside, and
• 48:25
  um we actually started shooting. We you know, we finished Madison County shooting
• 48:30
  wise October twenty and ten, and um, March two thousand and eleven,
• 48:37
  we were flying to Virginia to shoot Roadside. Um so you know, we
• 48:42
  we found private investors again, um, you know who who wanted to get
• 48:45
  into the movie business, and um, you know, we we convinced them
• 48:49
  to give us the financing based on you know, all the news articles and
• 48:53
  all the press and success that we had had with Madison County. We showed
• 48:57
  him, we said, look like we already had people offering to buy the
• 49:00
  movie, and you know it's like we're we're we're pretty confident that we're gonna
• 49:04
  at least make our money back, if not see a decent profit on Madison
• 49:07
  County. So we kind of parlayed that into Roadside. And Roadside was probably
• 49:12
  the messiest production in my life because it, you know, we were just
• 49:15
  so on cloud nine for Madison County. That I think we really underestimated the
• 49:22
  process of Roadside because it was essentially, you know, a very contained,
• 49:25
  hitchcocky and thriller. And you know, we shot the movie entirely at nighttime,
• 49:30
  where Madison County was entirely at day. Like, we just wanted to
• 49:32
  do something really really different, and um, you know, we we kind
• 49:37
  of didn't realize that we were still learning and we kind of had this mentality
• 49:40
  of like, oh, we've done this before, so we weren't prepared for
• 49:44
  the new challenges that laid in front of us. And that was the first
• 49:46
  time, you know, it clicked to me. I'm like, shit,
• 49:49
  going out to make a movie. It's it's it's brand new every time you
• 49:52
  do it, you know. So um so that that production was a nightmare.
• 49:55
  We were under scheduled, under understaffed, underfinance. So we'll be right
• 50:01
  back after a word from our sponsor and now back to the show. It
• 50:10
  was just a big, big hurdle. It was the worst shoot of my
• 50:13
  life. I still you know, I probably lost hair on that shoot.
• 50:15
  Um but um, you know, it was just the biggest pain in the
• 50:21
  ass. And I remember flying home just relieved that it was over and nervous
• 50:25
  as hell that we didn't make a good movie. And you know, thankfully
• 50:30
  when we got into the editing room, like you know, we had most
• 50:32
  of the pieces that we needed. Like I didn't I didn't get to direct
• 50:36
  the movie the way I wanted to, and I regret that immensely. But
• 50:38
  um but I think it was one of those things where it's like there's really
• 50:43
  not much I can do once again, even more so, like this was
• 50:45
  another one just struggling to keep our head above water. But it was it
• 50:49
  was worse because we were just underprepared, you know, like we we kind
• 50:52
  of were like, okay, we did really well in Madison County. We
• 50:54
  had you know, twenty locations, we had thirty characters, and with Roadside,
• 51:00
  we're going to have three locations and five characters. This is going to
• 51:04
  be a walk in the park. And it absolutely wasn't, you know.
• 51:06
  So it was just kind of a you know, we we were defeated before
• 51:09
  we went in, but thankfully we still pulled out a very very competent film.
• 51:15
  Now you had said something about doing that before, I mean, getting
• 51:20
  starting to shoot that before Madison County had even really gone into distribution, right,
• 51:24
  Yeah, Madison County actually hadn't even finished post production, so our editor
• 51:29
  was actually still working on editing Madison County while we were filming Roadside. So
• 51:34
  did it end up having the success that you thought it was going to have?
• 51:37
  Did Madison County? Yeah? I don't think. I don't think it
• 51:42
  had. I think it had a better success than than what it should have.
• 51:45
  And I think I don't think it reached our expectations. But our expectations
• 51:51
  were extremely high. But I mean, we you know, we we you
• 51:53
  know, my first movie, Right out of the Gate premiered at the Chinese
• 51:57
  Theater at one of the biggest genre festivals in North America, actually the biggest
• 52:01
  genre festival in North America. And um, and you know, and and
• 52:06
  I was in there with like, you know, Tye West had a movie
• 52:08
  there that year, and um, you know, it was just a huge,
• 52:12
  huge turnout. We we were the only movie to sell out. Um,
• 52:15
  they gave us an ONCRESE screening, We got distribution. The movie came
• 52:19
  out in May of twenty twelve. Um, and and it was it was
• 52:22
  decently received. Like it didn't it didn't you know, critics didn't you know,
• 52:28
  you know, praise it and they didn't hate it. It's just very
• 52:30
  middle of the road. But um, you know, but I think the
• 52:32
  movie ended up having a success of its own, which was you know,
• 52:37
  good enough for us, Like it was our first foot in the door,
• 52:39
  right the distribution Sorry, I get a lot into the nuts and bolts.
• 52:45
  So yeah, the distribution deal that you made? Was that? Um?
• 52:50
  What what kind of a contract was that? I mean, just what was
• 52:53
  that for? Like for world distribution? Was it for DVDA? How did
• 53:00
  that all come together? Was there any sort of like talk of video on
• 53:04
  demand or you know, things like iTunes and voodoo and stuff like that,
• 53:08
  or or just to give us a little bit of an inside look into that
• 53:12
  part, Yeah, for sure, it was. It was a pretty straightforward
• 53:15
  contract. Like we we had people approach us about doing a limited theatrical run,
• 53:20
  um, but their minimum guarantees, which are the money they're going to
• 53:22
  pay for the movie upfront, weren't as high. So we ended up going
• 53:27
  with a company that had a little bit of a bigger reputation than some of
• 53:30
  the others, and and you know, had movies that we had seen on
• 53:32
  shelves and Walmart and things like that, so, um, we we took
• 53:37
  that deal. It was a it was a straight to DVD contract, so
• 53:40
  the movie went into red Box and things like that. The company wasn't really
• 53:44
  a VOD focused company. That this was still like the last year that physical
• 53:49
  media was still pretty relevant. Um but um but you know, so the
• 53:54
  movie went to to Walmart and and got released on DVD and actually made most
• 53:59
  of the money on DVD if I remember correctly. But um, but yeah,
• 54:02
  so, I mean the contract is pretty straightforward, nothing nothing fancy in
• 54:07
  terms of promotion or release or anything like that. It was. It was
• 54:10
  very standard, and we got the movie on shelves and we got a really
• 54:15
  solid amount of exposure into the marketplace. So you know, we we we
• 54:20
  were happy with that. We were happy that people would go to stores and
• 54:22
  buy our movie and and that, uh you know that that kind of gave
• 54:25
  us a pretty good chunk of legitimacy. So who owns the movie though?
• 54:31
  That's the question I always have, Like if you the distribution company has the
• 54:35
  right to distribute it for for how long I want to say it was like
• 54:38
  fifteen years, okay, and then after that you retain the owner like the
• 54:43
  producers retained the ownership. Yeah, the producer retains the ownership. I actually
• 54:47
  owned the property, so I can do sequels and stuff. No one else
• 54:51
  can do sequels m or remake or anything like that. But um, that
• 54:54
  one movie is owned by the producer and the distributor owns the rights to exploit
• 55:00
  it for Yeah, I believe up to like fifteen years. So you get
• 55:05
  to retain the rights because you have the copyright from the script or how is
• 55:07
  that? How do you? Um? I basically put it into my deal,
• 55:12
  like because it was such a low budget film and I literally took no
• 55:15
  money, like not not just like oh a couple pennies here and there,
• 55:17
  Like I literally took nothing to drop them. Um. So I basically was
• 55:22
  like, look, you know, if we're gonna make this movie, I
• 55:23
  want to own the quote unquote franchise potential of it. So like if someone
• 55:29
  wants to make a sequel, I'll get paid for that one. Um you
• 55:32
  know. So so that that was kind of the idea, was like if
• 55:35
  if someone ever wants to come along and remake it or do a sequel or
• 55:37
  something like that, like I will I will own that because I created the
• 55:43
  first one. Um. But the producer actually owns that that particular film,
• 55:46
  so you know, he if he wants to rerelease it after fifteen years,
• 55:51
  or if he wants to license it to someone else, or you know,
• 55:52
  if someone comes along and they're like, we want to, you know,
• 55:55
  do a retro screening or something like that, Like they have to go to
• 55:59
  him. Okay, so you can. Can you do action figures? Uh?
• 56:04
  Yeah I can. Okay, that's the big one. You know,
• 56:07
  just learn from George Lucas. Always always keep the action figure rights. Yeah,
• 56:10
  totally. Um so okay, moving on from there. From Roadside,
• 56:15
  the next film was contracted or was there something between there? I was contracted?
• 56:20
  Yeah, okay, so that's I want to focus on that for um
• 56:23
  a bit. Can you talk about how that came about and you know,
• 56:29
  where the screenplay came from, how how producers got it involved, just how
• 56:32
  did it all kind of comes together? Totally? Yeah, it was.
• 56:37
  You know, I was kind of frustrated with the whole business side of everything
• 56:40
  because, like with Madison County, the movie was exploited. It's kind of
• 56:44
  like a slasher movie, and you know, the the idea of the film
• 56:46
  wasn't really to do it as a slasher movie, like I tried to do
• 56:49
  something it was a little different and um so, you know, but they
• 56:52
  kept focusing on the serial killer in the movie because it was kind of this
• 56:55
  iconic imagery that they were able to mass Floyd and just grab people's attention,
• 57:00
  which you know, I knew nothing about how they marketed films in that way.
• 57:05
  So you know, it's a very eye opening and learning experience. And
• 57:07
  then when we went to do Roadside, Roadside's this very tense, story driven
• 57:12
  character movie and there was no you know, iconic imagery in the film that
• 57:16
  could really sell the movie. No serial killer, no you know, nothing
• 57:19
  for them to exploit, essentially, no famous actors. So we're having trouble
• 57:23
  selling Roadside because everyone was like, look, we like your movie, but
• 57:27
  that we don't know how to sell it. And so fed up with that,
• 57:30
  I was like, Okay, you know what, I really I really
• 57:32
  want to do a movie that it's just totally hits the point for the market.
• 57:38
  Maybe this will get into a festival because like up until that point,
• 57:42
  you know, we got rejected from almost every festival with the first two movies,
• 57:45
  and so I was like, you know, I'm gonna really aim high
• 57:47
  for festivals and markets and just trying to do something really really different again,
• 57:52
  but something that felt more in line with the stuff that I saw having success
• 57:58
  in the genre, and and so and also, h something's really important to
• 58:04
  point out is like with Madison County and Roadside, I was making movies because
• 58:07
  I could, you know, like people were saying, hey, we have
• 58:09
  money, what do you what do you want to make that works in this
• 58:14
  world? And I wasn't telling stories that I necessarily felt needed to be told.
• 58:19
  So like, you know, we shot at my grandpa's farm from Madison
• 58:22
  County because I had an idea that based around his farm. And then with
• 58:24
  Roadside, you know, I had an idea because I knew we could shoot
• 58:28
  the movie because we could get a car, we could do this. So
• 58:30
  it was like kind of like what can we make with what we have?
• 58:32
  You know what I'm saying. And so with Contracted, it was the first
• 58:36
  time I'd ever written a story not thinking about like, Okay, I know
• 58:39
  this is the one element that I can exploit um, and I'll write a
• 58:44
  story around it, you know. So I wrote I wrote the movie just
• 58:46
  based on you know, the the initial idea, which was you know,
• 58:51
  a girl has a one nice stand and contracts what she thinks is an STD
• 58:53
  and so, you know, I was like, that's a really cool idea.
• 58:57
  I should write that story. So I kind of, you know,
• 59:00
  plotted out the story and I initially wanted to shoot it overseas because I wanted
• 59:04
  it to happen in a country where, um, you know, where the
• 59:07
  girl didn't speak the language and didn't you know, just had trouble realizing everything
• 59:15
  that was happening to her. So what happened was the producers came to me
• 59:21
  and said, hey, you know, we want to make a movie.
• 59:22
  This was their first film, and they were like, we have financing,
• 59:27
  we can green light it immediately, but we just need to find someone who
• 59:30
  can make a movie and make something good. And they had heard of Madison
• 59:34
  County. They had seen it. I think they even went to the premiere.
• 59:37
  I'm not sure, but uh, you know, I showed them Roadside
• 59:38
  and they loved it. They were like, wow, this is really really
• 59:40
  good. So they saw that I had versatility and they they greenlit the movie
• 59:46
  right there, just on a handshake, Like I had no script, no
• 59:49
  anything. I was just like, look, you guys are gonna you know
• 59:51
  write a check. And it was my smallest movie to date. It was
• 59:54
  you know, they had fifty thousand dollars and I think we ended up spending
• 59:58
  like forty five to you know, make the entire film. So we'll be
• 1:00:02
  right back after a word from our sponsor and now back to the show.
• 1:00:10
  Um. So you know, it was kind of like I used it as
• 1:00:15
  almost once again, kind of an experiment to kind of go back to my
• 1:00:17
  my grassroots style of filmmaking. But I was going to change one crucial thing,
• 1:00:22
  and that was I wasn't going to write a story just because I had
• 1:00:25
  elements in place already. I was just going to write the story based on
• 1:00:29
  what I thought the story should be, and then m and then figure out
• 1:00:32
  how to execute it based on the elements I had. So it was it
• 1:00:36
  was. It was a completely new style of filmmaking for me, and you
• 1:00:40
  know it thankfully it worked out. It was mostly handheld, right. Uh.
• 1:00:45
  Yeah, the whole movie's handheld except for maybe two or three shots.
• 1:00:49
  Okay, does that change how you approach it? I mean, since you're
• 1:00:52
  not thinking in terms of you know, a camera is like slowly doing a
• 1:00:59
  pen or or you know, do you just film it more kind of guerrilla
• 1:01:02
  style, documentary style a little bit. Yeah, I mean Madison County was
• 1:01:07
  very handheld. But with Contracted, I think it was the first time I
• 1:01:10
  approached I'd approached the movie with kind of the aesthetic in mind for the character
• 1:01:15
  with with Madison County, I approached it like, Okay, these other movies
• 1:01:17
  did handheld, I should do handheld or the other these other movies did a
• 1:01:22
  dolly here, I'll do a dolly here, you know. So with Contracted,
• 1:01:25
  it was the first time I was like, you know, I wanted
• 1:01:27
  the movie to feel intimate because the character story was so intimate, so I
• 1:01:30
  was. It was really one of the first times I was thinking like,
• 1:01:32
  Okay, what should I do as a director? Like in a lot of
• 1:01:36
  ways, I consider Contracted my first real movie because it was the first time
• 1:01:39
  I started thinking like a filmmaker and thought story first instead of Okay, what
• 1:01:45
  do I need to do to make sure I don't mess this up? You
• 1:01:47
  know. So, I you know, my first two movies, I was
• 1:01:50
  thinking very heavily as a producer and so so with Contracted, Yeah, I
• 1:01:54
  approached everything from a from an emotional or and or a narrative standpoint, so,
• 1:02:00
  you know, and and the the handheld aesthetic was based on the story,
• 1:02:05
  and both of those were based on the budget, so I kind of
• 1:02:07
  reverse engineered it knowing that, you know, I didn't need any big crane
• 1:02:12
  shots or dolly shots or anything like that because I was going to tell a
• 1:02:15
  very intimate story that didn't need a lot of fancy, you know, fancy
• 1:02:19
  bells and whistles. Right. Can you talk a little bit about your process
• 1:02:22
  for screenwriting? Uh? Yeah, I mean my I you know, I
• 1:02:29
  don't consider myself that great of a writer, so I always hate talking about
• 1:02:31
  it. But you know, actually a lot of the people that I talked
• 1:02:36
  to say the you know, filmmakers who have made really good movies that you
• 1:02:40
  know, will always tell you, oh, but I'm not a writer,
• 1:02:43
  you know. But it's like, well, you know, you might not
• 1:02:46
  be comfortable with it, but screenwriting is a lot more about you know,
• 1:02:50
  telling a visual story than it is about being necessarily the greatest writer in the
• 1:02:54
  world. But if you can tell your story visually, you know, it
• 1:02:59
  goes a lot further totally. And I mean, you know, it's it's
• 1:03:01
  weird for me to talk about writing because, like I've I never, Like
• 1:03:04
  I said, I don't consider myself much of a writer. Um, I
• 1:03:07
  write by necessity, Like I I write because I need things to direct.
• 1:03:10
  Um. So you know, when when I write a screenplay, I know
• 1:03:15
  that I'm not writing it for like, um, you know, a studio
• 1:03:17
  head or something like that. Like I've never I've never entered into a competition
• 1:03:22
  or anything like that. So I write my screenplays, you know, my
• 1:03:24
  my screen play. My screenplays read like any other screenplay. Like I I
• 1:03:28
  I my formula and my my structure and everything like that is is you know,
• 1:03:31
  very traditional. But um but it's like my my screenplays are you know,
• 1:03:36
  essentially what they're supposed to be. They're they're blueprints for for my my
• 1:03:39
  movie. You know. So it's like I don't necessarily write in shots like
• 1:03:43
  I have some friends who are very just director driven, you know, and
• 1:03:46
  they write like a director. Um, I don't necessarily write like a director.
• 1:03:51
  But you know, I I definitely I write very simply, Like I'm
• 1:03:54
  a very efficient writer. So I I what I do. My my process,
• 1:04:00
  for lack of better terms, it's like I let the story kind of
• 1:04:01
  marinate in my head for you know, a few days or a week or
• 1:04:04
  however long it takes. Sometimes it takes months, sometimes it takes weeks,
• 1:04:09
  sometimes it takes a year. It really just depends on how well I grasp
• 1:04:13
  that story and that concept, and then eventually it kind of reaches a boiling
• 1:04:16
  point where, you know, I don't write down, you know, I'll
• 1:04:18
  write down like the initial ideas so I don't forget it, and then I'll
• 1:04:23
  just kind of let it stew, like I don't really write much after that,
• 1:04:26
  Like I'll just kind of keep this little notepad or journal, and I'll
• 1:04:30
  keep that log line or that idea or the chicken scratch, you know,
• 1:04:33
  I wrote down to begin it with. And then eventually the all the ideas
• 1:04:39
  I have just kind of boil over, and I start writing them down and
• 1:04:42
  like almost bullet point form, and they're not always necessarily in chronological order,
• 1:04:46
  so it's just kind of the thoughts that generate in my head. Sometimes they're
• 1:04:49
  seen ideas, sometimes they are dialogue, sometimes they're characters, sometimes they're you
• 1:04:56
  know, whatever, and then I kind of just do that for you know,
• 1:05:00
  however long it takes. Usually it's like a few days or a week,
• 1:05:02
  and then eventually I feel like I have a good enough grasp on the
• 1:05:06
  story and I'll start writing. So, like, you know, I wrote
• 1:05:11
  Contracted in like three weeks the first draft, so you know, it's like
• 1:05:14
  I knew the story really well. I kind of marinated on it really quickly.
• 1:05:17
  And you know, I get really excited when I know, like I
• 1:05:19
  don't, I don't have a lot of you know, spec screenplays that I've
• 1:05:23
  written laying around. Um. If I if I have any spec screenplays laying
• 1:05:28
  around, it's because I wrote a script for a movie that just ultimately the
• 1:05:30
  financing film through. You know, because like I've never written a screenplay and
• 1:05:33
  said hey, here's you know, except for Madison County. Really, you
• 1:05:38
  know, that was the first time I ever said hey, I have this
• 1:05:39
  Scriptum. But every other time Roadside Contracted, even even my news film Get
• 1:05:45
  the Girl. It's like I have the producers commit to the movie and say,
• 1:05:48
  yeah, we're gonna you know, they almost pay me to write the
• 1:05:50
  script because I know we're gonna make the movie. Like I want to know
• 1:05:55
  what this movie is getting made or else there's no point in me writing a
• 1:05:57
  script in my opinion, Um, it's actually at a low budget level because
• 1:06:01
  things changed so much so you know, if I write a script, um,
• 1:06:05
  you know, for one producer at a certain budget level, and let's
• 1:06:09
  say the movie doesn't get financed, and then that scripts just sitting there and
• 1:06:12
  another producer comes along, it's like the circumstances may have changed, and then
• 1:06:15
  I have to go back and rewrite, restructure and do all that stuff.
• 1:06:18
  So it's like I'd rather just wait until the movie is ready to be made,
• 1:06:21
  you know. So that's just my personal mentality. But um, up
• 1:06:26
  until recently, like just just this year, actually, UM, I wrote
• 1:06:29
  my first uh you know, I got hired to write a screenplay. Um,
• 1:06:33
  you know that I'm ultimately going to direct, but it was the first
• 1:06:35
  time that you know, it was going to bigger producers and studios and you
• 1:06:42
  know things like that. So that was kind of a new process for me.
• 1:06:44
  But you know, I treated the process the exact same way as I
• 1:06:48
  did with all my other ones. Like the producers came to me, I
• 1:06:50
  pitched them an idea, they liked it, and they said, yeah,
• 1:06:53
  we're gonna pay you to write it. And I wrote it, and uh,
• 1:06:56
  you know, I marinated on it and it took me like, uh,
• 1:07:00
  I want to say, maybe maybe a month month and a half to
• 1:07:02
  finish the entire screenplay. And and you know, we went through I want
• 1:07:05
  to say, maybe five drafts or something like that, and you know,
• 1:07:10
  send it off for feedback and the feedback's coming back great. So you know,
• 1:07:13
  I'm getting a little more confident in my writing. But yeah, it's
• 1:07:15
  it's like my my process is very much you know, just what worked for
• 1:07:19
  me because I don't know how to do it any other way. You know,
• 1:07:23
  right, are there any um where did you learn screenwriting? Is there
• 1:07:28
  any resource that you can point people to? Um, I don't know how
• 1:07:31
  I learned. I actually I learned. I mean, that's That's what I'm
• 1:07:34
  saying is it's kind of my head one day and I was right, Yeah,
• 1:07:38
  it's kind of a learn by learned, trial by error kind of thing.
• 1:07:41
  Like did you read a lot of screenplays when you were in film school?
• 1:07:43
  I did. That's actually what I was about to say is I've I've
• 1:07:45
  actually read a lot of screenplays. Um. And I actually had a screenwriting
• 1:07:50
  teacher who who's written some books on you know, screenwriting, and she she
• 1:07:55
  know, she she's had some success in coaching screenwriters and things like that,
• 1:07:59
  and she used to gave me the biggest, biggest piece of advice I'd ever
• 1:08:01
  gotten, and it still resonates with me to this day. But we were
• 1:08:04
  in class one day and pitching ideas and learning learning to take notes and learning
• 1:08:09
  to get criticism, and learning to develop ideas, and I would always throw
• 1:08:13
  out the most bizarre ideas in her classroom, and she would tell me.
• 1:08:16
  She would say, you're a brilliant screenwriter, but you don't know why,
• 1:08:20
  And I didn't. I didn't know. I didn't know what that meant.
• 1:08:26
  But now now that I've kind of come to terms and kind of come into
• 1:08:29
  my own as a filmmaker, I finally get what she means. And she
• 1:08:32
  meant that I have a very unique voice. I have a very unique perspective
• 1:08:35
  on the world, and I tell you know, pretty unique stories, especially
• 1:08:41
  now now if you're contracted, But you know I tell unique stories. But
• 1:08:45
  for the longest time, I didn't know why I told them, and I
• 1:08:46
  didn't know why I wanted to tell them. I just I wanted I wanted
• 1:08:50
  to get them out. And finally I've kind of learned the discipline that I
• 1:08:54
  lacked when she first told me that. I think it's really been you know,
• 1:08:59
  a very helpful thing to me. But you know, those words really
• 1:09:01
  stuck with me because it at least validated me to know that I had something
• 1:09:04
  inherently you know, positive about my work, and I had a natural ability
• 1:09:10
  or talent or whatever you want to call it, but I just needed to
• 1:09:13
  learn how to harness it. And I think I finally you reach that point.
• 1:09:15
  So thank you to her. You don't remember her name, Yeah,
• 1:09:20
  no, I do, living know. I just didn't know she Okay,
• 1:09:25
  No, I'm sure that that that praise would be something she would, you
• 1:09:29
  know, absolutely ironically. I mean, if you're if you want to talk,
• 1:09:32
  you know, smack about a teacher, they're probably not gonna want no,
• 1:09:35
  no, no, no, no no. She she was great.
• 1:09:39
  She. You know. It's funny because, like I said, I didn't
• 1:09:41
  really fancy myself a screenwriter, but I love my screenwriting teachers um in film
• 1:09:45
  school, and she was one of my favorites. And ironically it kind of
• 1:09:47
  came full circle while I was filming and Get the Girl. Um, We're
• 1:09:50
  shooting at the parking garage in my old film school because I needed a parking
• 1:09:54
  garage, and she actually came and visited me on set. We'll be right
• 1:09:59
  back after a word from our sponsor and now back to the show. You
• 1:10:08
  know, she was like I heard, She was like, I heard someone
• 1:10:11
  was shooting a movie here, and she was like, and then someone told
• 1:10:13
  me it was you, and I just had to come by and say hello.
• 1:10:15
  So it was really kind of cool for you know, my old screen
• 1:10:17
  nighting teacher to come see me on the set of my latest movie. Um,
• 1:10:21
  you know, really really cool. Yeah. Okay, so walk us
• 1:10:26
  through the process picking Contracted. If you can give us a little bit of
• 1:10:30
  you know, behind the scenes of how how that was working with your actors
• 1:10:33
  and and you know, one thing that's interesting to me is knowing kind of
• 1:10:38
  in a twenty four hour period, what is that like? Okay, you
• 1:10:42
  wake up, you have maybe some coffee, you know, you go to
• 1:10:47
  this set. Well, what are you doing while you're filming? I mean
• 1:10:49
  you just like constantly twenty four hours a day focused on I mean, are
• 1:10:54
  you generating new ideas thinking about how you're going to shoot the scene the next
• 1:10:58
  day? What is the mindset that you're in while you're shooting? And how
• 1:11:01
  how long would that sorry, how long was the shoot? By the way,
• 1:11:04
  uh, Contracted with shot in fifteen days, so three five day weeks.
• 1:11:09
  The process actually Contracted was probably the smoothest shoot I've ever had, and
• 1:11:12
  I think it was simply because we didn't have a lot, and we knew
• 1:11:15
  we didn't have a lot, so there was really nothing to stress about.
• 1:11:19
  You know. It's like we planned very efficiently. It was my third feature
• 1:11:23
  film, so I was really really well prepared for what the challenges were going
• 1:11:28
  to be. We shot in Los Angeles. We used a lot of people's
• 1:11:30
  locations that we knew we could get for free, so people's apartments, people's
• 1:11:34
  houses, things like that. You know, a lot of my friends are
• 1:11:38
  in the movie. So Contracted once again was kind of going back to like
• 1:11:41
  my backyard roots. Like it felt very much like a home movie, but
• 1:11:45
  just with a bigger, bigger story, you know, like whereas Madison County
• 1:11:47
  and Roadside were backyard movies, you know, filmed in the backyard with like
• 1:11:51
  very humble roots and kind of like, you know, we treated those movies
• 1:11:57
  with baby hands because like we didn't really know what we were doing, and
• 1:12:00
  we were making movies because like, oh, my parents can get a car,
• 1:12:02
  my grandpa's a farm, Like we just we were making movies around the
• 1:12:05
  elements we had with Contracted. We treated it like a real movie. It's
• 1:12:10
  like, Okay, let's let's go for broke here, you know, like
• 1:12:13
  let's really go for it. And so, you know, I think that
• 1:12:15
  mentality changed everything. It made us really strive to make something unique, original
• 1:12:19
  and different, exciting. And you know, every day was kind of a
• 1:12:25
  kind of a challenge because you know, my lead actress was in makeup almost
• 1:12:29
  every day. We didn't have a lot of time to shoot. Um,
• 1:12:31
  we didn't have you know, a you know, our our actors were extremely
• 1:12:35
  great. The casting process was phenomenal, So we had great actors. Every
• 1:12:41
  it just felt like a family. Like my lead actress and I really clicked.
• 1:12:44
  Uh, you know, my other co stars and I really clicked.
• 1:12:45
  A lot of them were my friends and a lot of the crew. You
• 1:12:48
  know, I thankfully I was able to kind of cherry pick the great crew
• 1:12:51
  members from Madison County and Roadside to come along with me to film Contracted,
• 1:12:56
  and that shorthand really helped a lot. Like my you know, my sound
• 1:13:00
  guy knows where I'm going to shoot the shot, so he knows where,
• 1:13:02
  you know, where he should put the microphones and you know, it just
• 1:13:05
  it really really helped. So it was a great, great shoot, really
• 1:13:09
  smooth and um, you know, every day it was just kind of like,
• 1:13:13
  you know, I show up to set with my shot ideas, my
• 1:13:15
  shot list, and then I see you know, the scariest thing about shooting
• 1:13:19
  low budget films is sometimes you show up on set and you're seeing location for
• 1:13:23
  the first time. So like, you know, I had ideas of shots
• 1:13:25
  that I wanted to do, but I didn't know if they were if they
• 1:13:28
  were possible. So you know, especially when you're shooting handheld, you can
• 1:13:30
  really adapt to your scene. You can really adapt to what your actors are
• 1:13:34
  gonna do, you can adapt to your environment. So it made it really
• 1:13:38
  flexible, which I think really helped the film. And we kind of approached
• 1:13:41
  the entire movie like we had a great plan, but we were very adaptable.
• 1:13:45
  So you hadn't seen some of the locations before. You didn't do like
• 1:13:48
  a location scout for each place that you shot, or that we did for
• 1:13:53
  the key locations like the actual the house party at the very beginning of the
• 1:13:58
  film and the end, like us his house was that actress's house, Alice,
• 1:14:01
  like, so I wrote for her. I mean, I'm not joking
• 1:14:05
  when I say it was a backyard movie. Um, you know, I
• 1:14:08
  wrote the role for her. I knew she had a house. I knew
• 1:14:11
  she'd let us use it. Um, and you know, I'd been to
• 1:14:14
  our house a million times. And then, um, you know, the
• 1:14:16
  cafe and the bars that we shot at were places that my girlfriend worked at,
• 1:14:20
  uh you know, or the lead actor worked at, and I'd been
• 1:14:24
  to a million times and um, you know, so it was just writing
• 1:14:27
  around things we knew we could get. Um that that also worked for the
• 1:14:30
  story. We weren't forcing them into the movie, you know. Um.
• 1:14:34
  And and then but places like you know, the doctor's office I had never
• 1:14:38
  seen before. The uh, the the morgue you know, was shot on
• 1:14:43
  a sound stage. I'd never been to that place before. UM. Trying
• 1:14:46
  to think if there are any others, Um, I think that was actually
• 1:14:49
  it. But um, but yeah, a lot of those places I had
• 1:14:53
  never seen before. Now, the makeup for the movie was incredible. Did
• 1:14:57
  you have to did you? U? I assume you didn't shoot everything kind
• 1:15:01
  of in the correct order. I mean, would you shoot one location?
• 1:15:04
  And do you know the makeup? How she was normal? Than the gradual
• 1:15:10
  change every time you would shoot that location, or did you try to shoot
• 1:15:13
  relatively in order, Um, we tried. We that that was kind of
• 1:15:16
  the nightmare the shoot was the makeup because like we shot based on location,
• 1:15:20
  so like we spent the first week of shooting at the house location for her
• 1:15:26
  and her mother. So like you know, at the beginning of the movie,
• 1:15:29
  she's fine, and then towards the end of the film, she's like
• 1:15:30
  rotting away. So like we would have to shoot certain you know, makeup
• 1:15:35
  scenes in progression and then go back. So like the very last scene in
• 1:15:41
  the movie with a car crash actually takes place in front of the location where
• 1:15:45
  she goes to buy drugs, like midway through the movie, So we actually
• 1:15:48
  to shoot the ending of the film at the beginning of the day and then
• 1:15:51
  take off the makeup and then reapply it to shoot a scene in the middle
• 1:15:57
  of the movie. So like that that was kind of we shot based on
• 1:15:59
  location, so that that kind of you know, forced our hand and which
• 1:16:03
  makeup scenarios were which, but you know, and that that was kind of
• 1:16:06
  paying the ask, just because it took so long and we had a very
• 1:16:10
  you know, minimal makeup grew because we just didn't have a lot of money,
• 1:16:12
  so you know, we were really kind of tied down to the makeup
• 1:16:15
  schedule unfortunately, but we were able to kind of shoot around it or make
• 1:16:18
  it work. And you know, my makeup artist and I I was really
• 1:16:21
  involved with the makeup, Like I was very detailed in the screenplay, and
• 1:16:27
  we broke it down into three phases. We said, okay, this is
• 1:16:30
  phase one, this is phase two, this is phase three, so we
• 1:16:31
  were able to kind of have a little bit of a shorthand knowing where she
• 1:16:34
  needed to be with her makeup and kind of you know, okay, this
• 1:16:38
  came after that. We kept really good continuity photos, so we kind of
• 1:16:41
  knew what she looked like and things like that. So so yeah, it
• 1:16:45
  was pretty regimented. Yeah. The thing with the eyes, I think was
• 1:16:48
  the thing that really kind of was just like shocking to me, you know,
• 1:16:53
  because like she would walk around with her glasses on and then people would
• 1:16:57
  want to see her eyes and that just kind of you know, just having
• 1:17:00
  the red eye. It's just kind of freaky to me, you know.
• 1:17:03
  Yeah. Yeah, once again one of those simple, simple tricks it becomes
• 1:17:08
  really effective. Yeah, well, you know, we we've I've been talking
• 1:17:11
  a lot with other filmmakers about kind of body horror and the concept of having
• 1:17:17
  a story that kind of got one foot in reality and one foot in um,
• 1:17:23
  you know fiction, which is that there is something very real about what
• 1:17:28
  she's going through. You know, it's like you identify with Okay, it's
• 1:17:31
  like she's deteriorating, and there's some like kind of horrorfic science fiction side of
• 1:17:35
  that, but at the same time, it's told within the context of this
• 1:17:40
  is a real you know, this kind of connects with something that people deal
• 1:17:45
  with in real life, you know, yeah, totally, you know what
• 1:17:47
  I mean. Yeah, okay, Like I mean I was talking to Adam
• 1:17:53
  Robotel the other day and he did the taking of Deborah Logan. Yeah,
• 1:17:58
  I know, I know, Adam. Yeah, And so it was like
• 1:18:00
  the thing that I think connects and they connect in similar ways, you know,
• 1:18:04
  which is that you connect with the lead character immediately because it it's based
• 1:18:10
  you know, on something that's real, but it's also you know, horror.
• 1:18:14
  You know, it's also like the science science fiction side of it.
• 1:18:16
  Yeah, totally. I like to call it like relatable relatable horror. You
• 1:18:20
  know, and it's like it's something that's really fascinating to me because like,
• 1:18:24
  you know, you can take like you know, it's something as simple as
• 1:18:27
  like Halloween. You know, it's it's so relatable because who hasn't you know,
• 1:18:30
  had a babysitter or known a babysitter or been a babysitter. You know,
• 1:18:32
  it's like that's that's something that really resonates to a lot of people.
• 1:18:35
  And then you know, you see something like The Strangers. It's like,
• 1:18:39
  who hasn't been home alone at night and someone knocks on the door you don't
• 1:18:42
  know who they are or you haven't heard a creaky noise outside. You know,
• 1:18:45
  it's like the those are all relatable feelings and scenarios. And then you
• 1:18:49
  know, but something like you know, you watch something like The Thing or
• 1:18:53
  The Fly, which are both body horror films. Um you know, it's
• 1:18:57
  like, not many people have been trapped inside of a you know, a
• 1:19:00
  machine that turns you into something or tries to teleport you, or you know,
• 1:19:03
  not many people have been stuck in like, you know, an antarctic
• 1:19:06
  environment with a creature. You know, but it's like they find ways to
• 1:19:11
  get inside your fears and things like that, and it's like, for me,
• 1:19:14
  I think we're just kind of taking a more relatable approach instead of like
• 1:19:17
  trying to take a narrative that's not familiar and make people identify with it.
• 1:19:23
  We're taking something that's very familiar to them and kind of using that as a
• 1:19:28
  shorthand to get our point across that much quicker, because I think you know,
• 1:19:32
  today's audiences check out really quickly if they don't relate to the characters right
• 1:19:36
  away. Yeah. I mean, I think one of the things that impressed
• 1:19:41
  me the most is just the restraint. You know, you let it build,
• 1:19:44
  and it does happen very gradually, you know, so that you you
• 1:19:47
  really get to know this character. But it's like slowly things start, you
• 1:19:51
  know. Is there some way that you kind of like paste that out or
• 1:19:55
  like could feel what was the right moment for things to happen. We'll be
• 1:20:00
  right back after a word from our sponsor, and now back to the show.
• 1:20:10
  I mean, do you do you go through your structure and say okay,
• 1:20:15
  I mean something like save the Cat or the Hero's Journey, stuff like
• 1:20:17
  that. You go through your story and say, okay, this is going
• 1:20:20
  to be when this happens, and then we need to have this happen by
• 1:20:24
  this moment and stuff like that. Yeah, totally, that's a big part
• 1:20:27
  of my process. But I don't know if I follow like traditional structure like
• 1:20:30
  Save the Cat, Like I've read the book, but it's like I haven't
• 1:20:33
  touched it in years. I really to a cut. It's more of a
• 1:20:36
  gut thing. You know. It's like I kind of think, like,
• 1:20:39
  what is the audience want at this point? What am I trying to tell
• 1:20:42
  them? Where's my character's journey at this point. It's like, really,
• 1:20:45
  it's it's just a matter of in my opinion, I'm a big fan of
• 1:20:47
  ambiguity, and I'm a big fan of um, you know, doling out
• 1:20:51
  enough information to keep the audience invested, but not enough to where they know
• 1:20:56
  everything and they can figure it out. So it's like for me, I
• 1:21:00
  want to keep them, uh kind of on the hook. And if I
• 1:21:03
  have them on the hook, I can I can pull them up and down
• 1:21:05
  whenever I want. That's kind of the idea was like, you know,
• 1:21:09
  mid I think some of the biggest, biggest moments and contracted like at least
• 1:21:14
  in terms of like effectiveness, are really in the middle of the movie because
• 1:21:15
  I'm I'm not a big fan of following the structure of like everything needs to
• 1:21:19
  build, build, build to the climax and then you know, it explodes.
• 1:21:23
  Like that's kind of the uh, that's kind of like the tent pole
• 1:21:25
  mentality of Hollywood nowadays is like, Okay, you know, first we kidnapped
• 1:21:29
  the girl, and then you know, then there's a chase scene in the
• 1:21:31
  middle, and then by the end of the movie, they're on top of
• 1:21:33
  a building and someone's gonna die, you know, and it's like or or
• 1:21:36
  you know, like the world's gonna explode by the end of the movie,
• 1:21:40
  you know. And it's like for me, I like the idea of like
• 1:21:44
  they're being and and a lot of movies are kind of taking this approach,
• 1:21:46
  Like if you look at um I don't know why, but this this one
• 1:21:48
  always comes to mind for me, but like you look at like Skyfall,
• 1:21:51
  Um Skyfall, most of the action in that movie takes place in like the
• 1:21:57
  middle of the film, and then the ending in the movie is contained into
• 1:22:00
  one house, you know, and it's like it's it's almost like an anti
• 1:22:02
  climax, you know, it's it's a narratively and emotionally satisfying climax, but
• 1:22:08
  in terms of the action, that's not really where it's at. So for
• 1:22:11
  me, I try to apply that to contract it a little bit, where
• 1:22:14
  it's like, emotionally the movie's building and narratively the movie's building, but like
• 1:22:18
  the action so to speak of the film, like the grosser moments and stuff
• 1:22:21
  like that are kind of safe for the middle of the movie. Like,
• 1:22:25
  yeah, there's gross moments towards the end, but I think I think they're
• 1:22:28
  a little more spread out than they are in the middle, so it's like,
• 1:22:30
  yeah, I definitely kind of plot and pick and choose where I want
• 1:22:34
  my moments to come for sure. Right, do you feel like it's better
• 1:22:39
  to kind of like, if you have a mystery that's going on in your
• 1:22:43
  story, it's like better to keep that going as long as possible because inevitably,
• 1:22:48
  once the mystery is solved, it's like, oh okay, it's like,
• 1:22:53
  you know, it's not such a big deal, but like keeping people
• 1:22:56
  on the hook that the whole time you know that you're trying to figure it
• 1:22:59
  out. I mean that seems like most most stories nowadays have that, like
• 1:23:02
  some element that you're kind of putting things together, you know. Yeah,
• 1:23:05
  once you figure it out, it's like whatever, yeah exactly. I mean
• 1:23:09
  I'm a huge fan of mystery. Like, mystery is one of my favorite
• 1:23:11
  genres. Um So it's like I try to infuse a little mystery into everything
• 1:23:15
  I do if at all possible. So I that that, to me is
• 1:23:18
  part of the fun. It's like, my favorite movie of all time is
• 1:23:21
  Scream and and it's like the Who Done It? The Scooby Doo pulled a
• 1:23:25
  mask off at the end of the movie. Like that element of it is
• 1:23:29
  my favorite thing. Like I I will forever be a fan of the Who
• 1:23:31
  Done It? Subgenre because if you can have a movie with cool characters and
• 1:23:34
  horrible things are happening to them, and then by the end of the movie
• 1:23:36
  you have to figure out who's doing it and why, Like that's that's a
• 1:23:40
  that's a formula that never gets old for me. Um So, I'm a
• 1:23:44
  big fan of of incorporating that and you know, keep keeping the audience on
• 1:23:47
  the hook, as you say, But it's funny because um you know,
• 1:23:50
  uh, with contracted it's like, to be honest with you, I didn't
• 1:23:55
  expect for there to be much mystery. Like you know, when I was
• 1:23:59
  writing the movie, I was kind of you know, I was like,
• 1:24:00
  okay, like people are gonna get what this is, like what she's turning
• 1:24:03
  into. And it's funny because the movie kind of took on a life of
• 1:24:06
  its own when people didn't realize like what she was turning into until the very
• 1:24:10
  end. And it's so funny because like at the end of the film,
• 1:24:13
  after the car crash and she wakes up at like the you know, I
• 1:24:15
  watched the movie in theaters in Mexico and Spain all over the world and and
• 1:24:20
  all of the country, and it's like the gasps at like certain moments of
• 1:24:25
  the movie. I'm like, really, you guys didn't see that coming,
• 1:24:27
  So, you know, it was it was really kind of eye opening for
• 1:24:30
  me to see, you know, how far you can take audiences and what
• 1:24:32
  audiences picked up on and what they didn't, So, you know, it
• 1:24:35
  was it was kind of fun for me that that that people, you know,
• 1:24:39
  found that element of it to be really exciting. Well, you know,
• 1:24:43
  I think people are used to being told what a movie, you know,
• 1:24:45
  what it is, and how they're supposed to feel, and you left
• 1:24:47
  that open. You know, yeah exactly. So, UM, just fast
• 1:24:53
  forwarding a little bit. UM. I know you've talked a lot and and
• 1:24:56
  you know your blog. I highly recommend your blog for anybody who is,
• 1:25:00
  you know, out there wanting to know about filmmaking. UM. And I
• 1:25:01
  was reading through it and I got you know, it was really nice to
• 1:25:05
  get like a perspective on you know, not like a politically correct written,
• 1:25:13
  you know blog, but a blog that's actually talking about what you actually feel
• 1:25:16
  like and what happened. Can you talk about what happened with Contracted after you
• 1:25:21
  know, after you finished it? And um, you know, of course
• 1:25:26
  what what has happened with the sequel? Yeah? I mean you know the
• 1:25:30
  short version is the movie. The movie was uh, you know, it
• 1:25:33
  sat, it was finished, and then you know, we we we started
• 1:25:36
  trying to sell it and showing it to people, and everyone thought it was
• 1:25:40
  so weird or too two gross or something. You know, there was always
• 1:25:44
  one excuse or another. We got really close to getting into south By Southwest,
• 1:25:47
  we got really close into getting into Tribeca, um, but at the
• 1:25:50
  last minute just didn't happen. So, you know, people, I was
• 1:25:54
  trying to get work, UM, I couldn't get hired for anything. Um,
• 1:25:58
  and so I I kind of thought I was a failure. My producers
• 1:26:00
  didn't think they were going to sell the movie for very much money. And
• 1:26:02
  then, um, you know, something crazy happened people. You know,
• 1:26:05
  our poster got leaked, which ironically, the poster initially was something I made
• 1:26:11
  with a guy named Zach Palmizano. Um, you know, he and I
• 1:26:14
  just kind of cut it together really quickly after I sent him a couple of
• 1:26:16
  ideas and we were told it wasn't going to go public, and our sales
• 1:26:20
  agent accidentally posted it on their website when they weren't supposed to, and and
• 1:26:27
  a news site found it and let it slip. So you know, so
• 1:26:30
  was that the one the one that everybody's seen or was that something else?
• 1:26:33
  Um, it's the one. It's the one where only half her face is
• 1:26:36
  exposed. And I think it's like actually the DVD cover now, um,
• 1:26:42
  but um, but yeah, that that was just something that you know,
• 1:26:45
  I had cut together with Zach on our own, like just you know,
• 1:26:47
  they were like, hey, we need something to represent the movie and I
• 1:26:50
  was like, look, I don't want to show her entire face yet,
• 1:26:53
  so I'll send them this half cut poster and uh, you know, we'll
• 1:26:57
  just call that like the teaser image for right now. But I told the
• 1:27:00
  company. I was like, look, don't let this go public, like,
• 1:27:01
  we don't want anyone seeing this yet. And within four hours, it
• 1:27:04
  was all over the new site. And I was like freaking out because I'm
• 1:27:10
  not a poster artist. You know, It's like I didn't I thought we
• 1:27:13
  just ruined our film. Um. But it caught on and everyone was like
• 1:27:15
  I started getting text messages and all kinds of stuff, and people were like,
• 1:27:18
  wow, this is incredible, like we we love this poster. Um
• 1:27:23
  and and then you know, and then you know, IFC bought the movie,
• 1:27:26
  uh and and you know, the producers weren't happy with the sale initially,
• 1:27:30
  so you know, they were like, all right, we're never gonna
• 1:27:32
  make any money off of this, so let's just start focusing on what's next.
• 1:27:35
  And you know, at the time, they they had no interest in
• 1:27:39
  working with me again. They were like, all right, you know,
• 1:27:41
  you you you made a movie. It's not gonna make a lot of money,
• 1:27:43
  but you know, congratulations, you might get another job off of it,
• 1:27:45
  but we're not ever gonna see a dime. Um And I was like,
• 1:27:48
  I was like, I was like, guys, I'm not getting hired
• 1:27:51
  for anything, like no, no one will hire me, like they think
• 1:27:54
  this movie is weird. And you know, it's like I don't know what's
• 1:27:57
  happening. And then you know, the crazy thing happened. The trailer came
• 1:28:00
  out and everyone started talking about it, and then the movie came out and
• 1:28:04
  every even more people started talking about and Howard Stern was talking about it.
• 1:28:08
  It's like, you know, it was over the course in just a couple
• 1:28:12
  of weeks, like every everyone's perspective change. It's funny. I started getting
• 1:28:15
  emails from companies that had passed on me for things or had said no,
• 1:28:19
  we don't like your movie who were suddenly like, hey, we watched your
• 1:28:23
  movie. Did you change something? And I was like, no, I
• 1:28:24
  didn't change anything. The movie is just the movie is just popular now,
• 1:28:27
  so you want to talk to me, you know. So it was it
• 1:28:30
  was really eye opening for me. And it's funny because I signed with my
• 1:28:33
  agent like the day after the movie came out in theaters, and you know,
• 1:28:38
  my agent hates when I when I you know, this this period of
• 1:28:41
  our exchange, but you know, I told my agent. I was like,
• 1:28:44
  look, I don't want to take meetings with people who passed on my
• 1:28:45
  movie initially, or they only want to work with me because because they thought,
• 1:28:50
  you know, contracted, you know, did really well, or you
• 1:28:53
  know, they think I can make them a lot of money. It's like,
• 1:28:55
  yeah, this is a business, and I get that, but it's
• 1:28:57
  like I want to work with people who like what I do, not people
• 1:28:59
  who just like me because I made someone else a lot of money, you
• 1:29:01
  know. So and my agent was like, no, no, no,
• 1:29:03
  this is Hollywood, Like you have to be okay with that, you know.
• 1:29:06
  So um so, you know, it's it's fine now. It's like
• 1:29:10
  I've kind of come around to it. But it's like I still stand by
• 1:29:13
  that to a degree. It's like I like working with people who like Eric
• 1:29:15
  england films, not Eric England's films that make money. You know. So
• 1:29:19
  that's kind of that's kind of my mentality when I approach it. But you
• 1:29:23
  know, it was very eye opening because, like I said, a lot
• 1:29:25
  of people who initially wouldn't talk to me, or you know, didn't think
• 1:29:28
  I was good enough or whatever, suddenly you know, open their arms.
• 1:29:30
  We're like, hey, let's have a meeting. Let's talk what projects do
• 1:29:33
  you have? We have some projects, you know. So it was it
• 1:29:36
  was just a very very bizarre kind of change change of pace. But you
• 1:29:41
  know, I wouldn't I wouldn't trade it for anything. Okay, so walk
• 1:29:45
  us through a little bit of what ended up happening with the sequel. We'll
• 1:29:53
  be right back after a word from our sponsor, and now to the show
• 1:30:01
  that you know. I'll note that you're you weren't involved with other than doing
• 1:30:09
  the screenplays, right, we're working on a screenplay for it. Um yeah,
• 1:30:13
  so I um, so basically what happened was, you know, I
• 1:30:15
  started writing a screenplay for the movie, and um, you know, it
• 1:30:19
  was just decided that, uh, we weren't going to you know, make
• 1:30:24
  the movie with the budget. I was told that we were initially going to
• 1:30:27
  get. So I I said, look, I'll still be involved. I'll
• 1:30:30
  you know, I'll continue writing the screenplay, I'll produce the film and uh,
• 1:30:34
  you know, we'll keep in the family. I'll kind of mentor the
• 1:30:38
  new director who I hired, you know, Matt Mercer to do, who
• 1:30:40
  was a producer and star the first one. And you know, ultimately what
• 1:30:44
  happened was they they decided that, you know, I was a better director
• 1:30:47
  than I am a writer, which I can't necessarily, and uh, they
• 1:30:53
  didn't want to They didn't want to pay for me to write the screenplay or
• 1:30:56
  produce the film because they thought I was going to cost more money than I
• 1:30:59
  was worth, which actually wasn't wasn't a lot of money I was. I
• 1:31:01
  was kind of, you know, given them the friend price at this point.
• 1:31:05
  So, um, you know, it was just uh, you know
• 1:31:09
  a little bit of you know, Hollywood Hollywood disagreement. You know, bottom
• 1:31:13
  lines are important, and some people think, you know, five dollars over
• 1:31:15
  what they're willing to spend is too much. So do you do you still
• 1:31:20
  have people coming up to you and talking about how much they liked Contracted Too.
• 1:31:26
  Um. Sometimes, I mean I I have people. I had people,
• 1:31:29
  you know, come up to me and say, hey, I'm about
• 1:31:30
  to watch the sequel and I'm like, look, I you know, I
• 1:31:32
  didn't make that one. And then I have people. I have people who
• 1:31:35
  reach out to me and they're like, hey, I can't wait to see
• 1:31:38
  Contracted too, And I'm like, you know, I didn't make that.
• 1:31:40
  Or I had people say hey, why didn't you make Contracted too, So
• 1:31:43
  I mean, yeah, you know that that that That's the whole reason I've
• 1:31:45
  kind of been vocal about my lack of involvement with the film is because you
• 1:31:48
  know, when people think Contracted, they they think of two people. They
• 1:31:51
  think of Najara, who played the lead actress, and myself. And so
• 1:31:56
  I want people to understand that, you know, just because I made the
• 1:31:59
  first movie doesn't mean I had anything to do with the sequel. And it's
• 1:32:01
  like, I if I liked the sequel, it would be a different story
• 1:32:04
  because then I would say, yeah, I don't I don't mind people associating
• 1:32:08
  me with that. But the sequel was it's it won it's not a good
• 1:32:12
  film. But two, I even if it was a good movie and I
• 1:32:15
  still had no involvement with it. It's like I would let them know,
• 1:32:16
  like, hey, I like the movie, but I didn't make it,
• 1:32:19
  you know, um, And but it's like I don't like the movie.
• 1:32:23
  I don't think it's very good. So it's like I don't want I don't
• 1:32:26
  want to be represented or I don't want to be associated with that in any
• 1:32:29
  way regardless. Right, do you have any of that, like copywriting stuff,
• 1:32:32
  that you had with the uh, the other ones that you were talking
• 1:32:35
  about. Um, I do not have control over it or you that's not
• 1:32:40
  part No, I No, I don't. I don't own contracted. Um,
• 1:32:44
  I do own part of the franchise, so like I will make money
• 1:32:46
  off of the sequel, but you know it's it's yeah, I don't control
• 1:32:50
  what happens with it. Right? Is the lead girl? I haven't seen
• 1:32:55
  the second one? Out of respect, I don't know if that's good,
• 1:33:00
  but I haven't seen it yet. But um, is the same lead actress
• 1:33:03
  in it? Or is it completely it's completely different? People? Um,
• 1:33:06
  she's she's in it for like literally two shots. Oh that kind of sucks,
• 1:33:12
  all right? Yeah, So okay, so your your latest film?
• 1:33:15
  Um, what can you tell us about that? I unfortunately haven't seen it,
• 1:33:19
  so I don't really know, UM have specific questions? But have you?
• 1:33:25
  Is that? Is it like in the same can you can you talk
• 1:33:29
  a little bit about it? H Yeah? I mean I can't say much
• 1:33:31
  because the movie is not out yet. It'll be out okay, okay,
• 1:33:34
  but um, but yeah, I mean it's it's once again, completely different
• 1:33:38
  movie. It's more of like a dark comedy thriller. Um, it shows
• 1:33:41
  a lot of humor. You know, I wanted to do something a little
• 1:33:45
  different tonally, and uh you know it's it's a it's a crowd pleaser.
• 1:33:47
  I wanted to do something that I felt like I would like to watch as
• 1:33:50
  an audience member and something that I thought, um, you know, fans
• 1:33:56
  uh in in this world haven't necessarily seen before. It's definitely a unique,
• 1:34:00
  dark and fun movie. When is what what's the plan with that? Is
• 1:34:03
  it going to go to festivals? And then I don't know. I mean
• 1:34:06
  I I, like I said, I'm not a big you know, I
• 1:34:10
  love festivals, but I think their mentality is a little different than mine.
• 1:34:13
  So we may play some festivals, um, if we find the right ones
• 1:34:16
  that I think, you know, kind of fit within the world of what
• 1:34:18
  we want to do with the film. But you know, the goal is
• 1:34:21
  to release it next year, just kind of get it out to the audience.
• 1:34:25
  Okay, do you do you ever go to AFLM or any of that
• 1:34:27
  stuff. I don't personally, I mean my sales reps and everything like that.
• 1:34:30
  Dude, It's it's not really a filmmaker friendly place. Okay, It's
• 1:34:35
  kind of like go into a cattle auction and you being a cow. Okay,
• 1:34:42
  so you know, I'll just kind of wrap it up with this,
• 1:34:44
  if you could, um just maybe give a little bit of advice or what
• 1:34:47
  you let's try this, if you could give advice to yourself. Let's say
• 1:34:51
  you know you're you're relatively young director. One of the things that kind of
• 1:34:56
  impressed me when you know, I was looking through your information was, you
• 1:34:59
  know, you're born in nineteen eighty eight, so like it kind of I'll
• 1:35:03
  be honest, I mean, it annoyed me a little fit. You know.
• 1:35:08
  Sorry, It's okay, No, it's good, you know. But
• 1:35:14
  if you could go back in time to when you were younger, when you
• 1:35:16
  were like say nineteen, what what advice would you give to yourself about filmmaking?
• 1:35:23
  Um, you know the I give the same advice to everyone, and
• 1:35:26
  I think it's the same advice I would give to myself, which is be
• 1:35:29
  as original as possible. You know. Uh. The craziest thing for me
• 1:35:32
  in my career is I started making movies when the world perspective of filmmaking and
• 1:35:39
  also the marketplace itself was drastically changing. I mean, you have movies now
• 1:35:44
  with two of the biggest stars like you know, like Bradley Cooper or and
• 1:35:45
  Jennifer Lawrence in them that are going straight to vod now, you know.
• 1:35:48
  So it's it's a completely different world. And so the best thing you can
• 1:35:53
  do is just make the movie you want to make, but also know that
• 1:35:56
  you're making it for an audience. You know, don't the world of just
• 1:36:00
  making movies for yourself is dead. Like you can't be a filmmaker like that's
• 1:36:03
  that's now a hobby, you know, Like if you want to be in
• 1:36:05
  a tour and make films that only you like, then then you know,
• 1:36:11
  make it as a hobby. Filmmaking is too expensive to try and do that
• 1:36:14
  on a mass level. But I think if you truly want to be a
• 1:36:17
  working filmmaker and you want to be in the movie business, then be original.
• 1:36:20
  But know that your originality needs to be commercial to someone so if they
• 1:36:25
  can sell your product and continue getting you work. And I think that's the
• 1:36:29
  best thing you can do is be aggressive, be original, and uh,
• 1:36:31
  you know, keep a good head on your shoulder to be objective. Eric
• 1:36:35
  Man, I appreciate it. Thanks for coming on the show, no problem,
• 1:36:39
  Thanks for having me all right, Man, talculator. All right,
• 1:36:44
  I want to thank Scott so much for doing such a great job with this
• 1:36:46
  episode. If you want to get links to anything we spoke about in this
• 1:36:48
  episode, head over to the show notes at any film muscle dot com Ford
• 1:36:53
  Slash six eighty four. If you haven't already, please head over to Filmmaking
• 1:36:58
  podcast dot com, subscribe and leave a good review for the show. It
• 1:37:02
  really helps us out a lot, guys. Thank you again so much for
• 1:37:04
  listening to guys. As always, keep that hustle going, keep that dream
• 1:37:08
  alive, stay safe out there, and I'll talk too soon. Thanks for
• 1:37:12
  listening to the Indie Film Hustle podcast at Indie Film Hustle dot com. That's
• 1:37:15
  I N D I E F I L M h ustl dot com.