Latest / Bulletproof Screenwriting™ Podcast / BPS 316: What They Don't Tell Filmmakers about Making an Indie Film with Jeremy Gardener

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BPS 316: What They Don't Tell Filmmakers about Making an Indie Film with Jeremy Gardener · Bulletproof Screenwriting™ Podcast

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  You are listening to the IFH podcast Network. For more amazing filmmaking and screenwriting
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  podcasts, just go to IFH podcast network dot com. Welcome to the Bulletproof
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  Screenwriting Podcast, Episode number three sixteen. Compromise for your dream, but never
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  compromise on your dream. Name ron Con Broadcasting from a dark, windowless room
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  in Hollywood when we really should be working on that next draft. It's the
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  Bulletproof Screenwriting Podcast, showing you the craft and business of screenwriting while teaching you
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  how to make your screenplay bulletproof. And here's your host, Alex Ferrari.
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  Welcome, Welcome to another episode of the Bulletproof Screenwriting Podcast. I am your
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  humble host Alex Ferrari. Now, today's show is sponsored by Bulletproof script Coverage.
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  Now. Unlike other script coverage services, Bulletproof Script Coverage actually focuses on
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  the kind of project you are in the goals of the project you are,
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  so we actually break it down by three categories micro budget, indie film,
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  market, and studio film. There's no reason to get coverage from a reader
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  by professional readers, head on over to cover my screenplay dot Com. Enjoy
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  today's episode with guest host Jason Buff. On this episode, I'm talking with
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  Jeremy Gardner and Christian Stella about their films The Battery and text Montana Will Survive.
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  We'll talk about all the stuff that went into making The Battery, the
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  difficulties of making a really really low budget independent film, the cold hard reality
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  of being an indie filmmaker today, as well as the new way they've approached
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  distribution for their newest feature. So get comfortable. You might want a nice
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  cold beverage or some tea, you know, maybe some Aroma in the room,
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  maybe some Lavenders, some Jacarn Noir, and enjoy this episode because I
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  had a good time talking with these guys. I ever heard the show,
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  Yeah, I listened to a few episodes. Yeah, I've been subscribed for
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  a while, but then I went on a tangent and subscribe to every podcast
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  ever, and now I can't remember what I'm supposed to listen to now.
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  I used to like my favorite way to learn filmmaking, aside from DVD commentaries,
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  was listening to podcasts, you know, because you can sit there for
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  a good hour and a half listening to a filmmaker and you'd never get that
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  access on just like interviews and stuff that's literally how yeah. That was one
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  of my big tools when I was deciding I want to make the Battery was
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  podcasts. Oh really? Oh yeah absolutely, I've started back with Creative Screenwriting
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  Jeff Goldsmith's podcast. Yeah yeah, I listened to a ton of those,
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  and then I just went what else is there? And I start downloading everything.
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  What are the ones? Did you? My big one because I was
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  trying to make a film in two thy twelve that didn't end up happening,
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  but I would listen to one called film Method all the time, and it
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  was to two women that were like they had already made their own film and
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  they were just interviewing people that had worked on it and talked about it.
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  But they stopped recording it in two thousand and twelve, so it was like
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  all of a sudden just came to an end. But it's avoid now.
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  Well that's kind of what I based mine off of, was just the idea
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  that I want to learn stuff and people want to you know, they want
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  to hear what actually goes into filmmaking, you know, instead of like these
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  kind of generic conversations, you know, I like to go into you know,
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  the nuts and bolts, money issues, technical, you know, the
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  cameras that were used and stuff like that. So no, absolutely, I
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  mean it's that's the important stuff, and that's that's why I listened. I
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  watched every behind the scenes extra on every DVD I had for ten years,
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  and I listened to director's notes for a long time. Huh. I don't
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  know if you know that podcast I was yeah, yeah, yeah, um
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  gosh, there was another one. I'm I'm like a big YouTube Vimeo guy.
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  Like I watched a lot of a lot of the camera geeks on there,
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  you know, and all those camera reviews and tests, like I love
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  Philip Bloom uh huh yeah, Boom is like my hero. Yeah he's there's
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  a lot I think most of the stuff because I also do, um,
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  I'm an amateurs cinematographer, you know, So I just sit there and watch
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  everything about lighting tutorials and everything about lenses and whatever, you know, and
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  I don't think. It's like you don't even need to go to school anymore.
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  If you've got an Internet connection, absolutely get on, you know.
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  I mean that's I mean everything that we everything that I did technically for the
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  battery and now text Montana has been through tutorials. It's insane. Like I'm
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  I mean, I was just telling Jeremy to the day. I was like,
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  well, I'm trying to fix a couple of shots in text Montana colorwise,
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  So I'm like I had time to watch another twenty hour Da Vinci Resolved
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  tutorial. Yeah. I spent most of my time listening to screenwriter interviews and
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  stuff too, because back when I didn't think I could actually make a movie,
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  I just wanted to be able to write a script. And just to
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  hear different processes is amazing because no one does it the same way, and
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  so you'll start to think that your writing routine is weird, and then you'll
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  listen to twenty different people say that there's twenty different variations on some same thing,
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  so it doesn't matter it's just getting it's just putting the work in.
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  I mean, that's one of the things that I just recently put up a
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  blog post about the creative process, and there's a bunch of videos about screenwriters
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  only talking about the creative end, you know, and how they schedule out
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  their day and how they actually write, you know, and it's it was
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  nice to hear almost all of them say, well, I spend most of
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  the morning procrastinating, and then when I start hating myself, I'll kind of
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  sit down and I'll start writing, you know. So you realize that everybody
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  that has this drive to write screenplays or to write anything, they're all kind
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  of fighting with themselves. You know. Yeah, I mean that's it's a
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  daily grind. But you know, the thing that I've unfortunately, the thing
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  I've taken away from every single interview I've I've heard, is that the the
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  you know, the successful writers are the ones who treat it like a day
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  job. They know that they are going to put in a certain amount of
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  hours every day in the seat, but in seat and just writing, and
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  boy, just getting your butt in the seat is the hardest part for me
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  because I will find everything else to do when you started screenwriting, what were
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  the resources that you found were the most helpful. You know, it's funny.
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  I started probably very similar to a lot of people. I found a
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  sid Field, you know, screenplay book from god knows when it was all
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  yellowed and old, for like twenty five cents, and you use bookstore,
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  and you know, people kind of laugh off those those manuals. But that
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  really helped me understand the structure and the formatting. And then once you get
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  that down, it's just about reading other screen But I just read as many
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  screenplays as I could, and you start to see how you go, Okay,
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  well this is the structure, but I can tweak it to make it
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  you read a certain way that I want to read. And I like to
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  write line with absolutely zero camera interaction at all. I really like almost to
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  write like a prose story where it just flows and yeah, they say,
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  Jeremy, Jeremy. Screenplays sometimes read like novels. It's kind of yeah,
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  but but sparse novel They're not like dense like I have a rule. I
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  refuse to have any action beat go over four sentences. I will not do
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  it because I know people skim. So I have little rules for myself,
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  and I don't like to I don't like to break up sequences with like interiors
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  and exteriors. I kind of like to try to let them flow into each
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  other and just just drop maybe while he walks into and then the next line
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  the bathroom. There's no like interior the bathroom, because you want to just
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  keep a pace and a kind of momentum going. I'm really about readability because
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  when it's so hard for me to read some screenplays, they're just so dense
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  and just so much stuff on the page. Yeah, I think that a
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  lot of people think that you have to follow very strict code, you know,
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  And what I've learned from talking to other screenwriters is that, you know,
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  as long as you're telling the story and as long as you're bringing people
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  into the movie, that you can kind of do whatever you want to.
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  You know, you have to have a certain amount of structure, but there's
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  a lot of leeway with that. No, there really is, there's no.
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  Like I said, that's what I like about John August and Craig Mason.
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  You know, they'll they'll talk to you about the nuts and bolts on
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  their podcasts all the time, but for the most part, every rule that
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  someone tells you that you can't break. They will just say, no,
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  that's not true. If that were the case, we wouldn't have this movie
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  or that movie or this movie or whatever. So you can break whatever rule
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  you want if you're writing a good story. So what would your typical day
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  be, you know, talking about screenwriting? What do you have to set
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  like a date that you're going to finish by or do you just sit like
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  sit down? Do you do you do a bunch of writing out notes and
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  blueprints? What? What kind of is the I'm so weird when it comes
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  to writing. It's well, you know, unfortunately I have not had to
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  write on a deadline yet. I have not, you know, taken a
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  job where it needs to be in by this time. So it's very hard
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  for me to manufacture my own my own deadlines. So typically I will just
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  start writing. I will just start writing, and then I'll write. I'll
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  do what's like a beat sheet where I will write down just slug lines of
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  the scenes that I know are going to happen up until a point where I
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  don't know anymore, and then I'll go and I'll start writing that. And
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  then then I was telling I was telling someone the day. I think I
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  was telling your wife, Christian that if you look through my notebooks, you
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  will see the same beat sheet written over and over and over again, and
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  I don't know why I do it. I will go back after writing like
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  ten or fifteen pages, and I will write again the same beat sheet of
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  the scenes, and I'll maybe add a little bit in between, or I'll
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  reorganize them. But for the most part, I think it's just me refamiliarizing
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  myself with where I'm at, and then hopefully something will spring up and I'll
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  add another beat to the end of that thing, and then I'll go back
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  and start writing again, and I'll take walks and lots of showers and just
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  I ruminate on it a lot. I think I think you get a lot
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  more writing done when you're not writing than you actually think. We'll be right
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  back after a word from our sponsor, and now back to the show.
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  Lots of Starbucks trips. Oh yeah. I have a weird thing about being
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  able to write in the place I live. There's something about being there as
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  often as I am, or it's just like I can't I can't disconnect myself
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  from just the routine of living in the home, so I need to try
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  to get out of it as much as possible. Yeah, I think that's
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  that's a lot of people have told me that. I mean, I'm the
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  same way too. I cannot I'm here in my office right now. I've
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  tried to write here and it just doesn't happen, you know. So I'll
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  go off to Starbucks and I'll sit there. And when you don't have all
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  the distraction, that's when you say, Okay, I can sit here and
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  actually do the hard part, which is you know, the word focusing on
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  it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And there's something about the
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  chatter of being in a public place. I like that kind of white noise
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  of people talking and just the mumbling in the in the ruckets of just people
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  moving around. That helps too, other than the silence. Another problem I
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  have with writing, which people should not do, is I wake up every
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  day when I sit down to write, and I go back and tinker with
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  everything I've already written. So I will kill an hour or two hours just
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  perfecting what's already written, so you know, in a good way. When
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  the script is finally done, it's been it's been polished in a way that
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  it's like it's a second or third draft, but it takes so long to
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  get to that final draft because I just go back and move commas, and
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  moving commas is not writing. Do you do one like you know, as
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  they say, vomit draft? Do you try to get like one first draft
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  down and then go back and no? No, That's what I wish I
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  could do. I really wish I could just move just barrel ahead and not
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  worry about what happened before. But I cannot. I will keep going back
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  and tinkering and tweaking, and then and then hopefully by the time when if
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  I wake up and I tinker with the pages I wrote the day before,
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  hopefully by the time I get to the end of those, I've kind of
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  pushed myself into the process a little bit. So how did you guys meet?
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  You guys have been friends for a while, right, And where are
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  you from? We're both we're both from Central Florida, you know, we're
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  like outside Disney World. But we met when we were kids basically, I
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  mean I was definitely a kid. I was like thirteen or something, and
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  we started making movies back then, and uh, that was kind of our
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  film school, which was it was also our regular school because we dropped out
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  of school sort of education system. Yeah. Yeah, so I mean that's
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  like staying in school in Florida. But yeah, we just started making movies
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  back then, like with like a five hundred dollars sony handicam And what year
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  are we talking here? Just so I know technology, Let me think about
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  this. Uh we shot the Bags in two thousand, okay, okay,
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  so this is PREHD yes definitely. Um, it was like almost pre computer
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  editing. Like I still remember buying a hard drive for like five hundred dollars
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  for like a like a forty gigabye hard drive. I mean we were cutting
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  our were we cutting our shorts before we did the Bags on like like VHS
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  to v like a r VCR, we were, we were editing VCR to
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  VCR when like in nineteen ninety six or seven or something. Um, but
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  yeah, so we just did that. We we we made some features with
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  my sister and um, got got into some film festivals and then we became
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  adults and we had to get jobs. That was yeah. So then it
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  was like a just like an entire decade where we just you know, weighed
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  tables and so on. Yeah, we didn't do much for ten years,
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  and then we kind of moved apart, and then I was trying, well,
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  I'm going to go pound the pavement as an actor. And then that
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  got really demoralizing really quickly. And I had spent a lot of time,
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  like we were talking about, watching those DVD extras and reading those interviews,
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  on listening to those podcasts and thinking, you know what, I think it's
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  about time to get the band back together. The technology had finally cut up,
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  and I started to believe that there was a way to make a movie
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  that could stand, you know, against real quote unquote real movies now.
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  So I felt like we should jump back in it because that was the thing
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  about our early movies, even though they were fun, and you know,
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  we played festival. I remember the director of the Sarasota Film Festival telling us,
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  you know, I'm going to put your movie in this festival, but
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  because it's clear that you guys made a real movie, but it's also very
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  clear that you have absolutely no money, because it was just the quality was
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  so well. He said it was the first movie they had ever played that
• 14:11
  wasn't shot on film, so it was crazy. I mean, he was
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  even talking about like maybe having a micro budget features section in following festivals because
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  he just didn't know what to do with ours. So that but by the
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  time the technology cut up, was like, okay, well we can make
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  something that you could literally play in a theater and people wouldn't be like,
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  well, was a shot on my face? Yeah, I mean that,
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  I definitely know that feeling, because I mean I think I'm a little older
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  than you guys. But you know, when I was in film school,
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  it was like that was the only option we could only we could shoot on
• 14:48
  sixteen millimeter and like spend everything we had, you know, and like spend
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  thirty It was easy to spend like thirty thousand bucks on a little crappy sixteen
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  millimeter film because you had to send it off the the lab or the other
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  option was to shoot on VHS. So there's a lot of people, you
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  know now that are coming back to it after it's like everybody realized, Okay,
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  now the technology is caught up. All these people that couldn't make films
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  when they were you know, college age are coming back to it. You
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  know, yeah, absolutely, it's such a you know, it's it's such
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  a democratic process. Now, it was like the art that no one was
• 15:22
  allowed to get in unless you had permission or money, and now that's not
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  the case, right, Okay, So you went to where did you go?
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  You went to New York area or where were you at? Yeah?
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  Actually, Christian's dad got a show on the Food Network and moved up to
• 15:37
  New England, Connecticut area to shoot the show. And he he was like,
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  you know, he's like a second father to me. So he's like,
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  hey, I know you want to be an actor. We're gonna go
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  live like forty minutes away from New York City if you want to come live
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  with us. So I hugged my family goodbye and moved up moved up there
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  for twenty I mean he moved up there with me. And then within like
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  six months of me living up there, I was like, I want to
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  move back to Florida, and I left him with my parents and then their
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  entire family ended up moving back to Florida and I stayed. I was there
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  just until this last until this last October. But I can't. I gotta
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  get out of Florida. I can't. I can't take it. So you
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  were like, what on the couch or something for up in there? And
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  Oh no, there they were. No, I had a they had a
• 16:26
  room for me. They had I mean it was like I was their second,
• 16:29
  their third, third child. So um, it was a great living
• 16:33
  situation. And then I ended up you know, I got a job and
• 16:34
  I got my own place, and I moved in with a girl, and
• 16:37
  you know, I settled in up there when they all left. I need
• 16:40
  seasons. I was just talking about how I can't. I can't deal with
• 16:42
  this warm winter down here. It's creeping me out. I'm a very seasonally,
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  you know, creative person, if you know, if it's nice out
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  all the time, all I want to do is do fun stuff. I
• 16:55
  kind of need those dark, cold winter months to get a little you know,
• 16:59
  to turn my thoughts inward and helps to create and read and focus.
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  Maybe snow every once in a while, Oh it's so nice. I just
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  I just want to be able to drive to the store without like driving my
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  car off a sheet of ice. That just flipped me out. I stopped
• 17:15
  driving for like four years when I lived up there, because I mean I
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  only lived up there for two years, but I just refused to drive on
• 17:22
  the snow, and then I got scared of driving in general. Because I
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  was like, I haven't driven in four months, all right, so let's
• 17:27
  let's focus on filmmaking. When when was the I mean, what was the
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  kind of seed that got you guys started with the battery? Where did that
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  kind of begin? Well, there was this um online kind of they were
• 17:37
  gonna there was a site called massify that was gonna make a movie completely through
• 17:42
  the community. So they were taking pitches for scripts, and then they were
• 17:47
  taking director videos, and then they were casting all through this website. So
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  I sent and I was I made an audition video, and I wanted to
• 17:56
  make it kind of like a short film. So it stood out. So
• 17:56
  I made this little two minutes short about a guy friend who kind of document
• 18:00
  their day to day life in a zombie apocalypse worlds, a little two minute
• 18:06
  nothing video. And nothing ever came of that site or that movie. I
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  believe it became Perkins fourteen one of the eight Films to Die For in that
• 18:15
  series or whatever it was. But um, but I couldn't shake the idea
• 18:18
  of this, like just two guys wandering around in the woods in a post
• 18:23
  apocalyptic situation. And so then I started thinking about, well, the way
• 18:26
  you if you're going to make a no budget movie. It's the way you
• 18:30
  should do it is you should you should tailor it to what you have.
• 18:33
  And in my mind that's right after a word from king story. You could
• 18:37
  write a creative story around any situation. So now back to the sha have
• 18:42
  no money, what's the what's the way to do that? Okay, we'll
• 18:45
  just shoot it in the woods, right and then if there are zombie there
• 18:48
  are people trying to avoid zombies. Well if if they're smart, they're going
• 18:51
  to avoid cities, so they'll be in the woods. And that way we
• 18:53
  could get around all that stuff. And it just kind of came became a
• 18:56
  way for me to um take the zombie genre and turn it inward and focus
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  on how two different minds would would be affected by that rather than do this
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  big grand you know, macro scale the whole world is dying. Yeah.
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  And at the same time that, like he's thinking about getting back into film,
• 19:15
  I had become a food photographer and the best food photography camera was the
• 19:22
  five D. So I had a five D Mark two, so I already
• 19:26
  had the camera that was like changing the the indie filmmaking world. I just
• 19:32
  so happened to have to have that for my job. So it was like
• 19:37
  the kind of perfect storm is as he was thinking about this movie, I
• 19:41
  had the equipment to make a movie sort of. I had the camera.
• 19:45
  At least we'll be right back after a word from our sponsor and now back
• 19:56
  to the show. Yeah, so that's basically where it started, just just
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  just tailoring a story to what I knew would be cheap. And you know,
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  there was a long time where I could not convince anybody that you could
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  make a movie for the kind of money I was talking about. It just
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  couldn't. I remember I was introduced to some like rich guy at a bar
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  and he started talking to me like a big wig, and as soon as
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  I mentioned six thousand dollars, he just laughed and walked away. So that,
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  yeah, that that happens a lot. Well, it doesn't happen as
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  much anymore, you know. It's it's people are coming around to the fact
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  that movies can be made for nothing. Well, you know, the funny
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  thing that I run into is so many people think that they need, you
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  know, one hundred thousand or two hundred thousand dollars to make, you know,
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  a little indie movie. And it's ridiculous. It frustrates me to no
• 20:45
  end. I've seen so many people just waste money. They just waste money,
• 20:49
  and I don't understand, like the whole My whole concept going into this
• 20:53
  was, look, I believe we can do this, but if we can't,
• 20:56
  if it doesn't work, and I get the money. I got the
• 21:00
  money from like ten different people, so it would be like little chunks of
• 21:03
  six hundred dollars, So nobody was going to be broke, no one's gonna
• 21:06
  lose their house, and no one's gonna hate me. That was It's just
• 21:08
  like just you know, heads your bets, write something that you believe in
• 21:12
  that you could do for an incredibly small amount, and then don't don't break
• 21:15
  anybody, don't lose any friends over it. Had you been acting before,
• 21:19
  yeah, I've always been like more of a writer and an actor. I
• 21:22
  did. I did a bunch of plays when I went up there, up
• 21:25
  to the North, and you know, I was always the actor in our
• 21:26
  movies when we were making them. Younger, I was in all the plays
• 21:29
  in high school. So I wanted to be an actor or a writer.
• 21:32
  And it wasn't until I got the confidence from listening to all these interviews with
• 21:37
  other filmmakers and watching movies and starting to understand them more that I was like,
• 21:40
  well, you know, I can, I can. I'm just gonna
• 21:41
  direct this thing. I'm just gonna do this thing straight through. It's gonna
• 21:45
  be my little my little creature. But it was really it took a long
• 21:49
  time for me to say I'm directing this because I had never been in those
• 21:53
  shoes before. Christian, you were going to say something, oh, I
• 21:56
  was just gonna say. The other thing about budgets is that I think it's
• 22:00
  hard thing for people to wrap their head around that equipment can be rented,
• 22:03
  you know, and like, in fact, it always is rented in large
• 22:06
  budgets. Even so, like that was one of the things that people come
• 22:08
  up and they're like, you know, like you guys couldn't have made that
• 22:11
  movie for six thousand dollars. It's like it costs more for the equipment.
• 22:15
  And I'm like, I mean, I used a Zeiss lens, but it
• 22:18
  was one hundred and fifty dollars to rent it for the whole shoot. So
• 22:21
  there's always said the only thing I owned was the camera, and even that
• 22:25
  would have been two hundred and fifty dollars to rent. So you know,
• 22:27
  I think that even that seems to be a barrier of entry for people,
• 22:32
  but it shouldn't be. It's it's not. Yeah, it's funny because I
• 22:34
  you know, I've shot a couple of shorts down here my cameras, I've
• 22:37
  only got a sixty D and I've got a couple of friends who I've got
• 22:41
  one friend who has a five D Mark three and has never used it,
• 22:47
  like it was a gift from her her husband, And so I'm just like,
• 22:52
  hey, do you mind if we borrow your camera for this shoot and
• 22:53
  you know whatever? And she's like, yeah, sure, whatever, I
• 22:56
  don't care. I've never even I don't even know how to turn it on.
• 22:59
  So it's just like the equipment now is there's no barrier, you know,
• 23:02
  interactly. I mean, I'm shooting on a cannon see one hundred now,
• 23:06
  and I let my friend borrow it all the time, and he's another
• 23:08
  filmmaker. Yeah. Meanwhile, he went and shot a feature on an iPhone
• 23:12
  and I was like, why didn't you just borrow my camera? And he's
• 23:15
  like I was afraid to ask because now he borrows it all the time.
• 23:21
  Yeah. Yeah, I think that just I think people also, I mean,
• 23:26
  one of the hardest things for me to do is ask for favors.
• 23:29
  I'm really bad at asking for favors. But you'd be amazed the amount of
• 23:33
  things that you can get just asking. I mean even just you know,
• 23:37
  you know, a couple of weeks ago, we were shooting something new to
• 23:41
  add into text Montana and we we would like put a budget aside for Okay,
• 23:45
  if these people want money, here's what we're willing to spend. And
• 23:48
  then we go there and then we introduce ourselves, we tell them what we're
• 23:52
  doing, and then they just let us do it for free. And it's
• 23:53
  just it's amazing, like how often you can find, you know, the
• 23:57
  things that you need just from through people's generosity. Everyone just balloons up in
• 24:03
  their in their mind what these budgets have to be, and they just they
• 24:07
  really don't have to be that big, especially for your first one. Now,
• 24:11
  can you guys talk a little bit about the filmmaking process. I know
• 24:15
  you've talked a lot about the making of the Battery, um, but can
• 24:18
  you just talk, you know, for indie filmmakers, can you talk about
• 24:21
  the process that you went through to create that the production, maybe a little
• 24:25
  bit of pre production, and the production process. Well, yeah, I'll
• 24:30
  tell you. I was like, I was like, oh, we allowed
• 24:32
  to curse. Yeah, go ahead. It was a bit of a shit
• 24:34
  show. But I mean it was a lot of a shit show. Well
• 24:37
  okay, Well that's the one thing that should be should be very much noted,
• 24:41
  is that we you know, for the longest time, because Christian was
• 24:45
  down in Florida and I was up up in Connecticut kind of on my own
• 24:48
  trying to get this thing going. And I'm not a producer, like I
• 24:52
  said, I'm very bad at asking for people, for things from people.
• 24:56
  And I finally had just said an arbitrary date, and I said, you
• 24:59
  know, Gus, first we're doing this thing. That's it. August first
• 25:02
  is the date. And you know, I got locations squared away. But
• 25:06
  you know, between casting zombies and getting all the props together and trying to
• 25:11
  work out a schedule, which I'd never worked out of a movie schedule before,
• 25:17
  these things were just like beyond my grasp a little bit. And so
• 25:21
  that really really hurt us in the actual production was that we just we had
• 25:26
  about three full days of preproduction once Christian got up there, we had three
• 25:32
  days to buy all the props, get all these zombies, like in order
• 25:34
  get the crew, you know, our small crew shots, shot lists up
• 25:38
  to where we were shooting. So if there's anything to be learned is plan
• 25:42
  as much as you can before you get to set, because everything will go
• 25:47
  wrong when you get to set. And if you if you plan for the
• 25:49
  things that you can that you can fix, then then when everything else goes
• 25:55
  to shit, you'll you'll be ahead of the game. Meanwhile, meanwhile,
• 25:57
  I'd only ever shot like two silent four minute short films before I got up
• 26:03
  there. I was still reading how to how to use the camera when I
• 26:07
  got up there, because I was like, I mean, I know how
• 26:08
  to do photography, but I did not know cinematography at all. Well,
• 26:11
  I saw the clip of I haven't seen the full documentary behind the Scenes,
• 26:15
  but I saw there looking at that book Master Master Shot Master Shots, and
• 26:21
  I thought that was kind of a joke. But was that where you like
• 26:22
  actually got those books are awesome, The Master Shots books great. But that's
• 26:27
  the thing too, is like you have to just there has to be kind
• 26:30
  of a blind, youthful confidence when you go into something like this, because
• 26:36
  if you think about all the ways in which you can fail, you just
• 26:38
  won't do it, you know. And it's like, I know Christian is
• 26:42
  talented in a way that I'm not. I know he's he's going to solve
• 26:48
  any technical problem that we run into. And I have faith in my acting
• 26:52
  and my writing and understanding of what I want the story to look like.
• 26:55
  And it's just like at some point you're going to run into stuff you don't
• 26:57
  really know. But as long as you keep it to a manageable budget,
• 27:02
  Like I said, if you screw up whatever, you know what, no
• 27:03
  one's no one's gonna die. So you just have to have this kind of
• 27:07
  blind confidence to just go in and do it. I think is learn as
• 27:11
  much as you can from all the free information that's out there, and then
• 27:14
  just do it, because man, if you really think about all the ways
• 27:17
  you could screw it up, you just you might as well just wait tables.
• 27:19
  Yeah, and I mean, no one's no one's come back and like
• 27:22
  called me on the shots that are out of focus or the shots they are
• 27:26
  over exposed, and all this other stuff that I can see, and that
• 27:29
  like paying me, nobody calls you on that. As long as the movie.
• 27:34
  It is a good story and is competent most of the time. You
• 27:40
  know, like, as long as you're telling the story and it's and it
• 27:42
  looks competent um, you can't get away with a little bit of that,
• 27:47
  at least at first. I mean at least especially if you're making it yourself.
• 27:49
  And I think I think passionately told too, it's a big thing too.
• 27:52
  It's like you can tell when you're watching something if it's if it's somebody
• 27:56
  just trying to cash in, trying to grab a quick buck, somebody just
• 28:00
  just doing an homage to some splatter thing that they've seen, or if someone
• 28:04
  just really genuinely is putting themselves out there. And I will give anything a
• 28:10
  pass if I can see the passion in it. Was there a lot of
• 28:14
  ad lib on the set, you know, it's funny. I get that
• 28:15
  a lot. And the script is so we cast, we cast Adam.
• 28:19
  Adam was a theatrically trained actor, so it was a little bit harder to
• 28:25
  get him to come out of his shell. So basically what you see in
• 28:27
  every scene is almost completely as scripted. But then I, as the director,
• 28:33
  being in the scene, would let the scenes run longer and I would
• 28:38
  start trying to throw him off at the end. So most of the ad
• 28:41
  libs will come from tags at the end of the scenes as written, because
• 28:45
  once we would get once I would know in my mind that we were reaching
• 28:48
  the end of the scripted portion that Adam knew, I would kind of throw
• 28:52
  in a curveball and see if you would follow me. So there are definitely
• 28:56
  definitely some ad libs in there and some goofy kind of asides, But for
• 28:59
  the most part, that is a that is a written that as a written
• 29:03
  movie. I'm just so naturally you can't even tell. Yeah, I know,
• 29:06
  it's mind blowing now, all the little weird things like um like fuck
• 29:10
  you, sir, fuck you to death. At the end of you know,
• 29:11
  the scene that that's a tag. There's a scene where where we're playing
• 29:15
  catching, I just do a weird dancing like bootoo birdoo, boo boo.
• 29:19
  That was a whole dialogue scene about like we'll start our own like place and
• 29:26
  we'll we'll let people in there and we'll decide who gets to and it just
• 29:29
  was coming off really stilted because we were playing catching. So I just I
• 29:33
  just said screw and I'm just gonna do a weird song and dance, and
• 29:34
  then that was what we used instead. One of the things that I think
• 29:37
  Synx films and one of the things that you guys do really well is everything's
• 29:41
  very it feels very natural. And one of the problems that I have with
• 29:44
  a lot of the things that are coming out now is the acting just you
• 29:47
  know that that's like the first thing you notice is just people reading lines.
• 29:49
  You don't really feel like a scene is actually taking place. Well, I
• 29:53
  mean it obviously all starts at casting. I mean, you got to get
• 29:56
  somebody who can do it right off the bat. You gotta they can do
• 30:00
  it. We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor and now back
• 30:08
  to the show. But it's also about letting the actors, you know,
• 30:14
  feel out there, feel their way through the scene. You know, I
• 30:15
  didn't get to do that much of it on this because it was our first
• 30:19
  time and you know, and I was in the scenes. But there's a
• 30:25
  part about it that's if you put an actor in a box and you tell
• 30:29
  them that they can't go here, here, or here, and it has
• 30:32
  to be like this, this or that, then they're going to You're gonna
• 30:36
  stifle their their instrument. They're one thing that they have, which is trying
• 30:40
  to feel confident enough to fail, not be embarrassed to try something crazy.
• 30:45
  And you know, there's something about kind of going through the scene before you
• 30:48
  shoot and letting the actor go where they naturally would want to be and then
• 30:52
  framing your shot around that is an easier way to get them to feel comfortable
• 30:57
  doing something that they would naturally do. Yeah, I would say that,
• 31:02
  like the wide shots in the Battery were extremely helpful to the fact that,
• 31:07
  like they they had a ton of room to move around. And then on
• 31:11
  top of that, like there's just something for me personally when you when you
• 31:17
  look at like the digital video because even like the five D it's great,
• 31:21
  but it's still video. Um super duper close ups of people just feel soap
• 31:29
  opera ish. So like even just like shooting wider like that makes it feel
• 31:33
  more cinematic, which in turn actually helps their performance. Like there's just something
• 31:37
  about like those those ultra mackerel close ups where you can see every poor on
• 31:42
  their face that makes it feel more like you're watching a movie and that like
• 31:47
  like you can see the acting because it's you're right up in the face.
• 31:52
  I mean, those are necessary for a certain if you're going for a certain
• 31:55
  style. But I would also say that even though I said the script is,
• 31:56
  you know, this movie's pretty scripted, I made very clear from the
• 32:00
  get go that it I'm not precious about my words. Uh that's another way
• 32:06
  to that's that's a surefire way to get a stilted performance, as if an
• 32:08
  actor doesn't can't feel the line the way it feels natural coming out of their
• 32:14
  mouth, and yet they feel like they're they're tied to that that verbatim.
• 32:19
  Uh so, just whatever we feel. I mean, I was literally reading
• 32:22
  a script last night for a role I'm going to do, and as I
• 32:23
  was reading it, I was changing words in the moment and then writing those
• 32:29
  words down on the script because the way it's written didn't sound natural. I
• 32:32
  couldn't quite make it flow in a natural way. But if I just tweaked
• 32:37
  this word, change that word, then suddenly it starts to come out more
• 32:39
  naturally, you know, in the way that I've I've analyzed that, Carol,
• 32:44
  weren't you weren't like precious about actions at all either, So it's like
• 32:47
  that that'd be the other thing, like we didn't really. We weren't precious
• 32:51
  about locations or actions. We'd be like, you know what, this location
• 32:53
  is not working out. Let's let's move over to this location and let's hey,
• 33:00
  maybe they're playing catching this scene where they weren't playing catch, or maybe
• 33:02
  they're doing this in this scene. Yeah, it certainly works for a certain
• 33:06
  kind of movie. The more I think, just the more freedom you can
• 33:07
  give an actor to feel like they can move about, find the character,
• 33:13
  find the character's gait and rhythm and and feel their way through the set um,
• 33:17
  then you're just gonna get It's just gonna get better. The more the
• 33:21
  more they feel natural and lived in in the moment, the more natural performance
• 33:23
  you're gonna get. You know. It reminded me a lot of Jim Jeremusch.
• 33:29
  I don't know if you absolutely well, thank you very much. That's
• 33:34
  that's a good compliment. Yeah, I just just lived in is what I
• 33:37
  always go for. I mean, I always say that I will tweak the
• 33:39
  dialogue until until I can read it where it doesn't feel like it's being read
• 33:44
  anymore, and then I'll say throw it all out. If it doesn't work
• 33:46
  for you, just just get you know, the point of the scene,
• 33:50
  right, you know, the the intent of the scene, and then just
• 33:53
  get there any way that feels right. And if you have actors who are
• 33:58
  quick on their feet, if one act or goes a certain way to try
• 34:00
  to get to the same point in a different way than the other actor will
• 34:04
  follow and let them follow. And then if that doesn't work in the editing
• 34:07
  room, throw it out because we did a lot of that too. Right.
• 34:12
  Were you working with a lot of non actors? I mean I assume
• 34:15
  most of the zombies were just friends, right, Yeah, all the zombies
• 34:17
  were non actors. Unfortunately, that's you know, they're not only were they
• 34:21
  non actors, but they were young. We get that a lot that Well,
• 34:23
  all the zombies in this movie are the same age as the Yeah,
• 34:28
  I get it. Yeah, we should have cast a more diverse set of
• 34:30
  an extra zombie. But like I said, we didn't do good enough preproduction.
• 34:35
  So that goes back to that. Right. Well, talking about for
• 34:38
  a second about the technical aspects, I want to talk to Christian for a
• 34:40
  second about you know, in terms of the way you approach this, I
• 34:46
  assume most of its natural light. Can you talk about kind of them what
• 34:51
  you were using? I know you were worth the five D mark two and
• 34:54
  you said A Carl's Iceland's can you talk a little bit about how you approach
• 34:58
  that. The craziest thing about the movie was that we knew that the last
• 35:01
  third of it takes place in the back of a station wagon, so we
• 35:07
  needed a super wide lens. So I ended up renting a Zeiss twenty one
• 35:12
  millimeter that on the full frame five D that ended up kind of creating the
• 35:19
  whole look for the movie because it was such a better lens than any that
• 35:22
  I had that I tried to use it as often as possible. So then,
• 35:27
  you know, we already knew we wanted to shoot super wide, but
• 35:30
  then shooting with the twenty one millimeter just really really opened it up even further,
• 35:37
  so much so in fact that we we actually we didn't shoot with the
• 35:44
  intention of having the movie be two thirty five one. We actually cropped it
• 35:49
  in post as an afterthought. Like it was just that we realized, wow,
• 35:54
  these these shots are so wide, and they looked much better cropped,
• 36:00
  and it once again like helped with the film look that we were trying to
• 36:02
  achieve. So yeah, no, as far as lighting, I just had
• 36:08
  a like a fifty dollar led light that was battery operated because we were in
• 36:13
  the woods, we had no power. It was only using a couple of
• 36:16
  scenes. And then I mean, obviously the most important thing I had was
• 36:22
  one of those variable and D filters because so much of it was shot outside
• 36:28
  in sunlight. And that's the one thing that I noticed whenever I get sent
• 36:32
  something now someone's like, hey, can you review this? Can you review
• 36:35
  this? Their shutter speed is, oh like its first time filmmaker. The
• 36:38
  shutter speed is all over the place. And you got that saving private Ryan
• 36:44
  look from shooting at a high shutter speed. So other than that, I
• 36:50
  didn't really have much equipment. I didn't even have a fluid video hit on
• 36:52
  the battery. I mean, it was crazy. I had an eighty dollars
• 36:57
  shoulder rig from Optica. Oh yeah, that was that was That was it.
• 37:02
  I had a plastic tripod uh that I bought it Best Buy. So
• 37:08
  yeah, no, I was unprepared. But you know, we we wanted
• 37:12
  most of the shots to be static, so you know, I didn't think
• 37:15
  I needed a food videohead and all those other things. And we didn't quite
• 37:19
  have the budget. So yeah, so what what were the major things that
• 37:23
  if you could go back in time, you think would have made things a
• 37:27
  lot easier for you a steady cam, because we had discussed everything's gonna be
• 37:35
  stationary. But then you know, you start making the movie and it's like,
• 37:37
  oh, well, just you know, follow along, We're gonna walk
• 37:40
  down this hill, over these rocks, and you know, just walk behind
• 37:45
  us, and that kind of stuff. I mean, I I my ass
• 37:47
  was saved in post by Premier's warp stabilizer and that's this. They're not something
• 37:54
  you want to rely on, especially like you know, has artifacts in someone
• 38:00
  that I can see. But we had to do it because we didn't have
• 38:05
  a steadicam. Although like on the last day of the shoot, one of
• 38:07
  the producers was like, I got a steadicam in my trunk and I wanted
• 38:13
  to stab him. I absolutely wanted to stab him, and I would say,
• 38:15
  just you know, there are certain things about the fact that we didn't
• 38:19
  get to We didn't really know how to plan a shoot schedule, so there
• 38:23
  were some there were some days where we were just overloaded with things we had
• 38:27
  to get. I mean, when we had the only other two actors in
• 38:30
  the movie Alano Brian and Neil's Bala. They they we had them scheduled on
• 38:35
  the same day because they were both coming from New York. That's fourteen pages
• 38:38
  of dialogue, you know, and then it's raining, and then it's you
• 38:43
  know, the night is approaching, and it's just one of those things where
• 38:45
  you start to feel you don't want to feel like you're losing control your set
• 38:50
  when you have actors there, and once the elements get involved, it's just
• 38:52
  like, we should never have scheduled both of those actors on the same day,
• 38:57
  that many pages in one day, but we just had no idea how
• 39:00
  schedule of film and we had such a little amount of time to do it.
• 39:02
  So a backup audio recorder would have helped on that day because our audio
• 39:07
  recorder fried and we had no other option to record audio, and we waited
• 39:12
  two hours to get one and then finally gave up and recorded using the mono
• 39:17
  mic on the SLR. So yeah, that would have I mean, we
• 39:23
  would have not just saved the audio quality of that scene, but we would
• 39:28
  have saved the two hours while we were waiting for someone with a video camera
• 39:30
  to come that had XLR inputs. Right. But it's another thing that you
• 39:36
  guys. Did that's you know a lot of indie filmmakers forget about is you
• 39:39
  hired a guy to be your sound guy, you know, and that makes
• 39:45
  a big difference. Absolutely, absolutely, that was you know, that's the
• 39:49
  you know, I think throughout our little weird troop of filmmakers, since you
• 39:53
  know, since we've been kids, we'll be right back after a word from
• 39:59
  our sponsor and now back to the show, we've all kind of had our
• 40:07
  own specialty, but none of us have ever been sound guys. You know,
• 40:09
  that's that is a very specialized area to go into. So when I
• 40:15
  was the one thing I did do right in pre production was I put an
• 40:19
  ad out and I for a sound guy, and I said, look,
• 40:22
  I got a little bit of scratched to give you, and I can give
• 40:23
  you a little back end in the movie, but you've got to stay with
• 40:28
  us the entire time. You can't go home. I can't be wondering where
• 40:30
  you are, you know, every day when when it's time for call,
• 40:35
  you're just going to be a part of the crew and you're gonna be there.
• 40:37
  And this guy responded and he was like, that sounds cool. And
• 40:40
  so I met this guy for a couple of pints and we ended up arguing
• 40:45
  over the merits of baseball and hockey for about two and a half hours.
• 40:50
  And you know, he's a sound guy now, but he used to be
• 40:52
  like a roadie, so he's used to like living in a van with musicians
• 40:54
  and stuff. So he just I mean, day one he was there.
• 40:57
  He was sleeping on the couch in the cabins with us, you know,
• 41:00
  beers at night. He was, you know, doing everything that a grip
• 41:02
  would do, that a PA would do, and he was doing sound.
• 41:06
  So he was invaluable. So if you can get yourself, you know,
• 41:08
  and especially in a small crew, people are gonna have to wear many hats.
• 41:12
  So get a guy who can do sound and blackout windows if he needs
• 41:15
  to. So, what would you say was the hardest aside from well,
• 41:22
  let me ask you about the scheduling. What if you could go back and
• 41:25
  possibly what you you did for UM texts. We'll talk about that in a
• 41:30
  second, But what UM when you're scheduling and everything, what are there Is
• 41:35
  there a specific tool that you're using now that you didn't have then, or
• 41:37
  something that you're doing now to schedule things out? We still have not a
• 41:43
  movie tradition, or you would like to in the future. Uh yeah,
• 41:45
  well I would love to just get a good line producer and do it.
• 41:49
  They can do it themselves. Okay, No, it's it's just one of
• 41:52
  those areas that I just had we haven't had to. I mean, Texts,
• 41:55
  as you will see, was not very well planned in itself either,
• 42:00
  So we didn't learn a lot from our first effort. But no, but
• 42:05
  there's little things that are obvious, like when you look back, like,
• 42:08
  okay, you can't have forty or fifty extras standing outside for twelve hours a
• 42:14
  day, two days back to back. You've got to feed them, you've
• 42:16
  got to keep them occupied, and there's a way to break that up.
• 42:21
  But then you realize that you can only have the certain location where those extras
• 42:24
  can be for one or two days. Then you start running into two issues
• 42:29
  that we just didn't really concern ourselves with. I mean, there's a moment
• 42:34
  in the movie where where Mickey puts blankets all over the windows in the car
• 42:37
  because he doesn't want to see the zombies faces anymore. And luckily, you
• 42:44
  know, story wise, you can you can justify that because Mickey just can't
• 42:49
  deal with the situation. But in reality, we realized after that first day
• 42:52
  of shooting with all those extras, that if we have these extras staring in
• 42:55
  the windows for the entire thirty five minute or an act, that these these
• 43:00
  characters are in the car, you're gonna start to see them get bored.
• 43:04
  You're gonna start to see the zombies looking at the camera. You're gonna,
• 43:07
  you're gonna, you're gonna, you're gonna invite the audience to start looking at
• 43:10
  the zombies rather than focusing on the characters. But it was in fact just
• 43:15
  because we couldn't We couldn't afford to have them out there all that time,
• 43:20
  So we went back after the first day Brainstorm just came up with that blanket
• 43:23
  idea and then moved the car into a garage, into a controlled setting,
• 43:28
  put a sun lamp out the window and had a one person shake it,
• 43:30
  and then just added the zombie sounds at the end, and that worked fine.
• 43:34
  That's one of those creative decisions I'm really proud of, But it was
• 43:37
  one that we might not have had to run into if we had, you
• 43:39
  know, knew how to schedule a movie. What was the hardest day on
• 43:45
  the set? Yeah, it was. It was the day where the sound
• 43:51
  broke. I mean, that was the day I quit the movie before the
• 43:52
  sound broke. Oh okay, well I didn't know about that. I quit
• 43:58
  on text too. I think I quit the movie. Yeah, and just
• 44:02
  kind of a tradition at this you're not doing it right. If someone doesn't
• 44:06
  quit, Yeah, that means it's not hard. That means you're not struggling.
• 44:08
  We were trying to make a squib and it was failing, and it
• 44:13
  was a it was a disaster. That was the day that we had the
• 44:15
  two actors come in from out of town. There's this I get shot in
• 44:19
  the legs. We were trying to make a squib out of nothing, out
• 44:22
  of blood and a condom and like a firecracker. It was raining. You
• 44:27
  were running out of time, you know, tensions were high. The sound
• 44:30
  broke, we ran out of light. It was just the most everything that
• 44:35
  could go wrong went wrong. I mean, if you watch the documentary,
• 44:38
  you'll see it's just once that day is mentioned, it did everyone's size.
• 44:44
  It was a rough day. Well, I think it's helpful for other filmmakers
• 44:49
  to realize, you know, that it is such a difficult process, because
• 44:52
  I mean you know, I think everybody who makes an indie film that doesn't
• 44:55
  have much of a budget has probably gone through the same thing, and a
• 44:59
  lot of people quit, you know, a lot of people never make their
• 45:00
  film. Yeah. No, that's unfortunate too, because it's the most rewarding
• 45:05
  and most fun I've ever had, and it's also you know, the most
• 45:08
  stressful and crazy. But those two things go hand in hand, and there's
• 45:12
  nothing like you know, sitting down with other filmmakers and chewing the fat and
• 45:15
  listening to them talk about their nightmare moments on set, because you then you
• 45:20
  can relate. Oh yeah, gosh, that's just like when the wasp nest
• 45:23
  was stuck in the car door and the lawnmowing people came all on the same
• 45:28
  day, on the first day of shooting. It's just like, what is
• 45:30
  happening here? You know, it's it's but that's kind of one of those
• 45:34
  badges of honor you wear after you made a you know, an indie movie
• 45:37
  on your own. In terms of the music, can we talk for a
• 45:44
  second about that and how you were able to get such a great soundtrack?
• 45:49
  Absolutely, and thank you. No, you know, it started as um,
• 45:53
  I'm a huge fan of rock Plaza Central to span rock Plaza Central.
• 45:58
  I've loved them for years. It used to be a big and I would
• 46:00
  go to all their shows. And when we cut together a location scouting video
• 46:05
  before we'd ever ever made the movie, we used one of their songs and
• 46:08
  we kind of put it up on Twitter for people to see what we were
• 46:10
  going to do, and the lead singer of the band contacted us and said,
• 46:14
  Hey, that looks cool. Are you guys going to use our music
• 46:15
  in the movie as well, which had never even occurred to us that that
• 46:19
  would be a possibility. And he was really kind and put us in touch
• 46:23
  with his label, and they were souper. I mean, they gave us
• 46:27
  the rights to the songs for literally nothing, like I think it was like
• 46:30
  five hundred bucks forever worldwide. That is great. And even better than that,
• 46:36
  it's like he put us in touch with the band The Parlor, who
• 46:38
  has a couple of songs in the movie, and they just gave us free
• 46:40
  reign of all their songs for nothing. And the same thing happened with you
• 46:45
  know Wise Blood, who does the electronica in the movie electronic songs in the
• 46:49
  movie. He adam kind of knew him from college, so he gave us
• 46:52
  his music. Son Hotel and El Cantador were some Florida bands that Christian knew
• 46:57
  from the local scene down here. He talked to them and they let us
• 47:00
  use their music. You know, you hear a lot of people. I
• 47:01
  mean, one of the most amazing things is, no matter where I've gone
• 47:05
  with this movie, all over the world, whatever language, people always always
• 47:07
  ask about the music. And that's so rewarding because there's something that's to be
• 47:12
  said about, you know, artists helping other artists out, and it was
• 47:15
  such a beautiful thing for them to do, to let us use their music.
• 47:17
  And what's been lovely is how often those bands have contacted us and said,
• 47:23
  hey, you know, once the movie came out, we saw a
• 47:25
  huge uptick in downloads and sales on our music and stuff. So it's just
• 47:30
  a it's one of those things where you know, look, we can't give
• 47:31
  you much upfront, but you know, if our movie does well, you'll
• 47:35
  do well. It's a you know, it's a symbiotic relationship. And that
• 47:38
  was amazing And now we're like great friends with Chris Eaton from rocks Pleasant Central
• 47:45
  and that's it's such a weird thing to go from being a fan of somebody
• 47:50
  and like I shook his hand one time at a show to now he'll like
• 47:53
  call me up and say, hey, I got this idea for a novel,
• 47:55
  Like what do you think about this? And just talk to him about
• 47:58
  it. And you're like, that's so crazy. You know, it's so
• 48:00
  crazy to go from fan to to peer and collaborator. But you haven't told
• 48:05
  him that you were like that though. I mean, he's not like I
• 48:07
  want to shake my hand again. I went on and told him. I
• 48:09
  mean, there was literally a show where I was so into it. I
• 48:13
  was having such a good time that they like handed the microphone to me in
• 48:17
  the crowd to like hold up to the trombone player because I was I just
• 48:22
  wouldn't stop. And then another show they were like, hey man, we
• 48:24
  saw you out there like dancing up a storm like a crazy person. Like
• 48:28
  just thanks some it's cool that you're like getting into the musical and I was
• 48:30
  just like they talked to me. Now it's like a go to their house
• 48:35
  and like you know, having barbecue with their kids and stuff. It's so
• 48:37
  wild as far as the DVDs and stuff like that, and reproduction of their
• 48:42
  songs. Do you guys have to have like contracts and things like that that
• 48:45
  were worked out. Just can you give me an idea of how that all
• 48:47
  kind of worked out. So most of the bands, most of the bands
• 48:51
  is UM were off label and they gave us like the rights to do anything
• 48:57
  with their music in the movie, UM, including I mean rock Class of
• 49:01
  Central gave us those rights. And then but then they were like, oh,
• 49:05
  we forgot we're in Canada. No, we have a label in the
• 49:08
  US. UM. So we did have to get in contact with their label,
• 49:13
  but their label basically gave us the rights to use the songs. UM.
• 49:17
  Yeah, you definitely have to get you know, releases signed. You
• 49:21
  have to get all the bands to sign off. But once you do,
• 49:22
  once you get into deliverables, if you if you have a distribution deal,
• 49:25
  you've got to get all the contracts squared away with those artists. But I
• 49:30
  mean, I can remember I think one of the bands from Florida was happy
• 49:32
  to be playing in New York City and Adam uh you know who plays Mickey,
• 49:36
  our producer, one of our producers, He was like, what they're
• 49:38
  in the city right now? He just like hoofed it down to where they
• 49:40
  were playing a show, and like confront of them, it's like, hey,
• 49:43
  can you sign this release for that song that's in our movie. It's
• 49:45
  just like you just gotta you gotta get it all squared away. Deliverables is
• 49:49
  a is an annoying, annoying part of what should be one of the most
• 49:53
  amazing parts of the process, which is, Hey, we're gonna distribute your
• 49:57
  movie. We'll be back after a word from our sponsor, and now back
• 50:06
  to the show. Cool, what do we need to give you? Oh,
• 50:09
  everything that's ever been made in the world, we have to God no,
• 50:15
  yeah, but I mean yeah, in general, I mean, I
• 50:17
  mean we didn't really have to pay for the songs. I mean we I
• 50:22
  think even the record label deferred the payment until after the battery was like bringing
• 50:28
  in money from the distribution. So it was it was pretty pretty awesome.
• 50:31
  Actually, now, can you talk a little bit about your post production process.
• 50:37
  I just want to give people a full view of the whole thing and
• 50:40
  kind of how how you went from taking all you know, even the minutia
• 50:46
  of taking the card out of the camera and did you do backups? Did
• 50:51
  you you know, how how did post production work. Can you talk about
• 50:53
  that? I could talk about on the battery, UM, we had I'll
• 50:59
  tell you we had two hard drives on set. I would I would take
• 51:04
  the cards out every day when we got back to we had these little cabins
• 51:07
  that we were staying in. I would take the card out, put it
• 51:10
  off onto the two hard drives. Then I would move one of the hard
• 51:15
  drives into one the other cabin, just in case one of the cabins got
• 51:20
  broken into because we had all this film camera equipment coming in and out so
• 51:24
  so or it burned down, who knows, you know, So we had
• 51:28
  we had two separate hard drives every day. UM. And then after that,
• 51:32
  post production kind of took like two whole years. I mean, it
• 51:37
  was off and off. I mean it was never just like jumped into it
• 51:40
  all at once because we didn't have time because we had day jobs. But
• 51:45
  yeah, I mean, I mean my sister and Michael Katzman edited the movie.
• 51:50
  UM, and then after that our friend Ryan Winford did the score.
• 51:55
  But everything else then after that was done by me. M So, like
• 52:01
  I did the sound design and the score mixing and the color grading and then
• 52:07
  you know, like the final kind of tweaking to the edit and all that
• 52:10
  stuff, the deliverables um, and that that just was like it's just never
• 52:15
  done. We would play a film festival and I'd come back and be like,
• 52:20
  I gotta fix that color in that scene. I got to fix the
• 52:22
  sound in that scene. But like I said, I mean, we are
• 52:24
  we are lucky in that. You really are lucky if you have people who
• 52:29
  can wear many hats, because it's you know, our editors are you know,
• 52:31
  they put together a rough cut for us and then until I could come
• 52:35
  down and we could really sit there and hone the editum and then but then
• 52:39
  they also just went off on their own and did like hundreds of follies of
• 52:44
  folly sounds for the movie, which we didn't even you think, how are
• 52:47
  we going to get to folly? They just went off and did that Christians
• 52:51
  you know, going into his garage and like recording himself slapping the car like
• 52:54
  a million different times so we can create that soundscape for all the zombies like
• 52:59
  slap their hands up against the windows. So it's like everybody's doing you know,
• 53:04
  jobs they don't know. I remember one thing Christian wanted was somebody to
• 53:07
  do sound design and I met a guy, and Christian flew to New York.
• 53:12
  He flies to New York to meet this guy, and the guy like,
• 53:15
  who's basically like an intern somewhere and he thinks he's a hot shot tells
• 53:21
  us that the movie can't be can't it can't be done in the state.
• 53:24
  It's him, he said, he said we didn't have enough folly. We
• 53:27
  had a thousand pieces of folly in the movie, and he said we needed
• 53:30
  more foliage. Means he didn't even notice it was folly. He was just
• 53:32
  good, yeah, and it was I'm like, we're a six thousand dollars
• 53:37
  movie. We have a thousand pieces of folly in here. And he's saying,
• 53:39
  I can't mix it until there's more folly, and so Christian goes out.
• 53:43
  Christian goes outside for a cigarette. I walk outside and I'm like,
• 53:46
  hey, man, what's going on? And He's like, fuck it,
• 53:49
  I'll learn to do it myself. And anyway home and just watched online tutorials
• 53:53
  and did the sound design himself. So hopefully from here on out, what
• 54:00
  we're hoping is it Christian doesn't have to wear as many hats, because I
• 54:04
  could see him dying his hair is graying, just freaking out because I'm the
• 54:09
  writer, director, actor guy who gets to do all the fun stuff,
• 54:13
  and he's just like, I'm coloring the same scene for a year because we
• 54:16
  added we added editor, like we well, Jeremy and I co edited the
• 54:22
  new movie and but I also did the sound recording on the new movie on
• 54:27
  set. So like I was just adding jobs like and this one. Maybe
• 54:30
  she just sayd the things that you didn't do in the credit to Yeah,
• 54:34
  exactly this one. I mean, I mean tex Montana. All the tech
• 54:38
  was done by me. The only the only thing that wasn't was the score
• 54:42
  was done by Ryan again, but I recorded the score with him, so
• 54:46
  you know, like it's it's just nuts. Now. Was there any when
• 54:50
  you were learning how to do that? Were you just going on YouTube or
• 54:52
  was there any just for people who might want to take on something like that?
• 54:58
  Yeah that helped them, I mean any thing, uh like, because
• 55:01
  I mean even my my other job, I do photography and design. Um,
• 55:05
  there's a site called Linda dot com l y n oh yeah, yeah,
• 55:08
  definitely, yeah, that site. I've learned how to do a million
• 55:13
  things on that site. And it's pretty great because you could just sign up
• 55:15
  for twenty dollars like Crunch for a whole month, and then cancel your subscription,
• 55:22
  but they'd sign up again when you need a refresher. Yeah, that's
• 55:27
  sad because that's I've I've done that before. Yeah, like, I want
• 55:30
  to take this class, but I don't want to. I don't want to
• 55:31
  get a membership. So you can do a two week free trial too.
• 55:35
  Yeah, did you take Dieck McClellan's class. I think Deek is kind of
• 55:40
  the guru over there because I teach photoshop. It's I'm also a graphic designer.
• 55:45
  But um, you know, it's it's funny because I learned Deek was
• 55:49
  the guy that basically taught me photoshop back in like ninety eight or something like
• 55:54
  that. But it came the it used to Linda dot Com used to also
• 56:00
  be I think Total Training. I think they merged or something, and Total
• 56:04
  Training, you stay, you would get like twenty VHS cassettes of how to
• 56:08
  learn photoshop. But I remember that arriving one day and I was just like
• 56:12
  so excited to get the Total Training series. Anyway, Sorry, off topic,
• 56:15
  right, It's it's totally you know, like I'm sure, I'm like
• 56:19
  Deek. I would I would probably recognize him, my son. I'm like,
• 56:21
  oh yeah, oh yeah, yeah, Well I've seen that guy a
• 56:22
  million times because I mean I've watched all every Adobe program I've watched on there,
• 56:27
  because I use pretty much every Adobe program in different jobs. And I
• 56:30
  would say my advice for all of that is to get yourself a Christian,
• 56:37
  because because I just want to go right, I don't want to do that
• 56:39
  shit. We're gonna give Christians email address and home address at the end of
• 56:44
  this so everybody can get in touch with them. Oh I said, get
• 56:46
  yourself a Christian. I don't. Oh, sorry, another Jeremy. Everyone
• 56:53
  needs another Christian, but no one needs another Jeremy. Yeah. Okay.
• 56:59
  So and and color grading, can you talk about that for a second,
• 57:02
  because I mean, yeah, you were in here and deferred to Christian.
• 57:07
  Yeah, you don't know anything about that. Um. Actually this is crazy
• 57:12
  now. Um on the battery, I uh, I was using just the
• 57:17
  built in color corrector stuff in Premiere. Um. Uh. I didn't switch
• 57:24
  to Resolve until text Montana. And that's why I'm still learning Resolve because it's
• 57:30
  it's kind of a whole mind fuck for me. Um. But yeah,
• 57:36
  No, the battery was done with like the fast colored corrector and all these
• 57:39
  other premiere tools um. And then I think towards the end uh colorista um.
• 57:47
  Which but that was already when I was like like after we had premiered
• 57:52
  the movie, I was going back and fixing some things. But then the
• 57:57
  major thing I did on the battery was is um besides I just I was
• 58:01
  color grading it to be really low contrast. I was always bringing up the
• 58:07
  blacks because I felt like when you have these crushed blacks and these super super
• 58:15
  whites, basically, um, it's it's stuff that really you can only do
• 58:20
  with video. UM. And the film didn't really have that because even you
• 58:24
  know, film film in a theater had just light going through it. So
• 58:29
  to me, I was like, I'm not gonna I'm not gonna ever have
• 58:30
  true black in the battery. UM. So it was always kind of raised
• 58:37
  up to like around even like tena iri um. But anyway, I know,
• 58:46
  But the most important thing I did on the battery was I got I
• 58:50
  bought this film grain loop from a company called Gorilla Grain, and it was
• 58:54
  like fifty dollars for a real scan of film grain, and I put it
• 59:00
  over top of that, because over the battery, because not only did it
• 59:05
  make it look more like film, but it also helped with I have been
• 59:07
  doing a lot of noise reduction from shooting high ISO at night, so that
• 59:15
  you know, we use I was using neat video for noise reduction, and
• 59:20
  when you do that, like things start to look plastic e and fake,
• 59:22
  and the film grain really kind of gets rid of that plastic look. But
• 59:29
  now that I shoot with the C one hundred, I'm using Da Vinci Resolve
• 59:31
  because there's just so much more color information there. Yeah, I'm shooting into
• 59:38
  the progress Ninja at amost Ninja two recorder, okay, And it's so it's
• 59:45
  so much more. I mean it's like night and day from the battery.
• 59:49
  So I'd say, like tex Montana Will Survive is a found footage movie.
• 59:54
  We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor and now back to the
• 1:00:01
  show. Yet on a technical level, it's way way more. It's way
• 1:00:10
  better looking than the battery is, Okay, So I don't want to put
• 1:00:15
  Jeremy to sleep over there. So let's talk about are you kidding me?
• 1:00:19
  Have I have recordings of Christian talking tech and I just listened to it as
• 1:00:22
  my lullaby. Yeah, I've just heard it a thousand times, but people
• 1:00:27
  do need to know this ship. As you were making the film, were
• 1:00:29
  you thinking about distribution, were you concerned with trying to build up social awareness
• 1:00:35
  of the you know, what was your idea towards the marketing? You know,
• 1:00:40
  we didn't really have one. Honestly, I think that a lot of
• 1:00:43
  times, speaking of things that could derail your your production, putting a cart
• 1:00:49
  before the horse is one of the main issues too. I mean, I
• 1:00:52
  don't people you'll still spend a month making a poster for a movie that haven't
• 1:00:55
  even considered getting out there and actually making. So it was really just about
• 1:01:00
  one thing at a time, Right, Let's let's make a movie first.
• 1:01:01
  Let's see if we've got a movie first, and then okay, well,
• 1:01:04
  let's see how we can get people to see it. And then it became
• 1:01:08
  you know, the festival circuit, trying to get into festivals, and then
• 1:01:14
  you know, getting a trailer cut together, that's that's interesting enough to where
• 1:01:17
  you might get some people a little bit of buzz about it, get it
• 1:01:21
  to some websites that traffic in those things, and just start to build an
• 1:01:23
  awareness, But it really wasn't until the festival. The festival circuit kind of
• 1:01:29
  kicked up that we started building an online presence and then going to those festivals
• 1:01:35
  and glad handing and meeting people and talking to them is really the only way
• 1:01:38
  you're going to get getting noticed in you know, because there's so many people
• 1:01:43
  making movies now. The only way you're gonna rise to the top is is
• 1:01:45
  to get into festivals, get seen, be there, meet as many people
• 1:01:49
  as possible, be nice, be humble, have drinks with them, make
• 1:01:53
  yourself available. What were some of the more important festivals for the film in
• 1:01:58
  terms of like what you guys connections and things like that, or what were
• 1:02:00
  the most fun ones? The fun ones are there's so many fun ones.
• 1:02:05
  I mean the first, the first one we got into is the Tellyright Horror
• 1:02:07
  Show on Colorado, which was amazing, and that was our world premiere and
• 1:02:13
  we were super excited about that. And then after that we didn't get into
• 1:02:15
  anything for months. I mean, it got really demoralizing. You start throwing
• 1:02:20
  fifty dollars a pop at these festivals and not hearing anything, and it's like
• 1:02:22
  you're chucking money into a hole and you have no idea what's going on,
• 1:02:27
  and then out of the blue, we got an email from Imagine in Amsterdam,
• 1:02:31
  which is a big genre festival that's been going on out there for about
• 1:02:35
  twenty five years, and we got into that. And then because they are
• 1:02:38
  a part of kind of a genre of Europe, like an international genre like
• 1:02:44
  coalition almost of film festivals, other film festivals that were in that same union
• 1:02:49
  started asking for the movie. So there's this weird thing that happens where at
• 1:02:52
  first you're spending a lot of money to get to submit to festivals and not
• 1:02:57
  hearing anything. Then you get into one, and then suddenly other festivals know
• 1:03:00
  that that's happening, and then they start saying they're going to waive their submission
• 1:03:05
  fee. And then at some point, not only do they waive the submission
• 1:03:07
  fee, they just invite you to screen their period. And then at some
• 1:03:13
  point they start flying you out and they start paying you screening fees to show
• 1:03:17
  your movie. So it's this really weird process where if you're lucky enough to
• 1:03:22
  catch a little bit of fire on the festival circuit, you can go from
• 1:03:25
  spending money to making money and getting to see the world. So Imagine definitely
• 1:03:30
  was what kick started that. And then from there we went to We won
• 1:03:35
  the Audience Award there, which has been won by like Silence of the Lambs
• 1:03:38
  and you know, The Raid and Donnie Darko and from Dust till Don all
• 1:03:43
  these like great big genre movies, and we won that award somehow, And
• 1:03:46
  I know that's just because we were there. We were there for a week,
• 1:03:50
  we were having beers with people, we were shaking hands, We do
• 1:03:52
  lively Q and a's and we you know, and it's it's part of the
• 1:03:55
  politics of building an audience and hoping that they'll all you to your next project,
• 1:04:00
  just just saying I know, I'm living in a dream right now,
• 1:04:03
  and I want to be respectful and humble of the entire process. So it's
• 1:04:06
  um. That was really fun. Then we went to Dead by Don in
• 1:04:09
  Scotland and won the Audience Award there, and then we went to Brazil and
• 1:04:13
  Mexico City. Fantasia was sold out crowd, even though we were already released
• 1:04:18
  in the United States, which was kind of a hang up. They weren't
• 1:04:20
  sure if they could play it. They decided to take a chance on us
• 1:04:24
  anyway, and it was completely sold out there. Was still a line outside
• 1:04:27
  when they shut the doors. We ended up giving up our own seats so
• 1:04:30
  some more people could squeeze in. Um just just a really amazing process to
• 1:04:35
  go over the world, go down to Brazil and and you know we we
• 1:04:39
  were the opening night film at Macabre in Mexico City, like five hundred people
• 1:04:43
  in the theater. Like red carpet and flashbulbs and but these things really like
• 1:04:46
  they help you build traction and and and now to see on this Kickstarter campaign
• 1:04:53
  how many of those people from all over the world have kicked in that we
• 1:04:56
  don't even know is incredible. And that's that's just from not taking your audience
• 1:05:01
  for granted. And of course it helps that. You know, the thing
• 1:05:05
  I said at the beginning of this whole process was if we do at least
• 1:05:09
  come close to what I'm what I'm trying to do here, which is make
• 1:05:13
  this interesting, you know, artsy, character driven zombie movie, that the
• 1:05:18
  gate keepers of the indie horror world will respond to it. And then you
• 1:05:24
  know, to get people like ain't a cool News and bloody disgusting in Fangoria
• 1:05:28
  and dread Central, all these people to write really positive things about the movie.
• 1:05:30
  Just really helped helped push it along. Were you doing anything or was
• 1:05:34
  it just like once you got the first festival, what was it? Imagine?
• 1:05:38
  Imagine you know, once you got that, all these things just started
• 1:05:41
  happening without a whole lot of effort from you guys. Or were you still
• 1:05:45
  like out there pushing it and promoting it. I mean we were always pushing
• 1:05:48
  it in our way, you know, through Twitter, and you send a
• 1:05:50
  couple of emails here and here and there. But it's amazing how many people
• 1:05:54
  find it on their own. You can you can try morning, noon,
• 1:05:59
  and night to get press for something and never hear a word, and then
• 1:06:02
  as soon as something happens, it just you can't stop it. It's it
• 1:06:08
  just takes off on its own. It really is crazy. I mean,
• 1:06:10
  it's like the Catch twenty two about you know, getting an agent, Like
• 1:06:14
  you can't get an agent unless an agent comes looking for you, and by
• 1:06:17
  then you need an agent. It's just one of those weird things where it's
• 1:06:19
  just you. You're not gonna get press until the press hears about you,
• 1:06:24
  until they can't ignore you anymore. Right, Yeah, I mean that's one
• 1:06:28
  of the things we talk about with our marketing. The film marketing program is
• 1:06:31
  the idea that you need to be. You know, if you go to
• 1:06:35
  somebody, you need to be the person that's already kind of in front of
• 1:06:39
  like horror fans or zombie fans. You know, so if you're getting on
• 1:06:42
  Bloody Disgusting or fang Warrior or whatever, there's no way you're gonna you could
• 1:06:45
  do that on your own. You know, those people already have that fan
• 1:06:48
  base. Right. Well there's another well there are little things too, right,
• 1:06:53
  So even though we want this movie to stand on its own as a
• 1:06:56
  film, it definitely helped that we were able to every time we were talking
• 1:07:00
  talking about it at a Q and A or whatever, to say that we
• 1:07:01
  made it for six thousand dollars because it was the truth. But it's also
• 1:07:04
  it's a it's a clear marketing hook, right, people are going to write
• 1:07:08
  about that. Um. So it was one of those things where we actually
• 1:07:11
  talked about like do we really want to talk about the budget for this movie
• 1:07:14
  or do we want to just let it have, let it exist on its
• 1:07:16
  own merits. But at some point it was just like, you know what,
• 1:07:18
  it's too it's too good of of of a marketing hook and the Walking
• 1:07:23
  Dead helped as well, which the movie. I mean, the movie was
• 1:07:26
  conceived before the Walking Dead premiere, but I mean that was major. Yeah,
• 1:07:31
  there's little things like that, and um, what was I just gonna
• 1:07:35
  say, Um, I don't know. I'm glad I threw you. Thanks,
• 1:07:39
  Thanks Christian, thanks for popping in there and talking about well, I'm
• 1:07:44
  saying that zombies. Zombies don't hurt, but we didn't. We were not
• 1:07:47
  planning on that at all. In fact, they might have actually like stunted
• 1:07:51
  the movie if if zombies were as big as they are now. Oh no,
• 1:07:55
  well, I mean even even when it came out, I you know,
• 1:07:58
  I heard zombie fatigue, zombie fatigue all over the place, and it
• 1:08:00
  was like, oh boy, here we go. I mean, he got
• 1:08:01
  to the point where when I told people I made a movie, I would
• 1:08:04
  say, oh, yeah, I made this little like artsy horror movie.
• 1:08:05
  I wouldn't say the zombie word unless I was pressed, because it's just,
• 1:08:11
  you know, you hear so many people just completely shut down when when they
• 1:08:14
  hear zombie, and that's just annoying. That always annoys me. I always
• 1:08:17
  said, like nothing is worn out if someone makes a good one. I
• 1:08:20
  mean, you can make five hundred vampire movies and be sick of them all.
• 1:08:24
  As soon as someone makes a good one, it's like, oh,
• 1:08:26
  the return of the vampire film. It's no, it's just because someone made
• 1:08:30
  a good one again. It really is. You know, when you're making
• 1:08:31
  a zombie film, it's never about the zombies. It's always about the human,
• 1:08:35
  you know. I mean Walking Dead is not about zombies at all.
• 1:08:39
  It's so yeah, absolutely no, and that's the way it should be,
• 1:08:43
  right. I mean, it got to the point where I was even considering
• 1:08:45
  very briefly when it was you know, it's difficult for us to try to
• 1:08:48
  get you know, makeup for the movie. I was like, you know
• 1:08:50
  what, let's just put all of the zombies in T shirts with a Z
• 1:08:55
  on it and then don't you don't even don't even deal with this the zombie
• 1:08:58
  makeup. Just to prove that this is more about the characters than the zombies.
• 1:09:00
  We'll just that'll really piss people off and be weird. But that was
• 1:09:04
  a little, maybe a little too esoteric. So okay, let's talk about
• 1:09:10
  distribution. No, discuss the distribution aspect of the battery. Uh yeah,
• 1:09:19
  uh okay, um no, yeah, no, it's um. Well,
• 1:09:27
  so you know, after we got to that first festival, Tell You Right,
• 1:09:30
  Horror, we were approached by film buff about them the digital rights,
• 1:09:33
  um the world relation, the worldwide digital rights yea. And and you know,
• 1:09:41
  like I said, between Tell Your Ride and Imagine, we didn't have
• 1:09:44
  a lot going on and didn't see it. Felt like, okay, that
• 1:09:45
  was it, that was our We're winding down now, so let's let's do
• 1:09:50
  this. Let's let's get on this train. And you know, of course,
• 1:09:55
  then the movie takes off. We'll be right back after a word for
• 1:10:00
  our sponsor and now back to the show. And you start to wonder,
• 1:10:09
  oh boy, And we got approached by a lot of people saying, oh,
• 1:10:11
  you've already given away your worldwide digital rights? Are you crazy? And
• 1:10:15
  you know, that's a lesson you got to learn, is that you gotta
• 1:10:18
  I mean, it's a hard lesson to learn if you've never done at the
• 1:10:20
  business side. It's so difficult to navigate if you're just coming into it.
• 1:10:27
  I think, far more difficult to navigate than actually making a moving because every
• 1:10:30
  time you do something, someone tells you you made the wrong decision. But
• 1:10:34
  through having that, at some point we were able to get our international rights
• 1:10:41
  back from them because we had we realized that they weren't really interested in selling
• 1:10:45
  the international rights. They were really more focused on getting the movie out in
• 1:10:48
  America. And excuse me, we met a woman named Anna Mannard who saw
• 1:10:55
  the film at a festival in France, and she has been just an incredible
• 1:11:00
  champion of this movie from the moment she saw it. She actually flew to
• 1:11:03
  Germany while we were there and had brunch with us and has just been working
• 1:11:09
  tirelessly to get us into festivals. And she works with Raven Banner in Canada
• 1:11:14
  as an international sales agent and got them to take the movie on and they
• 1:11:17
  were able to go out and sell it to territories across the world. And
• 1:11:20
  then, speaking of getting a champion, you know a j Bow and the
• 1:11:25
  actor he when he saw the movie, he didn't stop talking about it at
• 1:11:29
  all, and he would go on podcasts and mention it, and he would
• 1:11:31
  mention it to the point where the host of those podcasts started there like,
• 1:11:34
  all right, we got to watch this movie. This guy won't shut up
• 1:11:36
  about the battery. And then they watched it, and then they wouldn't stop
• 1:11:40
  talking about it and it just so happened that they had frequent guests on who
• 1:11:44
  run screen Factory and Shout Factory, and because they talked about it so much,
• 1:11:47
  finally Screen Factory was like, all right, let's see what this movie
• 1:11:49
  that these guys won't shut up about is. And then we were able to
• 1:11:53
  get a DVD and Blu Ray deal from Screen Factory, which is just I
• 1:11:59
  mean, that was I think we grew two feet tall. Our heads couldn't
• 1:12:02
  fit through the doors. One. It's just amazing because you're told to wrap
• 1:12:05
  the bat that you're not gonna be able to get a physical, a physical
• 1:12:10
  distribution deal if you've given away your digital rights. But you know, but
• 1:12:14
  those guys are just make such beautiful physical, you know things in a in
• 1:12:16
  a digital world now that luckily they were able to just take a flyer on
• 1:12:21
  us and we got to put this amazing blue ray out with this documentary which
• 1:12:26
  covers all the ground you're making us cover right now. I'm kidding, but
• 1:12:32
  it isn't a fantastic documentary. You should really, uh, I encourage everybody
• 1:12:38
  to check it out if they can, because we basically made that exactly what
• 1:12:43
  we were talking about earlier, which is my film school was watching DVD extras
• 1:12:46
  and listening to podcasts, and so we made a ninety minute feature length documentary
• 1:12:49
  that goes from those stupid short films we were making high school all the way
• 1:12:54
  to the festival circuit on the Battery, and it goes through every step of
• 1:12:58
  the process. And we really wanted it to be where if somebody sees this
• 1:13:00
  and they're like on the cusp of thinking can I make a movie or not,
• 1:13:04
  then this would push them over and say, just go do it,
• 1:13:06
  because it's gonna be hard, but it's gonna be amazing. Now, the
• 1:13:10
  documentary is only available with the DVD in the Blue Ray, is there right
• 1:13:15
  or is it? Yeah? For now, for now it is. It's
• 1:13:17
  only on the North American Blue Ray DVD released by Screen Factory. UM.
• 1:13:23
  But we're we're looking into whether or not we can put it up online for
• 1:13:28
  free, UM because I think it's promotion for the DVD and Blue Ray.
• 1:13:33
  UM. And it's like, I like, we're saying, it's it's a
• 1:13:38
  really really wonderful kind of thing for filmmakers. UM. But I'm almost more
• 1:13:44
  proud of it than I am of the Battery, just because because if I
• 1:13:46
  had you know, it's seen something so thorough and you know, so so
• 1:13:50
  so naked about the you know, the ups and downs of the process.
• 1:13:53
  I would have been like, that's it. We're doing this thing, and
• 1:13:56
  that's that's what we're hoping. And oh god, I worked on that documentary
• 1:13:59
  for like six months. But it's like ten ten bucks for the DVD or
• 1:14:03
  something on Amazon. You and you get that that and the and the movie
• 1:14:06
  and the commentaries and the outtakes and stuff like that. So there's a and
• 1:14:10
  we really tried to pack it with as much if you want to make a
• 1:14:13
  movie, watch this stuff as you can. I don't even know where we
• 1:14:16
  started with that question, what was it distribution? Distribution? But yeah,
• 1:14:23
  I think that I think what humans getting at was just that, um,
• 1:14:27
  you know, for first time movie, are our first movie. Um,
• 1:14:32
  there's just there's a lot of like legal stuff and lawyers and expenses and so
• 1:14:38
  on that happen in distribution, so you know, and on the Battery we
• 1:14:43
  had like ten investors, so not a lot of that money trickles down to
• 1:14:47
  us in the end um but like just due to the system, like the
• 1:14:54
  whole the whole system in general. It's not like It's not like screen Factory
• 1:14:58
  didn't pay well. They paid great. It's just one of those things where
• 1:15:02
  you have to do It's I wish there were I wish I could create a
• 1:15:05
  like a list of things you need to do once you start to enter the
• 1:15:10
  distribution process of making a movie. But it is literally so dance and there
• 1:15:15
  are so many possibilities you I almost feel like you just kind of have to
• 1:15:23
  read as much as you can and then wait in and then make a decision.
• 1:15:27
  Because the amount of of options that we had that we didn't know we
• 1:15:32
  were going to have when we made one decision, that suddenly another avenue opened
• 1:15:35
  up later. If we hadn't done this, we could have done that.
• 1:15:38
  It's just there's just no way to navigate it. And we try as hard
• 1:15:42
  as we can. We've had you know, filmmakers email us and contact us
• 1:15:45
  and ask us about particular you know, distribution companies or deals or and it's
• 1:15:48
  just like, man, if it feels right, do it. There's just
• 1:15:54
  no you'll you're gonna learn from the process. Is the only way to the
• 1:15:58
  only way to really go about it. I mean, I'm sure someone out
• 1:16:00
  there has can elucidate much more you know with much better clarity than I can
• 1:16:05
  on this part of the process. But it was easily the most difficult part
• 1:16:09
  of the entire process for us to navigate was the business side and the distribution
• 1:16:13
  side. I think you just kind of got to learn as you go.
• 1:16:15
  The thing that's interesting, you know, listening to that is when you say
• 1:16:18
  it's a six thousand dollars movie, I've heard people that work in independent film
• 1:16:24
  talk about just the deliverables costing more than that. Well, I mean when
• 1:16:30
  it comes to distribution, a lot of the deliverable stuff was just like written
• 1:16:35
  off of our payment. So you know, that's like I think, like
• 1:16:43
  maybe the entire first year of the release, I mean, like just everything
• 1:16:47
  went to expenses. So yeah, we didn't have to pay for a lot
• 1:16:51
  of things up front, but yeah we had to. But I always say
• 1:16:57
  that the six thousand dollars is the production budget. That's what it cost us
• 1:17:00
  to get to the premiere and tell you write horror show. And then we
• 1:17:04
  did have some business related expenses after that, but we already had deals on
• 1:17:11
  the table that we were ready to sign, so you know, like I
• 1:17:15
  know, one for a fact was what's called errors and emissions insurance, you
• 1:17:21
  know, yeah, and that was like, that was like four thousand dollars
• 1:17:25
  that we had to pay. And I think Adam got a personal loan from
• 1:17:29
  his father or something and he and you know, and then he got paid
• 1:17:31
  back eventually. But we you know, we had deals on the table at
• 1:17:35
  that time. We would have never paid for that if we didn't. I
• 1:17:40
  mean, there are certain things you can do to make it make it easier
• 1:17:43
  to navigate, like just make sure you've got all your your performance releases signed
• 1:17:46
  by your actors, make sure that you've got a chain of title, you
• 1:17:49
  know, in order. There are things that you're gonna just look up a
• 1:17:53
  list of the typical deliverables. And then there are certain you know, there
• 1:17:58
  are certain ones that you can check off before you even make the movie or
• 1:18:00
  while you're in pre production that we just didn't even think about until we were
• 1:18:03
  done. But I'm pretty sure that as far as like the business expenses of
• 1:18:08
  the battery, maybe had I think that plus creating an LLC for like two
• 1:18:14
  thousand dollars, I think those might have been the only ones that we paid
• 1:18:17
  up front, and then the rest were deducted later on through distribution companies and
• 1:18:24
  so on. And not to say that that wasn't a lot. It was
• 1:18:27
  a lot. It was just we didn't have to pay it up front.
• 1:18:30
  Yeah, when you get your first report of your residuals and you see that
• 1:18:34
  gigantic chunk that goes to expenses, so you just go, oh, that
• 1:18:39
  was like three months rent more. So, Yeah, I just wanted I
• 1:18:44
  kind of wanted to go into the things that Jeremy discussed in his article on
• 1:18:49
  MovieMaker, because I you know, it really is something that I think a
• 1:18:55
  lot of filmmakers don't talk about and people don't want to. You know,
• 1:19:00
  first of all, people don't ever want to talk about pirating, you know,
• 1:19:03
  and what a big deal it is now and how easy it is for
• 1:19:06
  people just to download anything they want for free, and how much that affects
• 1:19:12
  you guys on the distribution side, and you know, and can we talk
• 1:19:16
  about how that's affected the way that you, you know, your your newest
• 1:19:19
  project. Yeah, I mean, I'll say, because it's something I don't
• 1:19:23
  think he put in the article, was that like the day our movie was
• 1:19:28
  released, the piracy was I mean, within three hours of the iTunes released,
• 1:19:31
  the piracy was just insane. But even like a year later, there
• 1:19:38
  was a day where some piracy group released a version of our movie and it
• 1:19:43
  was like the thirtieth torrent of our movie, and there was a hundred thousand
• 1:19:47
  downloads of that torrent in twenty four hours. In that same twenty four hours,
• 1:19:54
  we were selling the movie DRM free on our website for five dollars.
• 1:19:59
  Well, be right back after a word from our sponsor, and now back
• 1:20:05
  to the show. In that same twenty four hours we sold two copies.
• 1:20:11
  We made ten dollars, and all of our other digital sales had kind of
• 1:20:15
  just slowed to a halt at that point. So it was like there were
• 1:20:21
  one hundred thousand stolen in one day. A year after release, we make
• 1:20:27
  ten dollars that day. It's it's it's the ratio that's insane, you know,
• 1:20:31
  Like piracy is kind of a way of life at this point. I
• 1:20:33
  get it, but the ratio should be far, far less. Like I
• 1:20:40
  would say, there's got to be anywhere from twenty to eighty illegal downloads per
• 1:20:45
  every one real rental. That's just way too high. Yeah, And those
• 1:20:50
  those those those are never going to translate one to one, you know,
• 1:20:54
  for you know, if everybody who pirated it bought it instead. Well,
• 1:20:57
  that's never gonna happen. That's just not the way it works. I think
• 1:21:00
  I did touch on in the article that it is easy to vilify the piracy
• 1:21:02
  community because yes, they're they're they're causing a lot of issues in the movie
• 1:21:09
  business. I mean, where a five million dollar budget five years ago,
• 1:21:13
  you know, you could you could wrangle with you know, the companies who
• 1:21:16
  fund those movies now are really really hemming and hawing over a quarter million dollar
• 1:21:20
  budget because they know at the second that movie is released on demand, it's
• 1:21:25
  going to be pirated, and so the risks go way higher, and so
• 1:21:29
  the budgets are driven way down. Less movies are made, which means less
• 1:21:32
  crew jobs. There's so many things that it affects that people don't know.
• 1:21:35
  And I think you're never I think people tiptoe around the piracy issue because you're
• 1:21:40
  never going to get the pirates. The people who torrent on your side are
• 1:21:44
  the ones who believe that everything should be free and information is free and screw
• 1:21:48
  you, and I don't care. You're never going to get those guys.
• 1:21:51
  But there is an interesting contingent of the piracy population who number one would down
• 1:22:00
  loaded if they could if it were available in their territory. And there is
• 1:22:04
  something to be said about the fact that, you know, the way that
• 1:22:08
  movies are distributed nowadays is not taking into account the fact that the world is
• 1:22:12
  completely connected. Everybody knows what's going on in the movie world, everywhere in
• 1:22:16
  the world, and so you know, I can remember even myself, you
• 1:22:20
  know, years ago, hearing all about The loved Ones, that was an
• 1:22:25
  Australian horror movie, right, and it's just like you hear so many great
• 1:22:28
  things about it, and you never know when is this coming out here?
• 1:22:30
  And you just you keep hearing people talk about it, and you're like,
• 1:22:33
  am I ever going to get to see it? And I actually, I
• 1:22:34
  mean ended up getting dumped in the US like four years later. But it's
• 1:22:39
  one of those things where it just seems crazy not to hit on, you
• 1:22:44
  know, hit on the audience when they're ready for it, when they want
• 1:22:47
  it. So that's one part of the of the piracy thing that needs to
• 1:22:51
  be taken care of. Another one is that I just genuinely feel that there
• 1:22:56
  is a certain amount of people out there, especially of a certain age group,
• 1:23:00
  who absolutely have no idea the devastation it causes throughout the industry. They
• 1:23:06
  just movies are not what they used to be. When I was a kid,
• 1:23:10
  you know, I would you know, I beg to be taken down
• 1:23:13
  to the video store and I would stay in there for two hours. They
• 1:23:15
  were things that I knew were made and they were big, and then you
• 1:23:17
  had to go and get them, and you had to pay for them,
• 1:23:19
  and sometimes you didn't like them, and that's part of the process. You
• 1:23:24
  gamble a little bit with your money, and maybe you see the greatest thing
• 1:23:27
  you've ever seen, and maybe you see a turd, but that's part of
• 1:23:30
  the process. Now there's a generation that just simply thinks of them as little
• 1:23:34
  tiny thumbnail posters that you click on and then they play, and that's it.
• 1:23:39
  And there's no heft to the process and the amount of people and time
• 1:23:46
  that goes into making these movies anymore. And I think that is that's just
• 1:23:50
  a re education that needs to happen, or it might not might not even
• 1:23:54
  be able to happen. I just don't know if you can convince a generation
• 1:23:57
  that gets it for free, why they wouldn't get it for free anymore.
• 1:24:00
  It's a it's a real sticky, prickly issue to bring up. I think
• 1:24:04
  that another huge thing is just the fact that people aren't going to theaters anymore
• 1:24:08
  too, And it's like everything has become just digital files now, and we've
• 1:24:12
  gotten so far from the days when you had to go to a theater and
• 1:24:16
  watch a film and then many many months later you would be able to rent
• 1:24:21
  a copy at your local video club and sometimes they would be they wouldn't have
• 1:24:26
  it, you know. It's that whole culture has disappeared. Oh it's completely
• 1:24:29
  gone. And I loved I miss it and yeah, I mean even in
• 1:24:31
  you know, the movie that changed my life, that made me like super
• 1:24:36
  aware of that movies were made was Jurassic Park. That sounds might sound crazy,
• 1:24:41
  but that was the first time I started thinking about well, it's one
• 1:24:45
  I remember someone telling me, Hey, the dinosaurs are made with computers,
• 1:24:47
  and my brain, my like little twelve year old brain just went like what,
• 1:24:51
  Like that's not possible. What do you mean they're made with computers?
• 1:24:55
  And suddenly I started thinking about the behind the scenes process of making a movie.
• 1:25:00
  And I cut my first lawn, much to my father's chagrin because he's
• 1:25:04
  been trying to get me to mow the lawn for years. I mowed my
• 1:25:08
  first lawn to get money to go see Jurassic Park because I saw it seven
• 1:25:11
  times in the theater and that movie didn't come out on VHS for over a
• 1:25:14
  year after it was in the theater. You know, it was just like
• 1:25:16
  waiting for this thing to come out so you can have it, and those
• 1:25:20
  that that's just gone. Now, you know, the movie comes out,
• 1:25:23
  people go see it opening night, opening weekend, kind of fizzles out,
• 1:25:27
  and then ninety days later or less you can download it or steal it or
• 1:25:30
  rent it online. Yeah. Yeah, a lot of times, you know,
• 1:25:34
  here it's like you'll see the movie will come out in like a torn
• 1:25:39
  or something, even before it comes to a theater. It's ridiculous, you
• 1:25:42
  know, And I've been trying. I've been making an effort to try and
• 1:25:45
  see everything in a theater now, and it's so different, you know,
• 1:25:47
  the concentration that you have in the way that you're affected by the movies.
• 1:25:53
  I mean, even watching it on a great big HDTV, it's just not
• 1:25:56
  the same. No, it's not. It's a whole different experience. And
• 1:26:00
  what's crazy is you're right, it's it's this communal thing that I love it
• 1:26:03
  and more people should engage with I was actually my mother. You know,
• 1:26:06
  she's not a huge like cinema person, but I'm down in Florida and I
• 1:26:10
  get to see her for the first time in a while. And she'll always
• 1:26:13
  tell me she tried to watch this movie and she couldn't get into it because
• 1:26:15
  I know she's just sitting there distracted. She's got her phone, she's got
• 1:26:18
  Facebook's And I took her to the movies for the first time in like twenty
• 1:26:23
  years. We saw a couple of movies in the last couple weeks. And
• 1:26:25
  to watch her sit there and fully focus on the movie and like follow it
• 1:26:30
  and be engaged with it because she knows she can't pick her phone up or
• 1:26:31
  leave. It's just like, oh yeah, that's why you go to the
• 1:26:34
  theater. You go to the theater to commit to the experience of letting a
• 1:26:39
  story wash over you. Not with your phone and not with going to the
• 1:26:43
  bathroom and getting up and going to the kitchen. It's just you're there,
• 1:26:45
  You're in it. Well, it depends on where you go too, because
• 1:26:47
  I see, I mean, it drives me nuts. But people that just
• 1:26:50
  bring out their cell phone in the middle of the movie. I mean,
• 1:26:53
  I had to like yell at a guy the other day because he's just sitting
• 1:26:56
  there checking his Facebook in the middle of something I don't number one Star Wars.
• 1:27:00
  It's just it's it boggles my mind that with the amount of I mean,
• 1:27:05
  it's it's clear at this point that it is a serious social faux pas,
• 1:27:10
  and people still do it. Yeah. You know, it's funny because
• 1:27:13
  I was listening to your interview on the critics what's it called the review podcasting
• 1:27:20
  the Critics and your comments about well, let me put it this way,
• 1:27:25
  one of the greatest experiences I ever had in a theater was watching Dances with
• 1:27:28
  Wolves. And I really love the fact that you were saying that how good
• 1:27:31
  that movie was and how people have kind of forgotten about it because I watched
• 1:27:34
  it recently and I didn't realize I was watching the um the director's cut,
• 1:27:42
  which is like twelve hours long, you know, because I was supposed to
• 1:27:45
  go to a friend's house later, and I was like, yeah, I'm
• 1:27:47
  sitting here watching Dances with Wolves. But it's not it's not ending here.
• 1:27:53
  It's been on for the last four hours and we're still not to the midpoint.
• 1:27:57
  But it's such an amazing movie. And I don't I don't ever see
• 1:27:59
  how having that kind of experience again, I don't know. Movies just aren't
• 1:28:02
  made like that anymore. No, they're not. And you know that's a
• 1:28:05
  thing. That's another thing that people don't understand about the what piracy has done.
• 1:28:10
  Right. You want to know where those movies, I mean, Dances
• 1:28:13
  wils didn't cost that much money. But you don't want to know where those
• 1:28:15
  middle those mid range budget movies have gone, those adult movies, those grown
• 1:28:19
  up movies. I mean when I was in you know, in high school,
• 1:28:23
  I saw every single movie that came out. I can remember going and
• 1:28:26
  seeing Return to Paradise. Did you ever see that movie? That's a that's
• 1:28:30
  a drama. Yeah, Jackey Phoenix, Vince Vaughan and Haiti. It's a
• 1:28:34
  movie that time has completely forgotten. And yet it was a movie that came
• 1:28:38
  out on a Friday and I went and saw it, you know what,
• 1:28:40
  I loved it, and it could it could never be released. No one
• 1:28:43
  would ever make that like thirty million dollars, you know, drama about like
• 1:28:48
  should they go back and take a guy out of a Malaysian prison? And
• 1:28:51
  then the movie was such that's really rough. But it's like, what's the
• 1:28:56
  budget of Bone Tomahawk, Like one point two or one point eight million dollars
• 1:29:00
  in that movie, like just like fifteen years ago, would have been like
• 1:29:04
  a fifteen twenty five million dollar movie. Yeah, and in theaters like everywhere.
• 1:29:09
  Yeah, it is strange, but you know, but that's the thing
• 1:29:12
  is like so now because of that, because they need to milk every single
• 1:29:15
  dollar out of that opening weekend. That's why you're getting so many giant superhero
• 1:29:18
  movies. That's why you're getting sequels, that's why you're getting because they have
• 1:29:21
  to curb every possible risk. They can't take a risk on some of these
• 1:29:26
  small movies. I mean, luckily there's you know, people like Megan Elson
• 1:29:28
  and an apparentent pictures like putting movie, putting money into these like tours movies.
• 1:29:31
  But for the most part, the movies that filled the bulk of the
• 1:29:35
  year, you know, ten years ago, they just aren't being made anymore
• 1:29:40
  because you've got to get that four quadrant picture out. So you're either talking
• 1:29:43
  about movies being made under a million or over one hundred million. And it's
• 1:29:47
  just a weird, weird thing in the little giant like giant movies, like
• 1:29:50
  would Jerry McGuire be made today? We'll be right back after a word from
• 1:29:56
  our sponsor, and now back to the show, and like it was a
• 1:30:04
  huge hit, and like, yeah, would somebody green light Jerry maguire?
• 1:30:08
  Probably not, or I think he could get a movie just I mean,
• 1:30:11
  like look at David o'russell and guys like that, you know, Wes Anderson
• 1:30:14
  and Pete Anderson and those guys. I mean, they can get stuff made,
• 1:30:17
  but it's because they have the brand name. You know, they know
• 1:30:19
  there's going to be an audience for that, right But even even then,
• 1:30:23
  I mean you're talking about again, that's Megan Allison. You know, she's
• 1:30:25
  a billionaire's daughter who's decided to take her money and give it to the directors
• 1:30:30
  who aren't getting I mean the master. You know, she's done. She's
• 1:30:32
  funded a ton of those movies that the David David o' russell movies too.
• 1:30:35
  She decided to put her money behind artists where the studios are afraid to sometimes.
• 1:30:41
  I mean, even look at like Spielberg was saying he was having trouble
• 1:30:43
  getting money for Lincoln. It was gonna be a TV movie because you couldn't
• 1:30:46
  get the money to make it as a theatrical movie. There's it's just crazy
• 1:30:50
  how afraid Hollywood is of taking chances anymore. And a lot of that is
• 1:30:57
  because those movies aren't swallowed up by Torrance. Well, I want to make
• 1:31:01
  sure we have enough time to talk about Text Montana Will Survive. Can we
• 1:31:06
  do a segue into that and talk about how you've approached that and especially this
• 1:31:11
  kind of unique way that you guys are using Kickstarter to fund it or it's
• 1:31:15
  not being funded, but it's it's a way to control the distribution process.
• 1:31:17
  Yeah. Absolutely, I mean, Text Montana Will Survive is a movie.
• 1:31:20
  We shot it two years ago, but then our day jobs took hold again.
• 1:31:25
  But we're trying to use Kickstarter to basically buy them. Like we want
• 1:31:30
  the Internet to buy the movie off of us, the way that someone would
• 1:31:32
  go to soun Nance and buy a movie for a million dollars off of filmmakers.
• 1:31:38
  We want the Internet to do that. We want to it's a finished
• 1:31:41
  film and we want if we hit our goal, we're just going to give
• 1:31:45
  the movie to the Internet via creative comments, So that way torrenting will be
• 1:31:49
  completely allowed. And encouraged. We'll have DVDs that you can burn, with
• 1:31:56
  artwork that you could print, and we'll have it on YouTube Vimeo. So
• 1:32:00
  this was kind of our reaction to piracy, which is that like, rather
• 1:32:04
  than vilify the torrents, like, let's use them as a distribution method.
• 1:32:12
  So you know, I mean hopefully it works. Uh yeah, the days
• 1:32:15
  are kicking down, but um, you know it's a way to to um
• 1:32:20
  try and get a hold of those people who did torent the movie who would
• 1:32:24
  have paid for it as well. You know these are there are you know
• 1:32:27
  we got We put up a comment on some of our torrents on some of
• 1:32:30
  these torrent sites a couple of years ago, just saying, look, we're
• 1:32:33
  not passing judgment, um, but we're you know, we're day job filmmakers.
• 1:32:38
  You know, we're barely getting by. We made this movie for sixth
• 1:32:40
  grand. If you like what you see, um, you know, consider
• 1:32:44
  kicking in. And we had a lot of people donate money through that,
• 1:32:48
  and so those are the kind of people who use torrents that we're hoping that
• 1:32:51
  we can get ahead of time rather than slowly letting the movie roll out traditionally,
• 1:32:57
  like the battery did and having people in Australia go, well, I
• 1:33:00
  don't know when it's going to be in Australia, so I'm just going to
• 1:33:02
  download it now. So if we can just get it all up front,
• 1:33:05
  then maybe we'll have the cushion to take time off work and make a movie
• 1:33:10
  and then everybody everywhere in the world can see it at the same time if
• 1:33:14
  they want to. So does that mean that you don't have I mean,
• 1:33:19
  when you do creative commons, does that mean that you no longer have ownership
• 1:33:25
  of it? About? How does that work the particular creative there's a there's
• 1:33:29
  a couple of creative commons licenses, but the one we're going to be using
• 1:33:32
  basically means that you have to give us credit for the movie and that you
• 1:33:39
  can You can't profit off of the movie itself, as in the audience can't
• 1:33:45
  profit off the movie, but the audience will be allowed to like remix it
• 1:33:49
  or so on, Like if they wanted to take audio from it and use
• 1:33:53
  it in something that they make, they can make profit off of that.
• 1:33:56
  So you're kind of allowed to mess with the movie movie, um, but
• 1:34:00
  other than that, you're totally allowed to share it. And do everything else.
• 1:34:03
  So the only thing is that we still have to get credit. And
• 1:34:08
  yeah, basically you can't just put it in your own box and sell it
• 1:34:12
  as is in a store, but you can use it to remake art,
• 1:34:15
  right. It's it's artists saying, you know, here, here's a piece
• 1:34:17
  of art. If you want to make a different piece of art from our
• 1:34:21
  art, by all means do it. Yeah. Um, if you want
• 1:34:24
  to sample it and put it into a dance mix, you can, and
• 1:34:27
  you can make money off that dance mix. We're not, you know,
• 1:34:30
  like that's that's the kind of license that it is. I think the bare
• 1:34:32
  Bone bongo scene would be great as a grave. My friend already did this,
• 1:34:38
  The composer already did that. I'm sure someone else could do it out
• 1:34:42
  there too, though. I would love to be in like Prague and you're
• 1:34:45
  like baby Bear. That would be amazing. You watch it becomes like this
• 1:34:49
  huge hit. The guy's like like a millionaire, like size number one dance.
• 1:34:55
  Number one dance song in the world is baby bare Bones by like scrat
• 1:35:00
  And we're over here going why did we do this? So yeah, go
• 1:35:04
  ahead, Sorry, no, I was just gonna yeah, go ahead now,
• 1:35:08
  you go ahead, Okay, thank you. So, I mean I
• 1:35:12
  think one of the things that I liked about your article too was just your
• 1:35:15
  kind of honesty about how difficult it is to make a living as an indie
• 1:35:18
  filmmaker. And since we're all about indie filmmaking, um, you know,
• 1:35:23
  can you can you talk a little bit about that the idea of being able
• 1:35:27
  to make a living as a filmmaker and what you guys do, which is
• 1:35:31
  more like you have day jobs and you make indie films. I mean,
• 1:35:34
  is there a goal to move everything to being like one hundred percent filmmakers?
• 1:35:42
  What is your view on that kind of thing? Yeah, I mean that's
• 1:35:45
  my goal. That's that's one hundred percent. My goal is I just want
• 1:35:47
  to make movies for a living. And I'm not talking about, you know,
• 1:35:50
  making movies and being like a multi multi millionaire, even though that would
• 1:35:56
  be nice. I would just love to make a comfortable living and and make
• 1:36:00
  movies as a job, you know, And it doesn't seem like it should
• 1:36:02
  be that difficult. I mean, when you see the money that you that
• 1:36:06
  can that can come in from a small budget movie, I mean, this
• 1:36:11
  is sustainable. If you could start getting enough you know, time to make
• 1:36:15
  movies and put more movies out in the world. It kind of snowballs.
• 1:36:17
  I mean, I know, Joe Swanberg famously said that too. You know,
• 1:36:20
  He's like, you know, once you get three or four movies out
• 1:36:23
  in the world, every time you make another one, then everyone you get
• 1:36:26
  another press push, everyone talks about your other movies, you get a kick
• 1:36:29
  up on the rentals or the sales of those previous movies, and it just
• 1:36:31
  kind of snowballs every time. And so he's made a career out of just
• 1:36:34
  making like a million movies and just kind of kind of living that way.
• 1:36:39
  But I do believe there's a way to build an audience slowly and get and
• 1:36:43
  get enough of a return so that you can keep equity in your own movie
• 1:36:47
  the next time you make it, and then make a little bit more money
• 1:36:50
  the next time you release another movie, and suddenly you know you're sustaining yourself
• 1:36:55
  by telling stories and making art. I do I do believe it's sponsible.
• 1:36:58
  I don't know. I'm getting old, I'm gonna die, so probably not,
• 1:37:01
  it's gonna happen soon, or I'm definitely going to be managing a bar
• 1:37:04
  somewhere yeah. I mean I've talked to a couple of filmmakers who are full
• 1:37:12
  time, not necessarily making their own projects, but they're directors for Higher or
• 1:37:15
  whatever those are, and they say that, sorry, I say, those
• 1:37:18
  are called unicorns. Unicorns are there the people making films for a living.
• 1:37:23
  But no, he's saying their director for Higher not making their own things.
• 1:37:26
  Well, I mean the thing that they've said is that they it's not like
• 1:37:29
  before where you'd like make a film every three years. It's like these people
• 1:37:32
  are making two or three films a year, you know, and there's just
• 1:37:35
  this mass production. Yeah, it's crazy. I mean, that's what we've
• 1:37:38
  been saying forever. We need to generate content. I mean, because you
• 1:37:41
  look at the people making a ton of money on YouTube because they're putting up
• 1:37:43
  content every week. Everyone wants more stuff. You know, if we could
• 1:37:45
  get to the point where we were shooting a movie, you know, in
• 1:37:49
  finishing people or finishing all post production within you know, nine ten months,
• 1:37:54
  and then starting work on another movie at the end of the same year,
• 1:37:56
  then you know, that's that's the goal, is to be able to like
• 1:37:59
  maybe start working on two movies a year, one at the beginning one.
• 1:38:01
  Jeremy always talks about that and I'm like, but I'm doing all the post
• 1:38:04
  production. But that's the whole point too, is to make enough money to
• 1:38:08
  where he doesn't have to do that anymore. And luckily, and that's another
• 1:38:11
  thing that you'll realize. You know, what you start doing this is that
• 1:38:13
  you build a network, and you know, now you've we've met people who
• 1:38:15
  who will do those jobs, for who we can hire, who we trust
• 1:38:18
  to do those jobs, and it could fit within the budget that we're talking
• 1:38:21
  about, so the Christian doesn't have to do everything. I mean, eventually
• 1:38:25
  you'll meet people who can help you in this process. I mean, the
• 1:38:28
  network of filmmakers that we've met since we toward the Battery is has been invaluable.
• 1:38:33
  But it's always hard. It's always hard to even think about like scaling
• 1:38:38
  up like that and being like, can you can you keep the quality up
• 1:38:42
  two times a year? You know? That's scary. I mean, like
• 1:38:45
  just in three years you have six movies and it's like, man, I
• 1:38:48
  can't even imagine three years from now having six movies out there right and having
• 1:38:51
  them all be quality. So that's that's scary too. Yeah, that's another
• 1:38:57
  thing I'm well, especially with the way I write, it will never happen,
• 1:39:00
  can't. Yeah, that's another But that's another thing too, is like
• 1:39:03
  I have been, I have thought about a lot. I wish I could
• 1:39:09
  just pull my standards down a little bit. You know. It's like in
• 1:39:13
  my mind, maybe my stators don't seem high to everybody else, but I
• 1:39:15
  have serious quality standards with what I write and what I feel like is worth
• 1:39:19
  making. The same way Christian has ridiculous standards about you know, you know
• 1:39:25
  what he does technically with the camera and color and sound and everything like that,
• 1:39:28
  Like he will he will fux with something for weeks and I'll just be
• 1:39:31
  like, I let it go. But I'll be the same way with a
• 1:39:33
  scene. I'll tweak a scene while I'm writing it forever. And it's just
• 1:39:38
  one of those things where you're never going to get enough done, you know,
• 1:39:42
  to create this kind of content generator, like we're talking about if we
• 1:39:45
  if we have such high standards, But I don't know, there's got to
• 1:39:47
  be a middle ground somewhere. It seems like, you know, with the
• 1:39:50
  following that you guys have been building, we'll be right back after a word
• 1:39:56
  from our sponsor. And now back to the show. Have you ever considered
• 1:40:04
  approaching a production company, I mean going and you know, putting together a
• 1:40:08
  script and saying okay and going for more of a traditional not so ultra independent,
• 1:40:13
  but going. And have you been able to keep that following? I
• 1:40:15
  mean, do you have like some way to be in touch with your fans
• 1:40:18
  other I mean, is it primarily Twitter and Facebook and stuff like that?
• 1:40:21
  Oh? Yeah, well we didn't even touch on this. Yeah. One
• 1:40:25
  of the main reasons, one of the main other reasons we made tex Montana
• 1:40:28
  is because I wrote a script that I love that. You know, I
• 1:40:31
  started getting a lot of a lot of attention after the battery made the rounds.
• 1:40:36
  I started doing the water bottle tour. I've talked to the companies,
• 1:40:40
  I've talked to agents, and I've gotten very close. We've gone down the
• 1:40:43
  whole casting route path, and we've gotten far along the route to the traditional
• 1:40:49
  funding of making my new script. And then it always just kind of fizzles
• 1:40:53
  out in one way or another. You know, you hear that, oh,
• 1:40:56
  we love your unique voice, and it's so it's so interesting and it's
• 1:41:00
  you. And then you know, once you get up to like two hundred
• 1:41:02
  and fifty three hundred thousand dollars. They start trying to kind of, you
• 1:41:06
  know, buff a little bit of that personality out of it. Well,
• 1:41:10
  can't we explain where the monster comes from? And can't we cast this person
• 1:41:14
  even though they're way too young, and it's it just becomes like, oh
• 1:41:16
  man, the concessions you have to make for such a small amount of money
• 1:41:20
  is demoralizing. And after about a year and a half of that, that's
• 1:41:24
  why we decid, you know, let's just drag in the woods and make
• 1:41:26
  tex Montana because we wanted to not have to get permission to make a movie
• 1:41:29
  again. It's so frustrating to feel like you got your foot in the door
• 1:41:33
  and a business that you love and then it's just the wheels turned so slow
• 1:41:39
  that you just like, at some point were just like, we got to
• 1:41:41
  go do this again because we're gonna it's gonna tear our souls apart if we
• 1:41:45
  keep waiting for somebody to say, Okay, here's the money, go make
• 1:41:48
  your movie. So that even though and honestly it's still happening right now,
• 1:41:53
  like we that script is still out there. I'm on the cusp of another
• 1:41:57
  going down another avenue to get that movie made, and it's you know,
• 1:41:59
  I feel really good about this one, but I felt really good about some
• 1:42:01
  before. So I've gotten a little bit cynical about that process. And so
• 1:42:06
  there's a part, there's a part of me that says, you know what,
• 1:42:09
  that's fine. Let that script do what it's going to do through the
• 1:42:11
  system, and let's still remind ourselves that we got to go and make our
• 1:42:15
  own movies if no one ever gives us the permission. Plus, there's there's
• 1:42:17
  something that like nobody ever talks about, but it's it's crazy with all of
• 1:42:23
  these budgets getting smaller and smaller and smaller. Um, if a production company
• 1:42:27
  comes to you and hires you on as director for a quarter million dollar movie,
• 1:42:32
  UM, your pay as director is probably around five thousand dollars, and
• 1:42:36
  then you're expected to work on the movie for um, pretty much a solid
• 1:42:42
  year, and then promotion and so on. And it's like, how do
• 1:42:45
  you how do you even make a quarter million dollar movie and live off a
• 1:42:50
  five thousand dollars for a year and a half to two years while you make
• 1:42:54
  and promote the movie. It's kind of insane, and no one has been
• 1:42:58
  able to explain that to me. Literally, no one. I've talked to
• 1:43:00
  filmmakers I know, like who are who seemed very successful, and no one's
• 1:43:04
  been able to explain. Okay, you get a fee, you know,
• 1:43:06
  you get your your rate for actually filming the movie. But what about when
• 1:43:12
  it's time to go into post and it's time to you know, edit and
• 1:43:15
  then do sound, and then promote, and then like what what how are
• 1:43:18
  you making a living? Then no one can explain it. I still don't
• 1:43:21
  know. Five years in five years after making The Battery, we've made another
• 1:43:26
  movie. You know, I've talked to people, I've gotten meetings, I've
• 1:43:29
  talked to managers, I've talked to heads of studios. I've no idea,
• 1:43:32
  no idea how you're supposed to live. I mean that five thousand dollars would
• 1:43:35
  be gone before you come out of pre production, you know, just two
• 1:43:39
  or three months of rent and food and so on. You know, if
• 1:43:43
  you want to if you if you're making a quarter million dollar movie, you
• 1:43:45
  got to make a really good movie. So you really got to like be
• 1:43:47
  in there, um, you know, doing months of pre production and months
• 1:43:50
  of post production and months of promotion. It's just it seems crazy to me.
• 1:43:55
  I do feel like that's one of the pitfalls of the fact that everybody
• 1:43:58
  can make a movie now is that it's almost aspected that just like, well,
• 1:44:00
  that's the deal with it, like, you know, it's I remember
• 1:44:03
  that. I don't know why this popped into my head, but there's a
• 1:44:05
  scene in a League of their own where they revealed that the girl baseball players
• 1:44:10
  are gonna have to wear these little skirts, and everyone gaffalls, and he
• 1:44:13
  goes, Ladies, there are sixty four women getting on a bus back home
• 1:44:15
  right now that will play in a bikini if if if I ask them to,
• 1:44:19
  And you kind of get that feeling where it's like, hey, if
• 1:44:21
  you can't make a movie and live for this fee, then hey, I
• 1:44:26
  got a line of kids who want this job. I got a line of
• 1:44:29
  filmmakers who want to be in this position. Sorry, that's just the way
• 1:44:32
  it is nowadays, and that's it's just like God, And from a like
• 1:44:36
  from a production standpoint, it's kind of like, well, don't you want
• 1:44:41
  your director to not be worrying about how he's paying the rent? You know,
• 1:44:45
  like that's the last thing he needs to be worrying about. When he's
• 1:44:47
  in charge of your you know, even a half million dollar movie. So
• 1:44:53
  that's that's something. Yeah, we can't crack it. Yeah, I think
• 1:44:55
  there's a lot of kind of ego going on there and people don't really disclose.
• 1:44:59
  Sure. Yeah, Well, I mean and I have a friend,
• 1:45:00
  you know who who's a filmmaker, pretty successful filmmaker, and you know,
• 1:45:04
  he decided to go around it and raise the money for his movie on his
• 1:45:08
  own and then just paid himself a decent salary, like out of the budget.
• 1:45:12
  Like, I'm this is how I'm raising the money to make this movie
• 1:45:15
  on this budget. There's how much I'm paying myself to do it. I
• 1:45:16
  wrote it, I'm going to direct it, and that's that. And I
• 1:45:19
  was like, well that's a you know, that's a pretty good, pretty
• 1:45:21
  good way to do it, if you can get around all the gatekeepers and
• 1:45:25
  just be your own production company. So I don't know, this sounds like
• 1:45:28
  a demoralizing way to go out. So what what advice do you have?
• 1:45:33
  Indie indie filmmakers that are out there that want to make their first film and
• 1:45:38
  want to kind of follow in your footsteps. You gotta have friends. You
• 1:45:41
  gotta have friends who will help you out. People who are going to be
• 1:45:44
  in the trenches with you, in the mud, splashing around in the dirt,
• 1:45:46
  willing to do anything they can to get it done. That's you're not
• 1:45:48
  going to get anywhere if you don't have if you don't have loyal people on
• 1:45:54
  your side. Um, you got you gotta plan as much as you can
• 1:45:57
  ahead of time, and you got to write, you know, your story,
• 1:46:00
  a good story around what you can get, what you know you have,
• 1:46:03
  and then you got to not freak out about the things that you think
• 1:46:08
  might fail or you'll never do it. And my advice would be that you
• 1:46:12
  got to have at least one skill that you can sell to others, you
• 1:46:16
  know, whether it be cinematography or sound design or any of that. Like
• 1:46:20
  you know, that's where you I mean, that's where your money is likely
• 1:46:24
  to come in the first couple of films is from the work in between making
• 1:46:28
  your own films. Just like we have friends that are editors and so on,
• 1:46:31
  and they go and they get paid to edit other people's movies and then
• 1:46:34
  they edit their movies for free. Yeah, And the irony of the whole
• 1:46:38
  process is that I only wrote The Battery originally because I didn't want to go
• 1:46:42
  an audition for roles as an actor, And I'm about to be in my
• 1:46:46
  fifth feature film since The Battery came out. And that's simply from meeting filmmakers
• 1:46:53
  on the festival circuit, becoming fans of their work and them fans of my
• 1:46:56
  work, and then them calling me up and going, hey, I'm about
• 1:46:59
  to go and make this movie. I got a great role for you in
• 1:47:00
  it, and just suddenly I'm being cast without auditioning. When you know,
• 1:47:03
  this whole thing was was me railing against the process of auditioning. So you
• 1:47:08
  end up, yeah, you find a little skilled and hopefully you can you
• 1:47:11
  can tangentially work in film. I actually forgot to ask you about that.
• 1:47:15
  What was the experience of working on Spring Like, because that's that's actually one
• 1:47:19
  of my favorite movies from in the past couple of years. It's what was
• 1:47:25
  that working with Justin and Aaron? It was amazing, you know. Justin
• 1:47:29
  Aaron were actually the first filmmakers I met on the circuit. We met them
• 1:47:33
  very briefly in Amsterdam. I thought they were full of themselves. Then we
• 1:47:39
  met them again for much longer in Brazil, and they told us that they
• 1:47:43
  thought we were full of ourselves when they saw us in Amsterdam, and then
• 1:47:45
  we became great friends and I love them to death. We had a wonderful
• 1:47:49
  time, and just being on their sets amazing because those two guys, I
• 1:47:54
  mean, Justin's a really really, really clever and creative screenwriter and director,
• 1:47:59
  and Aaron is just you know, he's like Justin's Christian, He's a you
• 1:48:02
  know, he's an incredibly talented guy, and he's really technical. So to
• 1:48:05
  watch them kind of confer, uh, you know, with each other on
• 1:48:10
  set about a scene and then and then break up and then go and do
• 1:48:13
  their individual things is amazing. To watch that set work like clockwork, really
• 1:48:16
  helped me, um, you know, cache things away for the next time
• 1:48:21
  I'm directing too. It's really great. Was there a lot of it seemed
• 1:48:25
  like the scenes were very loose and kind of uh yeah, well, it's
• 1:48:28
  funny because they they definitely let me improv. I think that the part of
• 1:48:32
  that was me learning on the fly what it's like to be on a real
• 1:48:36
  set, you know, because you know, things gotta move, you gotta
• 1:48:40
  make lunch, you gotta make your days, you gotta make your time.
• 1:48:42
  The eighties, walking around and talking, and you start to worry that if
• 1:48:45
  you if you goof off or follow you know, follow a thread down some
• 1:48:48
  weird improv line, that you're gonna you're gonna throw off the entire schedule of
• 1:48:53
  the day. So I kind of boxed myself in a little bit, and
• 1:48:57
  I didn't really go as far as I'd have wanted to, but they were
• 1:49:00
  certainly open to my improblems. It's interesting is you throw out an improv and
• 1:49:03
  then they'll either say nothing, or say, oh my god, that was
• 1:49:06
  really funny to do that again, or actually, this time, don't do
• 1:49:10
  that thing. But I was really boxing myself in. And then I get
• 1:49:13
  down to the set down San Diego where we're shooting in the bar Vinny Kuran,
• 1:49:17
  who is one of the leads in their first movie, Resolution, and
• 1:49:20
  apparently he don't give a crap about no days or schedules because he was just
• 1:49:26
  riffing left and right, and all I could think was, man, man,
• 1:49:30
  I should have done, but Vinny did, Vinny don't care. Vinny
• 1:49:32
  just beas Vinny Vinny don't give a shit. Then he don't give a shit.
• 1:49:39
  So but yeah, no, it's such a such a blast. Man,
• 1:49:41
  I can't wait to work with those guys again. They're really really good
• 1:49:44
  friends. We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor and now back
• 1:49:53
  to the show. So I want to make sure that you guys, Um,
• 1:49:57
  what is the website to go to for text Montana? How can people
• 1:50:00
  get in touch with you guys? What's the best way to find out more
• 1:50:04
  and all that great stuff. You can go to Texmontana dot com. That'll
• 1:50:09
  take you right to our campaign page. We are about nine days away from
• 1:50:14
  this thing being over, which means if we succeed, you're only about fifteen
• 1:50:17
  to seventeen days away from actually seeing this thing. Because we're just gonna release
• 1:50:20
  it. It's done tex Moontana dot com. You can find me on Twitter
• 1:50:27
  at mister Jeremy Gardner and I'm at Christian Stella. I'm only mister because every
• 1:50:31
  other permutation of Jeremy Gardner was taken, so it's not like I'm calling myself
• 1:50:35
  mister, but there was just no do that. Yeah, and then you
• 1:50:41
  can find us on Facebook at text Montana or the Battery on Facebook, but
• 1:50:45
  tex Montana dot com or Twitter. We're really active on Twitter. Um,
• 1:50:47
  Yeah, I mean people can just like ask me stupid camera questions, I'll
• 1:50:51
  answer it didn't matter. I mean, there's no question too stupid. I'll
• 1:50:56
  just call it stupid on a podcast one day. Yeah, well that's what
• 1:50:59
  we've always been. I always used to say, like, you know what,
• 1:51:01
  whatever you think of Kevin Smith's films, the fact that he makes himself
• 1:51:04
  available to so many people and is so open about the process was something we
• 1:51:08
  wanted to ape. Um, and we try to do that, you know,
• 1:51:11
  we we we try not to ever let an email about a question about
• 1:51:15
  filmmaking go unanswered. So, um, whatever you got, throw it at
• 1:51:18
  us. Awesome, guys. Well, I really appreciate your time, and
• 1:51:21
  you know, I look forward to, you know, seeing the film.
• 1:51:25
  How how are you going to release it when it comes out? Are you
• 1:51:27
  just gonna put it? Do you? Do you assume that things will just
• 1:51:30
  kind of like explode on their own or are you going to put it somewhere
• 1:51:32
  specific? Yeah, we're basically if we hit the goal, um, two
• 1:51:39
  weeks after the campaign ends, uh, we're going to release it on YouTube
• 1:51:45
  and Vimeo, and the Vimeo version will have the download button unlocked, so
• 1:51:49
  you'll be able to download it ten ADP from Vimeo m and then there's going
• 1:51:55
  to be torrents of in all kinds of shapes and sizes, and of DVDs
• 1:52:00
  and blue rays with artwork, and then you know, tex Montana dot Com
• 1:52:03
  at that point will just be kind of a repository of all the different ways
• 1:52:09
  you can get it. And at that point then people can post it anywhere
• 1:52:13
  else if there's places that we don't know. The only places we're not going
• 1:52:16
  to be doing our places like iTunes, etc. Because then we'd have to
• 1:52:19
  charge for the movie. And that's the whole point is that after this campaign,
• 1:52:24
  we're not going to charge for it ever again. So that's it.
• 1:52:27
  I mean, if they if they'd be willing to put it up for free,
• 1:52:29
  I'd put it on iTunes. Yeah, and if we don't hit our
• 1:52:32
  goal, we're going to take the hard drive with the movie and we're gonna
• 1:52:35
  film ourselves smashing it with a Well, guys, I really appreciate it.
• 1:52:41
  Is there anything else? Are we good? No? That's it tex Montana
• 1:52:44
  dot Com. Thank you so much for the forum. Thank you guys,
• 1:52:46
  it's a really fun chat. I want to thank Jason so much for doing
• 1:52:50
  such a great job on this episode. If you want to get links to
• 1:52:53
  anything we spoke about in this episode, head over to the show notes at
• 1:52:56
  bulletproof Screenwriting dot tv. Forward slash three six. Thank you so much for
• 1:53:00
  listening, guys, As always, keep on writing no matter what. I'll
• 1:53:03
  talk to you soon. Thanks for listening to the Bulletproof Screenwriting podcasts at bulletproof
• 1:53:09
  Screenwriting dot tv.