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IFH 688: What They Don't Tell Filmmakers about Making an Indie Film with Jeremy Gardener · Indie Film Hustle® - A Filmmaking 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 IFAH podcast network dot com. Welcome to the Indie
• 0:13
  Film Hustle Podcast, Episode number six eighty seven. Compromise for your dream,
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  but never Compromise on your dream. Im Ron con Broadcasting from the back alley
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  in Hollywood. It's the Indie Film Hustle Podcast, where we show you how
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  to survive and thrive as an indie filmmaker in the jungles of the film biz.
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  And here's your host, Alex Ferrari. Welcome, Welcome to another episode
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  of the Indie Film Hustle Podcast. I am your humble host, Alex Ferrari.
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  Today's show is sponsored by Rise of the Film Entrepreneur How to turn your
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  independent film into a profitable business. It's harder today than ever before for independent
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  filmmakers to make money with their films from predatory film distributors ripping them off to
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  huckster film aggregators who prey upon them. The odds are stacked against the indie
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  filmmaker. The old distribution model of making money with your film is broken and
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  there needs to be a change. The future of independent filmmaking is the entrepreneurial
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  filmmaker or the film entrepreneur. In Rise of the Film Entrepreneur, I break
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  turn your indie film into a profitable business with case studies examining successes and failures.
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  This book shows you the step by step method to turn your passion into
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  a profitable career. If you're making a feature film, series, or any
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  other kind of video content, the Film Entrepreneur method will set you up for
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  success. The book is available in paperback, ebook, and of course audiobook.
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  If you want to order it, just head over to www dot film
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  bizbook dot com. That's film bizbook dot com. Now, guys, today
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  on the show, we have Naomi Batti and she is a screenplay consultant,
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  a screenwriting teacher and former studio executive that worked on films like Twilight, Percy
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  Jackson and The Lightning Thief, and The Stanford Prison Experiment. And she also
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  runs a website called Write plus Co. And she works with screenwriters on helping
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  them get from idea to final product, helps them look at things from a
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  studio's perspective, and helps them avoid a lot of the mistakes, these first
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  time mistakes and mistakes in general that she sees and has seen after reading thousands
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  and thousands of screenplays over the course of her career. We had a really
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  interesting conversation. We go off the deep end a little bit sometimes analyzing films
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  and talking about shows and projects and things like that, but we get into
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  the details about how to avoid some of these mistakes, as well as what
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  a studio is looking for and how to better prep your project to be noticed
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  by the studio. So, without any further ado, please enjoy my conversation
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  with Naomi Beatty. Enjoy today's episode with guest host Jason Buff. On this
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  episode, I'm talking with Jeremy Gardner and Christian Stella about their films The Battery
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  and text Montana Will Survive. We'll talk about all the stuff that went into
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  making The Battery, the difficulties of making a really, really low budget independent
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  film, the cold hard reality of being an indie filmmaker today, as well
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  as the new way they've approached distribution for their newest feature. So get comfortable.
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  You might want a nice cold beverage or some tea, you know,
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  maybe some aroma in the room, maybe some Lavenders, some Jacarn Noir,
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  and enjoy this episode because I had a good time talking with these guys for
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  the show. Yeah, I list a few episodes. Yeah, I've been
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  subscribed for a while, but then I went on a tangent and subscribe to
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  every podcast ever and now I can't even remember what I'm supposed to listen to
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  now. I used to like my favorite way to learn filmmaking, aside from
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  DVD commentaries, was listening to podcasts, you know, because you can sit
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  there for a good hour and a half listening to a filmmaker and you'd never
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  get that access on just like interviews and stuff that's literally how Yeah. That
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  was one of my big tools when I was deciding I wanted to make the
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  Battery was podcasts. Oh really? Oh yeah absolutely. I started back with
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  the Creative Screenwriting Jeff Goldsmith's podcasts. Yeah, yeah, I listened to a
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  ton of those, and then I just went what else is there? And
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  I downloading everything? What other ones did you listen to? My big one
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  because I was trying to make a film in twenty twelve that didn't end up
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  happening, but I would listen to one called film Method all the time,
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  and it was two women that were like they had already made their own film
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  and 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
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  like 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
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  idea that I want to learn stuff and people want to you know, they
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  want to hear what actually goes into filmmaking, you know, instead of like
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  these kind of generic conversations. You know, I like to go into you
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  know, the nuts and bolts, money issues, technical, you know,
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  the cameras that were used and stuff like that. So no, absolutely,
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  I mean it's that's the important stuff, and that's that's why I listened.
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  I 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. I don't know
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  if you know that podcast that was yeah, yeah, yeah, um gosh.
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  There was another one. I'm I'm like a big YouTube and 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, Bloom is like my hero. Yeah,
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  he's there's a lot. I think most of the stuff because I also
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  do um. I'm an amateur cinematographer, you know, so I just sit
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  there and watch everything about lighting tutorials and everything about lenses and whatever, you
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  know, And I don't think. It's like you don't even need to go
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  to school anymore. If you've got an Internet connection, absolutely get on,
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  you know. I mean that's I mean everything that we everything that I did
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  technically for the Battery and now text Montana has been through tutorials. It's insane.
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  Like I mean, I was just telling Jeremy to other day. I
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  was like, well, I'm trying to fix a couple of shots in text
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  Montana colorwise. So I'm like, I had time to watch another twenty hour
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  Da Vinci Resolved tutorial. Yeah. I spent most of my time listening to
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  screenwriter interviews and stuff too, because back when I didn't think I could actually
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  make a movie, I just wanted to be able to write a script.
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  And just to hear different processes is amazing because no one does it the same
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  way, and so you'll start to think that your writing routine is weird.
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  And then you'll listen to twenty different people say that there's twenty different variations on
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  some same thing. So it doesn't matter. It's just getting it's just putting
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  the work in. I mean, that's one of the things that I just
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  recently put up a blog post about the creative process, and there's a bunch
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  of videos about screenwriters only talking about the creative end, you know, and
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  how they schedule out their day and how they actually write, you know,
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  and it's it was nice to hear almost all of them say, well,
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  I spend most of the morning procrastinating and then when I start hating myself,
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  kind of sit down and I'll start writing, you know. So you realize
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  that everybody that has this drive to write screenplays or to write anything, they're
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  all kind of fighting with themselves. You know. Yeah, I mean that's
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  it's a daily grind. But you know, the thing that I've unfortunately,
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  the thing I've taken away from every single interview I've I've heard, is that
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  the you know, the successful writers are the ones who treat it like a
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  day job. They know that they are going to put in a certain amount
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  of hours every day in the seat, but in seat and just writing,
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  and boy, just getting your butt in the seat is the hardest part for
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  me because I will find everything else to do. When you started screenwriting,
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  what were the resources that you found were the most helpful? You know,
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  it's funny. I started probably very similar to a lot of people. I've
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  found a sid Field, you know, screenplay book from god knows when it
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  was all yellowed and old for like twenty five cents and to use bookstore.
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  And you know, people will kind of laugh off those those manuals, but
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  that really helped me understand the structure and the formatting. And then once you
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  get that down, it's just about reading other screen But I just read as
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  many screenplays as I could, and you start to see how you go,
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  Okay, well this is the structure, but I can tweak it to make
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  it you read a certain way that I want to read. And I like
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  to write mine with absolutely zero camera interaction at all. I really like almost
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  to write it like a prose story where it just flows. And yeah,
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  they say, Jeremy, Jeremy, screenplays sometimes read like novels. It's kind
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  of yeah, but but sparse novel. They're not like dense like. I
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  have a rule. I refuse to have any action beat go over four sentences.
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  I will not do it because I know people skim, so I have
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  little rules for myself, and I don't like to I don't like to break
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  up sequences with like interiors and exteriors. I kind of like to try to
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  let them flow into each other and just just drop maybe while he walks into
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  and then the next line the bathroom. There's no like interior the bathroom,
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  because you want to just keep a pace and a kind of momentum going.
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  I'm really about readability because when it's so hard for me to read some screenplays,
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  they're just so dense and just so much stuff on the page. Yeah,
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  I think that a lot of people think that you have to follow very
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  strict code, you know, And what I've learned from talking to other screenwriters
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  is that you know, as long as you're telling the story and as long
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  as you're bringing people into the movie, that you can kind of do whatever
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  you want to. You know, you have to have a certain amount of
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  structure, but there's a lot of leeway with that. No, there really
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  is. There's no like I said, that's what I like about John August
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  and Craig Mason. You know, they'll they'll talk to you about the nuts
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  and bolts on their podcasts all the time. But for the most part,
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  every rule that someone tells you that you can't break, they will just say,
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  no, that's not true. If that were the case, we wouldn't
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  have this movie or that movie, or this movie or whatever. So you
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  can break whatever rule you want if you're writing a good story. We'll be
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  right back after a word from our sponsor and now back to the show.
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  So what would your typical day be, you know, talking about screenwriting?
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  What do you have to set like a date that you're going to finish by
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  or do you just sit like sit down? Do you do you do a
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  bunch of writing out notes and blueprints? What? What kind of is the
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  I'm so weird when it comes to writing. It's well, you know,
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  unfortunately I have not had to write on a deadline yet. I have not,
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  you know, taken a job where it needs to be in by this
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  time. So it's very hard for me to manufacture my own my own deadlines.
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  So typically I will just start writing. I will just start writing and
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  then I'll write. I'll do what's like a beat sheet, where I will
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  write down just slug lines of the scenes that I know are going to happen
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  up until a point where I don't know anymore, and then I'll go and
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  I'll start writing that. And then then I was telling I was telling someone
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  the day. I think I was telling your wife, Christian, that if
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  you look through my notebooks, you will see the same beat sheet written over
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  and over and over again, and I don't know why I do it.
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  I will go back after writing like ten or fee ten pages, and I
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  will write again the same beat sheet of the scenes, and I'll maybe add
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  a little bit in between, or I'll reorganize them. But for the most
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  part, I think it's just me refamiliarizing myself with where I'm at. And
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  then hopefully something will spring up and I'll add another beat to the end of
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  that thing, and then I'll go back and start writing again, and I'll
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  take walks and lots of showers and just I ruminate on it a lot.
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  I think I think you get a lot more writing done when you're not writing
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  than you actually think. Lots of Starbucks trips, oh yeah, I have
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  a weird thing about being able to write in the place I live. There's
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  something about being there as often as I am, or it's just like I
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  can't I can't disconnect myself from just the routine of living in the home,
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  so I need to try to get out of it as much as possible.
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  Yeah, I think that's that's a lot of people have told me that.
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  I mean, I'm the same way too. I cannot. I'm here in
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  my office right now. I've tried to write here and it just doesn't happen,
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  you know, So I'll go off to Starbucks and I'll sit there.
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  And when you don't have all the distraction, that's when you say, okay,
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  I can sit here and actually do the hard part, which is you
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  know, the word focusing on it. Yeah, yeah, yeah yeah.
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  And there's something about the chatter of being in a public place. I like
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  that kind of white noise of people talking and just the mumbling in the in
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  the ruckets of just people moving around. That helps too, other than the
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  silence. Another problem I have with writing, which people should not do,
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  is I wake up every day when I sit down to write, and I
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  go back and tinker with everything I've already written. So I will kill an
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  hour or two hours just perfecting what's already written, so you know, in
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  a good way. When the script is finally done, it's been it's been
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  polished in a way that it's like it's a second or third draft. But
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  it takes so long to get to that final draft because I just go back
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  and move commas, and moving commas is not writing. Do you do one
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  like you know, as they say, vomit draft? Do you try to
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  get like one first draft down and then go back and say no, No,
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  That's what I wish I could do. I really wish I could just
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  move just barrel ahead and not worry about what happened before. But I cannot.
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  I will keep going back and tinkering and tweaking, and then and then
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  hopefully by the time when if I wake up and I tinker with the pages
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  I wrote the day before, hopefully by the time I get to the end
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  of those, I kind of pushed myself into the process a little bit.
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  So how did you guys meet? You guys have been friends for a while,
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  right, And where are you from? We're both we're both from Central
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  Florida. You know, we're like right outside Disney World. But we met
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  when we were kids basically. I mean I was definitely a kid. I
• 13:31
  was like thirteen or something. And we started making movies back then, and
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  that was kind of our film school, which was it was also our regular
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  school because we dropped out of school Borda Education System. Yeah. Yeah,
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  so I mean that's like staying in school in Florida. But yeah, we
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  just started making movies back then, like with like a five hundred dollars sony
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  handicam And what year are we talking here? Just so I know the technology.
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  Let me think about this. We shot the Bags in two thousand,
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  okay, okay, so this is PREHD yes, definitely. Um, it
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  was like almost pre computer editing. Like I still remember buying a hard drive
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  for like five hundred dollars for like a like a forty gigabye hard drive.
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  I mean we were cutting our were we cutting our shorts before we did the
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  bags on like like VHS to v like a r VCR. We were we
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  were editing VCR to VCR when like in nineteen ninety six or seven or something.
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  Um, but yeah, so we just did that. We we we
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  made some features with my sister and UM got got into some film festivals,
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  and then we became adults and we had to get jobs. That was yeah,
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  So then it was like a just like an entire decade where we just
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  you know, waited tables and so on. Yeah, we didn't do much
• 14:48
  for ten years, and then we kind of moved apart. And then I
• 14:50
  was trying, well, I'm gonna go pound the pavement as an actor.
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  And then that got really demoralizing really quickly. And I had spent a lot
• 14:56
  of time, like we were talking about, watching those DVD extras and reading
• 15:01
  those interviews, on listening to those podcasts and thinking, you know what,
• 15:03
  I think it's about time to get the band back together. The technology had
• 15:07
  finally cut up, and I started to believe that there was a way to
• 15:09
  make a movie that could stand, you know, against real quote unquote real
• 15:13
  movies. Now, so I felt like we should jump back in it because
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  that was the thing about our early movies, even though they were fun and
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  you know, we played festival. I remember the director that Sarahsida Film Festival
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  telling us, you know, I'm going to put your movie in this festival.
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  But because it's clear that you guys made a real movie. But it's
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  also very clear that you have absolutely no money, because it was just the
• 15:33
  quality was so well. He said it was the first movie they had ever
• 15:37
  played that wasn't shot on film, so it was crazy. I mean he
• 15:41
  was even talking about like maybe having a micro budget features section in following festivals
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  because he just didn't know what to do with ours. So that but by
• 15:52
  the time the technology cut up was like, okay, well we can make
• 15:54
  something that you could literally play in a theater and people wouldn't be like,
• 15:58
  well as a shot on my face. Yeah, I mean that I definitely
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  know that feeling, because I mean I think I'm a little older than you
• 16:08
  guys, but you know, when I was in film school, it was
• 16:11
  like that was the only option we could only we could shoot on sixteen millimeter
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  and like spend everything we had, you know, and like spend thirty It
• 16:19
  was easy to spend like thirty thousand bucks on a little crappy sixteen millimeter film
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  because you had to send it off to the lab or the other option was
• 16:27
  to shoot on VHS. So there's a lot of people, you know now
• 16:30
  that are coming back to it after it's like everybody realized, Okay, now
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  the technology is caught up. All these people that couldn't make films when they
• 16:38
  were you know, college age, are coming back to it. You know.
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  Yeah, absolutely, it's such a you know, it's such a democratic
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  process. Now it was like the art that no one was allowed to get
• 16:48
  in unless you had permission or money, and now that's not the case,
• 16:52
  right, Okay, So you went to where did you go? You went
• 16:56
  to New York area or where were you at? Yeah? Actually, Christian
• 17:00
  dad got a show on the Food Network and moved up to New England,
• 17:04
  Connecticut area to shoot the show. And he he was like, you know,
• 17:08
  he's like a second father to me. So he's like, hey,
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  I know you want to be an actor. We're gonna go live like forty
• 17:12
  minutes away from New York City if you want to come live with us.
• 17:15
  So I I hugged my family, goodbuye and moved up moved up there for
• 17:21
  twenty I mean he moved up there with me, and then within like six
• 17:26
  months of me living up there, I was like, I want to move
• 17:27
  back to Florida, and then left him with my parents and then their entire
• 17:32
  family ended up moving back to Florida and I stayed. I was there just
• 17:34
  until this last until this last October. But I can't. I gotta get
• 17:41
  out of Florida. I can't. I can't take it. So you were
• 17:45
  like, what on the couch or something for up in there, and oh,
• 17:48
  no, there they were. No, I had a they had a
• 17:52
  room for me. They had I mean, it was like I was their
• 17:55
  second, their third, third child. So um, it was a great
• 17:59
  living situation. And then I ended up. You know, I got a
• 18:00
  job and I got my own place, and I moved in with a girl,
• 18:03
  and you know, I settled in up there when they all left.
• 18:06
  I need seasons. I was just talking about how I can't. I can't
• 18:08
  deal with this warm winter down here. It's creeping me out. I'm a
• 18:12
  very seasonally, you know, creative person, if you know, if it's
• 18:17
  nice out all the time, all I want to do is do fun stuff.
• 18:21
  I kind of need those dark, cold winter months to get a little
• 18:25
  you know, to turn my thoughts inward and helps to create and read and
• 18:30
  focus. Maybe snow every once in a while, Oh it's so nice.
• 18:33
  I just I just want to be able to drive to the store without like
• 18:37
  driving my car off a sheet of ice. That just flipped me out.
• 18:41
  I stopped driving for like four years when I lived up there, because I
• 18:44
  mean I only lived up there for two years, but I just refused to
• 18:48
  drive on the snow. And then I got scared of driving in general because
• 18:51
  I was like, I haven't driven in four months, all right, So
• 18:53
  let's let's focus on filmmaking. When when was the I mean, what was
• 18:56
  the kind of seed that got you guys started with the battery? Where did
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  that kind of begin? Well, there was this online kind of they were
• 19:04
  gonna there was a site called massify that was gonna make a movie completely through
• 19:10
  the community. So they were taking pitches for scripts, and then they were
• 19:14
  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
• 19:22
  make it kind of like a short film. So it stood out. So
• 19:23
  I made this little two minute short about a guy and his friend who kind
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  of document their day to day life in a zombie apocalypse world, this little
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  two minute nothing video, and nothing ever came of that site or that movie.
• 19:37
  I believe it became Perkins fourteen, one of the eight Films To Die
• 19:41
  For in that series or whatever it was. But um, but I couldn't
• 19:44
  shake the idea of this, like just two guys wandering around in the woods
• 19:48
  in a post apocalyptic situation. And so then I started thinking about, well,
• 19:52
  the way you if you're gonna make a no budget movie, it's the
• 19:56
  way you should do it, is you should you should tailor it to what
• 20:00
  you have. We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor, and
• 20:07
  now back to the show. And in my mind, that's right after a
• 20:14
  word from story. You could write a creative story around any situation. So
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  now back to the sha have no money, what's the what's the way to
• 20:22
  do that? Okay, we'll just shoot it in the woods, right,
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  and then if there are zombie there are people trying to avoid zombies. Well,
• 20:26
  if they're smart, they're going to avoid cities, so they'll be in
• 20:30
  the woods. And that way we could get around all that stuff. And
• 20:33
  it just kind of came became a way for me to um take the zombie
• 20:36
  genre and turn it inward and focus on how two different minds would would be
• 20:41
  affected by that rather than do this big, grand you know, macro scale
• 20:45
  the whole world is dying. Yeah, And at the same time that like
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  he's thinking about getting back into film. I had become a food photographer and
• 20:56
  the best food photography camera was the f D, So I had a five
• 21:02
  D Mark two, so I already had the camera that was like changing the
• 21:07
  the indie filmmaking world. I just so happened to have to have that for
• 21:11
  my job. So it was like the kind of perfect storm is as he
• 21:15
  was thinking about this movie, I had the equipment to make a movie sort
• 21:22
  of. I had the camera at least. Yeah, So that's basically where
• 21:27
  it started, just um, just just tailoring a story to what I knew
• 21:32
  would be cheap. And you know, there was a long time where I
• 21:34
  could not convince anybody that you could make a movie for the kind of money
• 21:40
  I was talking about. It just couldn't. I remember I was introduced to
• 21:42
  some like rich guy at a bar and he started talking to me like a
• 21:48
  big wig, and as soon as I mentioned six thousand dollars, he just
• 21:52
  laughed and walked away. So that, yeah, that that happens a lot.
• 21:56
  Well, it doesn't happen as much anymore. You know. It's it's
• 21:59
  people coming around to the fact that movies can be made for nothing. Well,
• 22:03
  you know, the funny thing that I run into is so many people
• 22:04
  think that they need, you know, one hundred thousand or two hundred thousand
• 22:07
  dollars to make, you know, a little indie movie, and it's ridiculous.
• 22:11
  It frustrates me to no end. I've seen so many people just waste
• 22:15
  money. They just waste money, and I don't understand, like the whole
• 22:19
  My whole concept going into this was, look, I believe we can do
• 22:22
  this, but if we can't, if it doesn't work, and I get
• 22:26
  the money. I got the money from like ten different people, so it
• 22:29
  would be like little chunks of six hundred dollars, so nobody was going to
• 22:32
  be broke, no one's gonna lose their house, and no one's gonna hate
• 22:36
  me. That was It's just like just you know, heads your bets,
• 22:38
  write something that you believe in that you could do for an incredibly small amount,
• 22:42
  and then don't don't break anybody, don't lose any friends over it.
• 22:45
  Had you been acting before, yeah, I've always been like more of a
• 22:48
  writer and an actor. I did. I did a bunch of plays when
• 22:51
  I went up there, up to the North, and you know, I
• 22:52
  was always the actor in our movies when we were making them younger. I
• 22:56
  was in all the plays in high school, so I wanted to be an
• 22:57
  actor or a writer. And it wasn't until I got the confidence from listening
• 23:03
  to all these interviews with other filmmakers and watching movies and starting to understand them
• 23:07
  more that I was like, well, you know, I can, I
• 23:07
  can. I'm just gonna direct this thing. I'm just gonna do this thing
• 23:11
  straight through. It's gonna be my little my little creature. But it was
• 23:15
  really it took a long time for me to say I'm directing this because I
• 23:19
  had never been in those shoes before Christian, you were going to say something,
• 23:22
  oh, I was just gonna say. The other thing about budgets is
• 23:26
  that I think it's a hard thing for people to wrap their head around that
• 23:29
  equipment can be rented, you know, and like, in fact, it
• 23:30
  always is rented in large budgets. Even so, like that was one of
• 23:34
  the things that people come up and they're like, you know, like you
• 23:37
  guys couldn't have made that movie for six thousand dollars. It's like it costs
• 23:41
  more for the equipment. And I'm like, I mean, I used a
• 23:44
  Zeiss lens, but it was one hundred and fifty dollars to rent it for
• 23:47
  the whole shoe. So there's always said the only thing I owned was the
• 23:51
  camera, and even that would have been two hundred and fifty dollars to rent.
• 23:55
  So, you know, I think that even that seems to be a
• 23:57
  barrier of entry for people, but it shouldn't be. It's it's not.
• 24:00
  Yeah, it's funny because I you know, I've shot a couple of shorts
• 24:03
  down here my cameras. I've only got a sixty D and I've got a
• 24:07
  couple of friends who I've got one friend who has a five D Mark three
• 24:12
  and has never used it, like it was a gift from her her husband,
• 24:17
  And so I'm just like, hey, do you mind if we borrow
• 24:19
  your camera for this shoot and you know whatever? And she's like, yeah,
• 24:22
  sure whatever, I don't care. I've never even I don't even know
• 24:25
  how to turn it on. So it's just like the equipment now, is
• 24:27
  there's no barrier, you know, internactly. I mean, I'm shooting on
• 24:32
  a cannon C one hundred now, and I let my friend borrow it all
• 24:36
  the time, and he's another filmmaker. Yeah, Meanwhile, he went and
• 24:37
  shot a feature on an iPhone and I was like, why didn't you just
• 24:42
  borrow my camera? And he's like, I was afraid to ask, because
• 24:45
  now he borrows it all the time. Yeah, that, yeah, I
• 24:49
  think that just I think people also, I mean, one of the hardest
• 24:53
  things for me to do is ask for favors. I'm really bad at asking
• 24:57
  for favors. But you'd be amaze the amount of things that you can get
• 25:02
  just asking. I mean even just you know, you know, a couple
• 25:04
  of weeks ago, we were shooting something new for to add into text Montana,
• 25:10
  and we we would like put a budget aside for Okay, if these
• 25:14
  people want money, here's what we're willing to spend. And then we go
• 25:17
  there and then we introduce ourselves, we tell them what we're doing, and
• 25:19
  then they just let us do it for free. And it's just it's amazing,
• 25:22
  like how often you can find, you know, the things that you
• 25:26
  need just from through people's generosity. Everyone just balloons up in their in their
• 25:32
  mind what these budgets have to be, and they just they really don't have
• 25:34
  to be that big, especially for your first one. Now, can you
• 25:38
  guys talk a little bit about the filmmaking process. I know you've talked a
• 25:41
  lot about the making of the Battery, um, but can you just talk,
• 25:47
  you know, for indie filmmakers, can you talk about the process that
• 25:48
  you went through to create that, the production maybe a little bit of pre
• 25:52
  production and the production process. Well, yeah, I'll tell you. I
• 25:59
  was like, I was like to curse, Yeah, go ahead. It
• 26:02
  was a bit of a shit show. But I mean it was a lot
• 26:03
  of a shit show. Well okay, Well that's the one thing that should
• 26:07
  be should be very much noted, is that we you know, for the
• 26:11
  longest time, because Christian was down in Florida and I was up up in
• 26:14
  Connecticut kind of on my own, trying to get this thing going. And
• 26:18
  I'm not a producer, Like I said, I'm very bad at asking for
• 26:21
  people, for things from people. And I finally had just said an arbitrary
• 26:26
  date, and I said, you know, August first, we're doing this
• 26:27
  thing. That's it. August first is the date. And you know,
• 26:32
  I got locations squared away. But you know, between casting zombies and getting
• 26:37
  all the props together and trying to work out a schedule, which I'd never
• 26:41
  worked out of a movie schedule before, these things were just like beyond my
• 26:47
  grasp a little bit. And so that really really hurt us in the actual
• 26:52
  production was that we just we had about three full days of preproduction. Once
• 26:56
  Christian got up there. We had three days to buy all the props,
• 27:00
  get all those zombies, like in order, get the crew, you know,
• 27:03
  our small crew shots, shot lists up to where we were shooting.
• 27:07
  So if there's anything to be learned is plan as much as you can before
• 27:11
  you get to set, because everything will go wrong when you get to set.
• 27:15
  And if you if you plan for the things that you can that you
• 27:18
  can fix, then then when everything else goes to shit, you'll you'll be
• 27:23
  at ahead of the game. Meanwhile, meanwhile, I'd only ever shot like
• 27:26
  two silent four minute short films before I got up there. I was still
• 27:32
  reading how to how to use the camera when I got up there, because
• 27:34
  I was saying, I mean, I know how to do photography, but
• 27:37
  I did not know cinematography at all. Well, I saw the clip of
• 27:41
  um, I haven't seen the full documentary behind the scenes, but I saw
• 27:44
  the you're looking at that book master master shot master shots, and I thought
• 27:48
  that was kind of a joke. But was that where you like actually got
• 27:52
  those books are awesome, The master Shots books great. But that's the thing
• 27:56
  too, is like you have to just there has to be kind of a
• 27:59
  blind, youthful confidence when you go into something like this, because if you
• 28:03
  think about all the ways in which you can fail, you just won't do
• 28:07
  it, you know. And it's like, I know Christian is talented in
• 28:11
  a way that I'm not. I know he's He's going to solve any technical
• 28:15
  problem that we run into. And I have faith in my acting and my
• 28:19
  writing and understanding of what I want the story to look like. And it's
• 28:22
  just like at some point you're going to run into stuff you don't really know.
• 28:26
  But as long as you keep it to a manageable budget, Like I
• 28:29
  said, if you screw up whatever, you know what, no one's no
• 28:32
  one's gonna die. So you just have to have this kind of blind confidence
• 28:36
  and just go in and do it. I think is learn as much as
• 28:38
  you can from all the free information that's out there, and then just do
• 28:41
  it, because man, if you really think about all the ways you could
• 28:45
  screw it up, you just you might as well just wait tables. Yeah,
• 28:48
  and I mean, no one's come back, And like called me on
• 28:51
  the shots that are out of focus or the shots they are overexposed, and
• 28:53
  all this other stuff that I can see, and that like pay me,
• 28:57
  Nobody calls you on that. As long as the movie it is a good
• 29:03
  story and is competent most of the time, you know, like, as
• 29:07
  long as you're telling the story and it's and it looks competent, you can't
• 29:11
  get away with a little bit of that, at least at first. I
• 29:15
  mean at least specially if you're making it yourself. And I think I think
• 29:18
  passionately told too. It's a big thing too. It's like you can tell
• 29:22
  when you're watching something if it's if it's somebody just trying to cash in,
• 29:26
  trying to grab a quick buck, somebody just just doing an homage to some
• 29:30
  splatter thing that they've seen, or if someone just really genuinely is putting themselves
• 29:34
  out there. And I will give anything a pass if I can see the
• 29:38
  passion in it. Was there a lot of ad lib on the set,
• 29:41
  you know, It's funny. I get that a lot. And the script
• 29:45
  is so we cast we cast Adam. Adam was a theatrically trained actor,
• 29:49
  so it was a little bit harder to get him to come out of his
• 29:53
  shell. So basically what you see in every scene is almost completely as script.
• 30:00
  But then I, as the director, being in the scene, would
• 30:03
  let the let the scenes run longer. We'll be right back after a word
• 30:07
  from our sponsor, and now back to the show, and I would start
• 30:17
  trying to throw him off at the end. So most of the ad libs
• 30:19
  will come from tags at the end of the scenes as written, because once
• 30:22
  we would get once I would know in my mind that we were reaching the
• 30:26
  end of the scripted portion that Adam knew, I would kind of throw in
• 30:30
  a curveball and see if you would follow me. So there are definitely definitely
• 30:33
  some ad libs in there and some goofy kind of asides, But for the
• 30:37
  most part, that is a that is a written that is a written movie.
• 30:41
  I'm just so naturally you can't even tell. Yeah, I know,
• 30:44
  it's mind blowing now, all the little weird things like um, fuck you
• 30:48
  sir, fuck you to death at the end of you know the scene that
• 30:49
  that's a tag. There's a scene where where we're playing catch and I just
• 30:55
  do a weird dancing like bootoo beerdo boo, boo. That was a whole
• 31:00
  dialogue scene about like we'll start our own like place and we'll we'll let people
• 31:04
  in there and we'll decide who gets to it, and it just was coming
• 31:07
  off really stilted because we were playing catch and so I just I just said
• 31:11
  screw and I'm just gonna do a weird song and dance, and then that
• 31:14
  was what we used instead. One of the things that I think Synx films
• 31:17
  and one of the things that you guys do really well is everything's very it
• 31:19
  feels very natural. And one of the problems that I have with a lot
• 31:22
  of the things that are coming out now is the acting. Just you know
• 31:25
  that that's like the first thing you notice is just people reading lines. You
• 31:27
  don't really feel like a scene is actually taking place. Well, I mean,
• 31:32
  it obviously all starts at casting. I mean, you got to get
• 31:33
  somebody who can do it right off the bat. You got to know they
• 31:37
  can do it. But it's also about letting the actors, you know,
• 31:41
  feel out there, feel their way through the scene. You know, I
• 31:44
  didn't get to do that much of it on this because it was our first
• 31:48
  time and you know, and I was in the scenes, but there's a
• 31:52
  part about it that's if you put an actor in a box and you tell
• 31:56
  them that they can't go here, here, or here, and it has
• 32:00
  to be like this, this or that, then they're going to You're gonna
• 32:02
  stifle their their instrument. They're one thing that they have, which is trying
• 32:07
  to feel confident enough to fail, not be embarrassed, to try something crazy.
• 32:13
  And you know, there's something about kind of going through the scene before
• 32:15
  you shoot and letting the actor go where they naturally would want to be and
• 32:20
  then framing your shot around that is an easier way to get them to feel
• 32:24
  comfortable doing something that they would naturally do. Yeah, I would say that,
• 32:29
  like the wide shots in the Battery were extremely helpful to the fact that,
• 32:35
  like they they had a ton of room to move around. And then
• 32:38
  on top of that, like there's just something for me personally when you when
• 32:44
  you look at like the digital video, because even like the five D it's
• 32:47
  great, but it's still video. Super duper close ups of people just feel
• 32:55
  soap operash. So like even just shooting wider like that makes it feel more
• 33:01
  cinematic, which in turn actually helps their performance. Like there's just something about
• 33:06
  like those those ultra macro close ups where you can see every poor on their
• 33:10
  face. That makes it feel more like you're watching a movie, and that
• 33:15
  like like you can see the acting because it's you're right up in the face.
• 33:20
  I mean, those are necessary for a certain if you're going for a
• 33:22
  certain style. But I would also say that even though I said the script
• 33:24
  is, you know, this movie's pretty scripted, I made very clear from
• 33:28
  the get go that I'm not precious about my words. Uh, that's another
• 33:32
  way to that's that's a surefire way to get a stilted performance, as if
• 33:37
  an actor doesn't can't feel the line the way it feels natural coming out of
• 33:40
  their mouth, and yet they feel like they're they're tied to that that verbatim.
• 33:46
  So just whatever way feel. I mean. I was literally reading a
• 33:49
  script last night for a role I'm going to do, and as I was
• 33:52
  reading it, I was changing words in the moment and then writing those words
• 33:57
  down on the script because the way it's writ didn't sound natural. I couldn't
• 34:00
  quite make it flow in a natural way. But if I just tweaked this
• 34:04
  word, change that word, then suddenly it starts to come out more naturally.
• 34:07
  You know in the way that I've I've analyzed that character, weren't you
• 34:12
  weren't like precious about actions at all either, So it's like that that'd be
• 34:15
  the other thing, like like we didn't really we weren't precious about locations or
• 34:20
  actions. We'd be like, you know what, this location is not working
• 34:22
  out. Let's let's move over to this location and let's hey, maybe they're
• 34:27
  playing catch in this scene where they weren't playing catch, or maybe they're doing
• 34:30
  this in this scene. Yeah, it certainly works for a certain kind of
• 34:34
  movie. The more I think, just the more freedom you can give an
• 34:36
  actor to feel like they can move about, find the character, find the
• 34:40
  character's gait and rhythm, and and feel their way through the set um,
• 34:45
  then you're just gonna get It's just gonna get better. The more the more
• 34:47
  they feel natural and lived in in the moment, the more natural performance you're
• 34:52
  gonna get. You know. It reminded me a lot of Jim Jarremusch.
• 34:57
  I don't know if you guys have absolutely, well, thank you very much.
• 35:00
  That's a good compliment. Yeah, I just just lived in is what
• 35:05
  I always go for. Man. I always say that I will tweak the
• 35:07
  dialogue until until I can read it where it doesn't feel like it's being read
• 35:10
  anymore, and then I'll say throw it all out. If it doesn't work
• 35:14
  for you, just just get you know the point of the scene, right,
• 35:17
  you know the intent of the scene, and then just get there any
• 35:22
  way that feels right. And if you have actors who were quick on their
• 35:25
  feet, if one actor goes a certain way to try to get to the
• 35:29
  same point in a different way, then the other actor will follow and let
• 35:32
  them follow. And then if that doesn't work in the editing room, throw
• 35:36
  it out. Because we did a lot of that too. Right. Were
• 35:39
  you working with a lot of non actors? I mean I assume most of
• 35:43
  the zombies were just friends, right, Yeah, all the zombies were non
• 35:45
  actors. Unfortunately, that's you know, they're not only were they non actors,
• 35:49
  but they were young. We get that a lot. That Wow,
• 35:51
  all the zombies in this movie are the same age as the Yeah, I
• 35:54
  get it. Yeah, we should have cast a more diverse set of an
• 35:59
  extra. But like I said, we didn't do good enough preproduction. So
• 36:01
  that goes back to that. Right. Well, talking about for a second
• 36:06
  about the technical aspects, I want to talk to Christian for a second about
• 36:10
  you know, in terms of the way you approach this, I assume most
• 36:15
  of its natural light. Can you talk about kind of them what you were
• 36:19
  using. I know you were worth the five D mark two and you said
• 36:22
  a Carl's Ice lens. Can you talk a little bit about how you approach
• 36:24
  that. The craziest thing about the movie was that we knew that the last
• 36:29
  third of it takes place in the back of a station wagon, so we
• 36:34
  needed a super wide lens. So I ended up renting a Zeiss twenty one
• 36:39
  millimeter that on the full frame five D. That ended up kind of creating
• 36:46
  the whole look for the movie because it was such a better lens than any
• 36:49
  that I had that I tried to use it as often as possible. So
• 36:53
  then you you know, we already knew we wanted to shoot super wide,
• 36:58
  but then shooting with the twenty one millimeter just really really opened it up even
• 37:05
  further, so much so in fact that we we actually, um, we
• 37:08
  didn't shoot with the intention of having the movie B two thirty five one.
• 37:15
  We actually cropped it in post as an afterthought, Like it was just that
• 37:21
  we realized, Wow, these these shots are so wide and they looked much
• 37:24
  better cropped, and it once again like helped with the film look that we
• 37:30
  were trying to achieve. So yeah, No, as far as lighting,
• 37:35
  I just had a like a fifty dollars led light that was battery operated because
• 37:39
  we were in the woods, we had no power. It was only using
• 37:44
  a couple of scenes. And then I mean, obviously the most important thing
• 37:49
  I had was one of those variable end filters because so much of it was
• 37:52
  shot outside in sunlight. And that's the one thing that I noticed whenever I
• 38:00
  get sent something now someone's like, hey, can you review this? Can
• 38:02
  you review this? Their shutter speed is oh like its first time filmmaker.
• 38:07
  The shutter speed is all over the place. And you got that saving private
• 38:10
  Ryan look from shooting at a high shutter speed. Um. So other than
• 38:16
  that, I didn't really have much equipment. I didn't even have a fluid
• 38:19
  video had on on the battery. I mean it was crazy. I had
• 38:23
  an eighty dollars shoulder rig from Optica. Oh yeah, that was that was
• 38:30
  That was it. I had a plastic tripod uh that I bought it best
• 38:32
  Buy. So yeah, no, I was unprepared, but you know,
• 38:37
  we we wanted most of the shots to be static, so you know,
• 38:42
  I didn't think I needed a fluid videohead and all those other things, and
• 38:45
  we didn't quite have the budget. So yeah, so what what were the
• 38:51
  major things that if you could go back in time you think would have made
• 38:54
  things a lot easier for you? A steady cam because we had discussed everything's
• 39:00
  gonna be stationary. But then you know, you start making the movie and
• 39:05
  it's like, oh, well, just you know, follow along, We're
• 39:07
  gonna walk down this hill over these rocks and you know, just walk behind
• 39:13
  us and that kind of stuff. I mean, I I my ass was
• 39:15
  saved in post by Premier's warp stabilizer and that's this You're not something you want
• 39:22
  to rely on, especially like you know, it has artifacts and someone that
• 39:28
  I can see. But we had to do it because we didn't have a
• 39:32
  steadicam, although like on the last day of the shoot, one of the
• 39:36
  producers was like, I got a steadicam in my trunk and I wanted to
• 39:39
  stab him. I absolutely wanted to stab him, and I would say,
• 39:44
  just, uh, you know, there are certain things about the fact that
• 39:45
  we didn't get to We didn't really know how to plan a shoot schedule.
• 39:51
  So there were some there were some days where we were just overloaded with things
• 39:53
  we had to get. I mean, when we had the only other two
• 39:57
  actors in the movie along Brian and Neil's Balla, they we had them scheduled
• 40:02
  on the same day because they're both coming from New York. That's fourteen pages
• 40:06
  of dialogue. We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor, and
• 40:15
  now back to the show, you know, and then it's raining, and
• 40:20
  then it's you know, the night is approaching, and it's just one of
• 40:22
  those things where you start to feel you don't want to feel like you're losing
• 40:27
  control your set when you have actors there, and once the elements get involved,
• 40:30
  it's just like, we should never have scheduled both of those actors on
• 40:34
  the same day, that many pages in one day, But we just had
• 40:37
  no idea how to schedule a film and we had such a little amount of
• 40:39
  time to do it. So a backup audio recorder would have helped on that
• 40:44
  day because our audio recorder fried and we had no other option to record audio,
• 40:49
  and we waited two hours to get one and then finally gave up and
• 40:54
  recorded using the mono mic on the SLR. Yeah, that would have I
• 41:00
  mean, we would have not just saved the audio quality of that scene,
• 41:06
  but we would have saved the two hours while we were waiting for someone with
• 41:07
  a video camera to come that had XLR inputs. Right. But it's another
• 41:13
  thing that you guys did. That's you know a lot of indie filmmakers forget
• 41:17
  about. Is you hired a guy to be your one sound guy, you
• 41:22
  know, and that makes a big difference. Absolutely, absolutely, that was
• 41:25
  you know, that's the you know, I think throughout our little weird troop
• 41:30
  of filmmakers since you know, since we've been kids, we've all kind of
• 41:34
  had our own specialty, but none of us have ever been sound guys.
• 41:37
  You know. That's that is a very specialized area to go into. So
• 41:43
  when I was the one thing I did do right in pre production was I
• 41:46
  put an ad out and I for a sound guy, and I said,
• 41:49
  look, I got a little bit of scratched to give you, and I
• 41:52
  can give you a little back end in the movie, but you've got to
• 41:54
  stay with us the entire time. You can't go home. I can't be
• 41:58
  wondering where you are, you know, every day when when it's time for
• 42:01
  call, you're just going to be a part of the crew and you're gonna
• 42:04
  be there. And this guy responded and he was like that sounds cool.
• 42:08
  And so I met this guy for a couple of pints and we ended up
• 42:13
  arguing over the merits of baseball and hockey for about two and a half hours.
• 42:16
  And you know, he's a sound guy now, but he used to
• 42:19
  be like a roadie, so he's used to like living in a van with
• 42:22
  musicians and stuff. So he just I mean day one he was there.
• 42:24
  He was sleeping on the couch in the cabins with us, you know,
• 42:27
  beers at night. He was, you know, doing everything that a grip
• 42:30
  would do, that a PA would do, and he was doing sound.
• 42:34
  So he was invaluable. So if you can get yourself, you know,
• 42:37
  and especially in a small crew, people are gonna have to wear many hats.
• 42:39
  So get a guy who can do sound and blackout windows if he needs
• 42:43
  to. So, what would you say was the hardest aside from well,
• 42:49
  let me ask you about the scheduling. What if you could go back and
• 42:52
  possibly what you did for um texts. We'll talk about that in a second,
• 42:58
  But what when you're scheduling and everything. What are there Is there a
• 43:02
  specific tool that you're using now that you didn't have then, or something that
• 43:06
  you're doing now to schedule things out? We still have not a movie tradition
• 43:12
  or you would like to in the future. Yeah, well I would love
• 43:14
  to just get a good line producer and do it. They can do it
• 43:16
  themselves. Okay, No, it's it's just one of those areas that I
• 43:21
  just had. We haven't had to. I mean, Texas you will see
• 43:23
  was not very well planned in itself either, so we didn't learn a lot
• 43:30
  from our first effort. But no, but there's little things that are obvious,
• 43:35
  like when you look back, like, okay, you can't have forty
• 43:37
  or fifty extras standing outside for twelve hours a day, two days back to
• 43:43
  back. You've got to feed them, you've got to keep them occupied,
• 43:46
  and there's a way to break that up. But then you realize that you
• 43:50
  can only have the certain location where those extras can be for one or two
• 43:53
  days. Then you start running into two issues that we just didn't really concern
• 43:59
  ourselves with. I mean, there's a moment in the movie where where Mickey
• 44:02
  puts blankets all over the windows in the car because he doesn't want to see
• 44:07
  the zombies faces anymore. And luckily, you know, story wise, you
• 44:14
  can you can justify that because Mickey just can't deal with the situation. But
• 44:17
  in reality, we realized after that first day of shooting with all those extras
• 44:22
  that if we have these extras staring in the windows for the entire thirty five
• 44:25
  minute third act, that these these characters are in the car, you're gonna
• 44:30
  start to see them get bored. You're gonna start to see the zombies looking
• 44:32
  at the camera. You're gonna, you're gonna, you're gonna, you're gonna
• 44:36
  invite the audience to start looking at the zombies rather than focusing on the characters.
• 44:40
  But it was in fact just because we couldn't we couldn't afford to have
• 44:45
  them out there all that time. So we went back after the first day
• 44:49
  brainstorm just came up with that blanket idea and then move the car into a
• 44:52
  garage, into a controlled setting, put a sun lamp out the window and
• 44:57
  had a one person shake it, and then just added the sounds at the
• 45:00
  end, and that worked fine. That's one of those creative decisions. I'm
• 45:02
  really proud of but it was one that we might not have had to run
• 45:06
  into if we had, you know, knew how to schedule a movie.
• 45:12
  What was the hardest day on the set? Yeah, it was. It
• 45:16
  was the day where the sound broke. I mean that was the day I
• 45:20
  quit the movie before the sound broke. Oh okay, well I didn't know
• 45:23
  about that. I quit on text too, I think, um, I
• 45:29
  quit, I quit the movie. Yeah, and just kind of a tradition
• 45:30
  at this you're not doing it right. If someone doesn't quit, Yeah,
• 45:34
  that means it's not hard. That means you're not struggling. We were trying
• 45:37
  to make a squib and it was failing, and it was a it was
• 45:40
  a disaster. That was the day that we had the two actors come in
• 45:44
  from out of town. There's this I get shot in the legs. We
• 45:46
  were trying to make a squib out of nothing, out of blood and a
• 45:50
  condom and like a firecracker. It was raining. You were running out of
• 45:54
  time, you know, tensions were high. The sound broke, we ran
• 45:59
  out of light. It was just the most everything that could go wrong went
• 46:04
  wrong. I mean, if you watch the documentary, you'll see it's just
• 46:07
  once that day is mentioned. It did everyone's size. It was a rough
• 46:12
  day. Well, I think it's helpful for other filmmakers to realize, you
• 46:16
  know, that it is such a difficult process, because I mean, you
• 46:21
  know, I think everybody who makes it indie film that doesn't have much of
• 46:23
  a budget has probably gone through the same thing, and a lot of people
• 46:27
  quit, you know, a lot of people never make their film. Yeah.
• 46:30
  No, that's unfortunate too, because it's the most rewarding and most fun
• 46:32
  I've ever had, and it's also you know, the most stressful and crazy.
• 46:37
  But those two things go hand in hand, and there's nothing like you
• 46:40
  know, sitting down with other filmmakers and chewing the fat and listening to them
• 46:44
  talk about their nightmare moments on set, because you then you can relate.
• 46:47
  Oh yeah, gosh, that's just like when the wasp nest was stuck in
• 46:52
  the car door and the lawnmowing people came all on the same day, on
• 46:54
  the first day of shooting. It's just like, what is happening here?
• 46:59
  You know it. But that's kind of one of those badges of honor you
• 47:01
  wear after you made a you know, an indie movie on your own.
• 47:07
  In terms of the music. Can we talk for a second about that and
• 47:12
  how you were able to get such a great soundtrack? Absolutely, and thank
• 47:17
  you. No, you know, it started as I'm a huge fan of
• 47:22
  rock Plaza Central to span rock Plaza Central. I've loved them for years.
• 47:25
  I used to be a big fan and I would go to all their shows.
• 47:29
  And when we cut together a location scouting video before we'd ever ever made
• 47:34
  the movie, we used one of their songs and we kind of put it
• 47:37
  up on Twitter for people to see what we were going to do, and
• 47:38
  the lead singer of the band contacted us and said, Hey, that looks
• 47:42
  cool. Are you guys going to use our music in the movie as well,
• 47:45
  which had never even occurred to us that that would be a possibility.
• 47:49
  And he was really kind and quit us in touch with his label, and
• 47:52
  they were souper. I mean, they gave us the rights to the songs
• 47:55
  for literally nothing, like I think it was like five hundred bucks forever worldwide.
• 48:01
  That is great. And even better than that, it's like he put
• 48:04
  us in touch with the band The Parlor, who has a couple of songs
• 48:07
  in the movie, and they just gave us free reign of all their songs
• 48:10
  for nothing, And the same thing happened with you know wise Blood, who
• 48:15
  does the electronica in the movie electronic songs in the movie. He Adam kind
• 48:17
  of knew him from college, so he gave us his music. Son hotel
• 48:22
  in El Cantidor were some Florida bands that Christian knew from the local scene down
• 48:25
  here. He talked to them and they let us use their music. You
• 48:29
  know, you hear a lot of people. I mean, one of the
• 48:30
  most amazing things is, no matter where I've gone with this movie, all
• 48:32
  over the world, whatever language, people always always ask about the music.
• 48:36
  And that's so rewarding because there's something that's to be said about, you know,
• 48:40
  artists helping other artists out. And it was such a beautiful thing for
• 48:44
  them to do, to let us use their music. And what's been lovely
• 48:47
  is how often those bands have contacted us and said, hey, you know,
• 48:52
  once the movie came out, we saw a huge uptick in downloads and
• 48:54
  sales on our music and stuff. So it's just a it's one of those
• 48:58
  things where you know, look, we can't give you much upfront, but
• 49:00
  you know, if our movie does well, you'll do well. It's a
• 49:02
  you know, it's a symbiotic relationship. And that was amazing and now we're
• 49:07
  like great friends with Chris Eaton from Rock Press Pleasant Central, and that's it's
• 49:15
  such a weird thing to go from being a fan of somebody and like I
• 49:17
  shook his hand one time at a show to now he'll like call me up
• 49:22
  and say, hey, I got this idea for a novel, Like what
• 49:23
  do you think about this? And just talk to him about it. And
• 49:25
  You're like, that's so crazy. You know, it's so crazy to go
• 49:29
  from fan to to peer and collaborator. But you haven't told him that you
• 49:32
  were like that though. I mean, he's not like want to shake my
• 49:35
  hand again? Told him. I mean there was literally a show where I
• 49:38
  was so into it. I was having such a good time that they like
• 49:44
  handed the microphone to me in the crowd to like hold up to the trombone
• 49:47
  player because I was I just wouldn't stop. And then another show they were
• 49:51
  like, hey man, we saw you out there like dancing up a storm
• 49:53
  like a crazy person, like just thank some it's cool that you're like getting
• 49:58
  into the musical. And I was just like they talked to me. Now
• 50:00
  it's like a go to their house and like you know, having barbecue with
• 50:05
  their kids and stuff. It's so wild. We'll be right back after a
• 50:08
  word from our sponsor and now back to the show. As far as the
• 50:16
  DVDs and stuff like that and reproduction of their songs, do you guys have
• 50:21
  to have like contracts and things like that that we're worked out? Just can
• 50:24
  you give me an idea of how that all kind of worked out? So
• 50:27
  most of the band's, most of the bands is UM were off label and
• 50:31
  they gave they gave us like the rights to do anything with their music in
• 50:36
  the movie, including I mean rock Plaza Central gave us those rights. And
• 50:42
  then but then they were like, oh, we forgot we're in Canada.
• 50:45
  No, we have a label in the US. UM, So we we
• 50:49
  did have to get in contact with their label, but their label basically gave
• 50:52
  us the rights to use the songs. Um. Yeah, you definitely have
• 50:57
  to get you know, releases signed. You have to get all the bands
• 51:00
  enough. But once you do, once you get into deliverables, if you
• 51:01
  if you have a distribution deal, you've got to get all the contracts squared
• 51:07
  away with those artists. But I mean, I can remember I think one
• 51:08
  of the bands from Florida was happing to be playing in New York City and
• 51:12
  Adam uh, you know who plays Mickey, our producer, one of our
• 51:15
  producers. He was like, what, they're in the city right now.
• 51:16
  He just like hoofed it down to where they were playing a show, and
• 51:20
  like confront of them, it's like, hey, can you sign this release
• 51:22
  for that song that's in our movie. It's just like you just gotta you
• 51:24
  gotta get it all squared away. Deliverables is an annoying, annoying part of
• 51:30
  what should be one of the most amazing parts of the process, which is,
• 51:34
  hey, we're going to distribute your movie. Cool, what do we
• 51:36
  need to give you? Oh? Everything that's ever been made in the world,
• 51:38
  we have to give God No, Yeah, but I mean yeah,
• 51:44
  in general, I mean, I mean we didn't really have to pay for
• 51:46
  the songs. I mean we I think even the record label deferred the payment
• 51:52
  until after the battery was like bringing in money from the distribution, So it
• 51:57
  was it was pretty pretty awesome. Actually, now, can you talk a
• 52:01
  little bit about your post production process. I just want to give people a
• 52:06
  full view of the whole thing and kind of how how you went from UM,
• 52:12
  taking all you know, even the minutia of taking the card out of
• 52:15
  the camera and did you do backups? Did you you know? How how
• 52:19
  did post production work? Can you talk about that? I could talk about
• 52:22
  on the battery, UM we had I'll tell you we had two hard drives
• 52:28
  on set. I would I would take the cards out every day when we
• 52:31
  got back to we we had these little cabins that we were staying in.
• 52:36
  UM. I would take the card out, put it off onto the two
• 52:38
  hard drives. Then I would move one of the hard drives into one the
• 52:44
  other cabin, just in case one of the cabins got broken into because we
• 52:47
  had all this film camera equipment coming in and out so so or it burned
• 52:52
  down, who knows, you know, So we had we had two separate
• 52:55
  hard drives every day. UM. And then after that post production kind of
• 53:01
  took like two whole years. I mean it was off and off. I
• 53:06
  mean it was we never just like jumped into it all at once because we
• 53:09
  didn't have time because we had day jobs. But yeah, I mean,
• 53:13
  I mean my sister and Michael Katzman edited the movie. UM. And then
• 53:19
  after that our friend Ryan Winford did the score, but everything else then after
• 53:24
  that was done by me. So like I did the sound design and the
• 53:30
  score mixing and the color grading, and then you know, like the final
• 53:35
  kind of tweaking to the edit and all that stuff, the deliverables and that
• 53:40
  that just was like it's just never done. We would play a film festival
• 53:45
  and I'd come back and be like, I gotta fix that color in that
• 53:47
  scene. I gotta fix the sound in that scene. But like I said,
• 53:52
  I mean we are we are lucky in that. You really are lucky
• 53:54
  if you have people who can wear many hats, because it's you know,
• 53:57
  our editors are you know, they put together they're a rough cut for us
• 54:00
  and then until I could come down and we could really sit there and hone
• 54:05
  the editum and then but then they also just went off on their own and
• 54:07
  did like hundreds of follies of folly sounds for the movie, which we didn't
• 54:13
  even think, how are we going to get to folly? They just went
• 54:15
  off and did that Christians you know, going into his garage and like recording
• 54:21
  himself slapping the car like a million different times so we can create that soundscape
• 54:24
  for all the zombies like slapping their hands up against the windows. So it's
• 54:28
  like everybody's doing, you know, jobs they don't know. I remember one
• 54:32
  thing Christian wanted was somebody to do sound design, and I met a guy
• 54:37
  and Christian flew to New York. He flies to New York to meet this
• 54:39
  guy, and the guy like, who's basically like an intern somewhere and he
• 54:45
  thinks he's a hot shot, tells us that the movie can't be can't it
• 54:50
  can't be done in the state it's in. He said, he said we
• 54:52
  didn't have enough folly. We had a thousand pieces of folly in the movie,
• 54:57
  and he said we needed more folly, which means he didn't even notice
• 54:59
  it. It was fully, it was just good, yeah, and it
• 55:00
  was I'm like, we're a six thousand dollars movie. We have a thousand
• 55:05
  pieces of folly in here. And he's saying, I can't mix it until
• 55:07
  there's more fully, and so Christian goes out. Christian goes outside for a
• 55:10
  cigarette. I walk outside and I'm like, hey, man, what's going
• 55:14
  on, And he's like, fuck it, I'll learn to do it myself.
• 55:19
  And anyway home and just watched online tutorials and did the sound design himself.
• 55:24
  So hopefully from here on out, what we're hoping is that Christian doesn't
• 55:29
  have to wear as many hats, because I could see him dying. His
• 55:32
  hair is graying, just freaking out because I'm the writer, director, actor
• 55:37
  guy who gets to do all the fun stuff, and he's just like I'm
• 55:40
  coloring the same scene for a year. I mean because we added we added
• 55:45
  editor, like we well, Jeremy and I co edited the new movie,
• 55:51
  but I also did the sound recording on the new movie on set, so
• 55:55
  like I was just adding jobs like and this one. Maybe she just sayd
• 55:59
  the things that you didn't do in the credit to Yeah, exactly this one.
• 56:01
  I mean, I mean tex Montana. All the tech was done by
• 56:06
  me. The only the only thing that wasn't was the score was done by
• 56:09
  Ryan again. Um, but I recorded the score with him, so you
• 56:14
  know, like it's it's just nuts. Now. Was there any when you
• 56:16
  were learning how to do that? Were you just going on YouTube or was
• 56:20
  there any just for people who might want to take on something like that,
• 56:24
  Yeah, that'd help them, I mean anything, uh like, because I
• 56:29
  mean even my other job, I do photography and design. Um, there's
• 56:31
  a site called Linda dot com l y N Yeah, definitely. Yeah,
• 56:37
  that site. I've learned how to do a million things on that site.
• 56:40
  And it's pretty great because you could just sign up for twenty dollars like Crunch
• 56:45
  for a whole month, and then cancel your subscription and the sign up again
• 56:51
  when you need a refresher. Yeah, that's sad because that's I've I've done
• 56:54
  that before. Yeah, like, I want to take this class, but
• 56:58
  I don't want to. I don't want to get a membership. You can
• 57:00
  do a two week free trial too. Yeah, did you take Dick McClellan's
• 57:04
  class. I think Deek is kind of the guru over there because I teach
• 57:08
  photoshop. It's I'm also a graphic designer, but um, you know it's
• 57:14
  it's funny because I learned Deek was the guy that basically taught me photoshop back
• 57:19
  in like ninety eight or something like that. But it came the it used
• 57:23
  to Linda dot Com used to also be I think Total Training. I think
• 57:28
  they merged or something, and Total Training used to you would get like twenty
• 57:32
  VHS cassettes of how to learn photoshop. But I remember that arriving one day
• 57:37
  and I was just like so excited to get the Total Training Series. Anyway,
• 57:40
  Sorry, I'm off topic, right, It's it's totally you know,
• 57:44
  like I'm sure, I'm like Dick, I would I would probably recognize it.
• 57:46
  My son. I'm like, oh yeah, oh yeah, yeah,
• 57:49
  Well I've seen that guy a million times because I mean I've watched all every
• 57:52
  Adobe program I've watched on there, because I used pretty much every Adobe program
• 57:57
  in different jobs. And I would say my advice for all of that is
• 58:00
  to get yourself a Christian because because I just want to go right, I
• 58:06
  don't want to do that shit. We're gonna give Christians email address and home
• 58:09
  address at the end of this so everybody can get in touch with them.
• 58:14
  No, I said, get yourself a Christian. Not oh sorry, another
• 58:17
  Jeremy. Everyone needs another Christian, but no one needs another Jeremy. Yeah.
• 58:24
  Okay. So, Um, and and color grading, can you talk
• 58:29
  about that for a second, because I mean, yeah, you were doing
• 58:30
  that resolve in here and deferred to Christian. Yeah, you don't know anything
• 58:36
  about that. Um. Actually this is crazy now. Um on the battery,
• 58:42
  I was using just the built in color corrector stuff in Premiere. Um.
• 58:50
  Uh I didn't switch to Resolve until Texts Montana, and that's why I'm
• 58:55
  still learning Resolve because it's it's kind of a whole mind fuck for me.
• 59:00
  Um. But yeah, No, the battery was done with like the fast
• 59:05
  colored corrector and all these other premiere tools. Um. And then I think
• 59:09
  towards the end Colorista um, which but that was already when I was like,
• 59:17
  like, after we had premiered the movie, I was going back and
• 59:21
  fixing some things. But then the major thing I did on the battery was,
• 59:27
  um, besides I just I was color grading it to be really low
• 59:30
  contrast. I was always bringing up the blacks because I felt like when you
• 59:37
  have these crushed blacks and these super super whites, basically, um, it's
• 59:45
  it's stuff that really you can only do with video. And the film didn't
• 59:50
  really have that because even you know, film film in a theater had just
• 59:53
  light going through it. So to me, I was like, I'm not
• 59:57
  gonna I'm not gonna ever have true black in the battery. So it was
• 1:00:02
  always kind of raised up to like around even like tena iri, We'll be
• 1:00:09
  right back after a word from our sponsor and now back to the show.
• 1:00:21
  But anyway, I know. But the most important thing I did on the
• 1:00:24
  battery was I got I bought this film grain loop from a company called Guerrilla
• 1:00:30
  Grain, and it was like fifty dollars for a real scan of film grain,
• 1:00:37
  and I put it over top of that because over the battery, because
• 1:00:42
  not only did it make it look more like film, but it also helped
• 1:00:45
  with I have been doing a lot of noise reduction from shooting high is at
• 1:00:50
  night, so that you know, we use I was using Neat video for
• 1:00:54
  noise reduction, and when you do that, like things start to look plastic
• 1:01:00
  and fake, and the film grain really kind of gets rid of that plastic
• 1:01:04
  look. But now that I shoot with the C one hundred, I'm using
• 1:01:08
  Da Vinci Resolve because there's just so much more color information there. Shooting progress,
• 1:01:15
  yeah, I'm shooting into a progress ninja at amost Ninja two recorder,
• 1:01:20
  Okay, And it's so it's so much more. I mean, it's like
• 1:01:23
  night and day from the battery. So I say, like tex Montana Will
• 1:01:28
  Survive is a found footage movie, yet on a technical level, it's way
• 1:01:35
  way more. It's way better looking than the battery is. Okay, So
• 1:01:40
  I don't want to put Jeremy to sleep over there. So let's talk about
• 1:01:45
  are you kidding me? Have I have recordings of Christian talking tech and I
• 1:01:47
  just listened to it as my lullaby. Yeah, I've just heard it a
• 1:01:52
  thousand times. But people do need to know this ship. As you were
• 1:01:54
  making the film, were you thinking about distribution? Were you concerned with trying
• 1:02:00
  to build up social awareness of the you know, what was your idea towards
• 1:02:05
  the marketing? Uh? You know, we didn't really have one. Honestly,
• 1:02:08
  I think that a lot of times speaking of things that could derail your
• 1:02:13
  your your production. Um, put in a cart before the horse is one
• 1:02:16
  of the main issues too. I mean, I don't people you'll still spend
• 1:02:21
  a month making a poster for a movie that haven't even considered getting out there
• 1:02:23
  and actually making. So it was really just about one thing at a time,
• 1:02:28
  right, Let's let's make a movie first. Let's see if we've got
• 1:02:30
  a movie first, and then okay, well let's see how we can get
• 1:02:31
  people to see it. And then it became you know, the festival circuit,
• 1:02:37
  trying to get into festivals, and then you know, getting a trailer
• 1:02:42
  cut together that that's that's interesting enough to where you might get some people a
• 1:02:45
  little bit of buzz about it, get it to some websites that traffic in
• 1:02:49
  those things, and just start to build an awareness. But it really wasn't
• 1:02:52
  until the festival, the festival circuit kind of kicked up that we started building
• 1:02:59
  an online president and then going to those festivals and glad handing and meeting people
• 1:03:02
  and talking to them is really the only way you're going to get getting noticed
• 1:03:07
  in you know, because there's so many people making movies now. The only
• 1:03:09
  way you're gonna get right at the top is is to get into festivals,
• 1:03:13
  get seen, be there, meet as many people as possible, be nice,
• 1:03:17
  be humble, have drinks with them, make yourself available. What were
• 1:03:22
  some of the more important festivals for the film in terms of like what you
• 1:03:25
  guys connections and things like that, or what were the most fun ones?
• 1:03:30
  The fun ones are there's so many fun ones. I mean the first,
• 1:03:32
  the first one we got into is the Tellyright Horror Show on Colorado, which
• 1:03:37
  was amazing, and that was our world premiere and we were super excited about
• 1:03:40
  that. And then after that we didn't get into anything for months. I
• 1:03:44
  mean, it got really demoralizing. You start throwing fifty dollars a pop at
• 1:03:47
  these festivals and not hearing anything, and it's like you're chucking money into a
• 1:03:51
  hole and you have no idea what's going on. And then out of the
• 1:03:53
  blue, we got an email from Imagine in Amsterdam, which is a big
• 1:04:00
  genre festivals has been going out there for about twenty five years, and we
• 1:04:03
  got into that. And then because they are a part of kind of a
• 1:04:08
  genre of Europe, like an international genre, like coalition almost of film festivals,
• 1:04:13
  other film festivals that were in that same union started asking for the movie.
• 1:04:17
  So there's this weird thing that happens where at first you're spending a lot
• 1:04:20
  of money to get to submit to festivals and not hearing anything. Then you
• 1:04:25
  get into one, and then suddenly other festivals know that that's happening, and
• 1:04:29
  then they start saying they're going to waive their submission fee. And then at
• 1:04:32
  some point, not only do they waive the submission fee, they just invite
• 1:04:35
  you to screen their period. And then at some point they start flying you
• 1:04:41
  out and they start paying you screening fees to show your movie. So it's
• 1:04:45
  this really weird process where if you're lucky enough to catch a little bit of
• 1:04:49
  fire on the festival circuit, you can go from spending money to making money
• 1:04:55
  and getting to see the world. So Imagine definitely was what kick started that.
• 1:05:00
  And then from there we went to We won the Audience Award there,
• 1:05:02
  which has been won by like Silence of the Lambs and you know, The
• 1:05:06
  Raid and Donnie Darko and From Dust Till Dawn all these like great big genre
• 1:05:11
  movies, and we won that award somehow, and I know that's just because
• 1:05:15
  we were there. We were there for a week, we were having beers
• 1:05:17
  with people, we were shaking hands, We do lively Q and a's and
• 1:05:19
  we you know, and it's it's part of the politics of building an audience
• 1:05:25
  and hoping that they'll follow you to your next project, just just saying I
• 1:05:29
  know, I'm living in a dream right now, and I want to be
• 1:05:31
  respectful and humble of the entire process. So it's that was really fun.
• 1:05:34
  Then we went to Dead by Don in Scotland and won the Audience Award there,
• 1:05:38
  and then we went to Brazil and Mexico City. Fantasia was sold out
• 1:05:44
  crowd, even though we were already released in the United States, which it
• 1:05:46
  was kind of a hang up. They weren't sure if they could play it.
• 1:05:49
  They decided to take a chance on us anyway, and it was completely
• 1:05:51
  sold out. There was still a line outside when they shut the doors.
• 1:05:55
  We ended up giving up our own seats so some more people could squeeze in.
• 1:06:00
  Just just a really amazing process to go over the world, go down
• 1:06:03
  to Brazil and and you know, we we were the opening night film at
• 1:06:06
  Macabre in Mexico City, like five hundred people in the theater. Like red
• 1:06:11
  carpet and flashbulbs and but these things really like they help you build traction and
• 1:06:15
  and and now to see on this Kickstarter campaign how many of those people from
• 1:06:20
  all over the world have kicked in that we don't even know is incredible.
• 1:06:25
  And that's that's just from from not taking your audience for granted. And of
• 1:06:30
  course it helps that. You know, the thing I said at the beginning
• 1:06:32
  of this whole process was if we do at least come close to what I'm
• 1:06:38
  what I'm trying to do here, which is make this interesting, you know,
• 1:06:43
  artsy, character driven zombie movie that the gate keepers of the indie horror
• 1:06:47
  world will respond to it and then you know, to get people like Anty
• 1:06:51
  Cool News and Bloody Disgusting in Fangoria and dread Central. All these people to
• 1:06:56
  write really positive things about the movie just really helped help to push it along.
• 1:07:00
  Were you doing anything or was it just like once you got the first
• 1:07:02
  festival? What was it? Imagine? Imagine you know, once you got
• 1:07:06
  that, all these things just started happening without a whole lot of effort from
• 1:07:11
  you guys. Or were you still like out there pushing it and promoting it.
• 1:07:14
  I mean, we were always pushing it in our way, you know,
• 1:07:16
  through Twitter and you send a couple of emails here and here and there.
• 1:07:19
  But it's amazing how many people find it on their own. You can
• 1:07:23
  you can try morning, noon and night to get pressed for something and never
• 1:07:28
  hear a word, and then as soon as something happens, it just you
• 1:07:32
  can't stop it. It's it just takes off on its own. It really
• 1:07:36
  is crazy. I mean, it's like the Catch twenty two about you know,
• 1:07:39
  getting an agent, Like you can't get an agent unless an agent comes
• 1:07:44
  looking for you, and by then you need an agent. It's just one
• 1:07:45
  of those weird things where it's just you can you're not gonna get pressed until
• 1:07:48
  the press hears about you, until they can't ignore you anymore. Right,
• 1:07:54
  Yeah, I mean that's one of the things we talk about with our marketing
• 1:07:57
  the film marketing program is the idea that you need to be you know,
• 1:08:01
  if you go to somebody, you need to be the person that's already kind
• 1:08:04
  of in front of like horror fans or zombie fans. You know, so
• 1:08:08
  if you're getting on Bloody Disgusting or fang Glorior or whatever, there's no way
• 1:08:12
  you're gonna you could do that on your own. You know, those people
• 1:08:14
  already have those that fan base. Right. Well there's another well there are
• 1:08:18
  little things too, Right. So, even though we want this movie to
• 1:08:21
  stand on its own as a film, it definitely helped that we were able
• 1:08:25
  to every time we were talking about it at a Q and A or whatever,
• 1:08:28
  to say that we made it for six thousand dollars because it was the
• 1:08:30
  truth. But it's also it's a it's a clear marketing hook, right,
• 1:08:33
  people are going to write about that. Um. So it was one of
• 1:08:36
  those things where we actually talked about, like do we really want to talk
• 1:08:40
  about the budget for this movie or do we want to just let it have,
• 1:08:43
  let it exist on its own merits. But at some point it was
• 1:08:45
  just like, you know what, it's too it's too good of of of
• 1:08:47
  a marketing hook. And the Walking Dead helped as well, which the movie.
• 1:08:50
  I mean, the movie was conceived before the Walking Dead premiere, but
• 1:08:57
  I mean that was major. Yeah, there's little things like that. And
• 1:09:01
  what was I just gonna say, I don't know. I'm glad I threw
• 1:09:05
  you. Thanks, Thanks Christian, Thanks for popping in there and talking about
• 1:09:11
  well, I'm saying that zombies, zombies don't hurt, but we didn't.
• 1:09:14
  We were not planning on that at all. In fact, they might have
• 1:09:16
  actually like stunted the movie if if zombies were as big as they are now.
• 1:09:21
  Oh no, well, I mean even even when it came out,
• 1:09:24
  I you know, I heard zombie fatigue, zombie fatigue all over the place,
• 1:09:27
  and it was like, oh boy, here we go. I mean,
• 1:09:29
  he got to the point where when I told people I made a movie,
• 1:09:30
  I would say, oh, yeah, I made this little like artsy
• 1:09:32
  horror movie. I wouldn't say the zombie word unless I was pressed, because
• 1:09:36
  it's just, you know, you hear so many people just completely shut down
• 1:09:40
  when when they hear zombie and that's just annoying. That always annoys me.
• 1:09:44
  I always said, like, nothing is worn out if someone makes a good
• 1:09:47
  one. I mean, you can make five hundred vampire movies and be sick
• 1:09:50
  of them all. As soon as someone makes a good one, it's like,
• 1:09:53
  oh, the return of the vampire film. It's no, it's just
• 1:09:56
  because someone made a good one again. It really is. You know,
• 1:09:58
  when you're making a zombie film, it's never about the zombies. It's always
• 1:10:00
  about the human, you know. I mean Walking Dead is not about zombies
• 1:10:04
  at all. It's so yeah, absolutely, we'll be right back after a
• 1:10:11
  word from our sponsor and now back to the show. No, And that's
• 1:10:18
  the way it should be, right. I Mean, it got to the
• 1:10:20
  point where I was even considering very briefly, when it was you know,
• 1:10:24
  it's difficult for us to try to get you know, makeup for for the
• 1:10:28
  movie. I was like, you know what, let's just put all of
• 1:10:30
  the zombies in T shirts with a Z on it and then don't you don't
• 1:10:32
  even don't even deal with this the zombie makeup, just to prove that this
• 1:10:36
  is more about the characters than the zombies. We'll just that'll really piss people
• 1:10:40
  off and be weird. But that was a little maybe a little too esoteric.
• 1:10:45
  So okay, let's talk about distribution. No discuss the distribution aspect of
• 1:10:53
  the battery. Uh yeah, uh okay, um no, yeah, no,
• 1:11:02
  it's um. Well, so you know, after we got to that
• 1:11:05
  first festival, Tell You Right, Horror, we were approached by film buff
• 1:11:09
  about the digital rights, um, the world relation, the worldwide digital rights.
• 1:11:14
  Yea. And and you know, like I said, between Tell Your
• 1:11:18
  Right and Imagine, we didn't have a lot going on and didn't see it
• 1:11:23
  felt like, okay, that was it, that was our We're winding down
• 1:11:26
  now, so let's let's do this. Let's let's get on this train.
• 1:11:30
  And you know, of course, then the movie takes off and you start
• 1:11:33
  to wonder, oh boy, And we got approached by a lot of people
• 1:11:38
  saying, oh, you've already given away your your worldwide digital rights? Are
• 1:11:41
  you crazy? And you know, that's a lesson you gotta learn, is
• 1:11:44
  that you gotta I mean, it's a hard lesson to learn if you've never
• 1:11:47
  done it. The business side. It is so difficult to navigate if you're
• 1:11:51
  just coming into it. I think far more difficult to navigate than actually making
• 1:11:56
  a moving because every time you do something, someone tells you you made the
• 1:12:00
  wrong decision. But through having that, at some point we were able to
• 1:12:06
  get our international rights back from them because we had we realized that they weren't
• 1:12:11
  really interested in selling the international rights. They were really more focused on getting
• 1:12:14
  the movie out in America. And excuse me, we met a woman named
• 1:12:19
  Anna Mannart who saw the film at a festival in France, and she has
• 1:12:26
  been just an incredible champion of this movie from the moment she saw it.
• 1:12:30
  She actually flew to Germany while we were there and had brunch with us and
• 1:12:33
  has just been working tirelessly to get us into festivals. And she works with
• 1:12:39
  Raven Banner in Canada as an international sales agent and got them to take the
• 1:12:44
  movie on and they were able to go out and sell it to territories across
• 1:12:46
  the world. And then, speaking of getting a champion, you know a
• 1:12:50
  j Bow and the actor he when he saw the movie, he didn't stop
• 1:12:55
  talking about it at all, and he would go on podcasts and mention it,
• 1:12:58
  and he would mention it to the point where the hosts of those podcasts
• 1:13:00
  started there like, all right, we got to watch this movie. This
• 1:13:02
  guy won't shut up about the battery, And then they watched it, and
• 1:13:05
  then they wouldn't stop talking about it, and it just so happened that they
• 1:13:08
  they had frequent guests on who run screen Factory shout Factory, and because they
• 1:13:13
  talked about it so much, finally screen Factory was like, all right,
• 1:13:15
  let's see what this movie that these guys won't shut up about is, And
• 1:13:18
  then we were able to get a DVD and Blu ray deal from screen Factory,
• 1:13:25
  which is just I mean, that was I think we grew two feet
• 1:13:28
  tall. Our heads couldn't fit through the doors. One. It's just amazing
• 1:13:31
  because you're told to wrap the bat that you're not gonna be able to get
• 1:13:33
  a physical, a physical distribution deal if you've given away your digital rights.
• 1:13:39
  But you know, but those guys are just make such beautiful physical, you
• 1:13:43
  know, things in a in a digital world. Now that luckily they were
• 1:13:46
  able to just take a flyer on us and we got to put this amazing
• 1:13:49
  blue ray out with this documentary which covers all the ground you're making us cover
• 1:13:55
  right now. I'm kidding, but it is a fantastic documentary. You should
• 1:14:00
  really I encourage everybody to check it out if they can, because we basically
• 1:14:06
  made that exactly what we were talking about earlier, which is my film school,
• 1:14:12
  was watching DVD extras and listening to podcasts, and so we made a
• 1:14:15
  ninety minute feature length documentary that goes from those stupid short films we were making
• 1:14:19
  in high school all the way to the festival circuit on the battery, and
• 1:14:23
  it goes through every step of the process. And we really wanted it to
• 1:14:26
  be where somebody sees this and they're like on the cusp of thinking can I
• 1:14:30
  make a movie or not? Then this would push them over and say,
• 1:14:32
  just go do it because it's gonna be hard, but it's gonna be amazing.
• 1:14:36
  Now, the documentary is only available with the DVD in the Blue ray,
• 1:14:40
  is right, Yeah, for now it is. It's only on the
• 1:14:45
  North American Blue Ray DVD release by Screen Factory. But we're looking into whether
• 1:14:51
  or not we can put it up online for free, because I think it's
• 1:14:58
  promotion for the DVD in Blue ray um and it's like I like, we're
• 1:15:02
  saying it's it's a really really wonderful kind of thing. For filmmakers. Um,
• 1:15:09
  but I'm almost more proud of it than I am of The Battery,
• 1:15:12
  just because because if I had, you know, it's seen something so thorough
• 1:15:15
  and you know, so so so naked about the you know, the ups
• 1:15:18
  and downs of the process, I would have been like, that's it.
• 1:15:20
  We're doing this thing and that's that's what we're hoping. And oh god.
• 1:15:24
  I worked on that documentary for like six months. But it's like ten ten
• 1:15:30
  bucks for the DVD or something on Amazon. You and you get that that
• 1:15:32
  and the and the movie and the commentaries and the outtakes and stuff like that.
• 1:15:35
  So there's a and we really tried to pack it with as much if
• 1:15:39
  you want to make a movie, watch this stuff as you can. I
• 1:15:43
  don't even know where we started with that question. What was it distribution?
• 1:15:45
  Distribution? But yeah, I think that I think what humans getting it was
• 1:15:51
  just that, um, you know for first time movie are our first movie.
• 1:15:59
  Um, there's just there's a lot of like legal stuff and lawyers and
• 1:16:03
  expenses and so on that happen in distribution, so you know, and on
• 1:16:09
  The Battery we had like ten investors, so not a lot of that money
• 1:16:13
  trickles down to us in the end. But like just due to the system,
• 1:16:19
  like the whole the whole system in general. It's not like it's not
• 1:16:23
  like screen Factory didn't pay well, they paid great. It's just one of
• 1:16:28
  those things where you know you have to do It's I wish there were I
• 1:16:31
  wish I could create a like a list of things you need to do once
• 1:16:35
  you start to enter the distribution process of making a movie. But it is
• 1:16:39
  literally so dense and there are so many possibilities you I almost feel like you
• 1:16:47
  just kind of have to read as much as you can and then wait in
• 1:16:51
  and then make a decision. Because the amount of of options that we had
• 1:16:58
  that we didn't know we were going to have. When we made one decision,
• 1:17:00
  that's suddenly another avenue opened up later. If we hadn't done this,
• 1:17:03
  we could have done that. It's just there's just no way to navigate it.
• 1:17:08
  And we try as hard as we can. We've had you know,
• 1:17:09
  filmmakers email us and contact us and ask us about particular you know, distribution
• 1:17:14
  companies or deals, and it's just like, man, if it feels right,
• 1:17:18
  do it. There's just no you'll you're gonna learn from the process.
• 1:17:23
  Is the only way to the only way to really go about it. I
• 1:17:26
  mean, I'm sure someone out there has can elucidate much more, you know,
• 1:17:30
  with much better clarity than I can on this part of the process.
• 1:17:33
  But it was easily the most difficult part of the entire process for us to
• 1:17:36
  navigate was the business side and the distribution side. I think you just kind
• 1:17:41
  of got to learn as you go. The thing that's interesting, you know,
• 1:17:44
  listening to that is when you say it's a six thousand dollars movie.
• 1:17:46
  I've heard people that work in independent film talk about just the deliverables costing more
• 1:17:54
  than that. Well, I mean when it comes to distribution, a lot
• 1:17:59
  of the liverable stuff was just like written off of our payment. So you
• 1:18:06
  know, that's like I think, like maybe the entire first year of the
• 1:18:12
  release, I mean, like it just everything went to expenses. So yeah,
• 1:18:17
  we didn't have to pay for a lot of things up front, but
• 1:18:20
  um, yeah we had a But I always say that the six thousand dollars
• 1:18:25
  is the production budget. That's what it cost us to get to the premiere
• 1:18:29
  and tell you write horror show, and then we did have some business related
• 1:18:34
  expenses after that, but we already had deals on the table that we were
• 1:18:39
  ready to sign, so you know, like I know, one for a
• 1:18:44
  fact was what's called errors and emissions and insurance, you know, yeah,
• 1:18:49
  and that was like, that was like four thousand dollars that we had to
• 1:18:53
  pay. And I think Adam got a personal loan from his father or something
• 1:18:56
  and he and you know, and then he got paid back eventually. But
• 1:19:00
  we you know, we had deals on the table at that time. We
• 1:19:02
  would have never paid for that if we didn't. I mean, there are
• 1:19:06
  certain things you can do to make it make it easier to navigate, like
• 1:19:10
  just make sure you've got all your your performance releases signed by your actors,
• 1:19:15
  make sure that you've got a chain of title, you know, in order.
• 1:19:17
  There are things that you're going to just look up a list of the
• 1:19:20
  typical deliverables, and then there are certain you know, there are certain ones
• 1:19:25
  that you can check off before you even make the movie or while you're in
• 1:19:28
  pre production that we just didn't even think about until we were done. But
• 1:19:30
  I'm pretty sure that as far as like the business expenses of the battery,
• 1:19:35
  maybe had I think that plus creating an LLC for like two thousand dollars.
• 1:19:42
  I think those might have been the only ones that we paid up front and
• 1:19:45
  then the rest were deducted later on through distribution companies and so on. And
• 1:19:51
  not to say that that wasn't a lot, It was a lot. It
• 1:19:56
  was just we didn't have to pay it up front. Yeah, when you
• 1:19:58
  get your first report of your residuals and you see that gigantic chunk that goes
• 1:20:02
  to expenses, so you just go, oh, we'll be right back after
• 1:20:08
  a word from our sponsor, and now back to the show. That was
• 1:20:15
  like three months rent war. So yeah, I just wanted I kind of
• 1:20:20
  wanted to go into the things that Jeremy discussed in his article on MovieMaker because
• 1:20:29
  I, you know, I it really is something that I think a lot
• 1:20:32
  of filmmakers don't talk about and people don't want to. You know, first
• 1:20:38
  of all, people don't ever want to talk about pirrating, you know,
• 1:20:41
  and what a big deal it is now and how easy it is for people
• 1:20:45
  just to download anything they want for free, and how much that affects you
• 1:20:48
  guys on the distribution side, and you know, and can we talk about
• 1:20:54
  how that's affected the way that you you know, your your newest project.
• 1:20:58
  Yeah, I mean, I'll say because something I don't think he put in
• 1:21:00
  the article was that, like the day our movie was released, the piracy
• 1:21:05
  was I mean, within three hours of the iTunes release, the piracy was
• 1:21:09
  just insane. But even like a year later, there was a day where
• 1:21:16
  some piracy group released a version of our movie and it was like the thirtieth
• 1:21:20
  torrent of our movie, and there was a hundred thousand downloads of that torrent
• 1:21:27
  in twenty four hours. In that same twenty four hours, we were selling
• 1:21:31
  the movie DRM free on our website for five dollars. In that same twenty
• 1:21:35
  four hours we sold two copies. We made ten dollars, and all of
• 1:21:41
  our other digital sales had kind of just slowed to a halt at that point.
• 1:21:45
  So it was like there were one hundred thousand stolen in one day.
• 1:21:50
  A year after release, we make ten dollars that day. It's it's it's
• 1:21:56
  the ratio that's insane, you know, Like piracy is kind of a way
• 1:21:59
  of life at this point. I get it, but the ratio should be
• 1:22:04
  far, far less. Like I would say, there's got to be anywhere
• 1:22:09
  from twenty to eighty illegal downloads per every one real rental that's just way too
• 1:22:15
  high. Yeah, and those those those those are never going to translate one
• 1:22:18
  to one, you know, for you know, if everybody who pirated it
• 1:22:21
  bought it instead, well that's never gonna happen. That's just not the way
• 1:22:25
  it works. I think it. I did touch on in the article that
• 1:22:28
  it is easy to vilify the piracy community because yes, they're they're they're causing
• 1:22:33
  a lot of issues in the movie business. I mean, where a five
• 1:22:36
  million dollar budget five years ago, you know, you could you could wrangle
• 1:22:41
  with you know, the companies who fund those movies now are really really hemming
• 1:22:45
  and hawing over a quarter million dollar budget because they know that the second that
• 1:22:49
  movie is released on demand, it's going to be pirated, and so the
• 1:22:54
  risks go way higher, and so the budgets are driven way down. Less
• 1:22:58
  movies are made, which means less crewe. There's so many things that it
• 1:23:00
  affects that people don't know. And I think you're never I think people tiptoe
• 1:23:04
  around the piracy issue because you're never going to get the pirates. The people
• 1:23:09
  who torrent on your side are the ones who believe that everything should be free
• 1:23:14
  and information is free, and screw you and I don't care. You're never
• 1:23:16
  going to get those guys. But there is an interesting contingent of the piracy
• 1:23:23
  population who number one would download it if they could, if it were available
• 1:23:29
  in their territory. And there is something to be said about the fact that,
• 1:23:33
  you know, the way that movies are distributed nowadays is not taking into
• 1:23:36
  account the fact that the world is completely connected. Everybody knows what's going on
• 1:23:42
  in the movie world everywhere in the world, and so you know, I
• 1:23:45
  can remember even myself, you know, years ago, hearing all about The
• 1:23:49
  Loved Ones. That was an Australian horror movie, right, and it's just
• 1:23:54
  like you hear so many great things about it, and you never know when
• 1:23:57
  is this coming out here? And you just you keep hearing people talk and
• 1:24:00
  you're like, am I ever going to get to see it? And I
• 1:24:00
  actually, I mean ended up getting dumped in the US like four years later.
• 1:24:04
  But it's one of those things where it just seems crazy not to hit
• 1:24:09
  on, you know, hit on the audience when they're ready for it,
• 1:24:13
  when they want it. So that's one part of the of the piracy thing
• 1:24:17
  that needs to be taken care of. Another one is that I just genuinely
• 1:24:20
  feel that there is a certain amount of people out there, especially of a
• 1:24:25
  certain age group, who absolutely have no idea the devastation it causes throughout the
• 1:24:31
  industry. They just movies are not what they used to be. When I
• 1:24:36
  was a kid, you know, I would you know, I beg to
• 1:24:39
  be taken down to the video store and I would stay in there for two
• 1:24:42
  hours. They were things that I knew were made, and they were big,
• 1:24:44
  and then you had to go and get them, and you had to
• 1:24:45
  pay for them, and sometimes you didn't like them, and that's part of
• 1:24:48
  the process. You gamble a little bit with your money, and maybe you
• 1:24:53
  see the greatest thing you've ever seen, and maybe you see a turn,
• 1:24:56
  but that's part of the process. Now there's a generation that just simply thinks
• 1:25:00
  of them as little, tiny thumbnail posters that you click on and then they
• 1:25:04
  play and that's it. And there's there's no heft to the process and the
• 1:25:12
  amount of people and time that goes into making these movies anymore. And I
• 1:25:15
  think that is that's just a re education that needs to happen, or it
• 1:25:19
  might not might not even be able to happen. I just don't know if
• 1:25:23
  you can convince a generation that gets it for free why they shouldn't get it
• 1:25:27
  for free anymore. It's a it's a real sticky, prickly issue to bring
• 1:25:30
  up. I think that another huge thing is just the fact that people aren't
• 1:25:33
  going to theaters anymore too, And it's like everything has become just digital files
• 1:25:38
  now, and we've gotten so far from the days when you had to go
• 1:25:43
  to a theater and watch a film and then many many months later you would
• 1:25:46
  be able to rent a copy eat your local video club and sometimes they would
• 1:25:50
  be they wouldn't have it, you know. It's that whole culture has disappeared.
• 1:25:54
  Oh it's completely gone. And I loved I miss it and yeah,
• 1:25:58
  I mean even in you know, the movie that it changed my life that
• 1:26:00
  made me like super aware of that movies were made was Jurassic Park. That
• 1:26:06
  sounds might sound crazy, but that was the first time I started thinking about
• 1:26:10
  dress. Well, this is one I remember someone telling me, Hey,
• 1:26:13
  the dinosaurs are made with computers, and my brain, my like little twelve
• 1:26:16
  year old brain, just went like what, Like that's not possible. What
• 1:26:19
  do you mean they're made with computers? And suddenly I started thinking about the
• 1:26:24
  behind the scenes process of making a movie, and I cut my first lawn,
• 1:26:30
  much to my father's chagrin because he'd been trying to get me to mow
• 1:26:32
  the lawn for years. I mowed my first lawn to get money to go
• 1:26:34
  see Jurassic Park because I saw it seven times in the theater and that movie
• 1:26:39
  didn't come out on VHS for over a year after it was in the theater.
• 1:26:43
  You know, it was just like waiting for this thing to come out
• 1:26:45
  so you can have it, and those that that's just gone. Now.
• 1:26:47
  You know, the movie comes out, people go see it opening night,
• 1:26:50
  opening weekend, kind of fizzles out, and then ninety days later or less
• 1:26:55
  you can download it or steal it or rent it online. Yeah. A
• 1:27:00
  lot of times, you know, here, it's like you'll see the movie
• 1:27:02
  will come out in like a torn or something, even before it comes to
• 1:27:06
  a theater. It's ridiculous, you know, And I've been trying. I've
• 1:27:10
  been making an effort to try and see everything in a theater now and it's
• 1:27:14
  so different, you know, the concentration that you have in the way that
• 1:27:17
  you're affected by the movies. I mean, even watching it on a great
• 1:27:20
  big HDTV it's just not the same. No, it's not. It's a
• 1:27:25
  whole different experience. And what's crazy is you're right, it's it's this communal
• 1:27:29
  thing that I love it and more people should engage with. I was actually
• 1:27:32
  my mother, you know, she's not a huge like cinema person, but
• 1:27:35
  I'm down in Florida and I get to see her for the first time in
• 1:27:38
  a while, and she'll always tell me she tried to watch this movie and
• 1:27:41
  she couldn't get into it because I know she's just sitting there distracted. She's
• 1:27:44
  got her phone, she's got Facebook's. And I took her to the movies
• 1:27:47
  for the first time in like twenty years. We saw a couple of movies
• 1:27:49
  in the last couple weeks. And to watch her sit there and fully focus
• 1:27:53
  on the movie and like follow it and be engaged with it because she knows
• 1:27:58
  she can't pick her phone up or leave is just it's like, oh,
• 1:28:00
  yeah, that's why you go to the theater. You go to the theater
• 1:28:02
  to commit to the experience of letting a story wash over you, not not
• 1:28:06
  with your phone, and not with going to the bathroom and getting up and
• 1:28:10
  going to the kitchen. It's just you're there, you're in it. Well,
• 1:28:13
  it depends on where you go too, because I see, I mean,
• 1:28:15
  it drives me nuts. But people that just bring out their cell phone
• 1:28:17
  in the middle of the movie. I mean I I had to like yell
• 1:28:20
  at a guy the other day because he was just sitting there checking his Facebook
• 1:28:24
  in the middle of something. I don't remember what, Star Wars. It's
• 1:28:28
  just it's it boggles my mind that that with the amount of I mean,
• 1:28:32
  it's it's clear at this point that it is a serious social faux paw and
• 1:28:35
  people still do it. Yeah, you know, it's funny because I was
• 1:28:40
  listening to your interview on the Critics, So what's it called? The review
• 1:28:45
  podcasting the critics and your comments about well, let me put it this way,
• 1:28:50
  one of the greatest experiences I've ever had in a theater was watching Dances
• 1:28:55
  with Wolves. And I really love the fact that you were saying that how
• 1:28:58
  good that movie was, and people have kind of forgotten about it because I
• 1:29:00
  watched it recently and I didn't realize I was watching them the director's cut,
• 1:29:08
  which is like twelve hours long, you know, because I was supposed to
• 1:29:13
  go to a friend's house later and I was like, yeah, I'm sitting
• 1:29:15
  here watching Dances with Wolves, but it's it's not ending here. It's been
• 1:29:19
  on for the last four hours and we're still not to the midpoint. But
• 1:29:23
  it's such an amazing movie. And I don't I don't ever see having that
• 1:29:26
  kind of experience again, I don't know. Movies just aren't made like that
• 1:29:30
  anymore. No, they're not. And you know that's the thing. That's
• 1:29:32
  another thing that people don't understand about the what piracy has done. Right,
• 1:29:36
  you want to know where those movies, I mean, Dances Wolves didn't cost
• 1:29:41
  that much money, but you do want to know where those middle those mid
• 1:29:44
  range budget movies have gone, those adult movies, those grown up movies.
• 1:29:46
  I mean when I was in you know, in high school, I saw
• 1:29:49
  every single movie that came out. I can remember going and seeing Return to
• 1:29:54
  Paradise. Did you ever see that movie that's that's a drama. Yeah,
• 1:29:58
  Jaucke Phoenix, Vince Vaughan and Haiti. It's a movie that time has completely
• 1:30:01
  forgotten. And yet it was a movie that came out on a Friday and
• 1:30:04
  I went and saw it. You know what, I loved it. We'll
• 1:30:08
  be right back after a word from our sponsor and now back to the show,
• 1:30:16
  and it could it could never be released. No one would ever make
• 1:30:19
  that like thirty million dollars, you know, drama about like should they go
• 1:30:27
  back and take a guy out of a Malaysian prison? And the movie was
• 1:30:31
  that's really right. But it's like, what's the budget of Bone Tomahawk?
• 1:30:34
  Like one point two or one point eight million dollars in that movie like just
• 1:30:40
  like fifteen years ago would have been like a fifteen twenty five million dollar movie.
• 1:30:43
  Yeah, and in theaters like everywhere. Yeah, it is strange,
• 1:30:46
  but you know, but that's the thing is like so now because of that,
• 1:30:50
  because they need to milk every single dollar out of that opening weekend.
• 1:30:54
  That's why you're getting so many giant superhero movies. That's why you're getting sequels,
• 1:30:57
  that's why you're getting because they have two curve of every possible risk.
• 1:31:00
  They can't take a risk on some of these small movies. I mean,
• 1:31:02
  luckily, there's you know, people like Megan Ellison and an apparentent pictures like
• 1:31:05
  putting a movie, putting money into these like tours movies. But for the
• 1:31:09
  most part, the movies that filled the bulk of the year, you know,
• 1:31:15
  ten years ago, they just aren't being made anymore because you've got to
• 1:31:16
  get that four quadrant picture out. So you're either talking about movies being made
• 1:31:21
  under a million or over one hundred million, and it's just a weird,
• 1:31:25
  weird thing in the little giant like giant movies like would Jerry McGuire be made
• 1:31:29
  today? And like it was a huge hit, and like, yeah,
• 1:31:31
  would somebody green light Jerry McGuire? Probably not? Or I think you could
• 1:31:34
  get a movie just I mean, like look at David o'russell and guys like
• 1:31:39
  that, you know, Wes Anderson and Pete Anderson and those guys. I
• 1:31:42
  mean, they can get stuff made, but it's because they have the brand
• 1:31:45
  name. You know, they know there's going to be an audience for that,
• 1:31:47
  right. But even even then, I mean you're talking about again,
• 1:31:49
  that's Megan Ellison. You know, she's a billionaire's daughter who's decided to take
• 1:31:54
  her money and give it to directors who aren't getting I mean the master.
• 1:31:58
  You know, she's done. She's fun did a ton of those movies that
• 1:32:00
  the David David Russell movies too. She decided to put her money behind artists
• 1:32:04
  where the studios are afraid to sometimes, I mean even look at like Spielberg
• 1:32:09
  was saying he was having trouble getting money for Lincoln. It was going to
• 1:32:11
  be a TV movie because you couldn't get the money to make it as a
• 1:32:15
  theatrical movie. There's it's just crazy how afraid Hollywood is of taking chances anymore.
• 1:32:21
  And a lot of that is because those movies aren't swallowed up by Torrance.
• 1:32:28
  Well, I want to make sure we have enough time to talk about
• 1:32:30
  Text Montana Will Survive. Can we do a segue into that and talk about
• 1:32:34
  how you've approached that and especially this kind of unique way that you guys are
• 1:32:38
  using Kickstarter to fund it or it's not being funded, but it's it's a
• 1:32:42
  way to control the distribution process. Yeah. Absolutely, I mean, Text
• 1:32:45
  Montana Will Survives a movie. We shot it two years ago, but then
• 1:32:48
  our day jobs took hold again. But we're trying to use Kickstarter to basically
• 1:32:55
  buy them, Like we want the Internet to buy the movie off of us,
• 1:32:58
  the way that someone would go to Nance and buy a movie for a
• 1:33:01
  million dollars off of filmmakers. We want the Internet to do that. We
• 1:33:05
  want to it's a finished film, and we want if we hit our goal,
• 1:33:10
  we're just going to give the movie to the internet via creative comments.
• 1:33:14
  So that way torrenting will be completely allowed and encouraged. Um, we'll we'll
• 1:33:19
  have DVDs that you can burn, with artwork that you could print, and
• 1:33:23
  and we'll have it on YouTube and Vimeo. So this was kind of our
• 1:33:28
  reaction to piracy, which is that like, rather than vilify the torrents,
• 1:33:32
  like, let's use them um as a distribution method. Um. So,
• 1:33:38
  you know, I mean hopefully it works. Uh yeah, the days are
• 1:33:43
  taken down, but um, well you know it's a way to to um
• 1:33:46
  try and get a hold of those people who did torent the movie who would
• 1:33:49
  have paid for it as well. You know these are there are you know
• 1:33:53
  we got We put up a comment on some of our torrents on some of
• 1:33:57
  these torrent sites a couple of years ago, just saying, look, we're
• 1:34:00
  not passing judgment, but we're you know, we're day job filmmakers. You
• 1:34:03
  know, we're barely getting by. We made this movie for sixth grand.
• 1:34:06
  If you like what you see, you know, consider kicking in. And
• 1:34:11
  we had a lot of people donate money through that and so those are the
• 1:34:15
  kind of people who use torrents that we're hoping that we can get ahead of
• 1:34:19
  time, rather than slowly letting the movie roll out traditionally like The Battery did
• 1:34:24
  and having people in Australia go, well, I don't know when it's going
• 1:34:27
  to be in Australia, so I'm just going to download it now. So
• 1:34:30
  if we can just get it all up front, then maybe we'll have the
• 1:34:32
  cushion to take time off work and make a movie and then everybody everywhere in
• 1:34:38
  the world can see it at the same time if they want to. So
• 1:34:43
  does that mean that you don't have I mean when you do creative commons,
• 1:34:46
  does that mean that you no longer have ownership of it? About? How
• 1:34:50
  does that work the particular creative there's a there's a couple of creative commons licenses,
• 1:34:57
  but the one we're going to be using basically means that you have to
• 1:35:01
  give us credit for the movie and that you can You can't profit off of
• 1:35:06
  the movie itself, um as in the audience can't profit off the movie,
• 1:35:12
  but the audience will be allowed to like remix it or so on, like
• 1:35:16
  if they wanted to take audio from it. And use it in something that
• 1:35:19
  they make. They can make profit off of that. So you're kind of
• 1:35:24
  allowed to mess with the movie. Um, but other than that, you're
• 1:35:28
  totally allowed to share it and do everything else. So the only thing is
• 1:35:30
  that we still have to get credit. And yeah, basically you can't just
• 1:35:35
  put it in your own box and sell it as is in a store.
• 1:35:39
  But you can use it to remake art, right. It's it's artists saying,
• 1:35:43
  you know, here, here's a piece of art. If you want
• 1:35:45
  to make a different piece of art from our art, by all means do
• 1:35:48
  it. Yeah, if you want to sample it and put it into a
• 1:35:51
  dance mix, you can, and you can make money off that dance mix.
• 1:35:55
  We're not, you know, like that's that's the kind of license that
• 1:35:58
  it is. I think the barebone bongo scene would be great as a grave.
• 1:36:02
  My friend already did this, The composer already did that. I'm sure
• 1:36:06
  someone else could do it out there too, though. I would love to
• 1:36:10
  be in like Prague and you're like baby Bear, that would be amazing.
• 1:36:15
  You watch it becomes like this huge hit. The guy's like like a millionaire,
• 1:36:18
  like SI number one dance, Number one dance song in the world is
• 1:36:23
  Baby Bear Bones by like scra And we're over here going why did we do
• 1:36:28
  this? So yeah, go ahead? Sorry no, I was just gonna
• 1:36:32
  yeah, go ahead, now you go ahead, Okay, thank you.
• 1:36:38
  So, I mean, I think one of the things that I liked about
• 1:36:40
  your article too was just your kind of honesty about how difficult it is to
• 1:36:44
  make a living as an indie filmmaker. And since we're all about indie filmmaking,
• 1:36:47
  um, you know, can you can you talk a little bit about
• 1:36:50
  that the idea of being able to make a living as a filmmaker and what
• 1:36:57
  you guys do, which is more like you have day jobs and you make
• 1:37:00
  indie films. I mean, is there a goal to move everything to being
• 1:37:05
  like one hundred percent filmmakers? What is your view on that kind of thing?
• 1:37:10
  Yeah, I mean that's my goal. That's that's one hundred percent.
• 1:37:13
  My goal is I just want to make movies for a living. And I'm
• 1:37:15
  not talking about, you know, make it movies and being like a multi
• 1:37:19
  multi millionaire, even though that would be nice. I would just love to
• 1:37:23
  make a comfortable living and and make movies as a job, you know,
• 1:37:27
  And it doesn't seem like it should be that difficult. I mean, when
• 1:37:30
  you see the money that you that can that can come in from a small
• 1:37:34
  budget movie, I mean, this is sustainable. If you could start getting
• 1:37:40
  enough, you know, time to make movies and put more movies out in
• 1:37:43
  the world, it kind of snowballs. I mean, I know. Joe
• 1:37:45
  Swanberg famously said that too. You know, He's like, you know,
• 1:37:47
  once you get three or four movies out in the world, every time you
• 1:37:49
  make another one, then everyone you get another press push, everyone talks about
• 1:37:54
  your other movies, you get a kick up on the rentals or the sales
• 1:37:57
  of those previous movies, and it just kind of snowballs every time. And
• 1:38:00
  so he's made a career out of just making like a million movies and just
• 1:38:02
  kind of kind of living that way. But I do believe there's a way
• 1:38:06
  to build an audience slowly and get and get enough of a return so that
• 1:38:12
  you can keep equity in your own movie the next time you make it,
• 1:38:15
  and then make a little bit more money the next time you release another movie,
• 1:38:18
  and suddenly you know you're sustaining yourself by by telling stories and making are
• 1:38:23
  I do I do believe it's sponsible. I don't know. I'm getting old,
• 1:38:26
  I'm going to die, so probably not it's going to happen soon.
• 1:38:30
  Or I'm definitely going to be managing a bar somewhere. Yeah. I mean
• 1:38:35
  I've talked to a couple of filmmakers who are full time, not necessarily making
• 1:38:40
  their own projects, but they're directors for Higher or whatever, and they say
• 1:38:44
  that, sorry, I say, those are called unicorns. Unicorns are there
• 1:38:46
  the people making films for a living. But no, he's saying their directors
• 1:38:49
  for Higher not making their own things. Well, I mean the thing that
• 1:38:53
  they've said is that they it's not like before where you'd like make a film
• 1:38:57
  every three years. It's like these people are making two three films a year,
• 1:39:00
  you know, and there's just this mass production. Yeah, it's crazy.
• 1:39:03
  I mean that's what we've been saying forever. We need to generate content.
• 1:39:06
  I mean, because you look at the people making a ton of money
• 1:39:08
  on YouTube because they're putting up content every week. Everyone wants more stuff.
• 1:39:12
  You know, if we could get to the point where we were shooting a
• 1:39:14
  movie, you know, in finishing or finishing all post production within you know,
• 1:39:18
  nine ten months, and then starting work on another movie at the end
• 1:39:21
  of the same year. Then you know, that's that's the goal, is
• 1:39:24
  to be able to like maybe start working on two movies a year, one
• 1:39:28
  at the beginning one. Jeremy always talks about that, and I like,
• 1:39:30
  but I'm doing all the post production. But that's the whole point too,
• 1:39:32
  is to make enough money to where he doesn't have to do that anymore.
• 1:39:35
  And luckily, and that's another thing that you'll realize, you know, once
• 1:39:38
  you start doing this, is that you build a network. And you know,
• 1:39:41
  now you've we've met people who who will do those jobs for us,
• 1:39:44
  who we can hire, who we trust to do those jobs, and it
• 1:39:45
  could fit within the budget that we're talking about, so the Christian doesn't have
• 1:39:48
  to do everything. I mean, eventually you'll meet people who can help you
• 1:39:53
  in this process. I mean, the network of filmmakers that we've met since
• 1:39:57
  we toward the battery is as been invaluable. But it's always hard. It's
• 1:40:01
  always hard to even think about like scaling up like that and being like,
• 1:40:04
  can you can you keep the quality up two times a year? You know,
• 1:40:10
  that's scary. We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor,
• 1:40:17
  and now back to the show. Um, I mean like just in three
• 1:40:23
  years, you have six movies, and it's like, man, I can't
• 1:40:25
  even imagine three years from now having six movies out there right and having them
• 1:40:29
  all be quality. So that's that's scary too. Yeah, that's another thing
• 1:40:33
  I'm well, especially with the way I write, It'll never happen. I
• 1:40:35
  can't. Yeah, that's another. But that's another thing too, is like
• 1:40:41
  I have been, I have thought about a lot. I wish I could
• 1:40:45
  just pull my standards down a little bit. You know. It's like in
• 1:40:48
  my maybe my stats don't seem high to everybody else, but I have serious
• 1:40:53
  quality standards with what I write and what I feel like is worth making,
• 1:40:57
  the same way Christian has ridiculous stands about you know, you know what he
• 1:41:01
  does technically with the camera and color and sound and everything like that. Like
• 1:41:04
  he will he will fux with something for weeks and I'll just be like,
• 1:41:09
  I let it go. But I'll be the same way with a scene.
• 1:41:11
  I'll tweak a scene while writing it forever. And it's just one of those
• 1:41:14
  things where you're never going to get enough done, you know, to create
• 1:41:18
  this kind of content generator, like we're talking about if we if we have
• 1:41:23
  such nice standards, But I don't know, there's got to be a middle
• 1:41:25
  ground somewhere. It seems like, you know, with the following that you
• 1:41:28
  guys have been building, have you ever considered approaching a production company, I
• 1:41:31
  mean going and you know, putting together a script and saying okay and do
• 1:41:35
  it going for more of a traditional, not so ultra independent, but going.
• 1:41:40
  And have you been able to keep that following? I mean, do
• 1:41:42
  you have like some way to be in touch with your fans other? I
• 1:41:45
  mean, is it primarily Twitter and Facebook and stuff like that? Oh?
• 1:41:48
  Yeah, well we didn't even touch on this. Yeah. One of the
• 1:41:50
  main reasons, one of the main other reasons we made tex Montana is because
• 1:41:55
  I wrote a script that I love that you know, I started getting a
• 1:41:59
  lot of a lot of attention after the Battery made the rounds, I started
• 1:42:02
  doing the water bottle tour. I've talked to the companies, I've talked to
• 1:42:05
  agents, and I've gotten very close. We've gone down the whole casting route
• 1:42:11
  path and we've gotten far along the route to the traditional funding of making my
• 1:42:16
  new script, and then it always just kind of fizzles out in one way
• 1:42:19
  or another. You know, you hear that, oh, we love your
• 1:42:23
  unique voice, and it's so it's so interesting and it's so you. And
• 1:42:27
  then you know, once you get up to like two hundred fifty three hundred
• 1:42:30
  thousand dollars, they start trying to kind of, you know, buff a
• 1:42:33
  little bit of that personality out of it. Well, can't we explain where
• 1:42:36
  the monster comes from? And can't we cast this person even though they're way
• 1:42:41
  too young, and it's it just becomes like, oh man, the concessions
• 1:42:44
  you have to make for such a small amount of money is demoralizing. And
• 1:42:48
  after about a year and a half of that, that's why we decided,
• 1:42:50
  you know, let's just drag in the woods and make tex Montana because we
• 1:42:53
  wanted to not have to get permission to make a movie again. It's so
• 1:42:57
  frustrating to feel like you got your foot in the door in a business that
• 1:43:00
  you love, and then it's just the wheels turn so slow that you just
• 1:43:05
  like, at some point were just like, we gotta go do this again,
• 1:43:08
  because we're gonna it's gonna tear our souls apart if we keep waiting for
• 1:43:13
  somebody to say, Okay, here's the money. Go make your movie.
• 1:43:15
  UM. So that even though and honestly it's still happening right now, like
• 1:43:18
  we that script is still out there. I'm on the cusp of another going
• 1:43:23
  down another avenue to get that movie made. And it's you know, I
• 1:43:26
  feel really good about this one, but I felt really good about some before.
• 1:43:29
  So I've gotten a little bit cynical about that process. And so there's
• 1:43:32
  a part, there's a part of me that says, you know what,
• 1:43:34
  that's fine. Let that script do what it's going to do through the system,
• 1:43:38
  and let's still remind ourselves that we got to go and make our own
• 1:43:41
  movies if no one ever gives us the permission. Plus there's there's something that
• 1:43:45
  like nobody ever talks about, but it's it's crazy with all of these budgets
• 1:43:49
  getting smaller and smaller and smaller. Um, if a production company comes to
• 1:43:54
  you and hires you on a director for a quarter million dollar movie, um,
• 1:43:59
  your pay as director is probably around five thousand dollars, and then you're
• 1:44:03
  expected to work on the movie forum pretty much a solid year, and then
• 1:44:08
  promotion and so on, and it's like, how do you how do you
• 1:44:13
  even make a quarter million dollar movie? And live off of five thousand dollars
• 1:44:17
  for a year and a half to two years while you make and promote the
• 1:44:20
  movie. It's kind of insane. And no one has been able to explain
• 1:44:24
  that to me, literally no one. I've talked to filmmakers I know,
• 1:44:28
  like who seemed very successful, and no one's been able to explain. Okay,
• 1:44:31
  you get a fee, you know, you get your your rate for
• 1:44:34
  actually filming the movie. But what about when it's time to go into post
• 1:44:39
  and it's time to you know, edit and then do sound, and then
• 1:44:44
  promote, and then like, what how are you making a living? Then
• 1:44:46
  no one can explain it. I still don't know. Five years in,
• 1:44:49
  five years after making The Battery, we've made another movie. You know,
• 1:44:53
  I've talked to people, I've gotten meetings, I've talked to managers, I've
• 1:44:56
  talked to heads of studios. I have no idea, no idea how you're
• 1:45:00
  supposed to live. I mean that five thousand dollars would be gone before you
• 1:45:02
  come out of pre production, you know, just two or three months of
• 1:45:06
  rent and food and so on. You know, if you want to if
• 1:45:09
  you if you're making a quarter million dollar movie, you gotta make a really
• 1:45:12
  good movie, so you really got to like be in there, you know,
• 1:45:15
  doing months of pre production and months of post production and months of promotion.
• 1:45:18
  It's it seems crazy to me. I do feel like that's one of
• 1:45:21
  the pitfalls of the fact that everybody can make a movie now is that it's
• 1:45:25
  almost expected that just like, well, that's the deal with it, Like,
• 1:45:28
  you know, it's I remember that. I don't know why this popped
• 1:45:30
  into my head, but there's a scene in a League of their own where
• 1:45:33
  they revealed that the girl baseball players are gonna have to wear these little skirts,
• 1:45:38
  and everyone gafalls and he goes, Ladies, there are sixty four women
• 1:45:41
  getting on a bus back home right now that will play in a bikini if
• 1:45:45
  if I ask them to. And you kind of get that feeling where it's
• 1:45:47
  like, hey, if you can't make a movie and live for this fee,
• 1:45:50
  then hey, I got a line of kids who want this job.
• 1:45:54
  I got a line of filmmakers who want to be in this position. Sorry,
• 1:45:58
  that's just the way it is now days, and that's it's just like
• 1:46:00
  God, And from a like from a production standpoint, it's kind of like,
• 1:46:05
  well, don't you want your director to not be worrying about how he's
• 1:46:10
  paying the rent, you know, like that's the last thing he needs to
• 1:46:12
  be worrying about when he's in charge of your you know, even half million
• 1:46:16
  dollar movie. So that's that's something. Yeah, we can't crack it.
• 1:46:20
  Yeah, I think there's a lot of kind of ego going on there and
• 1:46:24
  people don't really disclose. Sure. Yeah, Well, I mean and I
• 1:46:27
  have a friend, you know who who's a filmmaker, pretty successful filmmaker,
• 1:46:30
  and you know, he decided to go around it and raise the money for
• 1:46:33
  his movie on his own and then just paid himself a decent salary, like
• 1:46:38
  out of the budget. Like, I'm this is how I'm raising the money
• 1:46:40
  to make this movie on this budget. There's how much I'm paying myself to
• 1:46:43
  do it. I wrote it, I'm going to direct it, and that's
• 1:46:45
  that. And I was like, well that's a you know, that's a
• 1:46:46
  pretty good, pretty good way to do it if you can get around all
• 1:46:49
  the gatekeepers and just to be your own production company. So I don't know,
• 1:46:54
  this sounds like a demoralizing way to go out. So what what advice
• 1:47:00
  you have indie filmmakers that are out there that want to make their first film
• 1:47:03
  and want to kind of follow in your footsteps. You gotta have friends.
• 1:47:06
  You gotta have friends who will help you out, people who are going to
• 1:47:10
  be in the trenches with you, in the mud, splashing around in the
• 1:47:13
  dirt, willing to do anything they can to get it done. That's you're
• 1:47:15
  not going to get anywhere if you don't have if you don't have loyal people
• 1:47:19
  on your side. You got you gotta plan as much as you can ahead
• 1:47:23
  of time, and you got to write, you know, your story,
• 1:47:27
  a good story around what you can get, what you know you have,
• 1:47:30
  and then you gotta not freak out about the things that you think might fail
• 1:47:34
  or you'll never do it. And my advice would be that you got to
• 1:47:38
  have at least one skill that you can sell to others, you know,
• 1:47:43
  whether it be cinematography or sound design or any of that. Like you know,
• 1:47:46
  that's where you I mean, that's where your money is likely to come
• 1:47:49
  in the first couple of films is from the work in between making your own
• 1:47:55
  films. Just like we have friends that are editors and so on, and
• 1:47:58
  they go and they get paid to other people's movies and then they edit their
• 1:48:01
  movies for free. Yeah, And the irony of this whole process is that
• 1:48:04
  I only wrote The Battery originally because I didn't want to go an audition for
• 1:48:09
  roles as an actor. And I'm about to be in my fifth feature film
• 1:48:15
  since The Battery came out, And that's simply from meeting filmmakers on the festival
• 1:48:19
  circuit, becoming fans of their work and them fans of my work, and
• 1:48:23
  then them calling me up and going, hey, I'm about to go and
• 1:48:25
  make this movie. I got a great role for you in it, and
• 1:48:27
  just suddenly I'm being cast without auditioning. When you know, this whole thing
• 1:48:30
  was was me railing against the process of auditioning. So you end up,
• 1:48:34
  Yeah, you find a little skilled and hopefully you can you can tangentially work
• 1:48:39
  in film. I actually forgot to ask you about that. What was the
• 1:48:43
  experience of working on Spring Like because that's that's actually one of my favorite movies
• 1:48:46
  from in the past couple of years. Um, it's what was that working
• 1:48:51
  with Justin and Aaron? It was amazing, you know. Justin Aaron were
• 1:48:56
  actually the first filmmakers I met on the circuit. We met very briefly in
• 1:49:00
  Amsterdam, I thought they were full of themselves. Then we met them again
• 1:49:05
  for much longer in Brazil, and they told us that they thought we were
• 1:49:10
  full of ourselves when they saw us in Amsterdam, and then we became great
• 1:49:13
  friends and I love them to death. We had a wonderful time, and
• 1:49:17
  just being on their set's amazing because those two guys, I mean, Justin's
• 1:49:20
  a really really really clever and creative screenwriter and director, and Aaron is just
• 1:49:26
  you know, he's like Justin's Christian. He's a you know, he's an
• 1:49:29
  incredibly talented guy, and he's really technical. So to watch them kind of
• 1:49:32
  confer, you know, with each other on set about a scene and then
• 1:49:36
  and then break up and then go and do their individual things is amazing.
• 1:49:40
  To watch that set work like clockwork, really helped me, you know,
• 1:49:45
  cache things away for the next time I'm directing, too. It's really great.
• 1:49:49
  Was there a lot of it seemed like the scenes were very loose and
• 1:49:53
  kind of uh yeah, well, it's funny because they they definitely let me
• 1:49:56
  improv. I think that the part of that was me learning on the fly
• 1:50:01
  what it's like to be on a real set, you know, because you
• 1:50:03
  know, things gotta move, you gotta make lunch, you gotta make your
• 1:50:06
  days, you gotta make your time. The eighties, walking around talking we'll
• 1:50:11
  be right back after a word from our sponsor, and now back to the
• 1:50:17
  show. And you start to worry that if you if you goof off or
• 1:50:23
  follow, you know, follow a thread down some weird improv line, that
• 1:50:27
  you're gonna you're gonna throw off the entire schedule of the day. So I
• 1:50:30
  kind of boxed myself in a little bit, and I didn't really go as
• 1:50:33
  far as I'd have wanted to, but they were certainly open to my improv
• 1:50:38
  lines. What's interesting is you throw out an improv and then they'll either say
• 1:50:42
  nothing, or say, oh my god, that was really funny to do
• 1:50:44
  that again, or actually, this time, don't do that thing. But
• 1:50:47
  I was really boxing myself. And then I get down to the set down
• 1:50:50
  San Diego where we're shooting in the bar Vinny Kuran, who is one of
• 1:50:55
  the leads in their first movie, Resolution, and apparently he don't give a
• 1:50:59
  crap about days or schedules because he was just riffing left and right, and
• 1:51:03
  all I could think was, man, man, I should have done But
• 1:51:08
  Vinny did Vinny don't care, Vinny just beas Vinny Vinny don't give a shit,
• 1:51:12
  then he don't give a shit. So but yeah, no, it's
• 1:51:15
  such a such a blast. Man. I can't wait to work with those
• 1:51:18
  guys again. They're really really good friends. So I want to make sure
• 1:51:21
  that you guys, Um, what what is the website to go to for
• 1:51:25
  text Montana? How can people get in touch with you guys? What's the
• 1:51:29
  best way to find out more and all that great stuff? You can go
• 1:51:32
  to Texmontana dot com. That'll take you right to our campaign page. We
• 1:51:36
  are about nine days away from this thing being over, which means if we
• 1:51:41
  succeed, you're only about fifteen to seventeen days away from actually seeing this thing,
• 1:51:45
  because we're just gonna release it. It's done Text Montana dot com.
• 1:51:50
  You can find me on Twitter at mister Jeremy Gardner and I'm at Christian Stella.
• 1:51:56
  I'm only mister because every other premutation of Jeremy Gardner was taken, so
• 1:52:00
  it's not like I'm calling myself mister, but there was just no do that.
• 1:52:04
  Um. Yeah, And then you can find us on Facebook at text
• 1:52:08
  Montana or the Battery on Facebook but text Montana dot com or Twitter. We're
• 1:52:13
  really active on Twitter. Um. Yeah, I mean people can just like
• 1:52:15
  ask me stupid camera questions. I'll answer. It didn't matter. I mean,
• 1:52:18
  there's no no question too stupid. I'll just call it stupid on on
• 1:52:23
  a podcast one day. Yeah. Well that's we've always been. I always
• 1:52:26
  used to say, like, you know what, whatever you think of Kevin
• 1:52:29
  Smith's films, the fact that he makes himself available to so many people and
• 1:52:31
  is so open about the process was something we wanted to ape um, and
• 1:52:35
  we try to do that, you know, we we we try not to
• 1:52:39
  ever let an email about a question about filmmaking go unanswered. So, um,
• 1:52:44
  whatever you got, throw it at us. Awesome, guys. Well,
• 1:52:45
  I really appreciate your time, and you know, I look forward to,
• 1:52:48
  you know, seeing the film. How how are you going to release
• 1:52:51
  it when it comes out? Are you just gonna put it? Do you
• 1:52:54
  do you assume that things will just kind of like explode on their own or
• 1:52:57
  are you gonna put it somewhere specific it? Yeah, we're basically if we
• 1:53:02
  hit the goal, um, two weeks after the campaign ends, uh,
• 1:53:08
  we're going to release it on YouTube and Vimeo and the Vimeo version will have
• 1:53:14
  the download button unlocked, so you'll be able to download it ten ADP from
• 1:53:17
  Vimeo m and then there's going to be torrents of in all kinds of shapes
• 1:53:24
  and sizes, and of DVDs and Blu rays with artwork, and then you
• 1:53:29
  know, Texmontana dot Com at that point will just be kind of a repository
• 1:53:32
  of all the different ways you can get it. And at that point then
• 1:53:36
  people can post it anywhere else if there's places that we don't know. The
• 1:53:41
  only places we're not going to be doing our places like iTunes, etc.
• 1:53:45
  Because then we'd have to charge for the movie. And that's the whole point
• 1:53:47
  is that after this campaign, we're not going to charge for it ever again.
• 1:53:51
  So that's it. I mean, if they'd be if they'd be willing
• 1:53:54
  to put it up for free, I'd put it on iTunes. Yeah,
• 1:53:58
  And if we don't hit our goal, we're going to take the hard drive
• 1:54:00
  with the movie and we're going to film ourselves smashing it with a let receive
• 1:54:04
  it. Well, guys, I really appreciate it. Is there anything else?
• 1:54:06
  Are we good? No? That's it. Texmontana dot Com, thank
• 1:54:10
  you so much for the forum. Thank you, guys, it's really fun
• 1:54:13
  chat. I want to thank Jason so much for doing such an amazing job
• 1:54:17
  with this episode. If you want to get links to anything we spoke about
• 1:54:19
  in this episode, head over to the show notes at Indy film huscle dot
• 1:54:23
  com Forward slash six eighty eight. If you have it already, please head
• 1:54:27
  over to Filmmaking podcast dot com. Subscribe and leave a good review for the
• 1:54:31
  show. It really helps us out a lot. Guys. Thank you again
• 1:54:34
  so much for listening to guys. As always, keep that hustle going,
• 1:54:38
  keep that dream alive, Stay safe out there, and I'll talk too soon.
• 1:54:42
  Thanks for listening to the Indie Film Hustle podcast at Indie film Hustle dot
• 1:54:45
  com. That's I N D I E M I L M hustl dot com.