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IFH 680: Directing The Last Exorcism with Daniel Stamm · 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
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  Film Hustle Podcast, Episode number six eighty. It is a miracle every time
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  you make a movie, and a bigger miracle if it turns out well.
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  Mark Forrester Broadcasting from the back alley in Hollywood. It's the Indie Film Hustle
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  Podcast, where we show you how to survive and thrive as an indie filmmaker
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  in the jungles of the film biz. And here's your host, Alex Ferrari.
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  Welcome, Welcome to another episode of the Indie Film Hustle Podcast. I
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  am your humble host, Alex Ferrari. Today's show is sponsored by Rise of
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  the Film Entrepreneur How to turn your independent film into a profitable business. It's
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  harder today than ever before for independent filmmakers to make money with their films from
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  in paperback, ebook, and of course audiobook. If you want to order
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  it, just head over to www dot film bizbook dot com. That's film
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  bizbook dot com. Enjoy today's episode with guest host Jason Buff. Today we're
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  talking with the director of one of my absolutely favorite films, The Last Exorcism.
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  Daniel Stam is with us today and I'm really excited for you guys to
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  listen to what we talk about. I learned a whole lot and one of
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  the biggest things I got out of this was Daniel's checklist that he goes through.
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  You know, he's known for being a very prepared director, and he
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  actually gave me his list, his checklist of things that he makes he looks
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  at before he directs a scene. All right, here is my interview with
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  Daniel Stam And I think the best place to start is going into win film
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  really kind of affected you, Like the films that you were that kind of
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  convinced you that you wanted to do this for a living when you were growing
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  up. Well, my dirty secret is always but I didn't start out wanting
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  to make movies. I was a big role playing game nerd a lot of
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  Dungeons and dragons and my teams and all that stuff, and I always thought,
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  I have to find some kind of job where I can keep playing Dungeons
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  and dragons basically and get paid for it. So I wanted to be a
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  writer. I was kind of looking around in Germany for programs where I could
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  study writing, because German parents won't let you just do something if you don't
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  get a diploma for it, they don't take it seriously. So I knew
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  I had to look for something where I could get a diploma and it would
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  kind of be taken seriously. So I always said I wanted to be a
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  journalist. Which was a complete lie, because I wanted to write novels,
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  you know, make stuff. That was always amazing to me. Just the
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  feeling that you could sit down with a couple of people and make something up
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  and suddenly it exists in everyone's minds and you have this, you know,
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  this godlike power of creativity was always mind blowing to me. And I think
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  once you've experienced that, it kind of gets addictive. You know. There
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  was never like a question that I could do anything else. So then I
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  ended up at a film academy in Germany in Ludwigsburg, which was kind of
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  the most modern film school in Germany. They are very renowned traditional old film
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  schools in Germany, the bim Vendors and fast Bender and like the Werner Hertzark,
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  all the the old German grades went to. And then this film school
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  opened up and it was very commercial, you know, it didn't didn't only
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  support like making movies that made commercials and made TV shows. It made all
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  that kind of stuff that the other schools frowned upon. And I studied screenwriting
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  there and I was there for four years and wrote my little screenplay and then
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  I would give it to a directing student, and that directing student would go
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  off and make the movie and it'd be horrendous, which you always always looking
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  back now, they were pretty brilliant, But of course as a writer at
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  the time, you were so stuck on what you have in your head that
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  no matter what they'd come back with, it's never what you imagine it like,
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  you know, right, I sort of given them some wor slack,
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  But they also always came back with these amazing stories that were like adventurous stories
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  because there was always I mean, everyone who's tried making a movie knows that
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  they're always unsurmountable conflicts, you know, and it's a it's a team sticking
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  their head together and trying to figure it out. And the actresses are beautiful,
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  and there's romance on set. It's all that stuff that you're yearned for,
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  and you're locked out of all of that as a screenwriter. And I
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  always had the feeling his storytelling process is kind of artificially cut in half because
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  I've already figured out the story of the characters in my head. All I
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  need to do is to communicate that to the actors and the cinematographer and the
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  production designer, and I can call myself a director. It was always weird
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  to me that there was some random person coming in halfway through the process taking
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  over being the big shot that then gets all created for the movie. Right,
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  So I thought I can do that too, But then my friends at
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  the German Film School they weren't that taken with their directing program. So when
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  I decided to start study directing, I knew I didn't want to do it
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  there, even though it's a great school. But I came to Los Angeles
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  and studied at AFI, the American Film Institute here, and I was lucky.
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  It's a crazy expensive school, which I had to learn that everything in
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  the States is got. In Germany, you know you've got a film school,
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  it's an application process that's kind of tough to get through, but once
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  you do get through it, you don't have to pay anything. And then
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  af I suddenly it was like a hundred thousand dollars something crazy, which I
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  didn't have. So it took me a year and a half to raise the
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  funds through scholarships from different organizations and all that, which was kind of a
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  job in itself. And then I came here all busher tailed and wide eyed
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  to Hollywood, which still kind of amazes me every time I take the exit
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  ramp and it says Hollywood, I'm away. Was like, oh man,
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  I've been heard it. That never wears up. And then I found out
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  that the German Film Academy that I went to, they had sent a group
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  to the American Film Institute before they started the school for a week to explore
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  and to do research, and then they basically rebuild the American Film Institute in
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  Germany, like the structure, the curriculum, everything, the people they hired.
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  Even it was weird because it was like I knew everything about the school
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  and I'd never been there, because it was a one to one copy of
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  the whole thing. And then I started directing short films there and kind of
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  met my team there that I'm still working with. My cinematographer and my editor.
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  We worked together there, and it was kind of a great environment because
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  the German Film School didn't have the language barrier. Everyone that was studying there
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  came either from Germany, Switzerland, or Austria, so there weren't very big
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  differences in cultural approaches to narrative, to to storytelling to filmmaking. But at
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  AFI, my first group was a Native American writer or an Australian cinematographer,
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  an Asian production designer, and a Indian editor, and we were making editor
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  me as a German director, and we made a hip hop movie which none
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  of us give anything about. Of course, that's of course, that's what
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  you made exactly. It's cool because you suddenly get challenged all the time,
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  all these things that you kind of take for granted and have never all about.
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  Like your editor will suddenly let a white shot stand for two minutes and
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  you kind of go crazy and you go like, we can't do that,
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  and she said, why can't we do that? And suddenly you have to
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  search inside of yourself what your impulse is, where that's coming from. That
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  you can't do that. Like everything every creative decision, you suddenly have to
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  verbalize and discuss with the team. And there are some fights that you win,
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  in some fights that you lose. And if I was very concerned with
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  kind of d emphasizing the power of the director, which I think was really
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  helpful that you weren't the big shot. You didn't get to call all the
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  shots. Like the first short film was initiated by the writer, so the
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  writer had all the power, which created complete chaos because obviously the writers were
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  like in character, completely different from the directors, Like the directors normally are
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  these kind of grandiose, confident people and the writers really sweet, kind of
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  smart, but introverted people. So it kind of put everything on its head,
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  and it was a really good process because you couldn't just take something for
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  granted and just pull the director card and do it and then yeah. Then
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  then there was a seminar for the cinematographers, I think in second year where
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  one of the teachers told the class a genius thing that changed my life,
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  which is, tell your directors to shoot, shoot, shoot, shoot.
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  Don't spend years fundraising, don't spend years developing, because it's a trap.
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  Like many of my friends that they are still fundraising, they're still developing something
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  and have been for ten years, and they never shot a frame because they
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  kind of missed that momentum and it's hard to get that back out of nowhere.
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  So my cinematographer called me every day and said, are we shooting something
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  yet? And I always said I don't have a script that He said,
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  it doesn't matter, let's shoot something. And that's exactly what we did.
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  We kind of looked for a story We'll be right back after a word from
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  our sponsor, and now back to the show that would support us not having
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  any money, because no one had any money. You're coming out of film
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  school, you're completely broke. Digital was this was in two thousand four.
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  Kind of you could shoot digital, but it was still kind of expensive.
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  So another seven or a day. If I actually taught you to concentrate on
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  what you have and build your project, your first project after film school around
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  that, rather than trying to achieve things that you don't have. So if
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  you know a great actor, you know, write something for that actor.
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  If you know a great location, build something about that. If you have
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  access to crazy advanced camera, you know, then construct something where you can
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  show that up. And we were sitting down and we basically said, again,
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  we have nothing something but what you have in Los Angeles. Of course,
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  which is a tragedy for them but great for us, is you have
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  so many good actors out of work then would do anything for no money,
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  And if you can just find them and give them something worthwhile to do,
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  you don't really have to pay them. So we decided that we make a
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  fake documentary which at the time that was kind of before the whole fake documentary
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  wave like Great Player, which had been made five years earlier but had kind
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  of not really spawned any any new movies yet. This was before paranormal Activity
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  and all that. And we thought, if we shoot in that format,
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  we don't have to lie at anything. Everything can look gritty and bad and
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  it doesn't matter because if it looks bad, that's just adding to the realism
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  of it all. So let's shoot in that style. We'll just get a
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  video camera that one of our actors had and we borrowed it from him,
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  and then we came up with a story that there is a filmmaker, documentary
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  filmmaker in film school and for this thesis project, he is finding a suicidal
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  guy on Craigslist and basically is following him through his last weekend. And then
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  of course there are all kinds of complications there, becoming friends and the girl's
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  falling in love with a sound girl and a kind of a kind of complications.
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  Right, But we had four pages, you know, we didn't have
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  a script. And I was so traumatized from afi from the process of working
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  with a screenwriter because me as a screenwriter myself. Of course, we were
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  bumping heads all the time. So what why I wouldn't have shot anything for
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  a decade, probably like everyone else, is that I was so exhausted and
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  even the thought of getting together with a screenwriter again and writing something kind of
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  sounded crazy to me. So this, this project that we went into with
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  a four page outline was kind of perfect, and then we improvised all the
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  scenes with the actors and made that movie. The downside was because we didn't
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  have a script, there was never it was never over, you know,
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  we were kind of improvising scenes into the blue. If something didn't work,
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  then we would just shoot more scenes and shoot more material. And it took
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  us three years to make the movie in the end, and of course,
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  like the tough thing is to support yourself while you're making your movie, and
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  you're kind of phonetically single mindedly focused on making that movie, but at the
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  same time you kind of have to eat and pay rent and all that stuff.
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  So that was a tough time. But in the end, at some
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  point it was it was done, and then we submitted it to AFI Fest,
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  to the festival at which we were always told if I graduates, don't
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  get into a fifest because they don't want to be seen as kind of leaning
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  towards their own people and all that stuff. But somehow we got in and
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  we won the Audience Award, which was a big thing at the time because
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  other films that had won the Audience Award were like Hotel Ruanda and Life Is
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  Beautiful and all these kind of big movies, and suddenly there was our small
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  movie in between there that no one had ever heard about. You have Admitted
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  Unnecessary Death. It's Unecessary Death. Yeah, it's on Netflix right now.
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  Oh really? Oh great, Yeah, I've I've watched a lot of them.
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  I watched the some of the footage you put on YouTube. Oh yeah,
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  yeah, those were the but I was and I was trying to watch
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  it and yeah, that's great. Well, that must have been so weird
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  to just watch the deleted scenes of something new approach. So let me talk
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  a little bit about that. You know, in terms of improvisation, how
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  would you guys like say you're you're going out to shoot one day, how
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  would you put that together? Well, I think that the main thing is
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  to in the beginning understand that it's a completely different talent to have for an
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  actor to be good at improvising than to be good at making written lines come
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  to life and appear fresh and as if they're being set for the first time.
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  One of my actors put that really well, that there is a different
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  part of your brain that processes making up lines for the first time rather than
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  regurgitating lines. And that's something a lot of producers I later learned, don't
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  really know about. Like, if you're making an improv project, then you
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  have to cast improve people. Doesn't make any sense to give them a scene
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  and lines and see if they and make that come to life, because it
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  won't help you in the moment at all. So I was very much focused
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  on finding great improvisers. And what you kind of get as a bonus is
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  that you end up with very smart people because improvising takes a lot of brain
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  power and you have to be very fast, thinking on your feet, and
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  you have to be very high energy, which is really important. I didn't
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  know that at the time, but you really are looking for someone who has
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  a higher energy than real life. Like if you take people that are very
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  authentic, but they all kind of are either normal life speed or slightly slower,
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  it'll bore you to death on camera and you kind of have to try
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  to make up for it and editing and all that kind of stuff, and
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  it's hard. So luckily I ended up with very eloquent, very smart people,
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  and then we kind of went out and I always gave them a paragraph
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  and said, Okay, this is the scene we're coming from. The great
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  thing is that you can shoot in chronological order, which is huge, of
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  course for the actors to be able to kind of base their performance on the
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  scene you're just coming from, which you don't have a normal narrative movies because
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  they're always scheduled by location, and sometimes you shoot the climax the third act
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  first and then go back to the third act first, and then go back
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  to the first act and all that kind of stuff. So a lot of
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  rain power always goes to kind of reminding the actors where they are coming from
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  and all that. So that was easier for us because they knew where we
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  were coming from. But I would summarize it for them again and then kind
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  of tell everyone what they are trying to achieve in this scene and not give
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  them the outcome and just kind of give them the intention that they're going into
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  the scene with and really talk that up to them and sometimes take them aside
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  and talk to them separately so that they don't overhear what the other person's objective
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  is. And then we would just shoot and shoot and shoot them. Because
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  it was video, we didn't have to care about how much material we were
• 16:49
  shooting, so the first take was always twenty minutes long, and then we
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  did the second take, and I kind of pointed out which the great moments
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  were, and we boil it down to ten minutes, and then to five
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  minutes, and then to two minutes, and then too one minute, and
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  in the end we ended up cutting all these things together, and oftentimes we
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  ended up with the first take both parts of the first take, because it
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  was kind of the freshest because it was the first time that they would come
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  up with this stuff, and to kind of keep it as fresh as possible,
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  I would always say new words, make up new words, don't repeat
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  stuff that you've said in the last take the way you said it in the
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  last take, Keep the ideas, but phrase it differently, try different things,
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  try to surprise each other. And they were up for that and they
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  really loved each other, which was great because we spent as I said,
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  three years together kind of making up stuff together. And if there had been
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  one bad apple in that group, I think it would have been really problematic.
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  But it was a really great group of four core group of four people.
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  And then the only the team only consisted of those four people, and
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  then my cinematographer and me I did sound. So altogether we were six people.
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  And by sure you were directing and doing sound. Ye that that kind
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  of work. That wasn't the problem. That's like very do it yourself.
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  We didn't have a single like location permit or anything. If necessary, we
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  could cramp the entire team plus equipment into a car. If we didn't have
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  a location, we would just shoot the scene in the car. It was
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  like very fast. You know, nothing took a big setup. It's really
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  a big relief if you don't have to make it pretty. You know,
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  you don't have to light it pretty, you don't have to find a great
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  location, but you go for realism. All that stuff, all the design
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  stuff is off your chest. You just have to. As a director.
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  It's hard and as a cinematographer too, it's hard to let that go because
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  it kind of it does something to your ego that in the beginning is very
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  uncomfortable, but then after a couple of days you kind of switched to that.
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  My cinematographer, he's such a good cinematography. He's Hungarian, and he
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  would kind of if he could, he would shoot black and white, high
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  contrast. You know. That leads like a Vilmosh Sigmund disciple, and it
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  was really hard for him to switch to making it ugly. And he would
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  frame things so perfectly that from every now and then while we were shooting I
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  would have to bump into him so that the camera would shake. And then
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  after after a week he came to me and I get it. Now,
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  I get it. It started. The big breakthrough for him was that he
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  started listening to the to the actors, which he wasn't used to because the
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  cinematographers are so focused on the framing on the image that usually they don't listen
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  to the actors. But because he had to listen to the actors, because
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  if they were suddenly pointing something out outside of frame, then he would have
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  to pan over and show that. In the beginning, some actors were like,
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  oh, look over there, and the camera would stay on the actor
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  and I would always have to tap him on the shoulder and pan over and
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  after he kind of totally switched to that. So that was great. So
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  that would be my big advice. I think about making your first movie,
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  don't I know. It's it's tempting to really let your creative juices flow and
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  to write something in the French Revolution or something in out of Space or something.
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  We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor and now back to
• 20:07
  the show, but it will never get made. Like the Hollywood is so
• 20:14
  fear driven that no executive will give you that will give you money to make
• 20:18
  your first movie. That's the problem. You have to have made a movie
• 20:22
  to make your first movie, and short films don't count. That's the problem.
• 20:26
  I know that short films are great to kind of learn stuff for yourself,
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  but it's a total illusion that you can show a great short film and
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  someone will say you are displaying such talent that now we're going to give you
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  millions and millions to make your first feature. I think that was the case
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  once, and there are a couple of famous examples where that might have happened.
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  But that's like one in a million. To bet your career and that's
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  kind of crazy. So I think what you do have to shoot for these
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  days is to make a feature, make it as independently as possible. If
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  you are waiting for someone else to give you the green light it, I
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  can promise you that you will never shoot like if you rely on someone else's
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  money, you get all these all these stories where someone prepared and prepped and
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  they were ready to shoot and then everything fell apart. Like almost every story
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  ends like that. You know. It's really funny that you're saying that because
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  you're you're almost exactly describing the scenario that I went through, because we had
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  a screenplay and we had all these investors and all these things that were going
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  on, and it completely you know, I kept waiting and waiting and waiting
• 21:27
  for everything to be perfect, and then it fell apart. You know.
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  So now what we're doing is just taking the money that we have and we're
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  going out and shooting something, you know, just getting out and shooting and
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  making something, you know what I mean. Yeah, And that's the hardest
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  step, you know, because I think filmmakers are kind of perfectionists by nature.
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  So it's the impulse is I think very common to wait for perfect conditions,
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  but perfect conditions will never be there and money will always go await,
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  Like my whole first movie cost three thousand dollars altogether. Like everything was on.
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  We got use tapes and we taped over the dailies of Day after Tomorrow.
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  We got and everyone brought their own lunch. I didn't have any money
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  to do anything. I was sleeping on a friend's couch at times. Like
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  it was very very clear. I promised everyone no one will ever make a
• 22:15
  dime from this, which changed everything, because suddenly it's okay for everyone to
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  work for free if they know that you also are putting in all the work
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  and you swear to them that you will never make a dime from it,
• 22:27
  you know, like the Netflix money we are we're giving away to charity because
• 22:32
  I have to keep up this promise that no one can ever make any money
• 22:37
  from this movie. And that helps. That freed everything up, and everyone
• 22:40
  kind of contributed and brought their editing system and their camera and their sound equipment,
• 22:44
  and there this and bad and it was kind of a really good time.
• 22:48
  But all that started with finding a story that you can shoot in a
• 22:53
  non pretty way, and how that really helped me later. I mean,
• 22:56
  I was lucky with all this stuff because what I learned, what I didn't
• 23:00
  know coming out of film school, is that you have to do something that
• 23:07
  Hollywood that is new and worthwhile to Hollywood, like the other things that no
• 23:11
  one in Hollywood will ever help you just out of the goodness of their heart.
• 23:15
  You have to get to a place somehow where you have something that they
• 23:18
  want, you know. And coming out of film school, of course,
• 23:22
  we always thought we have to emulate Hollywood. Like the biggest thing to us
• 23:26
  was like getting a helicopter shot, Like if we could get a helicopter shot,
• 23:30
  then we'd made it, which is complete nonsense because the one thing that
• 23:33
  Hollywood has is money. Like they can have all the helicopter shots that they
• 23:37
  want, it's not going to impress them, you know, if you have
• 23:40
  a great stunt, it's not going to impress them. They You have to
• 23:42
  give them something where they go like, oh, we didn't have that before,
• 23:47
  and it's not so it can't be about money. That there was the
• 23:49
  big revelation afterwards that we luckily went the right direction out of dumb luck because
• 23:56
  we didn't have money, so we really focused on performances and getting very authentic
• 24:02
  moments and kind of making this heart wrenching drama thing. And because all that
• 24:07
  we had was time. There's always this kind of saying that you had to
• 24:10
  out of quality time and money. You can choose too. You can either
• 24:17
  get something great and make it cheaply but it will take a long time,
• 24:21
  or you can make something great and it'll take forever, or it'll be fast
• 24:25
  but it won't be cheap and all these things, and I think that is
• 24:26
  really true. So we didn't have money, but we had all the time
• 24:30
  in the world, and we wanted to make something great, so we kind
• 24:33
  of concentrated on that. And then when we had made the movie, it
• 24:36
  turned out that that's exactly what Hollywood was looking for at the time, because
• 24:40
  the fake documentary thing was just coming up and was becoming popular, and they
• 24:44
  were looking for someone to be able to work in that medium and get great
• 24:48
  performances out of it. So that's how I got my first kind of studio
• 24:52
  job with the Lion State project with them became The Last Exorcism? Did You?
• 24:57
  Was there the idea when you went up shoot that it's like, since
• 25:00
  we're shooting video, let's just try if we shoot like say an hour,
• 25:06
  let's try to have at least five minutes of that big goal that we can
• 25:10
  cut out, or it was that kind of your your process with I mean
• 25:12
  back in those days, I think that shooting in video and shoot, you
• 25:17
  know, if you're shooting that in film, you have to kind of be
• 25:18
  like, okay, we have to get it on this take. You know
• 25:22
  what I see. You're not afforded that when when you're shooting video, it's
• 25:23
  a lot easier. It's it's huge for the creative process. Someone said that
• 25:27
  in an acting workshop at AFI, and it was amazing that the most valuable
• 25:33
  words that you can ever say as a director is I don't know, let's
• 25:37
  try it. It might not work, which is exactly the opposite of what
• 25:41
  you think a director should do, because you always have the feeling the director
• 25:44
  has to have the vision, has to know exactly what they want, and
• 25:47
  they have to be able to communicate it to everyone, and then everyone is
• 25:49
  trying to hit that on the nails somehow, And if you do that,
• 25:53
  then that's that's a lot of pressure to put on all your creative collaborators because
• 25:57
  they have to kind of try to hit yours exactly but if you say,
• 26:00
  guys, I don't really have a vision, let's just play an experiment and
• 26:04
  will come up with something together, then suddenly you take all the pressure away
• 26:07
  from them and you allow them to contribute. Everyone's waking up and is going
• 26:12
  like, oh my god, they want my input. They don't just want
• 26:15
  me to execute something that they have preconceived, but they actually want me to
• 26:18
  be involved in the creative process itself. And suddenly you get stuff that is
• 26:23
  not filtered through one mind. You know, if you are that kind of
• 26:26
  filmmaker that is kind of exerting that power and putting your vision on everyone,
• 26:33
  then that means that everything that ends up on screen is filtered through your mind.
• 26:37
  And if you're a genius, that might be great, if you're a
• 26:40
  David Fincher or Orson Wells or whatever. But I'm not, you know,
• 26:44
  and I know that, and so it's a big asset to me to get
• 26:48
  a group of people together that I think are funny and witty and brilliant and
• 26:52
  fast, and get all these anarchic ideas and these moments in the scenes together
• 27:00
  and then be able to cut my scene together from all these moments that I
• 27:03
  didn't preconceive, but that were little gifts that came out during shooting, and
• 27:07
  they only came out because I gave them that freedom to just play and try
• 27:11
  stuff out. In some stuff will be totally off and will not work at
• 27:14
  all, but that's fine because we're shooting on video, and it's not that
• 27:18
  every second is golden because we're should shooting on film and every second costs so
• 27:21
  much money. But the video really allowed me to kind of open that up
• 27:26
  and say, we have the whole day for these three scenes. Let's just
• 27:29
  see what happens. And there was always there wasn't a single day when there
• 27:33
  weren't moments coming up that were completely surprising and a complete gift. And over
• 27:37
  three years, honestly, I never went home not being totally ecstatic about the
• 27:42
  day. And that's I think the only thing that can get you through this
• 27:45
  long shoot, you know, because that's the only payoff you have, is
• 27:49
  that if you lie in bed at night, you've got to I can't believe
• 27:52
  that moment happened today, That look between two people happened today, that line,
• 27:56
  that idea, that is that that and it's it's the most satisfying thing.
• 28:00
  And you never get that with a script because with a script or you
• 28:04
  rarely get that with a script, because with a script, you have a
• 28:07
  very preconceived idea of what the scene is going to be and how it's going
• 28:11
  to look. And most of the time, the best thing you can do
• 28:14
  is to kind of achieve that. It's rare that you suddenly see something come
• 28:18
  to life in front of you that is so much better than what you had
• 28:22
  imagined in your wildest dreams, in your in your mind. Can you you
• 28:27
  told a story that I heard before about your screening in Kosovo? I was
• 28:30
  wondering if you could that, Yeah, to talk about that for just a
• 28:33
  second, Yeah, because it's really interesting. Yeah. No, that was
• 28:36
  crazy because we I was at a couse of a film film festival with my
• 28:40
  thesis film, and then they invited me back the year later to be in
• 28:44
  the jury or a couple of years later, I guess, because I did
• 28:47
  bring a rough cut off unnecessary death and there were three people in the jury
• 28:52
  and everyone was screening some feature film project of theirs and my colleagues films.
• 28:57
  This sounds very arrogant, but I thought I thought they were They were great,
• 29:02
  but they weren't necessarily mind blowing. But the audience went crazy standing ovations,
• 29:07
  and I was like, oh my god, this is the best audience
• 29:10
  ever. Can't wait another way to show the rough cut of the necessary and
• 29:14
  it was something that my editor had put together. It was a cut that
• 29:17
  I hadn't even seen. Um, so I was excited to see it.
• 29:19
  And we're screening the movie and the movie is over, and I'm getting ready
• 29:26
  for my standing ovation and for people to come up to give me an oscar,
• 29:30
  and there was complete silence, absolutely terrifying silence, and then there was
• 29:37
  like one person, which is the worst silence would have been. I thought
• 29:41
  in the moment was the worst thing that could happen, But then I learned
• 29:44
  seconds later that's the second floorst thing that could happen, because then someone in
• 29:48
  the last row started clapping like this, which is like in a Western,
• 29:52
  you know, when you wanted the slow class. We'll be right back after
• 29:57
  a word from our sponsor, and now back to the show. In a
• 30:06
  Western, when you want to show silence, you don't just have it silent,
• 30:10
  but you have like a kyote howl in the back. There's like a
• 30:12
  cricket exactly. And I didn't get it I was so impressed and taken with
• 30:19
  my own creation up there. And the great thing about fake documentaries is also
• 30:25
  because everyone is contributing, you don't have to be an egomaniac to love the
• 30:30
  product because it's everyone's creative together. Yeah. So I was really amazed by
• 30:33
  the thing and couldn't wrap my mind around why no one was responding to it.
• 30:40
  I thought it was so powerful. And then I was walking down the
• 30:41
  steps to do the Q and A, and I turned around and everyone was
• 30:47
  kind of moving in the audience, which was weird because normally for a Q
• 30:52
  and A, you just stay in your seats and you don't get up and
• 30:55
  you don't walk. But people were walking out or running around or whatever.
• 30:57
  And then I realized that they were people in the audience that had broken down,
• 31:03
  and their friends were kind of gathering around them and pulling them back up
• 31:07
  to their feet and were talking to them whatever whatever. And next to me
• 31:11
  was a girl that was rocking back and forth and she had her hand in
• 31:15
  her face in her hands and the tears were running down her forearms. And
• 31:19
  that's when I realized, wait a minute, they didn't understand that this wasn't
• 31:23
  a real documentary. I didn't announce that beforehand. I didn't mean to fool
• 31:29
  anyone. Just wasn't a situation where you kind of would have announced it.
• 31:33
  And they were reacting to it as if they had just seen this guy kill
• 31:37
  himself on camera, because the character is a very lovable character. They were
• 31:42
  devastated by it, and I was running around. It was the worst feeling
• 31:45
  because you had as if you had dropped this bomb on these people and they
• 31:51
  were seriously hurt. So I was running around trying to tell everyone that this
• 31:56
  is a fictional film, and they didn't get it when I would say,
• 31:59
  Matt the suicidal guys. So there was Matt was the suicidal guy, and
• 32:01
  Gilbert was the filmmaker that was following him. And I would tell someone who
• 32:07
  had broken down, Matt is an actor, and the first first reply I
• 32:12
  got was like, does Gilbert know? I was like, Gilbert's an actor
• 32:15
  too, Like it was so. And then there was one girl, an
• 32:20
  American girls as you would imagine, that was attacking me. She was jumping
• 32:25
  at me and she grabbed me by the collar and she shook me. She
• 32:29
  was this tiny girl, but she was just an a ninja mote or something,
• 32:32
  and she screamed at me, you're a murderer. You shouldn't be allowed
• 32:37
  to make movies. And then her friends dragged her off, and then that
• 32:40
  the organizer, the organizer of the festival came up to me and whispered in
• 32:45
  my ear and said, stay where you are, don't go outside. There
• 32:49
  is a mob gathering to deal with, which is exactly the words you don't
• 32:52
  want to hear. In Kosovo that had just been through a murderous work.
• 32:57
  The last thing you want is a month that's gathering and it's bad when you're
• 33:00
  the worst thing in It was devastating, and then I phoned my team,
• 33:07
  my editor and say, we got to recut this movie. We've got to
• 33:10
  change the ending. People were devastated, and she said, well, isn't
• 33:15
  that what we were going for, which is true. It is a tragedy,
• 33:17
  so you kind of want to evoke these emotions, but it felt as
• 33:22
  if we were playing unfairly. And for the first time, this whole sentence
• 33:25
  with there is responsibility in filmmaking, and you have to take responsibility in filmmaking,
• 33:30
  I understood what that was about. I'd never understood that whenever people were
• 33:34
  talking about oh, Oliver Stone with natural born Killers got people to kill other
• 33:38
  people. I always thought, well, that's a powerful movie if you can
• 33:42
  achieve that. You know, obviously the movie work. It's a tragedy for
• 33:45
  the people that die, but is it really up to the filmmaker to prevent
• 33:50
  that from happening? And after seeing that an action in Kosovo, it just
• 33:52
  wasn't fun. It wasn't a rewarding feeling of oh, look what we were
• 33:58
  able to do. We just never thought about the why. You know,
• 34:01
  we worked so hard on trying to to affect an audience emotionally would you always
• 34:07
  do when you make a movie that I never stopped to think, well,
• 34:10
  why are we doing this to them? We just try to get them to
• 34:15
  feel bad, but we don't give them anything in exchange, ye know.
• 34:19
  And that was kind of an epiphany to me. And then we did recut
• 34:22
  the movie screened at south By Southwest and then screened at AFI Fest and won
• 34:25
  the audience a word which I think we wouldn't have if we hadn't recut the
• 34:29
  movie. But it definitely was counterintuitive to say our movie is that sounds very
• 34:34
  arrogant, again, but our movie is too powerful for the audience to consume
• 34:37
  we have to water it down. But that's kind of exactly what we did,
• 34:40
  and I think was the right decide. That's really interesting, you know.
• 34:44
  Can you talk about when you say give them anything in exchange, and
• 34:50
  you know that you went back and recut it, what did you recut and
• 34:52
  what was the What was really the difference between the version they saw in Kosovo
• 34:57
  and the one that was the big was the ending. We had shot two
• 35:00
  endings, one which was very straight. So just to spoil it all,
• 35:06
  spoil the whole movie. In the end, Matt the suicidal guy and Gilbert
• 35:09
  the filmmaker, they're going into garage together and Matt is going to shoot himself
• 35:14
  and Gilbert is gonna film that. And one ending was we stay outside and
• 35:19
  we hear the shot, and then there's silence for a minute, and then
• 35:22
  Gilbert comes out and we see an inkling of Matt on the floor and he
• 35:27
  has shot himself in the head. And you can see on Gilbert's face that
• 35:30
  what he just saw it was so nightmarish that he'll never never be able to
• 35:34
  forget that, and he kind of is paying the price for his ambition to
• 35:38
  become a great filmmaker or whatever. That was one ending which we showed in
• 35:42
  Kosovo, which played it very straight. You know, there's this guy who
• 35:46
  is announcing he's going to kill himself, and then he kills himself. You
• 35:50
  know the entire time what's going to happen, and you always kind of hope
• 35:52
  some miracle will happen, but guess what, the miracle doesn't happen, and
• 35:55
  that's it, and that was just devastating people. The other ending that we
• 35:59
  had shot was that we stay outside of the garage. We hear the shot,
• 36:02
  and then there's a pause, and then we hear a second shot,
• 36:06
  and it takes us a moment to understand what was going on, and when
• 36:09
  someone runs to open the garage and both of them are on the floor,
• 36:13
  and it turns out that Matt has shot Gilbert before he shot himself because of
• 36:16
  the whole subplot with a sound girl who was Gilbert's ex girlfriend and Matt was
• 36:22
  in love with her, and Gilbert, who wanted Matt to kill himself,
• 36:25
  took the girl away from him to not give him a reason to live and
• 36:29
  all that kind of stuff, so he shot Gilbert, which was the much
• 36:31
  more Hollywood twist ending. And played it much less straight and much less real,
• 36:37
  and it felt like that's exactly what people needed. They needed something that
• 36:40
  was kind of tipping it off and say it's all right, this is a
• 36:45
  movie. Here's a heightened reality. And also to punish Gilbert in a more
• 36:50
  conventional way for manipulating this guy that we've fallen in love with into suicide and
• 36:54
  now he paid the price by killing him by himself, by being killed.
• 37:00
  That kind of seemed to work. I think that was the main the main
• 37:01
  thing, and I think in general, it's always like you want to take
• 37:06
  something away from a story. I think that's the basis of storytelling. That
• 37:09
  we kind of communicate and insight into the world and into the human experience through
• 37:15
  a story, and you put your audience through different emotions and make them invested
• 37:20
  in the thing. But it's all with the implied promise that they will get
• 37:24
  something out of watching this for two hours that no one else knows. They
• 37:29
  will be let into a secret, you know, that they can take away
• 37:32
  into their life with, and we didn't really supply that secret. I had
• 37:37
  a few I was basically saying, here's a movie that will make you miserable
• 37:40
  and teach you nothing and that's responding to it. That was a problem at
• 37:46
  the time. Yeah, I think that's really, you know, interesting because
• 37:50
  with all the like horror movies, the whole concept of a horror movie is
• 37:53
  that you're going to watch something that's horrible. You know, that's something that's
• 37:58
  terrible, but there has to be some element of it that attracts people to
• 38:01
  it, that makes people want to experience that, right, you know,
• 38:06
  and gives them that like experience. One of the interesting things you said when
• 38:10
  you were working on The Last Exorcism, and I want to go to that
• 38:14
  in just a second. It's just that the documentary format doesn't give the audience
• 38:19
  a place to hide, right, And I thought that was really, you
• 38:22
  know interesting. It's like you have more power doing that well because you have
• 38:27
  the first person narrative. People are looking right into camera, and the cinematographer
• 38:31
  is a character in the film. He's not kind of this invisible, floating
• 38:35
  camera, but there is a direct proxy for you as an audience member in
• 38:39
  the movie. And if there's danger coming towards the camera, it's coming towards
• 38:44
  you, and it's you're kind of aware that there's danger coming from three hundred
• 38:49
  and sixty degrees. With a narrative conventional movie, you can always kind of
• 38:52
  count on them showing you what you need to see, Like if there's something
• 38:58
  that's important for you as the audience member to see and not to miss,
• 39:00
  they will make sure that they cut to that close up or that insert or
• 39:04
  whatever. And that kind of gives you a certain safety because you're being taken
• 39:07
  by the hand and guided through this story by someone who already knows the path
• 39:14
  of the story. But with the fake documentary, it's all about the stuff
• 39:16
  that you miss and that you don't see, so that you keep the audience
• 39:21
  on their toes about you know what, we might be showing you this side
• 39:24
  of the room right now, but that doesn't mean something can jump out behind
• 39:28
  you at any moment, because, you know what, we don't really know
• 39:30
  what's going to happen, and this we don't really know what's going to happen.
• 39:34
  I think it's a very important component in an effect documentary, especially in
• 39:37
  horror, right, and you see that a lot with I mean, you
• 39:42
  know, Spielberg used that in Saving Private Ryan, the idea of you know,
• 39:46
  and you see that in a lot of films that you'll have a scene
• 39:49
  that's all handheld and shot like a documentary, even though it's in a traditional
• 39:52
  narrative film. Right, we'll be right back after a word from our sponsor
• 40:01
  and now back to the show, you know, just to give people that
• 40:06
  feeling of uneasiness and that at any minute something could kind of, you know,
• 40:10
  affect your point of view or whatever. Yeah. I think the other
• 40:14
  component is that moving moving images just stimulate the viewer and kind of put it
• 40:22
  an energy into the thing that the brain has to process. So you are
• 40:28
  there's just more happening on a very simple, simple way. And if you
• 40:31
  have a locked off shot from a tripod, whatever is moving is just the
• 40:37
  object in the frame. But ninety percent of what you're seeing on screen doesn't
• 40:43
  move, whereas as soon as you go handheld, that means every single piece
• 40:47
  of grain it would have been in film world, but now pixel moves at
• 40:52
  any split second. So I think there is something that is just kind of
• 40:55
  overwhelming to the brain and that he kind of pumps up the adrenaline just by
• 41:01
  the virtue of going handheld. And the other thing that I've found out about
• 41:06
  handheld that was amazing to me, and I still don't have an explanation for
• 41:09
  it. Was when I was watching Lars Fontrier's The Idiots. He has everything
• 41:14
  is handheld, and the performances are amazing, and then for some reason there's
• 41:19
  some scene in the woods that's like a minute long where he suddenly is static
• 41:22
  on a tripod and suddenly the performances suck. And I realized that handheld,
• 41:29
  for some reason, really helps out your performances, like everything gets better if
• 41:35
  you go handheld. Maybe that is because the audience can't focus on every single
• 41:40
  twitch in a face at any moment. Like if there is a stale performance,
• 41:45
  probably if you have Meryl Streep and Any Adams and John Malkovich, you're
• 41:49
  fine. You probably don't have to go handheld. But if you, if
• 41:52
  you have performances that are on the staler side, going handheld suddenly gives that
• 41:59
  whole thing a vital effect that you otherwise wouldn't get. I don't know what
• 42:02
  it is, but I swear as soon as you tried it out, you'll
• 42:06
  see that your performance is kept much better in the hand Hell, yeah,
• 42:09
  definitely, I think that. You know, it's also the concept that you're
• 42:14
  capturing something that's really happening. And the camera's not like the camera's not ahead
• 42:19
  of the action, right, you know, the camera's following the action and
• 42:22
  seeing things, you know, all of a sudden. And you see this
• 42:25
  a lot in The Last Exorcism that you know, as they're moving through a
• 42:29
  scene, it's like the camera is like it'll go over and capture something and
• 42:32
  you're like, oh, did I just see that? Or what was that?
• 42:35
  You know what I mean. It's like it adds a lot more dynamic
• 42:38
  feel to it. Yeah, that's really hard to simulate for the cinematographer if
• 42:42
  you're on take twenty and you've walked through for him to kind of pretend he's
• 42:47
  very surprised by what just came into frame. It's kind of an art form
• 42:51
  in its own. Okay, well, why don't we jump into that.
• 42:54
  Can we talk for a little bit about how the Last Exorcism started, how
• 43:00
  you got involved, meeting with Eli Roth, all of that. Yeah,
• 43:06
  story, So I had made Last Exorcism and Last Exorcism had one the audience
• 43:10
  necessary death and the Audience Award which changes everything. Or that will be my
• 43:15
  next piece of advice for the starting filmmaker. Make that feature and then try
• 43:21
  to get it into festivals because Hollywood, like very few people in Hollywood,
• 43:24
  I think, have taste and rely on their own It's true. It's really
• 43:30
  crazy, Like I get scripts from studios that are so bad that you go
• 43:36
  like who, not only who wrote this, but which executive read it and
• 43:40
  said that's a good idea, let's make this movie. And that's ninety percent
• 43:44
  of old scripts. And it's I think it's really rare. There's a handful
• 43:47
  of people in Hollywood that trust their own opinion and what they will what the
• 43:52
  other people will rely on is other gatekeepers that at some point put a stamp
• 43:58
  of approval on that project. And film festivals, big film festivals with a
• 44:02
  good reputation do that. Like if you screen a can or itself by Southwest
• 44:07
  Sundance or AFI Fest or LA Film Festival or something bigger and you screen there,
• 44:15
  that's already great. If you win an audience award there or a jury
• 44:19
  award there, suddenly people will take your movie seriously and they will think the
• 44:24
  movie is great, even maybe if it isn't, but they don't really dare
• 44:29
  to have their own experience. So suddenly after the audience award, there were
• 44:32
  a lot of agents and managers that wanted to meet, and I learned that
• 44:39
  because it's always like everyone always wants an agent and thinks their career will really
• 44:44
  hit hit off, hit it off when they have an agent, which is
• 44:47
  nonsense. And also an agent will never want you, like an agent that
• 44:52
  you have to approach will never want you. You have to make something again
• 44:57
  that that agent finds desirable and he wants you. So this whole knocking on
• 45:01
  people's doors that people are always trying, it's not gonna work, but you
• 45:06
  have to kind of get the approval of the stamp of approval from some festival
• 45:09
  if possible, and then they will knock on your dirt anyway. So I
• 45:14
  did the rounds with the agents and found an agent, and we were looking
• 45:19
  at different scripts and couldn't find anything. And then I had the feeling I
• 45:23
  had done a necessary death, and I had this feeling, I really want
• 45:28
  Jacob Foreman to see this movie. Jacob Foreman was a screenwriter in my year
• 45:32
  who wrote All the Boys Loved Mandy Lane and it was a really good guy.
• 45:36
  But we never never had that much to do with each other at Afi
• 45:39
  and I don't know where this feeling came from that I wanted him to see
• 45:44
  the movie, but it was just a really strong feeling. So I emailed
• 45:45
  him and instead, I made this movie. Can I send it to you?
• 45:49
  And he said, sure, send it to me. I send it
• 45:51
  to him. I don't think he liked it much because he never recommented on
• 45:54
  it. But what happened like a week or two later, was that he
• 45:59
  was writing a screenplay for a production company called Strike Entertainment and they had had
• 46:05
  two directors, Huck Budko and Andrew Gerland, on this movie called Cotton,
• 46:10
  which was an exorcism movie, a fake documentary exorcism movie, and the two
• 46:15
  directors left the project because they had another project with will Will Ferrell at the
• 46:20
  same time called The Virginity Hit, and they had to decide which one to
• 46:22
  make, and they were under obligation with Sony to make The Virginity It.
• 46:27
  So suddenly this project didn't have directors, and Jacob in during a lunch break
• 46:32
  or something, overheard two producers say, Man, we lost our directors.
• 46:37
  Where are we going to find someone who can do a fake documentary horror?
• 46:42
  Jacob had necessary in his bag, you know which. I don't believe in
• 46:47
  fate or the supernatural or anything like that. But I have no explanation for
• 46:52
  how that ocame. And he gave them the movie and they watched it,
• 46:55
  and it obviously wasn't a horror movie, but it was exactly the format that
• 46:59
  they wanted. And so they called me the next day and sent me the
• 47:01
  script and wanted to meet. And the script was, I think I can
• 47:07
  say it now all these years later, was horrendous, horrendous, and it
• 47:13
  was outside wasn't written towards a fake documentary, because in a fake documentary,
• 47:16
  if you really want to sell it as real, then you can't have something
• 47:21
  spectacular happened in every single scene because the audience will figure out after two scenes
• 47:27
  that this is obviously you're not a real documentary. Like in a real documentary
• 47:30
  if you catch one amazing moment on camera and people structure a whole documentary around
• 47:35
  that, you know. So this script kind of had some action sequence with
• 47:38
  people flying through the air and every scene and just didn't work. And I
• 47:43
  went and I had no interest in making the movie, and I went into
• 47:46
  the into the meeting. If I had wanted to make the movie, I
• 47:50
  think I would have been really, really nervous. But because I basically just
• 47:52
  came there to say, your script sucks. I'm not going to do it.
• 47:57
  I wasn't nervous at all, so I told them that the bluntly no
• 48:00
  diplomacy involved. And I learned then that there's nothing sexier to Hollywood executives than
• 48:07
  you not wanting to do their project, because they always they're not stupid.
• 48:13
  They know that the script that they have out there is not brilliant and needs
• 48:16
  work, as they always call it, needs a polish, but polish always
• 48:21
  means complete rewrite, and they kind of know that. And then they invite
• 48:25
  all these directors, like ten twenty directors to come in, and nineteen of
• 48:30
  those directors say this is brilliant, I want to do this. I'm the
• 48:32
  right guy for this. And there is one guy who comes in and says
• 48:37
  the script doesn't work, I don't want to do it. Then suddenly they
• 48:39
  want the one guy that didn't want to do it. I had that that
• 48:43
  people for other projects that they called and said, we've shown it to ten
• 48:46
  directors, nine of them love it. You didn't want to do it,
• 48:49
  could you come in for a second meeting? I said, well, to
• 48:52
  go with one of the people. I want to do it, but they
• 48:53
  want to hear that you have ideas how to make it better another And it
• 49:00
  came out of that meeting with them saying, you can do with the script
• 49:05
  whatever you want. You can hire your own writer, you can completely rewrite
• 49:07
  it. We'll give you one and a half million dollars do it. And
• 49:10
  that was exactly what I needed to hear, because then I brought a writer
• 49:14
  on board that I loved, that's a genius who completely rewrote the movie within
• 49:19
  four days or something. And then yeah, Eli was attached. I didn't
• 49:22
  talk to him in the beginning. I think a couple of weeks later we
• 49:25
  had a call scheduled, and now I was nervous because I suddenly was talking
• 49:29
  to like the horror legend Eli Roth. I think he was on the Inglorious
• 49:32
  Bustard set in his trailer and had just seen a necessary death and was super
• 49:37
  nice and super complimentary and stuff. And then we went to make the movie
• 49:42
  and they let me bring on my cinematographer, my editor, and there was
• 49:47
  a little bit of a struggle. What I mentioned before that they because they
• 49:51
  had never made a fact documentary, they didn't couldn't quite wrap their head around
• 49:53
  the improv thing, Like they said, we need to see casting tapes.
• 50:00
  We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor, and now back to
• 50:07
  the show. And we can only judge casting tapes auditions if we see actors
• 50:14
  that are doing the same scripted scene, and then we can compare the quality.
• 50:19
  And I said, well, that's completely useless, because even if it's
• 50:22
  a great scene and written, it's not going to help you in an improv.
• 50:23
  They said, we have to do it anyway. So I always had
• 50:27
  to make the actors read the scene. And for I knew it wasn't going
• 50:30
  to make a difference, but for the producers it was important. And then
• 50:34
  we went off to Louisiana to New Orleans to shoot the movie. And the
• 50:37
  great thing was that this company, Strike Entertainment, had made all these hundred
• 50:42
  million dollar movies with Brett Pitt and Robert Redford and whatever whatever, and they
• 50:46
  had never made a movie under eighty million dollars, so they had no idea
• 50:52
  what to do with our little one point five million dollar movie. So they
• 50:54
  didn't take it seriously. They meant it when they said do whatever you want,
• 50:58
  they meant that. They completely stayed out of it. So the conditions
• 51:01
  were very close to what we had a necessary death, where a couple of
• 51:05
  more people, obviously, and the unions required us to have all these people,
• 51:08
  but there was a whole camera team that we never needed that was just
• 51:12
  coming in eating donuts, and and I wanted that because I wanted to recreate
• 51:19
  that intimacy. There was the big strength of working in that format that you
• 51:22
  don't have fifty people staring at the actors, and that you don't, for
• 51:27
  example, have to use the slate, because it turned out to me that
• 51:31
  clapping the slate and going a scene fourteing go action basically communicates to the actors,
• 51:39
  now create artifice. Now try to be someone you are not, you
• 51:43
  know. So I always try to avoid slating, or we would slate in
• 51:47
  the other room quietly, secretly, and then cut over with the camera because
• 51:52
  I didn't want them to act. I basically wanted them to be themselves and
• 51:57
  put themselves into the situation. And we never show to the script to the
• 52:00
  actors. With Last Exorcism, we had a script all written out, which
• 52:04
  we needed for the investors and for the production company and all that kind of
• 52:07
  stuff. But it was like my best hidden secret was this script. I
• 52:10
  knew if I ever showed that to the actors, it would be impossible to
• 52:15
  get that out of their heads again and make them created from scratch and come
• 52:20
  up with all these fresh moments, because they would just try to reproduce the
• 52:22
  script. And it's amazing if you watch the movie and read the script,
• 52:28
  how close the two are. I think no one would believe me if someone
• 52:31
  who had read the script and seeing the movie would never believe that the actors
• 52:35
  never saw the script. But I think it's the same technique. You tell
• 52:38
  them what motivation they go into the scene with, which is actually very similar
• 52:44
  to what you do with a movie that has a script. You know,
• 52:45
  you talk to the actors about where they are coming from and where they want
• 52:49
  to go, and then let them go and kind of see how that goes.
• 52:52
  And that's how we did Last Exorcism. And then we came back from
• 52:57
  this experience that was just really great and started editing and suddenly everyone was very
• 53:04
  involved. Suddenly had a lot of producers in the editing room that helped.
• 53:08
  And the ending, Like if you've seen Last Exorcism, the thing that was
• 53:15
  great about the original script was the ending, and that was like the one
• 53:19
  thing that I was excited about, which was this only makes sense if you've
• 53:22
  seen Last Excism. But the original ending was they go into the forest,
• 53:27
  they see a shadow, they hear the noises of the demon, and they
• 53:30
  run and they don't get killed, and they they reappear a week later,
• 53:36
  and Cotton, our excessis now has a full church with hundreds of people,
• 53:40
  and he's a celebrity and he gets his own TV show and he's, you
• 53:45
  know, he's a star because he has he has gotten a demon or as
• 53:49
  close as possible on video, and he's basically marketing that. And what was
• 53:53
  so smart about it is that the whole movie he tells us what a successful
• 54:01
  evangelical preacher needs. He needs a hook, you know, which is the
• 54:05
  demon on video. And everything Cotton does in his little frauds is based on
• 54:10
  sound, and it's based on lighting and all that kind of stuff. And
• 54:14
  basically in the end, it's just the huge version of that. So I
• 54:16
  wanted the audience to leave the movie as split as they had come in,
• 54:22
  with the believers saying, no, I saw a demon, and with these
• 54:24
  the cynics, the atheists saying, oh, it's just it was basically a
• 54:29
  big pr video, and this Exorcist used us and showed us this stuff for
• 54:35
  a financial gain, and I thought that was the smartest thing that you come
• 54:37
  out of a movie. And you don't even know if you just saw a
• 54:39
  horror movie or if you just saw a drama about a preacher that has a
• 54:44
  great marketing idea. You know that it was our most expensive scene because it
• 54:47
  needed green screen for the demon, and it needed all these extras and the
• 54:52
  location of the church and all that stuff. And then we cut it together
• 54:55
  and it didn't work. Like I showed it to ten friends, and out
• 55:00
  of those ten friends, one friend thought it was the greatest ending he'd ever
• 55:02
  seen, and nine friends were completely confused and said, we don't know what
• 55:07
  just happened. And I learned that you can You can ask a question and
• 55:13
  not answer it in a movie, but it has to be clear that you're
• 55:15
  asking the question. And with our ending, it wasn't even clear that we
• 55:20
  wanted the audience to wander about whether this was fake or not. They didn't
• 55:23
  even know what the question was, and we couldn't. We couldn't make it
• 55:27
  work, and that of course I had had my shot, and now it
• 55:30
  was opened up to the group, to every producer, every cousin of a
• 55:36
  producer, or the you know, the cleaning lady of a producer suddenly had
• 55:40
  ideas about the ending, and then we ended up with one that I don't
• 55:45
  think there's justice to the rest of the movie, but it was the best
• 55:49
  out of the bunch, and to this day, I don't have a better
• 55:51
  idea. And I lie awake at night for having screwed up the ending,
• 55:57
  especially because there was a thing to go in with. But I guess you
• 56:00
  never get that second chance. It'll always be like that. Well, it's
• 56:05
  really difficult to especially when you're doing a movie like that. I don't know,
• 56:08
  there's very few movies that have like completely satisfying ending. When it comes
• 56:15
  to like kind of putting together a mystery what's going on, they eventually figure
• 56:17
  it out, and then the ending is never quite like The build is a
• 56:22
  lot more important, you know. That's what keeps you going through it.
• 56:23
  It's so weird though, I totally agree, but you work towards that ending.
• 56:28
  Most of the time. You have that ending before you have anything else,
• 56:30
  and then you build the entire movie to towards that ending, like in
• 56:35
  screenwriting. You know that as a screenwriter you need to know where you're going.
• 56:37
  So the ending is, you know, the big payoff that you are
• 56:40
  working towards and can't wait to show to the audience. And then the outcome
• 56:45
  for some reasons exactly what you're describing that it's always weaker than it needs to
• 56:49
  be because there's all this expectation on it after the two hour build up,
• 56:52
  and then to pay that office really hard. You almost need like Finchhert's Head
• 56:58
  in the Box in seven or Fight Club, he's good with the endings that
• 57:01
  kind of pull the ruck right under, but it's rare. It's true right
• 57:07
  now, Um, I got so into listening to you, I was thinking
• 57:12
  about my next question. How did you in terms of finding like Ashley Bell
• 57:15
  and the actors? How how was that process? Well? That was it
• 57:19
  was equally hard because our casting director had no idea how to do the improv
• 57:23
  thing and didn't be leaving it and didn't really take the project that seriously,
• 57:29
  which was kind of hard to overcome. And she thought I was a complete
• 57:31
  dilettant and didn't know what I was doing, which he didn't tell me to
• 57:35
  my face. But there was a friend an actor who was a friend of
• 57:37
  mine, which she didn't know, and he was auditioning and she was bitching
• 57:40
  to him about me not I'm not what I wanted, which is exactly true.
• 57:45
  I didn't know what I want. But that was the point, you
• 57:46
  know, it was the point to keep it open and keep it free and
• 57:50
  whatever. Yeah, which I just did improv with the actors, which I
• 57:54
  still do now with projects that have a script, even if I know they're
• 57:59
  only going to to do scripted lines, because it very quickly tells you something
• 58:04
  about the energy and the IQ of the actor if they have to come up
• 58:08
  with their own moments, you know. And it's something I did an internship
• 58:14
  with a casting director called Mally Finn, who cast all of Cameron Oh Sure,
• 58:17
  yeah, Titanic and Terminator aswer and she said, always cast actors not
• 58:25
  just for how they're acting, but for who they really are, because when
• 58:31
  it gets to it and they are tired and you don't have time and you
• 58:35
  have to rely on them to get you out of that situation, they will
• 58:37
  always revert to who they really are at their core, which is completely true,
• 58:44
  but that also means you have to invest in that during the audition.
• 58:46
  So what I did is I said in the waiting room and I pretended to
• 58:51
  be an actor waiting to go in, and I was just chatting up the
• 58:53
  actors that were And it's a really interesting moment because it's it's as full for
• 59:00
  an actor. They're nervous, they're trying to prepare, and there's a guy
• 59:02
  next to them that won't shut up and tries to involve them in some conversation.
• 59:07
  And how they react to that tells you a lot about who they are.
• 59:10
  You know, as soon as they know that you're the director, they'll
• 59:14
  be on their best behavior, and you don't really ever have the chance to
• 59:17
  get to know them for real until you start shooting. So it was important
• 59:22
  to me to kind of have that moment, and with Ashley especially, like
• 59:24
  she was so sweet and so supportive, and I think she thought that I
• 59:29
  was nervous, so she was trying to calm me down because she and it
• 59:34
  was great. And then she was only the second girl that we saw for
• 59:37
  that role, and she just killed it. Like it was so scary to
• 59:40
  be in the room with her because we improvised the exorcism. We'll be right
• 59:45
  back after a word from our sponsor. And now back to the show we
• 59:54
  kind of. I think in auditions you always try to see hopefully your script
• 1:00:00
  has a certain kind of character development and show at least two sides to a
• 1:00:05
  character. One is the starting point and one is the endpoint. So I
• 1:00:07
  think it's smart in auditions to kind of have at least two scenes, one
• 1:00:12
  scene each that showcases what you're looking for. And if there is no scene
• 1:00:17
  in the script that does that, I think it's worth it to just write
• 1:00:21
  a script, write a scene for the audition that will never show up in
• 1:00:23
  the movie, but just very clearly focuses to see that one side from the
• 1:00:29
  actor, because you need to see the range. And then the other thing
• 1:00:32
  that I always do is like, no matter how great the first take is
• 1:00:37
  in the audition, sometimes people come in and they just nail it. You
• 1:00:39
  always want to do a second take and change something, and that can be
• 1:00:43
  completely random, again, has nothing to do with the character or the script.
• 1:00:46
  Like sometimes I say, now do it as a five year old child.
• 1:00:50
  Now do it as if you are on the electric chair. Now,
• 1:00:52
  completely made up stuff, but it tells you something super important, and that
• 1:00:57
  is how well can an actor it just to suggestions to direction, you know,
• 1:01:01
  And I learned that the hardware during during my thesis film that someone came
• 1:01:07
  in and was just amazing, and then on set she just couldn't get there.
• 1:01:12
  And it turned out that the night before the audition her boyfriend had split
• 1:01:15
  up with her and she was just so miserable and the part was about a
• 1:01:19
  miserable drug editor and she was tired, and she just that wasn't acting.
• 1:01:22
  She was just so great because that really happened to her, and then on
• 1:01:25
  set she couldn't reproduce that. So since then, I've always tried to make
• 1:01:30
  sure that you can only really judge how great an actress if you asked them
• 1:01:35
  to do different things with the same material, with the same lines, and
• 1:01:38
  see if that's if that's what you're going for. Yeah, So that's how
• 1:01:44
  we found Ashley. And then The Exorcist was much harder. We saw hundreds
• 1:01:47
  of people and we asked them to make up a sermon on the spot,
• 1:01:52
  and Patrick Fabian came in and he gave this eight minute long, perfect immaculate
• 1:02:00
  service and was preaching for eight minutes, and he talked so fast that I
• 1:02:06
  couldn't follow it, you know, I couldn't he was actually saying, but
• 1:02:08
  there was this energy that he had that just made me want to kind of
• 1:02:13
  go up, stand up and cheer. And that's where this in US Exorcism,
• 1:02:16
  the banana bread scene comes from. That was great. So basically that
• 1:02:22
  the Exorcist that the Exorcist says, I can sell them anything. I could
• 1:02:27
  preach about a banana bread recipe and they would see Hallelujah and they wouldn't notice,
• 1:02:30
  and they make a bet and he does it. That came from the
• 1:02:32
  audition scene because Patrick Fabian or Exorcist, did exactly that. Like he could
• 1:02:37
  have talked about anything and the energy still would have kind of been transmitted to
• 1:02:43
  the audience the way it was, right, was it always part of the
• 1:02:46
  story that he was, you know, kind of faking it and he was
• 1:02:51
  like just kind of pulling something. Because I read something about how it was
• 1:02:54
  influenced by that documentary Joe Yeah, mar Joe yeah, And I just recently
• 1:02:59
  watched that and it's like it's amazing how how much power comes from watching him
• 1:03:04
  in that documentary. There's there's kind of a similar feel right right that,
• 1:03:08
  Yeah, I think that that's what the I mean, that was the script
• 1:03:10
  that I originally got, and I think that was the core idea to the
• 1:03:14
  original script was to watch someone who is not a convinced believer in Exorcist but
• 1:03:20
  doesn't even believe in God, and it's just kind of a fraud. But
• 1:03:22
  at the same time, and that's always I think important in characters, that
• 1:03:27
  there is a butt in there. He is a criminal and he's playing with
• 1:03:30
  people's tragedies, but he is so charming that you can't hold it against him.
• 1:03:39
  And he's also his argument is I'm doing this. If they believe in
• 1:03:43
  it and it helps them, then great. It doesn't have to be real
• 1:03:45
  kind of a thing. So I think this this duality between the rogueness and
• 1:03:52
  the crime criminal part of him and the charm is something that really made that
• 1:03:57
  character and that's what we were looking for in the actor too. And it's
• 1:04:00
  funny to nel see Patrick in the different roles because he's been in so many
• 1:04:03
  TV roles and he's always cast for exactly that person, for someone you know
• 1:04:10
  you can't completely trust him. He's a bit a little bit too smooth and
• 1:04:14
  stuff, but he gets away with it because he's just very charming. So
• 1:04:16
  you build on that right now. It seems like what you're trying to do
• 1:04:23
  and do very successfully in the beginning is you know, it's very light.
• 1:04:28
  There's a lot of really kind of comic moments, but there is a little
• 1:04:32
  bit of a dark kind of like you know, when they bring out the
• 1:04:36
  book, when they start talking about real exorcisms, it's almost like the audience
• 1:04:41
  should start getting concerned even though he's not concerned, Like, yeah, you
• 1:04:45
  know what I mean. It's such a good observation. Yeah, I think
• 1:04:47
  humor is like such a good weapon because you want to in any movie you
• 1:04:53
  want to you want to create identification between the audience and your protagonist. In
• 1:04:57
  the first act, you want them to like him, to want him,
• 1:05:00
  they want they should want him to achieve what he's trying to achieve, so
• 1:05:05
  that you kind of suffer with them and you enjoy stuff with them if it
• 1:05:09
  goes well. And humor is a really good tool for that, Like if
• 1:05:13
  someone is funny, you immediately like them. So, especially in the horror
• 1:05:18
  movie where if you know you want to go horrific in the third act,
• 1:05:21
  you need to get the audience to care about that character otherwise it's horrific.
• 1:05:27
  If it's just some random people getting beheaded, then no one really cares.
• 1:05:30
  So I know that it's tricky to do terrifying and funny at the same time,
• 1:05:36
  so I try to stay away from that. But I try to be
• 1:05:40
  exactly what you're saying, light in the beginning and kind of draw the audience
• 1:05:43
  in through humor and fall in love with this character, and then we can
• 1:05:46
  go horrific later. But that's exactly what you're saying. Is so great that
• 1:05:49
  it would be great if there was kind of what you call dramatic irony,
• 1:05:55
  that the audience already has an uneasy feeling, and that you know, the
• 1:05:59
  feeling that the care is walking into a trap and he doesn't know it,
• 1:06:02
  but we know it, but we like him by now so much that we
• 1:06:05
  fear for him. I think that's a great place if you have the audience
• 1:06:09
  there and at the beginning of a horror movie you're golden, right. Well,
• 1:06:14
  you see that a lot with like Jaws and things like that. It's
• 1:06:16
  like all the characters are kind of unaware of stuff, but the way things
• 1:06:19
  are coming together, the audience is kind of like sitting there trying to hit
• 1:06:23
  the brakes, like no, no, no, no, no, come
• 1:06:26
  on, let's let's slow down. Don't don't just run in there with the
• 1:06:30
  you know, even though he's doing all these you know, really kind of
• 1:06:31
  funny things with the cross and the sounds and you know, and you see
• 1:06:35
  the father and the way he's acting, is there like a can you talk
• 1:06:41
  a little bit about getting into the second act and ways too? You know.
• 1:06:44
  One of the things that I was doing is I always try to,
• 1:06:46
  um, you know, I'm working on a screenplay that's not even a screenplay,
• 1:06:50
  but just a story that's got the documentary vibe to it. And what
• 1:06:55
  I did when I was watching The Last Exorcism was just kind of watched minute
• 1:06:59
  by minute what was happening. And things happen so fast in the beginning,
• 1:07:02
  you get so much story, you know, like what's going on? Who
• 1:07:05
  this character is, what's going on? You know, And by the time
• 1:07:10
  he's leaving for um, I believe it was Georgia, right, New Orleans,
• 1:07:14
  Louisiana. Yeah, Louisia. Sorry, UM, I should know that.
• 1:07:18
  He uh like it's it's only like ten minutes into the movie, you
• 1:07:23
  know, Yeah, that's I mean or something like sures I mean, you
• 1:07:25
  want to keep that's that's the problem. You want to keep your first act
• 1:07:28
  as short as possible because people want to get to the meat of the story.
• 1:07:32
  But at the same time, you want to create that identification. If
• 1:07:36
  you don't have that and you leave into the second act without that in your
• 1:07:40
  pocket, you're screwed U. But a lot of that obviously is editing too.
• 1:07:45
  It's amazing, Like my editor and I we love each other. She
• 1:07:47
  was like the priest during my wedding and all that. It's the greatest,
• 1:07:53
  But man, do we scream at each other during editing, And it's ninety
• 1:07:57
  percent is because she wants to cut stuff out to create momentum, and I
• 1:08:01
  am trying to save moments and save scenes because I've worked so hard achieving those,
• 1:08:08
  getting that moment on camera, and and she's just throwing it out and
• 1:08:12
  I take it personally it's if she's cutting a leg of my kid or something.
• 1:08:16
  But it always, and no matter how much I scream and kick and
• 1:08:19
  whatever, she always turns out to be right. It's always always, we
• 1:08:24
  always end up with the fast version. And that is that's something I had
• 1:08:29
  to learn that is actually a compliment to your filmmaking because it means you've tried
• 1:08:33
  to create two hundred meaningful moments throughout the movie, and if you were successful
• 1:08:39
  at creating those two hundred meaningful, clear, and emotional moments, then you
• 1:08:44
  don't need two hundred of them. Then twenty of them are probably enough to
• 1:08:47
  tell the story. You know, and wanting all those two hundred moments in
• 1:08:51
  the movie is just coming out of your insecurity as a filmmaker and your your
• 1:08:57
  vanity and your pride that you've created these moments. That actually, what I
• 1:09:00
  should have heard when she said we don't need that moment is trust the other
• 1:09:04
  moments that you've created that are in the movie that they are strong enough to
• 1:09:09
  carry this moment. You know. It's the same with screen time, like
• 1:09:14
  actors are always we shoot all this stuff like it's a good example, the
• 1:09:17
  sermon with the banana bread that cottoned it. We shot that for a day
• 1:09:21
  and the sermon was forty five minutes long. So of course Patrick Fabian watches
• 1:09:27
  the movie and goes like, oh, here, come by at least twenty
• 1:09:29
  minutes, and then he's devastated when it's only forty five seconds of that in
• 1:09:34
  the movie. But how he should see that is that those forty five seconds
• 1:09:40
  communicate everything we need to know about the character because he is so great in
• 1:09:43
  that scene. And that's exactly what you're saying. We get so much information
• 1:09:46
  on that character that we don't need the twenty minutes. The forty five seconds
• 1:09:50
  are completely okay. And it's the same in editing. So I think when
• 1:09:54
  you're saying the first act is so fast, it probably in the director's cut
• 1:09:59
  was forty five minutes and unbearable. We'll be right back after a word from
• 1:10:03
  our sponsor, and now back to the show and my editor. The good
• 1:10:14
  thing is that I have a very bad memory, and whenever she wants to
• 1:10:16
  get something through, she just cuts it out and sees if I notice it
• 1:10:20
  or not. And if she shows me something in a week, I don't
• 1:10:25
  even notice that that stuff is gone. So we always end up with the
• 1:10:29
  tightest version. I think that's something for every filmmaker. With me, it
• 1:10:32
  was a long learning process. So if you could start with the knowledge that
• 1:10:38
  you almost can't cut something too fast and too tight because the audience is so
• 1:10:43
  quickly bored that you if you're precious about your stuff and you want to stick
• 1:10:48
  to the script, and even though the editing rhythm suggests something different to you,
• 1:10:54
  you're dead in the water. If you don't answer that all. Well,
• 1:10:59
  it's always an interesting contrast because, of course, later once you get
• 1:11:01
  into the more frightening scenes, the whole concept of anticipation and that something is
• 1:11:08
  going to happen, you know, then it's just like the scenes go on
• 1:11:11
  forever, you know, and everybody's just like waiting for something to happen.
• 1:11:15
  Yeah, it had such a careful balance because the other thing, and that
• 1:11:17
  completely contradicts what I just said about cutting a first But in some editing book
• 1:11:25
  I think it was Walter Merge or something, they wrote that the audience doesn't
• 1:11:29
  feel speed. The only thing that they feel is acceleration, which is I
• 1:11:33
  think so true. So if you start with a very fast first act,
• 1:11:38
  and then you have a very fast second act, and then you have a
• 1:11:40
  very fast third act, the whole thing will just seem like in one gear.
• 1:11:45
  It won't necessarily feel fast. But if you have a second act that
• 1:11:48
  is slightly faster than the first, and a third act that is slightly faster
• 1:11:51
  than a second, then they will suddenly say, wow, that movie is
• 1:11:55
  really fast, even though in general it wasn't, but it accelerated, and
• 1:11:59
  that is something that an audience has a feeling for. And of course the
• 1:12:01
  other way around two what you're talking about. If you slow down, it's
• 1:12:04
  suddenly unbearable because we've gotten used to a certain speed, and suddenly, deliberately
• 1:12:10
  you you stretch a moment. You know that really does something to the audience's
• 1:12:15
  psyche. But it's such a such a balancing act. And that's why this
• 1:12:17
  whole wisdom of there are what's the saying, there are three movies, one
• 1:12:21
  that you write, one that you shoot, and one that you added,
• 1:12:25
  and that's the final move I think that is really true. And the more
• 1:12:28
  you can subscribe to that and let go of all the preconceived notions that you
• 1:12:32
  had during writing, and then even harder of how hard it was to get
• 1:12:38
  that crane shot in that scene, and that you know that day that actor
• 1:12:42
  was in a bad mood and has still got a great performance out of him.
• 1:12:45
  None of it matters. The only thing that matters is what ends up
• 1:12:47
  in the editing room. My editor makes a point out of never coming to
• 1:12:50
  set and not getting to know the actors, because she says she doesn't want
• 1:12:55
  to be influenced by the reality of it all because the audience is not going
• 1:12:59
  to know that, the audience is not going to know the location know,
• 1:13:01
  the actors know that, whatever. But she just wants to work with what
• 1:13:04
  actually materializes on the screen. And I think that's a really really good approach.
• 1:13:10
  Right. Another thing I think that's really interesting with the documentary approach is
• 1:13:15
  that you can, I mean, you can do this with a regular narrative,
• 1:13:17
  but the idea that characters are lying and that you're finding out the truth
• 1:13:23
  behind things, it just it seems a little more realistic when you're seeing like
• 1:13:28
  characters, Like when you're talking, the two characters are talking, they find
• 1:13:30
  out the girl is pregnant, so they have their conversation and then they talk
• 1:13:34
  to the dad, and the dads saying stuff and you know, you feel
• 1:13:38
  like he's lying or this person is saying something and you're trying to get to
• 1:13:42
  the truth with that. Yeah. One thing that's always intriguing to me is
• 1:13:45
  the whole idea that once you get into the second act, you know,
• 1:13:49
  or even the second part of the second act, that the the energy kind
• 1:13:54
  of dies in a lot of stories, and that's where most movies kind of
• 1:13:57
  start to you know, you start to like kind of wander around the theater.
• 1:14:00
  Do you have any any advice on that or anything that you can talk
• 1:14:05
  about in terms of the way you tell a story, you know, like
• 1:14:10
  structure it together so that it doesn't fall apart during that area. It's hard,
• 1:14:14
  obviously because the second I mean one thing that happened. We learned the
• 1:14:16
  Sitfield three act structure originally, and I think what people always were bumping up
• 1:14:23
  against was the second act is too low at two, too long, and
• 1:14:26
  it kind of there's a drop in the middle. And then Sitfield very smartly
• 1:14:30
  invented the midpoint, which is like you have the turning point from the first
• 1:14:34
  act to the second act, of the turning point from the second act to
• 1:14:36
  the third and now he basically introduced another turning point, which he called the
• 1:14:41
  midpoint where everything shifts in the story. I think that's a big help.
• 1:14:45
  And then you just have to you have to keep having ideas. I always
• 1:14:49
  have the problem with scripts that I'm getting that I have the feeling writers are
• 1:14:56
  inventing and having ideas into the second act. If I'm lucky, until the
• 1:15:00
  end of the second act, and then it's oh, then there's violence,
• 1:15:05
  and then there is people throwing each other from buildings and shooting and car chases,
• 1:15:10
  and it's almost if they start stop writing and just say and then third
• 1:15:14
  act generic third act action. And I'm always saying, because it's hard to
• 1:15:18
  tell your agents what you're looking for, I'm always saying, if you can
• 1:15:21
  find me a third act that is not based on physical violence, on generic
• 1:15:26
  physics. And that's hard, especially in horror movies and slasher movies, because
• 1:15:29
  it's always like the big confrontation in the third act. But if you can
• 1:15:32
  find me a script that has a confrontation in the third act that is not
• 1:15:36
  based on who is drawing his knife first and stating the other person first,
• 1:15:42
  then I want to read that. And that has to do with the other
• 1:15:46
  thing we're talking about earlier, that if you want to give the audience something
• 1:15:49
  to take away and some kind of a little bit of a piece of knowledge
• 1:15:55
  that they didn't have coming in, Like, how is that going to work?
• 1:15:58
  What are they going to learn out of some one drawing pulling up their
• 1:16:00
  knife sooner than the other person. That's not really something, you know,
• 1:16:04
  the story doesn't resolve in a way that is teaching the audience something about life
• 1:16:09
  other than always be armed and always draw your weapon. So that's that's the
• 1:16:15
  main thing I'm looking for, And I have the feeling if there is a
• 1:16:16
  strong third act, like something that still has ideas, then the chance that
• 1:16:23
  the second act that's leading up to that is strong and not generic and doesn't
• 1:16:28
  slump is much bigger than if the second act is leading towards a generic third
• 1:16:33
  act. But it's it's tough. You really kind of have to You can't
• 1:16:36
  ever be lazy and you can ever go to like the common places and have
• 1:16:43
  things play out, especially if you're working with the three X structure, because
• 1:16:45
  the audience is so savvy that you really kind of have to continue giving them
• 1:16:50
  something. So don't start shooting before your script does that. What really helps
• 1:16:57
  is telling your script to someone like I did that with Last excessis without knowing
• 1:17:01
  that every actor that came in in the beginning because they haven't read the script,
• 1:17:08
  I told them the entire story of the script and watching them by after
• 1:17:13
  you've said it so many times, it's kind of an automatic thing, you
• 1:17:15
  don't even think about it anymore, so you can have the mental resource to
• 1:17:20
  really watch the listener react, and you can tell exactly where they are engaged
• 1:17:26
  and where you were losing them, like I always lost them at the end.
• 1:17:30
  I should have known that there was always there was always a slump in
• 1:17:32
  the third act, looking back at it now that I should have reacted to
• 1:17:36
  it, We should have rewritten it. But it's really like you have to
• 1:17:40
  tough. You have to be tough with yourself in that moment, and it
• 1:17:44
  hurts because you don't want to see. You don't want to acknowledge that you're
• 1:17:46
  losing them. You don't want to have to rethink something. But if you
• 1:17:48
  don't do it there, then the problem is just going to get bigger and
• 1:17:51
  bigger and bigger. So I guess you have to keep inventing the story until
• 1:17:57
  you can tell it in a way that keeps the reader engage the entire time.
• 1:18:00
  And you can tell by oh, like you, you hear a lot
• 1:18:05
  of people telling you their story like this. So there is a student that
• 1:18:11
  falls in love with this girl and in the end it turns out she was
• 1:18:14
  a guy all along. And if you kind of go like, wait,
• 1:18:16
  okay, you told me the first act, you told me the third act,
• 1:18:19
  what's the second act, and you can kind of tell that the second
• 1:18:23
  act is gone slump because in the three sentence of the elevator pitch version it
• 1:18:28
  doesn't even come into play, you know. So I guess you have to
• 1:18:30
  keep working on your overall story until you can tell it in a way where
• 1:18:35
  you don't lose the audience ever. And then I think you know that you
• 1:18:39
  have a second act that will hold up. Do you when you're writing,
• 1:18:44
  do you try to write lots of notes and get everything out, and I
• 1:18:48
  mean do a lot of the work, basically have the whole story there before
• 1:18:54
  you actually begin the screenwriting process. Yeah, I'd be snobbish to talk about
• 1:18:58
  because I haven't written the screen played by myself since Films twelve years ago.
• 1:19:02
  But I am writing. I mean, they were always talking. I think
• 1:19:06
  that's very true about the inner critic that gets in the way, and we
• 1:19:10
  had that very strongly. We had a great screenwriting teacher, and she taught
• 1:19:13
  us all the techniques and the result was that we were a class of great
• 1:19:17
  script doctors. We always knew what was wrong with stuff, but none of
• 1:19:21
  us ever wrote anything again because what we wrote would never hold up to our
• 1:19:25
  expectation. So to get this critic out of the way. The only technique
• 1:19:30
  that I've ever heard about that does that is to have a notepad for the
• 1:19:33
  critic and just write everything down, you know, give him, give him
• 1:19:38
  the space to be heard so that he doesn't get in the way anymore.
• 1:19:42
  But then it tend to those notes later, don't let them get into the
• 1:19:45
  way of the initial brainstorming flow when you're writing something. And that really kind
• 1:19:50
  of works, and yeah, I do that religiously. We'll be right back
• 1:19:57
  after a word from our sponsor, and now back to the show. I
• 1:20:05
  don't start writing anything before I don't have an exact structure. I have the
• 1:20:10
  turning points. I'm very much going by Christopher Campbell's Hero's Journey, which I
• 1:20:15
  think is an amazing book, Joseph Campbell's Here's Journey, which then Christopher Vogeler
• 1:20:21
  wrote into a book called The Writer's Journey, which yeah, which is absolutely
• 1:20:28
  I think, absolute genius. And of course there's a lot of controversy,
• 1:20:30
  is it to formulaic, is it too whatever? Whatever, But just to
• 1:20:32
  be aware of those principles of those archetypes I think helps you usually in structuring
• 1:20:40
  it. And that's what you're talking about about the slump in the second act
• 1:20:43
  that also helps you to avoid that. Yeah, I mean, I think
• 1:20:46
  a lot of Vogeler is one of my favorite books. And you know,
• 1:20:49
  one of the things that it helps me with is when I'm writing, when
• 1:20:53
  I'm in the middle of a story. You know, if you go back,
• 1:20:56
  I never read I never went through the process of reading all those books
• 1:21:00
  before I started writing. You know. It was funny because I was already
• 1:21:02
  writing and then I was like, oh, well, this looks like an
• 1:21:04
  interesting book, and I would read that, or you know, even McKee's
• 1:21:09
  story or you know, Save the Cat all these other books that are you
• 1:21:13
  know, kind of the canon of screenwriting books. And it's not that you
• 1:21:15
  learned screenwriting from them, but you can it kind of jump starts your thought
• 1:21:19
  process of oh okay, you know, if you're if you're listening to Vogeler,
• 1:21:24
  He's got all these different archetypes, you know, all these different characters
• 1:21:28
  that have played a role traditionally in stories, and you can say, oh,
• 1:21:31
  well, this character is kind of the gatekeeper or whatever, you know,
• 1:21:33
  and it just kind of it helps you jump start that kind of like
• 1:21:36
  creative process. So I totally agree. I think it's about getting you to
• 1:21:41
  ask the right questions, and that's that's where the formulate thing. I don't
• 1:21:45
  care that it's formulate because I don't have to have everything come into play if
• 1:21:49
  I don't want it. But it can't hurt to ask yourself the question,
• 1:21:54
  you know, do I need that in that turning point here? If the
• 1:21:56
  answer is no, then fine, but at least you didn't miss us yourself
• 1:22:00
  the question. And I by now I've even put together like a questionnaire with
• 1:22:03
  thirty six question questions, then asking myself for every scene, because so much
• 1:22:09
  energy goes into remembering the questions that if I have that written down once,
• 1:22:15
  it's different for every story. Obviously the answer, but the questions are always
• 1:22:17
  the same, like what are you? What are you trying to make the
• 1:22:20
  audience feel? How is what is lighting communicating? What is bumba bumba bum
• 1:22:25
  all these what's the subtext? What's the obstacle, what's the objective? There's
• 1:22:29
  always stuff that what are the stakes? There's always stuff that will contribute tension
• 1:22:34
  to a scene, And it really helps me to not have to start from
• 1:22:39
  scratch every single time and then go like, oh yeah, right, the
• 1:22:42
  obstacles. But I have one questionnaire that clearly says what are the obstacles?
• 1:22:45
  And then it gets me to think about it. And that's basically what all
• 1:22:48
  these screenwriting techniques do for me. They get you to ask the right questions.
• 1:22:53
  So that's huge. You actually have that document I do, Yeah,
• 1:22:57
  I can, you can post it. I can humility, Oh yeah,
• 1:23:00
  that would know. I would absolutely love to just that. It's you know,
• 1:23:02
  that's that's really helpful because whenever you're you know, you know, I
• 1:23:05
  haven't directed a feature, but I mean the idea of you know, having
• 1:23:11
  something to make sure you always have to like kind of get your head in
• 1:23:14
  the game and be like, okay, am I sure that all these things
• 1:23:15
  are happening, because you don't want to go back later and be like,
• 1:23:17
  this could have been much better if I just remember that they maybe they're fighting
• 1:23:21
  a little in this scene, or maybe there's like you know, there can
• 1:23:25
  be more tension with this or that. Okay, So I wanted to um
• 1:23:30
  uh, I don't want to make sure I'm not missing anything about the Last
• 1:23:33
  Exorcism. Um it's one of my I really it's it's like one of my
• 1:23:41
  favorite horror films. Of all time, thank you so much. I can't
• 1:23:45
  hear that a lot because a lot of the real horror audience hated the movie
• 1:23:49
  with a pass really, which I see. The thing that you always have
• 1:23:51
  to take into consideration is that we are rarely seeing a movie cold, right.
• 1:23:57
  We're always going in, we've seen a trailer, we know that and
• 1:24:00
  that and that about it. And that's actually an interesting story when I like,
• 1:24:04
  when Lionskate bought it, they were counting something on their fingers and it's
• 1:24:10
  like, what are they counting? And turned out their counting while they were
• 1:24:13
  watching the movie. They're counting trailer moments and when when you know, So,
• 1:24:18
  when they were deciding whether to buy the movie or not, they wanted
• 1:24:21
  to make sure that there are seven trailer movies, the trailer moments in the
• 1:24:25
  movie that they can cut a trailer from, and once they reached that,
• 1:24:30
  they were like, We're okay, We're going to buy the movie. So
• 1:24:32
  that is something that I'm now keeping in mind when I'm writing or thinking of
• 1:24:35
  the story, because if if you have six trailer moments that you are fine
• 1:24:41
  with giving away in the trailer, but one the last one is a major
• 1:24:45
  revelationtion you know of a character that turns out to be the bad guy,
• 1:24:48
  or of you know something, then the marketing department won't care. They will
• 1:24:53
  cut it into the trailer and you can argue all you want, you have
• 1:24:55
  no power over that anymore. They will give away you're best kept secret.
• 1:25:00
  And with Last Exorcism, it was kind of similar in that the whole movie
• 1:25:05
  is basically based on the question is this girl crazy or is she possessed?
• 1:25:10
  And you only get the answer at the very last minute in the movie.
• 1:25:14
  You're waiting for that for nineteen minutes. But what lines Get did to create
• 1:25:18
  a great trailer was they took a shot of the girl crawling away from the
• 1:25:24
  camera. They played it backwards, so now she's crawling towards the camera.
• 1:25:28
  Then they flopped it so now it's upside down. They put a silhouette in
• 1:25:31
  it that it looks like she's in the in the light of a flashlight,
• 1:25:36
  and now it looks like she's crawling towards camera on the ceiling, which is
• 1:25:42
  a great shot, you know, and people complaining afterwards, like where is
• 1:25:45
  that great shot in the movie, But it was in the movie. It
• 1:25:47
  was just backwards and on the floor. But it also gives away after eighteen
• 1:25:51
  seconds in the trailer that the movie that the girl is possessed, because otherwise
• 1:25:56
  she couldn't climb on the ceiling. And we were so careful not to have
• 1:26:00
  her do anything in the movie that a crazy girl couldn't do, Like in
• 1:26:03
  our movie. She didn't levitate, she didn't spin her head, she didn't
• 1:26:06
  you know, whatever, whatever, because we needed to keep that question alive.
• 1:26:11
  But of course I should have if I had known that Lionsgate is going
• 1:26:14
  to put the answer into the trailer, I would have structured that differently,
• 1:26:17
  because now we had an audience that had gone to see the movie because of
• 1:26:20
  the trailer, but was always nineteen minutes ahead of the movie. So it
• 1:26:25
  must have been a really boring experience for them to watch the movie because the
• 1:26:30
  main spine of it just completely fell apart. So I don't I don't get
• 1:26:32
  a lot of people that, like, most of the people that really loved
• 1:26:36
  The Lost Exorcism are not horror people necessarily, they're kind of like I get
• 1:26:42
  that a lot, where it's like, normally I don't like horror, but
• 1:26:45
  I really loved The Lost Exorcism. Yeah, now, rarely do I get.
• 1:26:48
  I love horror, and I loved The Lost Exorcis. That's that's really
• 1:26:54
  surprising, because you know, I think it's one of the most effective horror
• 1:26:57
  movies that I've seen, you know, and I watch a lot of movies,
• 1:27:00
  and I really have gotten to the point now with Netflix where I'll put
• 1:27:04
  something on and I'll give it about five minutes, you know, and if
• 1:27:09
  it doesn't pull me in, because there's so many bad horror movies now,
• 1:27:13
  it's just like the now that the the digital revolution and everybody's got cameras,
• 1:27:18
  and I mean, it seems like everybody's shooting horror movies, but there's a
• 1:27:21
  lot of people that really shouldn't be that are making them, you know.
• 1:27:26
  But it tells you a lot about because we were talking about the fast first
• 1:27:29
  act. You know, if you give the movie five minutes, that used
• 1:27:32
  to be like the titled sequence wasn't even over after five minutes, and now
• 1:27:36
  now there's so it's so easy to kind of click the next movie that as
• 1:27:41
  a filmmaker, you just have to be aware of that end give the audience
• 1:27:45
  something like I was. I was when I was on that jury in Kosovo.
• 1:27:47
  There was all these short films. I had to watch eight hours of
• 1:27:50
  short films, and there was this beautiful movie about two monks in the snow,
• 1:27:56
  you know, and I fell asleep immediately. I was like, if
• 1:27:59
  you if you don't start with an explosion or a rape or something crazy that
• 1:28:04
  wakes me up, it goes like watch this, you know, then you're
• 1:28:08
  you're kind of screwed for sure. I think with the with the horror,
• 1:28:13
  I think the next successful horror filmmaker is the one that can figure out the
• 1:28:19
  next step after the fake documentary, because I love fake documentary. I think
• 1:28:25
  there's real strength in the format. But I think that people are tired of
• 1:28:30
  the conceit and for gimmick, and there is a certain cheapness that comes with
• 1:28:35
  them, you know, and people, I think want the next thing.
• 1:28:39
  And I think if whoever it is, can take the strength of that movie
• 1:28:44
  but roll it of that style, but roll it into a conventional movie,
• 1:28:48
  then you'd really have something like it's not a horror movie, but Blue Valentine's
• 1:28:53
  that the Ryan Gosling Michelle Williams, Oh, yeah, yeah. They I
• 1:28:57
  think we're very close to that where they can tell that the performances are so
• 1:29:00
  fresh that I bet anything that they are not following any script, that they're
• 1:29:05
  improvising the whole thing. And yet it's not the fake documentary conceived. It's
• 1:29:11
  not like, oh, here's a documentary crew, here's a filmmaker, blah
• 1:29:13
  blah blah. And that's kind of I think the beginning of an approach where
• 1:29:15
  someone takes the strength of both mediums and put them together. And in terms
• 1:29:21
  of a look, it's so bizarre because it used to be that film was
• 1:29:27
  so slow that you had to artificially light it. Right now, video cameras
• 1:29:31
  and film are so fast that you really wouldn't have to light anything. We've
• 1:29:35
  just become so accustomed to the artificial, artificially lit look that when it's not
• 1:29:43
  artificially it kind of stands out. But maybe it's time to get back to
• 1:29:46
  that and to say we don't have just because we don't want to light something
• 1:29:50
  and we want to shoot available light. That doesn't mean that we suddenly need
• 1:29:54
  to have the documentary the fake documentary format. We'll be right back or a
• 1:30:00
  word from our sponsor and now back to the show. But we can also
• 1:30:08
  do that in a conventionally narrative movie, right so yeah, the thing that
• 1:30:14
  that we're trying to do is um, well, that I'm trying to do
• 1:30:16
  is you know, I put something together that was kind of, you know,
• 1:30:19
  similar to you know, The Last Exorcism and you know, the documentary
• 1:30:25
  format. But I come from a background of documentaries, so I love documentaries
• 1:30:30
  by Errol Morris and a lot of these HBO you know, the true crime
• 1:30:33
  things and everything, and so the idea was to say, okay, can
• 1:30:36
  we go can we do it have elements of that, you know, handheld
• 1:30:41
  camera and going into stuff, but also have more of like you know,
• 1:30:44
  Errol Morris films all these beautiful scenes that are very cinematic as well. You
• 1:30:48
  know, so we're going to kind of see if that works. Because you
• 1:30:50
  know, I totally agree with you. You know, it's like you get
• 1:30:54
  a couple of hits, you know. The Last Exorcism rerec was also a
• 1:30:58
  really good example, I think. And then it's like people when I would
• 1:31:01
  tell them about what I was doing, the first thing out of their mouth
• 1:31:03
  would be like, oh, it's found footage, and I'm like, no,
• 1:31:06
  it's not really, but they're like, uh, you know, we're
• 1:31:09
  done with that, So they won't even let you in the door anymore.
• 1:31:12
  So it's like, okay, well let me let me go back to my
• 1:31:16
  back to the drawing board, forget it. Yeah, maybe you that next
• 1:31:19
  filmmaker that will it's the time is definitely right for the next idea to come
• 1:31:26
  along, just like paranormal or like Blair Witch and then Paranormal Activity. You
• 1:31:30
  know, they really hit the timing with with the fake documentary. I think
• 1:31:34
  if I were to make my first movie right now, I would really try
• 1:31:39
  to not make I know that it's tempting to do the fake documentary thing because
• 1:31:42
  it's cheap. But again, exactly what you were saying. People already kind
• 1:31:45
  of roll their eyes and are tired of it and won't even give it a
• 1:31:48
  chance. So if you can figure out any alternative, it's probably worth experiment.
• 1:31:55
  Um. One other thing I also noticed is the use of music and
• 1:32:00
  astextoricism, which is kind of breaking away from the documentary format because you do
• 1:32:03
  incorporate a soundtrack, right, So I was just curious. It's just I
• 1:32:10
  think, I think score is such a powerful tool in horror filmmaking, and
• 1:32:15
  you kind of have to obviously find your balance of realism and the whole thing.
• 1:32:20
  I mean, people were complaining, it's amazing with the internet right now,
• 1:32:25
  how many complaints you have to you know, have to deal with?
• 1:32:29
  Um. Of course people were like, very oh, this is obviously shot,
• 1:32:33
  it's two with two cameras, or it's you know, different scenes because
• 1:32:38
  they cut that together and that together. So then you kind of and it's
• 1:32:41
  true. So then you kind of have to weigh is that complain worth or
• 1:32:45
  would it have been worth? But to not have shot reverse shot in your
• 1:32:49
  movie just for that, I can never say the word very similitude. There
• 1:32:55
  is for that, for the authenticity or or not, And you kind of
• 1:32:59
  weigh your your tools and what you're going to use. And with score,
• 1:33:03
  it was pretty clear to me that the effect that score has to me way
• 1:33:09
  outweighs the artifice of having score on the movie. Plus a lot of documentaries
• 1:33:15
  these days, if you look at Nick Broomfield stuff, or a lot of
• 1:33:18
  like modern documentaries, very very heavily youth music youth score. So that was
• 1:33:24
  never a problem really for me. Okay, UM, so let's move into
• 1:33:30
  um, is there any are there any stories about the the life after you
• 1:33:35
  made it, or you know, is there any insight in terms of I
• 1:33:40
  mean, did you go to festivals or was it just a straight sell to
• 1:33:44
  Lion Skate. Yeah? In terms of distribution, yeah, I mean I
• 1:33:46
  didn't have anything to do with it. It's amazing how much a filmmaker you
• 1:33:49
  don't have. Once you deliver your cut, there's really nothing. You're never
• 1:33:56
  being consulted again, especially here. They did a very smart thing, and
• 1:34:00
  Eli is a great salesman, and he went around to different studios and showed
• 1:34:05
  that the movie two different studios at exactly the same time and let them know
• 1:34:11
  that other studios are watching it as well. To get him bidding war started
• 1:34:15
  and that's exactly what happened everyone, which was amazing to me. Everyone wanted
• 1:34:20
  the movie except for Fox, but the wine scenes wanted a universal, wanted
• 1:34:25
  it a lion scale and blah blapa. And then in the end it just
• 1:34:28
  came out to who is willing to commit to the most p and A,
• 1:34:33
  which is what is it? Prince in advertising? So how many and how
• 1:34:39
  many theaters are you going to screen and how much money is going to be
• 1:34:42
  invested into advertising? And Lionscape committed to sixteen million dollars in p and A,
• 1:34:48
  which is kind of amazing for a movie that was made on a budget
• 1:34:51
  of one point five million dollars and that was the highest that there was and
• 1:34:56
  they committed to like almost three thousand screens, which is huge, or two
• 1:35:00
  thousands of screens. And what then happened, which was kind of amazing.
• 1:35:05
  I never knew about this. They showed the trailer in theaters and they kind
• 1:35:12
  of the process is that you buy basically the advertising time in front of another
• 1:35:17
  movie, right, so you are completely gambling whether that movie that your trailer
• 1:35:23
  is cut in front of is going to be huge success and millions of people
• 1:35:27
  will see it, or it's a complete flop and no one will ever see
• 1:35:30
  it. And we had we kind of had both. We had the movie
• 1:35:33
  in front of Splice, which I thought was a great movie science fiction movie,
• 1:35:39
  but also a complete flop that no one ever saw, so that was
• 1:35:42
  kind of complete ways. But then we also had the trailer in front of
• 1:35:45
  Inception, which obviously was a huge blockbuster, so that helped them. And
• 1:35:48
  then what's happening is that the studio is working with a company that is basically
• 1:35:56
  sending out spice all over the country into movie theaters, and they have a
• 1:36:01
  questionnaire and they all they are doing is that they write down people's reactions to
• 1:36:06
  the trailer, and they write down quotes like they sit behind you as I
• 1:36:11
  saw the questionnaires afterwards, and they would write a boy eighteen looks up from
• 1:36:16
  his popcorn and says to his girlfriend, we gotta go see that, and
• 1:36:23
  pervaded. They write down how many people are watching the screen when the trailer
• 1:36:27
  is playing, how many people are going to the bathroom, how many people
• 1:36:30
  are not interested, how many people are all that kind of stuff, and
• 1:36:32
  then they that gets translated into a score, so the studio knows how well
• 1:36:38
  a trailer played, and we were playing like. Our release date was against
• 1:36:45
  Pirana three D, which was turned out to be an amazing movie Alex Alexaja
• 1:36:50
  amazing, but they had problems with the trailer because they didn't have their digital
• 1:36:57
  Piranhas ready by the time that the trailer, so they put in some kind
• 1:37:00
  of weird, bad artificial Piranhas, so the trailer look crap. So our
• 1:37:05
  score was a lot higher with our trailer than Piranhas score was, which was
• 1:37:12
  important because you try to avoid having two movieses off the same genre open the
• 1:37:16
  same weekend because you're just cannibalizing your audience. Right, if you were the
• 1:37:20
  only horror movie on a weekend, that means you get one hundred percent of
• 1:37:24
  the horror movie audience rather than having to split it with the other one.
• 1:37:28
  So it was kind of this. It was always clear that Last Exorcism and
• 1:37:31
  Piranna would not end up actually opening on the same weekend, but none of
• 1:37:35
  the two studios, Dimension at Lions Gale was budging. It was like this
• 1:37:39
  game of chicken. We're not moving, We're not moving. And then when
• 1:37:45
  the trailer scores came out, it was clear that the DM dimension was going
• 1:37:47
  to move, and that gave Lines get such a big boost in confidence.
• 1:37:53
  I guess about the movie that they suddenly increase the p and A from sixteen
• 1:38:00
  million dollars to twenty four million dollars, which just means a lot of presents
• 1:38:03
  and TV spots and a lot of presents and posters and a lot of you
• 1:38:06
  know that kind of stuff, And I think that really catapulted the thing then
• 1:38:10
  too well not it was like number one on Friday, and it was number
• 1:38:15
  one on Saturday, but then the movie takers like overtook it on Sunday by
• 1:38:20
  hundred thousand dollars or something, but that doesn't really matter because everyone is looking
• 1:38:27
  which movie is winning the weekend on Friday. By the time, they don't
• 1:38:31
  rarely check in again on Monday and go like, okay, who actually won
• 1:38:34
  the weekend. So we were in everyone's eyes we had this number one movie.
• 1:38:39
  And because it was a French French like the French finance, it was
• 1:38:43
  French money, so it was officially a French movie. And in France you
• 1:38:46
  don't go by opening weekend, whether you won the weekend or not, but
• 1:38:49
  you go by opening Friday. So to this day, France would say Last
• 1:38:55
  Exorcism was the number one movie in the country, when that's actually not true.
• 1:38:59
  But there's a lot of there's a lot of pr obviously coming from you
• 1:39:02
  have the number one movie in the country because you sell the movie worldwide,
• 1:39:06
  but the entire world waits until the US has opened the movie, like France
• 1:39:13
  wouldn't suddenly go before the US or Czechoslovakia, Australia, China, And they're
• 1:39:17
  looking at the numbers, and depending on the numbers, they will decide how
• 1:39:21
  many screens to show it on, how much p and A to do in
• 1:39:27
  their own territories and if you have a blockbuster in the US, that means
• 1:39:30
  that suddenly the entire world pumps a lot of money into your movie and you
• 1:39:33
  suddenly have a worldwide whereas if you bomb in the US, you can have
• 1:39:39
  the greatest movie in the world, but it would be very rare that foreign
• 1:39:43
  territories have the confidence to go for a big release even though you're bomb in
• 1:39:47
  the US. So that's how we suddenly became this kind of seventy million dollars
• 1:39:53
  worldwide thing on a budget of one point five. We'll be right back after
• 1:39:59
  a word for our sponsor and now back to the show. Which sounds great,
• 1:40:08
  but obviously if you pump twenty four million dollars into something, you could
• 1:40:13
  market anything, you know. But that was kind of great, and because
• 1:40:16
  it's unfortunately true that all Hollywood ever looks at is your last movie and how
• 1:40:21
  successful your last movie was, and they go for some reason they rate success
• 1:40:27
  by box office, which is like such a crap, because I had nothing
• 1:40:30
  to do with the marketing. You know, the movie could be horrible and
• 1:40:32
  there was great marketing and it was a great box office success that I then
• 1:40:36
  get hired for the next movie because they think I'm a great director because the
• 1:40:40
  movie did well kind of doesn't make sense and the other way around. I
• 1:40:43
  can have the greatest movie if you look at Steve Jobs this weekend, which
• 1:40:46
  is, you know, an amazing movie with amazing Oscar Willing winning talent,
• 1:40:50
  but Tony flopped at the weekend. If you just judge Danny Boyle by the
• 1:40:57
  box office income, then I guess he's a bad filmmaker now something. So
• 1:41:00
  it's it's bizarre, but it kind of opened a lot of doors for me
• 1:41:03
  afterwards and got me too. Did you go back to Germany and what kind
• 1:41:09
  of get to promote there? Yeah? I did. But Last Exorcism was
• 1:41:14
  a huge flop in Germany, and not really that it wasn't even a big
• 1:41:17
  release. It's very weird like which it was huge in France, huge in
• 1:41:20
  Italy, completely flopped in Spain completely, We went up against Harry Potter completely
• 1:41:27
  Germany. My friends hadn't even heard of it, so that was a little
• 1:41:30
  bit. What did you tell them, You say, I'm a big filmmaker.
• 1:41:34
  Well, that's why face I'm really famous. It's like, yeah,
• 1:41:36
  yeah, that's why Facebook is so important, so that everyone else was a
• 1:41:40
  successful filmmaker. M yeah, and then I made my next movie called Thirteen
• 1:41:46
  Cents, that I'm really proud of, and there was a lot of fun
• 1:41:48
  to make and that I would argue is as good as The Last Exorcism.
• 1:41:53
  But it made nine thousand dollars at the box office. It was screening on
• 1:41:58
  twenty two screens, which again has nothing to do with the movie. It's
• 1:42:02
  just that Dimension. It was a Dimension movie, and Dimension hasn't had a
• 1:42:05
  hit in a long time, so they just don't have the money. Even
• 1:42:09
  if they wanted, they couldn't pump twenty four million dollars into marketing the movie.
• 1:42:14
  So if you're working with Dimension, you kind of know that you're probably
• 1:42:17
  not going to go theatrical until you're unless you're like Screen five or scary movie
• 1:42:23
  or something. And then suddenly my career is judged by my last box office
• 1:42:28
  which is nine thousand dollars. So all the cachet that you have after the
• 1:42:32
  seventy million dollar movie is kind of out the window. And it's not you
• 1:42:38
  know, it's not your fault, but there's nothing you can do against it.
• 1:42:40
  You kind of live and die with your movie, and you're health responsible
• 1:42:43
  even for stuff that you had no influence over Well, how was that because
• 1:42:48
  that was you know, looking at your career, that was the first straight
• 1:42:54
  up narrative, you know, not handheld right film. You know, how
• 1:43:00
  was that different? How did you approach? Because one of the things that
• 1:43:02
  I was, you know, I do a lot of research, and the
• 1:43:05
  actors were talking about how well prepared you were. You know, well,
• 1:43:10
  that is I that is the questionnaire that we were talking about. Like me,
• 1:43:15
  because I always like I get star struck and I get nervous, like
• 1:43:17
  suddenly working with a Ron Perlman would completely terrify me. And the only or
• 1:43:25
  with Routina Wesley, who I had such a crush on, which she was
• 1:43:27
  on True Blood, and to suddenly Heather in person. And the only thing
• 1:43:30
  that protects me from from completely hiding in my shell is that I know that
• 1:43:36
  I am going to be more versed in the story than they are. Right,
• 1:43:41
  I've said over the script for years. I know every line I wrote.
• 1:43:46
  Some of those lines. I know why they're in there. There isn't
• 1:43:49
  a single question that they can ask me that I don't know the answer too.
• 1:43:53
  I'm not always going to give them the answer because sometimes you kind of
• 1:43:56
  want them to experiment or try and whatever, But only level of security that
• 1:44:00
  I get comes from my knowledge of the script. So I guess that's what
• 1:44:04
  they're talking about when they say I'm so prepared. I always want to have
• 1:44:08
  one version that I know I could fall back on this scene if there's no
• 1:44:13
  idea on the day and I completely draw blank, which you always do.
• 1:44:16
  There's are one or two days in every shoot where you just for some reason
• 1:44:19
  freeze and don't have any answers, and then it's good to be able to
• 1:44:24
  fall back on something that you've figured out beforehand and kind of go off of
• 1:44:28
  that. And Yeah, it was important to me to not be pigeonholed into
• 1:44:30
  the fake documentary corner, which happens pretty quickly, and because in all meetings
• 1:44:36
  that I had, people were always asking me the same thing, which is
• 1:44:39
  can you shoot conventionally? Now? I was always like, well, that's
• 1:44:43
  what I studied in film school for years. Just because I've made two fake
• 1:44:46
  documentary films, like they're the exception. It's not that the narrative standard movie
• 1:44:53
  is the exception to what I do, but the fake documentary. So I
• 1:44:57
  kind of had to prove that to people. I think there was portant to
• 1:45:00
  me that it's not a fake documentary movie. But if you notice there isn't
• 1:45:03
  a single locked off shot in thirteen cents, it's all handheld. It's much
• 1:45:10
  much more stable than last Exorcism because the character itself is not supposed to have
• 1:45:14
  a character, but it's all hand out, which goes back to the whole
• 1:45:17
  helping the performances and injecting the energy, right, I mean, it's not
• 1:45:24
  what I mean is yeah, it's not like a shaky camera though, but
• 1:45:26
  it is right right. You know, what was the hardest part about changing
• 1:45:31
  formats and going into like a purely narrative and you know, multicam kind of
• 1:45:36
  shot the film with that well, or in general, what's the hardest part
• 1:45:41
  of like making a film? What's kind of the part that you dread?
• 1:45:44
  I dread them all. I'm terrified of every single step of it. And
• 1:45:46
  then every time after that step is done, I'm always like, oh,
• 1:45:50
  that was kind of pleasant. I don't know why I was so afraid of
• 1:45:54
  this, but the next part is really going to suck. And then with
• 1:45:57
  every absolutely everything. When I'm writing, I think writing is the most terrible.
• 1:46:00
  When I'm casting, I'm like, oh my God, we'll never find
• 1:46:02
  our people when I'm blocking. It's it's a stressful thing. If you're not
• 1:46:09
  made for that. I don't think character was I'm necessarily made. I'm more
• 1:46:13
  of a writer soul than a director soul. I'm very introverted and shy and
• 1:46:16
  don't really I'm not a leader person. It goes like everyone look at me,
• 1:46:20
  I have the solution, and follow me kind of a thing. So
• 1:46:24
  it sucks. Directing sucks a lot of energy every minute of it, just
• 1:46:28
  being social and being in exchange with so many people for weeks. It's just
• 1:46:33
  I'm dead after a movie, So that's kind of hard. The perfectionism is
• 1:46:40
  definitely hard because you have with the standard movie, because you have a very
• 1:46:45
  clear idea of what you wanted to be, and because it never is,
• 1:46:48
  you're always slightly frustrated and you have to work against that frustration. Whereas with
• 1:46:53
  the fact documentary is the opposite. It didn't have a very clear idea of
• 1:46:58
  what the outcome was going to be. You get all these gifts along the
• 1:47:00
  way, so you're always in a state of euphoria. So it's very different.
• 1:47:03
  Like one is a very dark place. But even with the last Exorcism.
• 1:47:08
  I'm so tense when I'm shooting that I can't and really enjoy it.
• 1:47:13
  If I look back at the last Exorcism time, which was the greatest time,
• 1:47:15
  was great cast Ashley Bell could not be a lovelier and more talent person.
• 1:47:19
  I had my friends around me and my cinematographer, my editor. It
• 1:47:23
  could not have been a better time. And after it was done, I
• 1:47:26
  was like, why didn't I enjoy that more? And it is because you're
• 1:47:30
  always anxious because they're always expecting the next day to kind of go down in
• 1:47:35
  flames somehow, or in me at least I do. I'm kind of a
• 1:47:39
  defensive pessimist, but I'm always expecting doom around the next corner. So that's
• 1:47:45
  maybe the hardest hardest thing with the standard format and that you have to block.
• 1:47:48
  I mean, there's so much you don't have to do in a fact
• 1:47:51
  documentary. You don't tell the actors where they had to stand when they say
• 1:47:55
  what line, you know, and that really helped and saves you a lot
• 1:48:00
  of time because you can count on the camera following the movement of the actors.
• 1:48:03
  Because you don't have to light anything, you can pan and go wherever
• 1:48:05
  you want, and it's just much more restrictive in a standard format. Now,
• 1:48:15
  do you watch films while you're I mean, the obvious question is,
• 1:48:20
  and I know that you've you answered this previously about movies like the Exorcism or
• 1:48:27
  movies that are kind of in a similar genre. Do you try to watch
• 1:48:30
  movies that are kind of in the same genre that of the one that you're
• 1:48:34
  making, or do you try to stay absolutely Like with us Exorcism, it
• 1:48:39
  was important because we knew that we were up against a classic, the Exorcist,
• 1:48:44
  that no one has ever got to top, and if we were trying
• 1:48:46
  to top it, we just failed. So the only the only way for
• 1:48:50
  us was to stay away from everything that the Exorcist did, like the levitation
• 1:48:55
  and the crawling down the stairs backwards and this whole sexual stuff and go for
• 1:49:00
  something completely different and get out of the way of the Exorcist. And because
• 1:49:03
  of that, it was important to watch that The Exorcist and know it in
• 1:49:08
  and out, and also watch recent movies like The Exorcism of Emily Rose,
• 1:49:13
  because you also wanted to stay clear out of stuff that they did. And
• 1:49:15
  then there was there was a scene that I loved in last Exorcism that was
• 1:49:20
  so creepy, and then someone gave me a copy of Paranormal Activity. Before
• 1:49:26
  that came out, we were editing Last Exist and it was exactly the same
• 1:49:30
  scene. It's that scene where the girl stands up and just stares at her
• 1:49:33
  boyfriend sleeping, and then it's kind of the clock going forward to little bit
• 1:49:36
  and you know, she stands there for a hour, and we had the
• 1:49:40
  same without the clock, obviously, but we had the same with the sun
• 1:49:43
  going up and sun going down of our girls standing there staring at the exorcist
• 1:49:47
  who is asleep. And we had to cut that scene out because I know
• 1:49:51
  we would have been accused of copying that scene even though I hadn't seen it
• 1:49:56
  when we shouted or wrote it. We'll be right back after a word from
• 1:50:00
  our sponsor, and now back to the show. Yeah, but yeah,
• 1:50:09
  you kind of have to be aware of what the movies are that you're going
• 1:50:13
  to be compared to. Like my next movie that I'm working on right now
• 1:50:15
  as a home invasion movie. So I've watched you know, The Strangers and
• 1:50:20
  You're Next and all those movies that came out recently or that classics the genre,
• 1:50:26
  The wreck Breck and Wreck too, and you can't know the man you
• 1:50:29
  Also, it helps to just pull freeze frames from stuff that you like,
• 1:50:34
  the look that you like that doesn't have to be Home Invasion movies necessarily,
• 1:50:39
  Like I've pulled a lot of Blade Runner references that obviously it couldn't be more
• 1:50:44
  different from Storybis, but I really like the look, and it really helps
• 1:50:47
  if you can show people what you like and what you don't like. With
• 1:50:51
  my cinematographer, I don't have to do that anymore as much because we've made
• 1:50:54
  so many I mean, done many movies together. But we've known each other
• 1:50:57
  for fifteen years and my taste hasn't shame that his taste has a change,
• 1:51:00
  so we don't have to re educate each other every single time we work together.
• 1:51:04
  But it definitely helps for everyone else, and for the producers that always
• 1:51:09
  ask how are you going to shoot this? Which is such a weird question,
• 1:51:12
  how am I going to shoot it? But I don't even know what
• 1:51:15
  they're talking about. I guess they mean what is the color spectrum? Or
• 1:51:19
  are you going to use long lenses or not? Or are you going to
• 1:51:21
  move the camera? And I mean a lot of directing is pretending that you
• 1:51:28
  have answers that you actually don't have. It really is like every every meeting
• 1:51:31
  that I have, the truth would be I have no idea to every question.
• 1:51:36
  How what do you whom? Do you want a cast? I have
• 1:51:41
  no idea. I'm not there yet. We're still in the story. But
• 1:51:43
  you need to give them answers because they want to feel that you're in complete
• 1:51:46
  control, which everyone knows is a lie. But because everyone is lying,
• 1:51:50
  every director that's auditioning for a movie is coming up with all these, you
• 1:51:55
  know, completely made up things that they throw out as soon as they start
• 1:51:59
  making them movie. But you first have to walk in with the concept.
• 1:52:01
  So it really helps to have a visual presentation together and to have a starting
• 1:52:06
  point for the work you're going to be doing. Well. I've got one
• 1:52:11
  final question for you. I really appreciate, you know, all the time
• 1:52:13
  that you've given us. If you could go back in time and give yourself
• 1:52:17
  advice, give a younger version of your self advice, what would you tell
• 1:52:21
  yourself, Well, I lucked into it. I would tell myself to fucking
• 1:52:27
  hell enjoy it, because there's nothing wrong with enjoying it. It's not suddenly
• 1:52:31
  gone at derail just because you enjoy it. You know, you don't have
• 1:52:34
  to live in fear day. But I know exactly on the next movie,
• 1:52:38
  I'll be in fear again. And maybe that's just my amo. I think
• 1:52:41
  it's getting better from movie to movie. It's probably not something I can just
• 1:52:45
  tell my younger self and he would do it, but I lucked out with
• 1:52:47
  a lot of things that did happen with me. But I would tell and
• 1:52:54
  that I've basically gone through that while we were talking. I would tell younger
• 1:52:58
  people not to look the green light, wait for the green light, to
• 1:53:00
  write something for the resources that they have, to not be perfectionist and wait
• 1:53:08
  for the right moment because it'll never come. And to not try to impress
• 1:53:11
  Hollywood with stuff that is money related, because they have all the money in
• 1:53:15
  the world. I think those things. That's actually, at least what I'm
• 1:53:20
  trying to tell everyone from my old roommates who I watched wait and developed for
• 1:53:26
  five years and the script was never quite ready and maybe someone optioned it and
• 1:53:30
  maybe they'll get an agent until they walked out of the door with the script
• 1:53:33
  and said, fuck it, I'm going to shoot this myself, and I'm
• 1:53:36
  going to shoot it. Now, I always thought it was never going to
• 1:53:39
  happen, and so I think you have to get to that point. And
• 1:53:42
  if you look at people how people that are working in the film industry,
• 1:53:46
  how they started, most of them have exactly that story. If it's all
• 1:53:49
  in Pelli with paranormal activity, who just shot it for fifteen thousand dollars in
• 1:53:54
  his apartment with two friends or whomever, Like, the first efforts are always
• 1:54:00
  is almost always independent efforts that they didn't need anyone's approval for it, because
• 1:54:05
  no one is going to bet on you until you've proven that you can do
• 1:54:09
  it. Short films are not proving it to them anymore. So it has
• 1:54:13
  to be a feature. So you do have to make a feature on your
• 1:54:15
  own and then just pray that you get into festivals and get noticed someone.
• 1:54:20
  Yeah, I think that's you know. I did an interview with Brian Yudovich
• 1:54:26
  and that was one of the key things that he said during that interview was
• 1:54:29
  that you know, when they're putting together projects that they're not one of these
• 1:54:31
  gigantic studios. They find different elements and it's like, okay, what can
• 1:54:35
  we let's build a story out of what we already have versus. You know.
• 1:54:40
  What I would do when I, you know, was just a writer,
• 1:54:43
  was I would sit down and I would just say, Okay, what
• 1:54:45
  can I imagine? You know, and I put stuff together, and there
• 1:54:47
  was a part of me that would try to, you know, okay,
• 1:54:49
  well I don't want to have that spaceship blow up, you know. I
• 1:54:53
  try to make it small enough so a production company would look at it.
• 1:54:56
  But I was never writing it from what do I have right here around that
• 1:55:00
  we can actually film and just you know, make something really quick. So
• 1:55:02
  yeah, I think that's well, it's really important because you think it'll be
• 1:55:05
  easier if you have more freedom and if you can write whatever you want and
• 1:55:10
  you're not restricted by reality. But I think it's the opposite. Like with
• 1:55:14
  me, at least with necessary death, the story came very quickly because I
• 1:55:17
  had all these restrictions, and I didn't look in outer space and I didn't
• 1:55:20
  look to the French Revolution, to whatever. But it was very clear it
• 1:55:25
  has to be something that takes place in my kitchen, you know, and
• 1:55:28
  that that suddenly gives you a better framework for stuff, and that that helps
• 1:55:32
  for sure. I wouldn't even because you said you were writing something smaller so
• 1:55:36
  that a production company will like it. I would even urge people to go
• 1:55:40
  one step more radical and write something that they can do without a production company,
• 1:55:45
  because even production companies are are not most of it will fall apart or
• 1:55:51
  they never got to make it, and you're tied up in that stuff.
• 1:55:54
  If you really you need the persistence and the energy to emerge something that you've
• 1:56:00
  made without the help of a production company, I think, and there are
• 1:56:04
  probably a lot of examples that would prove me wrong. But I also I
• 1:56:10
  don't know anyone who actually relied on a production company and then got a movie
• 1:56:14
  made. I just don't. I know the people that have gone the other
• 1:56:18
  direction and shot their own thing and then one festivals and my wife is shooting
• 1:56:23
  something with her best friend right now. They've made a movie that was huge
• 1:56:27
  and was made for ten thousand dollars or something. There's just the thing is
• 1:56:30
  that there's no excuse anymore today. I understand that there were times when you
• 1:56:34
  needed that kind of money because the aver costed quarter million dollars and the camera
• 1:56:40
  shot thirty five millimeter film and whatever, and you needed that support. The
• 1:56:44
  great thing is today you need talent on your side, but you don't need
• 1:56:48
  the support anymore, and that's a really big chance that we should take.
• 1:56:53
  I think, well, Daniel, I really appreciate you coming on the show.
• 1:56:58
  I mean, this has been an amazing episode. We're at like two
• 1:57:00
  hours now, really fun. Thanks Jason. I want to thank Jason so
• 1:57:05
  much for doing such an amazing job with this episode. If you want to
• 1:57:10
  get links to anything we spoke about in this episode, head over to the
• 1:57:12
  show notes at Indie filmhuscle dot com forward slash six eighty and if you have
• 1:57:15
  it already, please head over to Filmmaking podcast dot com. Subscribe and leave
• 1:57:21
  a good review for the show. It really helps us out a lot.
• 1:57:25
  Guys. Thank you again so much for listening to guys. As always,
• 1:57:28
  keep that hustle going, keep that dream alive, Stay safe out there,
• 1:57:30
  and I'll talk to you soon. Thanks for listening to the Indie Film Hustle
• 1:57:34
  podcast at Indie film Hustle dot com. That's I N D I E F
• 1:57:39
  I L M h ustl dot com.