Latest / Indie Film Hustle® - A Filmmaking Podcast / IFH 704: From Short Film to Hollywood Blockbuster with David F. Sandberg

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IFH 704: From Short Film to Hollywood Blockbuster with David F. Sandberg · 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 Houstle Podcast, Episode number seven, Go four. Be ruthless about protecting
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  your writing days, i e. Do not cave into the endless request to
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  have in quotes essential and long overdue meetings on those days. End quote.
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  JK. Rowling Broadcasting from the back alley in Hollywood. It's the Indie Film
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  Hustle Podcast, where we show you how to survive and thrive as an indie
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  filmmaker in the jungles of the film biz. And here's your host, Alex
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  Ferrari. Welcome, Welcome to another episode of the Indie Film Hustle Podcast.
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  I am your humble host, Alex Ferrari. Today's show is sponsored by Rise
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  of the Film Entrepreneur How to turn your independent film into a profitable business.
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  It's harder today than ever before for independent filmmakers to make money with their films
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  from predatory film distributors ripping them off to huckster film aggregators who prey upon them.
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  just head over to www dot film bizbook dot com. That's film bizbook
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  dot com. Enjoy today's episode with guest host Jason buff Now, I want
• 2:06
  you to imagine. I want to sell to close our eyes and imagine something.
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  You're sitting in your apartment one day, you and your wife and you
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  have always wanted to make a horror film, but you don't really know what
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  the next step is. So you see these horror competitions and you say you
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  know what, let's enter into one of these horror competitions and see how it
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  goes. Using just the resources. You know, you don't have a lot
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  of money, so just using the camera that you have and the equipment that
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  you have, You're going to create a horror short and submit it to one
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  of these competitions just to see what happens. And not only do you win
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  the competition, but your video becomes a huge viral sensation. Suddenly, your
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  you know, Vimeo videos and YouTube videos are being downloaded by thousands and thousands
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  of people. And not too long after that, you start getting phone calls
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  from people in Los Angeles that, you know, I want to have meetings
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  with you. Now fast forward a little bit to you know, being invited.
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  You're invited to Los Angeles by New Line, and before long you're sitting
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  in a meeting with James Wan talking about making a feature film version of your
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  short. This is more or less what happened to David F. Samberg in
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  twenty thirteen when his short Lights Out became a huge viral sensation, and on
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  June twenty second, the feature film version of Lights Out, starring Maria Bellow
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  and produced by James One we'll be coming to a theater near you, all
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  right, now, on with the show. Came here my wife Lata and
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  I a little over a year ago now, But it all happened really fast
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  because it was like, you know, we got to call that, yeah,
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  lights out, the movie is getting made. So can you get on
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  a plane next week? You know. So we flew over and yeah,
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  we went back home just over Christmas now, But that's that's it. No,
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  it's it's been weird, like it all happened so fast. When we
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  first got here, we just we're the first like nine months or so or
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  whatever. We stayed in the airbnbs around town and it's just now this year
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  that we've gotten a proper apartment to stay. Huh. So it was really
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  like, I mean, well let me ask you first of all, how
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  is how is living in la Because I've I've lived there and it was a
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  very difficult I mean, and I'm from the US, Yeah, you know,
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  so it was kind of a culture shot for me. Are you guys
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  like settling in and feeling more? Are you are you there permanently? Are
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  you going to go back to Sweden? I mean right now it's pretty permanent
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  because we rented out our apartment back in Sweden, and I mean, as
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  long as things keep going well here, well we'll stick around, you know,
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  right. But but yeah, it's a lot different from Sweden, but
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  both good and bad. You know, the weather is always great and there's
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  a lot of cool stuff here and but yeah, I mean we love it.
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  So far, we haven't seen a lot of the other parts of US.
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  We've only been to California. We went to Las Vegas for a day
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  for Cinema Con. This is all we know. Like, we want to
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  see more of the states. Yeah, you gotta go. Well, I'm
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  from North Carolina, so you should definitely head that way and kind of see
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  something in La is very it's cool, but it's very different from the rest
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  of the US. Yeah, that's I can imagine. It's it's it's a
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  unique place. It feels like the people that rented your old apartment know that
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  that was where the short was filmed. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's
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  one of our friends who's actually in We met a short called pictured and she's
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  the creepy in the picture, so yeah, she knows and she thinks it's
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  cool. Like she has people over and it's like, hey, this is
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  the Lights Out apartment and WHOA, yeah, that's cool. Well what I
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  want to do is, um, I've got a lot of stuff I want
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  to talk about, and I want to be very conscious conscious of your time.
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  Well, so, I mean it's it's Saturday today, so there's no
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  work today, So that's that's fine. Okay, So what is uh what
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  are you guys doing right now? I mean I assume the you know,
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  pictures locked and what's kind of going on right now? And you're like,
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  what's you're week full of right now? Right now? It's uh, pre
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  production on Annabel two. So yeah, we're shooting in six weeks. Okay,
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  So it's getting close A lot a lot to prepare. Is there anything
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  you can I mean not story wise, but I mean what when you say
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  you're preparing to shoot, what does that kind of mean? Are you working
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  on? Is the screenplay ready? Are you working on? Um? There's
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  still tweaks being done on the screenplay. But also you know, we're casting
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  people, we're scouting some of the locations we still haven't figured out yet.
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  And this one we're has a bigger budget than Lights Out, so we're shooting
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  it on a stage on the Warner Brothers lock, which is awesome. So
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  where the houses being the sets are being built, you know, and there's
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  you know, some budget issues like hey maybe we can you know, we're
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  a little bit over, maybe we can cut out this room of the house,
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  and a lot of stuff like that, back and forth. It's the
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  way you think about it changed now that you I mean, I would assume
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  that walking into Lights Out the feature, you probably still had a lot of
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  those ideas in your head about, oh, there's ways to save money and
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  cut corners into this, and you start working with the studio and it's kind
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  of like, oh, okay, well there actually is some money to spend
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  on this. Well, I mean I had no idea. I mean,
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  I've I'm so lucky to have skipped all of these steps, you know,
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  like I went from making no budget shorts, which is lost on me back
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  in Sweden, right into making Hollywood studio features, like I've never made an
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  independent movie or anything. Like I've never been on a real film set until
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  it Lights Out, which was scary as hell, and there was so much
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  like, you know, I put so much pressure on myself as well,
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  just like this is my shot, you know, better not screw it?
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  Up because you know, then I'll go back to Sweden and never do a
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  movie again. So yeah, that was intense, and it was just so
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  much to learn, Like, you know, I know how to sort of
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  make all the movie, like how to tell a story, but everything around
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  it was just new, the whole the studio thing and just working with so
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  many people. You know, I'm used to shooting myself and editing myself and
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  doing all that stuff, and now I had to work with other people for
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  the first time, and just you know, working with a writer, and
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  yeah, there I had like I'd wake up in the middle of the night
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  being all stressed out, and like I have these things where I wake up
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  and I'm half asleep and I hallucinate and I'd see like the whole crew standing
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  around my bed just waiting. You know, I'd be like, wait,
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  what are we doing? Way, So hopefully now on Annabelle, I know
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  a little bit more what to expect and maybe we'll have a little less nightmares.
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  Right, So your confidence is better going through this. Did you look
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  at the finished film and just kind of sit back and be like, Holy
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  crap, I did this? Yeah? No, I mean, but that
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  happened alto like just during editing, you know, we we're cutting this scene
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  with between Maria Bello and Teresa Palmer. They have this argument and it's like,
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  shit, I actually directed this, a real movie with real actors.
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  And yeah, there's been a lot of those moments, especially because of the
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  beginnings of the whole thing, Like I'd see people, you know, painting
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  the sets and stuff like that, and I'd have this feeling if these people
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  are working on this just because Lot and I made this a little short,
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  you know, just an evening back in Sweden, which is insane. We'll
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  be right back after a word from our sponsor, and now back to the
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  show. Did you ever run into because I remember reading stories about when,
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  for example, James Cameron was making Aliens and nobody really knew who he was,
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  so they were kind of like, this guy didn't know what that.
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  You know, he was making one of the best horror movies of all time,
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  but the people on the set were just kind of like, who's this
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  guy doesn't and he was, you know, he was. I think it
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  was on a British set too, so everybody was like, who's this you
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  know, America. I saw that a documentary as well, which is I
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  love that. It's one of my favorite movies as well. But yeah,
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  there were definitely elements of that of you know, it's some there was this
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  feeling of some people on the crew like, you know, they're doing me
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  a favor because there's nobody from from Sweden and the they've worked on all these
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  big movies, and it led to some friction in some places where it's like
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  some arguments with the camera department where they you know, tried to tell like,
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  now you don't need to do that, and it was like, no,
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  we need to do that, like I know what I'm doing. So
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  it led to arguments about stupid stuff as well, like how how cameras work
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  and like because they were telling me that there was this one shot that they
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  were telling me you can just you can shoot at high speed and then decide
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  in post if you wanted to be slow motion or regular speed. And I
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  was telling them, but but no, because the shutter speed will then look
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  you know, yeah, the shutter angle will look it will look like you
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  know the opening of Saving Private Ryan, if you yeah, So they were
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  telling me that, no, the shutter speed is always the same, and
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  I became his whole argument, and I was like, but then why do
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  you need more light when you shoot high speed? Not mean changes? And
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  it was like they're like, damn, this guy knows what he's saying.
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  Yeah, I mean just stupid arguments like that. But I mean it got
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  better, you know, further introduction everything did. But when we sort of
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  got to know each other and what we knew and didn't know. Yah,
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  yeah, what were you shooting on Arie? Yeah? The alex x right
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  right? Was there ever? I mean, if I was you and I
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  was kind of like, I mean, because you're a duet yourself kind of
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  guy, I would just be like looking over everybody's shoulder and be like,
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  okay, what do you guys? Do you know? And just like in
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  between directing, just kind of like you know all this. I mean,
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  this was my film school in a way, Like I didn't go to film
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  school and now I was getting paid for it. So it was a lot
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  of that. Okay, so you're lighting it like that, you're putting it
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  there. Okay, Cool, it's like you know, finding out stuff.
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  Is there anything that kind of maybe you can share that jumps out at you,
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  like in terms of just purely like cinematography. Were there any things that
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  you just kind of were surprised by that. You you know, having done
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  things yourself, You're like, oh, I didn't realize this is actually how
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  they do it on a film set. Um. Not to put you on
• 13:09
  the spot, no, but I don't know. I mean I think I
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  I mean I read a lot, like I read like the American cinematographer and
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  all of those things that so I try to keep up as much as possible.
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  So nothing really surprised me that much. Um No, it was just
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  being there and seeing it in real life, you know, on a full
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  set. That was was interesting. But I mean, you know that the
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  lighting, it feels like it's the same thing when you're doing it yourself with
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  what little you have. It's just on a bigger scale and you have more
• 13:48
  fun toys. Really, was there ever a moment when you were like,
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  is there like an Ikea around that I can Yeah, because there is.
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  I think there's an When I was there, I mean I was They're back
• 14:00
  in like ninety nine, so it's been a while, but there was a
• 14:01
  brand new Ikea and it was like a huge deal. I mean, this
• 14:05
  is off the point, but I just happen to remember that because I think
• 14:07
  it's kind of a funny idea of you being like, you know, if
• 14:11
  you just get a trash kid. Yeah, yeah, we do have money
• 14:13
  here man, yeah. Um now, but the yeah ikes awesome. I
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  you know, I built my own my trash cans here as well, and
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  boughts and lights. But I found out that they're light bulbs here, don't
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  dim They're do in Sweden for some reason, the fluorescence the led bulbs for
• 14:33
  something. Oh yeah, yeah, well some of them do, and I
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  mean you have to kind of look for them. But the US is really
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  and I haven't lived in the US since uh since two thousand and two.
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  I actually live in Mexico. Now I do every I do everything from Mexico.
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  But you know, I'm amazed when I go back because here everything is
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  so energy efficient and everybody has led bulbs or fluorescence. And then I go
• 14:52
  back to the US and it's it's always amazing to me that that still hasn't
• 14:56
  kind of caught on, you know. I mean, people have them,
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  but they're not as you know, I don't know how it is in Sweden.
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  No, Sweden is I think they've like banned regular light bulbs. You
• 15:09
  can't even buy them anymore. I mean you can probably there's still some old
• 15:13
  stock, probably, but it's multi LEDs and compactual essence. You guys are
• 15:18
  so you know, so far ahead with everything. I actually lived in Finland
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  for a while. Yeah, but not for a while, but for half
• 15:28
  of a year. I went to school in Yoinsu, so we were we
• 15:31
  were up in that area for a long time, and we passed through Sweden.
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  I got lost in Sweden for a while, and yeah, but it's
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  just it's one of my favorite countries in the whole world. It's great in
• 15:41
  the summer, but in the winter it's just gray and dark for so long
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  there's like not enough sunlight. And yeah, maybe I'll miss it eventually,
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  but now it's just it's here. It's sunny all the time. H Yeah,
• 15:56
  you get Actually I got kind of tired of it being sun all.
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  I mean, I missed the snows, the coziness of having like your coffee
• 16:04
  and being inside, and you know, maybe, I don't know. Around
• 16:10
  Christmas time, I think you start kind of like like when you have your
• 16:12
  first warm Christmas is always really bizarre. Yeah, I mean we went home
• 16:18
  for Christmas, but that was the thing as well, like we were thinking
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  that maybe when we were back in Sweden, will feel that, no,
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  this is our home. We don't want to go back to LA. But
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  when we got home, it was gray and dark and we both got winter
• 16:30
  winter vomit disease, Lot and I, so we were like, just throw
• 16:33
  one up. Yeah, we couldn't wait to get back. Okay, Well,
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  what I want to do is kind of go back and talk a little
• 16:44
  bit about your biography, I guess, you know, and how you got
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  into this. And I was wondering if you could start a little bit by
• 16:52
  just talking about where you were at, what you what led up to making
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  the original shorts. And as far as I it was lights Out the first
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  short you made, or was it like after making a few more, because
• 17:04
  it's listed in IMDb, is like the third or fourth one you made.
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  I mean it was the second one I made with that Lout and I made
• 17:12
  together. Okay, So what happened was, you know, I've been making
• 17:18
  little shorts and stuff ever since I was a kid, you know, and
• 17:19
  barred my dad's video camera. But then as I got you know, older,
• 17:26
  it got more sort of difficult to you know, get your friends together
• 17:30
  and make movies. So I actually started playing around with animation because that was
• 17:37
  something you could do all by yourself. And what happened was when YouTube was
• 17:42
  new, this was in two thousand and five, I made an animated short
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  that became like a viral hit in Scandinavia and that led to me getting a
• 17:52
  lot of job offers to do like commercials and videos for different companies with my
• 17:57
  sort of brand of the animated humor. So I did that for a few
• 18:03
  years, but eventually I felt that, you know, what I really wanted
• 18:07
  to do was live action genre stuff, so you know, lat and we
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  made this movie called cam Closer, which we really enjoy doing, is just
• 18:18
  a two and a half minute short, and we tried getting like in Sweden,
• 18:23
  you had the Swedish Film Institute that gives grants to movies, shorts and
• 18:29
  features, and that's pretty much how we finance films, but they weren't very
• 18:33
  interested in financing genre stuff. Like we tried several times to get just some
• 18:40
  a little bit of money to make horror shorts and they said no every time.
• 18:44
  So we figured, you know, screw it. You know, I
• 18:47
  have a camera and we can do stuff ourselves, just in our apartment.
• 18:52
  So yeah, Lights Out was the second one we did, and yeah,
• 18:57
  it became this whole crazy thing. Now, just to get into the nuts
• 19:03
  and bolts, because I was curious about this you had you were working with
• 19:07
  the black Magic Cinema camera. Yeah, what was just from a purely nerd
• 19:14
  point of view, what was your decision to get that camera versus some of
• 19:17
  the other ones that were out there. Well, I mean I started one,
• 19:22
  you know, when I was younger, I got like a consumer DV
• 19:27
  camera, started shooting shorts with my friends, and then I actually got a
• 19:33
  grant like a cultural stipend or whatever it's called, so I could buy an
• 19:38
  HD camera. And I've never had a lot of money to buy cameras.
• 19:44
  But then I saw about this black Magic camera that was coming out with a
• 19:48
  shooting raw which was very interesting to me because I you know, when you're
• 19:52
  shooting like H two six four stuff, you can't shoot the compression. When
• 19:57
  you shoot dark stuff, it just breaks apart in the shadows. We'll be
• 20:04
  right back after a word from our sponsor, and now back to the show.
• 20:12
  So I really wanted that camera. So we I have a producing friend
• 20:18
  in Sweden who we got some money to do a short called Wallace, which
• 20:22
  is sort of like an you could say that sort of like an anti bullying
• 20:30
  film or something that that's the kind of stuff you can get from money from
• 20:33
  For this from the Swedish Film Institute, you know, we got money to
• 20:37
  do a documentary about a Thai lady boy and like more sort of important subjects,
• 20:42
  I guess. But because we got some money to do Wallace, I
• 20:48
  could buy the black Magic Cinema camera finally, so that that's what we used
• 20:52
  to do shoot Let's Out. But the short Bee shot before that Camp Closer
• 20:57
  I shot on the Panasonic GH one, so I had to have a lot
• 21:03
  of sort of lights that just to have a break apart in the shadows.
• 21:07
  H I've always heard that the black Magic wasn't that great with shooting in low
• 21:12
  light. Those I right, well, not low light, but shadows.
• 21:15
  Like so in Lights Out, you know when she that bedside table lamp,
• 21:25
  there's actually like a three hundred and seventy five walk bulb, like a photo
• 21:30
  bulb. So what I did, like, so there's a lot of light,
• 21:34
  but it's not evenly lit, you know, so I could and that
• 21:40
  works out great. So if you're not shooting in if you're not trying to
• 21:45
  bring the shadows up, but just bringing everything down instead. It works great,
• 21:52
  So you still need light, but you don't have to evenly light your
• 21:56
  scene. That was the same one you had with um closer right when you
• 22:03
  did the trash can thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, and that really
• 22:07
  close to Latta's face so that everything else would be black and you would just
• 22:10
  turned down the yea the aperture though. Yeah. So so that one and
• 22:15
  I've used for all of our shorts except for the very latest one. They're
• 22:18
  called Closet Space because that one I used the pocket camera for it. So
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  what happened was that when we moved over here, I didn't bring my cinema
• 22:29
  camera and I was kind of missing my camera almost you know, when I
• 22:33
  was over here. So when I got started getting paid for Lights Out,
• 22:37
  I bought the pocket camera and we actually used that on Force and stuff for
• 22:42
  Lights Out the feature, and that's you know. Now since I've been back
• 22:48
  this week, I've actually brought my the cinema camera with me as well,
• 22:52
  So now I have both the cinema camera and the pocket camera that they're they're
• 22:57
  great cameras. Yeah. I thought it was really interesting on your video talking
• 23:02
  about the trailer. And by the way, I really I can't tell you
• 23:07
  how much it means to indie filmmakers to get to see the behind the scenes
• 23:11
  stuff because it's you know, you're in a very unique position to be able
• 23:17
  to let us in on a lot of that stuff because we're all kind of
• 23:19
  watching and you know, there's a lot of stuff that that we don't know,
• 23:22
  you know, and you know all those videos like I mean, there's
• 23:26
  just little tips that are are kind of like, oh wow, I didn't
• 23:30
  know it was that easy to do that or whatever. You know, But
• 23:34
  did you have any any resistance to shooting with the pocket cam for those the
• 23:41
  you shit, the like the old eight millimeters super eight stuff like that,
• 23:45
  right, The only resistance was that I was shooting it. So what happened
• 23:51
  was we went to this like abandoned hospital to shoot some stuff, and you
• 23:56
  know, I was telling them, like the studio like, you know,
• 24:00
  I could shoot that myself, I just need the actors in my little pocket
• 24:03
  camera, and they were like, nah, you know, they didn't really
• 24:10
  believe in that or something. I don't know. So what happened was we
• 24:15
  went there with the whole crew and shot some stuff. With the Alexa and
• 24:19
  none of that Alexa stuff is in the movie, So like between setups,
• 24:23
  I would borrow the the cast and just go shoot these little snippets of film.
• 24:30
  And yeah, that's the only thing that wound up in the new movie.
• 24:33
  But the only thing they were sort of afraid of was me shooting it
• 24:36
  myself, just because of union stuff and all that. If if the cinematographers
• 24:41
  union would be upset about me shooting stuff myself or something, but I don't
• 24:45
  know. Yeah, I've heard a lot about uh huh. I heard some
• 24:51
  of that, you know, with some of the other stuff that I've been
• 24:52
  involved with, where it was like I just wanted to go and shoot b
• 24:57
  roll with a like a five f D or something. Yeah, and the
• 25:02
  cinematographer was kind of like, you know, it's like you're really not supposed
• 25:07
  to do that, you know, But I mean, when you're used to
• 25:08
  shooting your own stuff, you don't even think about that kind of thing.
• 25:11
  Yeah. I mean that was also the thing with the effects because I we
• 25:18
  shot for example, we shot at a school where we weren't allowed to show
• 25:22
  the name of the school, and so I was telling the line producer that,
• 25:26
  you know, I can just paint that out on my laptop, you
• 25:30
  know, with open source software. But he was like, no, I
• 25:33
  mean it has to go through the proper channels, and we don't have that
• 25:37
  in the the effects budget. So instead the production designer had to paint or
• 25:41
  make a physical sign and actually hang it up over the real sign, which
• 25:47
  just felt stupid. But then when we were in post, I did a
• 25:52
  lot of work, some like fifteen or so the effects shots myself, and
• 25:57
  then it was all right because you know, the v effects guys, you
• 26:02
  know, unfortunately for them, they don't have a union, so that that
• 26:04
  was sort of all right with me doing a bunch of the effects shots myself.
• 26:10
  That, yeah, they kind of give you their vote of approval with
• 26:12
  the stuff that you did. Yeah, I mean no one said anything like
• 26:18
  we showed it to people like yeah, I mean the studio knew that I
• 26:22
  was doing some of the stuff and they didn't mind. You know, I
• 26:25
  did it for free, so you know, so win win. Yeah,
• 26:29
  were you Now One of the things that I see that you use, and
• 26:33
  you mentioned this in one of your videos, is that you'd like to use
• 26:36
  open source software like Blender. Yeah, I mean that's it started out just
• 26:41
  because I didn't have any money, you know, I was a goalmaker.
• 26:42
  It's like, oh hey, this three software is free. Um, and
• 26:47
  it was a bit of a learning curve. I think Blender has gotten a
• 26:51
  lot better recently, but you know, since it was free and was stuck
• 26:56
  pretty much the only option, I'd sort of powered through and learned it.
• 27:03
  Did you just learn by creating projects or was there some sort of resource that
• 27:06
  you were using? Um, this is sort of a common I mean mostly
• 27:10
  if if I wanted to find out how to do a specific thing I or
• 27:15
  sort of a specific thing, I've just searched YouTube for tutorials on that.
• 27:18
  Otherwise it would like Blender Guru has a lot of cool tutorials, and you
• 27:23
  know on Blender Nation you can find a lot of cool stuff as well.
• 27:27
  So yeah, but mostly just doing like yeah, trying to find out what
• 27:33
  can and can't do right now, talking about horror in general, UM,
• 27:42
  I was wondering if we could talk a little bit about why you're shorts really.
• 27:48
  I mean they're very effective in terms of, you know, having a
• 27:52
  kind of universal idea behind them, something that's very much you know, something
• 27:57
  that connects with people. You know, no matter where they are. Can
• 28:03
  you talk a little bit about how you developed your ability to kind of I
• 28:07
  mean, no, it's not just like cheap jump scares. There's actually some
• 28:11
  you know, there's a lot of you know, story to it and things
• 28:17
  that are going on almost subconsciously while you're watching it. How did you kind
• 28:21
  of develop your technique in terms of, you know, when you're watching the
• 28:25
  short lights out, what what were your influences and things that you were like,
• 28:30
  Okay, this is how I'm gonna you know, really suck people in
• 28:33
  and then scare the hell out of them, if that makes sense. It's
• 28:36
  a long question. I mean, I yeah, when I started making horror
• 28:41
  shots with friends, there were a lot of fake blood and stabbing and stuff
• 28:47
  like that, which I sort of got tired of and I'm more into sort
• 28:52
  of suspense and sort of playing with fun ideas and stuff. So, I
• 28:57
  mean, just the main thing with with the Short was that, you know,
• 29:03
  we try to have not just a bunch of scares, but just have
• 29:07
  that scare in the beginning to get you on the edge, just because then
• 29:11
  you know that, okay, anything can jump out at any moment, but
• 29:15
  then not have another scare until the end. So it's just tension up until
• 29:21
  that point, because whenever you have a jump scare, you sort of deflate
• 29:25
  the tension and you have to start over again, you know, because you
• 29:29
  sort of you can laugh because you jumped or whatever. I don't know.
• 29:34
  I just just love mood and sort of tension and try to keep that maintained
• 29:47
  for as long as possible. We'll be right back after a word from our
• 29:51
  sponsor, and now back to the show. Are you thinking to yourself?
• 29:59
  Are you kind of like, Okay, this is what I want people to
• 30:02
  be thinking at this moment or feeling at this moment, and just trying to
• 30:07
  kind of like, I mean, there's a great moment when a lot of
• 30:11
  tapes the light and that's kind of like that's a little bit of comic relief.
• 30:17
  I think that. I mean, I don't know if it was planned
• 30:18
  like that, and it's it's very similar to the moment where she drops the
• 30:23
  I guess it's like a pearl or something or the marble or something into the
• 30:30
  yeah, great thing. And there's always there's there's like it seems like there's
• 30:33
  a it's like it leads up. There's something that's like, Okay, We're
• 30:37
  supposed to sit there and be like, Okay, what what's going on?
• 30:40
  What is this? You know? And a lot of It's the thing that
• 30:41
  I love about your shorts is so much is done with sound. There's not
• 30:45
  these cheesy FX you know, CDs or whatever, you know. I mean,
• 30:52
  it's all done purely like quiet and you just hear these little subtle noises.
• 30:57
  Yeah. I mean, I love playing with expectations because there's nothing more
• 31:02
  boring when you watch a movie and you you already know every beat is going
• 31:06
  to play, you know. So that's what I hope to achieve, to
• 31:11
  play with exec expectations. And that's something that I'm very proud of in the
• 31:15
  feature that they a lot of some of the characters, they don't do the
• 31:21
  typical stupid horror movie character stuff and get themselves killed. So you know,
• 31:25
  people who have seen the film are like, oh, he's going to die
• 31:29
  now, and then it turns out no, he's actually smart and he's gonna
• 31:32
  you know, get away. But also as far as the humor, you
• 31:37
  know, yeah, I've been doing sort of humorous animation for a long time,
• 31:42
  so I like to have that a little bit of humor in it and
• 31:47
  in fact, in lights Out not I mean, the tape is definitely supposed
• 31:51
  to be a little moment, brief moment of humor. But the face at
• 31:55
  the end, to me, was supposed to be humorous as well, because
• 31:57
  it's this sort of face that turns off the lights. But most people are
• 32:04
  they don't see the humor. But it's kind of a twisted humor problem.
• 32:08
  Yeah. No, but I like that because there's and there's funny moments in
• 32:14
  the feature as well. That's um that's not very evident in the trailer they
• 32:20
  released, but people you know that. That's I love seeing the feature with
• 32:25
  an audience because they laugh and they clap and they cheer and like it's the
• 32:30
  best. It's like horror and comedy are the best sort of films to see
• 32:36
  with an audience. Really. Yeah, I think that one of the things
• 32:40
  that a lot of horror movies don't get right is the humor. You know,
• 32:45
  they think that everything is supposed to be just okay, scary jump scares,
• 32:51
  you know, somebody walking with a flashlight and then jump scare, and
• 32:53
  then and they don't really develop the characters at all, you know, they
• 32:58
  don't really work on the story. Yeah, but I think you need that
• 33:00
  sort of dynamic range in movies, you know, like because then you know,
• 33:07
  if if everything is just depressive darkness, you know, then I mean
• 33:13
  you need the lighter moments as well, just to have the difference between the
• 33:16
  two and the same in comedies, if it's just silly the whole time,
• 33:22
  it's not as good as if you have some emotional depth at times. You
• 33:25
  just need variation, really, and I think no movie needs to be serious
• 33:34
  enough that you can't have some light moments in them. What would you consider
• 33:39
  I was actually watching one of your other interviews and you mentioned jump scares that
• 33:46
  were just kind of cheap jump scares. Yeah, And I was wondering if
• 33:52
  you had kind of an example of what is like an urn jump scare versus
• 33:57
  one that's just a cheap one thrown in there for effect. Yeah, I
• 34:00
  mean the cheap ones started the typically you know, the cat jumping out from
• 34:05
  a cupboard or something where the friend putting a hand on the shoulder, or
• 34:07
  just stuff that's not that's not part of a scare, you know, like
• 34:14
  it needs to come from whatever it is that that's scary. So I mean,
• 34:19
  for instance, if you take an example from James Juan from Insidious.
• 34:23
  You know the red demon face, I mean that sits behind Patrick Wilson Um.
• 34:30
  I think that's such a great scene. Yeah, because that's really well
• 34:32
  made because you have you have her telling this story and setting the mood,
• 34:37
  and then you even have that sound design, that crackly sound designed sort of
• 34:44
  creeping in a little bitfore you see the the face. I mean, you
• 34:52
  can have jump scares, like I think it's one is its paranormal activity two
• 34:57
  or something. All the cupboards open at once and it's like, you know,
• 35:01
  it's just quiet, just someone sitting in a kitchen doing nothing. It's
• 35:05
  just boring, and then bam, all these kitchen cabinets high open and of
• 35:08
  course you're gonna jump because it's unexpected, but it's not part of It's not
• 35:14
  really scary, you know, it's not it's not building to anything. So
• 35:20
  I think those are this sort of glazier jump scares because because you can make
• 35:23
  people jump very easily, they just have to be unprepared. But to make
• 35:29
  them, to put them in that mood and then make them jump is a
• 35:32
  lot more fun and effective. So is there like a choreography to it that
• 35:37
  you're like Okay, here's this Like when you watch Insidious and I want to
• 35:43
  talk about James one in just a second, and you know, it seems
• 35:46
  very you know, I don't know exactly how he approaches it, but it
• 35:52
  seems like, Okay, this is we're gonna create this jump scare. You
• 35:57
  know, we're gonna put it together and it's got certain beats to it.
• 36:00
  Yeah. Is there like as you're going through the screenplay and everything, are
• 36:04
  you like, okay, we need to have you know, certain moments that
• 36:07
  are going to be like this, and you just kind of start putting them
• 36:09
  together. I mean, how does that all work? They sort of come
• 36:15
  naturally from the situations, or that's what I try to do, at least,
• 36:20
  to to just build from the situations the characters are in and then not
• 36:25
  to have them just be like a singular scare, but actually have it be
• 36:30
  part of a longer sequence. And I think that's sort of James's m as
• 36:36
  well, to not just have bam, but there's a scare and now it's
• 36:38
  normal scene and Bam, there's a scare, but it's actually something that builds.
• 36:43
  You have things start going creepy and then they get even creepier. And
• 36:47
  you have a little bit of a scare, and then it just ramps up
• 36:52
  and it stretches out for longer than just have those brief punctuation scares. You
• 36:58
  know, do you work? You are you conscious of the like the compression
• 37:04
  and expansion of time as you're going through, Like this is going to go
• 37:07
  buy real fast. And then once we get to this suspenseful scene, let's
• 37:09
  just drag it out as much as we can. Pretty much. Yeah,
• 37:14
  we're just yeah, I mean all scenes need you need to find that sort
• 37:19
  of rhythm of when to compress and when to expand. But yeah, for
• 37:23
  when you were when you're in those tense moments, you really want to expand
• 37:29
  as much as possible without without going overboard. You know, you can have
• 37:31
  people just walking through a hallway for way too long. M do you go?
• 37:38
  Do you do that? In editing, you're just kind of like,
• 37:39
  okay, let's try it a little shorter, okay, little, okay,
• 37:43
  little, I mean, do you like sit there and just nitpick exactly when's
• 37:45
  the right moment? Kind of? Yeah, I mean it's yeah, I
• 37:52
  mean I have a pretty clear I planned these things out in advance so much
• 37:55
  that it's not that much that can change in editing, I guess. But
• 38:04
  but yeah, then then it's finding the the sound effects as well to work
• 38:08
  with it and just where the sound design because a lot of movies have and
• 38:14
  that that's something that happened in the initial sound design on I side as well,
• 38:16
  that they the sound guys were putting in they were sort of giving away
• 38:22
  the scares with the sounds, like they had sounds building up to a scare,
• 38:25
  or like they just had a tendency to put in too much sound and
• 38:30
  telegraphing everything that's going to happen. So, yeah, that was a bit
• 38:35
  of a struggle. There's nothing scarier to me than being in a horror film
• 38:39
  and all of a sudden there's like no sound. I mean, that's the
• 38:43
  scariest, Yeah, scariest you can do because you know something's going to happen.
• 38:46
  Yeah, And that was the thing with the music as well for the
• 38:50
  feature, that I didn't want a lot of music for the scarier parts,
• 38:54
  Like we can have music whenever else, but let's go quiet and let's just
• 38:59
  have the scenes play out as they are, you know. Now, moving
• 39:05
  back, I kind of jumped forward talking about Lights Out when that became a
• 39:09
  big, you know, kind of a viral success. What were you contacted
• 39:15
  by other people? I mean, what was that kind of like when you
• 39:17
  realize that people were kind of sharing it. I mean I think it had
• 39:21
  like twenty thousand or twenty million views or something like like crazy at that well,
• 39:28
  first sort of people just random and people contactors and said they want to
• 39:32
  work with us, and you know, like actors and like this one guy
• 39:36
  who does special effects for movies, like big Blockbuster movies. It was like,
• 39:43
  hey, I'd love to work with you. And it's like, yeah,
• 39:45
  I'd love that too, but you know, it's just me and Lotta
• 39:49
  and our apartment in Sweden with no money. It's like, how's that going
• 39:52
  to work? But then I actually, you know, we started getting contacted
• 39:55
  by these people and by a journalists and I actually said a lot like you
• 40:00
  know, we'll be right back after a word from our sponsor and now back
• 40:08
  to the show. I've heard that people in Hollywood, you know, get
• 40:15
  representative, that people get representation from Hollywood through like viral videos and stuff that
• 40:21
  agents and managers you know, look at DeMeo staff picks and stuff like that.
• 40:25
  And it was just like a day after I said that I woke up
• 40:29
  and I had my first email from a management company here, and then it
• 40:34
  was just all at once, like I got contacted by me managers and agents
• 40:38
  and producers and studios and it was just insane, Like I had to put
• 40:44
  together a spreadsheet with everyone I talked to and what was said the last time,
• 40:50
  and yeah, so weird. Like so you know, first of all,
• 40:54
  I had to sort of choose manager and agent, which was a great
• 41:00
  position to be in because I had all these options, but at the same
• 41:04
  time, I knew nothing about them because when you google these management companies or
• 41:08
  agencies, you know, they don't they hardly have web pages because they don't
• 41:14
  want people contacting them. They'll contact you if you've done something they're interested in,
• 41:19
  right, So I had I got like an IMDb pro account so that
• 41:23
  I could at least see like who these guys were representing, just to get
• 41:29
  a field for who they were. And yeah, it was a crazy time
• 41:35
  because because of the time difference. You know, during the day, I
• 41:38
  just have a normal day, and then during the evening and the night,
• 41:42
  it was just phone calls with Hollywood every day. So you still had like
• 41:47
  a normal day job when this was all going on. Yeah. I mean
• 41:51
  my job at the time was pretty much a freelance animator, right, which
• 41:57
  is co word for broke, because you know, I was doing this on
• 42:02
  my own and I'm terrible with charging for my work. So they were like,
• 42:06
  hey, so how much do you want to make this one minute commercial?
• 42:09
  It's like, oh, well, you know, it's not that hard
• 42:13
  to do, so I can really charge a lot of money for it,
• 42:15
  and yeah, so uh and that how was the thing as well that once
• 42:22
  I picked a manager, they were like, hey, so can you fly
• 42:28
  out to LA because we want you to meet all these people and you know,
• 42:31
  go on this go to all these producers and studios and stuff like that.
• 42:35
  It's like, no, I don't have money, so all I could
• 42:38
  do was sort of skype with people for the time. Um. But then
• 42:44
  I got in contact with a producer called Lawrence Gray. He was one of
• 42:49
  the first sort of producers I got in contact with who wanted to make something
• 42:52
  out of the lights out. And you know, as soon as that started
• 42:58
  coming together, he he paid for for a look at me to fly out
• 43:02
  to LA so we could meet you know, James Juan and the studio and
• 43:07
  get everyone on board, and that when we were out here, that's when
• 43:09
  I did the whole water bottle tourists they call it where you go to all
• 43:15
  these studios and producers and just have general meetings and you know, they offer
• 43:21
  you a bottle of water since you get um. Yeah, so it was
• 43:25
  how was that, I mean, was that like a total cultural shock for
• 43:29
  you? Yeah? Yeah, I didn't know what you're supposed to do because
• 43:36
  it's just a general meeting. So it's like they just they ask about you
• 43:39
  and you know what who you are and like what you want to do,
• 43:44
  and then they give you their steel about who they are and what they do,
• 43:47
  and then you know, you can get their business card and it's like,
• 43:51
  hey, let's keep in touch or something, and you walk out of
• 43:53
  it. Sometimes they might send you a script or something like hey, maybe
• 43:57
  the script is something for you, and yeah, but I just yeah,
• 44:01
  it was all new. And then that's the thing as well. That after
• 44:07
  so we were out here for a little over a week I think, and
• 44:12
  one of the last scheduled things was to meet New Line, the studio that
• 44:15
  was interested in doing Lights Out. And so after every general meeting, my
• 44:22
  agents would talk to you know, like check out the I was, so,
• 44:27
  how is that. The feedback they got was that I was very sort
• 44:30
  of reserved and that, you know, I didn't talk a lot that you
• 44:35
  know, I was very Swedish and what do you want? Yeah, So,
• 44:42
  so I got this call from my agent that were my managers, and
• 44:45
  they were sort of telling me that, you know, it's important when you
• 44:47
  meet the studio now that you know, you can show them that you're that
• 44:52
  you can be captain of the ship. You know that you can be a
• 44:53
  director, take charge. And it's like, I don't know how to do
• 44:58
  that. So I just you know, tried my best to just talk a
• 45:02
  lot, and you know, I was sort of telling them about this YouTube
• 45:09
  short I made that got banned from YouTube because it was had a lot of
• 45:15
  you know, giant dicks and vaginas and a lot of sex and stuff in
• 45:19
  it, and you know that made him laugh, so you know, and
• 45:22
  you know, I got to break the movie, so it must have done
• 45:24
  something right. But your manager wasn't like, Okay, that was a little
• 45:28
  too far. Let's tone it down now. Well, they weren't there,
• 45:30
  so they just knew that. They called me back. Well, yeah,
• 45:35
  they just called me back afterward I heard you killed it and it's like,
• 45:37
  oh, okay, so that was with new line. Yeah, okay.
• 45:43
  So how did these these comes the project comes together? You're talking to the
• 45:50
  executives, I mean, you know, where does where does James One come
• 45:52
  into the picture with all this? Um, Well, it actually started with
• 45:58
  when I was talking to all these people in Hollywood. One of the managers
• 46:04
  I talked to had this client who had written a script that I really loved,
• 46:07
  because I, you know, even before all of this happened, I
• 46:12
  read a lot of scripts like I. You know, every year they have
• 46:14
  the blacklist with the most read scripts and most liked scripts in Hollywood or whatever.
• 46:19
  So I'd made sure every year to find downloads of all of the scripts
• 46:23
  so I could read them, just to see what good scripts are like.
• 46:27
  And this guy had written one of those blacklist scripts, a horror script that
• 46:31
  I really liked. So I got in touch with him and started talking about
• 46:37
  Lightside. Because when we made the short, we had no idea what a
• 46:42
  feature would be, because we didn't expect to make a feature out of it.
• 46:45
  So I started talking to this writer here in LA who had an idea
• 46:49
  for it, but his idea was very big, and I felt like,
• 46:57
  like, I don't think I could I don't think I could handle that as
• 47:00
  my first movie, and I don't think people would give me that kind of
• 47:05
  budget, you know, just coming from having done nothing to do such a
• 47:08
  big thing. So instead I had this idea of making a smaller, sort
• 47:15
  of more family based story that could be made for less money, which that
• 47:21
  writer wasn't as interested in. But that writer put me in touch with Lawrence
• 47:25
  Gray, the producer, and Lawrence Gray was still interested in that idea.
• 47:30
  So I wrote a treatment based on that idea, like a fifteen on page
• 47:36
  treatment or something. And Lawrence knew James wand like he had been meeting with
• 47:43
  him and they wanted to find something to do together, and he felt that
• 47:46
  this could be it. So he sent my treatment to James to read,
• 47:52
  which he liked. So that's when they flew me out here to La to
• 47:57
  meet with James, and so we did that, and then because James has
• 48:02
  his relationship and new line, that's how they came in. You know,
• 48:07
  they they worked together a lot, and James has now his production company at
• 48:13
  the warn't a lot to make, you know, these kind of low budget
• 48:19
  horror movies with new Line, and it just came together really fast and really
• 48:23
  smoothly. And people have kept telling me, you know that, don't get
• 48:27
  used to that, because that's usually not how it happens. But yeah,
• 48:31
  it just worked out really well. You off the topic, do you ever
• 48:37
  deal with like trolls and people who are just kind of being jerks about Like
• 48:40
  I mean, it is kind of a rapid rise to that kind of thing.
• 48:46
  That's what I was expected that people would sort of hate me because I
• 48:51
  got this, that I got this lucky, you know, people should hate
• 48:54
  that. But instead, people, at least on YouTube and all the comments
• 49:00
  that I read, people are like, hey, I'm so proud of you
• 49:02
  and like yeah you like, oh okay, great, Like it doesn't seem
• 49:08
  to be jealousy. This seems more to be like, oh, hey,
• 49:13
  one of us actually got in the door of Hollywood, you know, yeah,
• 49:17
  which is how I feel about it, because I certainly don't feel Yeah.
• 49:22
  Well, I mean I think if you had a bit, you know,
• 49:23
  if you came out with sunglasses on, you're just like, you know,
• 49:27
  being all egotistical, Like, hey, that was a nice guy.
• 49:31
  What happened to the Vimeo guy? That I used to look like, screw
• 49:36
  you guys. Now I'm a big time player. No, like just uh
• 49:42
  the other day I was meeting with this actress or potentially for Annabelle too,
• 49:49
  and you know, of course they set up this meeting at Chateau Chateau Marmont
• 49:53
  here sentence where you know you're supposed to meet celebrities. We'll be right back
• 50:00
  after a word from our sponsor and now back to the show. And it's
• 50:08
  just just so awkward. Like she was like, she was like, oh,
• 50:13
  well, let me give you my email, and she put out her
• 50:16
  hand too, so I because she wanted me to give her my phone to
• 50:22
  her. But when she stretched out her hand, I was like, oh,
• 50:24
  she wants to shake my hand. Okay, so I shaked her hand.
• 50:27
  It's like she was like, uh no your phone. It's like,
• 50:30
  oh okay, So yeah, I think I'm always going to be that awkward
• 50:37
  now probably. I mean, you know, once you've have one, you've
• 50:40
  got one on your you know, behind you. I think the next one
• 50:44
  you're gonna be a little more like Okay, this I'm getting You're gonna find
• 50:46
  your comfort zone, you know, yeah, hopefully it's just yeah, it's
• 50:51
  weird. It feels like I'm just just going along with everything and just okay,
• 50:57
  you know, yeah, yeah, so for I mean, I certainly
• 51:00
  can't speak from you know, experience with that. But LA is a very
• 51:04
  bizarre town too, you know, which is yeah, the way people act.
• 51:07
  And I mean I was I was a you know, lowest, I
• 51:10
  was working as like a pa on stuff, and you know, there was
• 51:14
  just this whole way that people talk and act that I just couldn't ever wrap
• 51:19
  my head around, you know, because I come from the South and we're
• 51:21
  just kind of say we I don't know, it's just a different world.
• 51:24
  Yeah, and uh it's weird as well. Like I hope I don't turn
• 51:30
  into an asshole, but like I mean, they just started. I'd get
• 51:34
  a lot of people were sending me like their shorts, like hey, can
• 51:37
  you watch my short? Or are they saying me scripts and stuff like that,
• 51:40
  and you know, I watch them, but now more time goes on,
• 51:47
  I'm getting so many shorts sent to me, like I don't have time
• 51:52
  to watch them all. It's like, uh, sorry, you know,
• 51:54
  like, yeah, I want to be a nice guy and helpful by just
• 52:00
  don't have the time. Yeah. Yeah, Well let me, let me
• 52:02
  ask you a question about that. You know, you're you're in a situation
• 52:06
  now where you're seeing a lot of shorts, and your shorts were they were
• 52:10
  all very effective. What are the things that you see with people who are
• 52:15
  making maybe indie films, indie horror films and making shorts and things like that
• 52:20
  that maybe is kind of like mistakes that you see people making in terms of
• 52:24
  you know, not being really effective as you know, maybe jump scares or
• 52:30
  being scary or whatever. Because there's a lot of filmmakers out there making shorts
• 52:36
  trying to do what you're doing, and it's just not quite hitting the nail
• 52:39
  on the head. I mean, I see the biggest problem that I see
• 52:45
  that they're too long, or that they don't get to it quickly enough,
• 52:51
  even even the ones that are in just three minutes or something like. I
• 52:54
  feel like with attention spans today and especially online, you have to you have
• 53:00
  to keep up the pace and just I think timing is just the biggest issue.
• 53:07
  The second biggest is probably sound that people don't, you know, spend
• 53:12
  enough time on sound. Like a lot of shorts can look great because you
• 53:16
  have all these cameras and tools, these days to make them look really expensive,
• 53:22
  But then people don't pay as much attention to sound. Yeah, timing
• 53:27
  sound, I'd say, what did you use to like, Yeah, I
• 53:32
  assume you had like a digital recorder? Yeah, when you were shooting,
• 53:36
  did you what did you use for like the kind of jumps those those sounds?
• 53:42
  Um? Well, actually I didn't have for all of these shorts.
• 53:45
  I don't record sound when we're shooting. I replace all the sound in post.
• 53:51
  And that's that's something I started doing as soon as I could edit digitally,
• 53:55
  like on a computer. That's how I did it. Just replace every
• 54:00
  sound, even the dialogue, just to have that control. Actually, I
• 54:06
  may not be necessary to be that anal about it, but you know,
• 54:09
  that's been how I work with it. So and also I've always wanted to
• 54:16
  make sure that I could put these up without any copyright issues and stuff like
• 54:21
  that. So I've always been sort of afraid of like sound effects libraries or
• 54:25
  royalty free music and stuff like that in case they weren't actually royalty free and
• 54:30
  stuff like that. So I've made a point out of trying to record as
• 54:35
  much sound myself as that I can, and just try and make my own
• 54:40
  music even even though it's not great, it's at least I know I can
• 54:45
  use it as much as I want. But yeah, I've just I have
• 54:51
  for a while there. I used to record a lot of sounds just on
• 54:54
  my role. I had assumed age four and just brought it with me when
• 55:00
  I was going place. It's just because hey, maybe I'll find a cool
• 55:04
  sound. Yeah you're like Binburt. Sorry, are you a fan of Binburt?
• 55:10
  Yeah? Absolutely, He's awesome. But yeah, just trying to gather
• 55:17
  as much sounds as I can to keep in my little library, do you.
• 55:23
  One of the things that I think is also really effective is not showing
• 55:28
  the monster, you know. Yeah, that I've seen a couple of shorts
• 55:31
  recently where it was like, oh, okay, that was the that's the
• 55:37
  thing that we're supposed to be afraid of, and you look at it and
• 55:38
  you kind of like, okay, that's not quite you know. No.
• 55:40
  Yeah, Like we did this short called Coffer where I kind of kind of
• 55:45
  regret showing a monster at the end there because I don't think it was needed.
• 55:50
  But yeah, in general, I try to not show it as much.
• 55:52
  And even in the feature, you don't see a lot of the what
• 55:57
  she actually looks like, because I mean, you're what you imagine something to
• 56:00
  be is always going to be scarier than whatever rubber suit you get made,
• 56:05
  even though you have even though we had like Oscar winning makeup artists created you
• 56:10
  know. Yeah, I remember. I think it was Spielberg who was always
• 56:16
  saying that you know, you're what you bring it. It doesn't matter how
• 56:20
  scary the monster is. What you have in your head is always going to
• 56:22
  be a lot scarier than anything we can create on screen. Yeah, I'm
• 56:28
  a big believer in that. So I want to get into a little bit
• 56:31
  about talking with James Wan and if you could describe meeting with him, because
• 56:37
  you sounded very casual about that, but I mean I think that for most
• 56:42
  of us it would be kind of a big deal to meet, you know,
• 56:44
  somebody like James Wan and to be able to kind of just see how
• 56:47
  his mind works. Can you talk a little bit about that, Well,
• 56:51
  there's a lot going on in his mind. I mean that first time I
• 56:55
  met him, he was just you had so many ideas, Like he was
• 57:00
  just saying maybe we do this, maybe that, and maybe this could be
• 57:02
  that, and and they were so like far apart from each other and like
• 57:08
  from I mean, some were like totally sort of opposite from the treatment I
• 57:14
  had, while others were very much in line with it. But it's like,
• 57:17
  so walking out of that meeting, I was like, am I supposed
• 57:22
  to incorporate yes into the script or into the story? Because I can't do
• 57:29
  that? Like there were just so many and so varied, you know.
• 57:34
  But he yeah, I just had a lot of ideas. Um now,
• 57:38
  but that first meeting was great except for just freaking out with all the ideas
• 57:43
  he had. But I mean, yeah, he's cool. I mean he
• 57:46
  sort of started out with a short as well. He made saw as a
• 57:51
  short and about to make a feature over here, And yeah, I was
• 57:55
  just telling me a lot about just just to have fun with it because it's
• 58:00
  it's a weird business and a weird process. So but I couldn't really listen
• 58:05
  to that on lights out because I was freaking out. It's like, oh,
• 58:07
  this is my chan chance. I better better make it awesome. Maybe
• 58:13
  maybe for Annibal, I'll be able to be a little more relaxed and have
• 58:15
  fun with it. Well did you, I mean, psychologically was what did
• 58:21
  you have to do to kind of just say Okay, I'm gonna deal with
• 58:23
  this and just kind of move forward. And even though things are freaking me
• 58:27
  out, I'm I mean, did I'm sure there was a certain aspect of
• 58:30
  your personality that was like that has like this imposter syndrome, which is something
• 58:35
  we all have, oh yeah, you know of like walking in somewhere and
• 58:37
  being like, oh, well, you know, I'm just waiting for these
• 58:39
  guys to figure out that, you know, I'm I'm a fake or whatever,
• 58:45
  you know, And that's not just I mean, that's everybody's kind of
• 58:49
  has that, you know, Yeah, absolutely, And I mean, especially
• 58:52
  with this, it's like how come they're letting me do this? Like do
• 58:54
  they think I have more experience than I actually do? Because I think maybe
• 58:59
  it was an advantage that I was from Sweden, so for all they know,
• 59:02
  I could be huge in Sweden hadn't have a big career there. But
• 59:07
  so yeah, I mean, I it just was this weird feeling of just
• 59:10
  going along with everything, just you know, just like there was no way
• 59:15
  to prepare. So it's just all right, I'll just go along and try
• 59:20
  to figure things out as best I can, try to be as prepared as
• 59:22
  possible to do a lot of story boards and just figure everything out as much
• 59:28
  as possible in advance. And yeah, there's just so much weirdness, Like
• 59:36
  when West a little over a year ago, when we first got here,
• 59:40
  I was invited to this you know, like I'm with the same agency as
• 59:45
  James Wan and The Furious Seven had recently came out. It had made like
• 59:50
  a billion dollars or something, so a lot that I were invited to this
• 59:53
  party in James's honor and we had just gotten here and the film wasn't the
• 59:59
  film wasn't light yet, so we had no money. We'll be right back
• 1:00:04
  after a word from our sponsor and now back to the show. Like we
• 1:00:13
  had borrowed from our families as much as we could just to you know,
• 1:00:16
  buy food and stuff. So we had no money at all, and we
• 1:00:22
  got invited to this party in this mansion in Beverly Hills, you know,
• 1:00:25
  and it's like, you know, Vin Diesel was there and Adrian Brody and
• 1:00:30
  it's like, what the hell are we doing here? It felt like we
• 1:00:32
  snuck into this thing, and so we were just sort of standing there talking
• 1:00:37
  to me each other in Swedish, like keeping this appearance up of just casually
• 1:00:43
  talking, but we were just saying things like this is so fucking weird,
• 1:00:45
  like what are we doing here? Like we you know, like, oh
• 1:00:49
  hey, hey, Ben Diesel, how's it gone? It was? And
• 1:00:52
  I mean that that weirdness just hasn't stopped. Like when we went to Cinema
• 1:00:57
  Con recently, because now we're doing publicity for for a light Sounds. You
• 1:01:01
  know, we got to go on a private plane charted by Warner Brothers,
• 1:01:07
  you know, and there were like Samuel L. Jackson and Christophe Waltz and
• 1:01:13
  all these celebrities Jared Leto and on a private plane going to Vegas. It
• 1:01:20
  was, this is so weird, Like how can you can you ever get
• 1:01:23
  used to this? Is there anything that like kind of being in that world
• 1:01:30
  that surprised you that you kind of didn't think would be the way it actually
• 1:01:35
  is? Um, it's kind of a vague question, but yeah, I
• 1:01:39
  mean, or people just kind of are people that are like that, you
• 1:01:45
  know, celebrities and stuff when you're kind of hanging out at that level,
• 1:01:47
  is it like are they just kind of down to earth and just like kind
• 1:01:52
  of yeah, well I don't dare to talk to them anyway, So yeah,
• 1:01:57
  I talked it too whish, So I was just briefly Alexander Scarscourt and
• 1:02:02
  Joel Kinneman. But otherwise it's like I just feel so out of place that
• 1:02:07
  I can, you know, I just keep to myself. Yeah. Yeah,
• 1:02:12
  but they seem like normal people. I guess now I want to go
• 1:02:17
  a little into pre production and just talk about that a little bit. What
• 1:02:23
  was involved? How long was that process? Was it like, Okay,
• 1:02:28
  this is when you're setting it all out. I assume that just from a
• 1:02:31
  complete outsider's point of view, you've got I mean, who who's kind of
• 1:02:36
  your chief person that you're leaning on. Are you dealing with like a line
• 1:02:39
  producer? Are they giving you a certain you've got Okay, this is your
• 1:02:43
  certain amount of time that you have to work on this. You're working on
• 1:02:45
  the screenplay with your writer. I mean, how how is how does basically
• 1:02:50
  pre production all come together? And then you know, what are the kind
• 1:02:54
  of ways that you know, what are the things that you're doing? Yeah,
• 1:02:58
  I mean first it's sort of like a soft prep. I guess when
• 1:03:01
  you're still just figuring out the screenplay and you're sort of people are slowly starting
• 1:03:07
  to get hired, like yeah, line Producers is was the one you sort
• 1:03:10
  of talk to a lot during pre production and then all of a sudden,
• 1:03:15
  we you know, you have a pre production office with all these people,
• 1:03:20
  and yeah, I mean my first sort of thought before all of this was
• 1:03:25
  like, is this just going to be like me stepping onto a film set
• 1:03:29
  and not knowing what the hell's going to happen or how things work. But
• 1:03:32
  during prepped, I don't know how many, like real prep weeks we had
• 1:03:38
  six seven or something. I'll light out, but during prep there's so much
• 1:03:44
  going through everything that once you get on set, you know the movie inside
• 1:03:49
  out. You know, you have all these you do camera tests, you
• 1:03:52
  do like tech scouts where you go through you know, the whole locations and
• 1:03:59
  just tell everyone everything that's going to be shot and how it's going to be
• 1:04:02
  shot. And so it's just a lot of preparing and a lot of answering
• 1:04:10
  questions. Because that's something that the new line told me before it all started,
• 1:04:15
  Like I went to dinner with these two executives and they were like,
• 1:04:18
  you're going to get a lot of questions. Just answer them right away.
• 1:04:21
  Don't let them pile up until this big thing. Because even if you answer
• 1:04:27
  them wrong, we can always fix that on set. And all the questions
• 1:04:31
  were like, you know, what kind of car does this person drive?
• 1:04:35
  What kind of shovel does this person to pick up? And this scene like
• 1:04:40
  stuff like that, Like there's a shot where someone picks up a shovel,
• 1:04:44
  so you get presented with like five different shovel options and it's like, yeah,
• 1:04:48
  I want that shovel. And it's just so much weird, so many
• 1:04:54
  questions, and like it started, I got burnt out on giving answers.
• 1:05:01
  So I was actually buying a hamburger late one evening and I couldn't decide on
• 1:05:08
  the menu with burger to get, so I like I called my lot down
• 1:05:13
  my wife and I was like, hey, just tell me what burger to
• 1:05:15
  get because I'm done with answers now. So it's just yeah, a lot
• 1:05:23
  of going through everything and figuring everything out, lots of answering questions. And
• 1:05:29
  the weird thing on Lights Out was that there were some casting issues that ate
• 1:05:36
  up a lot of the pre production time unfortunately. So for example, Teresa
• 1:05:43
  Palmer wanted to do it pretty early on, but then there were some issues,
• 1:05:47
  like, for example, we found out that she didn't actually have a
• 1:05:51
  visa or like a work visa because she's Australian, so like she's married to
• 1:05:57
  an American, so we all figured like, well, she you know,
• 1:06:00
  she's married to him. But it turned out that she, like you have
• 1:06:04
  to be in the country for a certain number of days consecutive days, and
• 1:06:09
  because she's an accuracy, travels all over all the time, so she hasn't
• 1:06:12
  had that opportunity yet. So while that was figured out, we had to
• 1:06:17
  look for others and it was this whole thing where people got cast very late.
• 1:06:24
  In fact, Maria Bellow was cast like a week or two into shooting
• 1:06:30
  the movie, so the first time I actually met her was like five minutes
• 1:06:33
  before her first scene. So it's like, oh, hey, it's nice
• 1:06:35
  to meet you. And action. So I was really lucky in the fact
• 1:06:42
  that we had such great actors that you know, it's not like we needed
• 1:06:46
  all of that prep. Like they got into it really quickly and we're awesome
• 1:06:50
  because you know, Newline was saying like, yeah, this is the first
• 1:06:54
  time we've never had a table read before the shoot because we just didn't have
• 1:06:58
  the cast. And it also meant that like Billy Burke is in the film
• 1:07:02
  when he was cast even later than Riabello. He plays her husband, So
• 1:07:09
  all the like family photos in the house have to be just green pieces of
• 1:07:15
  paper and then we have to you know, put that in a post.
• 1:07:18
  So that was insane, but you know, it worked out. We'll talk
• 1:07:25
  a little bit about I think one of the things that intimidates directors, it
• 1:07:29
  certainly does me is the idea of, you know, working with an actor
• 1:07:35
  who is at that level. You know, what did you learn by you
• 1:07:41
  know, working with those people, and what kind of what things can you
• 1:07:43
  share about what you learned about the directing actors? Well, I mean something
• 1:07:48
  I've learned since I was younger. It's just that you're never going to get
• 1:07:54
  what's in your head, like you have this sort of vision about I mean
• 1:07:59
  the whole movie really, but with actors as well, that you hear them
• 1:08:02
  in your head saying things a certain way, but you're never going to get
• 1:08:05
  that. I mean, if you try to just get them to say exactly
• 1:08:10
  this in exactly this way, it's just not going to be good. So
• 1:08:15
  my approach is just to go sort of to not go against the grain and
• 1:08:19
  let the actors sort of find it or whatever. So for the first like
• 1:08:26
  for the first take, I'd not give them much direction at all and just
• 1:08:29
  see what would come out of them, and if if it was too far
• 1:08:33
  from what I wanted, we'd talk about it and we'd try it again,
• 1:08:38
  you know. But yeah, in general, I just I mean, they
• 1:08:44
  were so great that it was just it wasn't very difficult. It wasn't like
• 1:08:48
  I had to pull a good performance out of it. It just sort of
• 1:08:53
  came naturally and we just did tweaked it a little bit. So yeah,
• 1:08:58
  but yeah, it was sort of a timiding. Like you know, Maria
• 1:09:01
  Bello, which I'm a huge fan of, she's in I love a History
• 1:09:04
  of violence when she's in and like she's in Partners and all of that,
• 1:09:09
  and uh, but you know, she's like problem. She'd come in and
• 1:09:13
  just nail it, and she would also sort of talk about like almost give
• 1:09:17
  tips or like when she was working with Gabriel httle Kid in the film,
• 1:09:25
  she would sort of come over to me and like, you know, he's
• 1:09:27
  doing this unless maybe you could talk to him about that, so which was
• 1:09:30
  very helpful. M Yeah. I found also that on some of the indie
• 1:09:36
  you know, really low budget stuff if you have one really good actor in
• 1:09:41
  there, a lot of times they kind of become the default like acting teacher
• 1:09:45
  for everybody. You know. So it's like, if you have a film,
• 1:09:47
  get at least one. I mean, in your case, you've got
• 1:09:49
  a bunch of great actors. We'll be right back after a word from our
• 1:09:54
  sponsor and now back to the sh out. But I mean in that case,
• 1:10:01
  it's like everybody's game goes up when you have somebody who's is really Yeah.
• 1:10:06
  Both Maria and Theresa play mother and daughter were just awesome. Like we
• 1:10:13
  have this scene where they're a little bit of an emotional scene between them,
• 1:10:17
  and it's like, you know, everyone who was there and saw that,
• 1:10:21
  it was just like yes, we we we got it. You know this
• 1:10:25
  is this is gonna be great. Um as they just play off each other
• 1:10:30
  really really well, and you can just sit back and go, look at
• 1:10:33
  what a good director I am. It was a little bit like that because
• 1:10:36
  we had and they were shooting this um um. We we're shooting this argument
• 1:10:44
  at a dinner table, and we were shooting a sort of handheld sort of
• 1:10:47
  free flowing um and you know, sitting by them on or looking at that
• 1:10:51
  sort of a handheld argument with great acting. It was like, this feels
• 1:10:56
  like a larst one tree or fillum or something. It's like awesome. They
• 1:11:01
  were like, whoa, yeah, that's some Swedish guy. I don't know.
• 1:11:08
  Yeah, well cool, Yeah that's I mean, I'm just kind of
• 1:11:13
  amazed. I'm kind of living vicariously through this, through everything you're saying.
• 1:11:16
  You know, I want to plan I'm doing a bunch of YouTube videos just
• 1:11:20
  talking about all this because this stuff that I would want to know, like
• 1:11:24
  how does this happen and how what's the process like? And I really want
• 1:11:29
  to talk about that, but most of that will have to be after the
• 1:11:31
  movie comes out, just because I want to go so in depth with the
• 1:11:35
  whole thing, you know what, Yeah, story points and everything. No,
• 1:11:41
  that would be amazing, you know, It's it's one of the difficult
• 1:11:43
  things I'm doing. You know, this is probably the first time I've talked
• 1:11:45
  to a filmmaker about a film that hasn't come out. Usually what we would
• 1:11:48
  do is just kind of jump in and start dissecting everything, you know,
• 1:11:53
  But I you know, but I'm really looking forward to hearing hopefully. Yeah,
• 1:11:57
  that would be great if you could just kind of explain the experience and
• 1:12:00
  put things together. I just want to make sure that I've got a bunch
• 1:12:03
  of questions here. How are you doing for time? Okay, whole day?
• 1:12:08
  Okay, yeah, well this will be our first twenty four hours yet
• 1:12:12
  to sit here. People will tune out. Now let me see here.
• 1:12:16
  I've got a bunch of different things. I wanted to continue talking a little
• 1:12:19
  bit. I don't know how, you know. I talked to Um,
• 1:12:23
  I've talked to a number of filmmakers who have worked with you know, kind
• 1:12:27
  of people that have big names in horror right now. I talked to Daniel
• 1:12:30
  Stam about making The Last Exorcism with Eli Roth and James Juan and Eli Roth
• 1:12:36
  are kind of in similar stratospheres right now in terms of the horror world.
• 1:12:43
  Was he kind of you know, hands on with stuff? Would he come
• 1:12:46
  on, said and did One of the things that I was thinking about was
• 1:12:50
  like, you know, wouldn't it be cool if you're working on a horror
• 1:12:54
  film and you could say, I wonder how James Juan would do this thing,
• 1:12:57
  and then you just say, well, let me give him a call,
• 1:13:00
  like let him see this or whatever. Were there any like moments like
• 1:13:02
  that where you're like, let me, let me kind of see what's in
• 1:13:04
  his head. How how would we put this together to be better or or
• 1:13:09
  was there anything like that a little bit, But I mean he's a really
• 1:13:13
  busy guy, so he wasn't around all the time, but he did come
• 1:13:17
  by the set a few times, and he did have a lot of input,
• 1:13:20
  like he'd give me sort of his input, like, you know,
• 1:13:27
  maybe you can shoot this scene all in sort of one take, because that
• 1:13:30
  is usually very effective when when you don't cut a lot, when you have
• 1:13:34
  these sort of scary sequences. So we can't try that, and uh no,
• 1:13:40
  he didn't come in and sort of come come up with some advice,
• 1:13:44
  and he and in pre production he was around for a little bit as well
• 1:13:48
  and had some ideas like if you've seen the trailer, you've seen the there's
• 1:13:53
  a neon sign gag, you know that the neon sign goes on and off
• 1:13:57
  and she sort of blinks in and out. That was actually his idea,
• 1:14:00
  because my original idea was that it would be cars going by outside and the
• 1:14:05
  sort of headlights would sort of sweep across the room and that's how she would
• 1:14:10
  appear and disappear. But the neon sign was a really cool thing because you
• 1:14:15
  get more of that on off thing instead of this the sweeping light. It
• 1:14:21
  did make it hard to shoot, though, because you know, any on
• 1:14:27
  sign would be on a set time interrole. So at first we tried shooting
• 1:14:30
  it like okay, it's four minutes, four seconds on, four seconds off,
• 1:14:35
  and Teresa would have to sort of act to that number. It's like,
• 1:14:42
  okay, so the first time it goes off, you do this,
• 1:14:44
  the second time you do this, and it just didn't work. So what
• 1:14:48
  we had to do was I would just call out on or off, so
• 1:14:53
  I would watch her performance. It's like, okay, now it would be
• 1:14:55
  good if it came on. Now would be good if it came off.
• 1:14:58
  But so I was sort of afraid that people would go, what the hell
• 1:15:02
  is wrong with that me on sign because that sometimes it's all for ten seconds,
• 1:15:05
  sometimes it's all for one second. But no one's that's seen the movie
• 1:15:10
  so far as complaint. So yeah, it worked out. Did you ever
• 1:15:16
  talk to him about any of his films like The Conjuring or Insidious or any
• 1:15:20
  of those, or did you have any like I would just be like I
• 1:15:24
  would have like a million questions. It'd be like, Okay, I don't
• 1:15:27
  want to work with this guy anymore, just set up, let me alone.
• 1:15:30
  Did you like ever kind of talk about his stuff, because I mean,
• 1:15:33
  obviously, you know, when I watched Lights Out, the first kind
• 1:15:36
  of idea I had was, this is kind of in the same genre,
• 1:15:42
  kind of in the same mindset is insidious. And I don't know if insidious,
• 1:15:45
  I don't know which came before or whatever. But did that Did his
• 1:15:49
  films influence you Saw? Obviously? Yeah, I mean I'm sure they did.
• 1:15:57
  But what we mostly talked about I think Saw just because that was his
• 1:16:02
  that was the closest to my experience because that was his first movie, his
• 1:16:06
  first time sort of coming to la and doing all that. So he would
• 1:16:11
  talk about, you know, the difficulties of getting that made and just yeah,
• 1:16:16
  try and trying to give as much advice as he could on just how
• 1:16:19
  to get through your first movie. But I mean his was a little bit
• 1:16:26
  different as well, because he like he couldn't get into the country right away,
• 1:16:30
  so like he had to do like all the pre production from it.
• 1:16:32
  He was stuck up in Canada waiting for his visa, so he you know,
• 1:16:39
  he had like a couple of days of prep on site before they had
• 1:16:43
  to start shooting, so you know, I was glad that didn't happen to
• 1:16:45
  me. And yeah, no, we didn't really talk about stuff like that.
• 1:16:53
  He would sort of just give more of a general advice, like,
• 1:16:57
  you know, try to shoot more over apping stuff because I'm so used to
• 1:17:03
  shooting and editing myself, so I'll only shoot like, Okay, now I
• 1:17:08
  know that I'm going to cut to this and then I'm going to cut back,
• 1:17:11
  so I don't need all of that. But so he was sort of
• 1:17:13
  adamant that, no, but try to actually shoot everything through because you don't
• 1:17:17
  know what happens in editing stuff like that. When you were on set,
• 1:17:27
  who was the guy that kind of I mean, did you have a pretty
• 1:17:30
  good relationship with your assistant director? Was there was it? Did you feel
• 1:17:33
  pretty comfortable after a while? Yeah, yeah, no, I've got along
• 1:17:40
  great whatever, And he's yeah, my assistant director is coming back on Annabel
• 1:17:44
  too, Like, I have no idea. That's the first time I've ever
• 1:17:47
  worked with an assistant director. So he's good or not, but I like
• 1:17:53
  him, so he's coming back now. It's just the first time working with
• 1:17:59
  every one, and really like, I've never had and someone else edit what
• 1:18:02
  I've shot before, So that was weird where someone else shoot what I'm making.
• 1:18:09
  So a lot of times it was almost like, oh, you just
• 1:18:12
  let me do it, you know, Yeah, Um, did you kind
• 1:18:15
  of sit in video village and just kind of watch from there? Or did
• 1:18:18
  you actually get up and yeah? Yeah? Always sort of me at the
• 1:18:24
  camera, I would only look at a monitor. I mean, I usually
• 1:18:28
  I just look at the focus pullers monitor because it was closer. I didn't
• 1:18:30
  want to go all the way to video village. Um, but uh yeah,
• 1:18:36
  I mean the good thing about the editing was that I'd never edited with
• 1:18:42
  Avid on the Avid Soum, So even if I wanted to just take over,
• 1:18:49
  I didn't know that software at all, so I just had to sort
• 1:18:53
  of talk to the editor instead. What was that process, Like, I
• 1:18:58
  mean, how how did you u where did they start editing before you finished
• 1:19:04
  directing? What was what was kind of the timeline on that. No,
• 1:19:08
  they were editing while we were shooting, you know, like they got material
• 1:19:14
  continuously. So as soon as we had rapped production, I you know,
• 1:19:18
  went to the post production office and I could see the first cut of the
• 1:19:24
  movie and I got super depressed. This is the worst thing ever. Um,
• 1:19:31
  And everyone was telling me that that's how everyone feels. But good now
• 1:19:35
  starts the real work, you know, to make it into a good movie,
• 1:19:39
  because everyone was saying, like, you know, when Ben Affleck saw
• 1:19:41
  the first cut of Argo, he was like, my career is over.
• 1:19:44
  And then he won the Oscars and stuff. And it really is like that
• 1:19:47
  because you have while you're shooting, you have this vision in your head,
• 1:19:53
  We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor and now back to the
• 1:20:00
  show. And then you see what someone else has put together and it's like,
• 1:20:05
  oh no, I wouldn't have put that there, and that you know,
• 1:20:09
  it's all it's not at all what you just expect. You get really
• 1:20:13
  depressed, but you know, you keep working at it. You take things
• 1:20:16
  out, you move things around, and you tweak it, and eventually it's
• 1:20:20
  like, hey, this isn't bad. But yeah, And I mean I
• 1:20:28
  got really depressed during the shooting as well, because here the thing is that
• 1:20:31
  whenever we make our shorts, look one halfway through the short, I'll just
• 1:20:39
  be now, this is shit. I don't want to do this. And
• 1:20:42
  she'll have to convince me that no, we're actually going to finish this,
• 1:20:45
  and then we do, and then it actually you're like, hey, this
• 1:20:48
  isn't bad, you know, we've actually made something cool. And that happened
• 1:20:54
  on Lights Out as well, but because it was a feature in my first
• 1:20:58
  Hollywood film and every thing, it was so much worse. Like I got
• 1:21:02
  so depressed for a while there in the middles, like this isn't fun at
• 1:21:06
  all, Like I don't want to make movies. And yeah, and the
• 1:21:11
  producers took me out to dinner to sort of cheer me up and talk about
• 1:21:15
  it, and that the whope ben affleck argo thing came up there as well.
• 1:21:19
  It's like you're gonna like it when it's finished. Yeah, And I
• 1:21:25
  got back to it and powered through and then got fun again and it turned
• 1:21:30
  into a good movie. But it was just so overwhelming, you know,
• 1:21:33
  working with all these people and being you know, like question on the camera
• 1:21:38
  stuff that I was talking about before, and just it was so overwhelming and
• 1:21:43
  just so much work. You know, you worked fifteen hour days, so
• 1:21:45
  you really become depressed. But then once it's over, you're like, yeah,
• 1:21:49
  let's do that again. It's weird. Do you remember a moment when
• 1:21:55
  you really started feeling that depression. I mean, was it just that things
• 1:21:59
  were coming together the way you wanted them to, yeah, or just I
• 1:22:05
  don't know if it's exactly what it was. It was just dealing with so
• 1:22:10
  much at once, and those really long hour days. I think I was
• 1:22:15
  the most depressed after like a fifteen hour day, came home at night,
• 1:22:18
  It's like this, I can't, I can't do it, you know,
• 1:22:24
  Yeah, just from exhaustion. Yeah, yeah, I think that was a
• 1:22:28
  big part of it, because I can't really point to one thing we was
• 1:22:30
  like, oh, that just fucked everything up. But yeah, it was
• 1:22:34
  just hard to get through, but yeah I did it. Yeah. I
• 1:22:39
  mean I think that's really super important for other filmmakers also to hear, you
• 1:22:44
  know, because not many people will, you know, they don't talk about
• 1:22:47
  that aspect of it that you know, and you can look back through time.
• 1:22:50
  I mean, look at you know, Star Wars or all these you
• 1:22:54
  know, amazing films. I was listening to some interview I think with Robert
• 1:22:58
  Rodriguez about talking with Quentin Tarantino and how depressed he was that pulp fiction was
• 1:23:03
  just a piece of shit, and he was like so depressed about it,
• 1:23:06
  and it's like it doesn't make any sense and it's done and whatever, you
• 1:23:11
  know, and it's like it seems like a pretty common thread with you know,
• 1:23:15
  making a film that you will go through that you know. Yeah,
• 1:23:18
  and even even the short's like you said the short too, yeah, I
• 1:23:21
  mean, the most important thing is to not give up, even though I
• 1:23:27
  mean, when you're in that moment, you are one hundred percent sure that
• 1:23:30
  this is never going to be good, that this is going to be shit.
• 1:23:33
  So it's really hard to continue, especially if you're making a low budget,
• 1:23:38
  no budget saying at home, because then it's easy. It's just nah,
• 1:23:41
  well it's you know, go watch Game of Thrones or you know,
• 1:23:44
  do something else instead. But you just really have to power through and get
• 1:23:49
  it done because you you can't know how you will feel about it when it's
• 1:23:54
  done. While you're in the making of You just can't even though you're one
• 1:23:58
  hundred percent convinced that you can. All right now, how I'm just curious
• 1:24:04
  how old were you when you made lights Out the short? Uh? So
• 1:24:09
  that was how do you do? I'm thirty five, so okay, thirty
• 1:24:14
  three maybe thirty two thirty three. Okay, I guess it was at the
• 1:24:17
  end of the deadline for that competition that we entered it, and was December
• 1:24:23
  thirtieth, twenty thirteen. Yeah, and then it went viral in the spring
• 1:24:30
  of twenty fourteen. Right, Well, can you was there any day in
• 1:24:36
  particular that sticks out that was like the hardest day you ever had on the
• 1:24:41
  set? I mean, I guess it must have been that fifteen hour day
• 1:24:46
  when we were just, yeah, trying to because we actually shot the finale
• 1:24:54
  of the film or a big sort of scene pretty early on, and that's
• 1:25:00
  what took so much time. It was so hard. And yeah, I
• 1:25:06
  don't know if it was the same day, maybe it was the same day,
• 1:25:10
  but when when we were having a big argument with the camera team as
• 1:25:15
  well, because we were shooting one of those scenes with the neon light when
• 1:25:21
  she disappears, you know, so you have to shoot you have to lock
• 1:25:25
  the camera off, shoot it with the performer, and then shoot it without
• 1:25:29
  the performer, so you can do that the effects thing of her going in
• 1:25:33
  and out, and they were so we'd moved the camera and then we were
• 1:25:39
  going to shoot one more time of her appearing and disappearing, and they were
• 1:25:42
  telling me that, no, but we already shot the clean clean plate.
• 1:25:45
  And I was like, but we've moved the camera. We have to do
• 1:25:48
  another clean plate. And they were kept telling me that, but we already
• 1:25:54
  have it, we shot it before. And I was like, eventually,
• 1:25:57
  I just snapped and I was like, just put the camera here, turn
• 1:26:00
  it on, and now you come in here, and now you okay,
• 1:26:01
  now roll the camera, cut it, and like I just had to take
• 1:26:06
  over and be Yeah. I was, yeah, kind of mad. Do
• 1:26:15
  you have what looking back now on the process and kind of being a little
• 1:26:20
  more weathered, I mean, do you feel like you changed a lot from
• 1:26:24
  the first day to the last day in terms of just the way you were
• 1:26:27
  doing things? Yeah. And I just just realizing how much you can ask
• 1:26:33
  for or demand, even because it was this whole thing that I've talked about,
• 1:26:40
  I talked about reasonably, where like I wanted this seem to be shot
• 1:26:45
  with candle light, like the little boy Gabriel, he has a candle walking
• 1:26:48
  through the house, and everyone was telling me about, no, you can't
• 1:26:54
  do that. You gotta lighted, you gotta lighted properly. And it's like,
• 1:26:58
  oh, okay. But then James came to the set that they were
• 1:27:01
  shooting that and he was like, hey, you should like that, but
• 1:27:04
  just a candle and everyone was like, oh, okay, great, great,
• 1:27:08
  we'll do that. So it's like it's mister ware, sure whatever you
• 1:27:12
  say. Yeah. So I've just realized that you can demand more. And
• 1:27:15
  something I discovered as well was sometimes when I was just tired and things weren't
• 1:27:21
  going as well as I wanted to, I'd be like, all right,
• 1:27:25
  that's good enough, let's move on. But then everyone would be like good
• 1:27:29
  enough. No, Like that's like the worst thing you can tell the film
• 1:27:32
  crew that it's just good enough, because they wanted to be really good.
• 1:27:36
  You know, did you say that on the set? It's good enough that
• 1:27:41
  you did? And I got that reaction It's like, what do you mean
• 1:27:44
  good enough? Like I'm Swedish, but I mean something else? Does we
• 1:27:47
  say it different? Did it sound bad? I don't know. Yeah no.
• 1:27:50
  So it's just realizing how much you can actually demand or sort of get
• 1:27:56
  people to do. Because the thing as well is that no one on set
• 1:28:00
  is going to care as much about the film as you do, just because
• 1:28:03
  for most of these people, for most of the crew, it's just another
• 1:28:06
  job, you know, like there's another movie and they'll just soon move on
• 1:28:11
  to another thing. So of course, if there's an easy way to do
• 1:28:15
  it, then that means they'll go home to their families earlier. And you
• 1:28:17
  know, you can't blame for that, but sometimes you have to do things
• 1:28:21
  the hard way. That the way they'll take a lot of time just to
• 1:28:26
  get it right. And yeah, I've sort of learned to demand that,
• 1:28:30
  I guess. Yeah, I mean, as far as I've seen with a
• 1:28:34
  lot of you know, these films, the director is usually the one person
• 1:28:41
  who has the least experience of being on a set. Yeah, you know,
• 1:28:44
  because all these other guys have been working for years as you know,
• 1:28:46
  crew members and doing stuff. That's a weird thing, Like there's two jobs
• 1:28:53
  on a film set you can get with no experience. It's a PA and
• 1:28:56
  the director, which is super weird to being on that film set and feel.
• 1:29:02
  I mean, it's reassuring as well to feel that you were the least
• 1:29:05
  experienced because at least everyone else has made movies before. Yeah, it's really
• 1:29:11
  good that a director can get that shot while others have to do go the
• 1:29:17
  long way. You know, to get good at cinematographer or you know,
• 1:29:24
  it's a strange business. Well you kind of see that going right and going
• 1:29:29
  wrong with different people, you know, because there's a lot of directors who
• 1:29:31
  are around now. I mean I look at like Gareth Edwards, for example.
• 1:29:35
  It's probably one of the closest examples to to kind of your story,
• 1:29:40
  you know, which was he made he went out and was making stuff on
• 1:29:44
  his own, and then you know, he made monsters with a little you
• 1:29:47
  know, yeah, the ax Ax something the sony with a let Us fifty
• 1:29:54
  millimeter on his you know, and then just took it into I mean,
• 1:29:57
  I see a lot of similarities with with what you guys have done. We'll
• 1:30:01
  be right back after a word from our sponsor and now back to the show.
• 1:30:11
  And he was the one that kind of inspired me to kind of get
• 1:30:14
  back into filmmaking after you know, I've been doing graphic design for years and
• 1:30:17
  I was like, wow, look at what this guy did and just kind
• 1:30:19
  of shot handheld and put all the effects in with motion tracking and everything.
• 1:30:24
  And then I saw what you did. And when I first discovered your videos,
• 1:30:29
  I didn't know that you were making a feature. I think the first
• 1:30:31
  time I saw Lights Out, you would already you were already in la you
• 1:30:34
  were already making it, you know. So I didn't even know that part
• 1:30:38
  of the story after it. Yeah, no, I mean it's quite interesting
• 1:30:42
  that there's so Hollywood seems to be so prepared to take chances on new directors,
• 1:30:48
  which is, yeah, probably a bad idea. Sometimes I wouldn't have
• 1:30:56
  given me a movie, because that's that's the thing back in Swi where we
• 1:31:00
  couldn't get money. You know. I went to one of the film centers
• 1:31:03
  in Sweden and wanted to get like a couple of grand to make a short.
• 1:31:09
  And they thought that. They said that I wasn't experienced enough to apply
• 1:31:14
  for the sort of professional money. And they said, yeah, maybe you
• 1:31:16
  can apply for the rookie money. But the rookie money was for people under
• 1:31:23
  thirty. So suddenly I was like, Okay, I'm too old for the
• 1:31:26
  rookie money and I'm too inexperienced for professional money. So what do I do
• 1:31:31
  now? While Hollywood, you know, they see it a two and a
• 1:31:33
  half minute short I directed, and they're like, hey, here's five million
• 1:31:36
  dollars direct the movie. And I was talking to a DP who shot a
• 1:31:45
  Single Man among other films. He's from Spain and he was saying the same
• 1:31:48
  thing like he was twenty seven and no one in Spain wanted to take a
• 1:31:51
  chance on him as a DP. But in the Hollywood they were like,
• 1:31:56
  yeah, you can DP a single man. So for some reason, they're
• 1:32:00
  stupid enough to take chances on people. Do you find that, like,
• 1:32:04
  I mean, what did you notice when you were in that world of producers
• 1:32:09
  and executives and stuff. Are they kind of dialed into that whole world of
• 1:32:15
  YouTube people and vimeo? I mean, is that kind of ye that they
• 1:32:18
  really started focusing on finding their next people from there? I mean obviously with
• 1:32:23
  you, Yeah, no, that's something I've discovered here that you hear a
• 1:32:27
  lot of talk about what's currently you know, the viral video or Yeah,
• 1:32:32
  people get discovered from that a lot. It seems, I mean, I
• 1:32:35
  don't seems to still be pretty rare that one goes to a feature, but
• 1:32:41
  you can still you know, get in a room and get meetings and people
• 1:32:45
  and maybe representation by doing shorts, because they seem to keep track of what's
• 1:32:50
  out there and what's popular. When Nate would talk to you about your shorts
• 1:32:56
  when I mean, and I don't know if if you and James talk about
• 1:33:00
  this, but were were they commenting on the amount of views it had and
• 1:33:04
  the amount of like the viral sensation or did they specifically say, oh,
• 1:33:09
  well, this guy knows what he's doing because look at this short and look
• 1:33:12
  at these things that he you know, these are kind of advanced things that
• 1:33:15
  you were doing versus somebody who just started doing you know, yeah, I
• 1:33:18
  I you know, I don't think they cared that much about the views,
• 1:33:23
  just sort of the effectiveness of the film really. Then, I know James
• 1:33:28
  was at first all hesitant because he was like, yeah, it's a cool
• 1:33:30
  short, but can this guy tell like a ninety minute story, which is
• 1:33:35
  you know, the treatment I wrote was what persuade him. Was like,
• 1:33:41
  that's what made him go, Okay, this guy knows a longer storytelling telling
• 1:33:47
  as well. But yeah, did you when you were after the treatment?
• 1:33:55
  What was is the the actual screenplay pretty pretty much what you had in that
• 1:34:00
  treatment or was it changed? It's he Eric Heiser, who wrote the screenplay,
• 1:34:08
  kept very close to that treatment. In fact, there's even like in
• 1:34:11
  that treatment where bits of dialogue and stuff that actually made it through to the
• 1:34:14
  film as well. Like there was one scene in there where we needed like
• 1:34:20
  a little scene between Teresa and her boyfriend and sort of like a placeholder.
• 1:34:27
  I wrote this scene where they have a like an argument about a sock or
• 1:34:30
  whatever, and that actually made it through the film. Like I was convinced
• 1:34:34
  that that would be the first thing that he would throw out that he kept
• 1:34:38
  it in. So yeah, it's pretty close. Was there ever a moment
• 1:34:44
  when you you were considering or you thought about actually writing the screenplay for it,
• 1:34:48
  or did they want to just go with somebody that was a little more
• 1:34:51
  seasoned, Like I felt that I didn't want to push my luck, you
• 1:34:57
  know, like I was just like a first time director, so they probably
• 1:35:00
  don't want a first time writer as well. Uh. And it's the same
• 1:35:04
  thing with with Lutta, you know, like she's been the star of every
• 1:35:09
  short, but like we didn't want to push her to be the lead in
• 1:35:13
  the film because I mean we just didn't want to push her luck because it
• 1:35:17
  felt like, oh, we have this chance now, Like if we pushed
• 1:35:19
  her harder than they might go, oh, well, then we're not doing
• 1:35:23
  the film. So it's like, yeah, a lot of that, like,
• 1:35:26
  yeah, sure, I will just work with the writer. But it
• 1:35:28
  turned out great because I loved Eric's work as well. He you know,
• 1:35:33
  while I was doing the water Bottle tour and while the agents were sending me
• 1:35:38
  scripts, the one script that I wanted, really wanted to make was one
• 1:35:43
  that he had written called bird Box. And uh yeah, uh yeah,
• 1:35:49
  well that was another writer. But yeah that bird Box was on black List
• 1:35:53
  as well. Okay, okay, that's so um no lud and I even
• 1:35:58
  made a little like a trailer for bird Box to sort of to pitch that
• 1:36:04
  to the production company. But I'm not really sure with talking with that now.
• 1:36:10
  I think Andy Machetti or Miscueto who made Mama is a right, but
• 1:36:17
  he's doing it now, so I don't know what's happening with that. But
• 1:36:19
  that that was a really good script, so I was very happy that he
• 1:36:25
  wanted to write lights out. Yeah. Well that's another example. The guy
• 1:36:29
  that made um Mama is another guy that like had a short. Yeah,
• 1:36:32
  and what kind of did the same trajectory that you did. Yeah, and
• 1:36:38
  god gamal Gamaltro as a producer. Yeah, it's not too shabby. How
• 1:36:45
  is Luta dealt with La is she feeling comfortable there is uh what is she
• 1:36:50
  thinking? Yeah? No, uh, she's loving it as well. I
• 1:36:55
  mean it's did you ever get recognized? She does? I mean even I
• 1:37:00
  started to get recognized. We were at the grove here in a lady other
• 1:37:02
  day and these three guys came up, So hey, are you the director
• 1:37:04
  of Lights Out? It's like yeah, hey, um now, so so
• 1:37:11
  that's weird, but yeah, do you like that? I mean, do
• 1:37:14
  you like being recognized so far? Yeah? I mean as a director,
• 1:37:19
  I don't think you ever get to that point where it's annoying, you know
• 1:37:24
  where. I mean I wouldn't want to be you know, Brad Pitt or
• 1:37:27
  someone who can't probably can't go outside a lot um. But yeah, so
• 1:37:32
  far it's great. Yeah. I can imagine, like you just you know,
• 1:37:39
  going to the well in LA It's totally different though, because you'll go
• 1:37:41
  to the grocery store and you'll see like five or six stars shopping there and
• 1:37:44
  it's like nothing, Yeah, that's pretty cool. Like yeah, just down
• 1:37:47
  the street here, I walked by Christopher Nolan the other day. It's like,
• 1:37:50
  oh, yeah, like, hi, I'm a fellow director. Yeah,
• 1:37:57
  we were in the same union yeah. I used to go to a
• 1:38:01
  grocery store that was like down the road from like kind of near Melrose.
• 1:38:05
  I used to live, and there was a grocery store there that I would
• 1:38:08
  always go, and I would pay more because I would always see a star
• 1:38:11
  there. But I would just kind of sit there and like watch him and
• 1:38:13
  be like wow, that's yeah, it's the same thing here. We see
• 1:38:15
  a lot of slatteries down in the grocery store. You just play cool,
• 1:38:19
  You just yeah, well you know. Now you can do that on your
• 1:38:28
  movie set. You can be like, hey, that's it's gonna talk to
• 1:38:30
  me. Oh oh, he's coming over here. It's like you're the director.
• 1:38:34
  Why are you hiding? Yeah? Hi, how you doing? It's
• 1:38:39
  the same thing. I have a friend who's like, can't you give me
• 1:38:42
  the black guy's the autograph or whatever. It's like, no, I have
• 1:38:45
  to play cool, like I know what I'm doing when I'm meeting all these
• 1:38:49
  people. Well, is there like a do you kind of have a dual
• 1:38:53
  life now? I mean, is it like you go you go back to
• 1:38:57
  Sweden and it's kind of like, oh, yeah, it's just David,
• 1:39:00
  you know, how's it going and everything? Then you come back and it's
• 1:39:01
  kind of like you get to be on a set and have all these like
• 1:39:03
  famous people and everything. I mean, so far, I've I've only been
• 1:39:08
  back for two weeks at Christmas, so like, I don't know, I'm
• 1:39:12
  just here all the time. Now. This is my life now. But
• 1:39:15
  it's awesome because like I want to see how far I can take this Hollywood
• 1:39:19
  thing. Because I can always go back to making no budget shorts this doesn't
• 1:39:24
  work out well, you can always talk to the people that didn't give you
• 1:39:28
  your fund yeah, and be like, hey, guys, remember me.
• 1:39:31
  Yeah, I've made two Hollywood movies. Now can I get some money?
• 1:39:35
  They're like, I don't know, Yeah, I haven't done any Swedish movies.
• 1:39:40
  Yeah, that's the real you know the sign. Are there any Swedish
• 1:39:44
  horror movies that people like that? I mean, I know you probably I've
• 1:39:47
  seen seen your other conversations and I know you you like m mostly kind of
• 1:39:54
  American based horror films and stuff. Are there any horror films from Sweden that
• 1:39:58
  people should check out? We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor,
• 1:40:06
  and now back to the show. Yeah, I mean the one of
• 1:40:12
  the more famous ones is Let the right one in Oh yeah, yeah,
• 1:40:15
  that's brilliant. Um, they do some of that stuff. Usually it's based
• 1:40:19
  on books. I guess that makes them more comfortable in doing genre stuff like
• 1:40:24
  that. And you know, Girl with the Dragon Tattoo just isn't really horror
• 1:40:28
  but more of a genre film. Um, what else is there? There's
• 1:40:32
  not a lot of horror made in Sweden, I don't think, mostly sort
• 1:40:38
  of movies about alcoholism and the different type of immigrants and you know, divorce.
• 1:40:46
  But what would you what are your like favorite Like what if you had
• 1:40:50
  to go back and like pick say like five films that are the ones that
• 1:40:54
  influenced you the most, what would those be? Well, just from my
• 1:40:57
  childhood, it's sort of acold horror sci fi, you know Aliens, Terminator,
• 1:41:02
  the thing die Hard, you know, the stuff I grew up on,
• 1:41:06
  which I still love. And yeah, I just last week I think
• 1:41:12
  it was they were showing Aliens on the big screen here at Arclif and that's
• 1:41:15
  always been my dream to see that in a theater. So I had to
• 1:41:19
  go and it's like, yeah, my onest movie still holds up. I
• 1:41:23
  love that movie. Yeah so good. Yeah, But did you say Alien
• 1:41:28
  or Aliens. Aliens, I mean Alien it's one of the best. Well,
• 1:41:32
  that's amazing. Yeah, Aliens was the first movie that I ever saw.
• 1:41:36
  I'm a little older than you, but I mean I saw that.
• 1:41:39
  I was I got into the theater with my family to watch it, and
• 1:41:43
  I realized about a couple of minutes in that I was way too young to
• 1:41:46
  be on that movie because I was. I mean, I didn't sleep for
• 1:41:49
  a week, And to this day, it's still the most horrifying movie just
• 1:41:54
  in terms of, you know, scaring the hell out of me. But
• 1:41:57
  I mean I think it came out and what like ninety six or something,
• 1:42:00
  I mean eighty six, Yeah, yeah, and I would have been like
• 1:42:03
  twelve or something like that. But I remember going to see that and oh
• 1:42:06
  my god, it was so scary. And I mean that's probably one of
• 1:42:11
  my favorite screenplays too, you know. Yeah, I mean James Cameron just
• 1:42:15
  like has this way of creating care anyway, I don't want to get off
• 1:42:18
  into that, yeah I know, but I'm a Cameron fanboys as well.
• 1:42:23
  Okay, so let me just ask you this and I'll kind of wrap it
• 1:42:26
  up with Annabelle two. Are you um, do you go back and look
• 1:42:31
  at the original movie or you what do you do in a creative sense,
• 1:42:35
  And I know you're you're not writing the screenplay for it, I assume,
• 1:42:40
  yeah, but I assume you have a lot to do with what's going to
• 1:42:44
  be in the screenplay. Yeah, we're working together with the writer and all
• 1:42:47
  that. Um, you know, without giving too much away, the story
• 1:42:54
  of Annibal two isn't a continuation of Annibal one really, which was enticing to
• 1:43:03
  me that it's its own thing more, you know. But of course I
• 1:43:10
  had to go back and rewatch Annabelle one and sort of getting into that and
• 1:43:14
  see what they did and Conjuring one and two as well, because Annabelle is
• 1:43:19
  in well, especially in Conjuring one, which is where she first appeared.
• 1:43:25
  Um, but yeah, but James wrapped on the Conjuring two. That's that's
• 1:43:30
  like a done deal now, right. Oh yeah, and they even had
• 1:43:33
  like a surprise screening in Austin the other day and yeah, so um that
• 1:43:40
  opens on first sort of, they have their premiere at the LA Film Festival
• 1:43:45
  on the June seventh, and then on June eighth we show lights out,
• 1:43:49
  so that after June eighth, people are gonna know there's gonna be reviews and
• 1:43:55
  stuff. I guess. So what is your biggest like, how do you
• 1:43:59
  feel, what's your biggest fear right now? Are you kind of like just
• 1:44:01
  waiting for that? I am. Well. The weird thing is that everyone
• 1:44:05
  is so confident that it's going to be hit that I think they're going to
• 1:44:09
  jinx it, you know, because it's been it's tested really well, and
• 1:44:15
  like everyone's like, no, this is gonna be a hit. It's like
• 1:44:16
  you don't know, anything can happen, you know. So yeah, I
• 1:44:21
  hope people like it. You know, well, I think one of the
• 1:44:27
  really interesting things about it, and you know, not a lot of other
• 1:44:30
  films can say this, but it's already had you know, because of the
• 1:44:33
  short, it's already got people who are kind of aware, you know what
• 1:44:36
  I mean that that's a huge I mean in terms of marketing of a film,
• 1:44:41
  that's got to be like a huge, you know, huge deal for
• 1:44:44
  them. I don't know how much they think about that when they're doing it,
• 1:44:46
  you know, when they're like planning stuff out. But it's like,
• 1:44:48
  okay, well this has had a bazillion download so everybody already knows the sort
• 1:44:54
  you know. Yeah, I mean, we've had to push that out of
• 1:44:57
  a little bit because, like, you know, I don't to cut the
• 1:45:00
  trailer. That's all marketing. But so they they they had this trailer that
• 1:45:05
  they wanted to show that was similar to this trailer, but it didn't start
• 1:45:11
  with looked on the light Switch. And we told the marketing department, like,
• 1:45:16
  you have to put that in the trailer and put it at the top
• 1:45:19
  because there's going to be people out there that may have seen the short but
• 1:45:24
  they don't might not remember the name or whatever. But if you have that
• 1:45:27
  scene with her doing the same thing as in the short, they're going to
• 1:45:30
  go, oh, I've seen this before, like I remember that. So
• 1:45:33
  we really had to sort of push them to put that in the trailer.
• 1:45:39
  But yeah, otherwise, I know, I think I think the Warners digital
• 1:45:44
  marketing department are more on top of it, you know, with all use
• 1:45:48
  and all of that, because they wanted they wanted to get all the stats
• 1:45:54
  from my YouTube and Vimeo pages and I'm not sure what they're doing with that,
• 1:45:57
  but probably something cool. So yeah, it's it's been a it's not
• 1:46:03
  been at the forefront. It's been more the marketing seems to be more pushing
• 1:46:08
  that it's produced by James Wand because people know conjuring and all that. M
• 1:46:14
  yeah, yeah, uh, I just lost my train of thought. I
• 1:46:17
  had a question for you. Um, all right, it's gone. Sorry,
• 1:46:25
  that's something really important. Uh give me marketing short millions? Well do
• 1:46:30
  you do you how much are they kind of like? I mean, are
• 1:46:32
  you getting We talk a lot about marketing and distribution here, and I don't
• 1:46:36
  know how much you've kind of been you know, a part of that.
• 1:46:41
  I mean, is there any insights you've had in terms of the way they're
• 1:46:45
  promoting it and the way that you know things that you've seen on your side.
• 1:46:49
  I mean, that's a frustrating thing, how little you are a part
• 1:46:54
  of that. Because the weird thing is like this movie costs like five million
• 1:46:59
  dollars, but to market a movie you need way more than that. So
• 1:47:02
  I feel like the marketing budget is many times the actual movie budget for a
• 1:47:08
  project like this, and they I don't know. I mean, you just
• 1:47:12
  have to hope that they know what they're doing, because you're you know,
• 1:47:15
  they cut the trailers, they make the posters, and they do all that
• 1:47:17
  thing, all those things. I mean, they'll they'll show it to you
• 1:47:21
  and you can sort of say what you want, but ultimately it's they do
• 1:47:28
  their thing, you know, they know the marketing like that. That's one
• 1:47:31
  thing I've been sort of trying to say that this movie is more fun,
• 1:47:38
  Like the trailer is very traditional horror movie, but it actually is a bit
• 1:47:42
  more fun, more of a fun movie, which I told marketing like,
• 1:47:46
  isn't it their way to get that in there for the next trailer, And
• 1:47:51
  it's more like just no, like this is how you market a horror movie.
• 1:47:55
  It's like, all right, I guess what is there? The feeling
• 1:47:59
  they they've like just done it so many times, so like, yeah,
• 1:48:01
  we know what we're doing. Just you know, quiet down, we'll put
• 1:48:03
  it all together and this is we've done this a million times. We've made
• 1:48:06
  a bazillion dollars and is and I mean, yeah, they have made a
• 1:48:11
  get a billion dollars. Yeah, I guess they know what they're doing,
• 1:48:15
  you know. But and that's the same thing like if I if I were
• 1:48:18
  to cut a trailer, you probably wouldn't see a lot because I was like,
• 1:48:23
  no, we can't give that away, can't give that away. So
• 1:48:25
  it's like I guess you've got to have someone who's more sort of now we
• 1:48:28
  know how this works, like yeah, yeah, well, I mean my
• 1:48:33
  favorite is always like if you look back at the Alien, the original Alien
• 1:48:38
  ads and you just had an egg hatching, you know, and yeah,
• 1:48:43
  you know, I that's I'm a big fan of that, you know have.
• 1:48:45
  And that's one of the big things I like about your shorts as well,
• 1:48:47
  is that it just has you know, I'm working on a short right
• 1:48:50
  now, and I keep making it bigger and bigger and bigger, and I
• 1:48:55
  keep adding people and I no, no, no, no, I gotta
• 1:48:57
  get I gotta get it down to just the basic idea, you know.
• 1:49:00
  And I think that's one of the things that you're short also really inspires people
• 1:49:04
  to think about. It's like, look, you know, we were just
• 1:49:09
  at sitting around the apartment one day and we were like, Okay, let's
• 1:49:12
  come up with some ideas that are scary and let's just shoot it. You
• 1:49:15
  know. Yeah, I don't know if it was like that, but well,
• 1:49:17
  behind characterizing, yeah, I think a lot of people they have like
• 1:49:24
  feature ideas that they only have resources for a short, so they try to
• 1:49:27
  compress feature ideas into very short amount of time, and I think, I
• 1:49:31
  mean, at least the way we look then I make them. It's just
• 1:49:35
  a scene or two. You know, it's not really trying to tell such
• 1:49:41
  a big story. We're just going in for a couple of scenes and making
• 1:49:46
  the best we can out of that. We'll be right back after a word
• 1:49:51
  from our sponsor, and now back to the show. Do you consciously think
• 1:50:00
  I mean, when you were making Lights Out the short, was it just
• 1:50:05
  like, okay, we want we know people are sitting How much are you
• 1:50:09
  thinking about your audience? Are you like, okay, let's make this.
• 1:50:12
  I know people don't have any sort of attention span. There's a bunch of
• 1:50:15
  little horror shorts out there. Are you thinking about that? I mean,
• 1:50:20
  are you just like, okay, let's let's come up with something that people
• 1:50:23
  can click on real quick and just watch something fast. Yeah, it's just
• 1:50:27
  gets straight to the point. Just have her flip that light switch as early
• 1:50:30
  as you can. She's just walking from the bathroom and right there to just
• 1:50:34
  get straight into it. Because once they see that, they get sort of
• 1:50:36
  like, oh that's cool, and then they're hooked. You know, they
• 1:50:41
  want to see where it takes off from there, there's just a lot you
• 1:50:45
  can cut out of both shorts and features and still you know that that you
• 1:50:50
  don't need. I mean, you still have to have a good pace and
• 1:50:54
  a good rhythm to it. But I think movies today are too long,
• 1:50:58
  so lights out. It's actually like things like eighty minutes or something. So
• 1:51:03
  and one of the producers was kind of freaking out about that. It was
• 1:51:06
  like it has to be longer, Like why then, you know, people
• 1:51:11
  have seen it. No one has said that it's too short, or that
• 1:51:15
  the pacing is weird or something. It just feels right. Yeah, yeah,
• 1:51:20
  I wish more people more films were like ninety minutes instead of the two
• 1:51:25
  and a half hours things we get nowadays. Nowadays, it makes you wonder
• 1:51:30
  how many movies are like, you know, you see all these movies that
• 1:51:32
  come out, all these blockbusters and everything, and it's like it was just
• 1:51:35
  like maybe ten minutes a little too long, And you wonder if that was
• 1:51:39
  like some executive in there going, yeah, we need to we need to
• 1:51:43
  add a little bit more. And it was just like why, you know,
• 1:51:45
  but it's like it was weird. It could have ended. Yeah,
• 1:51:48
  yeah, it's weird because I mean if they have shorter movies, they can
• 1:51:51
  have more showings in a day and they'll make more money. But maybe it's
• 1:51:57
  something everything has to be epic these days, guys. No, what are
• 1:52:01
  you sick of seeing in horror movies? What turns you off to to you
• 1:52:04
  know, if you're watching something and you're just like okay, within like,
• 1:52:09
  say the first fifteen minutes, what is the horror movie has to do in
• 1:52:12
  the first fifteen ten, fifteen minutes to kind of like pull you in?
• 1:52:15
  Uh well, I mean, as as long as they don't have really stupid
• 1:52:23
  characters that you just like, you don't want a horror movie. You want
• 1:52:26
  the people to die, you know. I mean that can be fun in
• 1:52:28
  certain movies, but stuff like that and just yea and the fake kind of
• 1:52:34
  jumped scarce was this loud sounds with stuff that has nothing to do with the
• 1:52:40
  horrors of the film. Um yeah, but yeah. Do you watch like
• 1:52:46
  you click around like Netflix and stuff like that and try to find new stuff.
• 1:52:53
  It just seems like there's I mean one of the things that we talk
• 1:52:55
  about, you know, and I've talked to a lot of indie filmmakers who
• 1:52:58
  are you know, making all different levels of you know, they make stuff
• 1:53:01
  that you know, very low budget, from a couple of thousand dollars to
• 1:53:08
  fifty thousand till a hundred or you know in that range, and you know,
• 1:53:12
  I just kind of try to figure out, like what what's the whole
• 1:53:15
  process, you know, where they were they selling it? What's what's what's
• 1:53:18
  that world? Like, you know, and um, yeah, I mean
• 1:53:23
  for the last year. So, I mean, since we've came to LA,
• 1:53:27
  we haven't had a television, so we've been able to watch a lot
• 1:53:30
  of stuff just on our laptops. Um. But the good thing about living
• 1:53:34
  in LA is that you can see a lot of limited release, smaller movies.
• 1:53:40
  So, like I some of my favorites recently were Green Room, which
• 1:53:45
  I loved, and The Invitation, which is really good as well. Um
• 1:53:50
  now, but I'm going to see the Green Room. Yeah, I love
• 1:53:54
  though, um now, but that that and that's actually like I go,
• 1:53:58
  since we don't have a TV, we go more to the theaters these days
• 1:54:03
  because we lived by band Arc lights. So it's it's it's great, but
• 1:54:08
  a lot of movies it's just it feels like the same, you know,
• 1:54:11
  like it's all the same sort of superhero stories and stuff like that. So
• 1:54:15
  it's almost at points you get like, I'm kind of tired of movies,
• 1:54:18
  but then you see a movie like Green Room, it's like, no,
• 1:54:20
  I love movies, you know. Yeah, but yeah, a Netflix is
• 1:54:28
  I try to find stuff there, but usually you just Netflix. It's just
• 1:54:32
  we're scrolling through looking at movies and then never watching anything. Like Yeah,
• 1:54:41
  I mean, it's just interesting the way things are changing now, you know.
• 1:54:44
  And I try as much as possible to see stuff in the theater,
• 1:54:47
  but you know, and especially down here, we just don't get a lot.
• 1:54:53
  But it's just kind of watching the evolution. You know. When I
• 1:54:56
  was younger, you would go see a movie because the quality was my better
• 1:55:00
  that that was the only opportunity you had, you know, and then it
• 1:55:02
  would go to um, you know. Home video was even kind of like
• 1:55:06
  a new thing, you know, and things have changed so quickly, so
• 1:55:10
  everybody's watching, you know, the majority of people are going to see your
• 1:55:13
  film on a TV, which kind of sucks, you know, because it's
• 1:55:16
  made for being in a theater. Yeah, so you know, then there's
• 1:55:19
  this giant kind of glut of now that the technology is so cheap, there's
• 1:55:26
  just horror movies like Crazy coming out, you know. I mean, if
• 1:55:30
  you go on like Amazon, Prime and Netflix and all these different places,
• 1:55:33
  it's like and the qualities a lot of them is just not very good.
• 1:55:38
  So I don't really have a point. It's just bitching about it, I
• 1:55:40
  guess no, But I mean that's the sad truth, is that ninety percent
• 1:55:45
  of horror movies or preach terrible, And which is kind of sad because nowadays,
• 1:55:50
  like now that I'm I'm I mean this last year and now I've been
• 1:55:55
  working so much that it's almost like I don't really want to take chance answers,
• 1:56:00
  you know, I want to see something that I know is good.
• 1:56:02
  So yeah, I mean, and especially now that I'm making movies, I'm
• 1:56:08
  actually trying to watch a lot of classics because I want to see something that
• 1:56:13
  I know is good and something that's sort of valuable. So I've been watching
• 1:56:15
  old stuff like Fritz Lanz M and your Yimbo and just you know, trying
• 1:56:23
  to yeah, I mean stuff, yeah of Coursawa. I don't know if
• 1:56:28
  you're like me, but I find it's so inspiring to kind of see those
• 1:56:30
  stories and be like, oh, you know, do you get inspired,
• 1:56:34
  Like when you watch other people's movies, do you start having your own ideas
• 1:56:38
  about things? Yeah? Absolutely? Yeah? I mean is that how Let
• 1:56:42
  me just ask you this kind of blank question in terms of creativity, like
• 1:56:45
  what do you have any have you learned to kind of like control your creativity
• 1:56:50
  and learn how to use it and put it together and stuff? And do
• 1:56:54
  you do you do things that you know are going to kind of jump that
• 1:56:57
  creativity? No? Just yeah, I don't have a specific process. It's
• 1:57:06
  just sort of comes up. I guess. I love sort of idea that
• 1:57:11
  based things, especially sort of time travel movies and sort of that has a
• 1:57:16
  neat idea at the core of it. Um, But yeah, I'm really
• 1:57:21
  sure what the ideas come from. Do you write things down? I mean,
• 1:57:26
  do you like if you're you know, you said you wake up in
• 1:57:29
  the middle of the night sometimes, is that what? Do you get ideas
• 1:57:31
  sometimes that way? Or yes? Uh no, Just a little while ago,
• 1:57:35
  I add this, like I dreamed this whole scene and I woke up
• 1:57:42
  and I wrote it down on my phone, And then the morning after I
• 1:57:47
  sent that to the screenwriter for Annabel Too. I was like, hey,
• 1:57:50
  can we put this in the movie. And it was like if I wrote,
• 1:57:54
  like I have this dream of this in the movie, yes, it's
• 1:57:59
  like, what the hell are you talking about? Man? Yeah, I
• 1:58:01
  wrote out this whole scene and sent to him him and he was like,
• 1:58:05
  Uh, why don't I have dreams like that? Just get a whole scene.
• 1:58:10
  But in the movie No, So that's that's actually in the scripts,
• 1:58:13
  in the script. That's great, that's awesome. Well, you know one
• 1:58:15
  of the things that you know, there was a book out not too long
• 1:58:18
  ago that talked about how you're the state of mind that you're in just as
• 1:58:24
  you wake up is so far into your right brain that that is, you
• 1:58:28
  will never find a more purely creative moment that when you're in that kind of
• 1:58:32
  dream state, because you're you're in the same state of mind when you dream,
• 1:58:36
  so your mind is just creating stuff. So that's why a lot of
• 1:58:40
  people always have like a you know, a pad and paper beside the bed
• 1:58:44
  or people right when they first wake up. You know, that kind of
• 1:58:46
  explains a lot, because I do have that a lot of being sort of
• 1:58:50
  half awake, half asleep. Usually it's sort of nightmarish stuff and I freak
• 1:58:56
  out and like my wife will have to go. No, no, no,
• 1:58:58
  you're dreaming like get back to sleep. So maybe that's where a lot
• 1:59:01
  of it is born. Yeah, well, David, I really appreciate this
• 1:59:08
  man. Is there is there anything else that we could touch on? Is
• 1:59:12
  there any advice that you have for all the indie filmmakers that are out there
• 1:59:15
  kind of like hoping to emulate you a little bit or kind of following your
• 1:59:20
  path a bit. I mean, the main advice would just be to keep
• 1:59:25
  making stuff and putting it up online and not giving up even though you think
• 1:59:29
  it's going to be shit, because you never know. And yeah, and
• 1:59:33
  you never know what it is that's going to resonate with people. Like you
• 1:59:38
  know, I was talking to this producer who made this big Kickstarter project,
• 1:59:43
  like this big like series of videos that they had quite a budget for we'll
• 1:59:49
  be right back after a word from our sponsor and now back to the show,
• 1:59:59
  and nothing happened with it. And then with his friends, he just
• 2:00:02
  did like a quick YouTube thing that costs no money, and that's what got
• 2:00:09
  the representation in Hollywood and got into a bunch of meetings and stuff. So
• 2:00:13
  you just keep making stuff and you never know what's gonna what's going to be
• 2:00:17
  the thing that actually gets you out there. Yeah, that's one of the
• 2:00:23
  you know, after doing this for like a year and a half, you
• 2:00:26
  know, and I had a project that fell apart a couple of years ago,
• 2:00:30
  and I just you know, it's really inspiring the stuff that you did
• 2:00:33
  and with your short and everything. But it's just like that that seems to
• 2:00:39
  be the common thread with people who are having success in the indie film world
• 2:00:43
  now, is just okay, start making shorts. Just get out there,
• 2:00:46
  start shooting. It doesn't matter, you know, shoot with your DSLR or
• 2:00:49
  whatever. It's like the equipment doesn't matter anymore. And just slowly, not
• 2:00:54
  all of us are going to get like picked up for a major film,
• 2:00:57
  but it's like just slowly, one short, a little you know, and
• 2:01:00
  learn. I mean, were you, you know, each short that you
• 2:01:02
  did, were you learning a little bit more and kind of saying okay,
• 2:01:04
  I put this together, now let me try it a little bit more.
• 2:01:09
  Absolutely. I mean, yeah, I'm thirty five now and I've been making
• 2:01:12
  movies since i was eight, you know, so it's right, you get
• 2:01:16
  better and better and you learn more and more the whole time. So yeah,
• 2:01:20
  well, cool, is there, um, do you want to Usually
• 2:01:24
  I ask people if they want to leave there, like websites and information.
• 2:01:28
  I don't know if there's anything that you want to leave or like your Twitter
• 2:01:31
  handle, maybe people can kind of follow you. Yeah, I'm at Pony
• 2:01:35
  Smasher on Twitter and on Instagram and on YouTube, I'm pony Smasher as well.
• 2:01:45
  Should I ask what that? Well, it all started with YouTube.
• 2:01:47
  I mean when YouTube was this new thing, like I signed up for that,
• 2:01:51
  but it wasn't a thing yet, so it's like, I don't know
• 2:01:54
  if I'm going to use this, I'll just okay, I'm a Pony Smasher.
• 2:01:58
  And then it became things like okay, I guess I'm Pony Smasher now.
• 2:02:02
  Yeah. So it's kind of weird now that they're like the marketing people
• 2:02:06
  or like when the articles and stuff on Twitter about like you know, you
• 2:02:13
  have at Teresa Palmer or whatever, and then at Pony Smasher it's like,
• 2:02:15
  oh, but James, well, I mean it could have been worse,
• 2:02:19
  you know, it could have been like gorilla penis or something. Yeah.
• 2:02:23
  Oh, okay. I want to thank Jason so much for doing such an
• 2:02:29
  amazing job with this episode If you want to get links anything we spoke about
• 2:02:32
  in this episode, head over to the show notes at Indy Film muscle dot
• 2:02:35
  com Forward slash seven four. If you haven't already, please head over to
• 2:02:41
  Filmmaking podcast dot com, subscribe and leave a good review for the show.
• 2:02:45
  It really helps us out a lot, guys. Thank you again so much
• 2:02:48
  for listening to guys. As always, keep that hustle going, keep that
• 2:02:51
  dream alive, Stay safe out there, and I'll talk too soon. Thanks
• 2:02:55
  for listening to the Indie Film Hustle podcast at Indie Film Hustle dot com.
• 2:03:00
  That's I N D I E F I L M h U S T l
• 2:03:02
  E dot com.