Special Edition: An Interview with the Creators of "Canners" -or- How to Make an Award-Winning Film for only $2000

<v Speaker 1>Where do the movies that we love come.
<v Speaker 2>From as you wish?
<v Speaker 1>Do they come from some magical place that we ordinary
<v Speaker 1>folks can only dream of? Are they made by people
<v Speaker 1>of genius that we can never.
<v Speaker 3>Understand, oh, captain, my captain?
<v Speaker 1>Or do they come from people just like me and you?
<v Speaker 1>I'm Batman, a family man or woman who goes to
<v Speaker 1>the nine to five job every day, but is secretly
<v Speaker 1>an undercover artist, an undercover artist whose secret identity is
<v Speaker 1>crying out to be revealed. Three years ago, two regular
<v Speaker 1>guys began working on a script of a movie that
<v Speaker 1>they hoped would be something original and something they could
<v Speaker 1>produce on their own work. With virtually no resources at
<v Speaker 1>their disposal, they were in a difficult position, but with
<v Speaker 1>the termination and a steadfast dedication to their goal, they
<v Speaker 1>made their dream of reality.
<v Speaker 2>Look at all those teens.
<v Speaker 1>Mike Morgan and Darren Doyle, who are together known as
<v Speaker 1>the Nuevo Brothers, released this film in May of this year.
<v Speaker 1>Jason and I were fortunate enough to come across it
<v Speaker 1>just after its release, and we are honored to have
<v Speaker 1>them as guests on our show.
<v Speaker 3>And you know, this might be our only time ever
<v Speaker 3>to be able to do this, That's what happens.
<v Speaker 2>He's had can or kill each other over cans.
<v Speaker 3>There's something very cinematic about a bicycle man.
<v Speaker 2>Eighty percent of your film is done in the casting
<v Speaker 2>and to a point.
<v Speaker 3>Where we were writing scripts with I guess this idea
<v Speaker 3>that you know someone was going to come with a
<v Speaker 3>wand and make it happen for us.
<v Speaker 2>If you almost fell into the lake.
<v Speaker 3>At least we spend a lot of time trying to
<v Speaker 3>find people that would help us get stuff off the ground,
<v Speaker 3>and ultimately speaking, you just need to go out and
<v Speaker 3>just do it yourself.
<v Speaker 2>Got to be a self starter. You got to do
<v Speaker 2>it by yourself. Just make crappy little five minute videos.
<v Speaker 2>Do something. Because Delvalry is a coming tans question. We
<v Speaker 2>made a conscious decision. We said we're not going to
<v Speaker 2>write anything else. We're not going to make this is it.
<v Speaker 3>If we had settled and with it, we probably wouldn't
<v Speaker 3>be having this conversation.
<v Speaker 2>Out three fourths into the movie. We hit a wall.
<v Speaker 1>Since that time, they have earned the following awards. Finalist
<v Speaker 1>of the twenty twenty Hollywood First Time Filmmaker Showcase, winner
<v Speaker 1>of the scream at Off Screen twenty twenty and winner
<v Speaker 1>of the Creation International Film Festival for Best Comedy Short,
<v Speaker 1>Best Editing and Judge's Choice. We hope you enjoy the
<v Speaker 1>special edition of the Surely You Can't Serious Podcast?
<v Speaker 3>My God.
<v Speaker 1>Chairs all right, welcome everybody. We're here for the Surely
<v Speaker 1>you Can't Be Serious Podcast. Today is a special edition.
<v Speaker 1>We have two gentlemen with us today. Typically what we
<v Speaker 1>do is we go and look at movies from our past.
<v Speaker 1>We look at movies from the eighties or the nineties,
<v Speaker 1>music from the eighties or the nineties. We've had posts
<v Speaker 1>on Facebook that you know, what would you think about
<v Speaker 1>this movie being remade or that movie being remade, and
<v Speaker 1>almost everyone says, you know what, Hollywood needs to do
<v Speaker 1>something original. Well, we're with a couple of guys today
<v Speaker 1>that did something original, and they did it on a
<v Speaker 1>budget of next to nothing, and we are super excited
<v Speaker 1>that they are here. They have put together a short
<v Speaker 1>film that involves greed, murder, and the poverty stricken and
<v Speaker 1>surrounds that with ideas of God and the Chosen and
<v Speaker 1>wraps it all in the story of the Goose that
<v Speaker 1>laid the Golden Egg. And it's just it's a masterpiece,
<v Speaker 1>especially considering that these guys put this together for only
<v Speaker 1>two thousand dollars. I was blown away when you guys
<v Speaker 1>told me how much that costs to make. So we
<v Speaker 1>are here with our special guests, the creators of the
<v Speaker 1>movie Canners, Darren Doyle and Mike borgan A doing good.
<v Speaker 1>How are you guys doing?
<v Speaker 3>Thanks for having us.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, we love having you here. First, let's go back
<v Speaker 1>and tell us how you guys met.
<v Speaker 3>Yeah, we met in New Wavo playing hockey. That's where
<v Speaker 3>we formed our friendship. That's where we came up with
<v Speaker 3>the name for ourselves in the way of our brothers.
<v Speaker 2>Well, not only does it that's where we met, but
<v Speaker 2>it also means new and novel.
<v Speaker 3>But that was kind of cool.
<v Speaker 1>I'm really impressed you've taken an old idea and made
<v Speaker 1>something very new and very unique about it, and I
<v Speaker 1>think it's fantastic. Mike, you have a video company, correct.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, I own feedb Media, which basically relance from a
<v Speaker 2>wedding days ago, and you know, corporate and anything in between. Event,
<v Speaker 2>the talk, videography, okay, international pizza expo, that stuff.
<v Speaker 1>And Darren, what about you, what's your nine to five?
<v Speaker 3>I worked for a wholesale alarm monitoring company pays the bills.
<v Speaker 1>Right, yeah, So do you guys all right? Do you
<v Speaker 1>have families? Are you married, kids, anything like that.
<v Speaker 2>I've got a long long term girlfriend. Uh yeah, Karen's
<v Speaker 2>got a long term girlfriend as well.
<v Speaker 3>Mike's my long term girlfriend.
<v Speaker 1>It's funny because when I call it, when I'm talking
<v Speaker 1>to Jason on the phone, my wife will come in
<v Speaker 1>and she's like, are you talking to your girlfriend? And
<v Speaker 1>I'm like, yeah, yeah.
<v Speaker 3>My girlfriend says the same thing tongue in cheek, of course,
<v Speaker 3>because I feel I could do better to Mike.
<v Speaker 2>And I'm settling as well. So so what's.
<v Speaker 4>The ultimate goal for you guys? Do you guys want
<v Speaker 4>to be big time Hollywood directors and that type of thing?
<v Speaker 3>It sounds so shallow. Uh yeah, you know, I'd look
<v Speaker 3>to have the ability to be able to tell stories
<v Speaker 3>the stories I want to tell with the people I
<v Speaker 3>want to tell the stories with. That would be ideal.
<v Speaker 2>We don't necessarily care about Hollywood and the insular industry itself.
<v Speaker 2>That really hard to get into it and you know,
<v Speaker 2>break in and make the right friends and all that.
<v Speaker 2>I don't know if you guys ever saw the Mark
<v Speaker 2>Duplas interview called The Cavalry Isn't Coming. He made a
<v Speaker 2>really poignant speech at south By Southwest talking about got
<v Speaker 2>to be a self starter, You got to do it
<v Speaker 2>by yourself. Just make crappy little five minute videos. Do
<v Speaker 2>something because Delvalry isn't coming. And it shows the evolution
<v Speaker 2>of his steps of how they made short films and
<v Speaker 2>they got into film festivals one with this crappy thing,
<v Speaker 2>and then boom, next thing, you know, he's working with
<v Speaker 2>Jason Siegel and getting big budget, you know, and now
<v Speaker 2>he has a show. He did a league on effects
<v Speaker 2>and he does a show called Room one oh four.
<v Speaker 2>I believe it's called on HBO. So find his way
<v Speaker 2>up as an outsider. So that's kind of our goal.
<v Speaker 2>And with the way COVID's going, and it's kind of
<v Speaker 2>leveraging power of the creators because there's not even a
<v Speaker 2>movie theater to show you're exhibit anyway. So if people
<v Speaker 2>are willing to put in the elbow grease and they're
<v Speaker 2>willing to sacrifice their time and effort, they actually could
<v Speaker 2>make something really cool.
<v Speaker 1>Before I knew what you guys had done, I had
<v Speaker 1>talked to my my oldest boy is like me. He's
<v Speaker 1>an actor and into those kind of things. And I
<v Speaker 1>said to him, you know, like things are different now,
<v Speaker 1>like every every human being walks around with a video
<v Speaker 1>camera in their hand, and you can put your movies
<v Speaker 1>out to the public, like to the entire world through YouTube,
<v Speaker 1>like you guys have done, and who knows what can happen.
<v Speaker 1>There are people out there who are making really just
<v Speaker 1>trash who watchers and listeners are just listening to. And
<v Speaker 1>so if you're able to put together something quality, it's
<v Speaker 1>not as restrictive as it used to be back when
<v Speaker 1>we were kids, back when you had to break into
<v Speaker 1>Hollywood to make a name for yourself.
<v Speaker 2>The big keepers are being slowly kicked out, you know.
<v Speaker 2>It's the powers being leveraged greater. But people at the
<v Speaker 2>same time a very short attention span. So it's really
<v Speaker 2>tough to get somebody to sit down for more than
<v Speaker 2>three minutes and be actually, as you say, have something
<v Speaker 2>original and I'm kind of worthy and get what two
<v Speaker 2>hundred thousand views on TikTok if you're cute, you know,
<v Speaker 2>or something. But breaking in is really hard and getting
<v Speaker 2>people to care and take the time from our experience.
<v Speaker 2>If people actually sit down and take the time. Actually,
<v Speaker 2>either they love it or they don't care. There's no
<v Speaker 2>really in the middle of our movie so far.
<v Speaker 1>Right, well, we're our listenership is going to be mostly guys,
<v Speaker 1>mostly guys number one, but guys who are who are
<v Speaker 1>in our age range, who are not I mean, we're
<v Speaker 1>not watching TikTok videos. We're We're looking for something that's
<v Speaker 1>more substantial. And to have somebody out there who is
<v Speaker 1>trying to do it on their own is really exciting.
<v Speaker 1>I love the idea of original work. I need to
<v Speaker 1>at this point encourage those other undercover artists that are
<v Speaker 1>out there. These guys have done it and they've made
<v Speaker 1>something really high quality. Number one, go look at what
<v Speaker 1>they've done. And number two, go do it yourself, you know,
<v Speaker 1>go make something awesome, because the only restriction is the
<v Speaker 1>restriction that you're putting on yourself.
<v Speaker 3>At this point, absolutely I agree.
<v Speaker 4>Why don't you, guys, if you don't mind, describe for
<v Speaker 4>those who haven't seen your video, you know what it is,
<v Speaker 4>what you've done, what you were attempting to do, and
<v Speaker 4>just kind of tell us a little bit.
<v Speaker 3>About it, what we attempted to do. And I think
<v Speaker 3>what we accomplished was to try and make a film
<v Speaker 3>with in the restraints that were put in front of us.
<v Speaker 3>We had no permits. So this whole film was shot
<v Speaker 3>guerrilla style filmmaking. We shot it mostly in Long Beach
<v Speaker 3>and it was a blessing in a sense that the
<v Speaker 3>police department, a few times we rubbed up against them,
<v Speaker 3>they really had no problem with us doing what we
<v Speaker 3>were doing. And getting back to your original point in
<v Speaker 3>that in dis day and age, everybody's going around with
<v Speaker 3>cameras and stuff like that. We were using a DSLR
<v Speaker 3>camera and it's not conspicuous, and we weren't very conspicuous.
<v Speaker 3>Everybody who saw us thought we were making a documentary. Yeah,
<v Speaker 3>so right away we and this was like on the
<v Speaker 3>first day, our first interactions with people, they thought right away,
<v Speaker 3>immediately we were making a documentary, I guess. And that proved,
<v Speaker 3>you know, proof of concept that you know, it was
<v Speaker 3>believable that Joe was a believable homeless person of that.
<v Speaker 2>To make up in the.
<v Speaker 3>Right So there was authenticity there. So we were very
<v Speaker 3>happy with that right away. But getting back to your
<v Speaker 3>point in regards to what we were trying to do here,
<v Speaker 3>we were trying to make a film to kind of
<v Speaker 3>highlight all of our influences, which is every filmmaker's first
<v Speaker 3>film is usually a hodgepodge of their influences, and a
<v Speaker 3>lot of it was you know, self gratification too, and
<v Speaker 3>you know, this might be our only time ever to
<v Speaker 3>be able to do this. This is a moment in
<v Speaker 3>time that's very special, and we wanted to capture the
<v Speaker 3>shots we wanted to capture. You know, could counter has
<v Speaker 3>been told in five minutes, maybe, but I don't think
<v Speaker 3>it would have been effective as effective as telling a
<v Speaker 3>really true, fleshed out kind of classic storytelling, like we
<v Speaker 3>we drew upon ASoP we drew upon the Bible, Like
<v Speaker 3>the first time we were throwing around these characters of
<v Speaker 3>Cowboy and Joe, we kind of just applied like canaan
<v Speaker 3>abel as a canaan Abeles story. You know, one seems
<v Speaker 3>to be doing better than the other, and one is
<v Speaker 3>jealous of the other because not necessarily because one is,
<v Speaker 3>you know, better than the other, is just one is
<v Speaker 3>just going about it more clever, more genuine, more resourceful
<v Speaker 3>than the other, you know, and as a result you
<v Speaker 3>have resentment schusm occurs. But a lot of this story
<v Speaker 3>was kind of created, was engineered in such a way
<v Speaker 3>of being able to just being able to execute what
<v Speaker 3>was on paper to film.
<v Speaker 2>You know, taylored the story to what we had access to.
<v Speaker 2>We had access to friends that could help. We had
<v Speaker 2>his brother and brother Pat that played Inventor, and he
<v Speaker 2>was he wasn't doing that. He was running security or
<v Speaker 2>surly wrangling the dog. I mean, he had many, many jobs.
<v Speaker 2>And all the costumes could be bought and purchased made cheaply.
<v Speaker 2>Go to your thrift store. You can buy all that
<v Speaker 2>stuff dirt cheap. And then we distressed it at home,
<v Speaker 2>got everything ourselves. Back yard became the studio.
<v Speaker 1>So yeah, just on those ideas, and I want to
<v Speaker 1>I really want to encourage all of our listeners to
<v Speaker 1>go to go have a look at this. The first
<v Speaker 1>time that I watched this movie, I just kind of
<v Speaker 1>was like soaking in the quality of the shots, the
<v Speaker 1>quality of the acting, the quality of the script, the
<v Speaker 1>quality of the soundtrack. And it was upon the second
<v Speaker 1>viewing that I went, oh, my gosh, they've really got
<v Speaker 1>some deep layers here, and you've got your inventor that
<v Speaker 1>was played by your brother, who to me is kind
<v Speaker 1>of the deity character who has he's hanging out next
<v Speaker 1>to Cowboy, who is the one who is found favor
<v Speaker 1>with God, and so he's that's why God's next to him.
<v Speaker 1>And then and then Joe, your protagonist in this thing,
<v Speaker 1>scoffs at the notion that he's the inventor of the Internet.
<v Speaker 1>He scoffs at God. And that's that kind of falls
<v Speaker 1>into that whole canaanable of you know, Cowboy is just
<v Speaker 1>loving life and living it up and has found favor
<v Speaker 1>with God, whereas Joe, who keeps beating his head against
<v Speaker 1>the wall, is alone and struggling against the world pouring
<v Speaker 1>down upon him. And I just was like, add, gum,
<v Speaker 1>this is really solid stuff. To write a good story
<v Speaker 1>is hard enough. But to write a good story that
<v Speaker 1>throws back to biblical concepts, to fables of the past,
<v Speaker 1>all of those great conversation ideas is really something impressive.
<v Speaker 1>And I'm a good job. How about that. I'm just
<v Speaker 1>going to say, a good job, well done, well done.
<v Speaker 3>Wow, James. I wish I could like cheap you around man,
<v Speaker 3>like pull you out anytime I feel bad. I really
<v Speaker 3>appreciate that, James. And you know, this was three years
<v Speaker 3>of a lot of hard work, and we were definitely
<v Speaker 3>drawing upon all of our influences and we wanted to
<v Speaker 3>make something that was meaty and had layers. We love
<v Speaker 3>the Simpsons and depending on your how sophisticated your palette
<v Speaker 3>is in regards to different things depends on how far
<v Speaker 3>in on the joke you get, you know, if you
<v Speaker 3>if you can like you know, get the references and
<v Speaker 3>stuff like that. So, you know, we set out to
<v Speaker 3>make a film to highlight all of these different elements
<v Speaker 3>and layers. But like everything, how you know, how the audience,
<v Speaker 3>how the individual views it. It's subjective, you know, and
<v Speaker 3>it's not wrong. It's how you view it. It's how
<v Speaker 3>it's how you connect the dots. And that's great that
<v Speaker 3>you know. You saw that in those few opening scenes,
<v Speaker 3>you know, in the interaction between you know, Patrick and
<v Speaker 3>my brother and by the way, that's my brother Patrick,
<v Speaker 3>who played the invent with Poogy the dog, Yeah, the
<v Speaker 3>dog who was a pleasure to work with.
<v Speaker 2>The funny thing is like on top of the allegory
<v Speaker 2>to the Bible, you know, I saw it as also
<v Speaker 2>the other layer is it's a microcosm of what's going
<v Speaker 2>on around the water cooler. You know, this is their world.
<v Speaker 2>This is you know, the streets of their water cooler,
<v Speaker 2>and they have they all have their friends, they all
<v Speaker 2>have their politics, they all have their kinship. And basically
<v Speaker 2>Joe is kind of out of his luck. You know,
<v Speaker 2>he hasn't really figured things out, doesn't have the personality
<v Speaker 2>to get things done. And cowboys are very affable, smart,
<v Speaker 2>work smart, not hard kind of guy. And uh, you
<v Speaker 2>know all runs of business in life, you're gonna have
<v Speaker 2>winners and you're gonna have losers. So that's kind of
<v Speaker 2>the way I saw it too.
<v Speaker 1>And just to just to kind of lay it, lay
<v Speaker 1>the foundation a little bit here that the idea of
<v Speaker 1>Cannon is, this is based on something. This is a
<v Speaker 1>real group of people that exist out in the world.
<v Speaker 1>Back in the early eighties, they started having deposits on
<v Speaker 1>cans and bottles so that if you return to those
<v Speaker 1>things you got cash back. Well, most folks didn't care
<v Speaker 1>enough to do that, and so those trash, that trash
<v Speaker 1>got thrown out. And what would happen is these canners
<v Speaker 1>would come in, they'd take other people's trash and they
<v Speaker 1>would turn it into there to cash for themselves. And
<v Speaker 1>there's there there are human beings who live in New
<v Speaker 1>York City, which has the highest cost of living in
<v Speaker 1>the country, who live on being a cannery. They I mean,
<v Speaker 1>they go and get it and get paid for it
<v Speaker 1>as they go. And it's it's a fascinating thing that
<v Speaker 1>even though this might be a class of society that
<v Speaker 1>everyone else looks down upon, they're really doing the They're
<v Speaker 1>involved in the exact same struggle that all of us
<v Speaker 1>are involved in. Whether you're middle class or high class.
<v Speaker 1>It's all about whether fortune shines upon you or not
<v Speaker 1>and what you're willing to do to protect your livelihood.
<v Speaker 2>And that really exists, especially here in California too. We
<v Speaker 2>met several camp like when we shot at the recycling
<v Speaker 2>center that those were not actors. That was real people,
<v Speaker 2>real camp Those are real canners, And by the grace
<v Speaker 2>of God, we were able to shoot there without any problems.
<v Speaker 2>Everybody was cool. They didn't look into the camera, they
<v Speaker 2>didn't ruin any shots. They just did their thing. And
<v Speaker 2>you would have thought we set that place up to
<v Speaker 2>look like a Hollywood set with background actors. Now they're
<v Speaker 2>just doing their own thing. And it was from the
<v Speaker 2>accounts of when we got the okay to shoot there
<v Speaker 2>in Wilmington, which is a rough city outside of Long Beach,
<v Speaker 2>real rough. The owner of the facility with telling us that, yeah,
<v Speaker 2>you love the script, and that's that happens. He's had
<v Speaker 2>canners kill each other over cans over you know, bill
<v Speaker 2>deal confrontations. Oh yeah, that's that's happened out here. So,
<v Speaker 2>I mean, this is not some people think, oh, it's
<v Speaker 2>so far fetched. Some people say, oh, they wouldn't. They
<v Speaker 2>don't talk like that, they don't act like that. Well
<v Speaker 2>they do, and it happens, and it's you know, it's
<v Speaker 2>not always pretty, but part of the story. You know,
<v Speaker 2>it's real.
<v Speaker 1>The Just to touch on kind of the technical side
<v Speaker 1>of things, now that I've gushed over your story abilities
<v Speaker 1>a little bit, you know, you guys, you guys shot
<v Speaker 1>this thing for two thousand dollars, and that you relied
<v Speaker 1>upon people willing to work for you, even though you
<v Speaker 1>have had limited experience as directors of a short film.
<v Speaker 1>That that they're willing to do that for you is
<v Speaker 1>impressive number one. But number two, even with that, just
<v Speaker 1>to give some perspective to our listeners, you shot this
<v Speaker 1>for two thousand dollars in two thousand and twenty eighteen money,
<v Speaker 1>I guess so, so, just for some perspective, Steven Spielberg
<v Speaker 1>his first short film, which is called Amblin. He shot
<v Speaker 1>it for I believe it was fifteen thousand dollars, but
<v Speaker 1>it was nineteen sixty eight fifteen thousand dollars, which is
<v Speaker 1>basically about one hundred and thirty five thousand dollars today.
<v Speaker 1>It is I mean, the notion that you did this
<v Speaker 1>for so little money. Comparatively speaking, I'd much rather go
<v Speaker 1>watch your movie. I've seen Amblin.
<v Speaker 2>It's kind of experimental.
<v Speaker 1>It's just not that great. And to draw another to
<v Speaker 1>draw another comparison, you guys have done something with this
<v Speaker 1>that Steven Spielberg did do. He didn't use any dialogue
<v Speaker 1>in his in his movie at all, and in Ambulin
<v Speaker 1>at all, it's another, you know, roughly thirty minute long movie.
<v Speaker 1>You guys have done a thirty minute long movie. And
<v Speaker 1>it seems like a lot of folks who are doing
<v Speaker 1>short film elms these days. There's a term called mumblecore
<v Speaker 1>because there's just it's so heavily packed with dialogue that
<v Speaker 1>a guy in.
<v Speaker 2>A girl on account talking about the relationship.
<v Speaker 1>Nobody wants to listen to that, you guys, you guys have,
<v Speaker 1>I can't imagine that the actual you know, script of
<v Speaker 1>Dialogue is more than five to ten pages long. Most
<v Speaker 1>of it had to have been about the shots and
<v Speaker 1>the story because there's just not that much conversation between
<v Speaker 1>the characters. It's really more of a visual storytelling. And
<v Speaker 1>then of course, just like Ambulin has has a fantastic
<v Speaker 1>backing soundtrack, Well.
<v Speaker 2>That's probably influenced by the fact that we didn't have
<v Speaker 2>money to afford a real town guy, so kind of
<v Speaker 2>tailored that a little down too. In fact, I was
<v Speaker 2>the only person that got paid. A hired hand was
<v Speaker 2>two hundred bucks a day right thereon two hundred.
<v Speaker 3>Bucks, Yeah, two hundred bucks three days. For some crucial scene.
<v Speaker 3>We wanted to have a sound guy there so there
<v Speaker 3>would be no mess around. So we had to have
<v Speaker 3>a sound guy, and yeah, that was pretty much the
<v Speaker 3>only person we had to pay on the project. Everybody
<v Speaker 3>else worked solely on the fact that they liked the project,
<v Speaker 3>they wanted to be part of it.
<v Speaker 1>So you guys have I've seen in descriptions that you
<v Speaker 1>have out of out there of this film that you've
<v Speaker 1>got a twilight zone. If directed by the Cohen Brothers.
<v Speaker 1>You didn't have a desk in this movie, so I
<v Speaker 1>don't know that I would agree. I think every Coen
<v Speaker 1>Brothers movie has a guy behind a desk at some point.
<v Speaker 2>Cowboys bike that's where he runs his business.
<v Speaker 1>Oh okay, yeah that makes sense. All right, Yeah, we'll
<v Speaker 1>go with that. So we know that this movie came out.
<v Speaker 1>It was it January that you put it up.
<v Speaker 2>We officially released it May first.
<v Speaker 1>And it took you two years from the time that
<v Speaker 1>you started shooting. Is that right correct?
<v Speaker 3>We work on the script. We started in like September
<v Speaker 3>of twenty seventeen, and it was done by like Christmas
<v Speaker 3>around twenty seventeen, leading it to January twenty eighteen. The
<v Speaker 3>script actually was one of the quickest scripts that came
<v Speaker 3>together for us. We wrote two other scripts before this,
<v Speaker 3>and this one came together. It did come together overnight,
<v Speaker 3>but it came together quick quicker.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah. So let's back up just a bit before that. Then,
<v Speaker 1>what's the I mean, and it's probably multiple, but what's
<v Speaker 1>the conversation that you have with each other that you
<v Speaker 1>say we need to make this movie. We're, however, many
<v Speaker 1>years old. It's time for us to make this movie.
<v Speaker 1>We need pretty much how do you feel about it?
<v Speaker 3>To a point where we were writing scripts with I
<v Speaker 3>guess this idea in our heads that you know, someone
<v Speaker 3>was going to come with a wand and make it
<v Speaker 3>happen for us if you wrote a really good script,
<v Speaker 3>it was going to happen, you know, and like everything.
<v Speaker 3>But what made us want us to tell the story,
<v Speaker 3>It was just out of the fact that we were
<v Speaker 3>able to to do it. We were able to execute
<v Speaker 3>an idea versus our other ideas would require a lot
<v Speaker 3>more help, a lot more money to be able to
<v Speaker 3>get it done. So we decided that this was going
<v Speaker 3>to be the story. This was it. Canners was going
<v Speaker 3>to be it because we saw that, Okay, we could
<v Speaker 3>afford everything involved. We can afford the props or we
<v Speaker 3>have them already. We can get it done. It'll still
<v Speaker 3>have a visual flirt because it has bicycles, there's movement.
<v Speaker 3>We'll find great locations and we can make it happen.
<v Speaker 2>And a lot of people with funny after the fact,
<v Speaker 2>they had written me emails like four paid emails going
<v Speaker 2>man like it's like you saw my life. My mom
<v Speaker 2>was worked at the post office for thirty years and
<v Speaker 2>mail man. I said, hey, man, check out when you're done,
<v Speaker 2>you know, the family friend. And he didn't get back
<v Speaker 2>to me for like three weeks, and then I finally
<v Speaker 2>asked him and he says, I grew up poor. I
<v Speaker 2>grew up collecting cans. There was a cowboy. Somebody got
<v Speaker 2>to jump on my cans. So like this really hit home.
<v Speaker 2>And the same guy that John Rossino, that provided us
<v Speaker 2>the score for the music, which was huge in the
<v Speaker 2>movie Hell State Northridge, where we got the music, we
<v Speaker 2>got planets. What was it Jupiter? He said, When I
<v Speaker 2>grew up in New York, when I heard that sound
<v Speaker 2>of the printer at the scrap metal when I was
<v Speaker 2>a kid, like it brought me back, like I really was.
<v Speaker 2>There certain people, it resonates with stories, you know. Unfortunately
<v Speaker 2>some people have never you know, I haven't had that
<v Speaker 2>heart of a life where I've collected man for a living,
<v Speaker 2>but some people have. Some people like they don't know
<v Speaker 2>that life, so they don't think it's unbelievable. I thought
<v Speaker 2>we'd breathed life into these characters that you actually believe them.
<v Speaker 3>You don't think they're just.
<v Speaker 2>Cookie board cutouts. And it's not like we didn't try
<v Speaker 2>to get preachy in the movie. We didn't try to
<v Speaker 2>leave them message after the meat. We just tried to hey,
<v Speaker 2>this is their life, this is who they are, this
<v Speaker 2>is what they deal with. It's got to be watchable.
<v Speaker 3>It's not a movie if it's not watchable, and if
<v Speaker 3>other people can't enjoy it, who are not like your
<v Speaker 3>mom and your brother, you know, who don't have this
<v Speaker 3>oblig gation to tell you like it's it's good. So
<v Speaker 3>we definitely, you know, we wanted to get out there
<v Speaker 3>and and tell a story, you know, and we weren't
<v Speaker 3>going to wait anymore for people to you.
<v Speaker 2>Know, getting somebody to read your script. You try to
<v Speaker 2>try to get somebody to.
<v Speaker 3>Read your script. That was part of this project. Didn't
<v Speaker 3>even read the script.
<v Speaker 2>So but we made it. To answer your question, we
<v Speaker 2>made a conscious decision. We said, we're not going to
<v Speaker 2>write anything else. We're not going to make this is it.
<v Speaker 2>We're not We've wasted three four years of coming up
<v Speaker 2>with great ideas that are never going to see the
<v Speaker 2>light of day without a budget. So we said, this
<v Speaker 2>is it. Let's make something watchable, entertaining, funny, yet it
<v Speaker 2>has heart and hopefully we can pull it off, and
<v Speaker 2>people trusted our vision. If anything, we have passion, we
<v Speaker 2>know what we want to do, we have a goal.
<v Speaker 2>We're not like figuring it out as we go. We
<v Speaker 2>were very calculated, so people that we reached out for
<v Speaker 2>actors and crew, they got it. They knew that we
<v Speaker 2>weren't just playing around, even though we didn't have a
<v Speaker 2>necessarily track record like you suggested.
<v Speaker 1>So you've written the script, what's the next step? Did
<v Speaker 1>you storyboard it before you started talking to people or
<v Speaker 1>what happened next?
<v Speaker 2>After forty two revisions of that script.
<v Speaker 3>We went out and we started to location scout, and
<v Speaker 3>that's where a lot of the redrafts came in, because
<v Speaker 3>we were fine in better places and we could incorporate
<v Speaker 3>these places and enhance the story and tell more of
<v Speaker 3>a story. But our first step, pretty much after we
<v Speaker 3>wrote the screenplay, was just getting the ducks in a row,
<v Speaker 3>so to speak, of where we're going to shoot. We
<v Speaker 3>wanted to have all of that done before we even
<v Speaker 3>approached actors. So when we cast our actors and we
<v Speaker 3>were on location, we were intimate with the location. We
<v Speaker 3>knew what the light was like during the day, we
<v Speaker 3>knew what the traffic was like we knew if there
<v Speaker 3>was going to be a lot of people hanging around,
<v Speaker 3>We pretty much which knew what the actors were going
<v Speaker 3>to wear. We had our bikes where bikes were already
<v Speaker 3>being designed during the process of us starting to find
<v Speaker 3>out where we were going to hold auditions, and by
<v Speaker 3>the time we got to casting, the ones that were
<v Speaker 3>coming to audition, unfortunately just weren't up to par. So
<v Speaker 3>we really had to rethink what we were going to do.
<v Speaker 3>So we started to reach out to Backstage, which is
<v Speaker 3>an online database of actors and it's pretty cool because
<v Speaker 3>the partitions which actors are SAG on which actors are
<v Speaker 3>non union. Knowing that we couldn't go with SAG actors,
<v Speaker 3>we went with non union actors. We held our first
<v Speaker 3>audition at the Garage Theater in Long Beach and that's
<v Speaker 3>where we uh, we got Cowboy. That's where we first
<v Speaker 3>discovered Burtis Cutler and man, he was Yeah, he just
<v Speaker 3>came in and he just owned that role like he
<v Speaker 3>came in with such energy and such bravado, and he
<v Speaker 3>just owned that role like that.
<v Speaker 2>He didn't just like in the movie, he didn't know
<v Speaker 2>the line. He was just kind of improvising being vertus,
<v Speaker 2>and we ended up changing some of the script to
<v Speaker 2>accommodate his humor. And his character came in with a
<v Speaker 2>cut and with the patches saying don't we call nine
<v Speaker 2>one one, like I'm coming with the guns. And he's
<v Speaker 2>from Texas. He's a former military vet and he's is
<v Speaker 2>the real deal. He is a groundling background acting. So yeah,
<v Speaker 2>and we we had actors that thought they have this
<v Speaker 2>sewed up for and they're just like, Okay, well I'll
<v Speaker 2>be leaving now because that guy is your cowboy, Like
<v Speaker 2>they just left. It's kind of like.
<v Speaker 3>The devil laid down the fiddle by his feet.
<v Speaker 2>This was gonna be a cowboy, you know, he was.
<v Speaker 3>It's kind of like when you hear when when Slim
<v Speaker 3>Pickin shows up at Doctor Strange left set and everybody
<v Speaker 3>thinks like he's already in costume, but like, no, that's
<v Speaker 3>what he just wears.
<v Speaker 1>You know.
<v Speaker 3>He showed up like cowboy. But that's that's just the
<v Speaker 3>way he is. And he's awesome. He's he's he's a
<v Speaker 3>hell of a character and has quite a story, quite
<v Speaker 3>a history. He was wounded in Iraq, he was in
<v Speaker 3>the Navy, and yeah, he's a fighter. He's a fighter.
<v Speaker 3>He's going to bury us all, James.
<v Speaker 2>To answer your question, we did do storyboards, very rudimentary,
<v Speaker 2>crudely drawn. Didn't really help out much at all because
<v Speaker 2>because of the situations, it was not controlled, so we
<v Speaker 2>kind of had to improvise and call it out as
<v Speaker 2>we saw it on the set on location. So yeah,
<v Speaker 2>we did have storyboards, but you weren't very much he
<v Speaker 2>in reality.
<v Speaker 1>So you had your you had your script, you had
<v Speaker 1>your not very useful storyboards, you had your locations. Get
<v Speaker 1>back to low budget, yeah, and you had your cowboy.
<v Speaker 1>So far, other than the equipment that you already own,
<v Speaker 1>you're still you're still pretty well operating for free. But
<v Speaker 1>there there was a casting issue with Joe, is that right?
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, we made the rudimentary mistake of merely insinuating that
<v Speaker 2>one of the theater guys caught the part. He looked apart.
<v Speaker 2>He looked kind of like a well fed whino. He
<v Speaker 2>was he looked like he could be on the streets.
<v Speaker 2>And at that point we reached out to every theater
<v Speaker 2>you could try to, and it was a big waste
<v Speaker 2>of time. They're they're just they're not into it. They're
<v Speaker 2>not up the caliber, and then they're not interested. They're
<v Speaker 2>all into their own hustle. Like the theaters. They weren't
<v Speaker 2>very helpful as far as getting us in the right place.
<v Speaker 2>But we had a guy that'll leave unnamed, but we
<v Speaker 2>had him come in and read opposite like cowboys and
<v Speaker 2>other characters to the script going, and we quickly realized that, Okay,
<v Speaker 2>this is not gonna work. I'm not about to put
<v Speaker 2>two years of work into something that from the outgo
<v Speaker 2>isn't gonna work. Was it Ridley Scott? And eighty percent
<v Speaker 2>of your film is done in the casting by casting
<v Speaker 2>the right people. We had to have a second casting
<v Speaker 2>call for Joe. That's where we meant can't hatch and
<v Speaker 2>he has a look as the chops. He kind of
<v Speaker 2>looks like Jeremy Irons. He's got a lot of credits
<v Speaker 2>on his IMDb and he was legit. He had just
<v Speaker 2>been offered to do like a Charlie Manson movie, and
<v Speaker 2>he asked us questions like how serious are you guys?
<v Speaker 2>Are you going to be able to pull this off?
<v Speaker 2>The last movie we worked on, it was they weren't ready,
<v Speaker 2>they weren't this that whatever. So we had to give
<v Speaker 2>him assurances that we were ready. We didn't work, we
<v Speaker 2>were ready to go to work, and we put him
<v Speaker 2>in Cowboy together on the second rehearsal, and we knew
<v Speaker 2>we were ready to go with our two leads.
<v Speaker 3>And then we held our second audition at a different
<v Speaker 3>theater in Long Beach, and that's where we got the
<v Speaker 3>rest of our actors that we were going to cast.
<v Speaker 3>Chang was. We had another actor originally to play Chang's role,
<v Speaker 3>and fortunately he decided he wasn't going to be in
<v Speaker 3>the film, and then we had to recast, and that's
<v Speaker 3>where we got Jimmy May to play Chang and stuff too.
<v Speaker 2>His resume, he's been in like one of the Pirates
<v Speaker 2>of the Caribbean.
<v Speaker 3>Movies, an actor up. Yeah, he's been in like He's
<v Speaker 3>Lamar Yeah the video one of his music videos and
<v Speaker 3>like always like very like you know, Front and Center
<v Speaker 3>never has any dialogue though.
<v Speaker 2>He's breaking out to talk. He had rules and uh sunny,
<v Speaker 2>it's always sunny in Philadelphia. He's a crazy gambling Asian guy.
<v Speaker 2>So he's been on TV, he's been on films. He
<v Speaker 2>just never had a chance to have a bigger role.
<v Speaker 2>We also had two other possible Joe's and a little
<v Speaker 2>tips for filmmakers out there. One guy was picking my
<v Speaker 2>brand about all the props that we have on the film.
<v Speaker 2>He said, oh, I got that, I got this. He's
<v Speaker 2>like a long time character actor. He says he lived
<v Speaker 2>out in skid rowe the night before customer. He was great,
<v Speaker 2>he was he was awesome. Yeah, he was one hundred dedicated,
<v Speaker 2>but he had this cheesy be kind of like look
<v Speaker 2>and feel that it just wasn't real. And another guy,
<v Speaker 2>from the first minute he comes in, You guy's got
<v Speaker 2>enough bussfair to get me home, Like yeah, like from
<v Speaker 2>the first ten seconds if they're painting, but then you
<v Speaker 2>know it's going to be a good chance. I'm not
<v Speaker 2>gonna be worth working for thirty days. We got lucky,
<v Speaker 2>We got real lucky with kids, Yeah, everybody.
<v Speaker 4>So that kind of that leads me to a question,
<v Speaker 4>what did you learn that you can pass on to
<v Speaker 4>other sort of grilla filmmakers.
<v Speaker 3>You know, through this process, I would have stayed clear
<v Speaker 3>of the actors, cut off the theater altogether to waste
<v Speaker 3>of time. And you know, I have you guys seen
<v Speaker 3>that that documentary about Alejandro Judorowski. Do you guys know
<v Speaker 3>who he is. He was gonna He was the guy
<v Speaker 3>that originally was going to make doune Is the documentary,
<v Speaker 3>a really cool documentary. He was a very experimental Chilean
<v Speaker 3>filmmaker and he made a film called Holy Mountain. But
<v Speaker 3>Judarowski was all about spiritual warriors finding spiritual warriors. You
<v Speaker 3>could spend a lot of what a lot of wasted
<v Speaker 3>time looking for spiritual warriors, like they'll find you. So
<v Speaker 3>to speak, it like it happens, like if you set
<v Speaker 3>your focus, like things happen, like God will make it happen.
<v Speaker 3>You know, if you really want it to happen, like
<v Speaker 3>things will start to happen. We spend a lot of
<v Speaker 3>time trying to win people over and trying to find
<v Speaker 3>people that would help us get stuff off the ground,
<v Speaker 3>and ultimately speaking, you just need to go out and
<v Speaker 3>just do it yourself. That's what I would say, Like
<v Speaker 3>forget about trying to get freebies or trying to get
<v Speaker 3>help from other people, because everybody's got their own hustle.
<v Speaker 3>Everybody's trying to do in their own thing, and rightfully
<v Speaker 3>so I'm not saying there's anything bad about it, but
<v Speaker 3>ultimately speaking, you have to just pretty much do it
<v Speaker 3>yourself and be realistic, have realistic goals, and make sure
<v Speaker 3>you're able to manage other people's expectations. Because one of
<v Speaker 3>the things that we were up against too was initially
<v Speaker 3>we're told from the actors, once they get the role,
<v Speaker 3>however long this takes. We got all year, guys, we
<v Speaker 3>got all years. This is the first thing from Sorry,
<v Speaker 3>this is the first thing from the actors.
<v Speaker 2>We got all year.
<v Speaker 3>We'll get this, and then like once they're around trash
<v Speaker 3>for about eight hours or like, so, how long is
<v Speaker 3>this shoot gonna be?
<v Speaker 2>Like?
<v Speaker 3>What are we talking about here? Coming up? And I
<v Speaker 3>got this and I got that. So you have those
<v Speaker 3>pressures too, so you have to be able to manage
<v Speaker 3>those expectations. And that's what I was getting back to. Originally,
<v Speaker 3>we made sure that we had as much work as
<v Speaker 3>we possibly could done before we went out and started
<v Speaker 3>to shoot one frame of this thing, because we knew
<v Speaker 3>that once we got out there, not everyone, even if
<v Speaker 3>they're in the film, is a spiritual warrior. This is
<v Speaker 3>not their baby, so to speak. This is your baby.
<v Speaker 3>They're here to facilitate it, but they're not going to
<v Speaker 3>be here for a year or two years or three years.
<v Speaker 3>They're here to do their job and then they're out.
<v Speaker 2>Well real quick, if I can backtrack to say one
<v Speaker 2>quick discinct thing about what I learned. Yeah, just make something,
<v Speaker 2>get it on film. Show people have a proof of concept,
<v Speaker 2>because nobody will to help you. If you're nobody and
<v Speaker 2>no name, they're not going to volunte here their time.
<v Speaker 2>And rightfully, so, who are you? You're just the guy
<v Speaker 2>on the camera. But once we showed people this movie,
<v Speaker 2>all the doors are opening up all of a sudden.
<v Speaker 2>People that wouldn't want to give me their time. I'll
<v Speaker 2>do storyboards for you. Oh, I'll help with this. I'll
<v Speaker 2>help with that. So if you have a proof of concept,
<v Speaker 2>which this whole point of the movie was to show that, hey,
<v Speaker 2>you can write, deliver, produce a concept. So my biggest
<v Speaker 2>recommendation is do something that you're proud of that are
<v Speaker 2>going to attract people, because at the end of the day,
<v Speaker 2>brick by brick, you're assembling a crew. Brick by brick,
<v Speaker 2>we're trying to build up a crew. So we go
<v Speaker 2>on to the next project, and the next one and
<v Speaker 2>maybe the next one, and then we'll start big time
<v Speaker 2>of people.
<v Speaker 4>Hey, listen that just to touch on that. And I'm
<v Speaker 4>with you. I think that's awesome. You guys took a concept,
<v Speaker 4>you made it happen. You created something, and you know
<v Speaker 4>you're out there and you're succeeding, and that's great, D
<v Speaker 4>and I can relate to that. About six months ago,
<v Speaker 4>we had this idea of doing a podcast.
<v Speaker 1>We had no experience. Try a year and six months ago. Bro, well.
<v Speaker 4>We've been podcasting for six months. But yeah, but yeah,
<v Speaker 4>we thought nobody but our mom would listen to this too,
<v Speaker 4>you know. And uh, and we've we're having some success
<v Speaker 4>and it's it's thrilling, you know. It's it's exciting that
<v Speaker 4>people are enjoying your work and and enjoying what we're doing.
<v Speaker 4>And it's you guys are making it happen.
<v Speaker 2>So it's exciting to find like minded people, right, that's
<v Speaker 2>the whole goal. People the same wavelength. That's the that's
<v Speaker 2>the key.
<v Speaker 1>I'm going to tell you this. I'm not what was
<v Speaker 1>the term you used, time? Yeah, big time. I'm not
<v Speaker 1>big time, and i'm not I'm the opposite of big time.
<v Speaker 1>I'm small time, not even a small time. I'm no time,
<v Speaker 1>but legit, I was. I was listening to a podcast
<v Speaker 1>this morning that has a fascinating almost Coen Brothers type
<v Speaker 1>of feel to the story that's being told, and I
<v Speaker 1>thought this actually would make a good movie. I could
<v Speaker 1>write this script. And I was like, if if this
<v Speaker 1>becomes a movie, I'm going to the new Wavo Brothers
<v Speaker 1>and I'm gonna say, hey, Okay, here's the script. Do
<v Speaker 1>you guys let's make this movie awesome.
<v Speaker 2>I'll tell you this. If you write it, I'll read it.
<v Speaker 1>You got your two primary characters, the rest of the
<v Speaker 1>cast gets put together, and then what's the next step.
<v Speaker 3>Actually, the next step was we went out. We got
<v Speaker 3>their costumes, We messed them up, we dragged them through dirt,
<v Speaker 3>we did all kinds of stuff to you know, the clothes.
<v Speaker 1>How did you do the tew I'm sitting here thinking
<v Speaker 1>about the teeth. I'm like, those teeth were so nasty.
<v Speaker 1>How did you get so bad?
<v Speaker 3>Yeah, when we were doing research on makeup, it was
<v Speaker 3>one thing that you know, I've seen in other films
<v Speaker 3>that kind of let me down where it's like, you know,
<v Speaker 3>a medieval film or just that and the other. But
<v Speaker 3>they have beautiful teeth. So we wanted to have a
<v Speaker 3>situation where they had horrible, horrible teeth. So we found
<v Speaker 3>this product. It was movie makeup. It was like a
<v Speaker 3>laquer a tooth lacker, and had different gradations of decay,
<v Speaker 3>like it had like caffeine stains all the way up
<v Speaker 3>to pretty much like you're beyond a ruth canal. You
<v Speaker 3>need to get your tooth pulled. So we we played
<v Speaker 3>around with it and we thought it just brought an
<v Speaker 3>element of realism and authenticity to to the makeup. You know,
<v Speaker 3>it would have looked ridiculous if he was filthy and
<v Speaker 3>had because he had really nice teeth, he had a
<v Speaker 3>nice smile, and it was super white, you know, being
<v Speaker 3>an actor in Hollywood in la he's got nice teeth
<v Speaker 3>and there's snow white. So it would have looked ridiculous
<v Speaker 3>if his teeth were snow white. So fun to get go.
<v Speaker 3>We we decided that that was something that would really
<v Speaker 3>look Yeah. You know they say if you only have
<v Speaker 3>like a couple of you know, if you have a
<v Speaker 3>small budget and you want to do something to make
<v Speaker 3>yourself look younger, you know, get your teeth white and
<v Speaker 3>it has a huge effect on your face, you know,
<v Speaker 3>on how you look. So yeah, we we got the makeup,
<v Speaker 3>we got the clothes down, and then we had a
<v Speaker 3>few rehearsals at my house to work on blocking. I
<v Speaker 3>didn't want to have a situation where every confrontation they
<v Speaker 3>after just standing still and it's just over the shoulder
<v Speaker 3>each time, Like, I wanted to have movement in the scene,
<v Speaker 3>and they're on bikes. So that's why, you know, anytime
<v Speaker 3>Cowboy was on his bike, there was a lot of movement.
<v Speaker 3>He would circle him, he would go around them kind
<v Speaker 3>of like predatorial, you know, strutting his stuff like a peacock,
<v Speaker 3>especially the final confrontation when he goes around him and
<v Speaker 3>he kicks his bag and stuff like that. We worked
<v Speaker 3>on a lot of that stuff. Cowboy, Burtis, me and
<v Speaker 3>Mike have footage for like proud parents for teaching him
<v Speaker 3>how to ride a bike, So we were working on
<v Speaker 3>some of that stuff. There was a lot of stuff
<v Speaker 3>that we thought initially like, ah, we didn't even think
<v Speaker 3>about it. This is where I'm getting back to the
<v Speaker 3>stuff that you're not thinking about. All the planning, we
<v Speaker 3>made the asumption that everybody can ride a bike no problem,
<v Speaker 3>you know, So Burtis needed some practice on his bike
<v Speaker 3>initially to be able to.
<v Speaker 2>He almost fell into the lake at least twice.
<v Speaker 3>It was a few times where we thought he was
<v Speaker 3>going into the drink for sure, very lobbily. I don't
<v Speaker 3>know if it was nerves or not. But the handlebars
<v Speaker 3>were bolted pretty tightly, but by the end of each day,
<v Speaker 3>like the pandel bars were just swinging loosely, like he
<v Speaker 3>would like really like grip them and move them, and
<v Speaker 3>like she was always playing with them. But yeah, we
<v Speaker 3>had stuff like that, like where we had to make
<v Speaker 3>sure he was comfortable on his bike. We had a
<v Speaker 3>few rehearsal with all the actors. Then it was I
<v Speaker 3>believe July eighth, twenty eighteen. It was our first day
<v Speaker 3>of principal photography in Long Beach and it was like
<v Speaker 3>the hottest day of the year. The bikes. We wanted
<v Speaker 3>to do a lot more with the bikes. We have
<v Speaker 3>a lot more shots with the bikes and stuff like that,
<v Speaker 3>but unfortunately, being that it's a short film and a
<v Speaker 3>long short film, but that we weren't able to put
<v Speaker 3>more bike stuff. I think bikes are awesome. I left
<v Speaker 3>to see bikes and films. There's something very cinematic about
<v Speaker 3>a bicycle.
<v Speaker 1>Shot wise, You've got some great shots, and I'm looking
<v Speaker 1>forward to watching the movie with you guys here in
<v Speaker 1>just a minute. But what scenes did you steal from
<v Speaker 1>somebody else?
<v Speaker 2>There was some Kubrick, a lot of Koprick inspired horse
<v Speaker 2>perspective shots.
<v Speaker 3>Yeah, there was a lot of stuff that we still
<v Speaker 3>they steal from. The best, right the line where he says,
<v Speaker 3>my god, it's full of cans. That's just a rip
<v Speaker 3>from twenty ten where you hear Dave say, my god,
<v Speaker 3>it's full of stars.
<v Speaker 1>Nice, nice, nice, that's good, which.
<v Speaker 3>Is a great film. You know, I love Stanley Kubrick,
<v Speaker 3>and I think two thousand and one is awesome, but
<v Speaker 3>I thought Peter Heins twenty ten was awesome too.
<v Speaker 1>So when you guys are out there, when you're out
<v Speaker 1>there shooting, you've both of you are there every day, right,
<v Speaker 1>and then you have whatever actors are in the scene.
<v Speaker 1>Obviously do you have you get a boom operator.
<v Speaker 3>Some days, quite a few days in the shoot we
<v Speaker 3>had Brent Drubin and Brent he also added music too,
<v Speaker 3>John Theodore. He provided a lot of original music, and
<v Speaker 3>so did Brent Drubin. The music work Joe sitting on
<v Speaker 3>the beach, that's Brent's music the first time where Joe's
<v Speaker 3>writing through and discovered the golden goose as we call
<v Speaker 3>when he peeks in and sees the trash can filling up.
<v Speaker 3>That's a drubn.
<v Speaker 2>That was that was based on like a Willy Wonka whistle.
<v Speaker 3>Yeah, Willie Wonka as kind of having a whimsical.
<v Speaker 2>Disco song where Cowboy is written by by Joe with
<v Speaker 2>the trash bags, that's a drubn. A little disco.
<v Speaker 3>Song when he's shaving is a druven. Yeah. So he
<v Speaker 3>was instrumental in not only helping us during principal photography,
<v Speaker 3>holding like the bounce board and stuff like that, and
<v Speaker 3>like making sure, you know, if we could possibly get sound,
<v Speaker 3>he would hold and record.
<v Speaker 2>The friend crackheads. He would for friends people.
<v Speaker 3>One of the cool things that we were able to
<v Speaker 3>do was that while we were there, like we always
<v Speaker 3>had like a cooler with food and drinks and stuff
<v Speaker 3>like that. We would give people food and drinks, and
<v Speaker 3>everybody for the most part was cope aesthetic, Like nobody
<v Speaker 3>ever gave us any trouble and nine times out of
<v Speaker 3>ten they just wanted to hang out and just see
<v Speaker 3>what we were up to. It was great to have
<v Speaker 3>Brent there because he was great at being very diplomatic
<v Speaker 3>and it would allow us to be able to concentrate
<v Speaker 3>on the scene versus you know, what are these people doing?
<v Speaker 3>Are they stealing our stuff? What's going on? And stuff
<v Speaker 3>like that, and he just wanted to talk. So they
<v Speaker 3>would talk to Brent when we were left alone able
<v Speaker 3>to work on you know, the shop and stuff like that.
<v Speaker 2>They'd ask Brent, if do you want to steal a
<v Speaker 2>car with me?
<v Speaker 3>Would have gone and got married to a chick. And
<v Speaker 3>that's that's the thing, Like, there are people in your
<v Speaker 3>life that I'm sure everybody has those people that they
<v Speaker 3>can rely on. I hope they do, because films they
<v Speaker 3>require a lot of help and it's very hard to
<v Speaker 3>pull off something with just two people. You're going to
<v Speaker 3>have to have people there.
<v Speaker 2>Filmmaking is like construction work with the tripod. Now, it's
<v Speaker 2>it's not fun. It's a lot of work. It's a
<v Speaker 2>lot of sweat, a lot of tears.
<v Speaker 4>And just know that going in that's nothing good for
<v Speaker 4>young filmmakers here, you know.
<v Speaker 2>Absolutely sweat.
<v Speaker 3>Yeah, it's definitely, as Mike said, it's very reminiscent of physical,
<v Speaker 3>laborious construction work, and you're using your mind a lot too,
<v Speaker 3>and you've got to realize when things are not working
<v Speaker 3>in the scene. I guess like it's one of those
<v Speaker 3>things where people go off for like twenty years to
<v Speaker 3>become like present in a moment, where like when you
<v Speaker 3>make films, you got to be present, and the more
<v Speaker 3>present you are, I think that's what separates the great
<v Speaker 3>filmmakers from the lackeys. I think guys that we really admire,
<v Speaker 3>I think they were super present during the whole process
<v Speaker 3>and got it done because there's times man, as Mike said,
<v Speaker 3>it's like wrangling kittens sometimes and it's like sand through
<v Speaker 3>your hands, and you're trying to accommodate all of these
<v Speaker 3>different things all in real time, with the knowledge at
<v Speaker 3>the back of your head too that there's no guarantee
<v Speaker 3>that any of this is going to work. It's definitely
<v Speaker 3>a lot of work, and I would definitely say to
<v Speaker 3>anybody who wants to be a filmmaker, don't worry about it,
<v Speaker 3>because if you really like your story, you'll do the work.
<v Speaker 3>But it's not work. It's not work like your mom
<v Speaker 3>tells us to go out and you know, break the
<v Speaker 3>lawn of the leaves and stuff like that. It's a
<v Speaker 3>different type of work, and it's very satisfying. It's super satisfying.
<v Speaker 1>And I can identify you. It's hard, long work that
<v Speaker 1>you love.
<v Speaker 2>Imagine that's doing it outside with bums out there.
<v Speaker 1>Okay, so we've got production, we've got pre production, we've
<v Speaker 1>got production. Now let's talk about the infamous post production
<v Speaker 1>experience that you have. You've got roughly three and a
<v Speaker 1>half four hours of footage that you've got to bring
<v Speaker 1>down to thirty minutes or so, and then what happens.
<v Speaker 2>Okay, so I'm pretty experienced. In the final cup brow
<v Speaker 2>I've been cutting EBS Food Review shows everything you can imagine,
<v Speaker 2>smaller scale, probably forty five minutes at the most, you know,
<v Speaker 2>far less cuts and out three fourths into the movie,
<v Speaker 2>we hit a wall.
<v Speaker 3>Right at the Cowboy Joe scene, the confrontation scene. That's
<v Speaker 3>where that anomaly shows up. I'll let you go ahead.
<v Speaker 2>Well, what happens is it's not just five hundred and
<v Speaker 2>six hundred cuts from the movies for the video. That's
<v Speaker 2>not a problem for my computer. What's happening is you
<v Speaker 2>have thousands and thousands of audio files for everything you
<v Speaker 2>heard in that movie was put in by hand, particulously
<v Speaker 2>slowing the computer ever so slowly. We learned after reaching
<v Speaker 2>out to Final Cut user groups that Final Cut has
<v Speaker 2>a brick wall around twenty five hundred files into a
<v Speaker 2>project one library. Our entire timeline was six seven thousand files.
<v Speaker 2>So we had hit the wall. And this is not
<v Speaker 2>like a selling point for Final Cut. Now with twenty
<v Speaker 2>five hundred files, No, they don't talk about that. That's
<v Speaker 2>not really expressed and it's probably not common. People don't
<v Speaker 2>have that many files in one movie because typically you
<v Speaker 2>would have sound recorded and you'd have one track a
<v Speaker 2>post to thirty with the crickets height walking like. All
<v Speaker 2>of that was particulously put in by hand. So anyway
<v Speaker 2>we hit a wall or Final cut A couldn't play
<v Speaker 2>back the footage on the computer. We put in a
<v Speaker 2>ominous black hole in our footage right where the confrontation
<v Speaker 2>is where Joe is kissing Cowboy's hand. It added a
<v Speaker 2>black bar footage blocking out our footage over the footage
<v Speaker 2>in the timeline, and no matter what we did, I've
<v Speaker 2>never seen it restarted it. I reached out to a
<v Speaker 2>gentleman named Ronnie Curtains, who's like a high end final
<v Speaker 2>cut guru and he was like, I've never seen anything
<v Speaker 2>like this. Yeah, he was from Belgium. So we're doing
<v Speaker 2>skype like walk me off the edge meetings like what
<v Speaker 2>are we gonna do? How are we going to get
<v Speaker 2>out of this? And he's like, oh, well, well I'll
<v Speaker 2>talk it to the Apple and we'll see if we
<v Speaker 2>can find a work around. And they never found anything.
<v Speaker 2>So we had to rent a new top of the
<v Speaker 2>line iMac with the Bilton five K monitor in order
<v Speaker 2>to finish this film because my twenty twelve PowerMac, which
<v Speaker 2>was maxed out, couldn't handle it. So that was luckily
<v Speaker 2>donated by Darren's brother half like more than half the money,
<v Speaker 2>which was like five or six hundred, five hundred bucks.
<v Speaker 2>I think it was luckily that allowed us to circumvent
<v Speaker 2>the problem and put it on another computer. And then
<v Speaker 2>we had to bring all the footage over to another computer,
<v Speaker 2>all the files, all the editing, you know, all that stuff,
<v Speaker 2>which wasn't fun. As you can imagine me and Darren
<v Speaker 2>are pulling our hair out. You might have read Job
<v Speaker 2>in the Bible.
<v Speaker 3>That was.
<v Speaker 2>A lot of turning on each other. Me and Darren
<v Speaker 2>like get mad, at each other like like, you know,
<v Speaker 2>who are you gonna blame? Well, this is blame the dynasty. Okay.
<v Speaker 1>So one of the most amazing features of the movie
<v Speaker 1>is the soundtrack. I was really impressed with the quality.
<v Speaker 1>I mean, this is like a professional soundtrack. So given
<v Speaker 1>that you guys did this for two thousand dollars, how
<v Speaker 1>did you get that done?
<v Speaker 2>Well, we knew coming into the film that music was
<v Speaker 2>gonna be quintessential and that it's gonna be an unseen
<v Speaker 2>character in the movie. But it tells you how to think,
<v Speaker 2>how to feel, and you definitely have to have good
<v Speaker 2>quality music otherwise I'll take you out of the moment. Anyway,
<v Speaker 2>we went online and found some sources for online scoring,
<v Speaker 2>and we went through a few interviews and a few samples,
<v Speaker 2>and we let we let our guy, John Theodor give
<v Speaker 2>us Okay, here's the opening up our movie. Send us
<v Speaker 2>an example of what you would do for this. You know,
<v Speaker 2>we paint the picture of what emotion you're going for.
<v Speaker 2>And he nailed it out of the park at home run.
<v Speaker 2>You know, he just like wow. And it turns out
<v Speaker 2>John Fiodor he studied under Hans Zimmer, you know, from
<v Speaker 2>the Great composer that's done things like Conception and Gladiator,
<v Speaker 2>and he's got a you know, huge repertoire, so we
<v Speaker 2>totally lucked out. And he did about seventy percent of
<v Speaker 2>the soundtrack on top of our friend Brent Drubin, who
<v Speaker 2>did the rest. But yeah, he came through big and
<v Speaker 2>we definitely couldn't have done the movie without him. We
<v Speaker 2>made him deep, dig real deep into his palette. You know,
<v Speaker 2>how do you make music about a homeless person? You
<v Speaker 2>know what I mean? And it's kind of a Western too,
<v Speaker 2>and it's also urban, and it's also got a lot
<v Speaker 2>of layers of what's going on there, So it's not
<v Speaker 2>your run of the mill soundtrack. You definitely wouldn't find
<v Speaker 2>this in any other film. Very custom.
<v Speaker 1>Yeah, it's it's fantastic. So you're saying that he created
<v Speaker 1>it specifically for you movie. This wasn't something that he
<v Speaker 1>had pre existing. He watched movie just like any other
<v Speaker 1>composer and composed the soundtrack from what he was watching.
<v Speaker 2>We ran, we put him through the wringer. I mean
<v Speaker 2>some versions were twenty fifteen versions, redoing it, redo it.
<v Speaker 2>So we were very hard on him to get him
<v Speaker 2>to what we wanted to be. But once we broke
<v Speaker 2>him out of the shell, and he was often running
<v Speaker 2>and he was very creative. He added things like elements
<v Speaker 2>of bike sounds and gears and jugs and things you
<v Speaker 2>would find on the streets. He put that in the
<v Speaker 2>soundtrack to supplement the music, so it became part of
<v Speaker 2>the environment and the music. So he probably hates us,
<v Speaker 2>and he probably will never work with us again. But
<v Speaker 2>I think, in my opinion, that really made the project
<v Speaker 2>the best it could have been.
<v Speaker 1>Well, it's a name for folks to remember, John Theodore.
<v Speaker 1>You have this fantastic effect that takes place during the
<v Speaker 1>murder scene where the graffiti on the walls is of faces,
<v Speaker 1>and the camera is kind of jumping into the faces
<v Speaker 1>as if they are the witnesses of this murder. I
<v Speaker 1>lent stone witnesses of what's going on. I thought it
<v Speaker 1>was beautifully done. Let me ask this. It was all
<v Speaker 1>of that graffiti already there. Did you guys do anything
<v Speaker 1>or were you just like there it is? That's a
<v Speaker 1>perfect face.
<v Speaker 2>Well, to be honest with you, I had Darren sneaking
<v Speaker 2>at night and paint that mural. No, we got super
<v Speaker 2>lucky that everything you see on site was done by
<v Speaker 2>local artists from around the area, and Darren found all
<v Speaker 2>the locations google apps and doing walks and doping things out.
<v Speaker 2>That's just call the fame part of it is he
<v Speaker 2>found all these places and he's like, oh man, you
<v Speaker 2>got to see these mural He would take pictures on
<v Speaker 2>his phone. I think we incorporated that. Okay, we got
<v Speaker 2>to put that in based on that, So it wasn't
<v Speaker 2>we didn't write that. We saw that and said, okay,
<v Speaker 2>we're going to take advantage of that. So that was
<v Speaker 2>just kind of serendipitous, right, Darren, Am I romanticizing that?
<v Speaker 3>Or no?
<v Speaker 2>I know, You're right.
<v Speaker 3>We knew, like we didn't have the budget to be
<v Speaker 3>able to pull off something on camera that was brutal,
<v Speaker 3>nor did we want to. I said initially, I would
<v Speaker 3>have liked the two brands just to have actility to
<v Speaker 3>see what could have become of that scene if we
<v Speaker 3>went in that direction. But yeah, we knew that we
<v Speaker 3>wanted to have a situation like I think, you know,
<v Speaker 3>Alfred Hitchhawk said, you know that what you don't see
<v Speaker 3>is what's terrifying. One of the most effective things, as
<v Speaker 3>you said about jobs, was that you don't see the Shark.
<v Speaker 3>One of the most effective things about Alien is that
<v Speaker 3>you don't really get to have a good look at
<v Speaker 3>the alien for pretty much the whole film. But yeah,
<v Speaker 3>we wanted to use the art and yeah, there's something weary,
<v Speaker 3>haunting yet about those faces just staring blankly, so to speak.
<v Speaker 3>And that's the thing to young filmmakers too, is that
<v Speaker 3>you've got to use what's there and spending time finding
<v Speaker 3>good locations. That's you know, that's key. This film could
<v Speaker 3>have looked like, you know, a really really bad student
<v Speaker 3>film very easily if we got lazy and decided to
<v Speaker 3>shoot in different places that didn't have that look.
<v Speaker 2>Our first Golden Goose house, where the Golden Goose was,
<v Speaker 2>we were going to say, for a parking lot in
<v Speaker 2>a restaurant, you know what I mean, where can you
<v Speaker 2>shoot openly in public with somebody simulatingly getting murdered, you know,
<v Speaker 2>And that was going to be in sam or Nadinos,
<v Speaker 2>So that wouldn't have turned out.
<v Speaker 3>Well. We got there and we're like, dude, are we
<v Speaker 3>really going to put all this work into this film
<v Speaker 3>and shoot this scene here?
<v Speaker 2>It is next to a red lobster.
<v Speaker 3>Don't settle. I always always keep looking and I use
<v Speaker 3>Google Map. I love Google Map. I spend a lot
<v Speaker 3>of my free time just looking around planet Earth on
<v Speaker 3>Google Map and stuff like that. And I found a
<v Speaker 3>lot of places on Google Map, and then I would
<v Speaker 3>drive there and check them out. And yeah, that was
<v Speaker 3>the best way to go about it for us, was
<v Speaker 3>to kind of make sure that the place had that
<v Speaker 3>look and then we could work inside. You know, we
<v Speaker 3>could we could kind of develop the scene even more.
<v Speaker 3>There was a lot of stuff that was on paper
<v Speaker 3>that even got more developed once we were there, and
<v Speaker 3>it just enhanced the scene and made it that much
<v Speaker 3>better because we didn't settle. If we had settled, it
<v Speaker 3>would we probably wouldn't be having this conversation.
<v Speaker 1>So once you got the rental Mac and moved your
<v Speaker 1>files over, was it relatively smooth at that point?
<v Speaker 3>Not really moving?
<v Speaker 2>There's always problems, you know. You never know until you
<v Speaker 2>start doing something and you have a deadline, then you're
<v Speaker 2>gonna start finding what the problems are. This is kind
<v Speaker 2>of uncharted territory, you know. Next time, I'd love to
<v Speaker 2>hand this off to somebody else to like make make
<v Speaker 2>it their nightmare. Because we had to absorb all the
<v Speaker 2>problems by one A lot of time and effort to
<v Speaker 2>be side by side on a project for two years.
<v Speaker 1>It's impressive that you guys are still friends.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, it really is.
<v Speaker 3>Actually, this is the first time we spoke since.
<v Speaker 1>All right, everybody, that is all the time we have, unfortunately,
<v Speaker 1>But be sure and go. If you haven't already check
<v Speaker 1>this movie out on YouTube. You can visit their website
<v Speaker 1>at cannersmovie dot com. Guys are really appreciate you meeting
<v Speaker 1>with us and going through this interview process. You've got
<v Speaker 1>a great piece of work there. Thank you so much,
<v Speaker 1>or for letting us have some of your time.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, thank you so much, Shirley, don't you sure. We
<v Speaker 2>appreciate giving us a venue, giving us a place to
<v Speaker 2>talk about the art our art, and we love your podcast.
<v Speaker 2>We're going to spread it like the gospel. We really
<v Speaker 2>think that you're on something good there. So well. We
<v Speaker 2>grew up with the eighties and nineties and I'm glad
<v Speaker 2>that you guys are doing something original and something well done.
<v Speaker 1>We look forward to meeting with you again soon when
<v Speaker 1>you're big time.
<v Speaker 2>Let's hope.
<v Speaker 3>Thank you.
<v Speaker 2>Okay, take care man, thank you for take care.
<v Speaker 1>All right, everybody, please be sure and join us. Next
<v Speaker 1>week we have a special Halloween series of episodes. Yeah,
<v Speaker 1>we were really excited.
<v Speaker 4>We're going to do Fright Night versus Lost Boys the
<v Speaker 4>These are going to be fun movies to talk about.
<v Speaker 1>Such great movies and perfect for this time of the year.
<v Speaker 1>Can't wait to get into it.
<v Speaker 4>You or I may die by stereo sometime during the podcast.
<v Speaker 1>We're not sure.
<v Speaker 4>All right, Well, thanks for joining us this week. This
<v Speaker 4>was a special one. I hope you enjoyed it. Join
<v Speaker 4>us next week. We'd get right back into or a
<v Speaker 4>movie matchupl
<v Speaker 1>Mh