6. I loved The Mold. Its appearance, its
attitude, everything.
Thanks!
That's huge. He's our shark. Our Jaws. If he doesn't sell by the end of the
film, it was a waste of our time.
I don't
think it was a waste of our time at all.
How did Jeffrey Combs get
involved with a project where he would be voicing a crusty growth of bathroom
fungus who only seems to speak in tough-guy hyperboles?
Jeff was
our first choice. We had a fallback position, but he was the man. There's a bit
at the end of the film that I wrote in Jeff's voice. I am a massive Jeff Combs
fan. (As am I -G.G.)
Once we
got the script to him he read it on a plane to a festival, I think, and called
me immediately He told me he loved it
and he was in. After that it was up to the money people to work it all out.
Jeff an I spent the following weeks just talking about who The Mold was, and
working out his center.
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| Ladies of the internet... you know the drill. |
One
thing I thought was pretty solid was that Jeff wanted to do the script entirely
as written. I think there's, like, a single ad-lib in the whole picture. The
rest is word for word from the page.
30% of
that slang is real. I made the rest up. I characterized The Mold as the father
of a greaser from a late 50s hot-rod grease-monkey film. You know those guys
with the greased Pompadour and the pack of Strikes rolled up in their sleeve?
Super misogynistic muscle car dudes. The Mold is what I imagine one of their
dads is like. The mess of a guy who can turn a sweet little kid with a bb-gun
into a selfish raging ass-hat.
Jeff
just ate it up. When we recorded him he'd do a take and be all super into it
and right when he got to the end of the line he'd look over at me and crack
this massive kid grin like he's just done the coolest thing ever. A number of
times, he had.
It's
thick stuff, The Mold's dialogue. Jeff makes it seem like it's totally natural.
Not only the language, but that a 3' fungus is saying it.
Tell me more about working with a
b-movie horror legend and how that effected the process of making Motivational
Growth (if at all).
Jeff was
a dream to work with. He'd been doing voices for Transformers Prime at the
time, so he was totally prepared for vocal work. He came at it 100% and held
nothing back. I pushed him in places as well.
It's an
awesome actor who can step into a booth with some little indie director and
just deliver for hour after hour. This guy's worked with Peter Jackson. This
guy's headlined Stuart Gordon pictures. This guy's been on three different Star
Trek franchises and has legions of fans at every con he goes to. He's in the
booth nailing this esoteric fake-slang for some guy nobody's ever heard of.
Just nailing it.
His
facial expressions, some of the bigger "Combs" moments, were used by
the puppeteers/creature effects team as a basis for performance as well. If
you're a huge Jeffrey Combs fan, you can see some of his signature moves in The
Mold. No small feat for an animatronic fungus I must say.
Mad props
to Steve Tolin from Tolin FX on his amazing design/delivery.
We
recorded Jeff first, edited his dialogue and delivered it to the creature team
who practiced against the recordings. We piped his voice over loud speakers
when we shot, so when The Mold speaks, The Mold is actually talking to Ian. The
bathroom set is 4.5' off the ground. The creature team is under it controlling
The Mold to video monitors with a feed from the set above them. If you're not
looking down there, you're just seeing Adrian DiGiovanni talking to a living
fungus with Jeff Combs's voice.
Jeff
also influenced something totally unrelated to The Mold as well. He described
the exact type and style of TV remote he remembered from growing up. For those
console TVs, like Kent, the remotes were ultrasonic. They had little hammers
that hit little metal bars inside - like really brittle bells - that would
signal the TV to turn on or off or whatever at a frequency at the very upper
range of human hearing. He said he used to jingle his keys at the TV while his
dad was watching it to change channels or turn it off.
We spent
ages finding the exact remote he described, and even more ages in sound design
making a convincing (while technically inaccurate because it is audible) ring
every time Ian clicks the remote. If you listen closely, it is never the same
ring. Also, the ring changes with the darkness of Ian's situation.
All
because of Jeff's remote story.
7. The “Stay Tuned” style television
sequences throughout the film seem sort of self-explanatory, what with the
nature of Ian’s attachment to Kent (his T.V.). But there is a heavy use of
video-game imagery, music, and actual 8-bit scenes featured in the film as
well. Can you explain some of the reasoning behind this?
Technically,
the game sequences are 16bit graphics. While the Vikingr99 SuperSystem (the MG
world's invented game system) has an 8bit CPU, the graphical capabilities are
16bit (via coupled 8bit graphics processors.)
The film
takes place in 1991. To some people that is crazy obvious. There are KMFDM
posters in Ian's apartment. He mentions that Gene Rodenberry just died. He
still uses a fax machine and plasma TVs are like something from the future.
There's no "In the year 1991" title card in there, and no one ever
says "because it's 1991" at
any point, but Leah is costumed pretty deeply in 1991 apparel and all of the
junk in Ian's apartment (including his tape deck and Shreikback tapes) are
pretty explicitly early 90s.
To me,
the 90s was clouded in an 8-16bit haze. Not a day went by without some form of
video game media. As such, Ian can't get away from it.
The
Vikingr99 SuperSystem is a pretty bold ripoff of the Turbo Grafx 16.
The
entire soundtrack for the film, save the cheesy TV show BGM, was created on NES
and C64 hardware. As far as I know, MG is the only film that boasts that. An
entire composed score in chiptunes. Real deal chiptunes, as well. Made/recorded
on the hardware.
8. Who do you see as your influences in
developing your voice as a writer/director? What books/films/other media do you
see yourself as having been weaned on as a creator?
I have
to start with my mom. She trusted me with media as a kid. She trusted my little
kid instincts. If I wanted to see something we'd talk it out. Something scary
or a little hard for a kid. If I saw it and my little mind was broken we'd talk
it out afterward. I wasn't watching Basic Instinct or anything - but I am sure
I was allowed to see/experience stuff that most kids my age weren't trusted to
be able to handle.
When I
was super young, E.T. cracked my mind in half. When he looks at the screen and
screams in that weird super-alien way, my little brain broke to pieces. I had
nightmares forever. But that was a formative moment for me. If that was kept
form me, I wouldn't be able to write something that scares me. I was trusted
and supported. That's so essential.
The same
goes for Alien. Terminator and Robocop - both super R movies - I was able to
see with the provision that we talk any of the confusing stuff out. Before
anyone starts accusing my mom of being irresponsible it has to be said that
this was all informed decision making. This wasn't a videotape left on the TV
at night or something. This was all managed.
My
experience is that if you're a kid with a stable home scenario and you see
Robocop, you see a movie about a robot guy and some bad guys and the robot guy
saves the day. That's the takeaway. When you're 17 and you re-watch it you get
the subtext and the corporate B-story and the really hideous gore and
everything. When you're 22 and you watch it you start picking up on the satire
and the dark comedy and the really multi-layered statements being made about
everything from 80s mega-corporaiton culture to industrial design to Jesus
Christ metaphors.
But when
you're a kid, it's a robot guy. A super cool robot guy who looks real and saves
the day and that is inspirational in ways that Saturday morning cartoons just
can't deliver.
My mom
also got me into Frank Herbert. Dune. Issac Asimov. Foundation. Books. Adult
books. Thick thousand page books. Arthur C. Clark. The Martian Chronicles.
I'm also
a huge nerd from the 80s. My ideal stories have some totally bonkers
fantastical element. It doesn't need to be robots (thought robots effing RULE),
but I'm not satisfied with a coming of age story about two kids who discover
themselves against the backdrop of one sweltering summer in South Carolina.
Unless one of them has a brother who's also a vampire, and the other one gets
offered the command of a Gunstar to deploy the Death Blossom against the Ko-Dan
armada under orders from General Xur.
It's
just how I roll.
9. If you could go back in time to your
childhood and rescue one favorite item that you have no chance of simply buying
on eBay now… what would it be?
I had
this tape deck - the top loader kind with the handle that slid out of it. I
took it everywhere.
EVERYWHERE. I played the Knight Rider audio tapes in it
under my pillow to listen to the adventures of KITT and Michael Knight while I
went to sleep. I danced around the neighborhood singing AxelF. It was more than
a tape deck. It was a spaceship that deployed tape shaped fighter craft if it
was held upside down. It was a super cool dune skimmer from some alien planet
if you popped the tape carriage up and pulled the battery pack off the back of
it. It was, as Kent the TV would later be, my best friend for some time. I
could always put the Beverly Hills Cop II tape in there if anything was messing
up my little kid world and instantly be happy, even though I had no clue what
George Michael was talking about in that one song I'd always skip until I
started thinking about girls.
It's
become a sort of myth to me, this tape deck. I'm sure I'd never recognize it if
I saw it today. It would be too small, too light, the wrong color or just a
plain old tape deck to my adult eyes - but I can close those eyes and be
instantly transported to laying on the floor in my mom's townhouse making hyper-warp
space jumps with nothing but that tape deck and a knockoff Star Battles tape
from the library.
10. What do you have coming up in the future?
Any Spin-off plans for The Mold? Any other films in the pipeline, or is
Motivational Growth still the center of your world right now?
The Mold
is having his moment, with the rest of the Motivational Growth crew. The
festival circuit is a long and arduous road wrought with success and peril. We
took home the Best Feature trophy last month at the Boston Science Fiction Film
Festival, for instance, but the film was also shown at 4am to a totally
different crowd who just weren't interested in Ian and his crazy world, and
were quite vocal about it. At this point we've racked up far more praise than
dislike, but both are expected in a film like MG.
As for
films in the pipeline: yes. We have films in the pipeline. For instance, we
have Flexure, that film we made Motivational Growth in place of. It's a
thriller about particle physicists who accidentally create a fissure in reality
with a particle collider. My writer and I have spent a couple days a week for
the better part of a year with scientists at Fermilab in Batavia Illinois
locking a set of actual physics circumstances to hang the weirdness on. It's
been quite a blast.
Otherwise,
we've got an entire pitch deck. Hopefully there will be some interested eyes
after MG shows at a few more fests. We're bristling with ideas and just need to
find someone who wants to support them.
11. I’m going to cheat and throw in an eleventh
question here in the interest of… self… interest. What exactly prompted you to
contact the Goodwill Hunting 4 Geeks blog? How desperate are you to promote
this film? Your blunt honesty is appreciated.
This
question is framed in such a manner as to imply that it would be hard to be
bluntly honest in answering. This is not the case.
I've got
an alert system set up. When anyone mentions MG on the internet, to the degree
that other people can freely view it, I get a notification. I set this up specifically
to find people like you. You're my audience.
I don't
know if you even like the film. I only know that you were initially interested
in it and that you are someone whose interests intersect with my own at enough
vectors to convince me that you'd watch the film honestly and your opinion
would be one whose weight would carry with me. Again, you're my audience.
MG is a
hard film if your vectors don't intersect with mine. It's a hard sell,
honestly, to a lot of people. I am convinced, however, that it's an easy sell -
an attractive piece - to even more people. People, for instance, who go kifing
through Goodwill bins for epic geek finds.
I don't
contact everyone. I don't base this interaction on fan-base or reach. I am
laser targeting the type of people that I would like to go see Motivational
Growth in a movie theater with, and asking them what they think of it. Because
I honestly care.
In
staying true to the "brutal honesty" request, it is my sincere hope
that those who love it will talk about it and get the word out to other people
who they feel would also love it. Less as marketing, however, than as honest
sharing of something cool.
There's
this story - true or not - that I overheard in LA. It's about the original Evil
Dead. Some people hated it. Some people loved the living hell out of it. Those
that loved it taped it. They brought it to friends' houses and their friends
taped it. In a year's time there were these 4th and 5th generation shitty tapes
of Sam Raimi's Evil Dead that people would play late at night whenever anyone
had a get together. The film resonated so hard with enough people that the
messed up VHS copies, with roll and squiggle and crappy audio, were what people
were watching.
That's
magic to me. That's amazing.
I'm not
comparing MG to Evil Dead. This is me laying on the floor with my tape deck
hoping that one day someone will like one of my stories enough to tell everyone
about it. And wondering what the hell George Michael is talking about.
(Soooo.... that's all I've got folks! There's a bit after this that I am including because I've had people express some interest in how they could see the film, and I contacted Don again to see what he had to say about it. -G.G.)
I have people asking me how they
can go about seeing your film.
F**king
awesome.
How do people go about seeing
your film at this point?
Right
now it's festival only, or through someone like you.
You don't have a distributor yet
do you?
Nope,
which is why I'm not just letting everyone see the thing. Once I get distro, it
will be out in the wild!
You guys must still be running
the festival circuit shopping around?
Exactly
right. The festival circuit is a marketing gig. Non filmmakers think it's some
big altruistic art party where we all get together and talk about film, but the
awful truth is that it's a business (the festival) trying to make money by
selling tickets, and charging filmmakers entry fees, and a bunch of filmmakers
glomming on hoping someone with the ability to do something about it is there
to love on their film.
Oddly, I
think most non filmmakers think that a theatrical release is also not a
marketing cost. Like, you make a movie and it just goes to theaters via some
form of "you made a movie" magic. This is also not the case. It costs
an egregious amount of money to place a film in a theatrical release schedule,
and even more to tell people that it's in the theaters. As much as actually MAKING
the film. Sometimes more. It's all marketing.
It's going to be a while before
this gets a release? Maybe?
The hope
is no. But, if we're bad at it, and people like you shut up about the film, it
could be up to a year if it is going to happen at all. If not - if we can get a
huge pre-audience, it's a better case to a distributor. If we have people
begging for the film, someone will be much more likely to want to buy it and
resell it to those people.
I don't know the industry
admittedly. These are all words that sound semi-right to me.
Pretty
good. For a human.
Anything I can share with others
about where to see M.G. in the future?
Well, right now the
best thing to tell people is that they need to see this film or they will be
forever broken and empty inside. And that they can see the film at the upcoming
fests it's going to, and that's cool - but that the best way to get the film is
to start a grass roots internet furor about the thing. That's my best
opportunity for a legit sales pitch. Walk into a distro meeting and tell them I
know of 3,000 people who will buy it today. 30,000 would be better. 300,000 and
I'll get another film budget out of the gig :)
