Strung Out Episode 170: PART ONE. INTERVIEW WITH MOVIE MAKER AND ARTIST DAVID ROCCO FACCHINI.

David Rocco Facchini is an artist's artist.  He's at once a visual artist, making amazing sculptures out of found objects, such as bits of old movie equipment, he's a storyteller, a stop motion movie maker whose most recent film was featured at the Cannes Film Festival, and also an adventurer of sorts.  He recently set out in a Sprinter Van to explore the psyche of America.  The result is a new film, USA2Z, which is in the final stages of production.   Facchini has a fun website with a lot of examples of his film and art and interviews.  Check out www.dellaroccostudios.com.

Facchini describes himself and his mission: Everything is communicated through story; be it wrote, oral, visual or even sensory. Throughout my career, I've come to understand why and how we tell stories and have honed my skills to tell stories in every medium possible.

I apply my evolving experience as a hands-on storyteller as a Director, Designer, Performer, Writer, Producer, Film Maker, Animator, Sculptor, Stop Motion Artist and Educator, my knowledge has served a wide array of clients from academia to film and television, theater and even immersive experiences. 

I founded Dellarocco Studios in honor of my parents Della & Rocco. I'm proud to put my family name on everything I create and welcome working in collaborative environments that embrace innovative approaches to produce engaging content for stage, screen & beyond!  

Transcript

[00:00:00] Martin McCormack: Great to have you with us and welcome to Strung Out. I have with me David Facchini who grew up a Chicagoan, born, bred, and now lives out in California and took it upon himself during the pandemic to go out across America in a van and based on an old car driving board game, interview Americans about topics that are on their mind.

[00:00:33] But rather than me try to describe this, I would like David to talk about it and talk about his art and that is of being a filmmaker and welcome to Strung Out and Before you start in on your projects, just give people a little background on you, how you grew up, how you ended up going into filmmaking.

[00:00:59] David Rocco Facchini: Okay. It's interesting because film has definitely been the latest manifestation of what I've done, but I consider myself to be a storyteller. I've done things on stage and screen, interactive things but I'm basically invested in story and film is a good format for that. I, started, grew up in the northwest side of Chicago in Jefferson Park, the Mayfair area, by Lawrence and Elston.

[00:01:22] When I was a kid, just was creative. It was nurtured. My father was a painter to a degree. My father was a Roman Catholic priest for 16 years and left the priesthood and got married. But he was a painter as well. He's always a creative person and was a storyteller as well.

[00:01:39] My mom loves to be gregarious and tell stories. My uncle's like telling jokes, my other uncle is an attorney, so he's used to being verbose. So this kind of story and narration thing is something that's always been around. I was heavily influenced by comedy.

[00:01:54] My dad got me a video camera as a kid, and me and my friends used to make movies in the basement. I was always drawn towards art. My friendships that I formed growing up were through people, through art and storytelling and, creativity play. As people might have gone in different directions, I stuck with it.

[00:02:10] I followed that into through high school. I went to Catholic grade school, all boys Catholic high school. My story's got me in trouble. Drawing inappropriate things in a Catholic high school. 

[00:02:21] Martin McCormack: Sure, I think we've all done that at one point. 

[00:02:24] David Rocco Facchini: Yeah, and I got caught a couple times.

[00:02:27] Martin McCormack: Oh boy. 

[00:02:28] David Rocco Facchini: Had some interesting stories about that. Went to Columbia in Chicago. I started studying film there. At one point I had a film and my actor didn't show up. It got me frustrated and making a film is a very hard process to begin with.

[00:02:43] So what ended up happening is I started looking at animation and at one point I found stop motion and I was like, wow. If I build my actor, they'll always be there. 

[00:02:52] Martin McCormack: Oh, what an interesting idea that, I'll just create my own actor. 

[00:02:57] David Rocco Facchini: And it had all the elements I love. Lighting, cinematography, staging. I love building props. I'm a hands on artist. I sculpt. I do found object sculpture and all that kind of . So I started making a stop motion film actor, which ended up taking me seven years to complete, but it was my first stop motion film. So a film that I started as a student, I got hired by the school afterwards and I started teaching stop motion using that same film.

[00:03:23] I put it out in a tiny little screening at the Portage theater. In 2007, I think it was, and I started being a stop motion person. There wasn't that much opportunity for stop motion , in Chicago. , I loved comedy and everything, so I started drifting towards comedy and performance. I performed at Improv Olympic.

[00:03:42] I started getting into directing. And I directed comedy at ImprovOlympic, I directed comedy at Second City at their Donny's Skybox, and , I became part of a group we called Creepy Hug. We put on shows for five years, comedy reviews at the end of the year, and then another topical show that might have been in the other, part of the year. That had a good run, and after that I was hitting the ceiling of what I felt I could do in Chicago. I was doing found object sculpture, for this music driven film festival. I started making awards for that festival that was made out of repurposed film and music production equipment.

[00:04:22] Martin McCormack: Oh, wow. 

[00:04:23] David Rocco Facchini: One of the best one I think I ever made was Melvin Van Peebles, who was the godfather of the blaxploitation film genre, was being honored at this film festival that was called SimFest. It's no longer an active film festival. It might have a presence, but it had a good run for like several years.

[00:04:39] I was commissioned to make something that would speak to him. I ended up making a sculpture out of film reels, tripods, and everything that I assembled to make look like a... A sawed off shotgun, but then I designed it to look like a 76 Cadillac Eldorado with gold trim and leather and everything like that.

[00:04:59] So it looked like this pimped out, sawed off shotgun made of repurposed film and music production equipment. I was able to give that to him. When he received it, he just looked at it. It's that's what I'm talking about. Those are the moments that you feel like, all right, that makes it all worthwhile.

[00:05:15] Martin McCormack: You're on the path. 

[00:05:16] David Rocco Facchini: in the Bay Area, I started figuring things out there. I worked on interactive experiences. There's a movie called The Game with Michael Douglas and Sean Penn, where it was like this, he gets a birthday gift.

[00:05:28] There's like your game starts now. And essentially, if you're living your life, people start interacting with you. So there was a thing called the Headlands Gamble that you actually pay into .It's a two day adventure. I'm the Uber driver, quote unquote, that gives a dossier to somebody, and then I end up a day later picking them up, being like Charlie of Charlie's Angels saying, welcome, you done well, or you, maybe you didn't accomplish this thing, but it was an interactive thing.

[00:05:52] That's in San Francisco in the Marin headlands. And it just became well placed actors throughout the Bay area that people could interact with. Oh how crazy. Yeah. So I love storytelling in all of its manifested forms, intentional forms of entertainment and also information. 

[00:06:13] Martin McCormack: And you have found then the movie genre to be the best. Place to produce your stories do you think or is this just the right vehicle right now? 

[00:06:22] David Rocco Facchini: You know every vehicle's right for the story you want to tell. It's like every story has its vehicle and sometimes you'll see a play that doesn't quite make the movie way or the book. It all depends on how you manifest it and you can shoehorn one story that's made for this, but it's not quite made for that.

[00:06:37] So it depends. I said to myself in my college career, I want to tell a story in every medium possible. My father, who I mentioned as a priest, he put out a book of his life and also the church that he first went to was supposedly haunted. My brother helped co author the book, and I did all the photography and illustrations, and it's called Muldoon, A True Chicago Ghost Story.

[00:06:56] That was like the first collaborative story that we worked on as a family. I ended up doing comedy with my brother afterwards, as part of that Creepy Hug group. But, it all depends on the stop motion story, there's a certain look and feel that has to be a little creepy, a little bit off, or it has to be very cute and toy oriented. So it all depends on what you're doing. I've got stories right now that I want to produce that I have lined up after this, the last two years I've been doing this documentary going across the country and doing a word association with people to see what stories that evokes. Because everyone tells themselves stories, and makes, tries to make themselves a hero of their own story.

[00:07:34] Martin McCormack: I think you're right. And before we started the podcast you said there's two things that about stories and I think it would be great to tell the listeners. Go ahead and define it. 

[00:07:44] David Rocco Facchini: I've studied story. Not even aware of it, but then I came to a revelation at one point, especially when I was running the stop motion department at this arts university in San Francisco.

[00:07:54] And breaking down story to students, I started really analyzing it, and I started looking at it in a broader scope. And I've since been giving talks about story, actually here and in Mexico. Where... I came to a realization that everything we do, humanity, since we have been able to pick up something to scribe, can be told through story.

[00:08:17] Even before that, and there's only two types of stories, how to survive and how to thrive. And if you look at anything around you, turn your head and you look at a painting. That's could be thriving. It could be surviving. Photography. There's that picture after the war was done where you see in New York, a sailor kissing a woman? That's thriving after surviving the shortest. I used to think the shortest story that could be told as a cave painting of figures with spears and a large kind of creature, because obviously somebody was alive to create that. So that's a story of thriving. The shortest story, however, that I have found visually, without language, that can be told universally is a stop sign, is a red octagon.

[00:09:06] Because anywhere in the world, if you see a red octagon, you know that you should stop there for a reason. Red is the shortest I think the shortest wavelength that can be seen the longest distance, and it's usually a color that even colorblind people can discern. And and the octagon is a recognizable shape. That right there is the shortness story of survive. 

[00:09:25] Martin McCormack: Obviously you do not drive around Rogers Park that often. 

[00:09:30] David Rocco Facchini: I think the, especially after the pandemic, even during the pandemic, survival became a relative term. And people started embracing a little bit more of their thrive sense and their thrill sense because they were so suppressed.

[00:09:44] But yeah. 

[00:09:45] Martin McCormack: How do you perceive yourself? Are you a survivor or are you a thriver? Or do we? Do we transition back and forth between these? 

[00:09:54] David Rocco Facchini: I think we all transition back and forth and it depends, there's manifestations of nature and nurture of where your chemistry is, what your upbringing is.

[00:10:04] The one thing that I find very interesting, if we were going to look at the brain, your brain stem is telling you one thing all the time. Just don't die. That's all it's telling you. That is your unevolved part . Your upper brain, which is regulating, it's leaning towards thriving, making things better.

[00:10:21] So as an example, if you're gonna go out with some friends, and it's raining, and you're gonna meet them for a drink, you're thinking, I want to thrive, but I want to survive. Walking down the stairs, surviving. Don't slip, don't fall, don't break your neck. Walking down the street, you see somebody at night, you don't know what it is, surviving.

[00:10:39] Going into an Uber, trying to figure out if that's safe enough, surviving, going, and finally, the dangling carrot of thriving is where we regulate surviving. It's always a tennis match back and forth. And depending on your human nature, whether you're more on the introverted side or the extroverted side, and that can, that can have, again, that's a wide spectrum, but there are people who lean introverted, there are people who lean extroverted.

[00:11:05] You make calculated risks to find out how much you want to thrive versus how much of a challenge it is to survive. So that's where, we all go back and forth. And I would say sometimes I go past my comfort zone to thrive and other times I'm like, I don't need that. And the older you get, the more you start thinking about survival mode.

[00:11:26] I think as a, I think as a human condition. 

[00:11:29] Martin McCormack: We certainly look at death, right? As we get older, death seems to play a little more of a prominent role in the endgame, or whatever you want to call it. A motivator for doing what we want to do. Sure. Across the board. So as an artist you see yourself thriving at times, but do you feel the call of an artist is to thrive or survive?

[00:11:57] David Rocco Facchini: I think if we're going to, from my experience and what people I've interacted with, and even my thing, I can't not create. And I've tried to muffle the voice, I've got 10 projects in my head that it's insufferable to think of how to manifest them. It doesn't make the voices go away.

[00:12:20] And that could be any voice. If I think creatively minded people. And that doesn't just mean artists. There's so many creatively minded people., like I mentioned my relationships I made through art in my life. They're still creatively minded people, but along the way, maybe that wasn't nurtured.

[00:12:37] Or they had other influences where my friend, one, became a police officer. That's like the family business. He's a cop family. And I will say, I don't think it suited him. He's now retired. I have another friend who got into medicine, but we all met through art grade school. We met art, and the thing is, some people are encouraged and some people are discouraged.

[00:13:01] And it all depends on how much that drive exists in you. You hear stories about people who are from medicine families who go into comedy, and it's I can't not do what is driving me. So I guess it all depends on how much do you want to shut that tap off. And I guess maybe I just didn't want to.

[00:13:20] Martin McCormack: Do you think though that the drive to create and be an artist, does that come from that lower brain part of us or does it come from the upper part? And I don't know if there's an answer for that, but you've been doing a lot of research field work and I want to get into that with your movie because you interviewing people you're basically holding those two ideas of story in your hand and maybe there isn't, maybe art combines both. I don't know if you've had any kind of revelation in that sense. 

[00:13:54] David Rocco Facchini: I don't know where it comes from. That's like the ultimate question, the one thing about science, which I'm very science minded.

[00:14:04] I think just because the social construct of religion has ultimately revealed itself to me to instill intolerance. I cannot subscribe to an organization that creates us and them. So besides that point, the ultimate question is science explains how, but it doesn't explain why.

[00:14:29] And science is essentially trying to reverse engineer to the why. And we won't see it in our lifetimes. I don't know if we'll ever see it as long as humanity survives. So that's the ultimate question of what drives us. I don't I, and I guess the whole thing is sometimes it's okay not to know.

[00:14:48] I think like actually even in everyday life saying I don't know versus pretending to know is like one of the terms in my word association interview is mansplaining. The idea of overcompensating to say like I'm in charge of my destiny, that's based off of fear. I don't know, but I'm in an environment where I should know, or they're looking to me as an authority.

[00:15:09] And I think the, actually the ultimate authority of somebody who is confident in who they are is saying, I don't know. Yeah. And it's unfortunate that we start going down a different road when there's an overcompensation, which essentially it's a lie. But you're trying to curate a reality that people might...

[00:15:25] Feel that you are the hero and like I mentioned in the stories we tell ourselves we all make ourselves the hero of our story Objectively because I think that is a survival mechanism because we don't want to be revealed. It's imposter syndrome 

[00:15:38] Martin McCormack: It's a little bit of Joseph Campbell in some ways describing the hero's journey.

[00:15:43] This everybody is based on and I don't want to dig into it too deep, but I think as I tell you, it's 

[00:15:51] David Rocco Facchini: like I bring up the hero's journey about every week with three or four times. Yeah. Yeah. 

[00:15:57] Martin McCormack: Campbell is amazing in that he. He takes that idea and he makes it so easy to digest and understand, but we all are the center of our own universe, so to speak.

[00:16:09] And with art it is interesting. I think that very rarely do you see a successful artist, I would say, in the thrive mode. I think it comes more from the survive mode. If I had to be forced to say something .

[00:16:24] David Rocco Facchini: What do you mean by thrive? 

[00:16:25] Martin McCormack: What I mean by thrive is once an artist reaches a certain level of notoriety or has achieved a certain level of success, that impetus for creating sometimes goes awry.

[00:16:41] And if you look at some of the good cases of people that have crashed and burned spectacularly, usually it's when that drive is no longer as present in their lives. 

[00:16:54] David Rocco Facchini: Sounds like you're thinking of an example. 

[00:16:56] Martin McCormack: Elvis Presley is a good example of somebody that, got very deep into thrive and forgot about the survive.

[00:17:04] David Rocco Facchini: What's interesting about Elvis, and I only know, I'm not an Elvis person, but I saw the film and I felt like it just the dynamic of being beholden to the Colonel as an example. That. Survive mode, whether he was willfully blind or came to a realization, it's all relative, think about everyone's life where you come from and you have a dynamic in your family that you feel like maybe I can't break loose from this.

[00:17:33] It's a balance of asserting your individuality. It's like Elvis could have made choices, right? But he didn't have. Whatever you might call it, the way to break from that dynamic. He could have done it. He could have filed for bankruptcy. He could have reinvented himself. He could have. He could have done a lot of things.

[00:17:58] But he was living relative to the situation. What was thought upon him, from what I understand, his mother had a very authoritative, quid pro quo love. Dynamic with him. He had to earn it. And even then it might not have been good enough. So living other certain dynamics of trying to earn something from someone, whether it's on a big scale or on a small scale of somebody who feels like they can't move and follow their dream because they're not going to have a job with insurance or something like that.

[00:18:30] It all depends. And I think, again, this goes between the brainstem and the evolved brain. How much of this is going to make you break loose? Uncertainty is the biggest agitator to anxiety. COVID is a perfect example.

[00:18:47] Nobody knew what was happening. And what you saw, in my opinion, is the people who are more extroverted had a harder time getting through COVID because they draw satisfaction and energy through interaction. Introverted side of it didn't have as big a problem. So it depends on, I always find it an interesting there in the scale.

[00:19:10] How do you know if you're extroverted or introverted? If you go out for an evening and you're with your friends and you're hanging out. By the end of the evening, are you feeling amped up or are you just drained? And I find that introverted people love interaction, but at a certain point they gotta be like, I'm out of here and I need to go pass out.

[00:19:28] And other people can stay past the party and hang out and keep going and they're feeling good and want to do it again the next night where maybe the introverted person needs the rest of the weekend to recover. So when you saw people who were told there's no party and you gotta be in your own environment that was torture, mental torture.

[00:19:48] So that was an interesting dynamic to see how that manifested. And building into other, what could eventually be mental illness, to say, this reality doesn't exist, so I'm curating a different reality for myself, so I make sure that I can still survive and also thrive. I, I know I'm going down a different path, but it brings me to a different point of like how we look at the world, and I could get to that in a second.

[00:20:16] Martin McCormack: You're handling it and explaining it as a storyteller should. You're trying to parse... The different gears and and so that's good and we're going to take a little break here, but before we do, I want you to give the listeners your website so they can start hooking into your films and everything about you, what you offer.

[00:20:37] David Rocco Facchini: Okay. My website is called Della Rocco Studios. So D E L L A. R O C C O and Studios, named after my mother, Della, and my father, Rocco. My middle name is Rocco. I usually go by David Rocco Facchini as my artistic name. 

[00:20:55] Martin McCormack: Nice. I like that. 

[00:20:57] David Rocco Facchini: Yeah, and that's on the front page, it gives a little overview of my most recent project called USA to Z. Where I'm doing a word association with people across the nation to see the stories I can elicit. And in my film, I also talk about... How story shapes everything. And even the story of America, the story we tell ourselves to live in America. Yeah, DellaroccoStudios. com. 

[00:21:22] Martin McCormack: Great. Let's dive into that when we come on the other side of the break. You are listening to storyteller and stop motion and live motion movie filmmaker David Rocco Facchini on Strung Out. 

[00:21:37] We're back with David Rocco Facchini.. We're recording here in the live studio. I want to jump back into the film that you recently have been working on. This is a pretty complex project. And can you tell the listener just what you did and... And how this board game inspired you to go on a Did you hit all 50 states?

[00:22:00] David Rocco Facchini: The wheels of my van touched every state that is in the contiguous US. Wow. Yeah. Wow. I bought a Class B Sprinter, which is actually a 2003 vehicle. It is actually the Prometheus or the Adam and Eve of what you might see on the road today. It's a cross combination. It's got a Mercedes engine.

[00:22:20] It has a Freightliner body and it was designed by Airstream. You could find these groups called million miles sprinters because they're diesel engines. I bought it with 271, 000 miles and it's now at 308. I've had issues with it, but they're repairable issues, and this, these things can run forever if you take care of it.

[00:22:36] I fell into this. I'm not a mechanic. I'm not mechanically minded per se, even though I'm hands on. But I've been learning, and there's a community out there, so I bought this Sprinter to, hit the road. And the idea was, I'm going to interview people while I go, and I just figured I was going to start just doing a word association with folks.

[00:22:55] Whenever I would travel with my partner at the time, Zita, we would take a road trip. We moved across the country from Chicago to Oakland in 2016 and on the road, we would play like road bingo or we would play the A to Z game was as you're driving, you look for signs and you're like, A, Applebee's, and as you go, you just go through the alphabet.

[00:23:16] And it became like a little competitive thing of who can see what and how far your eyes can see and all that stuff to get something down. But it was just like a way to pass time on long road trips. And also when I was a kid my parents would load us up into whatever vehicle was at the time. And there was these little cardboard...

[00:23:33] Game pieces that had these little translucent windows that you could slide over. So if you saw a fire truck, or if you saw a stop sign, or you saw a little girl, and it was formatted in a bingo sense. In April of 2021, I was ready to hit the road and I started interviewing people in the Bay Area as a beginner and always very COVID cautious.

[00:23:55] I knew I was visiting people, family that I hadn't seen for a while. I would sit down with people outdoors. I would just do a word association and start going from A to Z. I'd try to squat with them for about an hour and whatever the hour allotted is what we did.

[00:24:09] Martin McCormack: Did you have the game board in front of them? 

[00:24:12] David Rocco Facchini: I just started with word association. I ended up developing the game board. This is an interesting thing as an aside. So as a stop motion animator I I love the movie Marcel the Shell with Shoes On, and in that documentary formatted, animated, scripted film, Marcel says at one point, the funny thing about documentaries is you don't know what it is until it presents itself.

[00:24:35] That's what I figured. I will find the story, but I'm going on the journey. As I would travel, as I started one of the first stops I ended up doing, it wasn't necessarily exploring. The states. I wanted to go visit my buddy, Mike and Wendy, who live in Minnesota. And I've been creative with them for many years, and Mike is an animator, an Emmy award winning animating director, and Wendy's a wonderful production artist.

[00:24:59] She's a great animator as well. They're a couple, and I've known them since college. So we were, we've been working on a project since college, called Monkey and Car, which is an animated... Series, a finite series, not like an ongoing thing. It's got a beginning, middle, and an end. So I wanted to go there, but as I was traveling there, I would stop along the way, and I would see general stores, which I love, and I came across one. Camping Trip, this game that had the yield sign, the little girl, the fire truck.

[00:25:29] And I was like, that's cool. Of course. I remember this, those bingo games. And I was just like, I liked the idea of it. So I started just designing the graphic, but it wasn't until about a year later, a year and a half later that I was able to meet up with a producer. So I was going to end my road trip several months earlier, but then a stop motion film I produced, I got word that it was going to be showcased in Cannes, France in 2022. I was in New Mexico and I was heading West and I was like, I got to do this. So I went back up North, circled back to Chicago.

[00:26:13] I run a stop motion festival online, which would have been in person had COVID not happened. It was supposed to be in April of 2020. A very smart guy. Edwin Ruiz, Mondo Machine. He's a producer. He's a filmmaker. He operates out of Chicago and Wicker Park. We worked on this game piece. We refined it. We die cut the piece. I did the graphics and it was a back and forth trial and error. We finally got something that looked good that we could interact with.

[00:26:38] So since then, I've been at playing a short form of this word association. And you asked about an example. One of the perfect examples I have is It's, saying Mount Rushmore, I've gotten responses anywhere from Testament to our greatest presidents, a monument to genocide, George, Paul, John, and Ringo.

[00:27:01] It's just what is your Mount Rushmore? And we tell ourselves stories based on the information that's either been handed to us that we've found that speak to us or something that we've sought. And this is how we curate our reality. 

[00:27:18] Martin McCormack: How interesting that Mount Rushmore, of course, is a great icon to start with and, but let me get this straight before we take another quick break. You would approach a general store, you'd pull up, and you're a very approachable person for you people in the listening audience, very friendly and would you say, I have this game, I'm making a film.

[00:27:40] Are you willing to participate in it? Was it that kind of thing? How did you get people to actually go on film, especially during these crazy times? 

[00:27:50] David Rocco Facchini: Some of it was reaching out to people that I've known through my creative endeavors throughout my life. Sometimes it was, I've interviewed a couple of family members, but other times when I didn't know somebody, it, I would never put it as the agenda first.

[00:28:06] I was in a place in New Mexico before I went to Cannes and it called Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. I was in this small little town and walking down this strip and there was a place that had a bunch of old cars, like Model T old cars sitting in the front. I'm not a car person, but like these kind of souped up cars, so I'm like, wow, I'm walking around and this guy peeks out.

[00:28:29] He's got a cowboy hat and shorts and he's got a USMC United States Marine Corps shirt, probably guy in his seventies. Maybe older. I don't want to be, making assumptions about Jim. 

[00:28:41] Martin McCormack: In case he's listening.

[00:28:42] David Rocco Facchini: Yeah, but very youthful too. He's like, how you doing? I'm like, hi. , I hope you don't mind. I'm just sniffing around your property, looking at you guys. No problem. You want to come in for a beer? I was like, okay, so we started chatting, and he starts talking to me, I start talking to him, and he reveals how he was a Vietnam soldier, and I just started chatting, I was like, listen, I'm traveling, and I'm also doing this word association type of thing, I'm wondering if you'd be interested.

[00:29:05] So I like making a little bit of a connection. I don't, I'm not like saying, you see a lot of things on Tok or Instagram where it's just like standing on a boardwalk and trying to interact with people and just, doing that short form stuff, which is, there's fine with that, but that's just not my approach.

[00:29:19] So the viewer is going to really see a person open up as opposed to those boardwalk things where, we're going to, I think, there's an entertainment value of being a little bit exploitive in those things of showing somebody's ignorance or, whatever it could be.

[00:29:33] I'm thinking of just like simple kind of quick interview things. But what I'm trying to do is really get to understand how people have curated their reality in the United States. 

[00:29:43] Martin McCormack: Perfect. And before we take this break this is David Rocco Facchini and it's USA 2Z is the name of the movie that's being worked on right now. Are you still wanting to interview people?

[00:29:57] David Rocco Facchini: I'm always up for interviewing people. I'm always interested in trying to get more states represented. Like I said, I have about half of the states represented. 

[00:30:04] Martin McCormack: If you People, you can go to David's website and you can reach out to him. And also for the listener, is there a way that they can see your stop action movie that made it to Cannes? 

[00:30:17] David Rocco Facchini: So right now we only have the preview. My other entity of stop motion is called MostStopMo. M O S T O P M O. 

[00:30:27] If you go to Della Rocco Studios, you'll see something called the Cookie Cutter and that links up to my festival. I have every festival posted on YouTube and you can see it within the context of It might've been our 2020 festival, so it's in its full form. It's an eight minute thing, but we will be releasing it again because now it's done with this festival tour. So go to dellaroccostudios.Com or go to MostStopMo.Com. 

[00:30:50] Martin McCormack: Very good. We'll be right back with David Rocco Facchini. You are listening to Strung Out. We're back here in the studio and I'm interviewing David Rocco Facchini. He has this movie that's going to be coming out USA to Z.

[00:31:05] What did you learn from interviewing these people because these are tumultuous times and my Initial feeling is this is very risky. 

[00:31:16] David Rocco Facchini: Oh, really? Interesting. 

[00:31:17] Martin McCormack: The idea that, you know who are you? I see, you want me to do word association and, are you one of them? Were you met with suspicion or were you, or did people open up to you? 

[00:31:29] David Rocco Facchini: I will say, so this is something that I find interesting. I'm very open minded and I am definitely of the liberal side of things. There were people that I met along the way and I have family members that I love who are Trump supporters, Desantis supporters.

[00:31:46] I'll give this as an example. I was traveling in Colorado and my van is a class B van, but it's, 22 feet long, 21 feet long. It's got a presence. I pulled up and I was having pizza in Golden, Colorado. I go in and I'm having a pizza and I'm sitting with a friend there.

[00:32:02] She was actually traveling in her van that I helped her purchase, and she joined me for a while. This guy over here is what we're talking about, and he leans over and he hands me a sticker. And I don't know if you saw this in the Midwest, but it was definitely something that you would see throughout more of the South.

[00:32:16] It was a Biden sticker with pointing in it, that where you see him put on the fuel pumps that said, I did this and it was like supposed to indicate how Biden was responsible for the fuel surge and he handed it to me and he was wearing a red MAGA hat, and I just.

[00:32:30] I was like, Oh, hey, how's it going? He's I thought you might want this. And I was like, Oh, this is interesting. I was like, can I ask you? You think that one person who's been in power for maybe a couple of years is responsible for such a surge? I was like, do you think that maybe it's also relative to a global pandemic, a war in Ukraine, and ensuing, do you think that maybe this isn't just, he did this?

[00:32:55] And it was interesting to see, because I'm engaging in thoughtful conversation, I fell into the trappings a while back of online, wanting to win, getting aggressive verbally, through text, and it also reads, the thing about written text is it reads depending on how people receive it, but oftentimes there was no doubt of where I was coming from.

[00:33:18] I was like, Oh, this is it. So what I do is I want to engage in people because I really do want to understand something that it just just does not make any sense to me in a very human way. I will say one of the things about religion that I do embrace is the thought of live and let live and incorporate and, building community.

[00:33:34] So I think that's what I think is the ultimate religion. And I think that's innate to regardless. So I'm asking, I was like, And I asked him that question, there was a hockey game going on and whenever I would ask him a question that would challenge him a little bit, he was all of a sudden invested in this hockey game.

[00:33:50] And I would wait. Then he would come back to me and he would go to another subject and he was just like this I saw this movie that said so we got into it. He didn't really answer that question, but then he started asking me about the election.

[00:34:03] Do you think that Biden is president? And I was like I'll say this. There's no longstanding institutions that exist that we've invested in since this country's been around that has been able to prove otherwise. And of course, voting, there can be malfeasance. We're from Chicago. The phrase in Chicago is vote early, vote often, dead people vote in Chicago, but is it to the point where it's going to overturn a national election?

[00:34:28] And they found some malfeasance here and there, but it was nothing that was going to be substantial. So yes, there is malfeasance, but no, I haven't found evidence. And no one who's investigated has found evidence. The states that really wanted it to be couldn't find evidence. That's what I said. And he's I saw this movie that, and I was like, can I just stop you right there?

[00:34:48] I was like, movies are stories that have a agenda. I was like, I make movies. I know how to push forth an agenda. So I would ask that maybe you invest in another source if you want to prove your point. So we continue to talk and eventually he started saying do you think Michelle Obama is a woman? And then you start getting into somebody's mindset and I'm happy to engage.

[00:35:13] So the one interesting thing that I did find is people who have these biases can still be nice and friendly, especially to a white man. If I was a white woman, maybe not, maybe if I was another shade but we were engaged civilly and he's just I was like I think that's irrelevant.

[00:35:31] If she was a man or a woman, I was like, what does that matter? How does that influence politics? How does that manifest? And he's given me an emotional perspective of who he is and what he believes in. And what I've realized, it's every one who's brought up by parents who you want to love you.

[00:35:50] You can't imagine those parents steering you wrong. The people who love you aren't gonna tell, aren't gonna teach you racism. How could they're not gonna teach you intolerance. Why would they? But it happens. I grew up in an environment where the N word was tossed around in humor, and I used it. I joked. I would do the same thing.

[00:36:10] Female jokes, Brazil nuts were called N toes in certain circles. And I was just like, and my mom shot that stuff down. No matter what, she's very liberal, very, loving and extroverted. So there was always this thing. I was like, Oh, I'm just kidding. And she's yeah, but those mean, it's and I didn't interact with so many people uncovering of color in the Northwest side.

[00:36:33] And that humor was, it was. Prolific. So you don't imagine the people who love you steering you wrong, but then there becomes a responsibility of your own emotional social evolution where you are put up with a conflict of saying, oh, I realize that this is bad. I was in high school, I football with I'm sorry if I'm going on a little bit, but I was in high school playing football with somebody and we had three black students in the entire.

[00:37:02] All boys, Catholic high school that people paid tuition to go to. And we were playing football. And at one point when I was a kid, we used to play a game called N pile. And it's you pointed someone, you yell it out and y'all jump on them. And that's what the game was. We were playing football. And at the end of it, I'm about to say it.

[00:37:20] And then all of a sudden it was like I went online. I was like, Oh shit. And then I started thinking about that. And what does that mean? And then the racial implications of which it was founded, lynching and everything like that, which became, it's like cowboys and Indians. The Indians were the bad guys, the cowboys were the good guys.

[00:37:39] If you look at history, eh, cowboys weren't always the good guys. 

[00:37:45] Martin McCormack: Did you find, by talking to these people was that just a side benefit of the discourse? Or, is that what the movie ended up portraying, is that somehow we all have these stories. Some of them are learned, some of them are, and I love the idea talking about movies pushing an agenda.

[00:38:09] Because more than movies push an agenda. And clearly in this case, talking to this guy he... He certainly had an agenda too, right? 

[00:38:18] David Rocco Facchini: It's interesting. I don't I guess it depends on if you want to call it an agenda. So I guess the idea of having an open mind is being open to thought.

[00:38:25] And what I like to do is plant seeds and I'm not trying to win. I'm not trying to prove a point. But I'm challenging a notion. So the conversation with this person who actually ended up not being on film, this was just an interaction in a pizza parlor, at one point. I said the Mount Rushmore example to him, and then I was like, what is the first thing you think of with, I told him what the film was, what's the first thing you think of with Mount Rushmore, and he's just oh, it's just a mountain of our greatest presidents, and then I said, some people say it's a monument to genocide, and he's oh my gosh, that's ridiculous, how can people say that, and I was like I guess if you look at it this way, if you were indigenous to an area and you loved a mountain and you actually worship this mountain and you saw in that mountain in its natural formations, the spirits, the faces, the bodies of your ancestors, and then an entity comes in and annihilates not only your people, but decides to blast into that spiritual epicenter white male faces, maybe you would have a feeling about that. I was like, what if it ended up, they carved Michelle Obama's face into Mount Rushmore or even Barack Obama's face. And he's Oh, that's ridiculous. I was like if you look at his presidency, he did pretty well. He was like first president to ever get healthcare. Maybe not perfectly, but on the table. Whereas every other developed nation has it. Almost every other nation across the board has it right. So it's just like planning a seed. Then whether that grows or not is not my responsibility, but this is one of the things that I really learned. When you present factual, when you present information to somebody which would challenge it. And you decide to deny that information, that is the foundation of injustice. 

[00:40:16] Martin McCormack: We're going to leave it here for this podcast right there with talking about David Rocco Facchini. Storyteller, filmmaker. He has this new movie that's going to be coming out USA to Z. And. Are you going to have the board game with it when the movie comes out?

[00:40:35] It all depends on, how this manifests. My goal is to have this out by next spring in the festival circuit and then hopefully by summer in terms of like road trip season. Okay. We'll 

[00:40:48] see how it all goes. These are prototypes that we've developed. So anything's possible. 

[00:40:52] Great.

[00:40:53] We're gonna do a part two with David and continue along with his journey as being an artist, a storyteller. Not every day do you meet somebody whose film ends up at Cannes and just fascinating that he ended up traveling and making a movie during probably one of the most tumultuous times in American history.

[00:41:19] So that in and of itself is very intriguing to me. And but we're going to leave it at that, at this for this week. Thank you, David Rocco Ficini, and thank you guys for listening. We'll talk to you again soon. Bye bye.