Focal Point
Conversations with artists across all industries, taking a deep dive into the nuances, techniques, and philosophies of society's talent.
Focal Point
NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC Filmmaker Turns INDIE #56 w/ Filmmaker Christopher Maes
What if the best film school is a 15×22 basement? Former NationWriter-director Chris Maes breaks down how he turned a tiny room into a soundstage, shot two features with lean crews, and resourceful filmmaking. We dig into Hemisphere and AirShift, the genre twist that saved a stalled script, and the Nat Geo lessons that taught him to prep hard and stay lean.
Chris shares candid night-shoot challenges, smart pre-lighting tactics, and why actor chemistry and small details make low-budget films feel big.
Welcome to the Focal Point Podcast. I'm your host, Tony Riggs. Here I take a deep dive into my personal interests of the hidden craftsmanship, philosophies, and passions behind Society's talent. If you're intrigued by artistic nuance, please subscribe and follow on my YouTube channel, Spotify, and Bud Sprout. With that being said, let me introduce you to today's guest. Welcome to the podcast. We're live, we're recording. Go ahead and just introduce yourself and uh tell the audience what you do and how you got started.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, yeah. So my name's uh Christopher Mays. I'm a uh writer-director based in Northern Virginia, Washington, DC area. And um how I got started in filmmaking actually was probably middle school age. Went from being a troublemaker to discovering a camera and realizing you can take all that negative stuff you're doing uh and turn it into something creative. And um, it was um probably like horror movies were the first thing I kind of gravitated to at that age. And then uh I eventually went to UCLA Film School. Um, this was at a time when film schools weren't widely, there weren't very many of them. There were like three, I think NYU, UCLA, and USC. So people really, I remember, you know, friends of my parents asking, what do you do? And I was like, I'm majoring in film. What do you do? You watch movies all day? What is you know, and it wasn't clear sort of what's the professional angle on that, you know, how would you apply that? But um, when I graduated, I focused really on screenwriting at that point, and I worked as a professional screenwriter for about six years in Los Angeles, and um that was a great eye-opener in just how the studio system works. It was at a time when you could write a speculative screenplay and sell it or get it set up for development and do rewrites and get paid and make a living. And um, but it was also it was a chance to meet kind of all the people at the studio level, actors, actresses, production companies that were active at that time. This would have been in the mid to late 1980s, early 1990s. And um I think coming out of that, I I I found myself frustrated creatively that I went into film school as a filmmaker. I kind of came out as a writer and I'd sort of pigeonholed myself creatively as okay, you're a screenwriter. And that's all I did, and that's all I thought about. And uh at some point I got married and had kids, and my wife's let's move to the east coast. It's friendlier out there than living in LA with helicopters and bars on your windows. So um uh so I really, in an odd way, I let go of directing completely and just was like, okay, I'm moving to the East Coast. I worked as a production manager for National Geographic and for Discovery, and I kind of forgot about wanting to direct something until COVID happened, and I found myself working out of the home, and we had a basement space that used to be the kids' kind of area, and they had you know grown up and gone off to college. And I looked around this room and I'm like, wow, this is like 15 feet by 22 feet. This I could make a sound stage of some kind, I could shoot a movie here, and that was kind of the start of me really getting back into thinking like a director. Like, what story would you tell in a contained setting like that? And so the first movie I did three years ago.
SPEAKER_01:It would be Saul, basically. What's that in a base in a basement, uh single setting? That would be Saul.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, yeah. Somebody's uh a friend of mine says it's called he calls it two characters stuck in a box, you know. But it's what it does creatively that I find helpful is it forces you to really focus your story. Like, how do you tell a bigger story and focus it on um two characters was initially my thought. And um, so I made Hemisphere in 2023, and that was a sci-fi thriller with two main characters, and then I did most recently Air Shift that's out now as of a week ago, it's available on Amazon Prime, and that was a horror movie set inside a radio station, but that radio station setting, the Air Studio, was in my basement in that same space. So um, I guess my sort of creative journey has been realizing I I think I've always been a filmmaker, and I've and by that I mean I like knowing how to shoot and light and edit and work with actors and sort of combine all of that. And uh what's satisfying about what I'm doing now is you're using all those things all the time. It isn't just the writing of the script, is maybe 10%. And uh, so I'm finding that I'm using many more aspects of what I'm able to do, and and that's a little more challenging too, because you hopefully want to get better.
SPEAKER_01:How many years did you work for National Geographic? And what was your role there?
SPEAKER_00:So funnily enough, I worked for almost seven years, six and a half years for them, and I managed the Natural History Unit, which is wildlife shows. And my coordinator, my assistant was Corey Krinsky, who's now my producer. And that's how he and I met, strangely enough, making wildlife documentaries. And we, you know, sent crews all over the world. We did shows on blue whales and lions and gorillas and chimpanzees. And you know, every time we did one of these, there were experts at the Nat Geo Society who would be the consultants. And you learned, you know, I was surrounded by brilliant people. And me with my, you know, BA degree from film school, I was like, oh my god, this is what you know, people who really study have a calling in life, what that looks like. And um, but I I think it taught me to work in a really lean manner because most documentary crews are small, you know. You'll stand the only way you're gonna get wildlife behavior is you can't have 10 people standing because the animals are just staring at you like, who the hell are those guys? Yeah, you've got to get in and get out.
SPEAKER_01:You're basically like snipers trying to find a position.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, it's like a three-pur, you'll have a producer, cameraman, and a second camera, and that's kind of it. And you, you know, you hang out and you hide out and sort of stand still, and after an hour the animals forget about you and then they go about their behavior. So I think what Nat Geo taught me in an indirect way was just the value of having a small, capable team for your crew.
SPEAKER_01:If you said that you had been working on the alien documentaries, we were about to have a very different episode.
SPEAKER_00:Oh, well, so actually, before I did natural history, I did a show called Is It Real with uh Eleanor Garrison. It's vaguely familiar, actually.
SPEAKER_01:I've never seen it.
SPEAKER_00:And it's it's an early sort of series that explored paranormal phenomena from two standpoints. The first standpoint is it is real, and here's how it's happening. And that was all the people that believed in the phenomenon. And the second half of the episode, because these are one hour long, was the skeptics saying, No, this is how it was faked, or this is what so we did like the Shroud of Turin, we did you know, spontaneous human combustion, we did the legend of King Arthur, and and so that was when I first started with them. I was sort of thrust into this series, which was completely in my own sort of uh ballpark as far as my interests. So um, so I did do some, you know, what one of them was a ghost ship, the Mary Celeste that was discovered with food and nobody on on board and no one knows what happened to the to the passengers, you know. So I did do a little bit of that.
SPEAKER_01:No, that's pretty cool. Because that that personally that scratches my a different itch of mine, which is not relevant to the show necessarily, but if that could be a whole different podcast, I could probably yeah, yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_00:It's I I do find um what's helpful about doing those documentary series is usually with those in particular, that type of show you're talking about, they do recreations. So those are little mini films. You hire actors, you put costumes on if it's reenactments, yeah. You're like, we need to get horses, we need to get riders, we need to get whatever that steel mesh thing is. People want to know. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. So you you're like, but we only have, you know, those are little budgets. It might be we have like$15,000 to shoot to shoot the recre for two days. And so you're stretching everything to be like, how do we get enough of this so that when we're doing the documentary, we can we can illustrate some of the ideas. So I again I found that super, super helpful for uh indie filmmaking.
SPEAKER_01:From your experience with working uh with small crews uh for Nat Geo, what did you find that translates the most uh to indie productions when it comes to being able to accomplish something on a small budget?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I think the first is you really have to be up front with people and say it's only gonna be this many crew people. Because you don't want crew showing up and a cameraman saying, Where's my ga my gaffer and my second camera and my that my media manager? And you don't want that happening. So I try to be really frank up front when I'm having conversations with crew people. I'll say, look, uh, at least part of the movie is going to be in my basement if there's a set that we've built there, and we can probably fit four crew people and the actors, and that's about it. So um often I look for someone who's not afraid of that. If it's a cameraman, they might say, I light my own stuff and I just need a gaffer. And that's two people who do, you know, that's your camera department. And for the sound, if I can have one person that can run that, that's great. And then ideally, an additional person be sort of a production coordinator to do a little bit of everything. They do everything from um, as I like to put it, I make sure they check with the actors to make sure I'm not anyone, no one's feeling abused that our hours are reasonable, that I'm asking them for, you know, reasonable things in their performance and making sure we have food on time that we take a break. And you know, somebody's stressed out, that coordinator can pull me aside and say, Chris, she needs 10 minutes to you know take a break here, even doing take after take, you know. So that's sort of the minimum. And I think the way to get there is um by having a smaller space where we shoot, um, we can pre-light it, generally speaking. So often the T T and I will come through a couple days before we start shooting and like rig the instruments, and you come up with like a lighting plan, which we did in AirShift. We're like, here's the lighting plan inside the air studio. We have she has a dust lamp, she has a lamp behind her near the wall that's gonna have a uh diffusion around it, and then we're gonna throw some light from outside the air studio through the windows and diffuse that. So you by doing all of that kind of homework ahead of time, then when you're shooting, you're not trying to scratch your head and figure that out. Um, so that's I think it's a combination of just being sort of up front with people and and um giving some time, some some prep time, because uh I think with Airshift, again, I didn't really know. I was like I told the audio guy, I want to use her mic. The mic that we have, the prop mic, I want to, it's an actual mic. Let's oh yeah, yeah, yeah. The condenser mic. Yes. Because when a person's two inches away from a mic talking, you know, in that sort of radio, hey, you're listening to airwaves, and uh, you know, it's a very different sound than if you've got the boom mic four feet away, you know. So um, so again, those are you know just useful to have those conversations up front. I think I gave him half an hour, and Nick, our audio guy, looked at my audio board and knew what it was and like here's your turntable. Oh thank God. Well, yeah, I didn't know. I thought I sort of understand it, but he was deep in the you know, in the weeds as an audio guy. And um, that helps the actors too. So for uh Ashley, our lead actress, then had the um ability to to run an air, you know, when she put the headphones on, she was really hearing the music, she was really talking in the mic and hearing herself. And it just helps to establish a level of reality, hopefully, for the actors.
SPEAKER_01:How did you how did you come across Ashley? Like, how did you acquire your actors as well as your crew for this project?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, so um the actors I used um uh Breakdown Express, which is sort of an adjunct, I think, to actors access. It's free. You create an account, you post some information about your film, what it's about, who the main characters are, a quick description, when you're gonna shoot, if there's pay, how much. And um, I did that initially, but I had at the same time I was kind of preparing that, I discovered Ashley through Facebook, through a mutual friend. And I saw this picture of her. I'm like, that she has an interesting look. And I looked into her background and saw she was a drummer and looked at a little bit of her um her other work, including a movie she did called Hello, It's Me, that's on uh Amazon Prime, where she plays a sporting character. And I thought, you know, I bet she could, I want to have a read for this because I had a weird sort of gut feeling that she's a kind of a tough, she has a bit of a tough exterior, a little bit tomboyish. And that's kind of how I envisioned this character, somebody who's kind of tough on the outside, but all her vulnerabilities are sort of hidden under the surface. And so I reached out to her through Facebook and said, Will you audition for this? And thankfully she said yes. And I had her show up with all the other actors that through Actors Access, and she probably auditioned in red with like six, five or six different male characters. I was just trying to check the chemistry of everybody because it's um casting a movie. Somebody somebody somewhere said uh for a director, casting is nine per 90% of the job. I I would amend that and say casting is like 10 or 15 percent of the job. Once you have the actors and you rehearse with them, that's the rest of it, so that when you show up on the set, there's still work to do, but um, you certainly want to start with put picking the right person uh through the casting session. So it was really through those auditions where we would pair people up different ways. And I had my producer, Corey Grinsky, uh, helping me to watch those and run those, and you schedule them back to back. So you do half an hour with this team, and I would have them often do a little improv at the end. So that um part of that's for me to see what they're are they okay with that, because um, as much as I have a script that's written and set and pretty much set in stone when we're when we're shooting, I'm always welcomed ideas, and it and we may find that a scene doesn't work properly the way it was written, and we want to explore something different. So I often will have them ad lib a little too.
SPEAKER_01:Well, I mean it's just it's interesting because when you're when you're directing um a project, sometimes you're gonna have quick ideas on the spot on set that you want to try out. And so like checking the actor to see if you know they're they're good with improv or at least somewhat competent is like one of the key things that uh you're looking for when you're casting a person.
SPEAKER_00:Absolutely. And and there are times I think there were like two scenes that we changed uh pretty drastically. One we had in airship the scene where right after this murder has happened, and the woman realizes the DJ that the man she thought was a friend is a serial killer. Um, I think as originally written, I had her scared of him, and and um he was pacing around her, and it and I read the scene the night before we were gonna shoot. I'm like, God, this something feels really wrong about this scene. This feels like she's a victim. And I thought, what if I flip it and she's mad at it? What would that do? You're a serial killer and you murder someone, and then the woman that you think is gonna be like, oh, please don't hurt me. Instead, she's mad at you, yelling at you, what the hell's wrong with you? You don't do that, you know. Um, I thought, well, that's that's a I haven't seen that in a movie before. And so I quickly the next morning wrote this, rewrote the scene. And when the actors came and I said, you know, I think I sent them a text, but I said, We have a new, this is a different scene, we're not doing it the way it was written. And um, because they were both skilled with improv, I don't think it threw them. We rehearsed it once or twice and then just shot it. And and it's uh you definitely want to have room for that. I think the wrong thing would be and you you check this with actors, you can ask them, how are you with doing long takes? Because if an actor doesn't, if they're a TV actor who's not accustomed to learning the whole scene or the whole script, that might be a problem. But if it's somebody who comes from a theater background, on the other hand, they may be totally fine and they'll be like, I'll I'll do the scene all the way through.
SPEAKER_01:And that's I've also found from personal experiences that when it comes to uh theater actors trying out film for the first time, is that they they're obviously they're very good at memorization, but sometimes improv tends to be their weak weak spot because you know when you're on stage, you don't want you don't want to go off script. Like there's a whole production that is relying on perfect continuity every single time. And the other thing with Ashley is that she has a really good radio voice. She she really does.
SPEAKER_00:She, you know, she worked with a DJ. Uh there's somebody that I knew from LA, Trisha Halloran, who who worked as a DJ at a station there called KCRW, which is the uh NPR station in Los Angeles. And I reached out, I had met Trisha years before, and I reached out and said, Will you do a one-hour Zoom call with Ashley and just talk her through what being a DJ is like? And she agreed to do that. And I think that helped a lot because most DJs are juggling many things at once. There, you know, there used to be a time in radio where you had your own engineer who did all, you know, you just were the personality, and somebody else played the records and mixed, did the audio mixes and cued the commercials. And as you know, belts got tighter at radio stations, they started cutting positions. And today a DJ is an engineer, they often do promotions and commercials, they record and mix those themselves. They wear a lot of hats, and I think that was helpful for Ashley to meet and talk to Trisha to get some sense of that.
SPEAKER_01:Well, similar to well, the parallel between both Ashley, uh between Ashley and her character is that um both are jack of all trades. Like she she can her talents don't just extend to acting like she knows she's a drummer, she also does you know, a few other things. And you know, she's she's a competent actor, where it's like a lot of actors you you you know that you'll go through casting with them, it's like they're kind of a one-trick pony, you know. And I think that's something else Ashley uh told me when I interviewed her her for the episode like a couple months back. Um, is that one of the best things you can do to stand out as an actor is to have other talents than acting.
SPEAKER_00:I would totally agree with that. I would totally agree. I think as well, um I'm still learning this. I'm st I would I I feel like I'm I'm getting better with each movie at working with actors. And I think that's the key to probably a successful movie is credible performances and characters that you create with them. Because we all, you know, we've all seen movies where the plot is engrossing, but if the performances are flat or wooden, you check out, you're not in into the movie. Conversely, I've seen movies where there's some amazing performances, and even if there was some plot stuff, that's like uh the often the actor will carry me through stuff. You know, there are movies where the whole experience of the movie is an amazing performance that you you walk away remembering. So, with that in mind, I'm always trying to sneak little parts of actors into the movie. Like with Ashley, she had some props from home. I said, Bring what you have in Ohio, bring it to the set, and we'll stick it around the air screen. We need you to move it a little bit, but I but the idea, and I think we did this on the previous movie on Hemisphere. I stuck a couple things, little joke things for the actresses. You're on a space station, but I'm gonna stick a little cartoon character thing here from you know the 1980s. But little things to sort of remind you, you're playing a person, a human, so don't get too hung up on the plot and all of that. You know, just try to be in the space of you're an existing and an actual person with feelings and emotions. And sometimes that helps if you can have the actor borrow little aspects of their own life and bring those to set or wear them, or you know, I think Ashley had a necklace around her neck that was of a drum set. It's like, okay, you're a drummer, so that's what Lisa will wear. That's her, you know.
SPEAKER_01:And she incorporated that into her performance too, like you know, her fiddling with the drumstick. Yeah, those are things just a little bit me personally knowing her, like I I I yeah, I know why she did that.
SPEAKER_00:I think too much of doing it. What I liked is when she does it, she's so second nature. And I watched, I'm like, I could never do that. Like, you know, I would it would be flying off and smashing, you know, crashing into the walls, me trying to twirl the drumstick like that. But um, but I I feel like that's as an indie filmmaker, it's something you can do. It doesn't cost anything. And the major film studios don't necessarily have a lock on great acting, even though they're very talented, you know, name actors you and I can can think of. Um there are just there's just as much talent in the little smaller pockets of of acting communities around the US that if you tap into those, and as a director, if you say my goal is I want to bring more of that character to what I'm doing, um, there's a better chance you'll you'll you know engage with an audience in that way.
SPEAKER_01:I want to backpedal for a second because um from the conversations that I've had so far on this uh this podcast, a lot of artists um either uh got back into their craft because of COVID. Describe to me the um the moment uh during the lockdown that you're like, hmm, I I think I want to give this a shot.
SPEAKER_00:So I I had written probably three or four drafts of a space station story that I at the time I had a new agent representation as a writer and was using and was sending this out. And I would I was really obsessed with there's some sort of movie in the idea of a person being sent on one mission and then realizing it's really something else going on. And so I sort of had that in my head. And when COVID happened, I literally I was working for a company in DC, and they said, you know, sending everybody home to work from home. And I thought, well, where will I set up my office? And my daughter had just moved out of her bedroom, and I thought I could either do that, or no one's in the basement space of our home. And we have a fully built-out with a bedroom, a bathroom, and sort of a middle, like a large sort of um almost conference room sort of size space. And I literally set my desk up there, and the more that I spent, probably within two weeks, I just kept looking around when I was doing client calls and whatnot. I'm like, this is stupid. I'm in this space, no one's using it. And I sort of asked my wife, hey, would you be bothered if I built a film studio, whatever that means? And she's like, no, no one, just don't, just don't, you know, make holes in the walls. I think was her uh, you know, uh condition. And so I think really part of it was that, and part was I was very frustrated with Hollywood at the time, had stopped making movies. They said, Well, oh, we're in lockdown, no one can make movies, it's not safe anymore on set. Uh, there were COVID product protocols. I worked on an independent feature film during that time, and we shot, and there were these zones, and you everybody had to wear masks. And what was the role on that one? As a production manager, so basically managing the budget and the hiring all the crew and and paying the actors and that sort of thing. Um, but what I saw was how expensive it was for all these COVID protocols, and I sort of looked at that and thought, well, as an indie filmmaker, again, what if I did it with a small crew and we were, you know, we tested people before they came to set, take your COVID test and cut in it. So we make the attempt, but we're not like the way a union can sometimes be very rigid, like you know, about the protocols. I thought, you know, we'll shoot uh Hemisphere was the movie in this case, so that if we shoot it uh in a short time frame, you know, eight to ten days, um, there's a good chance we won't have anybody, you know, get COVID or bring it to SAT and spread it around. Um, so I think it was both those. I think it was being downstairs in that area, but I think the second thing was hearing from the industry, we can't make movies, everything's on lockdown. And I was like, wait a second, you're telling me we can't entertain audiences, there's no story, there's no way to, if you're used to making big, huge blockbusters, how do you do a story with two characters in a room? You know, that goes back to our two characters stuck in a box. Um, so that that was probably a little bit born of you know belligerence on my part, which is what do you mean you can't make a movie? Of course, I'm gonna show you, I'm gonna make a movie.
SPEAKER_01:And also challenge accepted.
SPEAKER_00:A little bit, a little bit. And I think, you know, I was a little ignorant of how much effort is involved in making the feature film, but I think that's important. I think it's okay, you don't have to know everything. And sometimes you can do something creative with that, you know, whatever that is in you. If you get if somebody tells you no, you know, I've had people tell me you can't you can't make a movie about serial killers because it's all been done. There's nothing new to be done with serial killers. That was a quote that a studio person gave me. And, you know, with AirShift, we're like, well, yes, except what if you had a zombie outbreak come in, then what? You know, so I I always take no, you can't do that as a bit of, like you said, a challenge or a call to action.
SPEAKER_01:So hemisphere was your first feature. The your newest one, Airshift, is your second. What were the lessons that you learned from the production of Hemisphere that you were um aware to try to not repeat those mistakes when approaching AirShift?
SPEAKER_00:So I think the biggest thing with Hemisphere, it is a special effects movie and it's sci-fi, it's set in the future. And there was a lot of what we did in set design where I didn't have a huge budget and we dressed the sets to a certain degree. And I think some of the sci-fi enthusiasts in the audience called us out on that. They're like, wait a second, I recognize that's a you know, they would point out that's a packing container you painted gray and stuck to the wall. You know, they would point out certain set design things that I didn't think people were paying attention to, and they were. And so I think with AirShift, the first thing was I need to do something set in the present day, not in the future. And let's not do sci-fi. Let's try to do something. Uh, you know, the challenge was I need to make a believable radio station, Air Studio set. But I thought I'm I'm confident I can do that. One of the things is I have uh, thanks to my dad, I have some carpentry skills. So I can build flats and walls and windows and doors and put sheetrock up and paint and all those things. So I thought if I if with AirShift, if I just avoid the sci-fi and future, that's one less headache, you know, that I think that's busted on. Um, I do think the value of rehearsals, we we rehearsed a lot on on uh Hemisphere, and those were both local actresses, two local uh actresses on on um hemisphere. That um the the benefit of that was we rehearsed for five or six days at night on the set before we ever shot a frame of the movie. We blocked out scenes, we discussed the characters, and that was I would I the next movie I do, I want I want to sort of insist on that. On Air Shift, I wanted that, but because I cast Ashley from Ohio, Patrick the serial killer from New York City, and Marguerite is also from from Manhattan. Um, suddenly I had three out-of-town actors, and it was like we had two days, really two half days to rehearse. And it wasn't probably as much as I would like to really, you know, to dig into the characters. Um, so we didn't have that on Airship, whereas I think, you know, I would have, in hindsight, I would have rather if I had a week, uh, to just work with the actors. I think the benefit of all that is the performances are are a little more stable and you can identify problems in the script if there are problems, transitions, and that sort of thing. Um, but other than that, I think I did not foresee the one thing I I kind of underestimated at the difficulty level in Airshift of there's three primary locations, two of which are not under my control. You know, it was two other places we had to travel to and dress sets and make sure we didn't destroy any of somebody else's property. Um, I think I underestimated the, you know, the it's an extra variable to do that. And the other is the actors. We had, you know, we had our three main actors, then we had two supporting, so that's five. Then we added a newscaster, Morgan, so that's six. Then I had a bunch of zombie extras from University of Maryland, you know, Baltimore County. That was another four people. So when you add all that together, it was like this huge cast. And I I really um wasn't prepared for, you know, when you have shoot days with a lot of people, you have a lot of questions, and you know, it's just a different way of directing.
SPEAKER_01:And people have questions for you. And then you gotta answer all of them. Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, and you can't tell somebody, I'm uh we're too busy, I can't answer your question. You know, you have to you're like bugger off, you know. Yeah, yeah. So um I think what I what I learned, I'm glad that they were so different from each other. I think if AirShift had been, you know, uh uh a mirror of the hemisphere experience, I would not have learned as much. I think because it was much more complex of a movie logistically, um, it forced me to try some different things. I think on AirShift with one of the uh shoots we did, I divided up scenes. I said, We're running out of time, and I tore pages out of my storyboard scenes oftentimes, especially the action scenes. I tore pages out, I gave them to Donald Dim, our art director. I said, You take the gaffer and you go shoot all these scenes of zombies breaking in and going down the hallway. And then we're gonna peel off the actors and the rest of the crew, and we're gonna shoot these underground scenes, these dialogue scenes. So we shot, you know, the two things concurrently over the period of like four or five hours. And that was kind of the the way we needed to do it for to get everything done we needed to in that particular shoot day. And so it taught me um, I think, flexibility. Like, let go, they'll shoot whatever they shoot. You gave them storyboards, try to follow these, but feel free to improvise too, you know.
SPEAKER_01:I can actually kind of relate to being able to spot um uh spot uh particular construction products when it comes to uh set decoration because I was at a film festival earlier this year, and you know, there was um coincidentally also a space themed uh short film that was there. And uh they built this corridor um you know out of basically air filters. You know, there's like a square home air filters. And so I spotted that immediately. And I'm like, uh but the way that they did it was actually really good. Like I know I was probably only one of maybe two people that actually knew how they did that. Yeah. It was really creative. Uh it took me out of it because I recognized it because I'm also in construction at the moment. And uh but I also appreciated it because I'm like, uh, you did it really well. Somebody knew somebody had a redneck friend that knew what they were doing on set, and uh they were able to do it.
SPEAKER_00:I would say the I I'm more impressed by sci-fi than almost any other genre that on the independent side, I've seen people pull off some really creative, clever stuff, you know, where either it's one of the things I learned from Joe Tyler on DP for Hemisphere is he said, Don't light everything. He said, Go for dark, go for shadows. Your main characters, yes, we want to see. Let the light fall off, and that's less stress on you to dress the set. And we had in that movie, I think we had like a crawl space where two characters hit out where there were some bad guys down below, uh hijackers in the space station. And uh he really was like, he told, you know, it gave me input. I would walk him through the set, and he'd be like, bring the ceiling lower so it's more cramped, keep that wall dark, don't put anything there, put more dark, you know, gray paint over here. And there's a lot you can do with um both hiding things from the viewer, and then as you're discussing, too, using being clever with using stuff you get at Home Depot that you're like, that's an interesting texture. And if I paint it flat gray, you won't immediately know what it is, but it looks futuristic in some manner, you know.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, people that aren't filmmakers don't realize how much work uh that goes into production is actually really blue-collar work. That's really something that's underestimated, honestly, in my opinion.
SPEAKER_00:I I would 100% agree that that um, in fact, I don't have the budget for this, but I would love to someday have a blue-collar crew of guys and be like, here's the plans I drew. I'm gonna leave, take your two by fours, frame this out, you know, that to just have them build it. There's a there is a lot of it that is like more construction oriented. And if you have the space for it, you can light from above and you can be like, you know, more of the um one of the things that I gravitate toward with um movie making is is set work, just because you control it. You control the lighting, nobody's gonna kick you out. Um, and and you can often light, you know, if it's a big enough space, you can light from above, or you can come up with a way so that you're making an environment for the actors, but you can also, when you cut and break, you go somewhere else and you eat and talk and whatever, but you have your sort of built area, which is you know, can be cool and and um it's just uh you know, you have control over the the element so you don't get rained out or anything like that.
SPEAKER_01:Now, conversely, what were the lessons that you learned from AirShift that you're gonna be mindful that you think you are gonna pay attention to uh going into you know potentially your next one?
SPEAKER_00:Yes, yes. I think as I mentioned, a lot of characters uh there are a lot of sort of pieces of airshift. You know, it isn't like a simple story, it's just like two variables. It's like female disc jockey serial killer, then zombies, and then there's a you know a singer-songwriter who comes into the mix. So I think for the next project I do, I probably want to get to to a point of simplifying the plot so that I focus more on the characters, not so much on guns and knives and blood and zombies and other stuff that can be, you know, that's that's certainly can be entertaining for an audience, but I want to try to challenge myself as a writer a little bit more to try to make something watchable where there's a little more drama going on. And then I think the other thing is the um probably uh I would like to try shooting something with a little more of floating camera. And by that I mean if I work with the DP who's like, we're gonna move, and the actors are gonna go here, move over there, and then they do some of the scene and then move back over here. Sorry, I'm moving in your frame here. But the idea is I would love to do a movie that feels a little less edity, if that makes sense, and a little more like this flow. Like you start a scene wide and then you move in, and now it's a two-shot or a close-up, and then we're gonna go back, you know, or we go over here. Um, I haven't tended to do that, it requires a little more choreography, but again, if I'm focused on performance and depending on what the story is, um, that would be a great thing to to uh to attempt. I think the last lesson is doing exterior night shoots is very, very it's probably one of the most difficult things you can do, maybe over shooting on water. Um we have one exterior night shoot with uh with airshift, and because you're dependent on when is the sunset, when is it truly dark, and then you have to light everything so you can see what's happening, and then you have to work. In this case, it was with zombies and one of the lead characters outside the radio station. That was all one compressed night shoot, and I think we had to get all the zombie footage inside four or five hours before we I told them we'd be out of there by like 1 a.m. And so literally the sun went down, it was totally dark at 8 p.m. So it was like a five-hour window to cram all this footage in. And um I wouldn't, I think next time going into a project, I would really look at if I have a night shoot, I would schedule it differently and understand that you know you can't trying to get eight pages of material is not realistic, you know. Um, that's quite the task. Yeah, yeah. It's um and it wasn't dialogue. Sometimes there's the you know, the benefit of dialogue is sometimes once you get set, characters have a discussion, it's two pages of script, and boom, you're you're you're out. And so it can be very a quick way to get through the page count. In this case, these are all action scenes. Guy walks out, stabs a zombie, another one grabs him, he stabs it and runs back inside. You know, it was like a series of you know, all action stuff that took, you know, 10 or 15 seconds of screen time, but you have to like light it, has to be in focus. You got to cover it a couple different shots, and you know, so it was uh it was a good lesson to me. And um uh don't over schedule your your crew or talent.
SPEAKER_01:What were your discussions uh when it came to approaching the night shoot with your DP?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, so Joe Tyler and I had actually looked at that space first, like two months before we shot, two or three months. I think it was the summer, I think, and we shot in December. We walked over the space and looked at it during the day. And at that point, we thought we were gonna use the interiors as well. We took pictures of the outside, and I had heard from other filmmakers, oh, you can shoot day for night now. That's a thing. Did you see Jordan Peel Nope? And I said, No, and they said, Go watch it. So I watched Nope. I'm like, Well, that's really interesting. They shot day for night on all those night scenes. So I go to Joe and I say, Let's try day for night. He says, It's not gonna work. I say, What do you mean? I'm here. I'm hearing everybody's buzzing about it. He said, Let's do a test shoot and I'll show you. And so we went and shot like three or four shots at the location at like two in the afternoon. And then we gave them to our color correction guy, Joey Deanna, and he fiddled with them and he said, This is the best I can do. And it clearly looked like overhead sun, there was no way to cut the contrast. It didn't look, you know, it was like super blue filters, and it just looked fake. And I was like, Okay.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, the only way really to do day for night is is if you have overcast weather. If you have sun and sunshine, those hard shadows just completely exactly.
SPEAKER_00:If we were in a forest canopy or something, we would have had a shot at it. But um, so that was the first step, was that telling me realizing okay, we can't do day for night. And he said, So we're using, we're gonna shoot night. And he said, I need more body, more people on my camera crew. So I think we got him two people in addition to himself. And then the place that we picked, strangely enough, it used to be a functional TV station, now it's uh has studios, sound studios you can rent out for musicians. It had no lighting in the parking lot for reasons unknown, big parking lot, you would think TV station, liability, you're gonna have lights, right? Security employees, no lighting. So the only lighting is in front of the station. So Joe's like, okay, I'm only gonna be able to shoot the first 40 feet of the parking lot, and then we're done. And I'm like, okay. So he said, I'm gonna need China balls, I'm gonna need two of them, we're gonna need to run power, and I'm gonna need time to move them. It isn't like you can just jump to a new setup, you know. So he said, if we can structure it so we shoot all the angles from one direction first. And so I went through the script and took every scene, every shot that I wanted, you know, with the main character and zombies. And I'm like, first we're shooting everything pointed this way toward the radio station with the lights. And we shot scene 64 A Take One, scene 6036 B, you know, and it was like almost like a mosaic, but I had the script, and I'm like, I mapped this out. I spent like three or four times going through it to make sure I wasn't screwing it up. Um, it's basically this shot list where I knew I need a wide shot of zombies doing this, and I need a tight of that, and we got all that from that direction, and then we had lunch break, and then we shifted the shot the other direction. And so the the benefit is well, and we had like two or three Zoom calls with Joe, with our uh makeup effects person, Kayla, who had to make up all these zombies too, and uh, and our gaffer and uh production coordinator. The benefit of those, I think it was two or three Zoom calls before we overshot, was each time we had new pro new problems to solve. It was like the first one was yes, we can shoot at the station, they'll let us shoot till 1 a.m. Great. We can have total control over the parking lot, great. The next one is, you know, sunset is at this time. We only have five hours a day of night, you know. Um, so each of the three Zoom calls, we tackled the different problem. And I think that's I would tell other filmmakers, do that. Have have as much prep like that as you can, because the night shoot when it happens, it's like you don't even know what's it's like you're stuck in a tornado. As a director, you're like, okay, we got these miraculously. That's great. Is it in focus? Good. Next shot, you know, and you you end up moving at such a quick pace, you can't really um you don't really have time to deal with a lot of logistical, you know, problems. So thankfully, we we worked out where's our power coming from, how many lights will we have, and then like I said, shooting from all one direction and flipping and shooting all the the other direction. Um, and there were a couple, there was an one thing we improvised. I think I had a scene where I had like five camera shots and we were running out of time. And Joe Tyler said, What if I just stick the camera inside his truck? And he runs up the steps and runs to the truck, he runs through the zombies and slams.
SPEAKER_01:Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I remember that.
SPEAKER_00:That was all that was improvised. That was not intended that way. And that was because we're running out of time, and I'm like, I love it. And then we'll just get a tighter shot of him in the cab with the keys. But we had, you know, we had what we needed, and so you have to be, I think, willing to do that. Um, so again, going into night shoots again, if I do one again, and I'm sure I will, I'll just have to go with have a pri, you know, have your storyboards, but be willing to, if you have to go totally gorilla, see to the pants, you know, what's your plan for that? So that it's not a big deal to shift years.
SPEAKER_01:So zombies, serial killers, and music. What made you clash all these things together?
SPEAKER_00:So I didn't really have the zombie aspect initially. For many years, I did a short film many years ago called Dead Air. It was just about a female disc jockey and a serial killer who hears her on the air and comes to the station and has some weird mistaken belief that she's his soulmate. And I had that short film in my head for years. I was like, how can I make a feature film version of this? And I think Airship is my answer to that, which is I had written two or three drafts that was just a straight uh thriller with a woman, a DJ, and a serial killer. And it it just it was very flat. When I got done, I was like, eh, you know, it felt like any sort of lifetime movie that you would see Woman in Jeopardy, male oppressor, woman vanquishes, male depressor, the end, you know, and I'm like that. That's there's nothing new for an audience with that. And at some point, I was I was literally writing some draft of the script, and the serial killer, the John Bowen character, had killed the character, and then that character came back in this draft, and I and a line of dialogue came out of his mouth, which is I know that guy was dead when I drug his body outside. What's going on? And I wrote that line and I stopped like, whoa, what does that mean? And I sort of, you know, it came like before I was really thinking about it, I sort of wrote the line, but it really kind of bumped me. And I thought about it and I reached out to Corey, my producer, and I said, Is this crazy? If what if the undead are coming back to the station in some way? And he said, No, not at all. Let's, and we batted around three or four ideas and kind of arrived at what if the station was on top of some nuclear site from the 1970s that everybody kind of forgot about, and somehow that, you know, Pandora's box got, you know, got released, and and that's you know, sort of how the zombie part of the story took hold. And I think what appealed to me about it, although it's it is a bit of a mashup, is the humor potential. I thought the second you have you think it's a serial killer holding a woman hostage, and suddenly she knows more than he does. She knows the station, she knows where all the exits are. There are zombies outside, and he's the one going, WTF, you know, what's going on? I don't, I came here, this is my agenda, and now I'm having to deal with this other thing. So I thought that was funny, and it wasn't something I'd seen in a movie before. And I thought, if we can pull this off, it could be quite humorous to see this guy suddenly having to grapple with something he wasn't part of his agenda for the evening.
SPEAKER_01:What was your most memorable moment on set?
SPEAKER_00:So one of the most memorable was probably there's a scene with a cassette. Uh oh, and the character sticks a pencil in. And this it's just this will date me, but I'm a child of the 70s. So I grew up in the 1970s. I worked at a FM radio station in high school and in college after that. And so I remember when we had cassettes and we had vinyl and that was it. And you had something called an eight-track tape that had terrible audio quality, but I remember we always do that with cassettes, and I think I was talking to Ashley, and she's like, Wait, what? And I'm like, Yeah, you stick the pencil through and you you're you're re you know, you straighten out where it got all crinkled and you're reloading it. And she had no clue what that was, and she didn't know how to stick the pencil. I mean, no, no, stick it in this way.
SPEAKER_01:And I thought you had to have felt ancient when you were teaching her this total generational difference.
SPEAKER_00:I'm like, if you took anybody age 55 and older, they know this because we all did it, you know. We all bought some tape that got jammed at some point. We're like, damn, I paid eight dollars for this with Mac Cassette. And you would figure out how to reload it and straighten out the tape so you could keep using it, you know. So that's one thing that stood out to me that was funny. Um, just that it was for me, I had no clue, but that for a younger person, that's not part of their experience. Um, I think the other thing was probably um, I think that these younger actors are really driven and determined and motivated to do good work. And I'm I continue to be really, really impressed working with Ashley, with Patrick, Margarita, Donald Dim, Alex, um, Morgan. So they are never, I never had anyone say, I can't do this, or you're asking too much, Chris. They were always eager for more, you know, and um I can't say enough good about that. I had no prima donnas and no, like, you know, I've rewritten your dialogue, Chris. I demand that we say it this way, you know, nothing like that. Um, it was a surprise, I guess, because there were more actors on this than on uh hemisphere. I was surprised by the level of integrity, even down to the zombie extras. Um, you know, these are theater students at UMBC in Baltimore. Um, they took it seriously. And they're, you know, they're like, how do what kind of zombie am I? How do I move? Just how do I how neurologically what's going on with me? You know, and they wanted to know. It wasn't like I'm just a textbook zombie, you know. They wanted to know how do I move and can what part of my body can move? And I appreciate that, and it was a surprise.
SPEAKER_01:What what what's when it comes to extras? Sometimes uh oftentimes the extras have more questions about their no-name character than the actual actors.
SPEAKER_00:Um, I didn't find that here. I would say the one thing that struck me, and it it turned out to be fine, but what you know, I had these extras and I had like four of them in a scene. And we do the first scene where it's like three of them showing up to go and talk about what they're gonna do and go below the ground and deal with the uh uranium deposits that have been stored there for decades. And we go to shoot the scene. I'm like, okay, you got you know, we've got the we've got the block in the camera, okay. Let's do a run-through. And all three of the actors pull out their iPhones and pull up the script and start reading lines. And I'm like, oh no, they don't know their lines. Oh my god, we're dead. And I thought, I didn't say, hey, know your lines when you come to set. I assumed that was known. Well, that is a given, you know. But what I would say to their defense, because I don't want them embarrassed by this, um, we did one take with their with the phones, and then after that, they got it, and they were just as competent as the the more experienced actors. There was never never an issue where they missed their line or forgot it. They knew it, they took direction just as well. They just needed a refresher, that's all. I think so. And I think it was funny. We did all the zombies first, and then we made them human. So I kept telling them, like, we shot all the footage where the characters had transformed into zombies. We shuttled that first, and then we at a about a month later, we shot exteriors where hey, here's where you show up, and you're a human being before you get infected. And they didn't expect that. I'm like, no, I wrote I wrote scenes for you as you know, you actually have dialogue, and and this can be a good moment for you. You know, you get two minutes of a presence in the in the movie on screen on camera. And I think I believe they appreciated that, that it wasn't like they were just playing a monster. They got to be a human. I said, This is a great character arc for you guys. You start as a human, you get infected, you turn into a zombie, you attack other people. You know, what a great who you know, how many actors get that that broad of a character arc? So um maybe it was me selling them a little bit on it, but um I I did find that there is fun working with college students, and maybe it gives them some stories to take back to university.
SPEAKER_01:Well, um uh I had um when I was uh helping a friend out um making his short film uh and I was ADing for him and I, you know, he told me to have the extras because the the context of the scene was that it was like a cage fight, you know, and there's a crowd going and everything. Yeah. Um and then uh I had to keep there was a a lot of work goes goes into actually keeping the extras lively, especially when you're doing TV. Yeah. Because they're doing the same thing over and over repetitively. It's usually something very simple. And then you gotta you gotta make sure that they're still, you know, going a hundred each take. And then still what happens is that the the performance starts the trail off a little bit as they get tired, especially if you're doing a night shoot, you know, and the you're you know, you're doing zombies where you know they're having a particular walk.
SPEAKER_00:There are breaks in the action. You're no, you're a hundred percent right. We had stuff where it was like, I need these two, I need Enzo and and you know the other actor. And we would do something, and the other ones are just hanging out at the craft services, and they'd say, Okay, I need all five of you. And they're like, Oh, it's later. You know, and if I think I used a bullhorn even because they were far enough away, and I kind of wanted to get more of a yes, this is a real movie, you know. Um, but there are times where you have to talk them into the moment, you know.
SPEAKER_01:You gotta be a hype man sometimes.
SPEAKER_00:I think so. I think so. I don't have a problem doing that, but yeah, I did notice that. That otherwise they come and the two that had just been in a scene were turned on, and the others that have been, you know, hanging out backstage, so to speak, would be very low energy, and you'd have to be like remind them, yeah. Cheerleader. How many cheerleader?
SPEAKER_01:What was the production uh schedule? Like, how did you decide to structure it in a way that you could go about shooting the film the most efficient way possible?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, that's a great question. Um, and I think that's a really important question as an indie filmmaker early on. Once you have the script written, I try to figure that out pretty soon. Um, in the case of Airship, it was I want to shoot all the air studio stuff, all the interiors first. And we shot for five days in the air studio. We shot the performance of the singer-songwriter and her manager. We shot all the stuff with Lisa and John, him showing up, being friendly, turning into serial killer. We shot all the stuff strategizing their zombies. What are we going to do? We did all of that in five days, December, a year ago. And my thought was if we can get that shot first, I'll cut it together and I'll get more confidence, and then I'll know what we need for the exteriors, the stuff with zombies. I mean, it was one of those things where I literally kind of made a um almost like a progress list. And it looked like about 60% of the movie was the radio station interiors. And I thought, well, if I can get that shot and in the can, that last 40% won't be, you know, I'll be over the hump, so to speak. Um, it didn't quite work out that way. I think that last 40 does was the hardest thing I've done in my life. It just was just again, because of the number of you know, amount of logistics with people and places and and that sort of thing. But that was my approach. I had at one point, I had it the opposite, and I thought, what if we do all the exteriors first with zombies and all of that, and then I go back to doing the stuff that I have more control over with the actors. And for whatever reason, I think the DP and I talked, and he said, just no, go with your first instinct, shoot all the let's do all the air studio stuff. Part of that is that it's easier, and so what you want to do as a filmmaker is give yourself the easiest stuff first, so there's room to work stuff out with the actors, to make adjustments with your crew. If you're not at your best as a director, you know, there's a little, there's there's fewer demands on you, if that makes sense. And so by having that first shoot be that all the interiors, um, I knew that we wouldn't get rained out, we didn't have any problem with daylight or nighttime. Um, you know, it was a controlled space that we worked in. And so, and I think it helps you develop a vocabulary with your actors so they trust you. Because the first time you're shooting, they're they're like, I don't want you to make me look like an idiot on screen, you know, and you have to sort of earn their trust and be like, I think that was good. I would change this and I would change that. And when she's pushing you, don't be afraid to push back. You know, you give them whatever your direction is, and you're trying to win them over a little bit too, you know, and so that later, when we got to those night scenes, I don't have a lot of time to have discussions, conversations with Patrick about his character's motivation. I'm like, you run up, zombie comes at you, you stab him, you know. It was more of a mechanical thing, but because I had shot with him earlier inside more of the character-developed type stuff, I think he trusted me with those later scenes a bit more.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, once if you if you trust that your your actor understands the character well enough that you don't need to constantly be giving points on his uh performance or his uh take or understanding of the character, the more you can focus on spending your time blocking the scene out. Because that I think a lot of times in indie filmmaking, especially those uh uh who are new to it, uh they underestimate how much time it takes to actually you know block the scene out and get the choreography right so that it doesn't not just uh for the sake of you know the camera guy being able to understand you know where he's gonna spend his time trying to set up for, but also just the efficiency and the aesthetic of the scene.
SPEAKER_00:I think so. You know, it's it's the when I did Hemisphere, the first movie, I thought, okay, I'm gonna be drawing all kinds of storyboards, and I don't have a problem sketching. I'm reasonably quick as a sort of sketch artist, but I thought, God, that's a lot of a lot of scenes. And what I realized the first time we were doing blocking with the actresses, just rehearsing in the it was the space, it was dressed as the space station, no crew. Again, this is part of the sort of one-week rehearsal. Um, I just pulled out my iPhone and I started taking pictures. I'm like, there's a there's a two-shot, and there's a close-up of her, and that there's a detail I want to get there. And I pulled those out of my iPhone and pasted them in a Word document and sent them to the DP. And um, I was grateful that to have that solution present itself because I thought, God, this would have been it could have taken an hour or two on a shooting day to figure that out, you know, where's the best place for them to, and when there's not a crew around, you get a little bit more organic. Um, I think with the actress, you can try stuff. What if if you're static and I'm moving, or I'm here and you're while we're having an argument, you're putting making pouring coffee and putting, you know, this I always think people never people seldom sit statically and have an argument or a discussion. Generally, there's always something else. You're cleaning something, or you're making dinner, or you're doing some other activity. That's just sort of how humans are. We try to multitask. And so I'm always looking and blocking for ways of how do we open it up and make it a little more kinetic so it feels like they're they're doing something while they're having this scene take place.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I think newer filmmakers definitely forget that um when dialogue hap is happening, life is also happening. You know, yeah. And it you end up with these really stale and static um moments that when you're right- especially when you're writing a script, the action isn't always that specific because it needs to be left open to interpretation uh for the director to be able to actually exploit for that particular scene uh in the location that you know sometimes ends up changing. You got to be a little bit more flexible with your interpretation. That's uh something I think uh uh newer directors. When it comes to um accomplishing that scene, have to be uh have to keep that in mind.
SPEAKER_00:I mean, I think the um what you're saying is the uh in a sense, I look at it this way. I came in at when I was in film school, if you would jump, if we rewound to Chris Mays as a 22-year-old, I was having actors follow my storyboards because I was I would storyboard stuff out, and it was like, this is the scene. So you step, walk two lines, say your line, and then walk out of the shot. And now the next shot is a two-shot, and you walk in and you say, you know, it was all broken up and disjointed, and that's what I thought directing was, and I would direct actors that way. And sometimes they would ask me, like, who why is my character in the scene? What do they want? And it'd be like, Don't bother me with that. All you have to do is walk, you know, it's a very mechanical approach to directing, and I thought that's what directing was. And the first short that I made, Dead Air, the actors were like, What, you know, hold on, let's let's stop all this. Why am I here? What is my purpose? What am I trying to get? And the second I started looking at it from that standpoint, I'm like, wow, that's that's a totally different approach. Let me work. And if you sort of, as a creative person, shift to the actor's point of view, there are a million ways you could shoot the scene. You could stick the camera on the ceiling, and maybe it's an overhead shot. You know, there's a lot of effective ways to cover it, technically, but the probably the most important thing is what is the life of the scene and how do you make it feel like it's really happening? So if you can take your what you've written on the page and create some kind of reality for it, so it's sort of like the audience is a bug on a fly on the wall, or wherever you stick the camera. You know, I I've seen perfectly acceptable movies where the camera is like, you know, somebody puts a drinking glass here and you're shooting through that, and characters are having an argument about their marriage in the background. Um, there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. And sometimes those inspired things can be, you know, very effective. And the most important thing probably is that the reality of what the actors are doing is working and feels believable to you. It seems to me, the more I do this, that's the thing that you can perceive right away. When you're watching a movie, if it's the actors aren't comfortable, you can tell.
SPEAKER_01:Um, between writing and directing, which do you personally identify with more?
SPEAKER_00:Uh that's an excellent question. I I think probably identify more as a director. I try to be nice to myself as a writer. It's a weird sort of Jekyll and Hyde thing. I think the writer part of me is much more sensitive and and my feelings can get hurt and all that. And the director side of me is more brash. Like it's fine, don't worry about it, let it roll off your back. But I think you need both to be a writer-director. I think the point that you're writing, you have to be emotionally be as connected as you can be to the characters and what's going on in the story. Don't worry about visually. If an idea occurs to me, I might say, I envision this scene with with no audio at all. Uh, or you know, if something occurs to you, you can certainly put that in the script. But but I'd say the the writing side of me is smaller um because I view writing more now, today, as um a step in the production of a motion picture. And so rather than the script is all, it's more like you're when I when I'm gonna put the hat on and be a screenwriter and just write the script, I'm writing it with the idea that now I'm gonna give it to my art director, I'm gonna eventually give it to actors, I'll give you to me as a director, and I'm gonna start playing with stuff and stuff's gonna move around. I'm fine with that because I I guess I'm both writer and director. It's easier to negotiate with yourself about, you know. I think at one point in Airshift, we had a whole scene with them boarding up the station against zombies, and again, we were running short on time, and then that became what if we just do a slow-mo shot of Ashley walking down the hall. We do the hero shot that we've all seen in the documentary series, and they're walking in slow-mo, she nods to that door, and one character peels off. She nods to the other door, and that character peels off. That all came from just you know, the director and me being like, I don't have time for all this other stuff. Let's just do one shot with two, you know, two inserts and and we're done with it, you know. Um, so I think generally speaking, I'm probably identifying more as a director because I I prefer there's something more fun, I guess, about using all those tools in the toolbox.
SPEAKER_01:I would probably gamble then that uh your sense of creativity thrives more in a collaborative environment than it does solitude. Is that my I think so?
SPEAKER_00:I and again, that was a shift. You know, when I worked as a professional screenwriter, I kind of didn't understand that. I was like, you write the script and make it as perfect as you can in every dialogue, you know, you really go through with a fine-toothed comb. And now my feeling is I'll write something, and I know if I'm working with Donald Dim as art director, he's gonna come up with a bunch of cool ideas, and I'll probably incorporate those into the script. I'll do a revision and maybe I'll change a set, or I'll change the the importance of something. Either I'll change a set, or maybe the set appears five times in the story because it's a more integral part of the story. Um the collaboration is really you giving away ideas and trusting people to run with them. It's impossible to make a feature film where you hold on to everything yourself. So I'm right, you know, I love the point where the actors where we have a table read and I'm like, these guys get it. This is I I there's a certain level of the movie's gonna happen now that I feel. I feel like if I have a DP and I have the movie cast, the movie's gonna happen. I may have a migraine headache on the day we're shooting, I may be if I have the stomach flu, whatever's going on with me, we can shoot something that's gonna look like a scene in a movie because there are other there are others that are carrying the weights, and you really need that. You know, it's you have as a writer, you don't ever deal with that sort of side of things.
SPEAKER_01:You have really the whole world of it's all resting on your shoulders, yeah, and it's all in your mind.
SPEAKER_00:And and in your mind, anything can happen. It can it can be a beautiful. I think I wrote Air Shift. I wanted a rural radio station, the top of some gravel road, a parking lot, you know, a quarter mile from all civilization, and right you can look down on the city. And we scouted and scouted and found nothing like that. I'm like, okay, that's going, you know, that that goes away. It's a little more, somewhat more urban radio station. It's still the middle of the night, so people aren't really awake, but um, but the you know, there's there are compromises, I guess, you make as a director that way.
SPEAKER_01:How has directing your material changed the way you write it?
SPEAKER_00:I think it makes so my scripts are much more lean now. I don't put a lot of what I call hype in something. So when I was a screenwriter, I would write something and try to make it entertaining for a studio executive reading it. If I was writing an action scene, I would put a lot of time into making it entertaining on the page. You know, Joe runs down the hall, and holy smokes, Holly's already there, and the monsters are behind her, and oh no, you know, you write it so that it reads well. When you're writing for yourself as director, it's like just just give me the bare interior room. Patrick walks in livid. You know, I try to use as few words as possible now because I know the actors will add their things and the crew people will add their things to it. And even me as director, I'll come up with some some idea of how I want to do that scene. So I think I I tend to get much more lean with my description, and then with the dialogue, I'm really trying again, it there's never a point where you know it all as a as a writer. So every script I think I'm getting a little better or trying to anyway. And I think what I really admire is when you can get to what is the real point of a scene, you know, people are arguing, and somebody says, You're afraid of X. And you're like, damn, that's right. That's good. I want that to hang there for a second. And that's kind of the truth of human beings, is we have things that are in the back of our head, and we go through life and we have these challenges, and every once in a while we're like, oh my God, the whole reason this is happening, I'm afraid of being abandoned. Let's say, you know. So in all my relationships, I'm always seeking to be for the person to assert to me that they're committed to me because I have an abandonment fear, let's say. I'm just picking that theoretically. Um, writing gives you the opportunity to do is explore that. Like if you know that about yourself, I'm a big proponent of stick as much of your own life, sneak it in somehow, you know. If you have a if you're antisocial, put that in there somewhere with a character. If you, you know, I grew up with a bunch of sisters, so I always feel comfortable writing female characters, and I tend to write them like my sisters, a little more tomboyish, maybe more vulgar than I don't even think writers have to try.
SPEAKER_01:It's just something that happens unconsciously, and then you have to you have to be careful to throttle it because uh uh sometimes it'll end up just being so personal that it ends up becoming unrelatable to a wide audience.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, yeah. I I I what I like to do, that's a good point. I think there's a there's definitely um like I don't view it as therapy, I don't view it as a purge, because I do feel like that's for me and my therapist if I can go talk about what's going on that way. But um, but I guess what I mean is when I'm starting a movie and then I'm outlining it, I'm like, what do I have in common with this character? Why am I telling this story? What can I bring to it? I don't want it to just be it's a cool plot, it sounds cool. I want it to be like, what have I experienced that I can bring to this that no other writer would? Like if I'm like, oh, I worked in a radio station in the 1970s, okay. Um, you know, I'm trying to think of whatever, you know, whatever thing that I think um I think with Hemisphere, I had a uh a family member, a daughter, who was very emotionally challenging to deal with, a very belligerent person, very in my face as a as a quote authority figure as her father. And I thought, let me bring that to Hemisphere. I want one of the characters to behave like my daughter Olivia. And so the reason I'm doing that is I'm like, this is some sort of truth I've experienced that I want to bring to the audience, you know, and I don't think I see other movies necessarily doing it that way. So anytime you can do that as a director uh and and infuse that into your writing as a writer, I think you're ahead of the game because you're it's like you're pulling a secret out of your life that nobody else knows. It's like, hey, did you know when people get really drunk and the next day when they're hungover, they do X? You know, I'm just again not from my personal experience, but if that was your experience with family members, you're like, I promise I don't drink. You could probably write a great scene that way, though, that would go much further than the next person because you'd be like, No, I've experienced this. When you have a hungover parent and they're chewing you out the next day, it goes on and on and on. You know, it snowballs or whatever, whatever the drama is. I I my sense is that you can uh tap into it more fully because it's your experience, than somebody else that might be like, Oh, I saw this in another movie. Let me do an argument scene between a hungover parent and a kid.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Um one a lot of the advice that writers end up getting is write what you know. And that is, you know, that's true to a large extent, but uh you know, writers also write about what they think, what they feel about certain things that have nothing to do with them. It's you know, writing it's also just c it's also commentary on you know your own perceptions about things in society about the world. Yeah. And you know, the that advice only goes so far. It it helps, you know, when it comes to making something feel real, because you're able to put a spin on something that is very personal. But I think a lot of advice about writing about what you think kind of goes under the radar to the detriment of of you know some writers, in my opinion.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. Um I think like Hemisphere has a lot of ideas in it, you know, which is like the companies oppressing you or not telling you the whole story about why you were sent on a mission. Um, and those are personal feelings I have or ideas. How do I think the future will be? What do I think in the future? I think there will be space stations with hardwood floors, and Martha Stewart will design it, not some NASA engineer. You know, that's my opinion. I could be totally wrong, but I thought, well, what if? What if we jump ahead 30, 40 years in the future, and there's a space station that has hardwood floors and painted walls, and it looks like a living space where a person wants to, you know, inhabit it for six months. That's kind of the idea. And then I think the write what you know part comes in more write emotionally what you know. I don't think you have to write a character like I think you can say, I'm gonna write a garbage man, or I'm gonna write a salvage worker, or something. Maybe you never experienced that in your life, but then maybe they have some little issue that you that you kind of have experience with, you know. I think those are the things where you can excel as a writer when you put some of your experience is is more the side, the emotional side is what you know. I know emotionally what it is to be abandoned, or um, you know, for me, a big thing is underestimated. I've been underestimated many times in my life, and then I exceeded it, and I had bosses and people being like, Oh my god, I'm impressed. I never thought you had that in you. And I'm like, why did you never think that? Did you not see all these other things I did for you? But that it takes some people, some huge grand gesture before the light clicks on. So, you know, that's my personal issue, but that's probably something emotionally I wouldn't, you know, I wouldn't be uh opposed to putting that in a story if it was appropriate, because I I have some experience with that, you know.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Chris, it's been a pleasure to speak with you. Do you have any final thoughts you want to leave with the audience?
SPEAKER_00:No, just I would say if if for any indie filmmakers out there, if you're considering doing it, take try to take steps and take the plunge and do it. Make a first movie because you'll learn so much from the experience of doing that, and you'll get help from areas you probably never suspected, you know, that there are others in your community that want to help. That would be my final word.
SPEAKER_01:Well, thanks for coming on the show. I appreciate it.
SPEAKER_00:Absolutely. Thank you for having me, Anthony. I appreciate it.