Filmmaker Jason Perlman discusses his Sci-Fi Thriller: SITE - Hosted by Heather Lenz

Our special guest today is Jason Perlman. Named #4 in LA Weekly's "Top 10 Entertainment Professionals to Watch in 2023," Jason is an accomplished screenwriter, director, producer and editor. He has worked with major television outlets and studios like Warner Bros, Sony, and Lionsgate. His material has screened at prestigious festivals such as Sundance and SXSW. As a WGA screenwriter, Jason's work in both features and TV is always high-concept and about superheroes, but not in the way you think. When consistently adapting IP, or in his prolific original work— Perlman focuses on grounded characters forced to challenge their human capacity and reach for the profound. In a word, Inspiration, our true superpower. Today we’ll discuss his new Sci Fi thriller, SITE, which is his second feature film as both screenwriter and director.

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 1:12

Our special guest today is Jason Eric Perlman, named number four in LA Weekly's top 10 entertainment professionals to watch in 2023. Jason is an accomplished screenwriter, director, producer, and editor. He's worked with major television outlets and studios like Warner Brothers, Sony, and Lionsgate. His material has screened at prestigious festivals such as Sundance and South by Southwest. As a WGA screenwriter, Jason's work in both features and TV is always high concept and about superheroes, but not in the way you think. When consistently adapting IP or in his prolific original work, Perlvin focuses on grounded characters forced to challenge their human capacity and reach for the profound. In a word, inspiration, our true superpower. Today we'll discuss his new sci-fi thriller, Sight, which is his second feature film as both screenwriter and director.

SPEAKER_01 2:32

Thank you so much, Claire, for the introduction. And thank you, Jason, for joining us today. Oh, yeah, you're welcome. Our pleasure. For audiences unfamiliar with your new film, Site, can you please tell us what it's about and what motivated you to make it?

SPEAKER_03 2:49

Yeah, absolutely. Site is about an American everyman who is a commercial real estate inspector. He's a family man. He has, you know, a lot of the same work-a-day concerns we all do, nothing particularly remarkable on the surface, but he inspects a decommissioned 1970s particle accelerator. And if you know what that is, it's a giant uh science contraption that is used to create the energies that were around during the Big Bang. They hurl particles together. And this thing has been lying dormant for about 40 years, 40 some years. And once he inspects this space, our character Neil, our main character, starts seeing into other time periods. He starts seeing other places in the world at other disparate times. He also starts seeing the faces of people he doesn't recognize in his immediate family and friend group. And the film really uh goes on from there to unpack what he's been exposed to and why he is seeing these disparate people in these disparate times and to make sense of it. Um I don't want to get out ahead of the reveal of why all that's happening to him, but um the the reason why I chose to uh to work with the story and to work with some of the concepts uh in it came from a point in my own life when I was uh wrangling with karma, let's say, you know, feeling that we live life in a certain pattern and some of the same problems uh visit us time and time again, and trying to understand why that is from almost a spiritual metaphysical perspective, uh, and writing the site and doing the research into a lot of interesting uh world mystical thought uh in terms of reincarnation, in terms of the Kabbalah, in terms of a lot of Eastern mysticism that that plays into this story, uh, you know, souls intersecting across time. That was my way of trying to gain a deeper insight into why a lot of us seem to find recurrent patterns in in our life. Um, as you get older, you see you start to see them more and more clearly that uh every so often a cycle seems to repeat itself. And you know, there's obviously a very grounded psychological reason for for some of that, but I think there's also something deeper. And uh site was a was a very, very deep dive for me to try to explore those things.

SPEAKER_01 5:45

Well, that's really interesting. And um, although this is a fictional story, it opens with a reference to true events, specifically the 1931 invasion of Manchuria by the Japanese. And these days, this is not a particularly well-known historical event. And I wonder how it came on your radar and what motivated you to weave it into your film, which also um involves reincarnation and time travel.

SPEAKER_03 6:15

Yes, yes. Um, great question. Um the process that it took to to make site, I'm gonna I'm gonna backtrack a little bit to answer your question. Um, our key executive producer uh is actually from Indonesia and she comes from Chinese parentage. Uh her family is is from some of the northern provinces of of China. Um, I had known pretty pretty in depth about the uh Japanese invasion of northern China, Manchuria in the in the 30s. Uh there was a lot of friction between Japanese uh and and Chinese interests in that region, well in advance of that turn of the century. And as some might know in historical terms, there were some very, very tremendous atrocities that were committed during that time, war war crimes in that conflict. Um the reason to invoke it uh in our story was twofold. We wanted to we wanted to reference something real in history that was pretty much exactly what you prefaced and somewhat overlooked, at least in the West, uh, atrocity that had happened uh in wartime. And we wrote, I wrote this well in advance of some of the current world conflicts that we're also acutely aware of now. Obviously, the the Ukraine and Russian conflict, the the Hamas and Israel conflict. Uh there's plenty of other ones that don't get as much airtime out there right now, too. So when we kind of projected into the future in writing site and conceiving the storyline, uh, I had a lot of conversation with our with our EP, with our our executive producer, who I told you had uh you know had heritage in that part of the world. And we discussed that interval of Japan's invasion of Manchuria and some of the uh very, very unsavory events that that happened as a result, and we decided this would be an interesting and meaningful uh piece of history to invoke here because again, without overstepping some of the plot in the movie, uh we wanted to also make sure that we were seeing a timeline and a real-world set of events that were not only unfamiliar here in the West, but that were so unfamiliar to our main character that they were forced to reconcile with a cultural history and a set of real atrocities that were not part of his knowledge set, not part of anything he'd heard of or had had any, you know, even intellectual experience with, and confront him with having to both reconcile and understand that period of time as it started to impact him very directly. So, you know, there's plenty of plenty of horrible things that humans have done to one another uh in the historical record. It's not a uh it's not a a dearth of options to choose from, but we did want to explore something in relatively near-field history, you know, within the last hundred or so years. Um, and we thought that this was a very interesting and portentous uh interval of conflict that we could explore in this story, that I think also ends up saying quite a bit about a cycle repeating uh that we're seeing play out in present day with our with our very near-field immediate uh conflicts that are happening out there. So that was part of the rationale. And uh, you know, it also bears mentioning that that my own wife uh comes from both Chinese and Japanese parenting. So she she comes from a mix of of those cultures. And when we first were were dating years ago, um, it was very interesting to discuss how uncommon that pairing is. Uh, the Chinese and Japanese have quite a bit of lasting resentment from that conflict all those, you know, years and years ago. And um it was just very interesting to see and hear and understand an inside cultural perspective of how uh you know a lot of of a lot of Chinese and Japanese still are very much at odds about things that that happened back then and how lasting the uh the grievances from that time period uh remain uh intact. So I hope that uh pretty much roundaboutly answers your question.

SPEAKER_01 11:17

Yeah, yeah. It's a very interesting choice, and it's um great to hear you know about your decision making and why you included it. Um when you were 15, you crossed paths with a cult leader. Can you please share how that experience has impacted you in the stories you tell?

SPEAKER_03 11:37

Yeah, yeah, it did quite a bit. Um when I was uh in my my middle high school years, I took a a six-week trip that was billed as an environmental uh awareness, environmental science sort of college precursor trip. Uh we were gonna study sea turtles and ecosystems and so forth. Uh, that was the that was the headline. Uh lo and behold, the individual who led that trip with nine other kids from from the country that I was on the trip with uh turned out to be a cult uh indoctrinator and cult leader in a very, very uh dark step. Um so those six weeks, and this was not not to date my my age too much, but this was pre-cell phones and in a very remote area, so there was not a lot of opportunity to connect with the outside world, to have any kind of recourse to our parents or or any other authority figures during this. So it was a little Lord of the Flies, if you're familiar with that uh with that classic novel, that uh we were kind of in these remote regions with this uh with this very, very powerful uh and very uh sort of in uh let's say uh he he had some abilities that I still don't quite understand in terms of of clairvoyance and knowing things about us that no one could know. Certainly this was even before easy internet searching of people's backgrounds or anything about their life story. So there was a lot of there was a lot of eye-opening and shocking uh sort of enlightenment about what people are capable of in terms of I wouldn't say paranormal, but para parapsychology in a way, uh these these sort of powers that I didn't really believe as a fairly rational kid uh that that people were able to cultivate, but I was I believe proven pretty otherwise during that experience. And that even though I have no uh kind words to say about this individual or or what he put us through, um the experience did open my eyes to a whole different bandwidth of human capacity, uh both in terms of its ability for for evil and darkness, but also its ability to uh to sort of transcend some of what we believe are the the general limits of of the human mind and what it can know and how it can know it. And that stuck with me uh ever since then. Um and it and it put me on a journey of exploration in terms of things that I researched and things that I wanted to know more about. Um it never really translated into anything that I personally tried to uh to cultivate as a an individual. I I I haven't tried to harness my psychic powers or uh move objects around with my mind or anything like that, but the uh the experience certainly did inform my sense of human ability and the types of stories and characters that that remain intriguing to me have a lot of root in that experience.

SPEAKER_01 15:26

Jason, I hope this will be a future film. I uh there's no um shortage of stories about, you know, sort of like bad adults preying on children and you know, Boy Scout leaders and you know, in the church and so forth, but uh preying on people studying sea turtles. This is a this is a yeah, it's its own niche, absolutely. Yeah. Uh so site is the second feature film that you've written and directed. Uh, could you please talk a little bit about the writing process? How long did it take you to flesh out the script?

SPEAKER_03 16:02

I began a first draft of Site in about 2015. So that is a good clean 10 years ago now. Uh hard for me to even imagine that that's the case. But I I believe I set set pen to paper, so to speak, uh, about 2015 and had a very long lineage of people involved with this project alongside me, helping shape the story. Um, you know, we knew from early on that it was ambitious on a number of levels. I mean, just in terms of the complexity of the story, of how we were going to, you know, on a on a on a relatively compact budget, how we were going to explore different time frames and different parts of the world at that. Um so we had to use quite a bit of sleight of hand, both in the script, in terms of how we were deciding to depict scenes so that they were producible and manageable on an indie budget. And also, you know, the softer science of getting the characters and the arcs right. And you know, there's a lot of different intervals of telling the story this way, telling it that way, ending it this way, having this conclusion, and you know, it it just shaped and shaped and kept sort of finding its crystalline structure. And eventually we as I brought uh the the producers who I ended up actually shooting the film with, as I brought them on board about midway through that process. So I'd say about 2020, we had assembled the key team that was gonna go forward with making the film. And with their input, and and as I expressed earlier, with with bringing our executive producer to the table and her cultural background and her imprint that that has a really great signature, I think, on the storytelling. Um, all of that evolved, you know, year by year and and and note by note uh to bring it to what we ultimately shot.

SPEAKER_01 18:24

After the script was ready to go, how did you go about raising the money to make it? And I'm curious if you started that process alone or if you already had like-minded collaborators.

SPEAKER_03 18:38

The process uh of finding financing went through a number of different stages and a number of different interested parties that sort of came to the table and for whatever uh you know reasons at the time also departed from the table. We were we were at a bit of a tender uh frux in time because we were getting ready to uh try to bring financing on board right as COVID uh took over the world. So uh as you can imagine, there was a lot of uh of financial interests that that uh needed to kind of play turtle at that time and tuck back into their shell because who knew what the world was even going to look like after that uh pandemic came and went. So we had a little bit of uh touch and go timing to begin, but when I did meet our EP through an introduction, um and we talked about this story, and she found as much personal relevance in it that uh that I had hoped to to convey to someone who was interested in backing the film. Um, she got very excited about it, and that started to gestate our finance relatively relatively quickly. Um, we started putting enough in play that we were able to hire a casting director and start to bring attachments to the movie. And as soon as we started to get some cast involved, that further, you know, enhanced what we uh could could envision as being our our full needed budget. Um and that was more or less the the process.

SPEAKER_01 20:27

Well, as already mentioned, this film deals in part with events that happened in Manchuria long ago, and there were some shots in the film with Chinese architecture, and I'm wondering if you shot on location in China, and if so, what was that experience like? And if not, how did you get those shots?

SPEAKER_03 20:46

We shot in North Carolina, so very, very, very far away from mainland China, about as about as far as I think you can get. But we um we accomplished those, what I hope are are pretty convincing, um both exterior landscape and and uh town, you know, uh city shots of that period of China in two ways. We we had a very, very savvy uh VFX team on board with us. And when we did a lot of pre-planning on those shots, we would build in this warehouse that we used basically as our studio. Uh, we rented this large uh warehouse that was actually uh had formerly been a textile mill in the early 1900s. It was a giant, just cavernous space, albeit unair conditioned and very poorly plumbed, that we uh that we used shooting in the dead of summer in uh in North Carolina. So it was not um it's not the most hospitable climate, but nevertheless, it gave us a lot of flexibility in building sets. And what we would do would kind of be build door frames or build the first bit of interiors of the Chinese structures and then allow for green screens to be in play, even in even in moving shots, where we knew we were going to match into uh landscapes outside of doorways or altogether you know overhead shots of whole environments. And we accomplished that uh two ways. We had um we had actual stock footage that we licensed uh for some of those shots, particularly uh some of the aerial overheads. But we also had the great good fortune of our composer, uh, who is a wonderful uh electronic artist uh and and well known in that space, uh, who goes by the moniker B. V. Dubb. Um he's a fantastic, fantastic musician who I think did a really, really magical score for us. But he The time of our of our shooting and well into some of our pre post-production, he was living in China. He was living in mainland China, uh, where he actually uh was also working on his music, but he taught uh English in Chinese high schools. So he was there on the ground uh in China and was able to uh get us some footage from the uh from the areas around where he was living, uh which we were able to work into some of the green screen work and really get granular and authentic with some of those shots. And um, you know, his presence during a lot of the time of the scoring being in in China as well, I think really informed some of the some of the musical uh decisions that are in the film um that are you know imbued with some of the the the musicality of that part of the world too. So it all it was a bit of kismet, uh to be honest, that he was there, that we were able to get some shots, uh very real time from from real environments, and of course we leaned on on stock libraries a bit.

SPEAKER_01 24:28

Yeah, you did a great job. Um Thank you. Yeah, could you please um talk about the process of selecting the actors to bring your story to life and how much time you spent rehearsing before you um began filming?

SPEAKER_03 24:43

Sure. Um, we worked with a really, really great casting director. Um, one of our producers had already had a real long relationship of working with this casting director across a number of movies. So they had a bit of a telepathy kind of already in place. Those, and when she was brought to the table to work with us, you know, a great casting director really, really takes the time to understand a piece of material and you know the filmmaker's vision for it, and uses that to kind of stir in the cauldron to figure out who they believe might be reasonable to approach this cast and who would also really really nail uh the roles that we were going for. So we spend a lot of time in uh preliminaries with our casting directing team, uh, talking about the story, kind of building out, you know, sort of a vision board of who our ultimate embodiments of these roles might be, and then working uh into lists of potentials who, you know, there are there are certain limitations in terms of of availability, of of where we were at as a budgeted film. Uh, you know, so you you take all that kind of stuff, all that criteria into the mix, and you start building lists of your, you know, your your tiered first pick, second pick, third pick down the line, yeah, and then approach those actors or their representatives, their agencies, etc. So we had we had a very in-depth casting process, um, more so than I think uh a lot of indies of our scale. We had a lot of roles to cast and a little bit more complex than than some movies because we have people speaking, you know, in Mandarin Chinese, we have Japanese speaking cast, um, and we wanted to do all of that extremely authentically too. So we had we had a casting director who was working on our our English-speaking leads, and then we also had uh a casting directing team who was working on our non-English uh speaking roles as well. So uh the casting process was rather uh in-depth and and complex uh for this. So, in terms of getting down to our final decisions, I was uh as the director, I I had the opportunity to speak with some of the uh cast that we were interested in and that were reciprocally interested in playing the roles, and we were you know able to get a sense of one another and one another's sort of communication style and working style and their view on the character, their view on the overall story. And a lot of those conversations ended up being the catalyst to decide who to cast, because uh, you know, when you find that someone really was understanding the the intention of the character and understanding the overall intention of the film and and latching onto it and really finding something personal in it that they could draw from in playing, you know, playing a role, uh that was that was the most kind of medicinal to me to make those decisions, to know that the actor was really connected to not only bringing something personal from their lives into into whichever given role, but also you know how that fit into the greater ambition of sort of the themes and and uh intention of the the piece as a whole. So in terms of rehearsal, uh almost none, to be fully candid. Uh we were shooting on location, uh, we were amassing our cast from very different points all over the country and in some cases internationally, uh descending on our sets in North Carolina to work with us. And we were able to have some, you know, we would we would sit and do some kind of table reads of of scenes to sort of get into the flow of the characters and in preliminary before getting into our initial shooting, but we did not we did not have a lot of time to do full-scale rehearsal with blocking, with, with physicality. We really ended up doing uh most of that onset, uh, you know, day and day when we were shooting given scenes. We would sometimes have conversations the night before uh we would go and do a shoot to just kind of talk into the scene and and you know go over a couple of of directorial notes of motivation and maybe where we'd put an adjustment here and there. But most mo most of it was left to uh the day of. And you know, sometimes there is sometimes there's a bit of a uh a captivity that can happen from from rehearsing because you sort of have a muscle memory of how you're gonna play the scene and when you're gonna hit this this note or play this adjustment and so forth. And I think that can be great to bring into initial takes because you know, at least you have sort of a start point where you're not way out in left field, then you gotta rein in what you hope for the scene uh across burning, you know, take after take. But there's also something very uh elegant and and very sort of mysterious about where a great actor can kind of push things in the moment without a lot of sort of pretext of what they're going to do or what they think they're supposed to do in a given scene. And that allows really interesting discoveries to happen, especially when actors are playing off one another. You know, it's infectious, it's contagious. If if one goes a certain direction and plays an unexpected uh delivery of a line or uh an unexpected emotion in a given scene, then often you know a really present actor playing off them will pick that up and do something equally and and reciprocally interesting. So we we didn't have a hell of a lot of time to rehearse, but we um we really were able to, I think, find it on on the days that we were shooting.

SPEAKER_01 31:50

Well, I'm uh I'm surprised to hear there wasn't like that much time to rehearse because um without giving too much away, there is a scene in the film where someone is on a motorcycle, and let's just say things don't go smoothly, and a child is involved, the child actor. And I was wondering if you could just talk a little bit about the logistics of filming something like that.

SPEAKER_03 32:11

Yeah, yeah, that was a very, very, very difficult uh scene. We um to to fill that in a little bit more, uh, we have a scene that's very pivotal in the early part of the film where a the our our main character and his son are on a dirt bike, riding a dirt bike through woods. So we're not even on paved roads or uh you know really kind of controlled linear surfaces. We're out literally riding a bike through through thick trees and and dirt rocky paths and things like that. So we ended up doing a lot of uh storyboarding and stunt crew uh planning for how to shoot that. And the way it was actually executed was getting a stunt rider who was you know adept at riding these types of bikes to do the actual driving through the woods and was able to to to actually you know negotiate that as a as a rider. Uh, when it came to shooting our actual cast, seemingly on the bike, we did that with what's called a sled. So we would put the bike on a basically a flatbed that's pulled behind a truck. So you get the impression that the bike is moving on its own on its own engine, but you shoot the you basically shoot the top of the wheels up and give it a little shake, so it looks like you know the characters are kind of turning with the curves and they're negotiating, hitting bumps and rocks and things like that. And it it looks very convincing. And then when you get into editorial, you're basically cutting between the stunt rider, who also had a dummy mannequin uh that was custom built by our special effects team to mimic the exact sort of size and look of our child actor. Uh, and we would shoot those shots at enough distance that it wasn't easily perceived that uh that was a dummy, you know, basically a stuffed weighted duplicate of our child actor on the bike. Um and we just shot it a number of ways. We shot it with drones, we shot it with uh a follow car uh with our cinematographer riding on it, uh, getting shots of the bike. It was uh pretty much an almost full day uh shoot to to get all that footage uh and to and to deal with what you can readily imagine were many, many problems and kinks that arose trying to uh trying to get that to go smoothly. But I'm very proud of what we ultimately did shoot, and I I think it looks about as believable as it as it reasonably could. Um, but it was complicated. A lot of pre-planning, a lot of storyboards, a lot of almost kind of editing the scene uh ahead of shooting it to know how it would envision how it would cobble together and and be realistic.

SPEAKER_01 35:45

Well, yeah, I think you did a great job. And you've already touched a little bit on um the use of sci-fi, I'm sorry, not sci-fi, but special effects in this film, you know, with um the scenes in Manchuria. And um, you know, like like most sci-fi these days, special effects are used to convey certain things. And I just wonder if you could talk a little bit about the process of working with the team responsible for those visuals.

SPEAKER_03 36:11

Yeah, absolutely. Um about six months out from even longer, perhaps, maybe even closer to a year out from when we started filming, we started uh reaching out to VFX visual effects companies and starting dialogues with them about the particular needs of the film and how they might go about realizing them and to basically give us sort of a pre-vis, a take on how they would approach some of the very specific special effects or visual effects, I should say, that we needed in the movie. And to to hint at some of that a bit more, uh, not only did we have, you know, trying to realistically portray different parts of the world, like the Manchuria scenes or something like the bike scene we were just discussing, but we also have quite a bit of uh people's faces uh changing from one to another. Um we also have uh quite a bit of environments shifting from seemingly one environment to another in a very sort of hallucinogenic way. And we wanted to make sure that our visual effects team was uh artistically and aesthetically very much on board with how we wanted to realize those things. We didn't want to do them in an expected, we've seen this all before, type of uh you know, hackneyed way. We wanted to do something that was new and unique and felt much more organic than some versions you see of that kind of stuff. So we reached out to, I think we've probably spoke to in the neighborhood of 10 to 15 companies. And quite frankly, we kept finding sort of a creative impasse, uh, even as much as we would use sort of reference points of other material that we liked that was doing somewhat similar stuff, or even uh, you know, things that were way off the map, like paintings and and photographs that we thought kind of dealt with the vibe of some of this really deftly. We just weren't getting uh we just weren't getting the resonance with some of these um some of these uh VFX companies to see what we wanted to see. And needle in the haystack, we we found the right partner who really understood what we were trying to do, and almost right out of the gate were giving us uh kind of representative pre-visual pre-visualization samples that uh even over and above enhanced what we thought we were gonna do with with coupled with their ideas brought to the table. So we knew we had found the right partner, and once that clicked into place, we started having to break down the script in every single scene where there was gonna be uh you know, VFX needed and analyze with them very, very, very granularly how we were going to shoot each and every one of those scenes. And each one, in some regards, was a little different. But the the technique that we was you know pretty much their brainchild of how to do this technically, based upon what we wanted to realize creatively, uh came down to some very, very interesting onset techniques that we had to do. Like, for instance, when we were shifting one character's face into another, or their whole body into another, or a whole environment into another, we would have to do almost an exact tracing where we would take uh a still of what we were shooting on the A-side of part of the scene, where you know one character is beginning the scene but has to transition into another character, let's say, and we would have to basically trace them identically as if we had a big piece of tracing paper over top of the shot, and then shoot it again, and often put a green screen into place if we were going to change the environment around them, uh, and do that in stages so that we could kind of graduate the effect um from where we started from to where we were ultimately going to end up. And it was it was very technical and it was very laborious. And the first couple of times we were shooting it, we didn't honestly get it right. We had to go back and uh and and learn from a handful of early mistakes and and sort of streamline the process. But by the time we were, you know, a couple days into shooting VFX scenes, we really got the recipe down and we were fortunate enough to have a supervisor on set with us from that same VFX company who was you know really running point on exactly where the camera needed to be, where the characters need the actors needed to be positioned, lighting on backgrounds that we knew would need to be a very specific uh kind of light to be able to transition to another environment seamlessly. It it got pretty technical, but also very rewarding when all was said and done to see that it did indeed work seamlessly and we were able to, you know, get the effect and get the the transitions that we were envisioning. That was that was a very, very rewarding part of this whole process because quite frankly, it was a little bit of a leap of faith. Um, it's kind of like the analogy of the old film still cameras, which I don't think anybody even remembers anymore. But you know, you take a picture with a with a still camera with film in it, and you wouldn't really know what you got until a couple weeks later, after you got it developed, you know, if it's in focus or if uh you know there was something on the lens, you had no real idea. And that was a little bit of the same type of faith we needed to bring to bear on some of these VFX, because until we got into editorial and started, you know, really getting the different VFX artists to to composite uh shots and and pull out backgrounds and all that stuff, we didn't really know 100% if we had gotten it right, but ultimately we got we got close enough that um we achieved what we set out to to do, which was very gratifying.

SPEAKER_01 43:20

Well, I definitely have um follow-up questions I'd love to ask, but in the interest of time, I I want to um jump ahead and um talk a little bit about distribution and getting a film, you know, an indie film out into the world. And I was hoping you could talk a little bit about you know that part of your journey and where you know people are going to be able to see the film, you know, in the months ahead and so forth.

SPEAKER_03 43:46

Yeah, absolutely. Uh we did not have any distribution on board when we went into shooting. Uh, we did not have any companies uh, you know, working with us to put the film out into the world. Um once we had cut together uh a fair amount of the film in order to put basically a trailer of sorts together and a couple of key scenes that we had um cut an editorial, we did start showing uh distribution companies and sales companies those bits and pieces. Um and nowadays, a lot of times a company based on cast and based on knowing what the genre of the film is will take an early interest because certain things you know do well in the marketplace and certain things are a bit more challenging. So at the time, uh sci-fi thriller that that edges into some horror elements as well uh was very appealing to to companies, and I I hope it still is. Um, and we were able to secure um a sales company that worked to get us a distribution deal. And we do currently have uh a distribution. Deal in place. And we have sold the film to a number of uh foreign international territories as well. That that process is still ongoing. Um the sales process is pretty languorous and and laborious these days. It's not quite as um, I think, uh fast as it used to be for a whole number of market reasons and and changes in in just the whole distribution pipeline that that's happened over the last five to ten years. But um we are tentatively um releasing the movie the middle of this summer. Uh it'll have a small theatrical run as well as uh appearing in all the the usual suspects for for rental and streaming online. Um it's a little uh early to give you an exact date because a lot of that is still uh uh forming presently, but it does look like either mid-July or mid-August would be our theatrical release. Um, so I'm certainly happy to keep you posted on that as it uh evolves. It's a very active conversation that's happening right now and will no more crystallize very soon.

SPEAKER_01 46:36

Well, you know, I think while we're on the topic, would you mind sharing with us the website for the film and the social media handles, and also if you have your own, you know, personal website and socials so that people will know, you know, where to look.

SPEAKER_03 46:51

Yeah, absolutely. Uh across all of our socials for the film and our website is called Enter the Site. Spelled just like the title of the movie. So enter the site, sit ear, is our website. Uh, enter the site is also on Instagram and Facebook, where we'll be posting everything about the upcoming release dates, uh, a lot of of bits of teasers and imagery from the film that we're starting to uh to put out there more and more as well. Um, I don't personally have a a website just for me. Uh my production company does indeed have a website that covers a lot of uh projects that are uh both mine and part of uh greater teams that we have moving through different stages of development right now. Uh you can look up our company website, which is entelechy, which is spelled E-N-T E-L E-K-E-Y, Entelechy. I'll spell that one more time. E-N-T-E-L-E-K-E-Y dot com. Excuse me, Intelchymedia.com. Sorry about that. Yeah, so Intellichymedia is our uh greater production company, and you can see information about our uh projects and things in the pipeline and other things that are gestating uh in both film and television there.

SPEAKER_01 48:30

Great. And um, you know, as we've mentioned, this is the second feature that you've written and directed. And I was wondering if you could just briefly tell us a little bit about uh the first one and also, you know, what you're working on now. Do you have another project, you know, another script ready to go that you're trying to push out into the world?

SPEAKER_03 48:49

Yeah, yeah. So my first film uh is a contained sci-fi thriller called Threshold uh that I made back, uh I think we shot that around 2016. Um, so quite some time ago. Um that film is very similar in some regards to some of the themes explored in site, um, which I guess stretches back to uh you know some of what we discussed earlier with what really has stuck with me in terms of of themes and characters and sort of metaphysics that I love to explore in my work, uh, from perhaps that fateful uh sea turtle journey gone wrong, uh as we can put it. Uh but Threshold is uh is what I like to think of as a really, really interesting, um, really interesting thriller about belief and how belief can be both an asset and a real um a real enemy to relationships too. Um and it takes place in a very, very interesting context where people don't know exactly what's going on in the world across one night. Uh is the world ending, is there some kind of apocalypse going on? Is there some sort of alien invasion or angels coming to the earth to just you know change people's whole trajectory on the planet? There's all these different sort of theories about what's going on, and we see it through the lens of a couple who's grappling uh with what might be happening in uh this woman who breaks into their house in this very fateful night and is seemingly feeding them information from beyond, from some other plane of existence, which is certainly enhancing both their and and us as an audience our questions about what really is happening, what do we believe, and and seeing the the characters wrestle with that as well. So um a lot of a lot of some of the same kind of mystical themes that are taken up in site had their had their first announcement um, I think in in my prior film, and uh and probably will have plenty more in my upcoming films too, because there's a lot of there's a lot to explore in all those uh in those realms. And that certainly plays into stuff that I am working on now. Um I'd like to think I am getting pretty good at juggling. Um, I have quite a quite a lot going on at present, uh, both in TV and film. I'm I wrote and I'm co-producing another feature that we're in pre-production and in early cast conversations and company conversations with right now. Um it's a larger scale movie uh based on some true IP about a very famous and fascinating uh real-world treasure hunt. So seemingly a bit of a departure in theme for from some of my you know more kind of metaphysical concerned work, but it's actually not. Uh this this has a lot to do with um with a very deep character study about a lot of these same kind of ideas about about what we believe in and and how far we're willing to go in service of a dream or a belief, uh, and what cost that what toll and cost that extracts. Uh really interesting story. And I and frankly, I love to work with real stories, with with real, you know, things that are that are true stories that have happened, because I think you can you can find so much meaning and and expressive content in reality, uh, and ask some of these bigger questions by way of it, as opposed to to pure invention. So it also on that same point, I have a television uh story uh project that we originally developed with Warner Brothers, uh, that's taken on a current new life that we're in early pre-production on as well, um, that has an environmental theme and is actually about uh some of the grassroots efforts that were undertaken in Los Angeles to clean up the air here. There was a terrible, terrible air crisis across many decades in Los Angeles, and the car companies fought the people of Los Angeles tooth and nail and tremendous gaslighting and lies about their cars causing the air issues and the health issues that were just rampantly out of control in Los Angeles for decades. Uh, a very timely David and Goliath story about uh enacting meaningful environmental change from grassroots uh uprisings. Uh, I think that's a a message in the story that the world is sorely needing right now as our climate seems to spiral more and more out of control by the day. Uh, and I also have uh two other TV projects that are rattling through the pipeline and one other feature film that uh is in uh sales conversations right now. So quite a bit. And I'm also finishing a large-scale uh sci-fi follow-up um project that that um that I don't know how we're gonna make this one because I think I've let my imagination run a little maybe a little too wild, but uh I'll I'll rein it in when the time comes. But in any event, a lot of a lot of interesting things going on. I I try to keep busy and um yeah, that's that's I think the the the roundabout of it.

SPEAKER_01 55:07

Yeah, you have a lot going on. Um and what advice uh Jason would you give to first-time filmmakers?

SPEAKER_03 55:17

Well, um, where to begin? Um I think the most important thing, really, uh quite honestly, and and I don't want it to sound trite, but it's to really hold fast to your creative vision. Too many people, I think, call it a brand these days, and I think that cheapens it a bit. But you know, really home in on what you as an individual have to say and why you say it through the medium of film, right? There's plenty of there's plenty of artistic outlets that are far less expensive and far more approachable to to to get creative gratification from, whether it's painting or or writing a book, or you know, those things are a little bit more autonomous and a lot easier to not easy to do, they require obviously great artistry, but they're easier to do than assembling, you know, hundreds of people to see a film realized. But if if the medium of film for any number of reasons is the conduit for your voice as a creative person, then really, really homing in on all the facets that that comprise filmmaking, the music, the visuals, the performative aspects, of course, from actors, finding your distinct stamp with the amalgam of those uh creative facets, I think is is really first and foremost, really, really crying to feel into what you yourself bring to the table uh in in working with those with those aspects that are that are so intrinsic to film. And then a little bit out of the you know, the ether of just finding your creative voice, the more practical and and perhaps equally important uh awareness that one needs to have, especially as a first-time filmmaker, is how can you distill those creative unique aspects into something that you can actually get made? And in terms of actually getting made, you know, a genre and a type of material that you know that the marketplace is receptive to, not to say that you want to paint by numbers or just do what you think people are buying or liking out there, that that that's not what I'm suggesting. But certainly being mindful of what kind of material gets made, and then using your own creative stamp to try to work, you know, somewhat within the brackets of a piece of material that you feel has viability in in the marketplace. And then I think secondarily to that, trying to figure out how to make it with the least expense and logistical complexity you possibly can. You know, how I like the analogy of how many parts can you pull off of a plane and still get it in the air? You know, uh that's I think the reductive logic you have to kind of apply to uh first-time films. You know, can you do it all in one location? Can you do it with just two actors? Can you do it with one actor? Uh there's ways to take very high concept and and very you know uh uh uh audience receptive material and distill it down to to some very bare essences that you can approach in terms of smaller budgets, in terms of of less complexity of multiple locations, and you know, in the in the complexity of hiring uh you know larger cast uh to complete the film too. So I think I'd say three three key kind of totem poles to be aware of are your own creative voice as it pertains to the aspects of film, particularly. Then what can you do with a story that coheres with sort of marketplace interest? And how can you do it third most? How can you do it for the least amount of of cost and the shortest amount of shooting schedule you possibly can to ensure that someone might give you the chance financially and otherwise to go ahead and make it? I think those are the the important pillars of uh of your first outing. They certainly were for me.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:06

So well, that's great advice. And before we wrap up, is there anything else you would like to share with our audience that I haven't already asked you about?

SPEAKER_03 1:00:20

I don't think so. I don't think so. Um, you know, I I would just say because I I hear it so many times it across a given day in so many different conversations on whichever project it might be, that there's a lot of discouraging uh chatter in the film business and and I think in the media sphere at large about where the future goes from here. I mean, obviously AI displacing the human uh elements and in the creative arts has become more and more of a concern, no matter how much you know, even the the unions have have uh tried to beat that back from taking people's jobs in the industry. But the the fundamental thing I I suppose that I would say is even though there's so much discouraging talk out there about how hard it is to get this or that made, or the streamers are making less shows now, and budgets are tightening and belts are tightening, and how many projects get out there in a given year now. You know, some of that might be true, but that kind of cynicism is basically always part and parcel of these endeavors. You're gonna hear that kind of thing day in, day out, no matter what the era is, no matter what the the threat out there might be, there's always that kind of stuff being kicked around. And yeah, this this stuff is hard. It's really, really hard. Make no mistake about it. It's really hard to get a project made and out into the world. It is, and it will extract everything it possibly can from you. There's no doubt about it. But I think uh, you know, for for those creatives listening and working on their projects and believing in what they have to say and what they want to put out there, despite all the naysaying and the you know, the admitted complexity of of the marketplace, don't worry about it so much. There's there's definitely a pathway when something's great and something's meaningful that it finds its it finds its breath at the surface, no matter how long it has to swim, it gets there. So I say stay the course, uh, you know, hold hold fast to your belief in your material and uh and try to shut off the noise. That's that's what I do.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:00

Well, those are great uh closing words, some encouragement for our fellow filmmakers out there. Thank you so much, Jason, for taking time out of your busy schedule to join us and for all the wisdom you've shared with us. And I'm sure you know the audience listening, you know, joins me and looking forward to see, you know, seeing what's next for you. So um, yeah, thanks again for joining us.

SPEAKER_03 1:03:25

My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:27

And thank you everyone for listening.