Episode 003 | So You Wanna Make a Movie?
Writer/Director Chris Nicastro ventures into the basement to talk about the making of his debut feature, Six Weeks to Twelve Years.
Plus, we talk about A.J.'s trip to Venice, Italy, and catch up with our mom about those "second-rate" White Lotus actors.
Six Weeks to Twelve Years is available to rent or buy the film on Amazon. Watch the trailer on hauntedbasement.video.
Subscribe//Follow on Spotify or Apple Podcasts for future episodes.
Episode 003 Transcript
Bubba:
Haunted Basement the podcast is brought to you by Haunted Basement the production company.
A.J.:
Haunted Basement is a full-service video production company that creates professional content for every budget to promote your business or brand.
Bubba:
Our portfolio has a bunch of different videos including branded content, social ads, music videos, documentaries, and our credits include an editing role on a feature film.
A.J.:
We are a sibling-run production company, and together we have over three decades of experience working in film, tv, digital media, and marketing.
Bubba:
So if you need a video to promote your business or brand, reach out.
A.J.:
Get in touch. Let's talk.
Bubba:
We have a link to our website in the show notes below, and you can also find us on Instagram @_hauntedbasement_
A.J.:
All right, let's start the episode.
…
Bubba:
We are back in the basement. And what are we talking about in episode three, Age?
A.J.:
Well, guys, you know how I'm going to Venice?
Ashleigh:
Yes.
A.J.
Tomorrow I'm going there for two weeks for a solo trip. Well, I'm going there mostly because I've been really wanting to write a screenplay, Bubba, and I have been developing this idea for over a year now, and I'm like, I just want to go detach for a little bit from my routine and write this screenplay. And I have never written a screenplay before. I don't know what it's like. I don't know how hard it is, but I have a friend, Chris Nicastro, who has not only written a screenplay, but he made a movie and I edited that movie back in 2019. So I thought it'd be a cool idea to get him on to talk about his experience.
Ashleigh:
Now, before we get to Chris, why Venice?
Bubba:
Yeah, same question.
Ashleigh:
That's like a pretty far remote location.
Bubba:
We're talking Venice in January, which as I recall is a bit bleak.
Ashleigh:
And wait, wait, we're talking Venice, Italy, not California, correct?
A.J.:
Venezi, Venezia, yeah. Italy.
Ashleigh:
Ah, sì, sì, sì.
A.J.:
Okay, for a few reasons. Reason number one, I haven't been to Italy in over a decade, and I feel like it's time to check in on the motherland, see how it's going. Number two, Venice, it's an impossible city. It's sinking into the ocean. It's either now or never in terms of visiting Venice, but
Ashleigh:
I think it had a few good years because of Covid.
A.J.:
Yeah, there were dolphins swimming in the canals. You see the pictures?
Ashleigh:
There were dolphins.
A.J.:
No, that was, remember in the early Covid days
Ashleigh:
I was going to say, why were they there?
Bubba:
No, there were animals taking back Venice along with other major cities.
Ashleigh:
Okay, but not dolphins.
A.J.:
In the early Covid days when everyone was experiencing high trauma, they just wanted to see cute nature in the city spaces. Remember that? And there was a lot of Photoshopped photos back in that time.
Bubba:
There were Italian unicorns walking down the alleyways of Venice saying, “Hey, how's it going? How you doing? Good to be back. Hey, good to be back.”
Ashleigh:
Wait. Can we tell the story about Bubba the first time we went to Venice as a family?
A.J.:
Yeah, go ahead. Go ahead.
Ashleigh:
So we're on this little plane. I don't know, we probably went from Rome to Venice. I don't know what we did, but Bubba, how old were you?
Bubba:
I think I was 16.
Ashleigh:
Yeah, you were still in high school. And so the plane is at the gate. We're, we're all getting our bags out. It's taking a hot minute in this guy in this very nice suit. Obviously, Italians wear very nice suits.
Bubba:
“Nice” being a purple suede suit.
Ashleigh:
Purple suede, very tailored, very beautiful. Turns around and goes to Bubba. Is this your first time here? And Bubba's like, yeah. And he goes, oh, we will love you here. And that was our intro to Venice baby.
Bubba:
That was the intro.
A.J.:
Guys, the only thing I really remember about our days in Venice was watching European MTV in our little hotel room. We watched German pop music videos. So good.
Ashleigh:
They did MTV Italia. They actually played music videos. Granted, they'd play like Queen and then Adele, and then more Queen. They just love Queen.
A.J.:
The Europeans definitely have a different relationship to music than us Americans.
Ashleigh:
Yeah. Oh, and one last thing about Venice. We missed Andrea Bocelli's free concert in Piazza San Marco by one day. Yeah. Ugh. What dopes.
Bubba:
There's this weird spooky energy there where you don't know what's going to be around every single corner and having some idea of what you're trying to write. I think that's going to be a good place to get some inspo.
Ashleigh:
A little spooky.
A.J.:
Absolutely. Trying to write something a little spooky. And I've been looking up on Atlas Obscura, which is my favorite go-to site for Off the Beaten Path things to do in cities. I found something in Venice called The Flooded Crypt of San Zacharia, which is exactly what it sounds like - a flooded crypt at the bottom of a church. So I'll be checking that out.
Ashleigh:
That's a no for me dog. I hope you get a beaked mask. Are you going to get a new mask?
A.J.:
I would love to bring a Venetian mask back to yeah. Brooklyn with me.
Ashleigh:
One of the plague masks.
Bubba:
That's how you could write, you could dip the nose and some ink and then scratch it on some parchment.
A.J.:
All right. Well, before I get to Venice, we got to have this conversation with my friend and filmmaker, Chris Nicastro.
A.J.:
Our guest today is a friend and collaborator. He's a writer, director and commercial editor based in Brooklyn, New York. His first feature length film Six Weeks to Twelve Years was released in December, 2021 by Mutiny Pictures. Chris Nicastro, welcome to the basement.
Chris:
Hey, super happy to be here. Always wanted to be in the basement.
Ashleigh:
Perfect.
A.J.:
So the topic of this episode is, “So You Wanna Make a Movie?”, and we're going to sort of demystify the movie-making process, and we'd love to hear what your process was like in making this film.
Ashleigh:
For all the listeners who haven't yet seen the movie, could someone just give a quick synopsis so people know kind of what we're talking about?
Chris:
Yeah. No, it's just about two brothers and their dad dies and they have to go sell his house. And one of the brothers is sort of a clean-cut, makes a lot of money, kind of bourgie, lives in New York, is an ad guy, and the other one's just sort of like a DIY kind of quasi-punk house show kind of guy. And they have nothing in common, and they just kind of can't stand each other on the entire trip.
Colin:
Hey Wyatt.
Wyatt:
Hey what?
Colin:
Why do you think Mom didn't tell me about Dad's funeral?
Wyatt:
Because she didn't like you.
A.J.:
Where did you originally get the idea from this movie?
Chris:
Every single thing I've ever written or made, I've just started with an image and then just kind of unraveled from there. Then, so the image I had for Six Weeks was the image of two adult brothers wrestling on the beach in the water as though they were five years old then. So that was the first scene I ever wrote was just the argument leading up to the fight.
Colin:
Why are you like this to me, man? Why don't you care about anything? Huh? Why don't you give a fuck? Wyatt, you hate everything.
Wyatt:
That’s a stupid thing to say. Really, that's a stupid thing to say.
Chris:
Yeah. It just kind of unraveled from there. It was like, okay, well, why are they there in the first place? Why is this one mad at this one?
A.J.:
Do you remember what year you got that original idea of brothers fighting in the ocean?
Chris:
The image was probably late….Oh shit. When did we shoot it? Did we shoot it in 2019? Then it was probably late 2018 that I had the image in my head. And then around spring I wrote just that scene. And that scene as it is in the movie, is largely the same as it was on the page that day that I just immediately started writing it, except for the fact that when we actually started shooting it, and when Billy who played the other brother and I played one of the brothers, when we started going at it, we started going way off script. It was very wordy, that scene. And I remember A.J., you were actually on the side basically and script-supervising and calling out lines. And then it just got to the point where, I don't know, we were both just really in it, and it was all just off the cuff at a certain point.
Wyatt:
The hell is this, Colin? You want me to have some kind of spiritual experience? You want me to treat dad's death like a fucking magical quest-catharsis. What do you want me to do?
Colin:
I want you to act like a fucking human. And not some sociopath. That's all I'm asking for.
Chris:
Yeah. So it was just a lot of improv, that scene, even though I think tonally, it very much didn't drift from how it was the first day that I sat down to try and come up with what the movie even was.
Bubba:
I'm always curious to know if a director, especially a writer/director, in watching their work back, does it feel very true to that, to the original concept, to the way that you had imagined it?
Chris:
Yeah, I think it still is very much how I thought it would be. Because when you make a movie with no money, it's like, okay, well how do I make it appropriate aesthetically for having $0 to work with here? And so we were basically just like, okay, everything's going to be shaky cam. Everything's going to be handheld. This is going to only be available light with very few exceptions. So I knew from the start I was like, it's just going to be as raw and kind of docu-style as possible.
A.J.:
The main reason why you have to shoot shaky cam with available light for people who don't really know film production is it takes a lot of time to set up lights and all this other, when you make big budget movies, it just takes a lot of time to set up lights and wait for the perfect lighting. So when you have 10 days to shoot a movie, it's very much run-and-gun guerilla-style filmmaking. And that's what this movie was.
Chris:
Well, there was a day, well, it was the day that we shot the fight scene which is near the end of the movie. And the way the weather was working was we were only going to have one sunny day left the entire week, and we wanted it to be a golden hour thing. So we had a bunch of book-ending scenes that we needed to shoot all in the same, basically same golden hour. And A.J., your family came to visit the set that day. And so I felt so bad because I wanted to say hi to your mom and dad and introduce myself and stuff. And they brought cookies and stuff and oh, it was very sweet.
Bubba:
Oh my God, you disrespected my mom?
Chris:
It was very sweet. It was very sweet.
A.J.:
They had never been to a film set before. They were excited.
Chris:
And meanwhile, everybody, it's like me, Drew who shot it, Jack who was on sound, and Billy who was the other actor, we were just literally running from location to location, just stealing whatever we could. And yeah, somehow we got it all done in that matter of two hours.
Ashleigh:
Mom and Dad almost ruined it.
A.J.:
Yeah. Well, they were just excited to be on a film set.
Ashleigh:
Is that why they got a special shout-out? I saw at the end, Renée Serrano, and I was like, why does she get a special thank you?
Bubba:
Because she made some damn good cookies.
A.J.:
When you had the original idea for this, was it like this is a movie or was this a short film? Did you know right away that this was a movie that you wanted to make?
Chris:
It was a movie from the start. I mean, I really only ever wrote feature-length things. I never really, I don't know. I don't really have it in me to write shorts. Every time I try and write a short, I don't have it in me. It's too short. Like I don't don't know how to resolve this. I'm just not good at it. So just from the start I was like, yeah, this is part of a larger film. And then I think before we even shot Six Weeks, I think I must have written over the span of the two years before maybe five or six feature scripts that just only a couple people ever read.
A.J.:
Putting in the work, putting in the 10,000 hours or whatever it is.
Chris:
Yeah. You got to put in the 10,000 hours. And it was like, I showed this one to Drew and he pretty much every time I'd ever written something before was just very nice about reading something.
A.J.:
Your friend wrote something. Oh, that’s nice!
Chris:
Oh, cool. Nice. And then it was when I showed him that, he was like, oh, this is really good. I was like, oh, okay. Maybe we should do this then.
Bubba:
That's awesome. And this is Drew Lang, your DP? And has he been a creative collaborator of yours for a while?
Chris:
For as long as I've known him. I met him at the same place that I met A.J., we worked together at a post house.
A.J.:
Drew and Chris were just inseparable. It just seemed like when they met each other that they had known each other for a decade. And everyone in the office is like, what is happening? These people, these two are just meant to be.
Chris:
It's the kind of friendship where when you start talking other people around you have no idea what you're saying, but you understand each other perfectly. It's turned into, he and I write things together now. So everything since Six Weeks has been, he and I have written it 50-50.
Bubba:
Well, that answers my question of what was the impetus to go forward with Six Weeks? And it sounds like it was someone recognizing the value in it.
Chris:
Yeah, well, there was that. And just I think even recognizing on my own that I'd kind of found a voice that was my own. And it's like, as with anything else, any other art. So much of what you do when you first start is going to be imitation of the things that you like. And even in this, there's definitely still a lot of imitation of anybody could look at this and be like, oh, this person watched Squid and the Whale too many times when he was younger. So I mean, there's a lot of imitation of guys like Baumbach for sure in this. But it was definitely a lot more personal. And it definitely felt more personal when I was writing it. And it definitely felt like it was coming from me rather than me trying to be someone else, to the point where it always felt like each of the characters were two different halves of me. In fact, when Drew read it, he was like, this reads you're yelling at yourself.
Ashleigh:
Oh wow.
Bubba:
My God. Just working out your demons.
Ashleigh:
Yeah. Better than therapy. Just make a movie you guys.
Chris:
Yes. Right.
Ashleigh:
That's so cool. One of my questions was, who do you relate to more? Colin? Wyatt? Or, I threw in a third – Chet? Cheff? Chet?
Chris:
Cheff. Cheff was a last second-second inclusion. Cheff was not in the original script.
Wyatt:
Colin, this is Cheff. He's the person who's going to be buying dad's house.
Colin:
What did you just say? You say Jeff?
Cheff:
Cheff. Like chef with a “che”.
Colin:
I hate to be rude seeing this is the first time we're meeting.
Cheff:
No worries, man. It's all vibes.
A.J.:
So you wrote a bunch of different drafts and then you get to a point where you're comfortable enough with the script to be like, okay, I'm ready to get financing for this. Did you feel that you were going to do the Kickstarter route the whole way?
Chris:
The only money we had was enough money to pay people who weren't our friends, basically. Cause it was like everybody who was our friend was there because they wanted to be there. And they were like, yeah, this sounds really fun. And it basically was like, A.J., you can attest to this. You even pointed out, you were like, this feels like being at summer camp. We were all staying at a house in Maine for a week and just waking up a movie at 6:00 AM making a movie. And it was being at summer camp. There was one point where actually you were loading footage from the night before and you said something that made me pause, which was like, take it all in because you'll never make another one of these that's quite the same as this one. And I've taken that to heart since, because again, I'm working on getting a second one off the ground and it's going to have money behind it and it's going to have a much, there's going to be people I've never met before working on it. I'm like, this is not going to be the same.
A.J.:
Yeah, you're going to have more money and it's not going to have that summer camp vibe, but hopefully the next film that you make is going to have that film-making family that we established on this one. That's the biggest hope that the people that you work with actually care and want to do their best work for you. I reached out to Chris during the Kickstarter process of this film because Chris made a little pitch reel, two minute, five minute pitch reel for this movie. And I watched it and the moment I was done watching it, I emailed you. I'm like, I must work on this movie. I will edit this movie. Do you have an editor? So I edited this feature and it was definitely a learning process for me, but it was fun thing to do. I really enjoyed it. I think there was, what, eight people total working on this film total?
Chris:
Probably eight, I think.
A.J.:
So everyone had to wear many hats. And I AD’d, I script-supervised, I edited, AE’d…
Chris:
You held bounce boards.
A.J.:
You learn the whole filmmaking process and you learn, oh, you don't really need 200 people on set to make a movie. You need 10. Or, that's like the core, but it's obviously much more efficient to make something with 200 people on set. But will it have the same sort of personal filmmaking feeling? I don't know. You have to be a master to be able to do that.
Bubba:
Listen, you don't need those big sets or big crews when you have Renée Serrano doing Kraft services. Going back to what Ashleigh was saying about your roles, Chris – writer, director and lead actor in this – you have three pieces of evidence there that this is such a personal document and that you're pulling a lot from your personal experiences and putting them in this feature. Are there any other kind of nuggets taken right out of your life?
Chris:
So I mean, part of the reason I played Wyatt was economical. That's one less person you have to pay. And then the other reason is that I think a lot of the nostalgia comes from…So Billy who played Colin, he and I used to spend the summer in Maine in that house together.
Bubba:
Oh damn. Okay. Wow.
Chris:
So that was the other thing that was, we had a shared past in those locations. And the other thing was when we were really little, we actually hated each other. His mom and my mom have been best friends since kindergarten. And his grandma and my grandma were best friends. So we're like third-generation friends.
A.J.:
That’s wild.
Chris:
But when we were little, we hated each other and we would fight all the time. Eight-year-olds getting into fist fights.
Bubba:
You were just rehearsing.
Chris:
Yeah, we were just rehearsing together. During that fight scene when we ended up way off book, there was definitely real tapped-in feeling there. That wasn't intentional at all, wasn't, I'm not trying to do this kind of show about the show thing live your own life on film, but it was just by virtue of our shared past and our shared nostalgias. There was a point where I was getting choked up while going off book and screaming at him. He was too, there was a point where I'm looking at his eyes and he's tearing up. Part of your head is like, okay, just roll with it. Try not to pay attention to it. Just roll with it. Yeah. It's such a weird line of where have we crossed the line of this is no longer us being two actors in a silly little mumblecore movie and when has this turned into we're actually meaning the things that are coming out of our mouths.
Ashleigh:
Is Billy a professional actor?
Chris:
Oh yeah. And I am not.
Ashleigh:
Okay, I was going to say he was really good.
Chris:
He's really good. He's fantastic. He needs to be in a lot more things.
Bubba:
As do you.
Chris:
No, see that's my thing is I am so thankful that I never have to act again because I'm like sweating the whole time. I was just, I hate this so much. I don't want to have to be doing this.
A.J.:
Having to do that on your directorial debut as well as writing, it's just like that's a lot of work juggle at once.
Bubba:
I wanted to ask how you actually juggle all three of those roles on set or on location as you're filming this? Are you with Drew trying to get the frame and you're kind of getting everybody's marks or whatever and then you jump in yourself?
Chris:
Yeah. I mean it started that way. It started as I was working with Drew to find the frame and all that kind of stuff. By the end it was really just Drew and I being on the same wavelength as we literally always are and being like, I know what I want. So we don't have enough time to frame this up. I know you know what I want.
A.J.:
You got to really trust your collaborators if you're going to do a small movie like this.
Chris:
I think what I would get at is it's at that point when you're juggling that many jobs, it just becomes trust.
Bubba:
I love knowing that the verité docu-style actually kind of is a little bit meta too because it is kind of a practical way of shooting this thing, but it also is a kind of documentary of your own life, or at least as this kind of documentary element if you want to, to dig into it. So I just think that's a really lovely way to think about just the making of this.
Chris:
A couple years removed from everything, I think if there's one thing I wish I had done differently that really stands out, I wish I had gone even further in terms of that part of me wishes I had that we had shot it on mini DV. Because one of the things that we talked about in conceptualizing the look of it was the idea of what do your home movies look like when your dad is shooting them? The idea was the ghostly presence of the father and their dad is shooting them on a home movie. So that brings into the 8mm bookends and all the little tiny little zooms that happen. Those were all feeding into this idea of thinking about the way that suburban dads shoot home movies.
Ashleigh:
I'm just laughing. Cause for us, we've been watching a few of those and our dad chose to not even zoom in on us, but we were at Disney World and he's recording the stage presentations. So that is so specific and so amazing. I love that, Chris. One question I had was how did you go about casting? So it sounds like you already knew Billy, but were you like he has to play this? How was that process?
Chris:
That was as simple as just texting him. He's been in a lot of no-budget horror movies and he was at the time really hungry for, I don't want to say you can cut this out if this is too mean, but he said this to me, but he was like, yeah, I want to be in an actual movie.
A.J.:
We all want an opportunity.
Chris:
Yeah, no, he was really excited and totally, and it had been so long since I'd talked to him at that point it had been years and I just knew he was an actor. And I mean it was one of those things where when I was writing it, it was him the whole time. Partly because of our shared past, but partly because when you have no money, you write to the things you have access to. So you're just already limiting your imagination because you just got to keep it realistic.
Ashleigh:
Well you're lucky you had such a talented friend.
Chris:
Yeah.
…
Bubba:
And now join us for a little segment. We like to call Call Your Mom. We’re gonna call our mom, ‘cause we love her (smooch and squeeze). We’re gonna call our mom.
Mom:
Bubbsidoodles!
Bubba:
Hello!
A.J.:
Hi Mom.
Ashleigh:
Hi Mom.
A.J.:
You got all three of us on the line.
Mom:
What’s going on my friends?
Bubba:
We just recorded episode three with Chris Nicastro, the writer, director, and actor of Six Weeks to Twelve Years.
Mom:
Oh, very cool.
A.J.:
Do you remember when you showed up on set back in 2019 with cookies?
Mom:
I think I brought cookies. I bring cookies everywhere don’t I?
Ashleigh:
She brings cookies everywhere. Do you know you have a special shout-out at the end? Your name is in the credits under “Thank You”.
Mom:
No!
Ashleigh:
Yeah.
A.J.:
Special thanks to Renée Serrano.
Mom:
I'm just finding this out. I could have bragged about this for so many years.
Ashleigh:
That shows you got to watch credits all the way to the end. Your name might be listed.
Bubba:
You have a credit in a film before I have a credit in a film, Mom.
Mom:
Oh my God. Can you send that to me? I want to share it with all my friends.
Ashleigh:
We got to talk about social media here in a little bit.
A.J.:
Mom, you've posted episode two like five times on your Instagram,
Ashleigh:
The same thing you've posted three times straight with zero context.
A.J.:
What's going on over there?
Mom:
Well, I think that Instagram has changed since the last time I posted three years ago because I have never…Now they tell me to do a story to invite friends. I'm like, what is going on?
A.J.:
So Mom, you know how I'm going to Venice tomorrow for two weeks?
Mom:
Yes.
Ashleigh:
Oh, what's that about?
A.J.:
Yeah. What's that tone of voice?
Mom:
I'm jealous.
Ashleigh:
Ah. Okay.
Bubba:
What do you remember most from our family trip to Venice, Mom?
Mom:
I remember we were a day late and a dollar short of seeing Andrea Bocelli.
Bubba:
I know.
Ashleigh:
Yeah. That one will live on forever.
Mom:
But do you remember when we were walking around and there were all the little old ladies hanging their bloomers out on the lines between the houses?
Ashleigh:
Yeah. I got some really good pictures of it because it's so colorful. They had some colorful boodandies.
Bubba:
As a 16-year-old that was the first I ever saw another woman's underwear, you know what I mean?
Mom:
And you remember Bubba, you ate pizza every single night. We were there for 14 nights.
A.J.:
You just had a ball of cheese and bread stuck in your belly for a month after that.
Bubba:
A lot of pizza was going in. Not a lot was coming out. Oh boy.
Ashleigh:
So I think what we all really want to talk about, because I've gotten a lot of comments about it, are these second-rate White Lotus actors?
Mom:
Wait a minute. Wait. I was just at my hairdresser.
Ashleigh:
Okay.
Mom:
And she watched White Lotus and she said, I've just started watching it. And I said, did you notice the second-rate actors they used? And she goes, yes!
Ashleigh:
Oh my God.
A.J.:
But these actors – one just won a Golden Globe.
Ashleigh:
Guys, Connie Britton is probably like, she's in everything.
Mom:
I guess I shouldn't say second-rate. I'm saying second-tier. Second-tier, not second-rate.
Ashleigh:
Oh, I guess we'll never agree on this one.
Mom:
Look at what happened with Jennifer Coolidge. She never got invited over her neighbor's houses for parties and now she is because she is now a first-rate movie star.
Ashleigh:
Oh my God. I guess we're going to have to agree to disagree on this one.
Mom:
No.
A.J.:
Well, we love chatting with you. I hope to see you soon and smooch ya and tell ya all about my trip to Venice. Smooch.
Ashleigh:
And squeeze.
Mom:
Oh my gosh, thank you. I get to talk to all three of you at the same time. That is special.
A.J.:
Anything you want to tell the listeners before we sign off here?
Mom.
…No.
Bubba:
It sounds like you’re hiding something. What are you hiding?
Mom:
All three of you are so talented.
Ashleigh:
Talented.
A.J.:
Talented, you’re so talented.
Ashleigh:
So talented.
Mom:
And I’m not saying this because I'm your mom. You are gifted and this company of yours is amazing.
A.J.:
You heard it hear first, we’re gonna put that in the testimonials.
Ashleigh:
Our mother thinks we're amazing.
A.J.:
So you better agree with her.
Mom:
I do. Alright, I got to go. Love you.
Bubba:
Okay, bye-bye.
Ashleigh:
Bye-bye.
A.J.:
Bye.
…
A.J.:
Could we talk about the pre-production process? You go through the Kickstarter, you get your financing, and how did the project change for you when you realize, okay, I have this set amount of money to work with. Did you have to change your vision at all in that script?
Chris:
No, because I came to the 5,000 beforehand. I came to the amount of money that I knew it was going to cost to pay people that I don't know to come work on this thing before I even launched the Kickstarter. And it basically ended up costing exactly what I thought it was going to cost. It was all transportation. It was paying a really good sound guy who he didn't know at the time. But shout out Jack Straton who was the most professional person on that set by far. And was just immediately he and I met after a couple phone calls just at a coffee shop just to go over the script and what was needed for sound within minutes of just hanging out with me and Drew, it was like we had known him for years. I guess related to that, it's a little bit, you're starting your own company and to make the company work, you have to hire people that you like. And not only people that you like, but that other people around will get along with. So it's like you really are doing full-on job interviews with people and it's like you'll have people who are willing to do it and are, I'm sure talented at what they do. But you talk to 'em on the phone and you're like, I don't think I would jive with you on a day-to-day basis which is something you like.
Bubba:
Non, for a 12-hour day when you're trying to make tweaks on the fly and creative problem, solve on the fly and people are cranky and lunch is delayed or whatever.
Chris:
Well actually that was the other thing was we had a couple of friends who that's what they did pretty much on the day-to-day was they went grocery shopping and made food for everyone. They were incredible. I was not knowing what to expect. The first day of shooting, I gave the two of them my debit card and I was like, okay just have lunch ready by noon. And we came back and it was like this gorgeous spread of just like home-cooked food. And I was like, oh my God this is beyond what I thought we were going to get out of this.
Ashleigh:
You don't want people hangry. So that's an important role.
A.J.:
If you want to make a movie, most important thing is feed your cast and crew. They will not work for you if you do not feed them.
Chris:
It was actually one of the people who was cooking constantly with Jake, who played Cheff, and he apparently one night woke up in a daze at 2:00 AM and someone was like, wh where are you going? And he was like, oh, I just remembered I should make some hard-boiled eggs for the morning. So at two in the morning he just went downstairs and made 20 hard-boiled eggs.
Ashleigh:
That's so nice. Got to have that protein. Can we just talk about something that made me laugh in the movie?
A.J.:
Yeah, let's talk about it.
Ashleigh:
The car. Whose car was that? I was watching and I was like, that is someone's car?
Chris:
So that was Billy's actual car. That was Billy's actual car. Well no, we were actually in person. We were rehearsing. And he was like, is there anything you were worried about? And I was like, yeah, I'm trying to find someone we can borrow a crappy car from. And he was like literally says to me, he's like, how crappy does it need to be? I was like, dinged up. So his parents had another car too that had hubcaps missing and he was like, does this work? And then he scrolled through other pictures. He was like, or what about this one? Yeah. So that was his real car and we, so that bungee cord to keep the trunk closed was real. That was actually keeping the trunk closed. And he drove us to another location that one of the days that we were shooting in New York, the whole car just made a grinding noise as you were just going five miles an hour.
Bubba:
Wow. Yeah. Hopefully, no camera equipment or gear was in that trunk. Just on the verge of flying through the bungee cord. I love all these little bits of evidence of real life seeping into the film.
Chris:
Other real life is Oliver. Oliver Parfitt-Helmsley.
Cybill:
Colin, this is my husband Oliver. Oliver, this is Colin.
Oliver:
Parfitt-Helmsley. Pleasure. I have heard all about you. You must be packing quite the punch to have been shagging my wife as a kid.
Cybill:
Oliver has a very dry sense of humor.
Chris:
So that is actually my friend James, who is another one of those people who speak to him and everybody around you is like, what the fuck are you guys talking about? Me and him and a bunch of our other friends every night, two weeks straight, just went to the same diner until four in the morning with no other purpose of being up that late than trying to make each other laugh. And one of the things that he came up with was a character named Oliver Parfitt-Helmsley, who's just like an obnoxious British guy.
A.J.:
Can we fast-forward to the editing process? I was editing on set a little bit, doing some assistant editing work, but when I got back to my apartment, that's when I did some real editing. And the way that I tackled it was I would edit, okay, this is scene six, I'm going to edit it. It's a little three-minute short film. And then this is scene 10, edit that as a four-minute short film. And by the end of it, I put it all together until it was an 80-minute sequence on my timeline. I'm like, oh shoot, I got a film here. And then we get to our V1. When you watch that first version all together and actually got to see the movie that we have to work with, what's that like? They say that you write a film three times, you write it when you write it on paper, you write it again when you shoot it, and then you write it again when you edit it. And that's like the final writing of it. What was your initial reaction to like, oh, okay, this is what I have to actually work with now,
Chris:
Initial reaction, and this has nothing to do with you, was I wanted to puke.
A.J.:
I get it. I get it.
Chris:
Like this has nothing to do with you. It has everything to do with knowing everything that happened on the day. And I assured myself by later finding out from directors I admire that they're like, if you don't want to throw yourself off a bridge after the first rough cut, then you're in bad shape because you think way too highly of yourself. And then it just becomes refining. It just becomes looking at everything a million times until your face turns blue.
A.J.:
I've watched this movie I think 600 times.
Chris:
Yeah. Oh yeah. And the other thing that I wish had been possible but just wasn't given the constraints was I wish that we'd done two cameras and I think I only ever would do a two-cam setup in improv scenes from now on doing the takeover and over again, you just find little bits that are just so funny. Where did that come from? Just pulling things out of the ether. And I love that. Just one of my favorite things in the movie is just something that on the day I didn't know was said and then finding it later, which was when Oliver says, “and that's pounds not US dollars”. That was in the script, but Billy's reaction when he just mumbles to himself…
Oliver:
Christ, this place cost me 4.8 million and that's British pounds. That's not US dollars.
Colin:
Oh, I don’t really know the difference.
Chris:
“I don't really know the difference.”
Bubba:
Billy's character, Colin has this, there's this quick scene where we don't really have too much context, but he is on the beach by himself and he's kind of rehearsing this big speech that he's going to give to his brother, Wyatt. You obviously don't really know what's going on. And then just a scene or two later you realize, oh, he was totally rehearsing the speech. How did you conceive of that?
Chris:
That was found in the edit. That was not planned at all. That was a couple nights before we shot the actual fight. We were just doing a blocking test on the beach and Drew was rolling and Jack was rolling and Billy was actually rehearsing his lines. And then A.J. and I were both, we need something between Cheff and Cheff coming back. We need something between here. It just feels so weird. It just doesn't feel natural. We need something. And so just going through 40 hours of footage, we just looked at that and we were like, oh shit, what if Colin isn't saying this in the moment? What if he practiced saying this to him? So we put it in.
Ashleigh:
I feel like it adds a lot to his character and just the whole story that he would practice.
Chris:
Yeah, tha’s what we both felt like when A.J. and I kept looking at that, we were both, he totally would do that. He would not know how to say this naturally to Wyatt. He would have to practice it. Everything that I love about the movie and everything that I'm proud about the movie I didn't have a hand in, which I think is interesting. It's like you just have to let real life enter the frame.
Bubba:
How long did it take for you to be comfortable with the film as something that is separate from you and something that you cannot touch anymore that you're releasing into the world?
Chris:
I'm still not comfortable with it. I don't think I ever will be. I don't think anything I make I will ever be comfortable with it.
Ashleigh:
I think that's probably healthy.
Chris:
Yeah. Because I can't look at the thing. It's not possible for me to even just look at it without being like, I should have done this. I should have done this. But I think that that's healthy. I think if I were to do the exact same script again today, it would be a completely different movie. And I don't think I, not to say like, oh, I hate this thing as an object. It's your first thing made for $0. It's just practice. You're going to keep learning, you're going to keep doing different things. But it would be a completely different movie if I did it today. But I'm like in the process of possibly getting a much bigger project going this summer. And I've found in the past three years that the naiveté of having no idea what you're doing when you're making that first feature is what gets you through making it in the first place. Because you don't know what you're getting into. When you know what you're getting into, you're like, I can't do that. I mean, it's been a bit of a handicap going forward trying to do things that are slightly bigger or even the same size now I know what it takes.
Bubba:
It takes 2:00 AM hard-boiled eggs. You know?
Chris:
Takes 2:00 AM hard-boiled eggs and where are you going to get those? And yeah, it's just like, yeah, it's just what it takes. And you're sort of held back by that a little bit.
Ashleigh:
And last question from me, what is a movie you've seen recently that you really have enjoyed and stuck with you?
Chris:
Movie that I've seen recently that I really enjoyed and has stuck with me? Shit. Oh God okay. I'm going to sound like a broken record to A.J. probably, but probably my all-time favorite movie that I watched over the holidays is The Apartment. I just love that movie so much.
Bubba:
I haven’t seen it.
A.J.:
Bub, you've never seen the apartment?
Bubba:
No, I don't think so.
A.J.:
Black and white. 1961.
Ashleigh:
Is that the one with the binoculars that the one with Shia LaBeouf was based on?
A.J.:
Chris, please explain what The Apartment is.
Bubba:
The one Shia LaBeouf was in?
Ashleigh:
No, that the one with Shia LaBeouf was based on.
A.J. :
Oh, Disturbia. But you're talking about Rear Window. Chris, give us a little synopsis.
Chris:
Yeah, The Apartment is Jack Lemmon is a low level insurance adjuster whose bosses use his apartment to sleep with their mistresses and a person that Jack Lemmon has a crush on is sleeping with one of his bosses.
A.J.:
Played by Shirley MacLaine.
Chris:
Shirley MacLaine. Yeah. So good. Not a wasted word in the script. It's so good.
A.J.:
It's just beautiful black and white photography. Perfect Christmas-time watch and just an expert balance of melancholy and funny. It's a must-watch.
Chris:
Yeah. Which is everything that I chase in the stuff I try and make.
Ashleigh:
Amazing. Well, I'm glad I asked.
A.J.:
Thank you for joining us on Haunted Basement, the podcast. We're looking to make more of these, but in the meantime, you can check out hauntedbasement.video. You can watch the trailer for Six Weeks to Twelve Years, which I cut for this movie. It's available to watch online. You could rent it or buy it on Amazon. And Chris, thank you for joining us in the basement.
Chris:
Thanks for having me.
Ashleigh:
Looking forward to your next one.
A.J.:
We'll see you guys later. Goodbye.
