Special Report: Todd Rohal on F*** My Son! (2025)

Mike talks with filmmaker Todd Rohal in a lively, no-holds-barred tour through one of the most delightfully unclassifiable careers in American indie cinema. From Knuckleface Jones to The Catechism Cataclysm, Rohal has carved out a lane where misfits, surreal detours, and emotional gut-punches live side-by-side.

The conversation zeroes in on F*** My Son (2025), his bold and darkly comic new feature that pushes his sensibilities into feral, confrontational territory. Rohal talks process, chaos, collaboration, and why he wants to work in a hardware store.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
Oh g is, folks, it's showtime.

Speaker 2 (00:08):
People say, good money to see this movie. When they
go out to a theater, they want cold sodas, hot popcorn,
and no monsters. In the Protection Booth, everyone pretend podcasting
isn't boring. Don it off.

Speaker 3 (00:41):
You're gonna make a sup of hoone going just a
few minutes, good chap do. Let's make sure we're on

(01:03):
the same page here. You're gonna make my son's penis
erect and heard you're going to put it inside your
vagina until he ejaculates fully.

Speaker 4 (01:23):
This will all be done bare back. Oh Jesus.

Speaker 3 (01:29):
Mm hmmm, No, rubbers, missy, he deserves the full pleasurable experience.

Speaker 2 (01:36):
No, mm hmmmm hmm, I'm not doing that.

Speaker 4 (01:48):
Well wait, what what are you doing? Wait?

Speaker 2 (01:58):
Their breaks me heart.

Speaker 3 (02:00):
There's so much sense in the world that he gets.
Not a crumb of it. Birds, fuck dog, fucking bugs,
fuck fleas, fucking nobody fugs him. You're gonna fuck him
and you're gonna fuck him. Good.

Speaker 1 (02:21):
Hey, folks, welcome to a very special episode of The
Projection Booth. I'm your host, Mike White. On this episode,
I am talking with the one and only Todd Rollhal
I have been a fan and a friend of Todd's
for quite a few years, and I'm very excited to
talk to him about his latest film, My Son. It
is going around the country. Follow Todd over on Instagram

(02:45):
to find out where it is going to be playing near.
You talk to Todd about quite a few films in
his career. Kind of left the Johnny Knoxville film alone,
but otherwise talked to him about quite a bit. Had
a great time catching up with him and also discussing
My Son. Thanks so much for listening, and I hope
you enjoy this interview. I've never asked you this before,

(03:05):
but how did you even decide to become a filmmaker?

Speaker 2 (03:09):
They make you make decisions when you're in Ohio. They're like, okay, everyone,
you have to make tell us what you're gonna be.

Speaker 4 (03:14):
No, it was in kindergarten. I remember telling my.

Speaker 2 (03:16):
Teacher that I was going to make movies, and honestly,
I don't even know what i'd seen at that point.

Speaker 4 (03:20):
Kindergarten's very early.

Speaker 2 (03:22):
I don't even know if I had memories before that,
but I remember saying that I was going to do that.

Speaker 4 (03:27):
It's odd I remember watching like the never ending story
over and over and over on a VHS tape that.

Speaker 2 (03:32):
We ran it from the library, very into it and
really picking apart shots from that and trying to figure
out how they did it, even as a little kid,
and then finding out, Yeah, other kids were too scared
to watch it because I was pretty young when I
was doing.

Speaker 4 (03:47):
And I was like, why are you scared of this?
Just a movie? You know.

Speaker 2 (03:49):
It's like I think I had a clear sense of
the making of things and the and then the result
of things fairly early on, and really loved that idea
of doing it, but never had any connection to this
was a total impossibility, I think as a little kid,
because I knew it was growing up in Columbus, Ohio,
and it was like there was nothing remotely connected to

(04:10):
the film world there. So everyone was like, I don't
know how you would do this, So maybe come up
with another idea if you can, maybe a different field
of work or something to pursue. So yeah, most of
my life was just spent trying to figure out what
early life was spent trying to figure out what else
I could do instead of making movies.

Speaker 1 (04:25):
The first movie of yours I saw was Local Face,
Jones back in ninety nine.

Speaker 4 (04:30):
What were those earlier films like, So I went to
film school. I tried to go to NYU.

Speaker 2 (04:35):
That's the dream, because reading about everybody.

Speaker 4 (04:38):
Was coming out of film school at that time.

Speaker 2 (04:40):
I graduated high school in ninety four, so it was
like the height of when the film school brats of
the generation's prior were all coming from NYU, USC UCLA.
Those are the three schools, and so I, yeah, I
applied to those and did not I have the grades
to get in nor the money. Member NYU sending the

(05:01):
which now it seemed very affordable, but it's twenty five
thousand dollars a year and they offered me one thousand
dollars in scholarship, and it was like, yeah, an impossibility.
And now I guess it's probably obviously, yeah, even more expensive.
So all colleges are unaffordable. But I ended up going
to Ohio University in Ohio where I was at because
it was in state school. I mean, they had a

(05:23):
film program that was in the arts department, which is
where I knew I wanted to go. I wanted a
film program in the art department. Either back then it
was like either in the communications department or telecommunications is
what it was called. That's a very nineteen fifties term,
which I doubt is still around in schools. But I
knew I didn't want to go into the communications end
of film. I was interested in the art department. So

(05:44):
they did have that, and it was like that program
dated back to the sixties. Ed Lachman went there and
there was a big history connected to even Ann Arbor,
between Ohio University and Arbor of like art experimental film,
and so a lot of the experimental filmmakers would make
that circuit through Ohio University, and so there was a

(06:06):
pretty deep history there between Stan Brackage and the Kuchars,
and I don't think Jonas Mikas came through there, but
even Stan Vanderbeek I think came through the school, and
Bruce Bailey and people like that were like in within
a few years of that, Like my time there had
been at the program speaking. I ended up loving it

(06:27):
and then making these Everyone had a bit of an
experimental sense. The teachers were all fighting with each other,
so it was like we were just we had a
bunch of CP sixteen cameras one Airy SR two. Everything
was edited on Steinbeck's Avid. They just bought a new Avid,
which no one wanted to touch because we didn't like technology.

Speaker 4 (06:48):
Then we were cool, but.

Speaker 2 (06:50):
Like all of that was just starting to bridge in
and like the students there, and I think the history
of that watching experimental films in our experimental film class
taught by this woman and Ruth Bradley, who was wonderful
at getting the stuff in front of us, just pushed
pushed some buttons to make some to go some different directions,
and we do everything from you. We'd have to shoot

(07:11):
our own titles and optically print everything, cut our own negative.

Speaker 4 (07:16):
The only thing we didn't have.

Speaker 2 (07:17):
Was a place to process the film there, so we
would have to send that to these labs in Pittsburgh
and get get the film back. But otherwise did everything
all the way to complete prints and everything of your film.
So I loved it and then made knuckle Face Jones
after seeing Gummo in the theater in nineteen ninety seven,

(07:37):
and I went to LA for the first time and
happened to be like by the Lemolee Theater where Gummo
was showing, and I saw the poster and I was like,
what is this? And went in and saw it, and
there was like eight other people in the theater.

Speaker 4 (07:48):
And as it was.

Speaker 2 (07:49):
Happening, I was like, this is going to change the world,
Like this is going to get the Academy War. Everyone's
going to start making movies like this. This is incredible.
And the lights came up and I remember people in
the auditorium or not auditory, it was a small little
theater saying like that suck, like they I'm so mad
about it, and I was confused, and so I just
kept talking about it and talking about it back in

(08:10):
school and and it really that really shifted something because
it was like looking at experimental movies from the sixties
is one thing, but then seeing something that modern and
out there and just so connected it took place in Ohio.
It just had it just felt it just opened a
door to like possibilities there that felt modern or felt

(08:31):
not modern out just just current contemporary I guess the
right word. But yeah, So I made this movie called
knuckle Face Jones that was just written. It just went
in my mind to try and ring some stuff. It's
not as far out there. It's pretty stupid and cartoony,
but it was definitely felt like me and I was
very excited about it, and the perhaps at the school
really didn't.

Speaker 4 (08:51):
Like it, and that felt great.

Speaker 2 (08:55):
And then yeah, when I met you and Skiz and
all these people in Baltimore. Skis was running Skis Physics,
was running the micro Cinifest, and he was one of
the first film festivals to accept the movie. I think
the Johns Hopkins Film Festival accepted it was one of
the first. And then they told Skiz about it a
micro Cinifest and as soon and right after graduating, moved
to Baltimore. So it was like, these screenings in Baltimore

(09:17):
were the first time I'd shown this movie and people
liked it, and I was and made friends because of it,
and that that was the beginning of it. So I
met you, like really right at that time when it
was going at the transition point from school to I'm
just living in this town and I have these movies
on these reels and I don't know, I don't know

(09:37):
what the fuck I'm doing. Met all these people through
through through Skis and through you and through Yeah, those
first few years being in Baltimore and meeting artists that
were just making weird work, and there was not an
obsession with like how do I parlay what I've made

(09:59):
into a career. It was like, how do I just
parlay this into something else interesting or something weird or
it was a really wonderful feeling of there was no
industry pressure, which, for better or for worse, I've not
had an industry career probably because of that.

Speaker 4 (10:17):
But and that was very formative for me. I think
of just being like, these are the.

Speaker 2 (10:21):
Things I truly love and am inspired by. But it's
a lot of stuff that's on the fringes. So that's
a yeah, that's where that.

Speaker 1 (10:29):
Speaking of fringe, tell me, how did you meet I've
Ben Dmitriev.

Speaker 4 (10:33):
Oh my god, I forgot this whole part of my life.
Ivan Dimitrov is a.

Speaker 2 (10:38):
Bulgarian man, a very special man, and he has been
in a bunch of stuff I have done. And he
was a construction worker in DC but grew up in
Bulgaria during the communist run of it. His life story
is really incredible that his parents had to leave the

(10:59):
city they were in and left Yvonne alone in an
apartment when he's I think nine or ten to go
to school on his own because his parents were threatened
with being executed and stuff. So he ended up making
his way to the US or no, I'm sorry. When
he was there, he was really into dance and he's
a dancer, and he's like the weirdest dancer you've ever seen.

(11:21):
It's like he now takes what's Bulgarian traditional folk dancing
and just combines it with total lunacy and he's just
got the energy that's maniacal. So after Baltimore, I met
not after Baltimore. While I was living in Baltimore, I
met a fellow at a screening named Leo who was
going to make a feature film and he had seen

(11:42):
knuckle Face Jones and he was like, I'm going to
make He was a very charming, suave British man. I'm
going to make a film, a feature film about a
Bulgarian pastry chef.

Speaker 4 (11:54):
And this sounds like Bernard Herdsong baby, but he was
very British.

Speaker 2 (11:58):
He's like, I'm going to make this movie that this
Bulgarian pastry chef that topples capitalism, brings the end of capitalism.
And I was like, I don't even know what that
is or what that could dan what the fuck he
was talking about, But I agreed to shoot his movie.

Speaker 4 (12:12):
We shot it on sixteen milimeter.

Speaker 2 (12:14):
It took probably two years two and a half years
to shoot.

Speaker 4 (12:18):
He worked for the World Bank. He financed this movie
on his own.

Speaker 2 (12:21):
He lived on Logan's Circle in DC on this which
at the time was just terrifying to live to be near.
And so we all lived in his house, in his
neighbor's house while making this movie. And he brought Yvonne
in from meeting him at this Bulgarian dance recital, and
I just latched onto him immediately and started casting hisself.

(12:43):
Now Leo later after the movie was done and it
never screened anywhere.

Speaker 4 (12:49):
I have a VHS copy of it. But Leo is
brothers with his brothers.

Speaker 2 (12:52):
Boris Johnson and Leo Johnson. Yeah, he's this filmmaker and
activist for the environment and stuff. And then his brother
is this man, Boris Johnson, who ended up being the
doing some things in England.

Speaker 4 (13:06):
I guess I should say I might have heard his
name before, but they're.

Speaker 2 (13:11):
Like identical looking. So all the news when that started
to happen was so crazy because it just was running
me of Leo. And but yeah, I've not really caught
up with Leo since all of that.

Speaker 4 (13:23):
The movie's never screened anywhere.

Speaker 2 (13:26):
I do have a copy, and I always thought about
maybe doing something with it, but I don't know what
it would be. I don't want to shame Leo in
any way, and it's not mine to put out. So
I met Yvonne, this crazy bulgarian guy that I ended
up writing other movies around, and maybe it was one
of the first people that was like, oh, like, I
really love writing for these true weirdo.

Speaker 4 (13:46):
True eccentrics helped me out here.

Speaker 1 (13:49):
So Microcentifest runs through both of our lives, very big,
and I swear I was at a Microcentifest and that stopped.
I want to say two thousand and eight, but I
could have sworn that I was at a MICROCINFS and
there was a table there with posters on it, and
I want to say, it was a movie that you
made with Johnny Knoxville. Does this ring any bells?

Speaker 2 (14:13):
I did make a movie with Johnny Nuttill, but I
don't know if it's a microcinifit.

Speaker 1 (14:16):
The movie wasn't at Microcinfs, but the posters were, I thought.
But the timeline doesn't add up because didn't that come
out in twenty thirteen or something.

Speaker 2 (14:25):
I didn't get anything of him prior to that, and
I don't think he was in anything that would have
been the era. But yeah, like your late nineties. Yeah,
I didn't meet him until we did that movie.

Speaker 1 (14:37):
Yeah, we were talking before we started recording about Corey Macabee,
and I remember he had a small role in guatemal
and Handshake, which is probably the last thing that I've
seen of yours in a theater, which is very unfortunate
because I love your movies, but that was the last
time I actually got to see that, and I got
to see it several times, which was really freaking fantastic.

(14:58):
And that experience of yours making your first feature, that
must have been quite an adventure.

Speaker 2 (15:05):
We shot that movie for fifty maybe seventy five thousand
dollars total, and it was shot on thirty five animorphic
on these old cameras and the same lenses they used
to shoot like the Mission. It's a massive anamorphic lenses.

Speaker 4 (15:18):
Like we were just like, give us.

Speaker 2 (15:19):
Your least rented camera for the lowest price possible from
Joe Dutton Cameras in North Carolina.

Speaker 4 (15:27):
And I don't know how we did this. Everyone worked
for free.

Speaker 2 (15:32):
I had no idea how we made this movie. But yeah,
it was like a million favors. I asked Will Oldham
to be in it, he said sure, asked Corey to
be in it, he said sure. It was all analog,
like no effects work in it at all.

Speaker 4 (15:44):
It was so nuts, But that was two thousand and four.

Speaker 2 (15:47):
We shot it and finished it in two thousand and six,
and at the time when everything was going to digital projection,
so it was like we had this beautiful thirty five
print and nobody could show it, Like festivals were like, nah,
we switched all our pet out.

Speaker 4 (16:02):
I watched the film again, like maybe five years ago.

Speaker 2 (16:04):
We did a screening at Austin Film Society and I
hadn't seen the print.

Speaker 4 (16:09):
In for years, and it looked like we shot it
in like nineteen thirty. It was just like looking at
something that truly felt so older than we were.

Speaker 2 (16:22):
It's just like the entire esthetic of film has changed
so much. And I remember the movie very well, and
I remember like we got the negative, did everything on it.
There was no digital process in that movie. But it
was like I felt so disconnected from my current self
in that movie and good and bad ways, but it
was truly it was just like, how did we How

(16:42):
was I alive at the time when this technology did.

Speaker 4 (16:46):
So I love that you got to see it.

Speaker 2 (16:47):
It was projected, I'm sure when you saw it, and
it just feels like that is not even a that's
a relic of a different time. But yeah, when we
did micro Cinifest, everything was like projected on film.

Speaker 4 (16:59):
At that there was shot video things.

Speaker 2 (17:01):
I remember watching Huck Vodko's movies cream Pie, Banana cream
Pie movies and stuff on video.

Speaker 1 (17:10):
Like The Last and all that.

Speaker 4 (17:12):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (17:12):
God, it was so fun watching audiences at Microcentifest go
through these roller coasters of and Skiz would know what
he was programming when no one would know what any
of this was. It all felt like it was coming
out of the trash when it was like anything was possible,
like a dead body could show up in these movies
or in Huckbodko's movies, like injecting people's blood into a
birthday cake and feeding it to little kids and making

(17:34):
it feel this.

Speaker 4 (17:34):
Is all pre like we all I believed it at
the times.

Speaker 2 (17:37):
Is that real?

Speaker 4 (17:38):
Is it not real? And seeing it with an audience
where people are.

Speaker 2 (17:41):
Getting mad and I was getting mad and then cracking
up and stuff. It's like this roller coaster of emotions
that like wouldn't work anymore today. All of that stuff
just feels from another definitely from another era, and I
guess it is. But seeing you actually seeing that projected
and feeling, oh my god, nothing looks like this anymore.
And it was not intentionally. It was like seeing our

(18:04):
silent films or something, as if we made things on Yeah,
I feel like Charlie Chaplin at the end of the
Chaplin movie. We're standing on the side crying.

Speaker 1 (18:12):
I'm sure that car doesn't help be there because that
car is so out of time and out of place.

Speaker 2 (18:18):
Yeah, a friend of mine, so, yeah, it's a little tiny. Hey,
this is pre electric car. This was a there's a
guy from Balta coincidentally from Baltimore that invented these commuter
car and city car things that we used in that
and he had a whole grand vision.

Speaker 4 (18:31):
He was ed Edward.

Speaker 2 (18:33):
Uh what's that actor's name from Big Junior. Wasn't electric cars,
but Edward Norton, Is that right?

Speaker 4 (18:42):
Yeah, that his it's his uncle or something. That they
started this whole.

Speaker 2 (18:47):
Community in Columbia, Maryland, I believe. And these cars are
all going to be part of it. Anyhow, I'm getting
two into the weeds on this thing. But yeah, this
guy had visions of a bigger electric car called a
Tesla at the time, was like in the eighties. He
was going to make it all got shut down. And
I love the idea of this guy with a true
dream of how to make something happen and it was

(19:08):
shut down by the bigger corporation things that actually had
worse ideas when it was just like he was just
shut out of it by the industry. The car influenced
a lot of Guatemalt Hanschack because that's kind of what
the movie was about, kind of people that were shut
off from their possibilities in life. I think very vaguely
abstractly in that movie. But yeah, a friend was up

(19:29):
driving from like Texas to Seattle and stopped in Montana
somewhere and was like at it in the middle of nowhere,
and he said, there was like a gas station and
an ice cream shop where he pulled over at this exit.
And he was at the gas station filling up his
car and he looked over and there's an ice cream
shop that was closed, and in front of the ice
cream shop was the orange car from guatemal Hendschack the

(19:52):
exact same looking one, and he goes over and it's
and he took pictures of it, and in the back
it said, this was the car used in the movie
The guatemalte in Montana. And he sent me pictures of it.

Speaker 4 (20:06):
That's incredible. One that anyone knows what that is. Two,
that's not the car.

Speaker 2 (20:10):
It's not the same one, because I could tell from
parts and stuff on it. I still had I think
at the time, I still had the car.

Speaker 4 (20:17):
I think that's why I was like, this isn't the car.

Speaker 2 (20:20):
But anyhow, Yeah, I ended up selling the car back
to the guy that ended up that bought it off
the lot when he when it was originally for sale
in Florida, I put it up on eBay and he
bought it because he had it was a project he
did with his father.

Speaker 4 (20:34):
When he was young.

Speaker 2 (20:36):
They were in Ohio and they drove down to Florida
to buy one of these cars where you could get them,
and towed it back to Ohio and he had it
and then sold it. And now he had grown up
and he had a kid, and he's I want to
relive those days working on this electric car with my
like I did with my dad, and he looked on
eBay and he found the exact car like the one
that he bought with his dad, so he inherited it.

(20:59):
That so a sweet which actually goes into kind of
what ganl on Handshake is about these loops of people, yeah,
reconnecting and disconnecting. So not to say that movie is
an artistic has any artistic merit, But Evie and the.

Speaker 1 (21:12):
Universe someone microcinifest ends in two thousand and eight, I believe,
and then I kind of track of you. And then
next thing I know, I see a movie come out
that says Catechism Cataclysm. How do you go from Guatemala
the Handshake to that one? And when? And how did
you meet Stephen Little.

Speaker 2 (21:30):
Want them on Handshake? No one ever sent me an
email being like do you want a job, or thought well,
you could take a movie and then people will be like, hey,
do you want to That never happened, and so I
think I got into the Sundance Labs. I wrote a
movie called Sweet Cheeks that about like a little Rascals
kids movie, and then started work on this movie called

(21:53):
Scout Masters, writing that for the Sundance Lab and that
eventually did.

Speaker 4 (21:58):
Get made in a disastrous way.

Speaker 2 (22:00):
But but prior to that, it was just a script
that was at the sun Dance Lab and somebody a
company came along and wanted to make it, and it
was just so frustrating. Years just we're going by and
my friend Megan Griffiths in Seattle made a movie called
Off Hours and she did it for fifty thousand dollars
on these little, those little DSLR cameras when they were
just hitting the market and had a decent enough image

(22:23):
that started to look good, and she was like, you should.

Speaker 4 (22:26):
Just shoot a movie.

Speaker 2 (22:26):
And I had this vision of Steve Little And actually
it was at the time Ronnie Bronstein from who's now
working with the Safti Brothers, just did this Timothy Shalame
movie that's coming out. It's going to be the two
of them in a canoe going.

Speaker 4 (22:39):
Down the river.

Speaker 2 (22:40):
I just saw them both dressed as priests in a canoe,
and I was on a long drive and just thinking
about it, started brewing up the story and just decided
to make that while the other movies weren't going anywhere,
and so we shot it very quickly, like the.

Speaker 4 (22:57):
In twenty ten.

Speaker 2 (22:58):
At the end of twenty ten, I think I wrote
that year, ended up casting Steve Little and Robert Longstreet
and put it all together very quickly and shot that
for I think fifty thousand dollars as well. I knew
of Steve through a mutual friend, David Gordon Green, who
had just shot the Eastbound and Down started Eastbound Down,

(23:18):
and when they shot the pilot for that, he sent
me a message that was like, I met the retarded
version of you, is what he said, and it.

Speaker 4 (23:27):
Was Steve, And basically David picked up it.

Speaker 2 (23:31):
And Steve was not really written into the show yet
because he showed up at the pilot and if you
watch the pilot, he's just like one of the teachers
at the table, and his obsession with Kenny starts to
come out in that scene, and it was all I think,
I believe that was all improvised or if it was
just hinted at in the script, and then those guys
were like, oh my god, and they found the whole dynamic,
like from after meeting Steve. I had known about Steve

(23:53):
from that moment David did, and I was obsessed, id
in love with him and asked him to do this movie.

Speaker 4 (24:01):
Yeah, so I wrote it around him, and it was
the movie.

Speaker 2 (24:04):
Is very Stevie Janowski because that's all I really knew
him as, and that is Steve's personality expanded upon. He
knows how to just like any good comedian, he's riffing
on himself in a bigger way. So yeah, it's like
that that came together really quick. But Steve took a
big risk on me, just being like, I don't know
what this movie is.

Speaker 4 (24:24):
I don't understand it.

Speaker 2 (24:25):
I remember him being on set being like, I get
why I'm here working for free, and I get why
you are, but why is that sound guy here for free?
And it was like, because this is like how movies
get made, otherwise they can't. But it was his first
experience with the low budget movie, Like he came from
a comedy world just got put into the film and

(24:46):
movie world. But and for him, I think it did.
I can't speak for him, but just from our conversations,
it had a significant impact and that he sees things
and sees the importance in things and can compare to
being on a massive TV show where it really has
you have no relationships with the people around you. It's
very transactional people here for the job, they go home,

(25:10):
and with movies like this, it's like everyone really bonds
and knows each other. And Steve and I have been
friends since then and talk all the time and it's
a real friendship. And that doesn't what I think he's
waiting this is that doesn't necessarily happen on any of
these bigger projects and stuff.

Speaker 4 (25:26):
So I don't know.

Speaker 2 (25:28):
Yeah, so it's like that movie came about very quickly,
and then we got into Sundance and which was crazy
because we had we were shooting it past the deadline.
Sundance gave me a very extended late deadline to send
it in and so we technically shot the movie after
the Sundance deadline had passed, ended a very fast edit.
I was going through medical stuff. I was actually in

(25:49):
the hospital for a month between the edit and that,
and then so yeah, we shot I think September October edited.

Speaker 4 (25:59):
I met as fast as we could until I went
into the hospital.

Speaker 2 (26:02):
I was in the hospital November and then got out
on Thanksgiving and got a call from Sundance on Thanksgiving
and still had to recuperate and finish the movie, mix it,
do the color and then be it Sundance in January,
and for the first day I felt back to normal.
I guess was the day of the premiere, and nobody
knew that any so it's like we finished movie in

(26:25):
the same time that I went through a massive like surgery,
so it was like just the craziest, most miraculous time.

Speaker 4 (26:33):
And then yeah, we sold the.

Speaker 2 (26:35):
Movie to IFC when IFC was buying movies for like
one hundred and fifty thousand dollars, but that was three
times our budget. Everybody got some money. IFC was like,
we're not really going to do anything with this or
any of the movies we're buying. We're just gonna throw
them out there, and that was fine with us.

Speaker 4 (26:51):
We were just like great. It was like that just
the beginning of.

Speaker 2 (26:53):
That style of distribution where it's we're gonna buy our
movie and then throw it into a pit and we're
all like, I don't know stand that, but thank you.

Speaker 4 (27:02):
And yeah, and that was that movie.

Speaker 2 (27:03):
But that movie's a miracle that it was made in
What was happening behind the scenes was crazy.

Speaker 1 (27:10):
I still haven't seen Uncle Kent Too, because I keep
looking for the first one, but I have read the
novelization of Uncle Kent too. First off House, the novelization
Come About, and then second off House, the movie Come About.

Speaker 4 (27:23):
The novelization, which I have a copy of. I should
go back and read it. It's written.

Speaker 2 (27:28):
It says it's written by LP eves On there, but
it's actually Jack and Darvis, who is a writer, was
a writer with Kent on Adventure Time, and he's a
short story writer. He actually he had a I think
his I think this is a microsof investor or Maryland
Film Festival. He wrote the short story of this movie
the Pipe is based on that stars Nathan Zelner and

(27:48):
Kent Osborne that they were both in. It's on the
It's on the Uncle Kent to DVD if you ever
want to purchase or steal that. But he wrote the
novelization because Kent had him, knew him as a writer,
and we were like, right, yeah, do anything you want
to do it as an adaptation, like these writers would

(28:08):
be given like batteries not included. Turn this into a novelization,
and they would take some liberties with it.

Speaker 4 (28:13):
And add things.

Speaker 2 (28:15):
And Jack came up with this idea that it would
be this guy that was really bitter about his job
like doing this, and so he really hated the movie,
and he picked things in the movie that he really hated.
So it just goes on this It's so stupid and
so funny and so for nobody, but it just diminishes
the audience.

Speaker 4 (28:34):
Who is this for? Smaller and smaller? But that is
the point of the.

Speaker 2 (28:37):
Movie, because Kent had made Uncle Kent with Joe Swanberg
as a mumblecore movie. Beck I remember when that movie
was made. I saw it once at Sundance and that
was it. And then years later Kent was like, I
want to make a sequel Uncle Kent too, and asked
Joe to do it, and Joe was kind of like sure,
but then he got busy and was making bigger movies

(28:58):
and just kept stringing Kent along a little bit maybe,
and Kent was like, Okay, you're not gonna do this.
I'm going to ask somebody else. And he asked Andrew
Bajowski and Andrew said no, and.

Speaker 4 (29:07):
Then but in a kind way.

Speaker 2 (29:09):
And then he called me and I had just read
an interview with Abel Ferrara where he said I've never
turned a job down, and I was like, yeah, I've
never been offered job and I would never turn one down.
Kent calls the next day and he was like, do
you want to direct Uncle Kent too? And I said yes,
I agreed to it without knowing what he was talking about.

Speaker 4 (29:27):
I was like, I'm just happy to do it.

Speaker 2 (29:29):
And Kent's so funny. He's just one of the funniest writers.
And yeah, he's wrote for Adventure Time in SpongeBob, and
he's made movies.

Speaker 4 (29:39):
With his brother.

Speaker 2 (29:41):
That are always funny, and all the shorts Kent is
in are incriably funny. I love Kent sincerely. And then
he came up with kind of the story, and then
I threw a bunch of things into it, and Kent
really liked those, and we just kind of shot it
off of an outline. But the idea was for it
to start in let Joe Swanberg direct the first fifteen
to twenty minutes of it.

Speaker 4 (30:01):
So it's supposed to feel like a.

Speaker 2 (30:03):
Very boring mumblecore movie, like where Kent's trying to make
Uncle Kent two and Joe rejects him, and then the
movie switches into this other gear and the movie's based
on Kent reading the first ten pages of the Singularity
is near and then.

Speaker 4 (30:20):
Putting the book away, and then we just kind of
riff off of what maybe happens in that book. This
makes no sense as I'm explaining it. The movie's impossible.
Who's impossible to tell.

Speaker 2 (30:28):
Anyone to watch because it's you shouldn't want to watch it,
But then when you do, the rewards are plentiful, I think.
And so it's an unmarketable movie for so many reasons.
But the movie then goes off in this totally different direction.
So if you make it through the first fifteen minutes,
you're rewarded with a movie that starts to turn on
itself and attack itself, and like all kinds of great

(30:51):
weird things start happening, the movie comes implodes and like
weird A Yankovic shows up. It's very stupid, very fun,
and we'd have screens of it that were just like
through the roof, like people loved it so much laughter,
so much fun. But it was truly like a movie
I can't I wouldn't be able to tell people like
you have to go see Uncle Kent too, and they'd
be like, I didn't see the first one, and I'd

(31:11):
be like, yeah, I know, I saw it once, but
I made the sequel based off of memories of a screening.

Speaker 4 (31:17):
It's impossible to pitch. But that's what I loved.

Speaker 2 (31:19):
About truly, like Underground, I think in its sensibilities.

Speaker 1 (31:24):
So this guy makes some of the most beloved cartoons
that are out there, and his name is on this
piece of filth that you just thret to call I
can't even say the title, Fuck my son.

Speaker 4 (31:37):
What the yeah?

Speaker 1 (31:39):
Is that gonna be like the news story, like we're
gonna now have to cancel Kent Osborne and everything that
he's done just because he's now.

Speaker 2 (31:48):
Ken supported this blindly and he doesn't approve of I
should say Kent is a holy man now, he's a
reformed Christian.

Speaker 4 (31:57):
God loves him. He's surrounded by God love and no.

Speaker 2 (32:01):
So Kip invested in this movie to get this one
going because it's like it's just been a lot of years.
I'm doing stuff for Adult Swim for years, but none
of those were taking off as a series, and had
other scripts and stuff that came close to getting made
and it would fall apart.

Speaker 4 (32:17):
I wrote a script for.

Speaker 2 (32:19):
Chris Columbus for The Christmas Chronicles three with a Buddy,
and Netflix didn't give Chris Columbus enough money to make it,
so he.

Speaker 4 (32:25):
Didn't make it.

Speaker 2 (32:26):
It's just like a lot of things are just like
I think, like it's probably more of a common La
lifestyle story of just like you're writing things and they're
not getting made. And I was like, I know how
to make movies.

Speaker 4 (32:36):
I know how to do it.

Speaker 2 (32:37):
I'm going to go back to what I did with
Guatemal Handshake and do that again and just make something
for as cheap as possible. And it happens to be
this comic book by Johnny Ryan called Fuck My Son.
I just wanted to do something totally uncompromised, and this
movie kind of drew a line of where that compromise
would start an end. So we don't change the title,

(32:58):
we keep as much of the comic intact as humanly possible,
and we go for it like an exploitation movie, just
sell it on its perceived faults of being disgusting and
vile and inappropriate and not available through a corporation. And
that really excited me of being like, what if we

(33:20):
make something that has no chance of selling to Netflix
or any of this stuff, you know, like if you
take that off the table, what do you have And
what do you have to do? And then that has
motivated everything since with it and that freedom with it
being like, let's not put hope into somebody coming in
and saving us, because all versions of a corporation getting

(33:42):
involved with any movie are ninety percent of them are terrible.
No one has a good experience. The movies are being
thrown into a pit or just put away or when
that had happened enough, So this movie really set a
line where it's it's up to me to get it
out there and to do it and to find new
means of doing it, even if those new means are

(34:04):
the old mean like that just looking back at how
movies were released prior in the seventies or eighties, like
when these restraints were there as well. So that's it's
exciting in that way, and it was like, oh man,
it really reinvigorated me about doing it. So I love
as you do not ever want to tell somebody when
they say what's your movie title? Like you're the doctor

(34:24):
and they're like, what are you working on? And it's
called fuck my son atat It's just you can't say
that to a normal person without them being embarrassed for
you put yourself in these set up, these parameters that
you have to work within. I have to is the
most creatively fulfilling thing that I've ever done. I wouldn't

(34:45):
exchange it for anything. It's really helped me find my
connection to everything that I've really truly love, like that
were were talking about, even back to microsynithist stuff like,
this is what I truly feel connected with, and this
movie makes me feel like I'm a part of that now,
horas I didn't prior. I always felt like my stuff

(35:05):
was maybe shooting for a little more of a commercial
vent or something.

Speaker 4 (35:09):
And he finished something and be.

Speaker 2 (35:12):
Like, man, I hope John Waters likes this, or I
hope the people from that kind of world like this.
But I was like, I think this is the type
of movie and this one really feels like, yeah, maybe
this is the one that cements itself in that same world,
and that feels great. That feels like an accomplishment personally
for me of where I belong, even if that separating

(35:34):
money from the equation. That's what I want more than anything.

Speaker 4 (35:38):
Yeah. So yeah, it's been an interesting experience.

Speaker 1 (35:42):
How did you find the comic and what did Johnny
Ryan say when you approach him?

Speaker 4 (35:47):
About this our.

Speaker 2 (35:48):
Mutual friend Calvin Reader, who I know you've seen his shorts, right,
he did, and he did some features called like The
Oregonian and The Rambler, and a new movie called The
A Frame. He he did a movie called Jerk Beast
back probably when we were at microcinifest stuff, but it
didn't enter that orbit back then early two thousands, but

(36:08):
it was a public access show in Seattle. And Calvin
this met Johnny Ryan at that time when he was
just starting out doing his comics. And so I've known
of Johnny since meeting Calvin years and years ago, and
loved Johnny's comics, but never thought of it as that
there was something there for me to do. And so
he had posted that he had a new comic called

(36:31):
fuck my Son, and it had this cover of an
old woman with a cigarette coming out of her mouth
screaming fuck my son. And so right away it was like,
oh God, what is this.

Speaker 4 (36:39):
He's just so intriguing. Got the comic and was halfway
through reading it.

Speaker 2 (36:43):
I had to order it from France, i should say,
because there's no US publisher that would do with it
because of the title. And so I got it from
France and just started reading, and it felt like getting
a real dirty magazine or something. It was halfway through
and I was like, oh my god, I know who'd
a cast in this.

Speaker 4 (36:59):
I know who can play these roles. I know how
to do this.

Speaker 2 (37:02):
And I was really hoping that it would take a
turn where I wouldn't be able to make it so
that I could say, Okay, yeah, it's out of my
too expensive. But by the time I got to the
end of it, I was like, oh my god, I
know where to shoot. I never mentioned it to anybody
for like weeks, and just kept thinking about it and
thinking about it, trying to talk myself out of it,
and then talk to Calvin and he was like, you
should do it, and then he put me in touch

(37:24):
with Johnny, and Johnny was like, I wrote this to
be a movie. This is the first comic I've written
that I really felt can be like a real movie,
like a serious movie. And we talked about tone a
lot on that call, and I mentioned that I wanted
to that while reading it. I wanted to cast Robert
Longstreet and Steve Little, who were in Catechism Cataclysm, that

(37:46):
Robert should play the old woman, and Johnny was like,
I don't know about that.

Speaker 4 (37:49):
I don't know if that can work.

Speaker 2 (37:51):
And then I said, but Steve Little is just and
I was explaining Steve to him, and Johnny started.

Speaker 4 (37:56):
Saying, yeah, I really love that idea.

Speaker 2 (37:57):
I love Steve Little because he did a shit film
where he was like a bedridden guy and this mom
hires a Sammy Davis junior impersonator to come to his bedside.

Speaker 4 (38:08):
And they have this weird relationship.

Speaker 2 (38:10):
And he said, the tone of that movie's perfect that
Steve was in and I was like, oh, yeah, yeah,
I made that movie.

Speaker 4 (38:15):
And Johnny was like, no, it's like a short that
I saw on YouTube. And I was like, no, I
made that movie. It's called rat Pack Rat I made it.

Speaker 2 (38:23):
That's Steve, Like he's my That's yeah, that's the movie
I made. And so that kind of blew both of
our minds that we were talking, and it just cemented
that we were on the same page tonally about how
to make a movie like this, that it can be funny,
but it's got to be played with real actors and
real straight and.

Speaker 4 (38:41):
And so that's how that.

Speaker 2 (38:42):
Yeah, so after that, Johnny was on board and I
just took it and ran with it. And somehow put
it all together. I don't think he thought it was
gonna happen when you've got your friends.

Speaker 1 (38:51):
Steve little and there again a little tough to see
him though. How long did it take to put all
that makeup on him?

Speaker 4 (38:58):
It was like three three and a half or no,
I think his his got down.

Speaker 2 (39:02):
To two and then Robert long Streets was like three hours.
And that was all done by Robert Kurtzman, who's like
a legendary effects person. You like, if you look him up,
he's if you don't know him, you look him up
and you'll know at least fifty movies he has worked
on and done from unlike the Austin Powers movies, to
pulp fiction, to all of Rodriguez's movies, to Nightmare and

(39:22):
elm Street movies, to Evil Did to UHF which is
our favorite one, to mention Ian did cod in the Librarian?
Oh so yeah, they built all that around it, But
it was like, yeah, that was the fear. It was like,
is Steve gonna come through on this? Like all his
dialogue in the comic is his murk, Like there's no

(39:42):
d Hill hug and but Steve's eyes were just and
his tongued as so much performing in The Whoopie.

Speaker 4 (39:50):
It's like they kept comparing him.

Speaker 2 (39:52):
To the best performance of a tongue since my left foot,
of having your tongue carry so much weight performance wise,
Daniel day Lewis in that movie, there's a lot of
risk just being like will this work?

Speaker 4 (40:04):
But it needed his performance.

Speaker 2 (40:06):
To me is every time he would you just be
sitting on set in that costume and it would just
look like a bag of shit just sitting there, and
we'd forget there's a human inside of it a lot,
and I like set my script down on his lap
and think it was a chair and forget the Steve's
in there. But then when we started shooting, it would
just he'd come to life and have all these ideas,
and it was so funny. You just riff on things

(40:27):
and bring this character to life in a way that
was not couldn't have been on a page.

Speaker 4 (40:33):
It was like he he invented it. Very fun to
watch that come to life.

Speaker 1 (40:40):
The movie itself is just so fun I love how
it takes a little while to get going those That
intro section is fucking fantastic.

Speaker 4 (40:49):
Great. Yeah, I wanted to have did the idea for
that come from it.

Speaker 1 (40:52):
It was like, it's kind of William Castle esque.

Speaker 4 (40:56):
Yes, yeah, like I think, oh, that was it.

Speaker 2 (40:57):
Johnny had mentioned something maybe about the opening Frankenstein, like
where there's an introduction to it. Then thinking about Polyester
with the scratch and sniff stuff.

Speaker 4 (41:06):
Oh, and that was it.

Speaker 2 (41:07):
The movie was originally going to be in three D too,
because I wanted to say, fuck my son rated X
in three D.

Speaker 4 (41:13):
I was like, you have to go see this movie.

Speaker 2 (41:16):
If you see that and you have any inkling to
go into that theater, you're gonna the payoff is going
to be substantial.

Speaker 4 (41:22):
Yeah, that's right. We were shooting.

Speaker 2 (41:24):
We did all of this planning and back and figuring
out how to shoot in three D and actually did
figure it out, and then a month prior decided that
attention was not going to go to the right things
on set, Like we could have done it, but the
focus would have gone to a bunch of guys standing
around a camera. And I was like, this is all
about their performances, This is all about really nailing that,

(41:45):
and the gimmick level is not worth it. I love
gimmicks and stuff. Yeah, So I think that intro came
from me wanting to explain the three D nature of
it in a similar William Castle way. And then once
that went away, I was like, oh, I came up
with this purvo vision that you could watch the movie amplify.

Speaker 4 (42:03):
Basically, if you felt triggered.

Speaker 2 (42:04):
By something, you could censor the movie the way you want,
because it felt like audiences are saying like, I really
love that, except I don't like this thing, and if
that thing didn't.

Speaker 4 (42:12):
Exist, then it'd be a perfect movie.

Speaker 2 (42:13):
And it's yeah, Jesus Christ, so yeah, go aheadit the
movie the way you want, but with the technology that
doesn't work and whatever.

Speaker 4 (42:21):
So it was like it came about from that, which
still doesn't seem to.

Speaker 2 (42:26):
Be translations and it's irony, where whereas people are mad
that there's thirty seconds of AI in the movie there
and which is part of that opening, like the corporate
opening of using AI and it yeah, they're like, I
want fangoria. Won't touch look at the movie or even
talk about it because it's got this in it, and
it's this is exactly what we're talking about. It's because

(42:48):
you have some you don't like the technology aspect of it,
or you don't like this part of it.

Speaker 4 (42:52):
It's like you're gonna bam it, and that is this
disturbing and it's crazy and also just fun to sit
back and watch as it's.

Speaker 2 (43:04):
Yeah, like the world implode on itself in this where
it's get it where people are coming from in terms
of their loyalty towards things, but it's like this blind
loyalty that's like destructive in so many other ways, like
we're censorship, why we need censorship and why we need
to boycott things, and it's like that lesson will never
be learned by human beings. So even though this movie

(43:24):
isn't an AI movie by any means, it's like fascinating
to watch that because I love anything that's forbidden. I
hate digital effects more than anybody. I hate green screens,
I hate all of that. I hate how all movies
look right now. And it's fun to be thrown into
a world right now where people are saying, like, but
you're using a technology that we don't like, and it's like,

(43:45):
where were you in the.

Speaker 4 (43:46):
Last twenty years of this shit? And all of that
Stuff's fascinating to me.

Speaker 2 (43:52):
I don't have to get into it too much because
I know people are very touchy about it and stuff
and it's not very much fun to get death with it.

Speaker 1 (43:59):
I read the letterbox and I know how to touch you.

Speaker 2 (44:01):
They are.

Speaker 4 (44:03):
I went online after the Toronto premiere and I shut
my laptop and I will never go that site is
like goats see to me or whatever it's. I'm not
falling for that again. I'm not going to the whatever, the.

Speaker 2 (44:14):
Swinging, the what's lemp again like I fell for this
shit like back in the nineties.

Speaker 4 (44:21):
I'm not going to letterboxed ever again.

Speaker 2 (44:23):
What a horrible place, because like the reality of it
is like in person, like meeting the audiences are coming out.
It's wonderful and I'm not lying about it. It's like
we've had really fortunate to have our first initial screenings
at IOFC Center and in LA and now in Austin
beyond the festival stuff, really great turnouts for it, and

(44:46):
everyone stays for the end and if if they didn't
ask a question, I feel like I've met everyone that's
in the audience, people saying stuff or writing afterwards and
genuinely feeling like that was a great movie to experience
with the crowd and to talk about and to be like, yeah,
fuck some of these rules that are out there that
make us say we can't use certain things, like we
can't reappropriate things or use it have like the universal

(45:09):
logo at the beginning of the movie, and just like
I think that's crazily enough. That's exciting to people to
be like, wait, yeah, why do we care? These corporations
don't even see us as something important or a threat.
And I think that's good, But I think that's maybe
purposeful on their part too, to kind of let things
that exist outside of the studio system of the corporate system,

(45:29):
we don't We're not even in it. We're not allowed
in it, and we're never going to get into it.
The in person reaction and meeting people and talking about
it is so different from the Internet and just seeing
the amount of hate or perceived things and all that.

Speaker 4 (45:46):
It's nothing new, but for the sake of film making,
it's Yeah.

Speaker 2 (45:50):
I think there needs to be a rededication to putting
movies in theaters for that because it really has a
significant effect just the size of the screen. It's an
interaction with other human beings and the excitement of it
and seeing people in the lobby talking to each other
about the movie and what they experienced together at Like, yeah,
I saw that movie Climax in the theater and afterwards

(46:12):
the entire audience was in the lobby of the Alamo
talking about it and how excited they were about it.
And I'm sure you could go look at the letterbox
reviews as somebody that watched that alone on their laptop
and is mad about something. What a horrible waste of
your time to do that, and those feelings are being
misinterpreted when you're doing these things alone. I don't know

(46:32):
what it's a good psychological study, but it's night and
day difference.

Speaker 1 (46:37):
Your main actress is fearless. Where did you find her?
It seems like she's been floating around like I know
she was in ABC's of Death, but I don't think
it was your segment. She was in the original Uncle Kent.
She did voices for Adventure Time, which I really didn't
hear that she could do voices until one of the
endings of the film where we don't see her face.
I was like, Oh, she's got a perfect cartoon voice.

Speaker 2 (47:00):
Yeah, she does all the Meatia Mate's voices too in
this and yeah, Tipper Newton and so we've been friends
for twenty years we actually met through Joe Swanberg. We
were both cast in Hannah Takes the Stairs, the pre
eminent a mumblecore movie like with Greta Gerwig and Mark
Duplas and Andrew Jowski and Tipper and I claimed to.

Speaker 4 (47:19):
Be the only two that walked away from that movie
with no career from it.

Speaker 2 (47:24):
But we've been friends since then, and Tipper's just been
somebody where we're somebody needs to cast her. She's so great,
blah blah blah, and then it's just not happening on
a substantial level. So when I put this together, was
too shy to ask Tipper to do it. So I
was asking her to help with casting because there was
so much nudity and weird shit required and it's a

(47:45):
very sexual thing, and I was just like, I'm not
asking Tipper to do this, it's too embarrassing. But as
the part came together and realizing, ah, you know what,
this character shouldn't have as much nudity as the other
characters and whatever. We don't need to see close ups
of these things that Johnny's got ridden in there just
because it's gonna just for all reasons that I felt
were tonally inappropriate, or for a movie versus a cartoons.

Speaker 4 (48:07):
It was like, oh shit, Tipper, you should do that'd
be great if you did it. And she was like, yes,
I want to do it. But she was there all along.
But it was just this thing.

Speaker 2 (48:15):
I think I was just too embarrassed and just felt
protective of her as a friend to be like, I'm
not going to ask you to do this. I've to
ask a stranger to do this weird stuff. But then
it came down to I still can't even ask a
stranger to do this. So it was wonderful. But Tipper
throws everything in. She channels like Bruce Campbell, and she
channels like Adrian Barbo at times, and it's like we'd
be shooting it and Tipper is such a goofball fun

(48:36):
and it's like she'd be doing this intense stuff and
then called cut and then it's like we're all goofing
around talking about whatever. She could just go in and
out of it in such a seamless, wonderful way. She's
the real deal. A lot people and saying such wonderful
things about her, So it's great.

Speaker 1 (48:50):
And who did all the animation of the media Bates,
And you have the two different styles of the media mates,
the more real life quote unquote versus the cartoon that
she's watching on the tablet.

Speaker 4 (49:01):
Who did those?

Speaker 2 (49:02):
I originally wanted to do like veggietails stuff, so I
learned Blender to do that in Blender, which is somebody
was like, that's the program that they've been using for that.
That's very once you get the characters set up very easy,
and it built those and they started to feel retro
in a way that was like, this feels like mold Joe.
I asked my friend Cable, who's been a friend since

(49:22):
film school, to do like a flash animation. It was
more like, this is what I don't even know if
they use if he uses flash anymore, but it's like
the same current animation style where it just feels so
cheap and the mouth is just whatever. And I was like,
once that was put into the actual scenes where the
media mates are interacting, it was like, this didn't It

(49:43):
just doesn't feel.

Speaker 4 (49:44):
Like it connects. They needed to be removed. In another step.

Speaker 2 (49:48):
I was learning AI stuff from like when Dolly two
came out, or like when I was just completely unemployed
and I was using it as a means to create
images it was just fascinated with anything that's film technology,
fascinated and interested in it and was using that and
then I was a kid's show. By the time this
movie's done is going to be created through AI. So

(50:11):
what if I tried to do that?

Speaker 4 (50:12):
And this is probably a year ago? What is it now?
Oh yeah, definitely a year.

Speaker 2 (50:17):
Ago when I started animating the media mate. So I
just decided to do it because also I was out
of money. I did all the post myself, but a
lot of the VFX myself, not everything, but I only
had so much to pay people to do the stuff
that I knew I couldn't do.

Speaker 4 (50:30):
So since I was going to do the.

Speaker 2 (50:31):
Animation, originally, I was like, let me just see how
to do this. But it's four different characters, which I
was like, fuck, why did I do that? If it
was one it would have been a lot easier.

Speaker 4 (50:40):
But four characters on.

Speaker 2 (50:41):
Screen at the same time and their mouths are all moving,
so AI can't or at the time couldn't do that.
So I just created these characters moving in different movements,
really basic stuff, and then cut those together, the movements together,
and then would have to create the mouths and put
composite the mouths on each character and the eyes so
they were looking the right direction or whatever. So just
generating a lot of stuff through AI to make it,

(51:03):
and then spending like literally three months compositing all this
stuff in after effects. With the intention I wanted it
to look like what an AI cartoon for kids would be.
And it's not accurate now because things have changed with
AI in a way that I didn't know, Like it's
gotten a glossier look so people could pick that out.

Speaker 4 (51:24):
It was like the idea was to make it. I
was like, this is me projecting that by end of
twenty twenty five, we're going to have kids cartoons that
look like this, And it's exactly not exactly right, but my.

Speaker 2 (51:37):
Target goal was to hit what lawnmower Man did for
the effects at that time. It's this feels current to
this tame period in a wonderfully janky, fun way. But
they were more on top of it because they knew
the direction it was going, whereas AI has just been
so fast and so different. But I don't even know
if now I could get four characters to do what
it's doing, but I had to composite each of those

(51:58):
into picture. It was so much where I had a
kidney stone while doing it. If it tells you anything
about how easy AI is, it needed to move around
a lot more and drink more liquids, so Lesson learned.

Speaker 1 (52:10):
Yeah, I didn't realize that was the AI stuff, so
I thought it was maybe like the opening credits or something.
The animation to the meats forming the letters, I was like, Okay, yeah,
I didn't realize that those were AI. Frankly, and yeah,
I guess now that you say that is early Will
Smith eating spaghetti.

Speaker 4 (52:29):
I wish it was more like that.

Speaker 2 (52:30):
I was like, I wish there was more of a
telltale with it, but it's just on. Once you start
having the composite things together, it loses the The character
would turn the wrong way, so I'd have to reloop
it and then re send it back into the AI
to keep the character just steady or their hands doing
something consistent. It gave it more of an animated look.

Speaker 4 (52:52):
It wasn't entirely AI enough.

Speaker 2 (52:55):
I didn't even know at the time, though, it was
like I just felt like, this is this works just
I thought it was just fine for the jankiness level
and for what I was capable of, but I didn't
know that it was going to be something that I
needed to speak for. I thought it would just be clear, like, oh, yeah,
that's what you're doing. If I did the ven details
Blender version of it, which I could have done, that
would have been clearer, but it just would have been like, oh,

(53:16):
this also was done twenty years ago already, that's like
the same joke. So I was just trying to get
ahead of it. And for that reason, people have their
heads in the sand about technology, so we can't act
like that stuff exists in any way.

Speaker 1 (53:31):
Yeah, yeah, that's a weird hell to die on. So
I know the movie is as we speak right now,
touring around at least that's what I think. I remember
saying on Instagram, playing like what.

Speaker 2 (53:43):
Music box a few other venues Austin this weekend, but
those are sold out, which is wonderful. And then oh,
then I'm going to San Francisco right after that and
doing a screening at the San Francisco Alamo with Mike
Kuchar and showing The Stranger in Apartment nine F one
of his shorts. That's a huge thing for me is
to be Mike say yes, I want to come there

(54:04):
and be there and show this is wonderful and terrifying
because I have no idea what he will think of
this movie. And then yeah, the marrige Chicago and Atlanta
and being at the Plaza in Atlanta. It's at the
Gap Theater in wind Gap, Pennsylvania. It's like a different
city every week through February and now March. So I

(54:25):
know we're announcing more stuff soon. We're just going to
keep it going like that, do an East coast tour,
a Midwest thing. All of that's still coming together. But yeah,
there'll be more things that come with it. Yeah, that
we have in the works, some other short films and
things that get added to it, and provo vision at
most of the screenings and stuff like that. So it's yeah,
very much. I chip off the old William Castle block

(54:47):
and the Roger Corman block and all of that stuff,
But in a way that's rewarding it that I wasn't
totally expecting of, just like in the community.

Speaker 4 (54:56):
Kind of way. Something that's perfect to do when you're
older and like to sleep in.

Speaker 1 (55:01):
I know you have a lot of like it's that
you're spending at all times just trying to get something
to take off do you know what's next for you?

Speaker 2 (55:10):
After we did this, I was like, I don't know
if I need to make another movie. I don't know
if movies want to be made right now. Again in
the letterbox front if in ten years, people are like,
why did movies die? And it's because you guys killed them.
But it's like everyone's feeling that every movie is a
miracle and an impossibility right now, and they just get trashed.

Speaker 4 (55:31):
I'm not sure what it means.

Speaker 2 (55:32):
I think it's great to make great work for yourself
right now, but like financially, it's not rewarding, and so
when it becomes like not even a warning to take
it out. This is starting to change in the last
few weeks for me personally. But it's like the film
festival scene is like turning into a comic con type
thing where it's really about the celebration of corporate work

(55:54):
and talking about microcinifest and stuff that was No one
talked about money.

Speaker 4 (55:59):
Or how this was going to lead to a making
a studio movie or anything.

Speaker 2 (56:05):
And I know it sounds stupid, maybe really naive of me,
but there's still pieces that are missing. So I'm not
really sure the way things are being received now and
treated even on the large scale, like seeing Paul Thomas
Anderson's movie is a failure and stuff is y'all aren't Yeah,
these the y'all aren't helping the situation here.

Speaker 4 (56:25):
You're digging the grave deeper. I don't know. I'm just hoping.

Speaker 2 (56:29):
I have definitely ideas and things I want to work on,
but still the kids movie I want to make. I
wrote a wrestling movie that's all wrestlers, like existing based
on the short we did called Suplex Duplex Complex, and.

Speaker 4 (56:42):
Yeah, another like exploitationing movie.

Speaker 2 (56:44):
So there's plenty stuff I'm thinking about, but I think
it'll come down to, like how difficult is this?

Speaker 4 (56:49):
Because I'm also equally as interested in just getting.

Speaker 2 (56:52):
A job at the hardware store here in Tacoma, because
it's I like just talking and interacting with people, and
I'm happy to talk about tiling and electric work and
stuff that I know about as well in that capacity
because it's a lot.

Speaker 4 (57:06):
It's just a human connection and not no.

Speaker 2 (57:08):
One goes on I guess people do go on Yelp
and talk about how that employee at the mclendon's Hardware
was a piece of shit or whatever, but it's.

Speaker 4 (57:18):
That might be. I think that would be more understandable
if that happens. So I don't know that's booey.

Speaker 1 (57:25):
Is there a soundtrack available for Fuck my Son?

Speaker 4 (57:29):
Right now?

Speaker 2 (57:29):
Just one track by the Zigzags is out and it's
called fuck my Son. And then there's other tracks in
the movie called fuck my Son that we're gonna put
out with the soundtrack that is done by Aaron Olsen,
who's a wonderful composer. He did David Gordon Green's movie Nutcrackers,
and he's got a band called La Takedown. He's an
incredibly experimental musician but also was played with Dave Paho

(57:53):
and a really wonderful and talented guy. But we want
to put that out, and I want to get other
artists to record cover and not covers, just their own
version of a song with the title fuck my Son,
so we can have a whole soundtrack that's just like
by different artists. So that's in the works probably next year,
but in pieces. But right now you can hear the
Zigzag song, which is beautiful, a beautiful ode to dirty movies.

Speaker 1 (58:17):
Thank you so much, man, this is so great connecting
after all these years I'm talking about this wonderful movie
of yours.

Speaker 2 (58:24):
Thank you for yeah talking about a good scene again,
and then yeah, I'm just yeah. I guess there's a
lot more to catch up on. I'll be in better
touch now that I made a dirty movie again and
I feel more connected to that world.

Speaker 4 (58:48):
Janie, it for a freak show. The thing you didn't
judge you're.

Speaker 1 (58:52):
Gonna play it by Les now?

Speaker 4 (58:55):
Is fudge some real perversion?

Speaker 1 (59:00):
You want to have some fun, you alshole fit there
willingly and watching fuck my sus so well ship kiss
his lips, looking in the eyes.

Speaker 3 (59:12):
I want to see full pleasure when my family boor jumped.

Speaker 4 (59:16):
Inside the single, streaking.

Speaker 2 (59:19):
Milks, the shiittings in the fans, the buzz beas.

Speaker 4 (59:22):
That choke getting jumped up.

Speaker 2 (59:24):
Fuck him like the Man of Frods. The PFI fust
you fucking jump p FI fire for fat Fox series joke,
fucking perls