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Nathan Wrann has proved with two feature films that you can make a good film with a modest budget and that he is able to create films that show how wide a range the horror genre really is. His first feature, HUNTING SEASON, a brutal story of campers in the woods attacked by a group of sadistic hunters, was made in 2006 and 2007 and introduced the horror world to this east coast bred filmmaker. He has followed it up with BURNING INSIDE, a black and white psychological horror film set to be released soon on DVD by Channel Midnight (headed by Glass Eye Pix's James Felix McKenney) that is as opposite as HUNTING SEASON as you can get in terms of story, mood, and atmosphere. To talk about the film's upcoming DVD release, the Crypt spoke to Wrann via e-mail and asked about making both films, the benefits of working on a modest budget, and the good and bad of being an independent filmmaker in a highly competitive field in this Crypt exclusive.
COLONEL’S CRYPT: What was the genesis for BURNING INSIDE? NATHAN WRANN: It certainly wasn’t a single spark or moment of clarity, that’s for sure. The journey from initial idea to final cut was a long and winding one that developed all they way up until I decided it was time to stop editing.
The idea and my intentions with BURNING INSIDE
started out considerably different than the movie that will be released
this spring. Almost immediately after I finished my first film, HUNTING
SEASON, in early 2007, I started thinking about what to do next. The first
place that I usually start working on ideas is by determining what
specific genre I want to work in. For example, HUNTING SEASON’s genesis
was when I decided I wanted to make a “kids-get-stalked-and-killed- So I started writing a revenge thriller and worked through a lot of scenes, characters and development. I did a lot of analysis of revenge movies. The formula is almost always the same: The hero and/or family are hurt/killed/violated by the bad guys. The hero mourns for a minute or two and then hunts down and kills the bad guys one by one with the Hero fulfilling his vengeance by killing the Bad Guy Leader in the last five minutes or so. Roll credits. Some revenge movies change it up with a slight twist where the violation occurs before the movie starts. But one thing they all have in common is that the hero hunts down the bad guys, going to multiple locations and usually gets clues to locate the next bad guy as he separates the current bad guy from his or her heartbeat. The writing process for BURNING INSIDE went really well. I was writing every day. Turning out tons of pages, a lot of great scenes but something was always lacking. Something was always ‘off’. At this time in my career I make ultra-ridiculously-low-budget movies. So one of the things that I have to do is write to my resources. A typical revenge thriller where the hero travels to 15 different locations bumping off the bad guys probably wasn’t within my resources. While writing to my resources I have to be able to visualize how it’s going to look on screen and how I’m going to accomplish that look. I had A LOT of trouble doing both of those with BURNING INSIDE. Version after version, rewrite after rewrite BURNING INSIDE really started to take shape, primarily in the structure and the characters involved. For a long time the story revolved around an Iraq War incident. Some of the elements became fixed in place: a concrete room. A wild-flower field. A pond. A house, and a second house within walking distance. It was a strong, unconventional script. Around October of 2007 the pages stopped coming and the writing slowed and nearly stopped. I would sit for nights on end with a blank legal pad in front of me, pen in hand. I would read through the script that I had, and I didn’t feel ‘it’. Another, different, story idea kept creeping to the fore so I took a break from Burning Inside and banged out a mass casualty, zombie-esque script in about a month. Once I purged those scenes and ideas from my mind I went back to Burning Inside but it still wasn’t there. I was envisioning the film, shot in beautiful HD, all sweeping landscapes, glowing fields with golden sunrises and fiery sunsets contrasting the horrendous actions of the characters. The problem was that in my gut I knew that I didn’t have the resources available to successfully pull off that vision. Sure I could have filmed those sunsets and sunrises and golden fields but it would have looked like a low-budget, baby-hollyood movie that was way out of its league and a failure in all respects. I had to get away from writing for a while so I stepped back from the unfinished script. Hell, in the stage it was in I wasn’t even sure if it was worth keeping at all. For all intents and purposes the script was done but I couldn’t visualize it. It was still missing something. Maybe I should just scrap the whole thing and start over. So I stepped away from it and picked up a paintbrush and some canvases and started painting. Painting freed my mind from the constraints of storytelling. There was no story. Just a picture. And a very abstract way of going about making that picture. No chronology. While painting my mind had cleared, and drifted and imagined and was inspired. After a few weeks and a half-dozen paintings I was itching to get back to BURNING INSIDE. My foray into painting also opened up a new vision with which I saw BURNING INSIDE. I now was inspired and knew exactly how I wanted to make the movie within the constraints of my resources, to my standards, and with a look completely appropriate for the story. As soon as I returned to the script I focused on the role memory, or lack of, plays in revenge. I cut out a couple of scenes, rewrote a couple of scenes, changed some locations and characters and within a few days the abstract, moebius strip, mind trip of BURNING INSIDE was done. And was a completely different movie than I originally intended to write. I sent the script off to Elmar Berger of Manic Entertainment (100 TEARS) in Germany (After watching HUNTING SEASON six months earlier, he had declared: “Whatever your next movie is, I am executive producing it!”) he loved it and in April of 2008 we went into production and started shooting. CC: Why the decision to make the film Black & White? NW: For the past few years everyone was talking about making ‘throwback’ and ‘old-school’ movies with aesthetics based on the classics from the grindhouse and the ‘70’s and ‘80’s. I figured I would one-up all of them and for the look of Burning Inside go totally old-school, all the way back to the ’20’s! Just kidding. The initial inspiration for the black and white came while I took my hiatus from writing and started painting. I’m not a trained, talented or skilled painter, but I needed something creative that wasn’t story based to occupy my time and my mind. I decided to paint scenes from famous, public domain movies so that if I showed the paintings there wouldn’t be any copyright issues. The first paintings I did were scenes from NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD and NOSFERATU. Both are black and white movies and the scenes that I painted were in high contrast black and white, no greys. As I started painting I really began to like the aesthetic. I’ve always loved NOSFERATU (and NOTLD for that matter) and I started to study the style of the movie. I did a ton of research on German expressionism and found that the heavy shadow, high contrast style fit beautifully in the BURNING INSIDE world. BURNING INSIDE was produced with an extremely limited budget, a skeleton crew and me playing the part of Cinematographer. I don’t know a damn thing about light meters, gels, bounce, diffusion and all that great stuff that trained DPs do to make movies look so good. So, for practical purposes, the heavy shadow, high contrast, black and white, allowed me to shoot very quickly, and hide many, many flaws, all the while lighting the scene by sight. With the digital workflow I was able to shoot a take, plug the camera into my laptop, bring the footage into editing, desaturate it and tweak the contrast to see if my lighting worked or not. Occasionally this made for a tedious day on set, especially when the lighting didn’t work. I also wanted the movie to be a complete departure, in all aspects, from my first film HUNTING SEASON, which takes place 100% outdoors in the woods at the height of summer the screen is filled with bright green foliage and dark red blood. It is, overall, a very colorful and straightforward film. With BURNING INSIDE, the script was already the opposite of straightforward so the black and white allowed me to give the movie an opposite look. I also desperately needed to get away from the handheld camerawork of HS. I love handheld work and verité is definitely a crutch that I would like to go to. It is, to me, difficult to make a film with a locked down camera, so I wanted a style that couldn’t be shot any other way so I could force myself to learn to leave the camera on the sticks. Storywise the harsh, heavy shadow, high contrast black and white is a perfect fit, if it wasn’t I wouldn’t have done it. There is very little grey in the look of the film, which is a total contrast to not only the overall telling of the story, which can be perceived to have a lot of grey area but also the character of John Doe as well as the Nurse. It appears as though nothing in this film is black and white except for the look of it. The German Expressionist style also allows for a lot of demons to hide in John Doe’s shadows. The black and white also allows the film to be timeless which works really well with the setting of the story. There were a few other reasons for the look of the movie as well. I wanted to make something that, regardless of what scene it was, would make you stop changing the channels when you come across it on TV at 2 in the morning. I liked the way the “video” in THE RING looked and wondered what it would be like to make an entire feature that looked like that. Don’t read too much into those reasons, they were just cool things that I thought about when thinking about the look of the film. Ultimately, it fits perfectly as a storytelling/enhancing creative tool. These reasons for the look of the film mostly focus on the tangible, practical reasons for the aesthetic and only briefly touch on the artistic/intangible and don’t address the emotional/sentimental aspect at all. I come from the school of thought that EVERYTHING about the movie HAS to have a story or character based reason for being there. “Because it’s cool” or “Because it looks good” or “Because I like it” is NEVER a valid reason to incorporate anything into a film. With that being said there are numerous reasons: artistic, story, aesthetic and practical, that BURNING INSIDE is stark black and white, and it all matters. I have my reasons, artistically, for the look of the film and I know how it affects me as I’m watching it but I think, overall it is up to the audience to determine what the look does for them or means to them in the overall scope of the picture. CC: The film was shot on a very low budget. What format did you shoot it on and what were the biggest challenges in making the film? NW: The budget was around $10,000 and the entire thing was shot on my trusty Canon-XL1s Mini-DV with Canon’s 3x Wide Angle lens and edited on Final Cut Pro Express running on an iMac. I used some filters from CGM (www.cgm-online.com) to enhance the look of the film. I would have loved to shoot it on Super 8 but that would have doubled the budget and wouldn’t have worked very well with my shooting style. Even though I built-in personal challenges crucial to my artistic growth, my previous experiences allowed me to address and overcome creatively the potential production challenges that lay ahead. Having been through the rigors and challenges of super-no-budget filmmaking already, Burning Inside was intended from the beginning to address head-on, and work around, some of the challenges that I had previously faced on Hunting Season. Sound is ALWAYS a major challenge on any film. Hunting Season is pretty talky for the first hour or so and was shot exclusively outdoors, so I had a LOT of experience dealing with shitty sound. With that in mind I wrote Burning Inside to be a nearly silent film with only a few, controlled scenes of dialogue and almost no background sound. I think this really adds to the overall experience of the movie and especially to John Doe’s situation. The lack of sound really makes the audience lean forward and focus on the visual. It doesn’t allow the film to just wash over the viewer without engaging them, I hate to say it but the audience is going to have to work with this movie. We had to go back in post-production and dub some of the dialogue but did so with excellent results. As I said, I’m not a bona fide cinematographer. Hunting Season was intended to be verité and used a lot of natural lighting. Although it takes a very skilled DP to shoot a good verité I was able to exploit that weakness enough so the “realism” adds to the movie and made it workable. On Burning Inside I was going to be the DP again and we’d have to move quick and dirty so I had to make sure that the look of the film could hide my lack of technical savvy, as well as allow me to light it by sight. As I said earlier one of the ways to do this was to remove the color from the film. Applying a German Expressionism style to it also allowed me to be able to make it highly stylized, look interesting and not worry about the faux realism of a bigger budget movie with a skilled DP, lighting crew and equipment. However, I’d have to say that the biggest challenge was making sure that the lighting was adequate for the high contrast black and white so that the actors or details weren’t completely lost in shadow or totally blown out Another challenge I had previously identified on HUNTING SEASON and was attempting to avoid on BURNING INSIDE, was dealing with overlapping scheduling of a mid-sized cast. Granted, there are only 7 characters in HUNTING SEASON but most days required 4 or more to be on-set. Scheduling 7 actors on a part-time schedule that is at the mercy of the weather and daylight over the course of a month and a half was hell. On BURNING INSIDE, even though we had 11 characters I made sure that really only 2 actors, the male and female lead, Michael Wrann and Kristina Powis, had to have extremely flexible schedules. When the scenes required other actors I would schedule the supporting cast and the two leads would need to be flexible enough to be there when we needed them. Fortunately everyone in the cast and crew was patient, flexible and willing to work on an inconsistent and odd schedule. The only other major challenge that I can remember on BURNING INSIDE was dealing with the weather. We didn’t have a lot of outdoor shooting but it seemed that whenever we did have it scheduled it would rain. We had the same problem with HUNTING SEASON so we’re pretty used to it by now. On HUNTING SEASON the immediate reaction was to cancel the shoot and then kick stuff when the rain stopped an hour later. On BURNING INSIDE I didn’t cancel days because of the rain, instead we would gather, prep and wait around for it to stop. I would cancel the day only when there was absolutely no way to get the shots even if the rain stopped. I think that already having one completed film, that demonstrates a certain level of quality and integrity, under my belt, allowed the cast and crew to believe in me, my abilities, my vision and BURNING INSIDE overall which contributed to their willingness to trust me and make sacrifices for the film. The hard work and dedication of the cast and crew are really what separates a challenging, frustrating, difficult shoot from an enjoyable, creative production. With a good cast and crew any of the challenges can be worked through and overcome, to the point that a year later they don’t even seem like challenges at all. CC: In addition to BURNING INSIDE, you made another feature, HUNTING SEASON, which is a huge departure from the psychological aspect of BURNING INSIDE and is a more brutal horror film. Were going on two opposite spectrums of the genre your intention with both of these projects? NW: HUNTING SEASON was originally created with the intention of being a straightforward, character based, kids-get-killed-in-the-woods, late-70’s, slasher, throwback. With BURNING INSIDE, I definitely intentionally set out to challenge myself with making something COMPLETELY different than HUNTING SEASON. From the story, to the look, everything about BURNING INSIDE is different. At this level of filmmaking the entire world is wide open. You’re not going to “lose EVERYTHING” or mortgage your house making a $10,000 movie so risks should be definitely be taken. If the movie pushes envelopes, and boundaries and challenges audiences and doesn’t sell 100,000 copies, it’s okay. At this level, and I assume at any level that I work at, the most important thing to me is personal, artistic growth and success, making a living in the process would be nice too, but… I began the process, before writing “FADE IN:” thinking about what I want to do to challenge myself with the project. If I had returned to any of the aspects of HUNTING SEASON it would have been a cop-out. Challenging myself to create an elliptical, off-beat, deliberate, semi-experimental film has increased my experience level immensely so for the next project I can combine what I’ve learned on HUNTING SEASON and BURNING INSIDE and make something else completely different than both of them. My intention regarding a career in filmmaking is to always grow with every film. Maybe they won’t always be as diametrically opposite as HS and BI but there will always be built-in challenges for me, always. With all that being said, I think that even though BI and HS are so different I’m confident that there is an audience out there that will appreciate both films, in the same way that I have PI and WRONG TURN on my DVD shelf. I also think that even though Hunting Season may be more viscerally brutal in a graphic, modern way that both movies are ultimately psychologically brutal tests that can raise questions and discussions if the audience allows themselves to be sucked in and begin to experience the events with the characters and think about the repercussions.
CC: What are the most important elements to make a successful psychological horror film? NW: That’s a tough one. I can tell you the common formulas for slasher pics and revenge thrillers but the intangibles that go into a psychological horror film? That’s tough. That’s a good question. I suppose the most important thing is to respect your audience’s intelligence. Stay away from the lame red herrings and the misdirections. Give them enough ‘evidence’ to allow them to make their own interpretations. Film is a collaborative art. There are writers, producers, designers, photographers, actors, directors and editors and all of those individual collaborators put a piece of themselves into the final product, but the last collaborator in the work is the viewer and that viewer is going to supply their interpretation, which is as important as all the other aspects. Each collaborator, including the audience, supports and enhances the other collaborators’ work. Before the film is presented to the final collaborator the director needs to make sure that all the pieces are in place for the viewer to be able to confidently apply their piece to it. If the filmmakers have done their job the viewer will be sucked into the nightmarish world of the film and emerge with the final product tucked nicely into their psyche, ready to discuss it with their friends and fellow audience members. It seems, then, that for a psychological horror film to be successful it has to be attractive, seductive, intriguing, mysterious, dangerous and challenging. Otherwise the final collaborator may pull out of the dark world you’ve created and lose interest, thus never completing their final piece of the puzzle. Of course, as with any other skilled, collaborative position on the film the viewer has to be qualified for the job. If they haven’t done their homework and prepared themselves for the important task at hand, all of the hard work and talent previously spent on the project will be a waste because the final collaborator won’t have the necessary tools to finish it. So it’s important for the director to “hire” the audience with the same care that he/she hired the other creative collaborators on the film. If you want an editor that specializes in action movies, you put out ads specifying what you need. If you need an audience that is open-minded and willing to delve into a dark, black and white, moebius strip of a semi-experimental, psychological horror film you need to make sure that the movie is advertised correctly and that it attracts those kinds of final collaborators. If someone is only interested in fluffy, romantic comedies starring Sarah Jessica Parker I wouldn’t expect them to embrace or be psychologically thrilled with Burning Inside. Some films are spoon-fed, cotton candy, and that’s fine there’s nothing wrong with purely dissolvable entertainment and there’s definitely a place for it in our culture. However, my kind of movies can’t really be spoon-fed to an audience, and psychological thrillers should probably have a little more meat to them, otherwise it loses the psychological and simply becomes athriller. The audience has to meet the film partway and enter into a pact. The film promises to keep the viewer engaged while delivering plenty of evidence and the viewer promises to open their mind, stay engaged and actually think about what the fuck is going on in the film, instead of being passive and letting it wash over them. CC: What is it about the horror genre that you find so appealing? NW: A lot of the shit that the horror genre gets is from detractors that think horror films are all about the gore and death. The real beauty and appealing thing about horror movies is the survival. The thing that I really love in horror films is seeing people survive the terrible situations they find themselves in. Why do we watch the news after a disaster? To see the stories about the people that survived. Horror films demonstrate this for us in a very dramatic manner. All well-made stories and films have an arc and all well-crafted characters in those stories have arcs as well. A few, well worn, clichéd examples are “the cynical bastard becomes a hero” or “the tough guy grows a heart”. If the characters don’t grow and change or develop the, or the audience’s perception of those, characters doesn’t change, chances are the movie is getting shut off halfway through because it will ultimately be unfulfilling. I think that most horror movies magnify this arc because of the extreme situations they deal with, especially in regards to the “Last Girl” concept. Even a poorly made horror film can be worth watching if a lot of care and development was put into the characters. Make a 20 million dollar movie with no character arc and it’s guaranteed to leave you cold and empty, like the recent FRIDAY THE 13TH remake. There wasn’t a single character in that movie that changed from who they were in the beginning to who they were in the end. Whether the audience knows it or not, that’s why that movie doesn’t play well. My favorite type of character arcs are the subtle arcs where you may not notice things the first time around but on multiple viewings you suddenly start to see the details that change over the course of the story. The details that happen in between the important forward moving dialogue and crucial plot points. Details like when Marilyn Burns, brilliant as Sally Hardesty in THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE about 45 minutes in says: “Oh Franklin, I’m just tired. It’s been a long day.” Doesn’t mean much when you see it for the first time but takes on a lot more meaning upon subsequent viewings. Those are the kind of rare movies that get better every time you watch them. Plus I like to see my wife (and producing partner) get the shit scared out of her. CC: What were some of your biggest influences growing up? NW: Punk rock music (Black Flag, Dead Kennedys, Minor Threat, The Misfits, the Repo Man soundtrack etc). Bootleg movies that were a VHS copy of a copy of a copy. Mad Max. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The Exorcist on a black and white TV in a basement apartment in the Lower East Side circa 1985. Dungeons and Dragons. Marvel comics. Star Wars. West Side Story. Gene Pitney. The Who. Those were some of the things that influenced my youth. BURNING INSIDE was influenced by some of the things I have previously mentioned but was most directly influenced and inspired by a handful of songs and the Bush Administration’s Pre-Emptive Strike/Revenge policy that was enacted over the past 8 years or so. Music has a great impact on me during the writing and production creative processes. “YOU MIGHT HAVE NOTICED” is a song by The Academy Is… that fueled a lot of inspiration for the character of John Doe. Listening to that song helped me with Doe’s perspective, the first line in the song is: “If you’re under the impression I’m alright / I guess you never noticed.” Since John Doe is someone who by exterior appearances seems to be normal but inside is far from it. Listening to this song always helped me to make sure that everything about this movie was a dichotomy or that appearances are not as they seem. “AUTUMN’S MONOLOGUE” by the band From Autumn to Ashes was a song that I found particularly helpful when thinking about the Nurse’s character and her motivations. This song pertains to someone trying to be whatever they think their partner wants them to be. The problem is that John Doe, much like the partner in the song doesn’t let the Nurse inside. I found this song about halfway through the writing process and was really struck by how closely the song was reflecting what the Nurse goes through. “ELIAS THE BLASTER” by local, Connecticut folk-noir singer/songwriter Shandy Lawson was a sort of indirect influence in that it doesn’t have as much direct impact or influence on the characters as the previous two songs had but instead impacted the way I thought about the story as a whole. I would often think of John Doe’s plight as something that could inspire songs, something like: “Burning Inside: The Ballad of John Doe” because it deals with love and violence and revenge. The perfect makings of a dark ballad. Shandy Lawson’s “Elias the Blaster tells a folk tale about a mining blaster and the tone and story telling in the song really made me think of John Doe’s sordid tale in this way.
CC: Both BURNING INSIDE and HUNTING SEASON were films that were made in this new age of digital technology. What do you think are the best things and the worst things about this technology? NW: The best thing about the technology is that virtually anybody can make a film now and the doors are wide open to all of the immensely talented people that would have previously been passed by because of the lack of resources. These artists now have the ability and resources at their fingertips to bring us different stories told in different manners. We could be at the precipice of a new renaissance. The worst thing about the technology is that virtually anybody can make a film now and the doors are wide open to all of the people that may have been better served bringing their talents to a different field. Unfortunately many low-budget filmmakers think that they can make a Hollywood-esque movie for 1/1000th of the budget and resources, I call these baby-hollywood. It seems that they expect the audience to give them a break and be forgiving of the quality and lack of creativity because it’s low budget. The fact is though, that it isn’t low budget to the audience member that pays the same price for a DVD of a $5,000 movie or a $50,000,000 movie. With that being said, there are plenty of bad $50,000,000 movies out there too. What I’m trying to say is that filmmakers shouldn’t think that the accessibility of technology and resources that allow them to make a movie actually allows them to make a Hollywood-esque movie, so it’s important to be creative when making a movie exploiting the available digital technology. The digital workflow and the ability to immediately be able to see the footage is hugely beneficial and really helps a low-budget filmmaker see potential issues before it’s too late. In the scientific community there is a term: ‘bucket scientist’, that is used to describe a scientist that doesn’t deal with exact numbers and precise details, just kind of wings it. In that sense I am a ‘bucket filmmaker’. I don’t have a light meter or a measuring tape or any of the other specific formulas and details but the digital technology allows me to hammer the movie into place and immediately see what the end result is going to be. That is a huge benefit to me. Especially on BURNING INSIDE where I was able to set lights, shoot the scene, import the footage into my laptop on location and apply the black & white, high contrast, and filters to it to make sure it looks how it should. If it didn’t look right I was able to quickly move lights around and shoot again. I am also notorious for doing re-shoots. The re-shoots are, 95% of the time, the result of a better idea coming from reviewing what was previously captured and being inspired with an idea that will make the overall movie better. For example, we shot a crucial scene right near the end of the movie. It’s a particularly graphic, tense, nerve wracking, bloody scene and I shot if from a low angle that I had originally envisioned. When I was reviewing the footage that night or the next day I realized that there was potential in the scene, if I shot it from a high, overhead angle, to mirror another crucial scene, the opening scene of the movie. Since we were going back to the same location, I planned a re-shoot and we were able to do it twice as fast as we had originally because we had already gone through it. The original shoot was great, but the new setup added so much more impact because of its subtle, psychological meaning and relationship to the rest of the story. Basically, the way that a writer rewrites a script, I re-shoot the movie. I make sure to capture the basics of the scene, then I take it and review it and see where it should or could be tweaked and if we have the resources available. New ideas are born and I begin to see ways that the scene could be better. Different angles, different emotions etc. So If there’s an opening in the schedule where we’re going to be at the same location I’ll make sure to do a re-shoot that day to capture the new inspirations. At first it may be a little frustrating to the cast but once they realize that the re-shoots are part of my process and for the betterment of the film they’re usually on-board. Also in the no budget world there is never time for rehearsals so the original production day can be considered a “dress rehearsal” and the re-shoot is the actual shoot. Re-shoots usually go by twice as fast because we’ve done it already. If I was shooting on film and had to wait weeks to get the footage back from the lab I would never be able to apply this process. Basically, the digital process allows me to work and rework the movie until it’s exactly what it needs to be. CC: Where do you see both the film and horror industry going in the next five years? NW: The future of the film industry and the horror genre both really depend on the fans and audience. It’s all about the money. You have a better chance of winning the lottery than of finding a movie website without horror fans bitching about the remakes that “Hollywood” makes. The fact is that “Hollywood” would stop making these movies if the movies stopped making money. So it’s important for fans and filmgoers to support the kinds of movies that they want to see. Personally I just want to see good movie, I don’t care if it’s a remake or adaptation as long as it’s good. The independent, original, film “industry” (which is comprised primarily of direct to DVD and VOD releases. The indie theatrical market and big money festival distribution deals were rare before and are completely defunct now) is really in turmoil now because of the collapse of the independent business to business (b2b) market. It used to be that an independent filmmaker would sign distribution of their film over to a mid-level distributor. That distributor would get the movie out there by selling thousands of copies to retail businesses (Best Buy, Circuit City, Blockbuster etc). For the past few years the fans have abandoned the DVD sell-thru option and obtained their content through Netflix, iTunes, downloading or some of the other low-cost options. The result of that is that Best Buy cuts back their DVD offerings. My local Best Buy now has about 4 aisles of DVDs available, which is about half of what they used to have. Circuit City is out of business. Target only carries theatrical or prominent releases. Basically, there is nowhere for the mid-level distributor to put their products. So now these mid-level distributors are not picking up content at the same rate and the filmmakers need to look for other avenues of distribution. So they attempt to self-distribute. The problem is that they run into the same issues as the mid-level distributor, in that nobody wants to carry their film(s) but it’s even more difficult because if a retailer wants to buy DVDs they want to deal with distributors that handle dozens of films, not individual filmmakers. Every member of this distribution chain lays the blame at someone else’s feet. The filmmaker says the distributors only want formulaic “name” movies. The distributors say the retailers don’t buy product anymore. The retailers say they can’t sell DVDs anymore. The audience says there’s no selection, only big-budget Hollywood remakes. To turn this decline around, first, comes down to the filmmakers. It’s no secret that a lot of crap is churned out in the low-budget indie film world. Especially in the horror genre. So the horror movie fans got smart and decided, instead of wasting their money on garbage week after week, they would just “test” it for free, either by downloading or through Netflix etc. Goodbye indie film market. If the fan was guaranteed they were getting their money’s worth they would keep paying for movies. There’s a lot of talk about the market being dead in “this economy” but believe it or not people are willing to spend money, AVATAR is a prime example of that, they just don’t want to spend money on something that might be total shit. I guess, in a sense, the distributors are right, there is no market, at least not a market like they’re used to, where they could trick the customers into buying tens of thousands of shitty, shitty movies because they put a cool, unrelated cover on the DVD and a title that was similar to a current blockbuster. These distributors knew they were peddling garbage and scamming the audience. The audiences finally got smart and decided not to pay for feces anymore. Ultimately it falls on the filmmaker’s shoulders. We need to win the audience back. We need to convince them that our movies are worth buying and we won’t sell them trash. Stop making garbage and the fans will start buying again. If the fans start buying again, the stores will start selling again. If the stores start selling again we have just re-opened mass distribution. And once that happens STOP GIVING AWAY THE RIGHTS TO YOUR MOVIES TO SHADY DISTRIBUTORS! In all honesty, at this point, I think it is important for independent filmmakers to band together and create co-ops with their fellow filmmakers that they feel create movies of admirable quality. If a fan recognizes quality from one filmmaker they will seek out the brands (production company, distributor, co-op, etc,) that that filmmaker belongs to and buy the other products available from them. A rising tide raises all ships. This is the kind of thing that distributors like Anchor Bay found success through, or now Glass Eye Pix is trading on.
This is one reason that we are distributing
BURNING INSIDE through Channel Midnight (http://www.channelmidnight. I know I started off saying the future of the industry rests in the hands of the fans and then went on a diatribe saying it’s up to the filmmakers but really, we need to work together. We need to make an alternative to “Hollywood” not just baby-hollywood low budget versions, but original, interesting, challenging, creative, amazing movies. The fans have a lot of work to do too. There are a lot of complaints about “Hollywood” making formulaic, generic, boring, remakes. Stop complaining. “Hollywood” isn’t going to suddenly fill their slates with original, interesting, challenging, creative, amazing movies because people complain on a message board. The fact is that those original, interesting, challenging, creative and amazing movies exist, they’re just being self-distributed and waiting for fans to find them. Take Bart Mastronardi’s VINDICATION, it comes out on DVD in April, when the new NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET comes out a few weeks later, horror fans will complain about remakes and unoriginality. I guarantee, 99% of the people complaining will have never heard of or seen VINDICATION, and if you respond to their bitching by recommending the movie they STILL won’t bother to buy it. Fans need to proactively seek AND PURCHASE the original, interesting, challenging, creative, amazing movies that fly below the radar. They do exist, they are out there and they are the future of quality independent film. People always wonder why there aren’t any current films like the classic, cult horror films of the Seventies and Eighties? The fans, by definition, made those movies “cult films”. Films like those exist today but the audiences don’t do the work to seek them out to bring them to the surface. Instead they spend their money on whatever “Hollywood” is spoon feeding, and bombarding us with ads for this week. What happened to the weird midnight movies? Theaters stopped playing them because audiences stopped going. It’s much easier to just see the blockbusters. I got a little off topic there but to specifically answer in regards to the five years? “Hollywood” will continue to release remakes, sequels and adaptations. Independent budgets will drop drastically (hopefully creativity will increase just as drastically). You can’t make a profit selling VOD at $4.00 a pop if your budget is over $250,000, hell, you can’t make a profit if it’s over $100,000. And the audience will NEED to start doing some hard work, stop complaining about the unoriginality of “Hollywood” and SEEK out the independent films that are amazing. By the way, if you’re a fan seeking original, interesting, challenging, creative, amazing movies and you don’t know where to start looking, some of the BEST places to look are filmmaker-specific websites, message boards and blogs. Places where filmmakers go to talk to each other and get advice about making movies. This is where you’ll find movies by filmmakers that are passionate about their craft and are more interested in making a good movie and finding an audience, rather than the distributors trying to force feed the latest releases to lazy consumers. Not to kiss ass, but the Colonel’s Crypt is a good spot too, just look at the subjects you interview. A lot of integrity there. CC: What is coming up for you? NW: Right now I’m doing a lot of work prepping BURNING INSIDE for our Spring release through Channel Midnight (www.channelmidnight.com). I’ve gone back over the film and tweaked some of the look with some filters from www.CGM-online.com, and worked on making sure the output looks great on a variety of formats (HD TVs, regular TVs, iphone, download etc etc.) It never ends. I’m sure ten years from now I’ll go back and tweak a few more things with it.
I’m also in the middle of co-writing a
sci-fi/horror novel, called “EUROPA”, with a great writer out of Indiana
named Heidi Fuqua. It’s a project I’m really excited about and I love the
concept, characters and style that we’re writing it in. BURNING INSIDE was
a total departure from HUNTING SEASON and this project will be a total
departure from both of those. Completely different than anything that I’ve
done before. It’s a real challenge, and working on the BURNING INSIDE
release has really taken its toll on the time I can spend on it. I can’t
wait to get back to work writing. We have a preliminary Facebook page
set-up at
http://www.facebook.com/ At the same time I’m working on releasing BURNING INSIDE and writing “EUROPA” I’ve also been spending a considerable amount of time working on a re-make of an old thriller that’s currently in the public domain. I’ll keep details on that under wraps for now, but I have been so enthralled with the novel writing process that I might first write it in novel form and then adapt it as a low budget movie. It should be fun and will be, again, a departure from the previous work that I’ve done. I’ve got some ideas about employing some artistic and creative techniques and processes I haven’t used yet.
We’re also wrapping up the first season of “Fun
With Lifevest” (http://funwithlifevest.blip. I spoke previously about building a brand and hopefully I’ll be doing that with Dalton Gang Productions over the next year with the release of BURNING INSIDE, a re-release of HUNTING SEASON as well as putting some of my early stories and screenplays out there. I had hoped that this year would be a production year (in production on a film) but it looks like, at this early point, it’s going to be a writing, releasing and marketing year. I might be able to get something going before the end. We’ll see. CC: OK, let’s say that you are a film professor teaching the history of film and you have five films to show your class. Which five films would you show to represent the history of film and why? NW: Since this is a “history of film” class and not a film analysis class I think that I would focus on the “game changers”. Gotta start with an early silent film and there are few better than NOSFERATU. It’s a vampire movie (very hot right now) and Murnau employed special effects that are still effective today. There’s also an interesting copyright story behind the scenes that would resonate with students of today, basically: Don’t make a masterpiece unless you have the rights to it. I think the next would have to be CITIZEN KANE, but it would have to be put into context in regards to the other movies of its day and how much it pushed the envelope. Kane may have started to seem dated a few years ago but students of today would definitely find relevance in a story about a tycoon who sacrifices his ideals for money and power. And revealing that THE HANGOVER didn’t invent the “retrace the steps to create the full picture” story telling technique might be an eye opener too. My third is WEST SIDE STORY, one of my favorite movies of all time and since the history of film wouldn’t be complete without a musical this one would have to be in there. My fourth would be either JAWS or STAR WARS because it was the invention of the summer blockbuster and the creation of the effects driven event movie in a double feature. Finally, my fifth film to show is AVATAR. No course on film history would be complete without a look at the future. This segment would focus on the fact that regardless of the incredibly advanced technology to make the film, the ‘story’ is still what makes or breaks a film and the basics of that haven’t changed for hundreds of years. CC: What do you hope audiences get out of BURNING INSIDE when it is released on DVD? NW:I hope that audiences get an experience that they are willing and able to open their mind and heart to and allow themselves to be transported into the story and nightmare of John Doe. I hope they find it to be an experience they are willing to delve into multiple times and begin to notice the subtleties and minutia. And lastly I hope it is an experience that opens discussions amongst their friends and fellow filmgoers, either about the film or the perils of revenge. The only thing that I can hope for is that audiences find BURNING INSIDE worth talking (or writing) about. CC: Thanks for your time Nathan and best of luck with BURNING INSIDE. NW: Thank you.
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