The Lives of Independent Filmmakers
Uh Oh
Left: Writer, Director, Actress Jessica Morgan.
the WORD
Is there anything you might’ve done different?
Jessica
I do think, yeah, there are moments of that. The first thing that comes to mind for me is that I would’ve loved to had it been a little bit shorter.
I would’ve liked it to be at 90 minutes. I think we were telling so much of a story, it was a little bit hard to keep it shorter, you know what I mean? That’s the first one that comes to mind for me. I know that there’s certain things like the kills and stuff, there’s certain ones we wanted to do even more ham for.
We pulled it back a little bit. There’s little things like that that I think I would go back and change. I don’t know about you, Chris.
Chris
If you have an infinite timeline or deadline, then you’re going to make infinite changes. It’s true. The art part’s a big thing. Funny enough, I have my degree in journalism, too. I think we’re in the same water here where I would write an article and I’d go back and I’d look at it and I look at it and someone said to me there’s a moment you just have to say, ‘Pencils down.’
It’s not healthy to do that because you linger, the what-ifs begin to pile up. I think it’s impossible to say, ‘Yeah, we wouldn’t have done something.’ There’s quite a few things I would’ve changed about it. The runtime, Jessica mentioned it I think it’s an hour and 46 minutes initially; was an hour right under two hours.
There’s the cut that we had initially is longer than this one and we had to trim it up. Some of the kills in independent filmmaking, you pay for everything. We don’t have producers, we don’t have people we go to and ask for money. It’s me and Jessica saving up paychecks to rent locations and to create these props that you see. I mean, the skeleton, the offering.
We made that in our backyard in our apartment with some chemicals and like, “Hey.” You find a balance in between making the best film you can with obviously your resources. To do things different, I absolutely would do things differently, but with the space and time and money that we had being the team that we were, it’s hard to say if me changing it would’ve made it better.
It probably would’ve made it worse because I’m pretty happy with where we ended up all things considered. I think the answer would be definitely change it, whether it’s better or worse is, I guess nebulous.
the WORD
Tell me a little bit more about the life of being an independent filmmaker.
Chris
Absolutely. I’ll take it and I’ll want to pass to Jessica ,too. We’ve been independent filmmaking team for a while now. It’s incredibly difficult because obviously you write these stories. As a writer, you want to tell a really interesting gripping story. In my script, we had a giant scarecrow. We had a big scarecrow that was going to be found in the warehouse, but we didn’t have the money for that.
There’s no way to transport it, so you have to make these concessions. Making this movie really has three stages when you write it, then when you can afford to put it together, and then when you edit it we were incredibly fortunate. We had to beg, borrow, and steal our locations, our talents, our food to feed our people, our transportation.
Of course it’s like, ‘Poor pitiful me, right?’ Everybody who’s made a movie has the same problems. I guess as an independent filmmaker, it takes away from other parts of life. Jessica and I, we live in a two-bedroom, one bathroom. apartment with another roommate. You make it work, but it’s definitely a struggle on the independent filmmaking side because there is no money. It’s very little money and it takes all of your money.
Jessica
I think because of that, you end up wearing a lot of different hats. We would love to just step back and be just directors. In the end, Chris ended up being the cinematographer as well. I ended up doing a lot of the makeup for it and having to do a lot of the set deck and stuff. If you’re looking at a budget and you can’t afford to pay people to do these things, it’s like, ‘Then who’s going to do it?’
If you want to make it happen, you have to do it. It does end up being a lot of juggling and a lot of extra work to get it done, which of course it’s huge work to get any movie done. I do feel like there’s a lot of juggling and involved when you’re doing independent filmmaking.
the WORD
I’m editing myself now, I was talking about the gore. One of the things that I noticed was that there wasn’t a lot of gore. Even when there was the slicing (with knives) that I can’t get over that, the knife and stuff. I also noticed that it wasn’t excessive. I mean, sometimes Iwould see a whole lot of cutting but it wasn’t gratuitous. Buy my first reaction several times it was gratuitous. Freaky, and then I realized, I was frightened, freaked out by more of what was going on in my head than what was happening on the screen.
You guys edited scenes so that they were meant to be scary but not gory. I mean, you didn’t rely on gore. Sometimes it looked like you allow people’s imagination to complete the scene; what you were doing when someone was about to get stabbed and stuff. I thought that was cool. Smart.
I thought that there was this thinking going, that the scenes were artfully planned to scare people, not weird them out. Wait a minute … how did you do auditions on this? How did you go about selecting different characters? How did you do the auditions?
Chris
Jessica loves this part. I’m going to let her talk on it. She ranks our actors as an actor.
Jessica
I was just casting in general. I was going to say we’ve worked with a lot of the same kind of actors for us just because I think you see a lot of, even big time directors do it once you get a vibe for each other and you understand how to talk to each other and how to communicate what you’re trying to get across and what they’re doing and what they’re bringing.
We’re pretty lucky that we have a little group of people that we can rely on. We generally bring them in and have them read for a bunch of different roles and see where their best fit is for that. We have a process a lot of times where even after we cast a film and we start doing the readthroughs, we actually will continue to develop the script.
We’ll be like, ‘Well, this person’s bringing this kind of element to this character that now we would like to incorporate a little bit more throughout the story.’ I really enjoy our casting process because I do feel like we allow it to adjust the script as well. It almost helps us fulfill our characters and make them a little more deeper.
Whatever that actor brings to the process it’s like, “Okay, great. We will embrace that and we’ll try to showcase it if we can.”
the WORD
Are you going to be showing this at any other festivals?
Chris
Yes, it has. I knew you were going to ask me this. Of course, I do not have it readily [inaudible 00:23:56].
Jessica
We did do a screening last year when we did complete it. We did a screening in May, just one screening in LA just to see how audiences were doing because we were like, “If we’re going to sit on this anyways, if there is something we need to adjust.” That was really helpful, we had a lot of good reactions and we were pretty excited about it at that point that we knew we didn’t have to adjust too much. Then we submitted to a few festivals, but we didn’t do a full festival run because we were already talking to distributors at that point.
We already knew we were on this timetable of, we want to release around October, September. A lot of horror film festivals tend to do their showings in September and October.
We’d almost missed the boat on a good amount of them that we then had to, we didn’t want to be patient, I guess is kind of the answer, that we didn’t want to be patient enough to wait for them to come around. We always like, “We want to get this out to everybody.” Chris, I don’t know if you found that name or not.
Chris
I did. We were in the Hollywood Independent Filmmaker Award and Festival https://filmfreeway.com/HollywoodIndependentFilmmakerAwards . It was screened on the Paramount lot and Jessica and I, we took silver. We were pretty well-received all things considered, I think. We didn’t want to do the whole film circuit run. We just wanted to get it out there.
the WORD
You have any advice for some of my students who are trying to get into the film business?
Chris
I think, Gregg, just correct me if I’m wrong, and I apologize if I am. It’s like a journalism class, right? I’m a journalist, well, not anymore, but I have my degree in journalism. You talk about the SPJ, I was very well aware of the SPJ. I got my degree from the University of Arizona. Being a journalist, this is no lie either, that’s where I got into filmmaking.
I was there, I graduated in 2012. I wanted to be a multimedia journalist, that was my focus. I wanted to build my website. I wanted to create original content, news-based, be able to shoot, edit, distribute, write, all that stuff. I wanted to be the all in one package. Once I got my camera, which I had to get a student loan for because of how expensive cameras were back then, I learned to film, I learned to shoot.
I had a bunch of friends that I was living with at the time who wanted to be actors or who had been actors in high school. It was, “Hey, let’s go take your camera out and let’s shoot.” Well, for me, I was like, “Well, I need the practice. That sounds great. Shooting live events on a DSLR.”
This was before autofocus and it was at Canon T2i https://www.imaging-resource.com/PRODS/T2I/T2IA.HTM , which they haven’t made for eight years now.
It was one of those things where you learned craft through one thing and you applied it through another. From that, from all my J-School training, I ended up understanding lighting and micing and audio people. It’s just so funny to have this conversation with you because I have just such fond memories of J-School for me.
Really, that’s what taught me all of this stuff how to do films. I’m self-taught, I didn’t go to film school. I went to J-School. From that, I learned all that stuff. I’m talking about lighting, micing camera, shutter angle, aperture, ISO. While you can apply that to taking stills, I’m sure a bunch of your students do in terms of coverage, you can apply that to film cameras.
The transition is seamless, if you understand one, you will understand the other. You asked, I get all excited about talking about J-School and whatnot, I’m sorry. What I would tell your students is just to soak it all in man and have fun with it. I don’t know, to be an independent filmmaker, if you can do something else, do something else because it’s hard and it’s expensive.
It’s rewarding as all how when a project comes together and the sense of relief and accomplishment that you get when the work that you’ve done for so many people who have volunteered their time and the efforts and the money that you’ve put into it and the sleepless nights and all the other things that go unmentioned that you lose because you’re editing or you’re writing or you’re filming or you’re doing that.
All of those things, it’s brutal. If you can get through it, the sense of accomplishment and the sense of relief and happiness. As fleeting as it is, there’s nothing on earth like it, there really isn’t.
the WORD
I don’t want to say this. I originally started in journalism. I wanted to be a writer and I wanted to get paid because I was looking at [inaudible 00:28:39] there were people, friends who were working jobs that they didn’t like, coffee shops, supermarkets and stuff. I wanted to try to get around that.
I’m blithering because what I want to say is I sensed there was a connection. I believe there’s a connection between journalism and filmmaking. I teach at Hurner College in New York City. My department, we don’t quite agree on that. They seem to think journalism is over here and film is over here and a few maybe there might be some little meaning in between.
I always thought that there was a cosmic connection between filmmaking and journalism. I thought, “Well, I’m not into the visual stuff so much.” Whenever I could assist someone who was working on the film read over their screenplay or read over their screenplay and I’ve done that read on screenplay. They let me do odds and ends and stuff here.
I am listening to you talking about your journalism experience. There was your passion for getting into filmmaking. You’re also involved in some aspect of journalism as far as I’m concerned because it’s storytelling.
Chris
Yes, absolutely.
the WORD
It’s the storytelling. I started this website and, basically it gets more attention for film. I don’t know why, it gets a lot of attention for film. I’m really into film. I can’t get my students where I teach to jump into it as much as I can. They usually write news stories or feature stories and stuff. They get a good ride. They get a lot of attention.
There are least projects going on now. I mean, I’m like 76 now, so I’m slowed down. I’ve noticed that there are these projects popping up where there are people who are using film to do stuff in journalism. They see a cause that they feel really passionate about, and they don’t want to write a news, I mean, they see beyond the news story.
They make a film, they can make a documentary. I love this, they make a documentary and then they use fiction techniques in their filmmaking in their documentary and it just gets me really excited. This seems to be something I’m just coming on top of it right now. Anyway, I had to get that off my chest.
Chris
I wanted to be a documentary filmmaker my whole life until I decided to be an actual film, I still want to make documentary. I tell Jessica all the time, I’ve wanted to make document. That was the bridge for me, that was the actual bridge because the idea of being able to tell a visual story, compelling as it is through the film median, especially, I wanted to be a war correspondent.
At the time when I don’t know if I had the courage to do that, but at the time, we were still in Afghanistan. I think that the stories were coming out from WikiLeaks and there were a couple other ones. I think Al Jazeera. Again, this is 2012, years ago, and I was just so enamored with telling a visual story because it’s attention-grabbing.
Look at today, people are on YouTube. It’s a YouTube generation, the TikTok generation. You need to be able to tell a story within 90 seconds. If it’s a new story, there’s a level of supreme intelligence that goes into that. I don’t have it, but the long form documentaries, you see them on Netflix, you see them on HBO, they’re winning. I mean, they’re fantastic, I completely agree. I completely agree on that medium for storytelling, for new storytelling.
the WORD
Back to the film. Well, one of the things that I already know I’m wrong in this. I mean, this has happened before. I thought maybe the first 30 or 40 minutes, I’m going to say were slow, but I spoke, which means I wasn’t bored, but I thought it was slow. Then I got towards the end when things seemed to speed up.
I realize, hope this makes sense, you really needed the beginning to make the end really exciting. Excuse me. Did you guys plan that or you must have planned it?
Jessica
Sorry. Yeah, there was definitely some thought planned into it where I think overall, even we talked about tone a lot for our film. It was in the beginning we did want it to be lighthearted more and happy and joking and stuff. Then as it goes on, the film just starts to get darker. Even when you earlier talked about maybe some of the kills might’ve been slightly funny.
In our first few kills, we were playing with this idea of older slashers and stuff like that. You know what I mean? We were bringing in these ideas of that, and then as the film goes, then we ramp up and we get much darker. Even color-wise, we got darker. I was going to say, so that was always a plan there.
Definitely, we talked about the time of the film and how we wished it. We had gotten down to 90 minutes. We looked at that beginning and we were trying to be like, ‘Is there anything we can do with this? Can we cut anything out?’ It was just so hard because the way we had thought it out and everything and what we needed to make everything else work, it was very hard for us to cut this any shorter unfortunately. Also, I’m happy you got that.
Chris
There’s that weird balance between being a creative and being how you want your film to be seen. It’s like two halves of the brain, you just want to make a movie, “Let’s put as much as we can into it.” Then in the end, putting out of a product out. Traditionally, it’s a 90-minute space. Horror films you see, and if you examine them, they’re about 90 minutes, that’s the sweet spot.
We knew we wanted to get it to that. Like you’re talking about, it was a little slow. We knew that we trimmed off as much fat as we possibly could so that you got the details about where we were going to take you. Like you mentioned, you had to know this before we got into the last third or half of the movie. Once at that point, we think that it just moves. We think that once you get to the second half of the movie, it flies.
the WORD
Jessica, you are in the film, you’re actress in the film, but you’re also the director writer. I’m fishing around it, what’s that like? What’s going on in your head where you have to do both?
Jessica
It’s hard. It’s so hard. I’ve tried to do it with short films before where I’ve acted in it and then just been the sole director. I’ve always felt like something has suffered because of it. It’s just two different mindsets in my opinion. I feel like directing, you’re trying to constantly see the full picture and what’s going on and how this connects.
As an actor, you have to just be in the moment. You just don’t think about anything else except for what’s happening right now. For this film, when we knew, when we started thinking, “Okay, if I’m going to be in it and I’m going to try to direct it,” that’s why it very much was a co-director situation because in those scenes that I’m in, I have to be able to let go and just focus on the acting part of it.
Chris fully takes over the directing if I’m in a scene that’s basically all him. I have to fully trust that we’ve done the prep work and we’ve looked at it and we have everything in place. Then now I can just act because otherwise it suffers, I think. It’s difficult, I don’t know how so many bigger names out there do it all the time.
This film, I’m kind of lucky that there’s a good amount of other actors in it, but I’m in less than half of it kind of thing. In the overall scheme, you look at how many minutes I’m in it’s like, “Okay, I can still help direct this thing when I’m not on-screen.”
the WORD
Have you been interviewed by any other reviewers or reporters?
Jessica
We had a podcast one, I think. Then we have a few more lined up.
Chris
I think it was Thursday. Then we have I think Behind The Lens the day before the movie comes out. Then we have another reviewer, I believe it’s this Friday. There’s a few of them coming up.
Jessica
Film Threat, I think.
the WORD
My question that is… let me see that, let me get it. There we go. This includes [inaudible 00:38:32] were there questions you wished I had asked but didn’t? I said that you think we could have pointed out or things that you were really excited about that was never touched upon? That’s the journalist thing looking for special angle [inaudible 00:38:52] else did. That’s why I’m asking you the question.
Chris
Can I just say, when I was actually interviewing people, I would ask that same question. Is there anything I haven’t asked that you want to tell me about? I get it, I love it. I ask the same question. I’d like to say I think you were great in your interviewer and we appreciate that. I think I’d just like to say about the people that were involved, it takes a village.
I’m sure everybody that’s ever made a movie has said that, but more so on indie film set. We haven’t talked about the props. I think the props played a huge part as the movie evolves into current day Halloween and goes into the ancient ritual. We had to make all the props. Jessica’s sister, this is the whole village part, she made most of the props.
Jessica and I made the offering, the gory piece of human that was there, we made that. You know what I mean? Just all of these things that you have to do as an independent filmmaker. It’s incredibly difficult, but it’s incredibly rewarding. I just want people to know that it really did take a village.
Everybody involved just was so fantastic in lending their time, their energy. Again, it was our money, it was quite an event to make this film, and we just really wanted to hopefully make people proud they were in it. They can say, “Hey, I was in something like this and we had fun.” The end product that they can show their family.
I think this is the first project that, well, maybe it’s the first project that they were in where you can see it anywhere. You can see it actually, we don’t have overseas distribution. We have I think Canada and North America. Everybody’s family that’s part of this is going to see it. One of the main actors, his family lives in Ohio so they haven’t seen it.
Mom and dad haven’t seen it yet. The only people that have, were fortunate enough to be in that November 2nd screening that took place a year ago. Nobody else has seen it. We’re excited for our families to see it because we talk about it, we post about it. We say, “We can’t hang out because we’re filming.”
Like our interview, we actually I think initially it was set for Friday, but we were filming our newest movie on Friday. There’s so many things you just have to put off because you’re doing something because you’re making a movie. I’m just excited that everybody sees it. I know that was a long-winded answer.
the WORD
I might have already asked this or you’ve already probably might have said it that I missed it. What’s next, I mean, with this project?
Chris
Well, this project, I mean, obviously being released on September 24th, we’re going to sit back, see how it does. We’re going to just take a minute and just enjoy it. We always say celebrate the victories because we’ve been making it for it’s Night of The Harvest has been on our minds for three years now. I think we’re going to do that.
We’re trying to have a little watch party. We live in California. Most of our actors live in California too. Hopefully, we’ll have people over have pizzas and some beers and just celebrate that moment that it comes out. Maybe talk about, it’s hard to do a sequel because we don’t have money to hire a bunch of people that we don’t know.
If someone were to give us a couple of hundred thousand, we’d be like, “Yeah, there is a story in mind, but we don’t have the actors to put in place for that story.” As a team, and most of the people that were in this film have started filming our new movie, which will be out next October. I don’t think the grind ever stops, but we hope we don’t get old enough to not do it.
Although yesterday or I’m sorry, Saturday the day after filming was pretty brutal. That was a day full of soreness.
Jessica
Basically, we’ve already started the next one where we have a different script and that is pretty solid and good to go at this point. We just literally started filming it. It’s always on to the next at some point.
the WORD
Wow, that’s intense.
Jessica
Yeah, it is.
the WORD
One of the things that I like about being a journalist was it is not true, but I had this imagination that it was Songs for the Lone Wolf person going out there trying to write decent books, get people out of jail, put people in jail, et cetera.
The thing that frightened me about, I guess frightening is okay [inaudible 00:43:46] well, in my mind, you had to have so many people. It’s collective. You have to be involved with a lot of people and that just spooked me. I remember one time when I knew I had this interest. I was finishing up this glass, one of my book projects.
The guy living next door to me, he was working on, I think it might’ve been a screenplay that he had to get to his producer or agent. At three o’clock in the morning, he could hear my printer going, I would print out, re-write, and then do it all over again. I would hear his printer, and then one day we both bump into each other.
We were rushing to mail the stuff we didn’t email stuff then. That was my first serious hook with film because he had writer’s block or he was going through a writer’s block. We got together and worked with him. Then he introduced me to filmmaking. He was from one of the local colleges and stuff, but I just like that.
One of the things that I did frightening, but I also find it fascinating is that god, you work with people. I like that but at the same time, it’s spooky.
Jessica
It’s very collaborative and you do have to ask a lot of people to help out and then continue to communicate what you’re trying to do and get that out of them. Absolutely, I could see that being difficult. Even Chris, Chris is our main writer. I just come in when he’s done a draft and we go through.
We start breaking it down and outlining some more and things like that. We just work together for those things, but he’s the main writer. I think even in that, it’s been interesting to see sometimes Chris as a writer, I think he is very like, “This is what I’m doing and this is my work. Don’t have an opinion on it, this is mine.” There is a little bit of that to work through.
the WORD
I remember I was interviewing this producer, this guy who had just made this film and I forgot what the festival was. I was in awe what he did and I asked him, I said, “How were you able to do this?” He says, “Well, I only work with my friends.” Then I said, “How do you make friends?” Then I realize I was really silly and crazy. How do you make friends?
Jessica
We wonder how we keep friends sometimes with what we put them through in these films. Sometimes we’re like, “How are we still friends after this?”
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Publisher, Editor Gregg W. Morris
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