The whole reason I came to see Goodbye World and the reason I love post-apocalyptic movies is I love the hunt for supplies or stockpiling of supplies. Do you obsess about that too?
I do in my head but I don’t actually do it in reality. On my desk I have lists of what I need to put in my emergency supply cabinet, and it’s just a list right now. It’d be no use if anything actually happened. So I do think about it, I do make lists, I do talk about it but I am woefully behind on actually going and purchasing these items.
Me too. I don’t actually have anything stored but I love movies about it.
Oh, I do too, absolutely. What are your favorites in that genre?
I Am Legend is kind of the ultimate. I’m sure I’ll remember something and want to call you back and tell you. The Book of Eli is a great movie anyway and it has a little bit of that. I love that the KFC wipes survived the nuclear apocalypse.
That’s good, that was great.
Surprisingly, Waterworld is pretty good. He has a lot of cool stuff he found at the bottom of the ocean.
Oh, I haven’t seen that since it came out. I should check that out again.
Have you had any sales or talk with buyers for Goodbye World?
We have a sales screening next week so we’ll be showing it to a lot of buyers then and showing it to buyers in New York. Ironically, it’s hard to get buyers to come to the LA festival because they’re at home and they’re with their families. They’re not at a festival to see movies and buy movies like they are at Sundance or somewhere else. So we’re doing something for them in Beverly Hills. I know we’ve had some people come out and I know that there’s been some response to our sales agent, but they’re not really thinking about it until after the buyers’ screening.
It is a genre movie that would have an audience on that factor. In that regard, is it relatively easy to get potential buyers in?
I think so. I think because of our cast and because of the conceit of the film, I think that we have a lot of interest. As you’re aware, being both a fan of the genre and somebody who has seen this movie, it’s not your traditional apocalypse movie and I think that’s obviously a challenge from a marketing perspective. But I do think if you really do like this genre like I do at least, I like to see different takes on it and I think this is a different take on the genre. Hopefully it just adds to that canon of what I think is a really interesting genre of films.
I understand you’re managing expectations in comparison to the blockbusters, but I actually think Goodbye World is more typical of the genre. The more explosive versions we’ve seen lately are more of a niche, rare recent trend.
Oh, that’s interesting. It definitely is in the world of like Dawn of the Dead, the original. I thought the remake was great as well, but the more deliberate, slow community aspect interest of that kind of movie. It is by no means a novel idea to explore this aspect, but it is something, you’re right, that maybe is not at the moment so much out there.
Certainly in low budgets. It’s a chamber piece essentially.
Yeah, absolutely. There was something that Gaby said to me when we were shooting. She was researching for something else and was researching the word apocalypse. She said, “The word apocalypse, everyone thinks it’s the end of the world. It actually is from the ancient Greek meaning to uncover. So it’s anything where there’s an event that uncovers what’s beneath it.” For us, that’s really how we approached the story. There’s this event. It’s a collapse.
To us it’s the end of the world but really it’s just uncovering what our foundations are and the flaws and the strengths that are there. As a chamber piece like you’re saying, as something that is really at heart a relationship drama, I guess it can feel like a forced conceit to say, “Hey, there’s an apocalypse going on.” In fact, for us it was super appropriate because that is where you get to see what is underpinning these relationships. We strip away the superficial that pervades a lot of our relationships.
How did you come up with Hannah’s tradition of Bubble Time?
[Laughs] When we were up in Mendocino working on the script and visiting with a friend of mine who has a daughter and a young son, the had these pails with bubble stuff and one of the same bubble makers and they were making bubbles for their kids. I was like, “That’s really pretty” and Sarah and I were trying to think of ways, we wanted James and Lily to have a child because we felt like that was part of what spurned James to want to retreat and create a safe space that he could control. So we were trying to find ways to incorporate Hannah into the beats of the story.
The bubbles were just so beautiful and interesting that we started talking about ways to use those and then found that it was this really lovely little metaphor for the fragility of our connections and for how we, day after day, moment after moment hope that things will last longer than they did last time, even though ultimately it’s all doomed. Ultimately we’re all going to die, civilization’s going to collapse, the bubble’s going to pop but we still watch every day with hope and expectations. But really it just came from seeing how cool they were. They’re fun to make and the kids love them. They’re really pretty, so that’s where that came from.
Now that I’ve seen Goodbye World, I want to see your other films. Is Bold Native similarly a thriller with political themes?
Yes, Bold Native is much more provocative than this. It is the first fiction film about the Animal Liberation Front. The U.S. government considers them to be the most threatening domestic terrorist group in the country, despite the fact that they’ve never hurt anybody. Basically what they do is they go in and they take animals out of research laboratories or factory farms and they create property destruction. One of their central tenants is that they must never harm anybody human or animal, and they haven’t.
Yet they’re considered the most dangerous domestic terrorist group, so we were like, “Wow, that’s really interesting.” We researched that. I wrote a story about it and we made that film a couple years ago. I’m really proud of it. It’s available at Boldnative.com to watch in HD for free. You can go watch it there. If you want a DVD they can be ordered through that website. We self-distributed that. That was like a real, independent, truly gorilla, hybrid distribution project.
That’s revolutionary too.
Yeah, the poster that Benji looks at that says “No Justice, Just Us,” that graphic is from our graphics from Bold Native. That is definitely a little tie in to that film. That movie is about the nature of freedom and what people are willing to do to fight for freedom, not just for themselves but for others. In that case, for others that most people would look at and say, “Oh, that’s dinner.” And yet people are in this world willing to give up their freedom in order to fight for the rights of those others.
That is the world that Benji is coming from in this movie, that if anybody else is oppressed then you also are oppressed. You’re freedom can’t be taken for granted. Just because you’re free, if somebody else isn’t, you can’t blithely pretend the world’s perfect. Somebody said to me after the first screening, “Oh, it was really stressful.” Yeah, there are tense moments but the movie overall doesn’t feel tense to me. For her, it was that idea that what you ignore is eventually going to come back and hurt you. If we all ignore the problems in the world, they will blowback and that’s sort of what happens in this movie as well.
I think you’re underselling again because I think it was highly suspenseful. As soon as the soldiers appeared I was waiting for them to come back. I guess I know how the world works. You don’t just get rid of people that easily. They find another way in.
That’s true, that’s true. You’re right. We plant that flag at that moment.
Or even as early as the bikers running the supermarket. They’re going to run out of supplies and come looking for other stuff.
True, true, no, you’re right. I agree. You know, you lose perspective on a film when you see it 1000 times so it’s been interesting to see people’s reactions to it. They’ve definitely run the gamut from negative to super positive and that’s a fun part of making movies, being able to talk about it and see how people take what you made.
What is your next film going to be about?
I’m co-directing a documentary that I’ve been working on for a few years that hopefully we finish this year. It’s a very epic project about a group of activists who were sent to federal prison for running a protest campaign. They were accused of doing nothing more than talking and yet they ended up in federal prison for between one and six years. That is hopefully getting done this year, we’ll see. And then I’m working on a script and would like to try to shoot that next year.
So you do still do documentaries? I noticed your first film was a doc too.
Yeah, mostly just because at that point it was like, “Well, that’s the only thing you can kind of shoot for free and make a movie.” If you don’t have much money, you can make a documentary for very little money, given a lot of time. You can’t make it quickly for not much money but you can certainly make a good documentary for very little money if you put time into it. So that’s where we started out because we were interested in making films. Then this documentary is something that I’m just passionate about the subject. It’s a campaign that we learned about during the research for Bold Native and got an opportunity to make the film, so it’s something that personally we were compelled to do more than anything else just to help tell the story. My main interest and my heart is with fiction filmmaking but I also try to take the opportunities that come to me.
Fred Topel is a staff writer at CraveOnline and the man behind Shelf Space Weekly. Follow him on Twitter at @FredTopel.
