The Honest Filmmaker
Are you about to leave Uni with a filmmaking degree? Or want to change careers and work in a creative industry? We want to give you the tools you need to enter the real world of production or freelancing. Honest and open career advice from people in the business.
We also talk to those in other creative industries to discuss their careers, the potential cross over with film production and practical tips for a successful and fulfilling career.
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The Honest Filmmaker
How to make a Micro Budget Action Indie Feature with James Couche
#filmmakingpodcast #filmmaking #moviemaking
This week on the podcast I talk to Writer/Director James Couche. James made a bunch of short action films before moving on to his debut feature film Lost Phoenix. It was shot during the Covid Pandemic with a very small crew, small budget, it's an action martial arts movie.
I talked to James about the challenges of shooting an action film on a micro budget, we talked about how difficult it was shooting during Covid, the advantages and disadvantages of that. We talked about the challenges of promoting your own film, James is with Indie Rights so we talked about his decision to go with them. And of course we talked about some classic action movies and what's influenced his movie. Enjoy!
Check out the re-release of Jim's first solo directing feature The Witches Hammer - out now on amazon
https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/video/detail/B0F235F4T8/ref=atv_dp_share_cu_r
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HONEST, OPEN ADVICE ABOUT YOUR FILMMAKING CAREER
Are you about to leave Uni with a filmmaking degree? Or want to change careers and work in a creative industry? We want to give you the tools you need to enter the real world of production or freelancing. Honest and open career advice from people in the business.
We also talk to those in other creative industries to discuss their careers, the potential cross over with film production and practical tips for a successful and fulfilling career.
Join the community: http://www.thehonestfilmmaker.co.uk
[Music] hi Jim here and you're listening to the honest filmmaker podcast career advice from people in the business this week I'm speaking to director James cuchet James made a bunch of short action films before moving on to his feature film Lost Phoenix the film was shot during covid with a very small crew small budget it's an actual martial arts film I talked to James about the challenges of shooting an action film on a micro budget we talked about how difficult it was shooting during covid the advantages and disadvantages of that we talked about the challenges of promoting your film he's also with Indie R so we talked a little bit about his decision to go with them and of course we talked about some classic action movies and what's influenced his movie enjoy so tell me a little bit about yourself and your rote into film making uh so my route into film making started when I was 10 uh I saw this TV special about Ray Harry Housen uh who made all these great you know dinosaur effects all these great monsters effects back in the 60s and 50s and I think maybe into the 70s and one of the things they showed was this little stop motion he did when he was six years old he basically made a little claymation version of himself and a little bear and basically it's like this 20 second clip of a bear hunting him in his backyard and I'm like that's amazing he was six and I'm I'm I'm 10 I can do this not realizing like all right what do I need all we had was this like uh this rocket launcher video camera um that would you know takes fullsize VHS cassettes and I had to learn the timing of how long it would take from when you press the button to when the tape starts going and then stop it so I could actually like get one frame of Animation so for about five or six years I was just doing these little stop motion videos and it wasn't until I want to say I After High School I went to to uh serve in the Air Force and after that I went to college and that's where I'm like all right I want to get into making movies I want to make action movies I don't know why it's kind of a thing and I started doing that in 2005 and in 2020 which is probably the worst time in the world to say hey let's make an action feature I made it my first feature linked action movie right okay so you said I was going to ask you actually why action so if you don't know why can you give me what's what give me some movies that that you aspire to be as good as or that have inspired you to make action I mean I I wouldn't say it was maybe probably mid teens I really started to kind of discover like action movies through my parents VHS collection they would they would get movies on Pay-Per-View tape them so I had access to stff like you Striking Distance and True Lies and Terminator 2 and the rock and all these just like got really really into them because I think maybe I just really enjoyed the craft uh because there's a lot of technicality to it there's a lot of you know it's it's very real world it's not necessarily like sci-fi where it's a lot of VFX it's like well no how do we how do we jump a bus across a missing section of Highway and do it for real and that along with I think it was um what got me into wanting to make movies movies was Jurassic Park and seeing this like I bought a VHS tape of the making of that movie because from the time it was in theaters to the time the movie came out on video was like a year so that tape was the closest I had to being able to watch it and getting to see just the process and all the the the the problem solving and all the creativity that goes into making a movie like that I think that's kind of like okay this is I love this aspect of it I think this is really fascinating and I just started getting more and more into Hong Kong movies and like John Woo that was also around the time when the Matrix was coming out so I was the the' 9s were like this Golden Era for Hollywood action and I caught right at the perfect time for that and then it all kind of fell apart when they decided hey you know we could just shake the camera around and edit really fast and call it an action movie and no one will know any different so as I was actually getting into making movies that's when the quality of Hollywood would action movies kind of like took a nose dive and I was part of this online community of people who were just like no we want to do it like we want to do it like Jackie Chan did we want to do it like you know John Woo did we want to do it like you know John McAn did and so we kind of all viewed ourselves is like this we were carrying a torch for kind of a a type of movie that wasn't really being made at the time and so yeah like learned kept on growing like I have interest in other genres but for whatever reason action movies just kind of kind of spoke to me differently yeah yeah I can understand that and that was a golden era and I get I know exactly what you mean about the editing which is interesting because you edit you edited your feature film as well so I imagine that's obviously if you want it edited a certain way and you're directing it and it's action so are you a are you a a martial arts person are you you know how to fight or are you is it just something you're kind of into uh I've I I've never fought competitively but I have been training and what in various stuff since I was 18 I kind of always kept running into a problem especially in college where it's like okay I'm taking full-time courses at the University plus I'm working one maybe sometimes two part-time jobs plus making movies and also trying to you know train in like you know Kung Fu or something and I would hit a Breaking Point and something would have to give and usually it's like sorry martial arts you're G to have to take a back seat because movies are I I I love making movies just a little bit more than I love like training but I do I do try to keep on going with that like I recently trained in CRA magga uh really enjoy like wink John kickboxing that kind of thing and it's really great to be able to bring that that understanding of like you know body mechanics to like fight choreography and St coordination but um yeah it's I I've I wish I had more experience in kind of the Kung Fu side of things because uh yeah you look at Hong Kong and like the really really intricate handwork and the Really intricate fight scenes I wish I could do that but I'm kind of like as you can see with lost Phoenix uh it's a little bit more of like the old school like vanam style of fight scene where it's like not super complex but it's high impact and I also really enjoy that too because I like kind of non nonsense type of action and that's what I leaned into for this right and so I I noticed on your YouTube channel you got a bunch of you've done a bunch of short films which kind of seem like you're warm up for this feature film MH um give me the pitch for lost Phoenix so tell me what the film's about so lost Phoenix was born of this a really dark idea that I had during the pandemic I mean we all remember lockdown it sucked I was very clearly suffering from depression and I had this really horrible thought what would it be like if if you woke up right now with amnesia and you couldn't remember anything from before this so this is your reality like the the pandemic the protests I don't know uh how much you know about um kind of like black lives matter but that was like if there was two big two three main factors of 2020 was covid black lives matter presidential election it was a very traumatic year and like imagine waking up and like that's your world is that that trauma is your world and then it's like well what if what if you didn't have any proof of your of your uh identity it's like well Homeland Security will probably come and try to like take you away so like it slowly morphed from this really kind of dark idea into an amnc action thriller set during 2020 and the reason for it um kind of being said that time is a combination of safety and also um a little bit just like Logistics I had been working on my what would have been my first feature but Co effectively killed it um and when it came time to like oh I can try to make another movie I had been looking at these other projects these other shows these other movies that were filmed during lockdown and you could it was always weird whenever you'd watch something was clearly made during lockdown and pretended like covid didn't exist like uh like Mission Impossible dead reckoning every frame of that movie you can feel the pandemic you can feel them having to almost most relearned film making uh on the Fly and the movie looks and feels so weird the blocking is all so weird but it was all Logistics and I real I thought you know I don't want to do that this set in 2020 if guys want to fight they kind of have to have masks on uh how do I make it not look stupid having to put masks on like well ninjas are a thing in cinema so let's just pull from that but um yeah a lot of so the things like oh Everything feels very empty and uncanny well there's a reason for that like everybody's communicating through technology as opposed to being face to face much of the movie there's a reason for that so it doesn't feel stilted U it kind of it very much dates itself but not in a negative way yeah and it's funny you should say that because I saw when I saw the poster I assumed it was a ninja thing was like he's got mask on he's a ninja but I did not realizing it was related to the time it's period it's set in so the um because I haven't managed to see the film yet I'm looking forward to seeing it trailer looks awesome um your lead actor is a black guy is that related to the black lives matter does Race come into it or was he the perfect person because of fighting skills and happen to be the leading man so that's a so the the lead actor's name is Juan draw uh he is uh of Haitian descent and what's interesting is he and I met about a year prior like we we actually lived in the same apartment building together and I was filming something and I came down to meet this to meet this actress and I see here's this dude like dressed real sharp um talk you know chatting her up and I walk up he introduces himself talks to me about wanting to be in movies and there was nothing there were no roles left for the that particular movie but I never forgot this guy like it's like like I kept on I'd see him around every so often but like yeah like never forgot we made a really good impression and so when this movie was kind of in its very infin idea um initially the main character would have just been a white guy and then it's like well okay but no what if it's this this other guy this like this like really like charismatic but also guy had never acted before he had never done acting he had never done anything like that but he had a lot of presence he had a lot of Charisma and so in like October of 2020 we I decided to shoot a proof of concept short and part a significant part of that proof of concept shows up in the movie Just To See like okay does is this going to work can we make a movie during this P like this lockdown is he can can I kind of direct him well enough that he can still give a good performance despite his lack of of you know experience and training and it worked out perfectly it worked out beautifully and so I'm like all right let's let's go and do this but at the same time if there was ever anything like socially relevant or precient about this movie was almost entirely by mistake right like it's like yes you can't talk about America in 2020 without talking about covid without talking about black lives matter but it never it never really Dives deep into that um it's just kind of like well no this is this is happening during this time and it comments on it but at the same time it's mostly focused on you know this guy trying to find out who he is is while dodging like you know immigration detention and then finding out oh there's a bunch of like there's there's this domestic terrorist group who happen to know who I am and they are really angry at me for some reason uh so it just kind of it does that Thriller thing where it's like how how bad can I make this guy's KN and that's just kind of the the basis for the the story right right right okay so the two things people always ask about Independent films where did you get the money from to make it and what's it shot on okay so the easiest one is the it's shot on a Blackmagic pocket 4K okay in Blackmagic raw really great camera also very problematic camera very fussy I actually had to do a modification on it so that because I don't want to put extra monitors I like to uh I like to run light uh and kind of keep it as efficient as possible so I had a mod done where you can could actually move like tilt the screen up and down because otherwise it's stationary and that made filming action scenes 10 times easier but um as for the budget it came from a number of places but it's pretty much a self-funded movie uh so I think we got like 2,000 from crowdfunding um we got a few we government sent out stimulus checks uh and those stimulus checks essentially went to the movie and the rest of it was kind of like throw it like kind of like cobbled together from money that I was earning and it was kind of this fun um we would keep I would keep running out of money but I would strategically run out of money and like all right we're gonna go on a quick Hiatus for a few months because you know it was in Virginia the summers are excessively hot kind of to the point of dangerous or like taking a break for the holidays so that would give me this perfect opportunity to go and find a way to raise more money for so we could like start so we started back up we would have enough cash in the end it cost about $10,000 to make that movie um it doesn't look or feel like a $10,000 movie which was the goal but um yeah it kind of reminded me of my days as a college student where I would have to figure out like okay so what bills do I have to pay and what bills can I like you know put off paying so I can eat this month and that so it kind of remind of like being kind of like being poor just like the the maneuvering of of funds so like we can keep the lights on um and you know not starve I think you you've just described film making haven't you that's how can you do this and that okay which one has to be thrown out this one this cost too much money yeah it's nonstop like that now you said the black magic 4K which immediately made me think oh God am I right saying there's no I focus on that so are you what you just on a wide lens for the whole thing or how's that so I got oh God yeah I I still like to this day I still wonder like how does this movie look as good as it does because I was using Panasonic lenses and they do this thing called focus by wire so they'll spin forever it's entirely digital Focus so yeah and if you spin it slowly versus fast it will it won't end at the same place so I have to get really good at pulling Focus manually with these really finicky lenses with this camera that did not have autofocus at all when it came time to do the fight scenes I would try to stop The Lens down to go as as deep focused as I could get away with but I also found myself using wide lenses because I really like the effect of you know when you throw a punch past a wide lens it looks like it's coming at you so you kind of like get that more visceral feel as opposed to shooting from like a long lens and having everything be you know shallow Focus but yeah I as much as I loved that camera I can honestly say it might have actually been possibly the worst camera given the style of filming I was doing and what I was actually trying to make yeah yeah yeah yeah that's what occurred to me when you said it I was thinking how how the hell we watch the trailer and we thought oh this looks good this was like it's a had a bit of money spent on it um but and I'm assuming you're saying you're pulling Focus so you're filming and focusing at the same time so that's yep nuts on an action movie um so then the other thing is uh if you're thinking of making an action film on $10,000 how did you handle did you have any special Insurance did you just wing it were you ever concerned someone was going to get injured or were you what did you do about all that sort of stuff because that's what would keep me up at night uh yes so um we kind of winged it with the insurance but whenever I'm doing because I was also the choreographer and I was also the stunt coordinator because you know why wear one hat when you can wear 20 um everything I do with a fight scene or an action scene in general is designed for safety like make it look make it look interesting make it look exciting but also make it as safe as possible and a lot of these people lot of these actors had either never done a fight scene before or they had very limited experience with fight scenes and so I worked with them I didn't have because of the the pandemic and limited budget and time I didn't have time to go into deep training with them so I was always sure to like teach him Basics like okay here's teach them how to give and receive a movie hit so they knew how to react they knew how to throw without hurting each other um footwork and distance so that way like they're not shuffling and tripping over themselves and they're also at a far enough distance they can get like a good extension of a a move without being like too close and hitting the other person and then the third one was Rhythm you know making sure that everybody is kind of on the same pacing everyone's in the same timing and that helped make things a lot safer and then the other thing was if we would go in training and like practice and it's obvious that people didn't feel comfortable doing the movement then I would change the movement so I would a lot of people kind of came with what they had like one guy uh one actor basically sent me a clip of him doing Capa and so I'm like okay well guess what you're doing in this movie he had never done Capa for a movie before he' only ever thrown like you know a couple punches like why why would no one use this you know the lead actor uh has like really he has like long legs so his kicks look great so he throws a lot of kicks uh the lead villain and you can see in the trailer um is a good friend of mine who is an eido practitioner so he's really good with a katana and so I'm kind of taking all these actors like existing skill sets and using them to kind of the best potential I can yeah but that reminds yeah that that reminds me uh so I did an I've done an action film I did a vampire action film called The Witches Hammer years and years ago it's my first debut feature and I shot it on 35 mil wow yeah not a lot of money at all and bear in mind how big those cameras are we had we actually we uh we rented the cameras um from Panavision in the UK and I was told when we took them that they were the same cameras that they shot Tim Burton's Batman on so we were that much ahead of them I was like oh my God so we shot them on these big massive cameras um and I know exactly what you're talking about because we I was fortunate enough to have a fight choreographer but people would turn up who knew how to fight and I'd sort of be watching him over there and he'd be doing his warm-ups or something and then he'd do a cool jump and I'd instantly be like well that's in the movie that you're doing that that's the first thing you do when you get into the scene is that jump I've Just Seen there because it just looks like we've choreographed it all into the film um so sales and distribution you're with Indie rights um did you consider another sales and distribution path was it always in the rights did you speak to Convention sales agents how did you approach that for a minute I considered film Hub but i' been listen I'm I was a kind of avid listener to of um indie film hustle and like about every one every year or so that he would have Linda come in do an episode and every year she would talk about kind of the new paradigm like every year was something different like oh this year it's it's like you know Amazon Prime this year it's tub this year it's YouTube that now feels like fossum might be the next you know Frontier and listening to her talk and have seeing also like the the the kind of the very good positive reputation Indie rice has all I could think was like she's not living in the 90s like a lot of people seem to want to she's really kind of focused on you know what's the next move what's the next Frontier where are things going and so that's why I'm like no she's not trapped in the past she's very much like focused on the future and that's the per that's the kind of person I would want to be in business with and so yeah like they were pretty much always my my main focus I was like I'm gonna distribute through them and also having gone through them I've learned so much that I'm gonna apply to my next project um because yeah like the the movie itself cost 10 grand I will say this I think I learned more on lost Phoenix than I did from the previous decade of film making just the amount of things you learn and you have to learn like all the I used every trick I had on that movie and then had to learn new tricks just to get it over the finish line and then learning about distribution which I I'll be honest I suck at I really I'm not I'm not great at promotion apparently um but yeah they they've been great and I don't really I've had other people try to be oh you should to be talk distribut maybe talk to these guys like I'll I'll do it but kind of India rights is kind of my my priority like they're kind of like my first option yeah yeah yeah and how's your have you had the same kind of experience with them yeah I mean for us we' always gone down a conventional route and gone for sales of distribution we'd done the thing we' walked around the pet at can we'd speak spoken to all the sales agents we'd been promised loads of things you know what I mean seen all these sales reports and he's oh and even like back in the day we got advances um and it was a big step actually going with Indie rights because it it is a completely different way of doing things in that the onus is almost completely on you to promote it obviously they've got channels that they're connected with so they can get you on them um and they've got places to put the film but obviously the onus is on you to promote it so yeah so far so good um the're the only um sales and Distribution Company I've work with that actually send me an email every quarter you know some of them you just never hear from them again um and I've had too many friends have their movies stolen by Distributors uh and hearing the horror stories behind it oh it's yeah some friends a friend had a film with a distributor this happened to two people actually they went to K went up to the booth and went oh hi you're representing our film and they had to look through their catalog to try and find it wouldn't believe the filmmaker was like have we hang on a sec let's have a look oh yeah we have so that's that's the last thing you want to hear um so yeah so I think this has been interesting the other thing they do which I found really useful is actually give you advice so give you a PDF of his how to promote your film and give you a report and say this is what's happening and it's all cold hard facts and if you don't like it tough you've just got to learn to live in the world where these things are happening so yeah so far so good um and how long have you when when did your film come out uh January almost exactly a year ago uh January of 2024 I think January 10th was uh the the movie's birth we'll call it the movie's birthday the movie's birthday and have you been pleased with the uh cash that's coming in from it so I I went into you know making the movie figuring okay I have a bad feeling that the streamers pay the films the filmmakers peanuts for everything and literally everything I've seen has confirmed that suspicion like you know the it's like oh my God got so many views and like it's 50 bucks like that's it um it's it's kind of rough out there and I think that's that's been the the the basis of it but also the fact that they give you a report for like the what thousand or so films they repres you do get a better sense of where you fall within within that like we like lost Phoenix is I would say kind of toward like the middle of it's very much kind of like falling with the average but I think that I just I kind of I wouldn't say I need to do better promoting it but at the same time it kind of gets harder and harder all the time as you know social media is great if you have a a platform or a good presence but then you also have to worry about did they change algorithm uh are they blocking or they are they throttling posts because well why would we let you do this when we can ask you to pay us money yeah uh back and then you pay the money and then you find out oh all the traffic it got was Bots yeah yeah yeah there is that yeah it's it's it's messy and I really do want to try to find I want to try to find like other ways uh I've considered you know can I buy ad space on the on like Roku devices the Roku Channel because you'll have like you know the the screen saver the Roku City and occasionally a promotion for a movie or a show will just like go Float by um because it doesn't it doesn't really feel like uh it feels like social media is kind of a lot less useful than it used to be and the fact that we don't have anything better is really kind of a bummer yeah definitely it's a is a it's a really tough uh part of the process to navigate and it's even more painful because like you say working with someone like Indie Brits there are other people like that popping up that you think okay I've got someone there they've got channels they've got a route for my film now I've got to promote it now I can just scream about it to my own family and friends on Facebook and Instagram but you know they can only watch it a certain amount of times so I where else do I go with it um is a bit of a challenge do what's been the best Avenue do you think that you've used to promote the film I went out of my way to try to get onto podcasts uh especially like action movie podcasts horr movie podcasts so I think early on I I kind of like went as went all in on that as much as I could and it did it it did move the needle but there was also a really cruel irony to it because the more visibility the film got the more one star reviews we were getting on IMDb so we basically got like every time I would go on a podcast the film would drop one whole point on IMDb so it's like this this sucks like there's no way like even if you don't like it there's no way this is worth one star so it literally is like people coming in and trolling and I then would find out from other filmmakers this is a common problem you know people come in just like one star and leave and that's it because they don't even have to leave a review you yeah you I I I'm past I mean if you saw some of the reviews for the very first film I made and I used to keep them because they just made me laugh so much these reviews some of the things people would say um but now that's all I miss that I miss little review where someone gives you their actual opinion now like you say it's faceless and it is a little bit meaningless because you can go on IMDb you can see I don't know what I could pick a film like aliens and it would get like a seven do you know what I mean you like you want about mov 10 yeah exactly so to rate somebody there's there's I mean to give a film a one it's got have offended you in some way the no movie is a one unless it's completely against everything you stand for so yeah it happens unfortunately and I think IMDb need to do something about it because I think their waiting should be adjusted accordingly because it's it happens like you said happens to every single Indie filmmaker pop a film up there and then you get blasted and usually I think those ones come from illegal download sites anyway I think because I've seen chatter on those I mean have you had much experience with piracy with a film um so tons uh the film got pirated within the first week but um what was interesting was I would go on to I would go onto these like pages and read kind of the user reviews and it was some of just the most vile like like vicious things like why are what happened to you that you're gonna what what happened to you that you feel like you know you need to go online and say this thing because about a person you've never met o over a movie you probably didn't even fully watch and or in in this in this case stole and it was kind of I I don't know it's it's I think that um because I've encountered people who have who have actually seen it and or like you look at reviews from someone who's actually seen it you can normally tell like okay did they number one did they watch it number two did they fully watch it or were they scrolling on their phone and half watching it because a lot of people kind of like hey there's all these continuity errors in your movie like did you watch the movie like did you not notice where these things like straight up was said um but the thing is it would be it wouldn't be so bad if that stuff didn't negatively impact you and this doesn't like bother doesn't bother me personally because it's like okay okay clearly like all right if you feel like you need to like you know if you're so like hurt you need to like hurt other people and you know whatever but when you find out like oh yeah this the poor rating can actually negatively impact your ability to like sell overseas and you're like oh so this troll these like trolls are actually like negatively impacting my film's like earnings that's when it becomes kind of a problem because you know you want to make money so you can make more mov and when you're you know when every time you promote it uh like you get like a flood of trolls hitting you it's it's hard right you know you want to you need to get the word out but then every time you do your film suffers for it yeah yeah which is one of the reasons Indie filmmakers need to watch more indie films and rate them talk about them and kind of share between each other ABS we love making films and you know even if a film The the main problem I think is you're competing with a John Wick movie in someone's head you're competing with something that's had that much money spent on it because they're pirating that as well so yeah you know they're GNA P both movies and go well this one's not very good it's like well no you're judging it against John Wick so not I don't know if you're are you a John Wick fan or not hate ited or is that quite long takes I'm trying to think how in my brain so I love John Wick but my love for John Wick has kind of dissipated as it kind of became more how do I put this the last one just did not do it for me it's like this movie it's very long and it's ultimately pointless like they they probably should have ended it at part three that felt like a really nice clean ending but no we got to keep it going and the on a technical level it's really cool but on the narrative level it's like it was just pointless like John was the least interesting character in his own movie yeah um the thing I didn't like was the bulletproof suits I can't you can't have a bulletproof suit I'm sorry you've got that's too that's too much it's pointless bulletproof suit oh hang on you haven't got a bulletproof suit in the film no God no yeah I I mean once they started introducing that and suddenly everybody has them or you have hey we have a guy with we have a guy with an attack dog like well cool but we had h Barry with two attack dogs in the previous movie and it felt like they were running out of ideas there I think my biggest problem with those movies is and think something I'm a big fan of with action movies is brevity like there were so many cases where like oh this action Scene goes on for like 12 minutes when there was maybe six or seven minutes of actual ideas and you just like so we're just literally watching John Wick take out faceless Goons an army of faceless goons and eventually he started seeing the same things repeated over and over I'm like guys just be I I know the stuntman worked hard but you kind of have to cut this down if like this bloated 12 minute sequence would have been a great seven minute sequence yeah like the the the bag the the the the bag of tricks they have is not deep enough it's like if it's a jackiechan movie and they have like a 15minute action scene like okay that's going to be awesome because that guy's got an endless bag of tricks yeah but with Wick it's like they don't quite have that yet and you know because Keanu is great but Keanu is an actor who trains for this as opposed to you know a former stunt man who is who can do all of it and that kind of over time as these movies got more and more bloated it kind of lost me yeah yeah yeah and um what I was going to ask you was so you made the film You released the film M if you could go back in time and tell yourself something something that you wish you'd known at the very beginning what would that be take more pictures and have somebody there to do BTS um but at the same time I think the fact that um the everything was so Bare Bones actually helped us with the whole the covid of it all uh normal like for the most part the there would maybe be two or three actors at most and then two two people behind the camera including myself maybe three on a good day but what that did was it allowed us to not be too crammed together where there were never too many people there so we got through PR like two almost two full years of the shoot uh without anyone getting sick it was the second to last shoot that I and one of the actors uh got sick uh thank there was like seven of us there that day which is the most crowded we've ever had it thankfully only two of us got sick but um but yeah like the The Bare Bones of it really helped us to like move faster uh allowed us to kind of get more stuff and also to not you know get not not become a super spreader event um like we didn't say for example we never had a sound person the entire movie okay yeah the entire all of it was done using Wireless Labs MH and I got to like haven't gotten see this movie in the theater I was like oh this actually does sound good in theater speakers how like you would never when I was making it there was always that concern like is just GNA sound okay and turns out it does do and just to cover off so you said Still's BTS so I'm assuming you want that stuff to market the film with yes yeah because so that is yeah so I'm I'm working on I'm actually working on the Blu-ray right now and I wanted it's like okay I wanted to have you know value outside of just having the movie I feel like the Blu-ray DVD special feature is kind of a lost art and so I since I don't have any behind the scenes video or behind the scenes photographs I'm basically having to rely on commentaries but I'm doing a director's commentary that is gonna just go in depth into just the making of the film all the tricks and techniques that went into making it how do you kind of get something like this done for you know less than the cost of a used car um because yeah if when when you watch movie there's a lot of locations there's quite a few action sequences there's a like say like 10 to 12 uh characters with speaking speak like speaking parts and that you know where and it kind of like flies in the face of a lot of like the whole like micro budget films where it's like well minimal locations minimal characters and we just kind of threw that out the wind threw that out the window like nope we're GNA have t a whole bunch of locations but we're going to film in them quickly and we're GNA have a whole bunch of actors but because it's the pandemic a lot of them are communicating through uh like technology so you don't have to get five people in a room together you can just be like oh well conversation between three people three different locations it's a pain to schedule those different nights but it's also easy to schedule one person and maybe one behind the scenes crew member to kind of feed them the the other characters dialogue so it was just a lot of um kind of like going against conventional wisdom yeah like yeah we're gonna do a Michael Bay shot the $10,000 movie like and yeah we we did a I want to say we did a pretty decent job of it yeah yeah yeah it's you you have to sort of think on your feet and make make stuff up um so believe right so that's interesting so how how are you are you authoring that yourself or you going through a company what are you doing for that uh as is the case with pretty much the whole rest of the movie I'm authoring it myself um thankfully there's a lot of there's a lot of resources online that kind of teach you how to do it um I think I actually have uh software that's designed specifically for creating it but the but you still have to build like what's the the creating the menu video and creating the uh the special features and creating the box artart and just all that stuff which is fun these These are good skills to have but at the same time it does get uh it can get a little bit um exhausting I remember after the film was done not quite realizing how burned out I was for a long time and it was weird that like I didn't I don't think I really started to come out of that burnout until I started adapting the movie into a video game and didn't have and didn't and wasn't doing every little part of it yeah and I was goingon to AR about that actually because I saw that come up as a Game Boy Color so is that that's a playable game if you've got a Game Boy an old game boy is it how's that work yeah so it is so basically about a little about six months after the movie came out we released lost Phoenix for the Game Boy Color um it's a five level platformer like you know you swap between like the two main characters uh kind of the the story you can play the game without actually spoiling the movie because I took so many liberties with the story to kind of make it a more fun game but you can play it using you can play it us in a web browser as it's available you can also play it using a Game Boy emulator uh for Game Boy Color but also uh we're actually about to have a physical release of the game from this company called project retro games and it's gonna be like 500 unit run but the first 50 you also get uh lost Phoenix on VHS which if you have told me if you had told me a few years ago oh yeah your first beat is gonna have a VHS release and you're gonna be really excited about that release I I don't think I would have believed you but one of the fun Parts there was it's going to be a full screen so it's gonna be like the 4x3 you know old school TV so I had to create a 4x3 version of the movie and that was interesting because the the actual format is pretty wide it's like 2.4 so I literally had to like cut it in half and for most scenes it was not too hard a lot of the dialogue didn't have a problem but the fight scenes I noticed they started to look a lot more Jason born like because you know the the shots weren't quite as wide you didn't have quite as much information it was a lot tighter and a lot more like intense so it does have it has a different feel to it so I'm very excited to I'm just very excited to see that release um and also the the game is just a lot of fun too yeah yeah yeah it's a nice little extra to have um so I was going to just ask you a couple of fun questions just to finish off so um we talked about action movies we've talked about uh influences that kind of stuff so give me your be who's your best action star who are you are you like a are you a Jackie chairman are you a vanam who's your kind of acual movie star favorite oh man at this point I would say pfor pound might still be Donnie Yen the guy is like 61 the guy is 61 still putting out just amazing movies um he has this really great this really deep backlog of films you can go back into like his pre uh pre uh Sao long days where he was doing stuff in you know Germany in he was in a Highlander movie he was uh he did like like you know all this all this like he directed a couple things that just are bizarre films so I'd say he's probably like the one of the most reliable for me yeah yeah yeah and he's in Rogue one so he wins oh yeah he's in he's in the one Star Wars movie that hasn't been ruined yeah he's yeah it's that movie is perfect s my top top five I think on letter box love it he's yeah sold um okay so and uh you don't have to pick a DM one but best action movie ever made what what would that be for you you know I I've I think about this a lot I would say for me probably the one of the I go to speed actually I really think that speed it understands not just spectacle but it's also a really like great story for an action movie like it's like even the opening sequence would have be its own movie in another world but this is just like cold open because to tell a good action movie story is it's not the same as telling a drama you know it has to you know have a lot of momentum to it it has to you kind of have to paint in Broad Strokes because of this the style of things but also just you know it also has enough personality like the the you get to know all the characters on the bus so you at least care about these people that and it's also not about you know a sociopath going around killing a ton of people it's like this one cop trying to save all these people on the bus and so it's it's easy to root for and not have to feel uncomfortable about uh later on but and also just yand de bont's just his Direction is amazing I don't know if I didn't even mention him before but yeah that guy he had this amazing run back in the 90s and then just kind of he kind of went away I think he's his producer now but yeah like speed is is easily one of the best hope you enjoyed that episode if you'd like to hear from more industry professionals how they got into the business and how you can do the same or you just want to listen to some cool stories from movie sets around the world then please do subscribe to the honest filmmaker podcast[Music]
