What took so long between “Charlie’s Angels 2” and now to get this finished?
“We edited the whole movie on Brett’s laptop computer. We spent a couple months doing that. We’d also been editing the movie while we were shooting because we had no idea how the movie was going to end, but we figured we’d edit the rest of the movie accordingly.
What we did was after we got the movie finished, we wound up going to do the film festival circuit because we wanted a distributor. It’s hard to sell a movie that you have $1,100 dollars on a DV camera that there hasn’t been a movie like this in existence before. This is the first of its kind. It’s a hybrid date romantic comedy that was shot like a documentary. And there was no blueprint on how to successfully market this movie, so it was hard to sell it. All the studios who saw the movie loved the movie, but they were scared to take the risk in promoting it and marketing it and getting people into theaters. So we’ve spent a long time.
It was a long road to get this movie sold and to get it into theaters. We turned down offers to turn this movie into an eight episode reality TV show. We turned down a lot of money to put this on television. We really banded together and believed in our project enough to say, ‘No, this belongs in a theater. We cut it like a movie, it’s our dream to get this into theaters, we’re going to go for it.’ You know, if you don’t take risks, you have a wasted soul. So it took a long time to get the distributors interested, and then they saw how it played at the film festivals. We won all the film festivals we played at beating movies like ‘Napoleon Dynamite,’ ‘Garden State’ and ‘Super Size Me’ for the audience award for best feature. These are movies that we adored, so when we beat them out for that award, we were just freaking out. And so were the distributors. So it was just a long time coming and here we are, two years later.”
Are you afraid this might typecast you for your future career?
“Nah, no, no, not at all. I’m not somebody who ever wanted to be in front of a camera. I have been getting a lot of oncamera offers, but for me, anything I did in front of the camera would be to further my career behind the camera as a director. Kerry and Jon have their own production company called Lucky Crow Films and Brett and myself have our own production company called Rusty Bear Entertainment. Between all of us, we have a lot of projects that we have in development that are feature films with a budget much bigger than $1,100 dollars. We want to make some fiction films, get it out there.
The next thing that the four of us are going to do together is that we’re executive producing a TV series based on the movie and inspired by the whole quest in ‘My Date with Drew’ where we follow somebody else trying to make their own lifelong dreams come true in 30 days. We’re going to executive produce that and I’m going to host that and just keep moving along.”
What other types of features do you want to do?
“The ones that Spielberg makes. I want to make movies that inspire, uplift and just are very positive movies for people. That really stemmed from the experience we had with ‘My Date With Drew’ because when you’re playing this movie for audiences and you have them coming up to you and telling you that you inspired them to follow their dreams, that’s a hard high to match. It’s just the best feeling in the world so I want to keep doing that.”
What’s your daily income now?
“I get no money. All the money we got from the movie, we put right back into the movie to promote it and for the marketing, so it has to do well in the theaters for us to see something. And I wouldn’t change anything about this ride for any money amount. It’s been an amazing ride.”
But for money? Do you still work at E?
“I worked at E for a month. I couldn’t do it after that. It was driving me crazy. Then I wound up temping at a company that Brett cuts trailers for, a company called Trailer Park. So I was temp PAing for a while but then I had to stop so I could start this press tour. They give you a per diem, so you can eat and that’s what I’ve got.”
