Oh God, yeah. I have to say that when I first started doing them, at Sundance was the first Q&A, it was the most unexpected, bizarre situation I’ve ever been in in my life. First of all, I was against them. I was like, “I don’t want to do a Q&A. It’s going to be hard.” And it was. One of my biggest challenges with it, I think, was having to justify myself as a filmmaker while severing my personal emotions and attachments to all the material. Ultimately I think it inevitably became like therapy because it’s not the typical Q&A where it’s like, “Why did you use this D.P.? What was your choice of casting?” It was more like, “How is your mother doing now?” It was very strange. It’s a Q&A that I have to do all the time over and over, so it becomes very intense. It’s very intense.
I’m sure audiences feel like they know you. That’s got to be a weird feeling to let so many strangers into your head, so to speak.
It is a weird thing. And you know, I never, ever anticipated this. This wasn’t a stunt or a gimmick. This was a private thing I was doing for a long time. The fact that it’s gotten out there, there was definitely some reluctance to put the film out there. I mean, really. It was like, “What’s going to happen?” I was thinking, “Am I going to be exploited? Is my mother going to be exploited? Have I opened Pandora’s Box? Would they think that I was exploiting my mother?” And one of my biggest fears was, even right as we were looking for distribution, my biggest fear was that whoever the distributor was going to be was going to pick my movie up and sort of assume it as ‘found art’ and sort of position me as a “director” in the sense that I would be ultimately buffooned. And they would exploit the whole thing, and me along with it, in like the worst way. That was one of my biggest fears.
Would you tell other filmmakers to make films the way you did with “Tarnation,” on a $200 budget and using your computer?
Yes. I would say at the end of the day, if you have a good story to tell I think that has a lot to do with it. At the end of the day I would absolutely love – if I could get anything out of this movie – to be able to inspire other filmmakers to get out there who never thought that they could have a voice or make a film because they were too intimidated by the film industry, like I’ve been.
I went all around the world in the weirdest way trying to make myself a filmmaker. And for some reason, I moved to New York as an actor and went to acting school because I was disenchanted by the whole idea of what the film industry encompassed. The amount of money it took and the contacts and the this and the that. So I thought that in my vague, blurred out plan, the way to get into the film industry was by way of acting for now. By being on the other side of the camera I thought that maybe if I could prove myself as an actor, then I would one day be behind the camera. I think at the end of the day, we do live in a day and age where anybody can make a film right at home. I really, truly in my heart of hearts believe that.
Gus Van Sant said it not too long ago that there really should be no more excuses. If you want to make a film, just go out there and make it. The latter part of my film was shot on a domestic camera that I got from Best Buy. Actually that my grandfather got for me as a gift like four years ago. Little did he know he was going to contribute to making the monster that this movie has kind of become (laughing). Anybody can do it with very little money and I would love to be able to be an inspiration for that.
