Let’s start off at the beginning. How did you guys get together and start Outsiders Productions?
Jason: I was supposed to do a senior project in college, Adam had already graduated and Kenny had already graduated, and I had asked Adam to write a script for me and I was going to pitch it to do it, and that kind of fell through. The only way we could do it was for Adam to come back and enroll in one class, so it kind of started from there. And Kenny helped out with that project, and after that was done, we just kind of kept it going.
Adam: Yeah, it was just a stupid endeavor to jump into the deep end of the pool. But we started with a full length movie originally titled Thunder Road, cause I am a hug Springsteen fan. We ended up changing the title to Looking for Hope and that was our first. We were involved in a couple of other full length projects and a short, but we formed the LLC for Charlie. Before then, we had to form a production company for college for the course, and then we formed the LLC for Charlie.
Starting off with a feature length, instead of a short film, is kind of backwards from the way a lot of college students go about it.
It really did teach us a skill set that we had to carry with us, which is you have to wear more than one hat. And to wear a lot of hats, you have to communicate, you have to be able to get in and get out, especially if you are shooting guerilla. We shot a lot of it guerilla. So, we learned a lot shooting that and I think kind of each project we have done, it has added some other angle, some other course we have had to graduate from.
How many films had you shot before you got up to do a Beautiful Day?
Jason: two other ones of our own, three all together that were just ours, we had Looking for Hope, the Cellar which was kind of a short, it was like an hour or so in that range, and then another feature, a comedy bowling alley and we had helped out on one other one.
Adam: As far as what was under the Outsiders label was Looking for Hope, The Cellar, Bowling Alley and then we shot A Beautiful Day. We did Killing Yourself Slowly, a super short.
Kenny: I think maybe one of the biggest reasons, and maybe I am wrong, of not doing a lot of three minute to five minute shorts is because, after college when we formed the group we were all spread out and we were becoming men in the real world.
(LAUGHTER)
Adam: he is speaking for himself
Kenny: But seriously, we were all spread out. A lot of people, I think, who do shorts like that are usually concentrated together and if we would have all been in the same town immediately after college, and we had money for a camera, we probably would have done a few more shorts. And that is a big assumption, so we just kind of put a lot of importance on doing a full length. I mean, if we are going to drive an hour to work on it – that is how we usually did it, from OKC to Ada to Shawnee, that whole area.
Did you have any festival success with those early films?
Kenny: The Cellar won our first award.
Adam: Part of the reason we formed an LLC was to try to raise some money for Charlie. Before that, we would get to the end of those shoots and all of us were putting everything we got into the movies, we are paying for everything, so by the time we get finished and it is time to send it out to festivals, the festivals are costly. We would get finished and then we would say “ok, let’s send it to 10 festivals, which you know, if you are lucky you get into a couple – especially with the level of our budgets and what we were dealing with. So, I feel like by the time we got to the point where we needed to have some cash to put it out there, we didn’t have the cash to put it out there. So we were on to the next project. But yeah, we started developing, that is when we started making our contacts as far as our sound guy, out in California at the time, then he went to Nashville, and other filmmakers. That is how we started building our contacts.
Next came A Beautiful Day, talk a little bit about making that movie and the thought that went into that script especially, because it is a pretty dark movie and its very interesting.
Adam: Well, we had spent a lot of time in post production on Bowling Alley and I wrote Charlie, goodness, like eight or nine years ago. Before we jumped into something that we knew would be pretty expansive like Charlie, I wanted to direct again something short – A Beautiful Day. I wanted to hopefully hone my skills a bit. So, at the time – it is kind of crazy the way world kind of cycles around – but at the time there was a lot of really fear about – I mean, it was post 9/11, so there was a lot of religiosity in the news, a lot of fear about that. I wanted to take that idea and bring it to a small town and play with this sort of haunted Americana. I wanted to be like Rob Zombie comes to Mayberry, although not gratuitous or anything like that – just trying to build suspense through the dialog.
After you got it made, you had the controversy with Bare Bones, do you feel that that helped or hurt in the short term especially and I mean it got you a lot of publicity that you might not have got otherwise but at the same time, is all publicity good publicity in that case?
Adam: I absolutely hated, I absolutely hated it. I was despondent. A Beautiful Day had been entered in the festival, the controversy came around Bare Bones Film Festival, and A Beautiful Day and Bowling Alley were both in that festival – both nominated for multiple awards.
Kenny: … and the short – they all three were nominated.
Adam: They were nominated for multiple awards, and a lot of people worked really hard on those films and put a lot of themselves into them, and we were of course booted. I was absolutely despondent, and I was also upset because I felt like we had put together a thoughtful horror film that I wanted people to think about and compel them, and then it became known for a mistaken publicity stunt. I would never have OK’d that, that was not what was intended. So it got us some notoriety, we still have people asking about it, not you but other people. I can’t speak for these guys, but I was actually devastated by that response because I didn’t want to be seen as a jackass. You know, especially – I mean people were freaked out, people in Muskogee were scared and for the wrong reasons.
So were all three of the movies booted out?
You were able to get in to other festivals in Oklahoma shortly after that.
Adam: we got into deadCENTER.
Kenny: Probably in some part because of it really.
Adam: I would like to think it was on its own merits. I know why I want to believe that it got into deadCENTER, but of course there was some publicity around it and deadCENTER gave us a showing, and we had a good screening, a packed house and great response. So yeah, we ended up screening it, getting some nice response to it, but it was certainly not the road we planned on going down.
You had said you had worked on Charlie Christmas before that, what, tell me a little bit about writing that screenplay. What were you going for with Charlie Christmas?
Adam: Well I mean, now it is kind of obvious, but at the time I would like to think it wasn’t. I can’t remember if it was before Batman Begins. I can’t remember, but I wanted to make a response to some of the Sam Raimi Spiderman movies, and some of the other superhero movies that had come out, and then take that and really address some social issues and tell a love story and tell a Field of Dreams sort of story about a guy and his dad. So really, it was me chunking a whole bunch of things that really, really mattered to me onto the page. It was kind of an experiment in that way. I mean, now a movie like Kickass comes out – great film, funny – and it’s sort of that whole post-superhero movie. But, that is really what I was trying to do, I was trying to acknowledge superhero films in this flick, acknowledge that as a genre, and try to sort of subvert some of the expectation.
One thing that I was thinking is before I saw it was that it is kind of like Kickass or Super, but then after watching it, it is different. It seems like there is a little bit more humanity, because you have the character of Charlie who is not just someone who wants to be a superhero and save people, he is someone who needs to find something in himself. So it seems like it is a superhero movie second, but first and foremost it is about someone trying to figure out who they are.
What kind of things were you looking for when you were portraying Charlie, what other movies did you look at, what other actors did you look at, what were you going for with your portrayal?
Kenny: That is a good question, I don’t know – just a lot of a lonely guys that might have taken a wrong turn. Charlie took, I don’t know if he never took a wrong turn, but he just never took a turn and this is about him finding himself. This may sound funny, I always thought, and it’s always weird to say it in front of Adam cause he is the writer-director, I wonder if that is what he thinks, I always thought it would be like if Rambo never went to Vietnam…
(LAUGHTER)
Adam: I wrote the part for Kenny, I wrote it visualizing him and what I think he can do, his physicality and his good sense of comedy. But it is also, everybody can recall back to school the kid that sat at the table by himself – there is always that kid. And if you talked to him, the kid was nice, maybe, or he was normal, maybe, but everybody had one of those. So there is almost like this outcast quality – kind of the quiet guy that sits in the corner that doesn’t make a lot of the eye contact. So he was supposed to sort of blend in as a character too, something most people can relate to – either they knew that guy or they were that guy. And then, it was written for Kenny, so we talked about it with the performance, a lot of it was just trying to play on some of his own quirks. I mean, Kenny has lost both of his parents, so that was not something that was really used, but it was certainly something he was aware of, and I was aware of when I wrote it.
It seems like you obviously wrote this seven to eight years ago. Since then, the bullying epidemic has really come into the public eye, and one thing that I noticed in the movie is that he might have been a normal person if his dad hadn’t have died. He might have been a normal person when the kids started bullying him, beating him up in the bathroom, and it almost seems like the bullying pushed him further away and that seems to be a very sensitive subject these days. Was this something you were looking at back then, because it is not a new subject, this is something that has been happening over the past 30, 40, 50, 100 years. Was that a subject that you were wanting to approach other than just as a catalyst?
Adam: Without getting into some sort of psychiatric dialogue, I did want to bring in parallels between bullying and domestic violence and in terms of victimization. There are a lot of kids that you can put in almost any room and they are going to get bullied. It is almost like people smell weakness. It is the same thing with women that get into these domestically violent relationships, and they leave one and they get into another. These predators can seem to find them. I really wanted to take these intangible social issues that you can’t ever really put a thumb on. We can’t ever really be John Wayne, go in and punch somebody, and that solves the problem with bullying or with domestic violence. No matter how easy those issues seem to people that aren’t involved, when you are trapped in that world, I think it feels hopeless and so I did want to draw parallels to that. With how Charlie is as a child, he tries to do it by dressing in a costume and he gets beat up, and then when he is an adult he dresses in a costume and he realizes that, you know, putting on a mask – and he never does it – but putting on a mask and going next door and beating up the domestically violent male in the house is not going to save the girl. It is just going to ultimately make it worse. I certainly wanted to bring that in, and that is what we wanted to do with the superhero movie is to acknowledge superheroes. I am a comic book nerd, but we wanted to acknowledge superhero films but to get past the “Super” and put the emphasis on how this guy becomes a “Hero.”
It almost seems like you were saying at the end of the movie that it is better not to fight at times. The entire movie, he is going to go and protect people, but at the end he chooses not to, and by not fighting he saves her. It is almost like it is turned on its head at that point. He was bullied as a kid. She is beat up by her husband and abused very badly. Did they see themselves in each other?
Adam: I think she was far more mature character, and that is why at the end they don’t get together, because there is no way that relationship works. But I think she certainly saw something in him – her scars, her pain was more hidden whereas he is just completely a social outcast. But absolutely there is a kinship there, and I think that when she saw strength in him at the end, whenever he keeps getting up and he is just displaying this strength not in aggression but it is in his ability to keep getting up, I think that is what compelled her, gave her hope, is the recognition of a kindred spirit.
What kind of filmmakers did you look to for, when working especially on this film, what other filmmakers, other movies do you look at to pull inspiration from?
Adam: You know, I am a big fan of Ed Burns and The Brothers McMullen. He has kind of gone back, after kind of being big time, and he is making small films again. I think I could look at Christopher Nolen all day long, there is no way we are going to be able to do what Christopher Nolen does, but looking at Ed Burns, guys like that who shoot these smaller movies, especially back like in the 90s, these talky sort of movies, relationship movies, and trying to see how they set up their shots with no money and how they told their story, I mean that is really what we looked at. I looked at a bunch of action films, and how can we make these punches look mean. I see a lot of independent movies, and some of them can really pull off fighting but most of them really don’t because they are very stale and they are very choreographed. We were lucky to have Kenny, who is a very physical guy, and we had guys that just wanted to get out and play. It was a matter of going over with Jason, setting up our shots, and looking at pretty much every action movie that we could get our hands on.
How did you go about casting the movie?
Adam: We had a casting call, and a lot of it I wrote with people in mind. I wrote Kenny, I knew I wanted to play the neighbor because I thought we would have good chemistry, and I also knew that I felt it was a very sensitive scene and we are not paying people so we need to get people we can trust in there to do those sensitive things. But, we had a casting call for a whole bunch of it in Shawnee and we had a tremendous turn out.
You didn’t find it difficult to find people willing to come and work for almost nothing on a feature length?
How did you afford this financially?
Adam: Well, we got on Kickstarter and we just wanted it to be as aboveboard with everything as possible once we started begging people for money – so that was a direct connection to Kickstarter.
Jason: Also, that protection from the company, us wanting to put a movie out there and actually want to maybe sell it and push it farther than it has gone, if something ever came back then it now falls on the LLC, not financially onto us personally. We had never thought about that before, if anything ever happened before that.
Chad: I think the LLC was trying to take that next step in professionalism. Shooting with insurance is probably the next thing that we need to tackle, although we are not doing action movies right now.
Kenny: The lucky thing with the fighting in Charlie, it was all between friends, like he said, people that we knew, people that I knew and people that just had fun.
How difficult was it to shoot the scene in the kitchen with the attack?
I am sure in Shawnee, you find a lot of the people there don’t have problems with you coming around and shooting in their places, cause I have noticed that in Norman too. I think in L.A. they want you to pay an arm and a leg, but it really helps to shoot it in Oklahoma, because we may not have the best film tax credits here, but we have people that are willing to help a lot.
Adam: Absolutely.
Chad: We had something like over 60 locations we shot in. We paid for like maybe one permit.
Kenny: Yeah, in McLoud.
Adam: None of us, we haven’t made a dime, I mean the process is really beautiful, and I like being involved in it, and then having the support and people that are interested and they care. I mean that’s really a rewarding, that makes it very rewarding. I mean as a storyteller, trying to tell a story, and having people care about the story, want to hear it, it’s nice.
So, you said you are working on something new now and it is not an action movie, what is coming up next?
Adam: Well, we are half way through. We are shooting a pilot episode for like a web/television series, because it is longer than a typical web series. But, it is called Rough Cut. It is about independent filmmakers in Oklahoma, and what we are. That sounds a bit cliché, but with the people we have encountered, and the process we have encountered here, and the insanity that often, frequently accompanies filmmaking here, we think it is kind of a unique endeavor so we are putting together a web series chronicling these filmmakers trying to make a film in Oklahoma with no money. Ultimately, like Charlie is about more than superheroes, ultimately it is about loyalty and under doggedness, you know and the pursuit of happiness.
Adam: We are really trying to integrate other filmmakers, other projects, not that anybody in Austin is going to know the difference, but to make it so it really, really speaks to people here. Obviously that is not the end goal, but it is legitimate to the filmmaking here because there are a lot of people putting together projects, so we are trying to acknowledge that.
Chad: The assumption being that it is not all that different than it would be for a group of people in Austin that are making film, or in Missouri or wherever. It would be the same situation, same things you have to go through, try to make a feature length movie that is really too big for the resources that you have but you do it anyway.
You mentioned that you raised the money for Charlie Christmas through Kickstarter?
Chad: It is an amazing resource for filmmakers like us, if it wouldn’t have been for that, we wouldn’t…
Adam: Between that and social media, Kickstarter and Facebook have completely revolutionized – at least what we do, at the level we are at, is because of it.
Chad: We have done event driven fundraisers, garage sales, and silent auctions and that kind of stuff. But, by far, the Kickstarter stuff, I think it was – what 10 days? – and we had already almost met our goal.
Kenny: I think the one drawback with Kickstarter, at least for us, I see going into the future is that the money we made was largely from family and friends and our network. Now, we are growing that network, because we are growing what we do and who we know, and our social media fan base has gotten bigger, so that helps out. But, I think there is a saturation point where if you want to continue to do something, like for instance with Rough Cut, if we tried to raise money through Kickstarter again it might be a little bit different experience. A little bit harder, maybe, depending on how well you grow your audience online, I think.
I don’t know if you know Kyle Roberts, he is also shooting a superhero movie here in Oklahoma.
ADAM: Is it called Posthuman?
Yes, and they have the IndieGoGo fundraising platform that they went through to raise money, as well as benefit concerts, so it seems that there are a lot of ways to raise money to do this. When I first started, when I was in film school back in 2000, these online things really didn’t exist. I bartended through the entire year to save money to go do something at the end of the year.
Chad: You get a credit card and max it out.
Exactly.
Chad: That is the way it used to be done.
Adam: Either that, or I am going to go around town and put up flyers. Now, you hit a few keys and you are on social media and you are on Facebook and you are reaching out to … At least for us, Kickstarter was the last straw, like we did everything we could up to a certain point and then hit a point where we had to have some cash. We were mostly post, like we have to have fight for this or it is not going to get done.
Jason: We were basically done with it.
Adam: It was audio clean up and score, that is all we had as our minimum. We needed $5,000 for the audio cleanup and score, and like we were saying about A Beautiful Day earlier, when we are done, we are broke and don’t have any money, so we got really lucky. It was a really good thing with Kickstarter to have that money for the festivals to enter all the festivals that since we went past our goal.
Kenny: We could have done a lot more with A Beautiful Day had we had the resources.
Adam: Yeah, we probably sent it to 15 festivals maybe.
Jason: Not nearly the scale we did Charlie Christmas.
Adam: Usually we would spend $500, maybe $600 on festivals.
Chad: Everybody chips in $100.
Jason: We would be tapped out on Charlie, but we got lucky. We had a lot of money left over, we weren’t worrying about it.
What do you think was the hardest part about shooting Charlie Christmas?
Adam: The fight scenes weren’t the hardest, the hardest thing was just finishing. The hardest thing was following the course when you had people quitting. You have, you know, the amount of time it took to shoot it.
How long did it take to shoot it?
Adam: I mean, it is a bit misleading, but we shot for over two years.
Jason: We actually shot for close to three years.
Adam: That is the drawback, I mean that is what you sacrifice when you don’t have money.
Adam: But again, it is misleading because it wasn’t … We would shoot three months of weekends, and we would take off and not shoot for four months because the scheduling wouldn’t work out. And then we would shoot three more months of weekends, and then we would have to end up taking another big long break.
Kenny: The general pitfalls of needing to reshoot something, an actor bailing out, and you just don’t pick that up the next day, you have to schedule the next month or two to get all the key pieces.
Adam: I remember one night in particular when we were shooting, and it was a night shoot, we had everyone lined up to go, we were in town, we were waiting for sunset. Then the actor that we needed bailed, and so everybody – people had driven from the city, people had come from all over the place – and we don’t have a back up, we don’t have a back door. In times like that it made it very difficult. I mean, the fighting was fun. Kenny was like really interested in what he was going to do, so a lot of that was creativity. He and I talked about the use of the weapons and Charlie’s sort of unorthodox style, the way he does things. And we also had a third guy named Troy Scott who had done stunt work at Frontier City and so he really knows how to take a punch and really helped out a lot with going over angles – you know, this looks better here and there and so forth. And then really, once we decided to ditch trying to shoot it with two cameras, because we wanted to be smart and we wanted two cameras – two outlooks – but we didn’t have the equipment to do that. So, we threw a camera in Jason’s hand and away we went.
Chad: Also some trial and error in that with style.
Jason: Yeah, with the fight scenes we were being very handheld and sporadic about the movement that two cameras really didn’t work out, because you would be in the way of one shot half the time.
Adam: And because we had limited lighting, you only have a small area that you can cover, and so you have two people trying to cover the same thing. It doesn’t work.
What kind of lights did you use to shoot the alley scenes?
Adam: For Charlie, we had one light kit and then we utilized a lot of street lights.
Jason: We had a soft box 250.
Adam: One bulb kit that had a 750, a 5 and a 250
Jason: Three lights.
That actually looked really good, lighting-wise considering the fact that is all you had to work with.
Jason: It was another trial and error kind of thing. We started out trying to shoot a lot of it at night, and we tried to shoot in places that were too open, so they ended up looking kind of stagey, not enough light to fill it up.
Adam: Light the background or light your people and not the background.
Jason: We learned if you put the lights in an alley and you have a wall to bounce it off of, it is a lot easier. It still looks big, it is just playing with that.
Kenny: And we made sure, or we learned to make sure, we found locations with good street lights and stuff to utilize.
You said you had people basically flake on you, you had to work around that, does that involve rewriting or does that involve reshooting the scenes they were in before.
Adam: Well, I guess on some occasions reshooting, but a lot of it just involved rescheduling. I mean, our cast was big and we pretty much used everybody that we knew, and that is a big part of it for us. I feel very fortunate as the writer, and the guy directing, to be able to count on a lot of people I knew to act, because if they don’t show up you go to their house and bang on the door until they are ready to go. But we really extended ourselves to the point where it was like, we had tryouts, we had actors come in, and people that nobody knew who said they were actors, and had their headshots and then they bale because we are not paying them. A lot of it was just trying to be sort of agile.