OVERVIEW
Jim Cummings is the producer/director/writer/actor behind acclaimed feature and short films like Thunder Road, The Wolf of Snow Hollow, and The Robbery. His work has garnered multiple Grand Jury Prize nominations and wins at both Sundance and SXSW.
In episode #004 of the Musicbed Podcast, Jim offers empowering advice for filmmakers attempting to break into Hollywood on their own terms. Topics include finding allies among industry gatekeepers, making the most out of DIY distribution, and the years-long journey to overnight success.
Show Notes
Thunder Road — https://vimeo.com/174957219
The Beta Test — https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11738830/
The Wolf of Snow Hollow — https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11140488
David Fincher — https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000399/
Alien 3 — https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0103644/
David Gordon Green — https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0337773/
Halloween Kills — https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10665338/
Sundance2016 — https://vimeo.com/173868076
The Robbery — https://vimeo.com/205973976
Lil Dicky — https://www.youtube.com/@LilDickyRap/videos
Musicbed Podcast — https://linktr.ee/musicbed
Episode #004 Transcript
Jim
You have to create your own industry and your own audience that is going to give a shit about you and your movies. No one will care about your movie as much as you do. You should act that way.
Christian
There’s a lot of things that I want to dive into. But I always just start with—what are you doing right now? What’s your zone right now? In terms of directing and acting and what are you into right now.
Jim
I am acting in a movie, a feature by a first-time feature filmmaker in October in Palmdale. So not too far away. And that’s the first real time I’m acting in a movie that I’m not writing and directing. And I’m the lead. So that’s different for me. And then we’ve written two features that I really like. But I don’t know if anybody’s gonna give us any money to make them.
It’s still a slog to go through Hollywood and get anybody to engage with something. And the only success that we’ve had has been releasing two movies in the last three years. And then celebrities reaching out and saying, hey, I really like that movie, I saw it on Netflix or whatever. And then them luckily being perfect for characters in the scripts that we’ve written. And then they sign on. And then everybody wants to come on and help out with the movie. But it’s still one of those things where we’re not trying to make enormously expensive movies, and we’re still not getting any help. So, I’m in this position of, well, we just spent the last movie making fun of Hollywood pretty hardcore. Why did I think that anything was gonna change?
Christian
Yeah. It’s funny how talent seems to be the crux of whether a movie gets made or not. Especially as a director, I think you really do notice the impact from celebrity versus known talent versus the $100,000 movie you made with your friends. Did you experience any of that coming out of festivals with Beta Test or Thunder Road? Were people biding for your next thing?
Jim
No, I never really had anybody bide for my next thing. There’s this weird misinformation that I think gets spread amongst young filmmakers where if you have a short film and you’re going to a big festival, you have to have some screenplay ready or people are going to ask you, well, what are you doing next? What do you have next?
And that’s just not true, really. A lot of it is just about packaging and talent being attached. So if you can convince somebody through a DM that they should be in your feature, immediately the conversation gets started that the movie is gonna get made. It doesn’t matter what shorts you’ve made before. So, yeah, I mean, no. Short answer. And I’m still in that position of—I can have a feature that I researched for two years, longer than anything we’ve done before, and then still have nobody want to help out. It’s a really strange marketplace right now.
Christian
Did you feel that way coming out of the short run of Thunder Road? Maybe tell me the story of how that got turned into a feature so quickly?
Jim
Yeah, sure. So I was a producer at College Humor, and I was making two sketches a week as a line producer, just budgeting and scheduling these sketches. And then I made the Thunder Road short film in a single day, on a Saturday. It’s one shot, so it had to be a single day. We made it that way because we didn’t have any money, and it was easier and cheaper to do it that way. And so we shot it and then submitted it to Sundance and then it got in and won.
And then for seven months, I did the water bottle tour around Hollywood and met a bunch of really wonderful people that continue to do the thing that we made fun of in Beta Test of—well, let’s keep talking. We’re excited, my god, we’re so excited. And really, I mean, bless their hearts. They’re all in this machine. And they don’t know how to make anything so then they rely on people like us to make stuff.
So for a long time, I thought we couldn’t turn it into a feature, and then had the idea to do it. The short film would be the opening scene of the feature rather than the climax. Then I wrote it in six days or something like that. And somebody that I met on the water bottle tour, my buddy Zach Parker came on and said, well, I would love to help out. The short is really meaningful to me. Let’s do it. And then we ran a Kickstarter campaign because we couldn’t get anybody to take us seriously. And we applied for grants. We did all the stuff that you think you should do to make a $190,000 feature film.
Vanishing Angle, Natalie Metzger, and Matt Miller were always there to support. And they did six of my single-take short films before we did the feature. So, I had been practiced and ready to make something that was longer form. And then we made it, and then it won SXSW, and I’d already written The Wolf of Snow Hollow as a web series for another company. Nobody trusted me to make a feature. I’d never made a feature before—I was only good in web series and sketches and stuff.
And then, as soon as we won SXSW, the people who had rejected The Wolf of Snow Hollow web series were suddenly asking “what’s going on with this werewolf thing? I loved it. Even though I rejected it in this same email chain, I loved it. It was great.”
And so then we had some clout, because of SXSW and getting into Cannes, that The Wolf of Snow Hollow was a viable project. And then we got that greenlit within a week. So, it’s good to hear that you say, how did that get done so fast? It was still just through Kickstarter. It had nothing to do with Hollywood or any of the established channels that I had built over those seven months.
The way the industry works from all this research that we did for The Beta Test, the whole way that the industry talks to creatives is to make them feel inadequate in a thousand different ways. So even if you win the Palme d’Or, their goal is to say, “well, I mean, the script is good, but it needs some work.” And all of this bizarre psychological warfare against creatives, so that they can control them, so that they are subordinates rather than the competition. And it’s really disturbing. I think we all know that when we say “Hollywood,” we know that’s what that means—this bizarre system that we all live in.
And so it was very important for me to circumvent it. It has not become easier as a three-time feature filmmaker, and we have a good scoreboard. A lot of our films have been very well reviewed and loved, and they’ve all been in the black as films. That never happens for an independent filmmaker. We’ve been very, very lucky. And even now, it’s difficult.
There are people who are really wonderful—executives—where I’ll knock on the door and say, hey, I’m really struggling, I really want to get y’all this movie. And they’ll go, “I didn’t even know that. Okay, send us the script. Just text it to me or whatever.” So in that sense, it’s become a lot easier to get past the gatekeeping and the gates in general. But even now, it’s funny. We made a movie making fun of gatekeepers in Hollywood. And I’m still thinking, I have to get approval from these people, from the tuxedos, in order to get anything made. And it’s just not true.
Christian
Do you prefer one way or the other? Because first of all, it was a $2M, $3M movie. And you’ve cut your teeth on these small movies. What is the biggest difference to you in approach? I think some of the obvious stuff that you get with money is obvious. What are some of the more intangible things that you picked up?
Jim
So just practically, for The Wolf of Snow Hollow, we had five days to mix the film at a professional vendor in Hollywood, which is not very much time to mix an 83-minute movie. I could have done it for 50 days, basically. And that was because of the deadlines and the studio systems and what we were able to budget for post-production. Whereas with The Beta Test, I had 44 days of mixing, because I learned the mixing software. And we bought speakers from Guitar Center, because they have a 45 day return policy, no questions asked. And so we made a 5.1 system in my garage, and we were able to forensically get in and make the movie a more cinematic experience than The Wolf of Snow Hollow because there’s actual time spent making the thing. So, practically, because I was able to make that post schedule, the movie just ends up becoming a better movie. Or at least a more cinematic movie. So practically, that’s the cleanest way that I can say it. And then with notes, it’s difficult because there are times when you’re working with a studio—I am the biggest diplomat of all time. I will take notes, I will listen, I’ll do all that stuff. And then we’ll have a test screening, and then you listen to the public. They’re going to be much better at giving notes than people who have never edited a YouTube video before. And I try to be nice, I’m always nice—I say that now because I’m being recorded—but it is a really difficult thing to get anything through that system that’s good.
We’re very lucky to have any great movies or fantastic movies. Severance gets made, and you’re, like, how the hell did that get made? It’s so specific. It’s so fantastic and well put together. Oh, he was really famous. That’s how he did it.
Christian
Yeah, it’s funny. In 2020, I made a 14-day $100,000 movie. There is a massive difference in that range from just $100,000 to $190,000. It’s not that much more money, but it gives you just one or two more things that you get to play with.
Jim
That difference means we’ll sleep. You get to sleep at night, rather than—how do I make sure that tomorrow happens? The less money that you have, and it’s exponentially—$130,000 is so much more relaxing than a $100,000 movie. But, I mean, I’m lucky. I was a producer on a $35,000 movie that we shot for ten days called 13 Cameras in a backyard, and we all camped out in tents. But then that movie went on to gross a million dollars or whatever. It was a slasher movie. That was the first thing that any of my friend group from college came together to make. It was 2015, 2014.
Christian
I think the audience has probably never really heard the description of how distribution gets acquired.
Jim
Criminally.
Christian
Can you tell me what the MG was from Gravitas for that $35,000 movie?
Jim
I actually don’t know. I was a producer on that one. And, also, it’s mailbox money for me. So every couple of months, I get a check in the mail that’s—my god, this movie we made in 2014 is still doing well. It was very lucrative for the investors, I’m told. But then, with Thunder Road, the same thing—because we made it for 190, I think the movie grossed 750K, maybe a million dollars, since it came out all over the world. Distribution is interesting. Distribution has changed so much in the last eight years, where you can use an aggregator to get onto any of the platforms that you can think of—iTunes, Google Play, Steam, Xbox, any of the places that people watch or rent movies.
Christian
As opposed to a sales agent, you mean.
Jim
As opposed to a sales agent. You can just go to an aggregator—Bitmax—and upload your movie, and it shows up on the iTunes Store and on Apple Trailers, almost the same way that any other movie does. And that’s something that I feel most filmmakers don’t know or aren’t told in their education because they need to be subordinates. They can’t be the competition.
Christian
What was it like dealing with Orion Pictures? What was it like trying to keep your vision with posters, trailers key art. Did hey take that away a little bit?
Jim
I was lucky because the executives were young and cool enough that they had good taste. I know filmmakers that do not have that luck. One of the executives is my age. He used to work at Sony and then went to Orion and is still a buddy. He was a guy who, when we were trying to heat up the hot tub in The Wolf of Snow Hollow, was carrying pots of boiling water down. I was, like, this guy’s my dude. But, no, I was very lucky in that sense. They had existing friendly vendors that were doing posters, and some of them were awful. Some of them were a joke because of how bad they were. It was like they had never seen the movie—oh, let’s make a kid’s book out of this poster. And I was, like, no, please, it’s gotta be cool.
But because I was the writer, actor, and director—I’ve said this before—I was much harder to deal with, or I was much more of a liability than if I was just the director. If I was just the director, the director could be disinvited from the editing rooms. But because I was the writer, actor, and director, the microphone ended up in my face at the end of the day. And I think there was a turning point in the post-production, where I made that apparent on a Zoom call—I’m gonna say bad stuff unless the movie’s good. It doesn’t help anybody if the movie’s cheesy. We can’t do that. And so I stopped getting notes. And then we were able to finish the movie properly for the last two months, and it was great. The movie turned out really well.
Christian
Yeah. That’s so funny. I guess I didn’t realize that. I mean, because you’re gonna be seeing your face on this thing for the rest of eternity. But you’re also directing it.
Jim
It’s an identity crisis. It is really stressful, and when someone is coming in who won’t even be working at the company in two months because of how quick the turnover is in Hollywood, they don’t care. They’re just giving notes in a vacuum. And then I have to live with it for the rest of my life. And the movie—because I wrote it and directed it and acted in it—is me. So, when the movie’s getting made fun of on the internet, it’s not the executives—
David Fincher went through all of this. Whenever I feel stressed about Hollywood, I always watch David Fincher interviews from Alien 3. He says, if the movie—this was on Gone Girl, in an interview—but he says, if the movie is really good, I’ll get more credit than I deserve. And if the movie is really bad, I’ll get more credit than I deserve. That is one of those things that, I’ve been very lucky. The movies that we’ve made have turned out very good.
Christian
Are there directors that are in your canon?
Jim
Uncle Dave is the top. David Fincher is one of my absolute favorite filmmakers. I’ve been very lucky. David and Ceán Chaffin, his partner and producer, were some of the first people to see The Beta Test. I was sending it to people, film festivals and stuff. And then I was, like, the sound design isn’t working. I don’t know if this movie works. I don’t know if A plus B equals C. Does the last act work? And then, I sent it to David Gordon Green because I was in Halloween Kills, and he’s been a pen pal for eight years. He’s such a wonderful human being. But he watched it and was, like—this works, I would move this around—and gave actual editing notes that were fantastic.
And then I’ve been so lucky that people watch my movies on an airplane and then will land and reach out. If I ever need help on, like, how do I get this visual effect to work? What am I missing here? I can actively email somebody, and they’ll respond very quickly. It’s so weird to me. I’ll email some hero of mine and say, “I don’t want to take up all your time, please, I just need help with this one thing.” And then within five minutes, they’re, like, oh, yeah, here’s your fix. It’s crazy.
Christian
Do you find that the higher-level people are more generous with their time for some reason?
Jim
I don’t think that’s an accident. I think that sometimes you get there because being nice and considerate in this industry is so rare. As a producer for six years before I ever wrote and directed anything or acted in anything, I worked with directors who were sometimes nightmares on sets. And I was, like, I never want to create this experience for anybody, any member of crew. And so I’m privileged in that sense. I got to work with a bunch of directors who were inconsiderate. And then I was, alright, we can’t do this. This is not the way that I want the film industry to be ten years from now.
Christian
Can you analyze your sets now? Do you have techniques and things that you bring to a set?
Jim
Yeah. How our sets are different from other directors or film sets, it feels much more like a summer camp. And then every time I say that, I realize all of my favorite filmmakers create that same environment on their sets, so that’s not entirely different.
Christian
How do you make it feel that way though?
Jim
So, because of the budgets, usually we all live very close to each other. For Wolf of Snow Hollow, we took out this giant Airbnb farmhouse in Utah, and we all shared a kitchen. Everybody was hanging out, the art department and cinematography team. And we were all living together. It was a great experience that happened to be this giant MGM movie.
And then with the sets, practically, we have an open video village. It’s not quarantined off or above the line. Anybody in any department can come in and watch the movies. And we’ve been very lucky that the last three movies we’ve done have had long takes in them, which is the most collaborative, fun experience you can have on a film set, opening it up to the art department and production assistants and anybody who’s visiting. When you watch playback of something that we all worked hard to get, it is like scoring a touchdown as a team. It’s so fulfilling, and you’re laughing and crying with the team. It’s the reason we make movies this way. So, in that sense, we’re different in that we are very collaborative and inviting of everybody. It’s an educational experience for everybody. And I learned how to do this stuff from being on other people’s sets. It’s important to pass that down.
Christian
Totally. What’s it like winning Sundance with your short?
Jim
I suggest everybody do it. It was really wild. It was, I mean, it’s strange because it was also very well documented. There was so much footage of it.
Christian
What was the name of it, so people can find it? The short that you guys made.
Jim
It’s called Sundance2016, all one word. It’s on Vimeo. I think it’s called Winning Sundance on YouTube or Vimeo. You can find it. We got into Sundance, and we didn’t know anybody that had ever gotten into the festival. It was this glass castle in the sky. We knew nothing about it. We hadn’t seen any short films. The only time you could see something was Short of the Week. I couldn’t afford the tickets to go to Park City. I couldn’t go and see the shorts program. But I’d seen stuff through Short of the Week, and I was, like, oh, these people have a sense of humor. I could do something humiliating and submit and maybe get in—and we did.
We got in, and my buddy Dustin Hahn and my buddy PJ McCabe, were, like, okay, well, this festival is all about pomp and circumstance and the ceremony of the whole thing. So, we thought—let’s go and do this fake documentary about Jim becoming addicted to cocaine and living the high life in the three days that we’re there.
And so we were filming this fake documentary. And then we went to the ceremony and won the Grand Jury Prize. So by accident, it was this unprecedented access to the festival and what it was to win Sundance, all wrapped up in this BS web series that we were doing. Basically, we convinced Filmmaker magazine to let us release them as episodes. We’re gonna go and do it. And for the first two episodes, they were, like, oh, this is a documentary, and Jim’s just a weird guy these days. And then when me freebasing cocaine got into it, they were, like—hold on a second, I don’t know if we can release this stuff. It was really funny. They were cool. But, no, it was exhilarating. And it’s weird to watch that footage of me and the team getting struck by lightning, basically.
Christian
That moment really does make me emotional. Because everything up until there is really funny, and then it’s the first real moment where you guys—
Jim
Break character?
Christian
You just break character. I think you guys were sitting down or something. You just collapsed.
Jim
So, yeah, circumstantially, I was a producer for six years. I knew I was a good actor. I knew I could do it if I wanted to or if I tried. And I really tried, really worked my ass off on that short film. I rehearsed it for two months, because all this baggage of feeling inadequate and less-than and never knowing if we’d ever make it in Hollywood. I went to film school and then basically everything that every filmmaker goes through for ten years trying to make stuff.
And then we won, and it was just this thing of—now the spotlight is on us, for whatever reason. It’s basically everybody’s dream to have these accolades, to be celebrated by this enormous arts festival. And it was really cool. And then you go to the VIP section, and there are other winners there, and you’re, like, what are you working on these days? And they go, not much. And that’s grounding. And from that night, after the VIP section, I was, like, I can’t do that. I can’t listen to the people that are gonna say, you’re gonna be great, things will work out. I have to make them work out. And then I just continued to work that hard and raced at hard work, whatever that was gonna be. And that became the three features that we’ve made over the last five years.
Christian
Did it make it any more special that Keegan Michael Key presented?
Jim
The way that it works is, that year they programmed 72 short films out of 7900 that got submitted. It’s easier to get into Harvard twice than it is to win Sundance. So, we were lucky enough that the programmers thought we were valuable, that the short was valuable or good. They have nothing to do with what the jury decides. The jury just gets shipped in and sits down in a theater and watches the thing. And we were so lucky that Keegan Michael Key happened to be one of the jurors that year, because this is a guy who has danced and done ridiculous shit for comedic and dramatic purposes. If we had been the next year, it’s possible we wouldn’t have won anything. It really is a crapshoot when it comes to these things.
So, being the center of the Venn diagram, it is so insane. It still feels like it didn’t happen. It feels like I’m in this universe in the multiverse system, and this one thing is different, and it happened to be that we got struck by lightning in Park City.
And then to have it happen again at SXSW with the feature and to get into Cannes—I think I’m very lucky. I was a redditor for 13 years, so I understand how audiences appreciate comedy and drama and what they actually find interesting. And that became my metronome of what was going to work in film. I still think that it’s very valuable that I did and do too much. I feel, like, really just trying to impress your heroes and being ambitious at a young age and having these small benchmarks of trying to get staff picked on Vimeo, trying to make something that is going to be socially and culturally significant and working your ass off—really trying to make something, those things are valuable. Those things will help you level up and help your dreams come true. So I’m very lucky that I came about at that time when Staff Picks and Short of the Week were prevalent, and I could educate myself on what was good.
Christian
A lot of people would just say getting into Sundance is one of the hardest things to do.
Jim
It is. Oh, and we’ve submitted stuff. We’ve submitted Beta Test and Wolf of Snow Hollow, and they were yeah, no. Or, not this year or whatever.
Christian
Didn’t you get in with another short the next year?
Jim
The Robbery. Yeah.
Christian
That’s so crazy. It’s also another great one-take short. I’m wondering if there was some kind of analysis—were you trying to hit lightning again with another one-take thing?
Jim
No, that was the only thing that we could get financing to make. And so we made six more single-take short films. And then Topic came along and financed three more. So before I made the Thunder Road feature, I made nine more single-take short films that are out there. You can watch them.
Christian
Was The Robbery truly one take?
Jim
Yeah. I saw Children of Men a bunch of times in theaters when it came out. I was in film school at the time, and I had been a huge fan of Tarkovsky, and Stalker was one of my favorite movies. And I was, like, oh, I wonder if you could do this in the modern day. And True Detective did that one episode that has a long take in it and I was, like, oh, man, this is cool. It’s impressive. My background was in hand-drawn animation and the thing with animation is, the audience is just in awe of how much work went into it. And it’s the same thing with long takes, where we wanted the audience to say—I can’t believe they did that. That was the easiest transition into live-action narrative for me, it was doing it in long takes.
Christian
Why do you think that Thunder Road—the feature and also the short—is a special thing? Why do you think it really nailed that moment in time?
Jim
I’ve had a lot of time to think about it. It’s been six years since we did the short of Thunder Road. And I think it is because it’s the center of the Venn diagram of—it’s a Pixar movie, in that it is trying to make the audience laugh and cry and does it seemingly seamlessly. All of the moves are hidden. It’s all one shot. All the editing was done beforehand.
It’s Alan Partridge-style comedy and humiliation pornography and Sacha Baron Cohen-style cringe and Ricky Gervais/David Brent. It’s all of these different heroes of mine that went into doing this thing. And then it’s also a very famous song that’s highly copywritten, so I think people were, like, oh, this is subversive, taboo artwork. I think also because it was one shot, it was incredibly impressive where people would say, I can’t believe this guy did that. And then the cinematography was so fantastic because of Drew Daniels, who shot Krisha and a lot of Euphoria. It was so thoughtful in the way that it was suspiciously simple or deceptively simple. And it’s also just really funny to watch somebody fall apart.
Philosophically and statistically, a lot of Americans say that the two biggest fears they have is death and public speaking. And to do both of those at the same time, and to have this guy be this goof, this dumb guy who is only considering mortality and life and his place in the universe at the very last moment of—I have to get up and talk about my mom, and then he’s, like, oh, yeah, what is death all about? This is crazy. And that’s very funny to me. To watch somebody fail very hard at something that we’re probably all going to have to go through is real ammunition to people to say, you’re not going to do it that bad. It’s okay. This guy did it terribly, and you’ll be fine.
Christian
Did it feel the universe fell into place when you were making it?
Jim
In retrospect, that’s deceptive. I think that might be an evolutionary thing in the mind of, oh, it all came naturally, these things. And I know that feeling of having made a piece of artwork, and you don’t remember how miserable it was to make the thing, when you’re, like, I was boiling hot. I was hyperventilating, not sleeping at night. And then you look back, you’re, like, oh, what a great fun time that was on set.
Christian
It’s like having a kid, where you’re just—
Jim
We only remember the nice stuff. It is a weird thing. I think that’s evolutionary, I think it’s something where the selective memory that we have for the past memories that we have. We only remember the nice things instead of how hot we were on the Spanish Steps in Rome. With that film, I’m so reminded of what torture it was to do. It is one of the hardest things I’ve done. It’s 13 minutes, and you have to organically cry halfway through, you have to do this complicated dance routine for an actor’s monologue, and it is a challenge to do. And I made it that way. I wanted to make something super impressive that would make people surprised that a human is able to do that.
Rachmaninoff apparently would do that. His hands were enormous. And he would only write music for people that can read keys. And I love that. I was trying to show off. It was a whole point—I wanted to impress people and get laid. And so I was doing that as well, what we’re all trying to do.
Christian
Now you’re married.
Jim
So, yeah, now I’m out man, it worked out perfectly, and I’m the luckiest guy in the world. But no, I look back and I’m with the Thunder Road feature. I’ve always had this thing, and I think a lot of artists have this thing of—I’m gonna die soon. I need to get this thing out of me. I need to finish this thing and be comfortable that I’m an artist, and I made this thing. It’s this weird fear of death, but also a desire to get things out there to spread your seed, basically. So, at any given time, I’m thinking I’m gonna be dead next year, I’m gonna be dead in two years or whatever. And I’ve always had that since I was a teenager. And with the Thunder Road feature, it’s a suicide letter.
It was supposed to be this thing that was going to kill me. We wrote this thing to be impossible to do and to also be this thing that is going to be on my epitaph of how to best raise a daughter. How to not screw up when a parent dies. It was supposed to be this digging up of all of this awful stuff that we try to ignore in America and in masculinity and in families, and I wanted to have it out in the world before I died. And now I don’t know what I’m still doing here. You ever have that feeling when you finish something that’s really great? It’s, like, I did that now I can go. Oh, I’m still here. What else do I do?
Yeah, I have all the scars from Thunder Road, breaking the glass in the door. For months, I couldn’t lift anything with my right arm above my head. It was like I was Jackie Chan. I was getting beat up on every movie. And I was loving that I still want to do that. But the next two movies that I’ve written, I’m not acting. It’s for other people.
Christian
How many takes did it take for Thunder Road’s one take?
Jim
For the short, it was six. We had to cut two of them short. So, it was eight. But we had to cut two of them short because I was laughing or people were laughing.
Christian
That’s gotta suck to get seven, eight minutes.
Jim
God, it was awful. You get all the way to the end and something happens, and then you have to go back. And then for the feature, it was 18. And we did nine with the song like it is in the short film. And then nine without the song and time to break for lunch in between. And then the last take was the 18th take. I just looked exhausted. It looked like I’d been crying all night. And I was, like, this is probably better for the thing. And the camera and the sound was all perfect. Performance was much better by the end of the day. And it worked out.
Christian
18. So I imagine you did that in one day.
Jim
Yeah. The first day of production for the feature, and immediately, everybody that was on the crew and cast that happened to be there was, like, I am in this.
Christian
Did you do it on day one because you wanted to get it out of the way?
Jim
I think that was my producer Natalie’s call. Natalie and Ben. I don’t know if it was just because we had the church on that day. But I think that was going to be the hardest thing that we had to do, open the movie with this 11 minute thing. Let’s kill Jim on day one. Yeah, but it was the best decision. And then basically, there was never a moment on set or any of the future sets where people weren’t coming up in video village and putting their arm around me. We felt like this big family. It’s because they saw me killing myself on screen and they were, like, I want to help out.
Christian
What was it like going from a $2M, more studio-driven movie, back to the grind of a small-budget movie? Does that annoy you?
Jim
No, I love making a smaller-budget movie. We couldn’t have done The Beta Test as a big-budget movie, they never would have let us do it. Hollywood never would have let us do it. The movie’s about Hollywood, it’s about the WGA packaging fight. And I’ve seen projects that were alienating of Hollywood that go through the system, and they lose their teeth. And it’s, like, the industry is—oh, we love it. Let’s make it more about us and how terrible we are. And it’s cutesy. And we wanted it to be an act of terrorism.
The whole point of that movie was to make something that you could not make in a system. It got bought by IFC. They have some of the coolest movies. All of Alphonso’s early stuff is on there, all of Death of Stalin, all these other subversive films are through IFC Films. We were very lucky. And that was our job to do that. I, if we had tried to go through the system, we’d be going through exactly what we’re doing right now—writing something. It’s ready, a year out, but we just need a bunch of people to convince their bosses that it’s ready to go out.
Christian
Was IFC a big thing for you growing up too?
Jim
Oh, yeah. I mean, I saw Edward Burns movies through them. I saw so many wonderful movies, Y tu mamá también.
Christian
First movie I ever saw on IFC was Y tu mamá también.
Jim
It’s an unbelievable masterpiece.
Christian
II think it’s always going to be in at least my top five movies of all time.
Jim
It’s so iconic as a summer movie of youth and childhood. It was certainly my experience growing up as a boy. He’s a buddy now, Alfonso. Which is crazy. Well, he’s a pen pal. We were supposed to hang out. He’s shooting something right now. But he reached out on Instagram. I’ve been bugging him. Like, het, man. Love your movies. You’re the reason I make movies.
For Roma, I said, hey, what’s up, and then months later, he was, like, oh, I do like your movie Thunder Road. But I’ve also loved your other two movies. We should hang out. And I felt I had to run around the block. I was, like, I gotta go for runs. I saw Children of Men in 2007. I saw it 20 times in the movie theater. It’s why I’m in this room right now. It’s really wild that you can make stuff and put it out on the internet and you have no idea who is watching.
Christian
It’s funny how the short of Thunder Road is a great origin story of this moment that created a lot of catalysts for your career, but the feature is so good.
Jim
I like the feature more. The feature of Thunder Road was 14 and a half days, 190 grand. We shot it in Austin, Texas. My buddy Zack Parker is an EP on the film. He said anything that we want in Austin, we can get. Like, locations. He grew up there. And so he’s, like, we can shoot at my mom’s house. Terrence Malick and Robert Rodriguez shoot there. There’s an infrastructure for film. Richard Linklater. There’s a great film community there. When we were shooting, nobody else was shooting in town. Those three guys weren’t shooting anything. So we got good cameras and stuff, it was great. But then, shooting it, I had never done a feature like that before. But I’d gotten comfortable with the team at Vanishing Angle in doing shorts to make something that was longer format. I had done it as a podcast. I’d recorded the script as a podcast and then changed the script to make it work more in audio form. And then I just rehearsed the hell out of it—over and over and over again. I brutalized myself to make it any good.
All of it was building up to this last scene of me taking my daughter to the ballet, which is what my grandfather did to my mom, which got her into ballet, which we hear from my sister in this other scene. It was this wonderful, perfect circle about parenthood and life and legacy that the short has in it. So, it made sense for me to make it this feature that went into that in greater detail, about the next generation, about trying to get my daughter to like me again. And it was all of that kitchen sink comedy that Mike Judge does so well like King of the Hill. It was everything that I love to do.
It’s brutal watching it. It is such a sad movie. This poor guy. It’s beautiful. I watch it now and I see not me with a mustache, I see this as this guy. I’m four years away from it. I shouldn’t have made it so sad. But that’s the thing that people connect to. Roy Orbison made music for sad and lonely people. Same with Bruce Springsteen. It just made sense to make it this way. And then we submitted it. We shot it in November, and we submitted it at the late deadline for SXSW. And then I think on January 1, SXSW reached out and said, yeah, we want to play it. So we wrapped on the 20th of November, and we had to screen it on March 6. It sucked. So, there was a carpet, like a shag carpet. It was in the loft of Vanishing Angle, and I would just sleep there.
Christian
Were you editing yourself?
Jim
Yeah, at that point, I was editing by myself. Brian Vannucci is Will Smith’s editor and did all the Lil Dicky music videos. He’s a good friend of ours. I went to school with him. He’s a very talented editor, and he came into AE the movie when we were in Austin. And he’s great. Phenomenal job. And then I took over the next few months to get in tune for SXSW. I just slept in the office, and I had a little heater. It was winter in LA, and I was, like, I will sleep here and do my work. I had bad influences. It was like John Lasseter, when they were doing Toy Story 2. The movie’s supposed to come out on DVD with Disney and they said, actually it’s gonna be a theatrical release. He’s, like, oh no—now this has to be good. And so he slept under his desk for months at Pixar to make it, and it’s gotta be good. He rewrote the movie, redid everything. And so I channeled that. I was, like, it’s got to be done by this date. I don’t know how to play a ukulele. I don’t know how to play a field organ. I can try and make these work because these are the instruments that I have. Let’s put in a soundtrack. And then that became the final cut.
Christian
How much time did you have to “finish it” finish it, like, color and sound design.
Jim
We had a week in post. My buddy Danny Madden, who’s a good friend from college and also a filmmaker, I was a producer for him for many years before I directed anything. He’s a great sound designer. Jackie Zhou came on and they tag-teamed. They would take different reels of the movie and do sound design for it, which is amazing. I was working on the edit, and they were able to do that for me, which is such a gift.
And then we went in and mixed it at our buddy Matt’s house, Matt Yocum, down the street from me. He had a little office that he could finish the movie in. And it was great. It felt like we were able to do it with our friends. And then it accidentally ends up on the world stage and being this indie hit or whatever. It was very lo-fi. It was never clean. And then we started to grow to make things cleaner for The Wolf of Snow Hollow, and then it was too clean. It was, like, alright, let’s go back to the garage. Let’s keep making stuff lo-fi.
Christian
Would you tell somebody who has a short at TIFF or Sundance to be ready for a feature version of that short?
Jim
No, be ready for failure. Be ready to constantly be told that you’re not good enough and that you suck and that there’s other people out there that are gonna sign contracts that you’re uncomfortable signing. Just be ready for FOMO, and be okay with that. You have to be the studio. You need to treat your life like you are a YouTuber and that the industry is not going to support you. You have to create your own industry and your own audience that is going to care about you and your movies. No one will care about your movie as much as you do. You should act that way. You should plan on self distributing it. You should plan on having your own channel on YouTube, basically, except it happens to be iTunes or whatever. That is the only way to survive in this industry and not be part of the revolving door and be booted out at the next film festival.
Christian
Walk me through your distro process. So, like, from day one, you lock the film. You’re not taking on any sales agents.
Jim
We had no other option. My buddy Ben Weisner, again, very lucky. Ben had been helpful in the sales world for many other films. He’d gone to Cannes a few times, Cannes Market, and made friends because he’s just a lovely Appalachian producer. Buddy of mine. And then we had enough contacts there that we could talk to five different distributors in France and pick the one who we actually love, who loves the movie, and have a bit of a bidding war, which is very rare.
And he wasn’t doing it in a way that a sales agent would. Let’s say this—you finished the movie, it’s 90 minutes. A lot of times, people will tell you that you have to go through these conventional channels to get on platforms like iTunes or Amazon. They’ll say that if you were to do it yourself, it wouldn’t be good enough, and that’s how they make their jobs valuable. Which is not true—you can do it yourself. You are good enough.
And Ben was just willing to take that bet with me because he was a producer on the film as well. So let’s say, distributors come up to you and say—we’ll pay you $10,000 upfront or $50,000 upfront for the rights to the movie that cost 190 grand. Most sales agents would say, yep, I want that deal, because they’re making a commission off of real money. Whereas Ben, my good buddy, has points on the back end of the movie and says, actually, I’m going to take this other deal that provides us with 30% of the streaming deal that you guys might make six months or two years from now. And we have made so much more money doing it that way, instead of giving it to somebody who is in it for the short term. It’s been great.
Christian
So you guys aren’t even looking for MGs necessarily.
Jim
Sometimes no. Sometimes it’ll be zero MG for a certain territory, but we get 50% of the theatrical ticket sales. And it’s, like, we know that we can make a certain amount from France, because we won Deauville or the Thunder Road feature had a great run in theaters there, and people like us for whatever reason. And the same thing goes with many other territories. But, again, it’s not because we were established. You could do all of this stuff on your own, and you can do it through social media. You can look up who distributed your favorite movie in France this year, and then reach out and say, hey, can I send you a screener? And would you like to make an offer?
Christian
Still feels very daunting. But it’s one of those things that’s—
Jim
It’s crazy to me, I know, you’re right. I don’t mean to interrupt. But literally every other aspect of filmmaking is daunting, and it’s the one time that filmmakers go, you know what? I would like to be removed entirely from this property. They build a building. They spend years of their lives building a building that they love, only to be completely removed from the ownership of the building because it’s slightly daunting. I don’t mean to insult you on a podcast, but I just encounter it every day. There are times when I’m on a call with a filmmaker for an hour, and they’re, like, you’re so right, this is great. And then I read in the trades that they signed a deal with some smaller distributor. It’s, like, what are you doing?
Christian
Yeah, I guess it’s, like, do I take the risk, because if it doesn’t work—
Jim
You take the risk anyway. And the other thing is, when you sign with a smaller distributor, you’re still going to be stuck working on the movie for the next three months. People are, like, it takes up too much time. A lot of sales agents, the way that they get you is, they’ll say—oh, you shouldn’t be focusing on this stuff. You should be focusing on your next movie. And that’s how they very quickly remove you from your property. And it’s not true. Really, if you even sell to a distributor, you’re gonna be spending the next month and a half doing deliverables of every asset that they need. You know, 5.1, surround sound and all of that stuff. The only difference is they’re uploading it to their YouTube channel rather than yours. And that doesn’t make sense to me.
Christian
Did you do a lot of improv growing up?
Jim
Hated it. Hated it. I couldn’t do it.
Christian
Do you still hate it?
Jim
I still hate it. I can’t do it. I’m good at all of the heavy rehearsal to do forensic comedy. I’m very lucky that Steve Coogan and I became a little close since he loved Thunder Road and all my movies. But to talk to him about it, he was, like, it was was a different kind of comedy. It was heavy rehearsal to do theater pieces, basically. It has to be meticulously done. And there is a right way to tell a joke and a wrong way to deliver a joke. Inflection is so important on every word. It changes the context. I grew up watching Alan Partridge, and that was my favorite comedy. As a producer, I was working at College Humor. It was a lot of improv performers. It was a lot of UCB performers, and I never found it to be helpful. I never found it to be really funny or that there was risk or anything. It felt different from the stuff that I wanted to do.
Christian
I get so jealous. It’s the same kind of jealousy that I have for people who can rap, just improv and rap real quick. I feel like I’d be so cool if I could do that.
Jim
It is genetic, I think. It actually is a skill that the brain works that way. So don’t feel bad.
Christian
Maybe just to close this out, do you have any funny stories from your days with Lil Dicky?
Jim
Oh, too many. Dave is really one of the reasons I have the work ethic that I have. At that time, he was so ambitious. I met Dave in 2014 when I moved to LA, and I wasn’t supposed to produce his three music videos. I was supposed to line produce or help out. Then one of the producers dropped out, thank heavens. And Tony Yacenda, the director, a good buddy of mine was, like,—well, I guess this is your job. Now you gotta do things. So then I produced ‘Lemme Freak,’ ‘Classic Male Pregame,’ and ‘Save Dat Money.’ And all of them were very stressful and very low budget.
But Dave just shines. He’s just such a wonderful, hilarious, authentic, and honest person. I mean, every moment we shot on ‘Lemme Freak,’ when he was fully nude, he would lean on me and be, like—Hey, man, can we get people to sign NDAs? Can we do it? I was, like—Dude, I got you. Don’t worry about it.
It was literally me, Tony, DP Alan Gwizdowski, and Dave in the same room. We would shoot, and he’d get completely naked. And then, just to humiliate himself, he went to the editor, Brian, and was, like, we’re going to blur it out. But it’s got to be the smallest blur possible. So, Brian had to go through, literally frame by frame, to cover Dave’s privates. It was so much fun. That was before motion tracking existed in Premiere Pro. Dave was leaning so hard into self-deprecation while also trying to do anti-rap and comedy-rap better than the real rappers out there.
I very much followed in those footsteps. A lot of my movies are genre parodies. Like, Wolf of Snow Hollow is Zodiac as a comedy. Beta Test is Fatal Attraction as a comedy or 50 Shades of Grey as directed by Ruben Östlund.
Christian
It’s got a little Eyes Wide Shut.
Jim
In talking to Bill Hader, he’s, like, Eyes Wide Shut is a deadpan comedy about this guy who’s stressed out about his wife maybe having sex with a sailor and he’s super-stressed about it. It’s really funny, and it’s true if you watch it that way. And you see the behind-the-scenes pictures of Stanley Kubrick, and everybody’s laughing on set for this super-serious movie that’s probably a comedy.
But, you know, all of my work—like, Thunder Road is Manchester By the Sea as a comedy. We try to make something that is more fulfilling and potent to audiences who are looking for stuff like that. Inside Out is one of my favorite movies of all time. It makes me laugh and cry every single time I watch it.
Bing Bong’s big scene—no spoilers—is unbelievable. And I realized that’s something that happens at the level of the brain. You can show an audience images and sound and get them to feel something that is magic. It’s like prescription drugs or something. If you organize it in such a way, you can get anybody to feel something in their brain, and we’ve just wasted that.
Christian
Totally. Dude, Congrats on getting married. I appreciate you coming to sit with us. Take some time with your wife. I know you’re acting right now, which is why your hair is red. I thought it was for me, but it’s actually for a role. I hope everything in the future goes smoothly.
Jim
Thank you. Likewise. Keep your fingers crossed for me.
Christian
Yeah, will do.
