This is a transcript of SYS 528 – From the Army to Writer/Director of a Musical With Ryan Smith.
Welcome to episode 528 of the Selling Your Screenplay podcast. I’m Ashley Scott Meyers, screenwriter and blogger of its sellingyourscreenplay.com. Today I am interviewing Ryan Smith, an indie filmmaker working far from Hollywood. And today I have him on to talk about his new feature film, Eldrick USA, a zombie apocalypse horror musical. Yes, a zombie musical. We dig into this film and talk about how he got it produced. I would say two of the biggest influences on my own early interest in filmmaking was the original Star Wars, which doesn’t really have anything to do with this conversation, but also Jesus Christ Superstar. I remember the first time I saw Jesus Christ Superstar as a kid and I was just blown away with it. The overall story, how they were able to put it together with music and tell this great story with the actors singing part of the dialogue. I also had this dream, you know, I always had this dream of sort of putting together a musical, but I’m not at all musical. So, I had a lot of questions about how all of this comes together from the writing angle. How does a writer work with a composer to write songs that are actually sung by the actors and help tell the story. And this is a really interesting case study for that. While he definitely has some musical Brain, definitely has some musical background. He did work with a composer and someone to write the lyrics and to write some of these songs to work with him to do all that. And he goes into it in detail. So, it’s really interesting, at least to me, as someone who is really sort of interested in potentially making a musical and stuff. It was interesting just hearing him talk about it. So, stay tuned for that interview.
If you find this episode valuable, please help me out by giving me a review in iTunes or leaving a comment on YouTube or between the podcast on Twitter or liking or sharing it on Facebook. These social media shares really do help spread word about the podcast. So, they’re very much appreciated. Any websites or links that I mentioned in the podcast can be found on my blog in the show notes. I also publish a transcript with every episode in case you’d rather read the show or look at something later on. You can find all the podcast show notes at www.sellingyourscreenplay.com/podcast and then just look for episode number 528. If you want my free guide how to sell a screenplay in five weeks, you can pick that up by going to sellingyourscreenplay.com/guide. It’s completely free. You just put in your email address and I’ll send you a new lesson once per week for five weeks, along with a bunch of bonus lessons. I teach the whole process of how to sell your screenplay in that guide. I’ll teach you how to write a professional logline and query letter and how to find agents, managers and producers who are looking for material. Really is everything you need to know to sell your screenplay. Just go to sellingyourscreenplay.com slash guide. So just a quick few words about what I’ve been working on. The film festival is now very much in our rear view mirror. And I think it went really well. We had our best turnout by far since starting three years ago. So that’s always fantastic. And we just really had a great slate of films this year as well. I mean, a lot of really great short films and a bunch of really great feature films as well. So just a really good turnout and just a really good slate of films. I’ve got to go back to the theater and negotiate for next year. They almost doubled our rates from the previous year. So, if they do that again, I’m not sure the festival will be economically feasible. But we’ll see. I’ll have all that worked out one way or another by the end of the year. We also announced our screenplay contest winners a couple of weeks ago. Check out the website for those announcements. We already have some interest in one of the top scripts. So, fingers crossed if that does come fruition. I’ll certainly make an announcement here and fill everybody in on the details. And now I am kicking around my rom-com screenplay and trying to figure out how I can get that into production next year. I feel like I’m getting pretty close on the script. I’m getting another round of notes right now from a few people. And then hopefully I’ll do one more quick pass and then I’ll hopefully be ready to go. Anyways, those are the things that I have been working on.
So now let’s get into the main segment. Today, I am interviewing writer director Ryan Smith. Here is the interview.
Ashley
Welcome, Ryan, to the Selling Your Screenplay podcast. I really appreciate you coming on the show with me today.
Ryan Smith
Hey, thanks so much, Ashley. I really appreciate you having me here.
Ashley
So, to start out, maybe you can tell us a little bit about your background. Where did you grow up and how did you get interested in the entertainment business?
Ryan Smith
So it’s actually interesting. So I was in the army for a while and I always wanted to have kind of a creative output. So for a while, I actually tried my hand at writing and drawing comics. And I found out really quickly because I was I was going through trying to learn how to draw. And it felt like as much as I was buying books, going through trying to learn how to draw, I just I can draw very basic things. But I wouldn’t categorize myself as what I would call a good artist. So as a result, after I got out of the army, I tried to find some other ways to kind of work on that in the process. I found videocopilot.net, which was an online source for learning how to do special effects. And so, I learned kind of how to build movies kind of from the ground up. You know, you start with even if you don’t have footage, you could still have fun with after effects, kind of building some creative things. So I started making short films and kind of got my own camera and built up from there and started with short film scripts and then worked my way up to Eldritch, which was my first feature.
Ashley
Perfect, perfect and maybe you can just speak in general like what did you feel that you wanted with this creative outlet like what was attractive for this great value, you’re in the army just what was it about making movies are just doing something creative that sort of inspired you why is that a part of your life.
Ryan Smith
I really like, I guess, telling stories. So, whenever I was trying to make comics, you know, I was into City of Heroes at the time, which if anybody remembers that MMORPG from several years ago, but I liked being able to kind of take aspects of that and turning it into actual stories. I read a lot of comics at the time. I guess I always fantasized about writing for Marvel or image or someone like that. And just, I don’t know, I guess I just, at the time I didn’t necessarily feel like I had all these unique stories that were within me, but over time I’ve found that, you know, with enough brainstorming, you can really come up with some fun stories. And I liked having that creative outlet outside of just having a normal 9 to 5 job.
Ashley
Now, as you got out of the army, it sounds like you really had a passion for comic books. I’ve interviewed some other comic book writers on the podcast. And my understanding is there’s definitely two different fields. You have the artist and you have the writers. Why didn’t you, did that ever occur to you to start just getting into the writing in terms of the story, not necessarily the actual animation of the cartoon or the illustration aspect?
Ryan Smith
I think, at the time I was more interested and felt like I had more confidence in the art of sequential storytelling as far as from a visual aspect, which is why at first I was more pursuing the how can I become a director of photography? How can I tell the story through the lens of a camera as opposed to writing? But over the course of that time, by the time I wrote Eldritch, I felt like I had gotten to the point where I was much more confident in my writing. And since then, I’ve written several more scripts.
Ashley
Gotcha, gotcha. So, I think that’s a good segue. Let’s jump into your new film Eldritch USA. It’s a horror comedy musical zombie film. And so maybe you can tell us what is the pitch? What is this film all about? What’s the log line?
Ryan Smith
So well, so that was the problem is I didn’t even know what a log line was whenever I wrote Eldritch. So basically, if I was going to on the spot, try to think of a log line, it would it would be, you know, a brother who is constantly living in his older brother’s shadow accidentally murders his older brother and finds a hillbilly colt that helps him bring him back to life. Yeah. And then and then from there, things go south because things never go right whenever you bring somebody back to life.
Ashley
Yes, yes. So where did this idea come from? What was sort of the genesis of this idea? There’s millions of zombie movies out there. You know, why jump on and do another zombie movie? Where was the inspiration for this?
Ryan Smith
So really what I wanted to make whenever I first started writing it was actually kind of a love letter to all the lovecraftian things that I love. So, I was trying to whenever, I was generating ideas I was trying to think you know how many lovecraft things can I throw into the same film and so you know there’s obviously the Necronomicon there’s the silver key. Lots of places that are referred to like the restaurant that eat at is referred to as the done which there’s just a lot of different lovecraftian things throughout the film in fact there’s a point this hillbilly colt that ends up bringing the brother back to life they’re like oh we you know we won this auction that was out in Kingsport which is a lovecraftian location and they’re like we got all this stuff and we show this table that has all these artifacts on it and there’s a map of the Antarctic, which is the reference to mountains of madness and there’s just a lot of different artifacts that are on that. So, originally, I just wanted to shove a whole bunch of lovecraftian things together as far as the story goes I have a twin brother and he’s very popular and you know he was popular in high school the town that I live in now he and I both live in the same town he’s very popular in the town we’re in now and I’ve never murdered my brother, nor do I have plans to. But it was a I think fun just to kind of take that and blow that out of proportion and say you know what would it be like to be this guy who’s always in his brother’s shadow and you know all of a sudden that brother is gone and he’s got to deal with the consequences. And then the musical part was I think insanity at the time when I was kicking around the idea I was really enamored with Dr. Horrible sing along blog and I thought wouldn’t it be fun to take that that concept and instead of making it about superheroes lean into horror and in fact whenever I first wrote Eldritch it was written as a six part mini-series and when you watch the film you’ll notice that there’s title cards throughout and those were the that’s where the episode splits would end up. But we ended up truncating it into a feature instead.
Ashley
Gotcha, gotcha. So, and it’s interesting as we’ve talked it doesn’t sound like you had a background in music So maybe we can talk about that a little bit. I mean Jesus Christ Superstar was a big inspiration for me I saw that as a kid and I just thought that was sort of the ultimate of Filmmaking where you’re combining all of these aspects the music and the performance and stuff. So, it just seemed to me sort of real the top of the key. I know the South Park guys obviously they’ve done the South Park movie is a lot of musical, I think cannibal the musical was one of their first movie sort of a horror musical. So, there’s a great sort of maybe template to some of these movies But just what are some great modern musicals that we can look at for inspiration? Did you watch a bunch of them before you started writing this? Did you have something in mind? Maybe you can just talk to that because as I just mentioned Jesus Christ Superstar, cannibal music. Those are sort of the ones that came to my mind. But are there some other sort of sleepers out there in terms of this combining this musical horror just met this mash-up with music?
Ryan Smith
As I said before, the biggest one for me was probably Dr. Horrible Singalong blog. So, if you’ve got people who haven’t seen that, I highly recommend it. Whenever I originally wrote it, I kind of looked at the formula for how they put that one together. And it was basically they would have one or two songs per episode. So, that was how I went through and wrote the script. And so, in the final film, there’s about 13 original songs that are in there. I did already have a background in music. I was a worship minister at a church. I have always played guitar and been part of. Show choir in high school and stuff like that. And so I, so I was, I was already kind of drawn towards musicals, but, um, and I also got to play, uh, Seymour in a little shop of horrors when I was in high school. So, that’s another great horror musical, that actually I was trying to kind of emulate that same thing with, with Dr. Horrible, where there was this kind of a dark story going on where you, where somebody has died and he’s trying to cover it up, but also trying to juxtapose it with music that sounded happy and visuals that were just bright and cheerful, even though it was kind of a dark, more of a horror feel to it.
Ashley
And so, let’s talk about that. Then as you’re getting into the writing of the script, what do you start out with? Do you have some song ideas in your head? Do you did you write the entire screenplay and then start to come up with the songs? Maybe you can work with that. And just what does this look like in terms of the team? I mean, it sounds like you play guitar, but did you write all these songs as well? Do you have a team of other musicians that come in and sort of fill this out? Maybe you can just speak to that a little bit. How is that process work of writing songs for a movie like this?
Ryan Smith
So, in the writing process, we actually wrote the whole thing before we ended up crowdfunding it because I wanted to have everything in place before we did it. I worked with Nathan Hurley. He’s currently the lead singer of Fox Royale. If you haven’t heard them, they’re kind of an up-and-coming kind of a pop rock band. They were at the time in another band called Guys on a Bus. So, he and I worked together. I kind of told him my idea. He loved it and I’m sure I did it completely the wrong way. I kind of had a really general overview of what I wanted my story to be. And then I just kind of worked through chronologically. I didn’t jump around to different spots. I just started in the beginning, worked my way through, and I just knew, okay, so here’s a spot where I need a song. And so I would talk to Nathan and I’d say, okay, well, here’s where we are in the script. We need to get to this point A to point B where this next part stops. We need a song to cover that ground. The song needs to be about this topic. And he and I would kind of workshop back and forth about the lyrics. And then once we kind of felt good about it, then he would go off and write the music. So, I think the music for this film, as a result, feels very conversational in a lot of ways, as opposed to some other musicals you might watch.
Ashley
Gotcha, gotcha. So, let’s talk about just the writing of the script a little bit. What does your writing schedule look like? Are you someone that just writes in the morning, you go to Starbucks, you need ambient noise, you have a home office. Just give us a little, shed a little light on sort of what you do to write and what that looks like for you.
Ryan Smith
So, at the time when I wrote this one, again, I was very new to writing a feature-length script. So, it took me about six months to write it. And it was very haphazard. I would write a section. And then once I kind of hit a wall and didn’t know where to go next, I would take it to like three or four people and I would ask them questions like, how do you feel about this? Do you feel like anything’s missing? And it really morphed quite a bit over time. As far as environment, usually, I mean, I’m in my home office here. I would usually sit in my home office and just kind of sit with a cup of coffee and listen. At the time, I wouldn’t play any music or anything like that because I wouldn’t want to be distracted. I would spend time, I think I’ve got the book here, I’d be going through the Hollywood standard trying to make sure that I was putting it in the right format the whole time. I was very concerned with trying to make sure that I was putting it in a format that whenever other people read it, that it would seem right because it was very much a learning experience at the time. Now, since then, actually I’ve done NaNoWriMo a few times now. I’ve actually written two scripts so far where you just start writing and I just write three pages a day and at the end of a month, I’ve written a 90-page script and I just go through. I still very much do it chronologically. I just start at the beginning of the script and I just start writing straight through.
Ashley
It doesn’t sound like you do a lot of outlining or the index cards or anything like that.
Ryan Smith
I do a lot of pre-planning before I do it now. So, with those ones that I did with that method, I do that now. So, I’ve gone through, save the cat. I’ve gone through some other kind of structure things. So, I try to have a good overall structure of where I want to take it. But once I sit down and actually start riding, I just start at the beginning and just go straight through, which I don’t know if that’s normal or not. That’s just the way I’ve done it.
Ashley
Yeah. So now that you, in hindsight, and I was the same way, I mean, I wrote my first scripts long before I ever read save the cat. But then as you go back and you learn some of that stuff, a lot of that stuff is intuitive. And I can look at some of my older scripts and say, yeah, that was an inciting incident. That was an act break. Do you go back now and look at some of that stuff? Was some of that stuff intuitive in your script?
Ryan Smith
Surprisingly, so I was actually yeah, very surprised that’s how I did it I think because I originally wrote it as a series I tried to write it kind of like a comic book where you would have all these things and then there’d be kind of a Cliffhanger where it would end off and then you’d have some more things to build upon it and then there’d be a cliffhanger. So, in Eldritch specifically, that’s how each of those sections is kind of broken up where you know. It like literally cuts to black you get a title card and then we get the next section I guess almost similar to if you saw the recent version of Suspiria where they’ve got kind of the title cards that That split up how that one is set up.
Ashley
So, with a genre, I guess it’s sort of a mixed, um, you know, a mix up or a mashup of genre. Um, how do you just approach something like that? Did you study musicals? I’ve never like really broken musicals down. You mentioned you have 13 original songs. Is there some standard, are there some books written or some courses on how to, you know, format or how to structure your musical? Cause you had mentioned at one point you said, well, um, I was writing and it just felt like this is a song. How do you know it’s time for a song? Is there some 13 songs or 12 songs? And, and I, I, I come at that from sort of the aspect that when I speak to, you know, distributors or, or producers of action, low budget action films, they’re like, you got to have an action scene, something, you know, some action every 10 pages, there’s probably similar sort of rules of thumb for, for musicals. Um, maybe you can speak to that a little bit. How do you figure it out?
Ryan Smith
Yeah, I wasn’t, so I didn’t read any books. I didn’t have like a formula that I went off of. I did watch a lot of musicals, but, but like I said earlier, I was trying to just make it so that each episode, whenever I wrote the original one had one or two songs in it. So, I kind of plotted out, okay, here’s what happens in this episode. And then looking at it as a whole, I would say, okay, where, where could I insert a song? Where could I insert a second song? You know, if it deserved it. And that was kind of the way, you know, once you kind of knew how the episode was going to unfold, you could say, yeah, you know, in this section right here, yeah, song would work there. And so, it’s not necessarily super consistent like every seven minutes, there’s a song or anything like that. And in fact, the movie is more front-heavy as far as the songs are concerned because as you get towards the end, there are still occasional songs, but they, they, they become more and more spaced out as you go.
Ashley
Gotcha. So, as you’re working with the composer on these songs, He’s coming back with songs. Did you tweak some of the lyrics? Did you work with them on that?
And I ask that, you know, coming, cause you’re, you know, a writer yourself, you’ve written this thing. We’re all very precious as writers. We don’t want people messing with our stuff. So, then you have a, you know, another creative coming in with his work. How do you be respectful of that? Were you able to tweak it? And just, what does that relationship look like working back and forth with somebody like that? That’s really adding to your, your project.
Ryan Smith
Yeah, as much as possible, I tried to respect Nathan as you know, with what he was bringing to the table. There was one song in particular where he and I co-wrote the song together where I was kind of working on how it sounded and he was coming up with the lyrics and we really gelled really well on that song. In the movie, that’s the, it doesn’t end well which is also in the trailer, I believe. But the rest of the songs, you know, we would talk about the lyrics, he’d go off and write it and nine times out of 10, he’d come back and I’d just be like, I love this, this sounds great. I would maybe make some tweaks to the lyrics to make it fit the character more or the situation more but for the most part, he really kind of hit the nail on the head because he would read the script and kind of have a good idea of where I wanted to go with it.
Ashley
Gotcha, gotcha. Okay so once you had your songs you had your script that you were happy with maybe you can talk about those next steps of getting this into production and just for clarity to where are you in the United States, where are you located?
Ryan Smith
I’m in Missouri. So I am, I am definitely not in one of the major places for, for doing that. And I’m not even in one of the big cities in Missouri. I’m in Springfield, Missouri, as opposed to St. Louis or Kansas City.
Ashley
Yeah. So, how do you, so as you built out this, so it sounded like you did a Kickstarter, maybe we talk about the funding first. Maybe you can talk about that doing the Kickstarter and then we’ll get into the cast and crew and getting all that stuff. But maybe you can speak to that a little bit. How did you raise the money for this and get this green lit?
Ryan Smith
Yeah, previously I had done a short film that was a Lovecraft film called The Terrible Old Man and I kind of used that as a template in my mind. I found out later that was completely wrong because I thought, oh well, I did a short film that was you know 20-25 minutes long and I’m going to try to do a feature film so I just doubled the amount and hoped that it would be good enough. It wasn’t. So, we brought in from the Kickstarter about 12 to 14 thousand dollars. I can’t remember the exact amount but it was also right at the beginning of Covid. So, we had the Kickstarter and then right as a Kickstarter ended with right around the time they locked everything down so we couldn’t even film for a year and a half. Unfortunately, that also meant that that money that I had got taxed because I couldn’t use it. It was just sitting there so the government said oh that’s income and so I lost a third of the money right away, which was a major pain. So, you guess you can’t really plan for that and I think had I had more financial sense I would have figured it out some way to show, oh yeah this is set aside for filmmaking or this is I’m spending it on this and then that wouldn’t have happened but I just didn’t know at the time. But you know, in the end we needed about five times that much in order to make the film. So, I ended up getting a couple of executive producers who came online kind of pitched the story to them. They were on board and they gave some money for that and then I also funded the rest of the film personally myself.
Ashley
Gotcha. So, then, okay, so then once you had your money, you got your production into place. What were those next steps? How do you find, you know, quality, experienced cast and crew in your small-town America?
Ryan Smith
So, we knew it was going to be a low budget film. We did put out a wide casting call. And we were very pleased with the people who came in. We made sure that everyone who came on set with the exception of the extras were paid. There was always food available. We had regular meal breaks and everything like that. All the cast, all the crew was paid. I think the only person who wasn’t paid besides the extras was me. But yeah, we consistently had, as far as our regular actors, I felt like they did a great job. Probably as you watch the film and see some of the extras in the background, they do a pretty good job. You can tell in a couple of scenes that they’re not necessarily dancers. And you know, we had a choreographer who came on from Branson. I don’t know if you’re familiar with Branson, Missouri. That’s where all country singers go to die. But she worked down in Silver Dollar City. She was one of the main dancers they had down there. So, she came on and would occasionally bring other dancers with her. But a lot of times she would just have to work with whatever extras we had on hand. So, she would she would show them that the moves for an hour or two. And then we just jump in and film it. And we had some mixed results with that.
Ashley
And what about getting crew, cinematographer, sound guys, grips, electricians, that sort of stuff. Is there a good network of people in your area? Did you bring people in from St. Louis? How does that work?
Ryan Smith
We actually did all local it was it was surprisingly well done. Again, there’s a lot of small groups of filmmakers in our city Springfield is, you know, the surrounding areas about 300,000 people. And there’s a lot of just pockets of filmmakers and so they’ve got a pretty tight community so you find out pretty quick who’s good who’s not good. And, you know, once we found the right cinematographer and the right assistant director they kind of knew where to pull the thread to bring in the right people.
Ashley
Gotcha. So, you mentioned on the casting and it sounds like the crew too, you cast this wide net. What does that literally mean? Are you putting out ads on Craigslist, Facebook forums, just through your network of people, you know, you go to local filmmaker groups, just maybe give us some tips for people that are actually going to try and do this. Where did you find real, the best results in terms of actually finding people?
Ryan Smith
Facebook, Reddit and Instagram as far as just kind of casting it out. We didn’t pay for advertising necessarily but we tried to find all the kind of collections of people who were looking for things like that. We also put a lot of stuff out at the local colleges. MSU is really big on theatrical productions and theatrical degrees and so that’s where a lot of our cast came from actually was from that and I mean since it was a musical film that kind of really fit really well with that crowd.
Ashley
Gotcha. Okay. So, once you had your film finished, um, what were the next steps on that? Did you guys do the festival circuit? And I’m kind of just curious, are there specific festivals for musicals? It doesn’t seem like there’s enough musicals that, that there would be. Um, but maybe you can just speak to that. How was it? How was your reception of a zombie musical at these festivals?
Ryan Smith
I did actually find that that was actually a large challenge because there’s not a lot of festivals out there that focus on music or focus on musicals. And so, it’s kind of a fish out of water. We ended up having to focus more or less on just horror and hoping that it had enough of a jive that it worked in those areas. I will say for people who are making their own films, if you’re like me or a writer producer and you’re wanting to get it out there, when we did our initial push, I love our premiere. Our premiere went really well. We put it at the Alamo. We sold out every showing for 10 shows. But because we made it public, we didn’t four-wall it. It unfortunately stole our premiere from our festival runs. And so for people who are considering doing this, that’s something to think about because we specifically did not get into South, not Southwest, we didn’t get into Fantastic Fest because they said it had already had its initial premiere and it had been seen by too many people. So, it’s something to consider whenever you’re doing that. If you’re going to have a local premiere for people, you’re better off four-walling it and saving those large, our North American premiere or worldwide premiere for a larger audience. And I would also say pitch to all the biggest festivals first and save the little ones for after you get all your responses to those because otherwise you’re going to end up having a small festival, take your big premieres and you’re going to lose those opportunities.
Ashley
Do you have any advice for submitting to festivals? Do you do some research? Film Freeway is obviously a great resource to find them. But how do you know if it’s a good festival? Maybe just some quick tips about filmmakers if they’re looking to submit to festivals. What did you learn from doing this?
Ryan Smith
Yeah, I would say Film Freeway is a good way to go. You definitely need to do your research ahead of time and find out who to submit to, what order to submit it in, what time of year even you should start submitting, because that’s really a big thing. The film was finished too late in the year for me to submit to some of the ones that I wanted to. And I think I would have been better off just waiting the six months and starting the next year, as opposed to just throwing it in at the end of the year. You want to hit the year fresh, start submitting in the November, December time frame to the big ones that you want to submit to and see how that goes. Because otherwise, you’re going to miss some of the ones that you may want to do. I would also say that once you do start submitting, you’re just going to get a flood of emails from other festivals that are like, hey, submit to ours. It’ll be free, or it’ll be heavily discounted. If they’re emailing you, unless it’s an individual that’s reaching out to you and it’s from a bigger festival, I would say just don’t even bother. Because there’s a lot of festivals out there that are just cash grabs. That’s literally all they are. It’s basically you’re paying to either get some sort of specific award, or they’re just looking for your money and they’re not going to give you anything. It’s kind of ridiculous.
Ashley
Yeah, yeah. Okay, so and I believe me, I’ve been down the festival circuit. So, I’m well aware of some of these things. But that’s clearly a red flag where they’re just sort of cross pollinating, you submit to one, as you say, you get all this influx of other festivals that want you to submit to theirs. Are there any other red flags that you look for when you’re going through and doing your research on film freeway? Were there any other red flags that stuck out to you that maybe things filmmakers can avoid?
Ryan Smith
It’s weird because I had a really good success at a brand new film festival and I and I would I would submit to that film festival again in a heartbeat. But I will say there is something to be said if we’re trying to find festivals that have been around for a while. They have some pedigree to them you can kind of look at what past films they had. I think that’s just that’s the biggest thing is just do your research of the different festivals. It’s not bad to do to a brand new one. And in fact, if it’s a brand new one, and it’s close to you, I would say it’s probably worthwhile to do it. But if it’s a brand new one that’s far away, particularly if it’s overseas, I would say yeah, maybe not.
Ashley
Now, and again, I’m speaking now just as someone too. I had a really miserable experience with my last film at the Film Festival Circuit and decided to start my own festival, which we just ran actually this last weekend here in Los Angeles. So, I’m always just looking for some, some tips and tricks. But what are some things that you really get out of the festival? Like some of these festivals you just mentioned, like in Europe, like I don’t understand why a filmmaker in Europe submits to my festival and then they have no, they’re not going to show up. They’re not going to come. They’re not going to even email me back. So, I’m always curious. Like, like I get the fact exactly what you’re saying as a filmmaker, you shouldn’t be, but, but why do filmmakers submit there? And just, what do you hope to get out of? Like you just mentioned, don’t submit to a European festival, but what are you hoping to get out of a European festival if you’re not actually going to go attend?
Ryan Smith
Yeah, I think the biggest thing is, particularly if you think that it’s one that you have a good chance of success with, there is something, I mean, I guess it feels prestigious. I don’t know if it’s actually prestigious, but it feels prestigious to say, yeah, I won an award at a German festival, or I won an award at a festival in the southern country. And I would say that European directors probably feel the same way. If they were to win an award at an American festival, that would feel prestigious and would feel like it’s something they can use to help push the film. But yeah, that’s the only reason I can think to do that. And so, you’re looking, as a director, you’re probably looking for festivals that you think I have a high likelihood of winning something at that festival.
Ashley
Gotcha, gotcha. So, as we wrap up the interview, I just like to ask the guest, one more thing I did write down, what about distribution? People like yourself, filmmakers like yourself usually come to me through a distributor, pitching them. So, did these did this festival run help you ultimately get in touch with distributors? Or did you find a distributor on your own?
Ryan Smith
Our distributor found us through actually through IMDB, which was surprising. So they started off as a sales agent, and then shortly afterwards, they started their own distribution arm. And they said, honestly, we really believe in your film, we’d like to take it on as a distributor. And so we said, that’s great, we’d love to do that. Because they had proven themselves to be very trustworthy over the time of being our sales agent. So, it ended up being a good relationship there.
Ashley
Perfect, perfect. So, as we wrap up the interview, I just like to ask the guest if there’s anything they’ve been watching recently that they think is really great and can recommend to our mostly screenwriting audience. Anything on Netflix, Hulu, what have you been watching that you think is worth recommending?
Ryan Smith
So, there’s a couple of ones as far as the movie that I’ve watched recently I watched the Substance and I would just say that that movie is Amazing like from a storytelling perspective From like they did a good job of creating a thoroughly disgusting body horror that also told a good message. It’s just kind of a rare gem to find something like that I’ve also found from a serious perspective. The penguin is very well-written, and has very good characters in it Colin Farrell, knocks it out of the park But just from a from a story, you know script perspective. It’s amazing.
Ashley
The substance, isn’t it very gore? Because I’ve been seeing some reviews. I’m not into like gore and blood and that stuff just makes me squeamish. Is it very gory or is it more psychological?
Ryan Smith
It gets progressively gory. So, it would it’s very much body horror I would say along a similar line of the fly and The thing so if you get too squeamish with those two movies, then I don’t then it might not be for you But it gets progressively. You just can’t help but just go. Oh, you know as you’re watching it.
Ashley
Now, what about the new Joker movie? Obviously, it’s having, some problems at the box office, but my understanding is that it’s actually a musical, but they’re sort of trying to hide that. Was that something you went to see, being in the creating a musical?
Ryan Smith
I haven’t seen it yet. I had heard that people were really struggling with it, so I’ll probably wait till it comes out on streaming to check it out. But I’ve also heard rumors about how the director felt about it and how Joaquin Phoenix felt about it. And I don’t know if those are true or not, so I hate to even comment. I will probably eventually check it out, but I just haven’t yet. As a side note, I will say I’m in a writing group and we decided since October we’re going through what lies beneath, just going through the script and then we’re going to get together and discuss it. And I tell you that if you haven’t read the script for what lies beneath, it is so good. It’s an amazing script. I would actually highly encourage your listeners to check that one out.
Ashley
Okay, perfect. Yeah, that’s a good recommendation. So, how can people see Eldritch USA? What’s the release schedule going to be like on that?
Ryan Smith
It’s coming out on Blu-ray and DVD October 22nd, it’s actually going to be at a whole bunch of different outlets but for sure it’s going to be you know if you search for it on Amazon you’ll find it, and then it’s going to be on TVOD all the different outlets for that it’s actually a whole bunch of them voodoo, Amazon, iTunes a whole slew of them as of November 5th. So, once you once you look it up you know it’ll be there November 5th,
Ashley
Perfect, perfect. And what’s the best way for people to keep up with what you’re doing? I will grab your IMDB link and put that in the show notes, but anything you’re comfortable sharing, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, I will also link to that in the show notes.
Ryan Smith
Yeah, we do have a Facebook as well as we don’t post on Instagram very often, but we have one for that. I think we also have one on X, but I don’t think we’ve posted on that one in a long time. Facebook is probably the one where we are the most active. Yeah, that’s probably the biggest one right there.
Ashley
Yeah, what’s your Facebook handle?
Ryan Smith
I think it’s just Eldritch USA.
Ashley
Okay. Perfect. So, I’ll round that up. Yeah. And I’ll put that in the show as people will be able to click over. So, Ryan, I really appreciate coming on and talking with him today. Good luck with this film and good luck all your future films as well.
Ryan Smith
All right. Thanks so much, Ashley.
Ashley
Thank you. We’ll talk to you later.
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