This is a transcript of SYS Podcast Episode 249: Actor/Writer/Director/Producer Bradley Stryker On Guerilla Filmmaking in Thailand With His New Horror / Thriller Film Land of Smiles.
Ashley: Welcome to Episode #249 of the Selling Your Screenplay Podcast. I’m Ashley Scott Meyers, screenwriter and blogger of the www.sellingyourscreenplay.com. Today I’m interviewing Bradley Stryker who is an actor as well as a writer, director and producer. He just did a really cool horror-thriller film called Land of Smiles. We talk through that project and exactly how he was able to get it made. It’s another great example of a guy going out there and making things happen for themselves. Stay tuned for that interview. If you find this episode viable please help me out by giving me a review in iTunes or leaving me a comment on YouTube or retweeting 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 mention in the podcast can be found on my blog in the show notes.
I also publish a transcript with every episode incase 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 #249. If you want my free guide- How to Sell a Screenplay in Five Weeks you can pick that up by going to www.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 log line and query letter and how to find agents, managers and producers who are looking for material. Really it’s everything you need to know to sell your screenplay. Just go to www.sellingyourscreenplay.com/guide.
So a quick few words about what I’m working on, on The Pinch, the crime-thriller feature film which I’m finishing up. We re-output the final version of the film this time hopefully without any dropped frames. So I put that on a horror drive and shipped it back to the aggregator. We’re then gonna prepare to release it on iTunes, Amazon and the various VOD platforms. They do have to go through with this new version of the film that we’ve produced, then do have to go back through the QC process. Hopefully it will pass and then we’ll get our official release date. Stay tuned for that…hopefully the next couple of weeks I will have an official release date for The Pinch. If you’re interested in seeing The Pinch now I have released it through www.sellingyourscreenplay.com. You can go to www.sellingyourscreenplay.com/thepinch.
The word “The Pinch” is all lower case and all one word. I’ve also given you the option when you buy it through SYS of buying the three-hour webinar I did on the making of The Pinch where I go through every aspect of how I made this film from writing the script, how to write a micro-budget screenplay to raising the money. I did a Kickstarter for this as well as just got some private equity investors. I go through all of that process, through pre-production, how I got the crew together, how I did all the casting, and then production, post-production, all the aspects of making this film are covered in that webinar. So if you’re looking to try and do your own micro-budget film I think this would be incredibly helpful for you. Again, you can make the purchase or learn more about all of this by going to www.sellingyourscreenplay.com/thepinch.
I’m still polishing up my mystery thriller script which I’m hoping to shoot early next year. I’m in the process of raising the money, which is always just a tough thing. I have a lot of verbal commitments at this point and I’m basically just trying to get the money into the bank account so that we can really start pre-production. A lot of filmmakers, they start pre-production before they have all the money which sometimes can light a fire under those filmmakers to go out and really push harder to raise the money. But that’s not really my style, I like to make sure everything is in order so I can really concentrate on the producing of the film, the directing, the writing, the creative aspects, all of that stuff.
And if I’m worried about raising more money while I’m going through that process, I think it will just really hurt me emotionally and creatively to be able to make those decisions if I’m constantly having to figure out where I’m gonna get those next dollars to keep production going. So I’m gonna have all the money pretty much raised in the bank. That’s basically what I did with The Pinch. I did the Kickstarter, I raised the money from some private equity friends, family and my own money I put it in the bank, so I knew I had all that money ready to go and then there was never an issue of me trying to figure out how am I gonna raise this money or that money. Obviously I do have to stay on budget.
You have to budget yourself and be very, very strict on not going over budget. There’s definitely always those times when it’s easy to throw money at a problem and you really have to resist those so that your movie does stay on budget, because no matter what level you’re at in terms of the producing things can always get out of hand and you can always spend more money and you always feel like, “Just a little here, a little over there,” and that’s what ends up in getting these films over budgeted. So I wanna have my money in the bank ready to go. I’m pretty good at staying on budget, but then I just don’t have to worry about it, I can go into pre-production, really concentrate on the script, on the casting, getting the crew together, the locations and then getting into production and not constantly being side tracked.
A lot of it is just an emotional sort of aspect of just you constantly have to be thinking about that and it just weighs on you, whereas you should be spending your time at that point on the creative decisions- the script, the story, the acting the casting, all of that stuff. Because that’s really what’s gonna make a better film. But if you’re constantly just thinking, “Man, where am I gonna get that next $5,000 or $10,000 to keep production going, it can really be a drain. Anyways, that’s the plan, we’ll see if it all comes together. So that’s the main thing I’m working on this week, now let’s get into the main segment. Today I am interviewing writer, director, producer, actor Bradley Stryker. Here is the interview.
Ashley: Welcome Bradley to the Selling Your Screenplay Podcast. I really appreciate you coming on the show with me today.
Bradley: Yeah man, thanks for having me.
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?
Bradley: Well, to be honest like a lot of people I think I was interested in the entertainment business probably since I was a little kid. I loved movies, I grew up on movies. I’m not gonna shy away from dating myself. I’m 41, so I remember getting the first VCR, I remember watching…I don’t even know if it’s Jaws, [inaudible 00:06:25] like everything in the VHS. We had 10VHs so I watched every one of those movies 397 times. I’ve seen Good Girls Just Wanna Have Fun more times than I wanna admit because I have a sister [laughs]. So I started with love of film and then I went into all other different sorts of things. Growing up I was big is sports and stuff and then when I was in college I was a sport and nutrition major at my sixth college San Diego State University. I hope around a bit.
I paid for college, don’t get me wrong. It wasn’t on my parents’ bill, it was me. I was at San Diego State University and it’s a long story but I tried to do a year and a half of classes in New York because I wanted to do double school, so my schedule was very strict because I also had a job I had to work at night. I was working in a restaurant 30 hours a week. So one of my classes got cancelled so I had to find something specifically for one hour and I had one Elective lapse so I stumbled into a drama class. I starter as an actor. I went into a freshman drama class when I was a senior then I went into a fresher drama class and teachers are like, “You can just crush a drama class because there was 300 people trying to crash it.” I stayed there for like six weeks.
I was even enrolled in the class and teachers looked at me…”Because you’re not even in the class,” and I was like, “I think I will be soon.” She finally let me in [laughs] but that was…to make another long story short I did a monologue as my final in that class. Maybe it was my midterm and it was a really emotional monologue and I was hooked because I was like, “Wow, this is something I’ve never been allowed to do before.” It happened to be the emotional side of being a human being because I think like most of us were taught that that’s something you do in private or just don’t do at all. And so that hooked me. I graduated from college, moved to LA and I was lucky enough to be those who had a commercial agent, I already had that stuff going.
Ashley: How did you get those agents? If all you had was one drama class, how did you get the commercial agent?
Bradley: I was doing [laughs]…I was attractive enough to do some prep work in New York, to do some modelling stuff in New York. By that communication I went to New York, I didn’t get any jobs modelling, did some feature background work and then did some television commercial stuff. That was for the summer Junior and Senior College, then went back to San Diego State to finish college and had found an agent in San Diego, a private agent and we did some commercial stuff. She partnered with an LA agency called [inaudible 00:09:16] Talent. Well, at the time, or still to date is like the crème de la crème for kids. They’re a very big kid’s agency, and they had a commercial department for adults and so I just started working with them from San Diego.
I used to drive when I was in college from San Diego to LA for commercial auditions. Any actors out there would know that’s ridiculously insane. I would drive like three and a half hours, wait for half an hour and then I’d go into my plain text commercial [laugh] and do a little song and dance for three minutes and drive three and a half hours back to San Diego to go back to school.
Ashley: Were you starting to book some of those things?
Bradley: No [laugh]. No bro. When I got a call back it was like there was a party, because I had to drive again three and a half hours for the call back and instead of it being just one other person, like five or ten of us there was another 80 people at the call back. Didn’t get those either. I was lucky though because a guy that I was recommended was my mentor. His name is Scott [inaudible 00:10:24] still is like a really good friend now. He mentored me and he said, “It’s gonna take a while because you don’t know what you’re doing. We were gonna do this, we were gonna go on this ride together.” To be honest if I was being conservative I had 150 auditions before I booked anything commercially. And so I started working…flash forward, a few years later bought a house.
So it was nothing and then it was everything all at once. But the time frame of me doing those 150 auditions I was in acting class [inaudible 00:10:56] learning, learning, learning.
Ashley: So now let’s talk about some of that transition. So you’re booking acting jobs, making a living as an actor. At what point dis you decide, “Okay, I really wanna write and direct as well?”
Bradley: There isn’t a very specific story actually in regards to this. I wrote my first screenplay in my 20s when I’d been for five years and I was like, “I wanna write something,” and I wrote a screenplay [laughs]. I had everybody read it of course. Looking back I cringe at it because I don’t even know if it made sense [laughs], but I thought it was magic because I’d finished the screenplay. People never really said anything to me about it and life went on. I then tried to read Story by McKee. I made it halfway through and closed the book, I remember definitely the day I closed the book halfway through and said, “I’m not intelligent enough to do this.” I didn’t write again for three years because I’d never read anything. That was the first book I tried to read.
Flash forward to I’m in Vancouver working on TV Show and then I’m in New Mexico working on that same show. Any actors out there will understand this, where you’re doing a part on the show where you don’t really have a lot to do on the show but you work a lot and you’re being paid well. So I decided after that show I was gonna go on a trip so I went on like my sort of spiritual trip or whatever it is to find myself in Thailand for two months. When I was in Thailand for two months because I realized I was a pretty miserable guy at the time. I was working as an actor and everything seemed to be going great, but it wasn’t enough. I was really bored on set, nothing to do in between. I was shooting in just a lot of downtime, I didn’t know what to do with.
So I decided I was gonna hire myself as a professional screenwriter and I went on from the trip to Thailand and I sat down the first day back in front of my computer going, “What I’m I doing?” I was like, “I have no idea!” Started writing, started reading books, signed up for writing classes. The first two years of me writing I promised myself that I’d write 40 hours a week and I wrote more like 50, 60 hours a week, sat in coffee shops all day long and wrote, wrote, wrote. Wrote a lot of garbage, just bad stuff, just getting it all out of my system studying. I started the process 10 years ago of writing. I’ve written a lot since then. I’ve written twenty-something feature films, a bunch of short films. I’ve made a bunch of short films. Ultimately I found that I like being a writer-director.
The thing I’m actually I think I’m the best at if I was gonna be completely honest is directing. That’s because I’ve also been an actor for 20 years. So I’ve developed a skill set that is valued by some, not by others, but I really enjoy it and love talking to actors and helping them surprise themselves with what they can do, which as an actor I can tell you not a lot of directors know how to do. And so it’s something I really, really love. But ultimately it’s really about storytelling. It’s all about storytelling. I’ve spent 20 years now being a part of storytelling, 10 of those as a writer…as a screenwriter. Kind of they flow back and forth into each other really fluidly. They really do. I really…it’s hard to explain but I need all of the pieces.
I need the acting piece to build the writing piece to build the directing piece and it’s like the circle that all benefit each other. Without having all three I don’t think I’d be as good at any of them. I’m not saying everybody out there needs to do all of it but what I am…kind of one of the things that I when talk to young filmmakers and especially people that are writers and directors I tell them, “Go take an acting class.” And they’re like, “I don’t wanna be an actor, that terrifies me.” And I’m like, “I didn’t say you wanna be an actor, I’m just saying you need to learn what that conversation is about so that you can then talk to us on set and we can go, “Oh wow, I didn’t see that, that’s a great idea.” Because ultimately it makes your screenplay and your movie better when you know how to pull that out, you know what I mean?
Ashley: Yeah, absolutely. So let’s talk about the short films that you did. So you’re writing this 40 hours a week. Did you start to send out some of those scripts? At what point did you Segway into some shots.
Bradley: I think I Segwayed into shots when I realized that the process of getting a feature made was gonna be a long one, and I also realized that I wasn’t gonna be patient enough to wait for one of those to get made and I did something that some people do, some people don’t but I just ponied up my own money. I was like, “I’m gonna do it, I wanna get these movies made and this is how I get these movies made.” Basically the first one I did was something I as an actor really wanted to do. So it was a situation I had explore in many acting classes. I was like, “I wanna do this as an actor so I wrote a short film about that situation and I did that and I hired a director.
I wasn’t directing yet and that director then helped me bring it to life with a bunch of people and I was up in Vancouver at the time. It was the first kind of experience of going through bringing something from page to screen and then I got addicted to that and I was like, “Wow, I love this, I need to keep doing that!” It was one of those things where when I saw it actually come to fruition I was like, “This is something I had to do.” So I then was asked to direct a theater thing and I decided after that I would direct them as well and not always act in them. So to be completely honest it started as an exercise I wanted to do as an actor and a writer and then it turned into something that I just wanted to do as a writer and a director.
Ashley: Was your plan then to eventually get to a feature film, you figure I’ll do a few shots and then a feature film or you just wanted to explore some things in features with no real plan?
Bradley: 1000% it was that. Actually one of the short films that I had made was one of the first feature films that I wrote. It was a short version of The Situation and that was the first script that I ever optioned. And so that one actually ended up coming to fruition. I mean, that particular screenplay came to fruition in terms of the option I think eight years after I wrote the first draft [inaudible 00:17:36].
Ashley: Okay. So let’s dig into Land of Smiles. Maybe to start out you can give us a quick logline or pitch for that film.
Bradley: Well, I’ve been to Thailand before and I also understand people think it’s a very scary place. I’ve been there and it’s not, it’s a really fun place. But before I went to Thailand everybody warned me including my own mother that it’s a very dangerous place and she hopes I come back alive kind of thing [laughs]. And so I decided I was like what if a young woman went travelling abroad and went to meet her best friend and this is literally where the idea came from. What if she got a video on an email on her best friend’s in basement of some crazy man in a clown mask and literally says, “Now we’re gonna play a game.” The game is we’re gonna play hide and seek and you’re gonna try and find your friend as I drag you through the country of Thailand toying with you.
Part of also what the concept was the way I shot it is while he’s dragging her through Thailand he’s unknowingly to her filming her the whole time and she’s toiling with these other two people trying to find her best friend. And to be honest I can tell you where the inception of the idea came from. I watched a horror film that was done and it was so easy and it made a ton of money how they did it and I was like, “Okay, I’m gonna make one of these movies and I paused this movie and I wrote the entire outline for the original script for The Land of Smiles literally sitting right there in about two hours based on this fact. It’s like I can go to a foreign country and make guerilla film or movie because at the time I was still trying to raise money to make my “legitimate movies” and it just wasn’t working. Nobody was willing to give a first time filmmaker $100,000 believe it or not, I know it shocked you [laughs].
Ashley: Yeah. So let’s dig into your writing process. Just a couple of quick questions to start. Where do you typically write? You mentioned a coffee shop earlier. But what is your typical writing…I guess now you’re in a hotel doing an acting gig so you’re writing in the hotel. But what’s typical for you when you’re writing?
Bradley: My writing schedule has changed over the years, but today my writing schedule is I get up in the morning, I have a son who’s three years old so I get up when he gets up. Usually he’s my alarm clock but sometimes between six and seven am, say hello to him, give him a kiss, I go sit at the coffee shop for three or four hours every morning. Usually then I’ve consumed too much caffeine so I go and exercise and eat and then I have a little bit of a break during the day and then I go back to a coffee shop around three and I do another four hours, maybe some four or five hours of writing in the afternoon. I try and do two sessions in my daily writing. Usually it’s somewhere between 6 and eight hours of time.
Some people think it’s too much and I’ve been doing it for a decade now. I used to write 12 hours a day. I had no problem. I can’t do that anymore. So I imagine in five years from now you’re gonna hear me say I write four hours a day and by the time I have been writing for as long as Steven King I’ll do it for three hours every morning too, but not quite there yet.
Ashley: And what is your…compared to the outlining stage versus actually opening up final draft and writing your dialogue and scene descriptions and stuff like that, how much time do you spend outlining before you’re actually in the final draft?
Bradley: I think back at the stuff that you’re saying…I’ve read every book, so even though I put down McKee originally now of course I’ve gotten through it and another 20 other screenwriting books and taken a bunch of classes and everything. So my actual outlining now is pretty rigorous. So I’ll give you an example. I’m developing a TV show with a producer friend who’s a writer producer and we are…by the time we got to the actual…well, I’m about there right now, by the time I got to the actual writing of the first draft of the screenplay, now mind you at this point I’ve already done like a scene by scene outline, but it’s not a draft. I wouldn’t consider it a draft yet. I have a document that’s about 57 pages that’s my prep. But you have to remember I’m an actor.
So what I do for each character is stupid insane. When I’m developing a character I probably do three pages of details on questions I ask myself and I answer all these three pages of questions on each character, because before I go to sitting down and writing anything I wanna know who they are. I wanna know their deepest fears, I wanna know their favorite book, I wanna know the first time they had sex, I wanna know what their relationship is with their mum and dad even if none of it applies. This is all work that I do as an actor. So it might be overkill, sure. But I also believe to each his own. I’m not telling everybody out there they need to write 57 pages before they do this.
What I’m saying is what you need to do is develop a process so the minute you write that first draft you’re writing something that is I guess for a lack of a better way to put it, not a first draft. Listen, all first drafts need work, but my first draft five years ago was garbage. Like really bad. My first draft now is like I’m only a couple of drafts away from something that I would be confident sharing with a professional.
Ashley: How many characters do you do this three page of notes on the specific characters? Like how deep do you go if the person of if the character in the script is only gonna have one scene where maybe they get 10 or 15 lines. Is it only the major three, four, five characters?
Bradley: Yeah, I’m not a crazy person [laughs]. So like the case of the TV show you have to remember it’s an ensemble so there’s a lot of characters. That’s an extreme version. I think for most of my movies I think I probably have a 30 paged document put together and I only break down either the leads or those supporting leads. So anybody that’s gonna show up in one or two scenes, no. I’ll do a basic breakdown on them so I know who they are, but no, no, no. Because I often find that your leads, a lot of times your “straight man characters” are the ones that disappear and then you have these wild and he’ll barely show up in one scene and he steals the show because he’s so much fun, you know what I mean? So I need to know all those details on the lead so that I can write a straight character that’s really multi-dimensional that can captivate somebody’s attention and be real and those other things and then you know sometimes they’re not quite as flashy on the surface.
Ashley: And how does your development process look? You just mentioned that nowadays your first draft you feel pretty confident about it. But when do you start to send it out and how does that work? Do you have some trusted writer friends, you have some actor friends you get notes from and then just sort of how does that process work for you?
Bradley: It depends very much. I had a manager I was working with for a while, we were developing stuff together. So for a year and a half we were developing everything together so I would go straight to him. I have a couple of producer friends…I don’t usually use friends too much. I’ve used them the last couple of years as might be a little bit ridiculous but more than anything else I’ve used contests. I’ll submit stuff to different contests. I’ve been a reader for contests. I was just a reader for a contest, I don’t even know if I’m allowed to say it but I was just a reader for a pretty big screenwriting contest and I know that the process of choosing readers is not always the best but I use it as a sounding board to see people’s reaction to the screenplays.
I just developed a script, I was on the fifth draft and I felt really good about it and so I started sending it out to producers. It’s a script that’s won a couple of contests as well. I started getting feedback from them and seeing what works and what doesn’t work ultimately. To everybody out there, the thing I think everybody needs to realize is we’re a business of opinions. There’s no right answers, there’s no wrong answers. So a lot of times people are gonna tell you what they think. I’ve literally had 19 year old readers try and teach me what screenwriting is about and you sit there and you listen and you go, “That’s humbling, thank you. That’s really nice of you.” I had one person ask me…Save The Cat is my backbone of everything.
This guy reads my script…he reads the first five pages of my script and he goes, “You need to read Save The Cat” [laughs]. I was like, “Bro, I’ve read that book like six times, I can write the book now.” But it was just really funny feedback because I was like then you have to be so humble to do this and ultimately what I do is I take feedback from a lot of contests that I’ll enter especially in the beginning will be the ones that give me feedback. I’ll take their feedback, process what works for me, what I believe makes sense, use the pieces that work and throw the rest away. And then there will be the one or two confidant’s sort of people I have that are screenwriting friends.
I don’t use the actor friends too much because actor friends read it one time and they’re like, “Bro, is that part for me?” [laughs]. I’m like, “No, we’re not there yet, we’re not making a movie yet!” They’re reading it going like, “If you changed the lead to a dude I could totally play her.” [laughs]. I’m like, “I’m not doing that right now. That’s not what’s happening, I just needed to get your opinion on the story.” They’re like, “Oh.” [laughs]. So it’s a fine line.
Ashley: So you mentioned Save The Cat. I wonder if you could mention some of the books that you’ve read and you actually would recommend to other writers. I always get emails from writers saying, “Hey, what books do you think I should read?”
Bradley: I’m gonna give you my three tier hierarchy. This is how I would say at the beginning. The three books that I think screenwriters should read are How To Make A Good Script Great is the first one. It’s a woman who wrote it.
Ashley: Is that Linda Seger?
Bradley: Linda Seger, correct. How To Make a Good Script Great, that’s like a foundation book. Nuts and bolts of screenwriting in my opinion. It’s super easy to understand. I felt good, I read that book and I was like, I can write, this is exciting! And then I read a bunch of other books in the middle and then I read Save The Cat. I think that would be my second book. So tier one, How To Make a Good Script Great, tier two Save The Cat. Because you really get a structure and a dynamic sort of structure to use and then make your own. There became a time when if you wrote by that structure the reader at any production company could recognize the structure and they just threw the script over their shoulder because everybody did it for a long time.
And then Story by McKee. Story by McKee by the way I feel is a very advanced screenwriting book. Part of the reason I mentioned that is that as an actor you need to learn the foundation of how to be an actor before you’re ever gonna be able to walk into an advanced acting class and be able to understand what that’s about. Actors are really ambitious, “I just wanna go to…” I believe all the arts should be that way. I believe you should start with a simple book and build your way up to the [inaudible 00:28:19] which is Story by McKee is an example of a complex screenwriting book because he’s talking about things that if you don’t know how to write already it goes right over your head.
You might think you actually get it but you don’t get it yet. It’s the same thing when you work with a very advanced acting instructor or director or you’re doing a really complex piece of theater, like of first tier actor shouldn’t be doing [inaudible 00:28:39].
That’s gonna go right over their head, they’re not gonna understand it. But once you get to that place and you put in the time and you go, “Now I’m ready for this.” Because I really believe that a lot of writers get scared off by reading really complex books like I did at the beginning and go, “Well, this is insane!” So you got to read something that just makes screenwriting feel like it’s not brain surgery. Does that make sense?
Ashley: Yeah, for sure. And so let’s do the same thing with contests. You mentioned that you enter a bunch of contests. Some of them are giving feedback. Maybe let’s see your top two or three, four contests that you think are worthwhile.
Bradley: I think everybody knows the top contest is Nicholl’s, there’s no question about that. It’s also a very hard contest, isn’t it? I’ve only entered that a couple of times, to be honest I don’t think I have anything worthy of it which is very weird, right? I think the closest I’ve ever gotten is in the quarter finals or whatever. PAGE is the other one. This is kind of number two. And then it falls into this big, vast vat of opinions. Boston is great. Some people like [inaudible 00:29:42] some don’t. Some like Script Pipeline, some don’t, some like Screen Crafts, some don’t. I don’t know the answer, you know what I mean. And the thing I want everybody to remember is that when you submit your screenplay, if you win the contest it doesn’t mean that you’re the greatest writer in the world.
Conversely if you don’t even get to the quarter finals it doesn’t mean your screenplay is garbage. It’s somebody’s opinion. What you need to do is you need to just take that information and go, “Why didn’t it resonate, how did I miss?” And I will say that as somebody that has now been a reader in something man, I completely understand the first page and first ten page thing, how people are obsessed with it. If I read a boring first five pages, I’ve already printed torment in my brain how bad the rest is gonna be, so even if you become a genius by page 20 you’re hard pressed to kind of turn my opinion around. Does that make sense?
Ashley: Yeah, it does for sure, for sure.
Bradley: So let’s now talk about once you have the script done. So you’ve written the script you’ve done your development process. What were those next steps to start to raise the money? Did you have some producer contacts, did you go out and just raise it family and friends, did you have some venture capitals? Maybe talk about that process a little bit because I know there’s a lot of screenwriters that would like to potentially produce their own film.
Bradley: Yeah. Well, the first thing I would tell everybody and you’ve heard it a million times, make your first movie…unless you’re getting money from like outside source like a production company, some sort of real financing, which then that’s a different bit altogether. But for those of us that are gonna do it the way I did it, which is raising money from essentially family and friends, and what ended up happening is I started family and friends and then people I didn’t know started showing up. They heard that I’m making a movie and they wanted to invest in it. And the way it all started is I sat down, I wrote a script that I knew I could make for an affordable price. I knew I could do it.
So I started sharing with friends I knew that had a bit of extra dough and they loved it. They got excited about it. They were like, “This is a lot of fun, this is gonna be super cool!” And so I got little bits of money from different places. My wife and I [laughs] I don’t recommend this to everybody but my wife and I…I looked at my wife at one point when we were going to make the movie because we actually raised…so when I say raised money I meant no promised money, right? I then went and bought all of…because we shot the movie in New York and Thailand. I went and bought all the plane tickets to Thailand on my credit cards and the day we were supposed to leave none of my money had shown up.
I called my best friend, he was one of my investors and I was like, “Bro, I’m leaving tomorrow, I need the money like really badly to make this movie otherwise I’m gonna be flying over to Thailand for a vacation. When I landed in Thailand the money was in my account that wasn’t there when I left. So I got very lucky to have some very good friends. But ultimately then other people started to show up and they wanted to invest in it and I looked at my wife before we went and I said, “Listen babe [laughs] one of two things is gonna happen.” She goes, “Okay, what are these two things?” I say, “Well, we’re either gonna make a couple of million bucks or we’re gonna go bankrupt.” [laughs].
And she said, “How about [inaudible 00:32:58] and I was like, “I’m not interested.” And I thought I was joking at the time but I like literally was like I think this is exactly what I was setting out to do without knowing it. So I raised the money, we invested our own money, I invested my own money in it. After the movie was made I had to raise more money to finish it. And then there’s also just things that come up like you know most people like myself don’t consider marketing at all. And for me what I realized after I had the film in the can, I got it put together…now here’s another thing. The one thing that all of us indie sort of grassroots filmmakers have on our side is time. You’re not in a rush.
If you’re in a rush I don’t know why because there’s no production company barking down your back unless you have that money then you know what I’m talking about. But for people that did it the way I did, I had finished a version of the film that I didn’t like, didn’t work. I had people telling me, “Just put it out and move on. Put it out and move on,” and I didn’t. I found another editor to finish it with me and I spent another year and a half finishing it. By the time I finished it I had something I was very proud of. And I did a couple of days of reshoots and all that. I also had to get some more money to make it work the way I wanted it to. But that’s one piece of advice I can give to everybody, take time. If you have a movie you’re not completely satisfied with, set is aside for a month, come back to it, figure out how to make it work and make it work.
Put in the time to figure it out because I believe as a storyteller we can figure out a way to make it work out. It’s just sometimes it will take that extra amount of time and money. And then when I got to the marketing place I realized how important it was. For me one of the things that everybody discounts is their movie’s trailer. That was my biggest investment of the entire film was…when I say that I mean singular investment, was the trailer because I knew it would open doors for me in terms of people watching the film. And you’ll put a link on here I believe, right?
Ashley: Sure.
Bradley: People can watch the trailer and check it out. The company that made the trailer was…there’s a thing called The Golden Trailer Awards which is the academy awards of movie trailers. So I was sitting in New York…I still lived in New York. I was sitting in New York at a coffee shop and I was like, “I’m just gonna start calling these people, maybe they’ll make my trailer for me.” And I was getting people that were like, “We only work with studios.” They were like very condescendingly, “Our trailers start at 50,000.” I was like, “Okay, I got to go [laughs].” But I found three companies that were willing to negotiate and talk and they were still way out of my budget.
So I befriended a couple of these guys and had conversations that lasted a couple of months with them and got them to come down, down, down, down and literally the people I hired were like, “Well give you three weeks, you’re gonna get these different versions out of it, we’ll do it for your price only under these constraints,” And they kicked out a really, really awesome trailer. So there was point when I first started [inaudible 00:36:00] I didn’t get anybody to watch the movie because all they would do is watch the trailer and go, “Wow, this is nuts!” Unfortunately in hindsight I think the trailer actually might sell the movie as something it’s not because really Land of Smiles is a suspense thriller. It really is.
The trailer comes across more like an action- horror film almost that’s really high tempo and crazy all the time and crazy when it’s not. They just did a really good job of making the trailer [laughs].
Ashley: Sure. So what was your pitch? When you were bringing on these investors, the friends, the family, the friends of friends, what is your pitch to them? Is it an ROY, “Hey man, you put in this many dollars and you’re gonna get this many dollars out? Were there some other actors, you said you gave them roles. How did you go about pitching them and convincing them, because just like you said yourself, you’re either gonna make a lot of money or there’s also a chance you could lose everything. So how do you sort of approach somebody when you’re trying to get them to…and invest is probably a very loose term in something like this?
Bradley: I did it right. I developed a pitch packet, it was eight to ten pages, beautiful. I didn’t have money to make it so I employed one of my good buddies to do it and he did an awesome job and it looked amazing. But I did the research. I found movies that were like the movie I was making and I said, “These are the movies that are like The Blair Witch, those stories…Those Blair Witch Paranormal things that happen, right? And I said, this is what could happen.” And I wasn’t lying because it could happen. It’s a legitimate thing. And to be honest, at the time I believed that that was gonna happen with me. I was like, “We’re gonna make this movie from nothing and we’re gonna turn it around…well, nothing loose to say, and we’re gonna turn around and we’re gonna now sell them for 100 million bucks.
The way I sold it was the way I believed in it. And the truth of the upside of a movie that you make for less than a million bucks is that there is a big upside. Conversely there really are part in today’s market is it’s inundated with movies. There’re so many movies made because…I mean, as I’m discussing there’s a kid in Nashville making a movie on his iPhone with his buddies, a 12 years old. And you go to AFM to try and get people to look at your movie, here’s there too. So how do they know the difference?
Ashley: Yeah. So had you been to Thailand on some sort of a shoot like as an actor or something? Like how did you know it would even be possible to go do [inaudible 00:38:29]? Like I don’t know what the permit situation is, I don’t know where there’re glows, I just don’t know how any of that works. So I would be very hesitant to kind of go off on that. How did you just figure out all that sort of Thailand filmmaking stuff?
Bradley: I was in Thailand for two months on a vacation, traveled all around and part of the way this whole thing came into fruition is that I woke up one morning, I’m staying in this beach Cabana on a little island in Southern Thailand, walk outside, water is in front of me. It’s like one of the most gorgeous beaches I’ve easily ever been on in my life. And I’m sitting there, I was like, “Man, I would watch somebody eat a bowl of cheerios on this beach for at least five minutes, you know what I mean? It’s so beautiful here, this is not rocket science. And so part of what I was also thinking as I was thinking this was like, “Man, the setting here is insane, it’s gorgeous!”
So when I got back from that trip, that was the trip when I decided I was gonna be a screenwriter, I started trying to write films for Thailand. So Land of Smiles was the fourth full feature I wrote for Thailand. The first three are lying in bird cages somewhere in California. But I finally figured out something that I could do there because I just really wanna tell a story there. Part of it was the aesthetic of the actual country, part of it was the people of the country. Land of Smiles is the actual nick name of Thailand because the people are so friendly. And part of it was because I thought to myself, I was like…the people aren’t really hell-bent and uptight in a lot of ways. Does that make sense?
If they see a bunch of young people out there, which our whole crew is young, making a movie together, they’re not gonna come to you and ask for a million bucks, you know what I’m saying. But let’s also be honest, you got to have a strategy in how you do it. The way we shot it was strategy. We shot it in New York on the Red but we didn’t bring a Red to Thailand, it’s too big. I actually had a friend who got shot down the street on a Red in Thailand trying to do that. So we used the Mark III. It was the crème de la crème at the time. That’s not an intimidating camera to build out. Even with a big cinema lens on it’s not intimidating. I also wrote the film strategically with this in mind.
And I’m not gonna lie to you and tell you that the film is what I wrote. You know, there was a night fight that didn’t happen [laughs]. It was supposed to happen in a night club…that didn’t happen. The day before we were gonna do it I was like, “Well, I don’t know how to go staging a night fight in a club. That’s not gonna happen at all [laughs].” So when you see the film you’ll see that the night fight turned into a very subtle moment where…I actually acted in the film too because I needed to save money on another actor, where a character doesn’t pull a knife as much as flash the knife [laughs]. A very subtle version because the scene might or might not have happened in a live club with people just hanging around [laughs] you know what I mean?
I’m not recommending any of this to anyone by the way. Lastly the thing that you have to know is you have to be true to yourself. I’m an adventurous soul. I love to do things that aren’t possible. So if you’re telling me it’s not possible I’m like, “Sweety, that’s probably why I got into this business.” And so part of my thing was people were telling me what I was trying to do was not gonna work, it’s not possible and that alone meant I had to do it. So there I was.
Ashley: And so what does your crew look like in something like this. Did you just have like a DP and a sound guy and maybe a PA? What did the crew actually look like?
Bradley: A skeleton crew bro! A skeleton. So you have a DP and he had his assistant who was essentially the cinematographer as well. A very talented guy. They worked as a team and we ran two cameras at all time. Sound guy and hair and make-up, special effects all that. And then my actors…we only had one person who was just solely an actor which was our lead. My wife was one of the other actors who’s also a producer. One of my best friends was the other actor who I wrote the part for and he was also like a studio producer but also just like the hey, he would do everything that needed to be done kind of guy. And then there was me who was the writer, director, producer, actor.
I got up before everybody every day, spent an hour and half rewriting scenes, going through footage and realizing what we needed to reshoot. Skeleton. The entire thing I think it was nine of us.
Ashley: And you just barrel into the club two guys, the two DPs got cameras and people are just dancing and having a good time and you’re just over there shooting your scene?
Bradley: We would set them up in ways that was very strategic as well. You sit down as a group and you’re having drinks for real and then you put a camera and sticks there, you set the scene up and you just go with it. Listen, the hardest part of the whole thing was sound. I’m not gonna lie to you about that. And then I had some magicians in post that just saved me. But I had some strategy. I knew what I wanted to do. So I didn’t put in like really heavy talking scenes in a night club, I’m not an idiot. Because how are you gonna do that. And there was a few montage sort of bits that are just eye candy because I wanted to get the eye candy. And there’re some things that…there was one thing that was a scene that turned into more of a montage type thing because the actual scene itself couldn’t unfold under the circumstances.
My thing was too that nobody was gonna give me the opportunity to make a movie. Nobody was gonna finance a movie no matter what I did. It wasn’t in the cards for me. So I said you know what, I’m gonna do this myself and that’s what I ended up doing. And in the end I had to be completely honest, an example is I was never gonna do film festivals with this movie. This movie was strictly to be sold. So I finished the movie, I started shopping it to distributors. The information I started hearing from distributors like a lot of your listeners have heard or will hear is the minimum fees and all these other things they come up and all of a sudden you go, “Oh my God, whose gonna make $150,000 before I see a buck, this is nuts!”
I realized right away the financial benefit might not be there. So I said, “Okay, the ship is already sailed, the money’s been spent, I don’t know if I’m recouping the money so I need to avert my plan from getting rich because I don’t think that’s what this is gonna be anymore. I’m still gonna try and do everything I can to get my money back but I said maybe the better way to go down that road is to actually see if I can do anything in the film festivals. So I stopped, I paused everything. I told distributors that I’m holding on to the movie for another year and I started submitting to festivals. It ended up in a ton of festivals but ultimately it ended up winning like 31 awards.
That was the thing that propelled it when I went back to distributors. Now I had that trailer that I told you about, and I go, “Well, here’s the list of awards that it’s won.” Wow, what! Now everybody wants to know more about this particular movie, right? And it’s opened doors professionally that it wouldn’t have opened otherwise because it critically did really well. So financially the benefit might not end up being mine. I’m not gonna make millions of dollars on the movie but I found a way to help my career in the end if that makes sense.
Ashley: Yeah, no absolutely. So what advice would you have then for people trying to break in to this business? Obviously you’ve just gone out there and just shot your own movie. Would you recommend that as a good first step for people? What do you think is a good first step for that guy that’s just getting into the business?
Bradley: It’s how old they are. To be honest, and I give advice to actors all the time because I mentor a lot of them. In terms of young filmmakers is if you’re really young and you’re not even out of high school yet, I would give my entire existence to get into one of the biggest and best film schools in the world. This is tricky because some people disagree with me. I wouldn’t be going to that film school for the “film education”. You’re gonna get a good one but that wouldn’t be the reason I went there. You’re buying relationships. You’re buying a membership to a club and you’re buying membership to a club that will help you for the rest of your life. I’m talking about AFI, USC. I’m talking about the big ones.
That would be my advice for really young filmmakers, because when you get into those clubs man, they help. They really help. The proof’s in the pudding. And for people that are a little bit older I would say it just depends on what route you wanna go. Like how do you wanna do this thing? Because as a lot of you might know the contest route, I mean, I’m seated here, I won a bunch of contests as a screenwriter. I’ve been a finalist and even more. None of them have really provided me with…some of them are providing me opportunities with managers and things that have been wonderful. But none of them have opened that magical door, does that make sense?
Unless it’s Nicholls and maybe Page but Nicholls is the only one I see that opens that magical door. So you can try that route. But for me it’s about doing it. So I would start with short films. Please don’t do the thing where your first film’s a feature. It’s such a bad idea [laughs]. I didn’t make a ton too, I thing I made five or six short films before I made a feature, but my amount of learning in those five or six was immense and it helped me go, “Okay, I’ve started to understand how this process works. I think I’ve got a grasp on it.” So make a couple of short films for nothing. I made a short film for a couple of a hundred bucks, I made a short film for $22,000. I won’t do that again. I wouldn’t recommend that at all.
It’s up to you what you wanna do but you just got to figure out like I need to start making things, so you start making things. Grab your friends, grab your cameras. The other thing I would give…the advice I’d give every single film maker, and this is for young people, this is also for your 20, 30, 40 year old filmmakers out there. Do not be scared to approach established actors. People are terrified. I’ve watched more movies that failed because they have awful actors. If I had a dollar for every time I’ve seen a really cool script get murdered by bad acting I would just be retired. I’d be done. And for some reason film makers don’t think they can approach real actors. Take this piece of advice everyone.
I can’t even tell you how many…I have hundreds and hundreds of professional actor friends, all of them are willing to give a little bit of their time a week, maybe two weeks to a project if the script is good and the result you’ll have is this magical moments in front of your camera that you couldn’t have got otherwise. So do not be afraid to approach those actors. Ultimately make your first movie for as cheap as possible.
Ashley: Yeah. How do you find those actors…all these actor friends of yours? You’re talking about just like going on IMDb and kind of drilling down and obviously you’re not going after the name actors but guys that have solid resumes and just contact their agent, maybe try and contact them directly?
Bradley: Okay, so first of all I’ve been in the business for a long time so I have access to actors that other people don’t. So obviously that’s not fair. Going through the route of contacting agents and all that, you’re gonna have to be then a SAG. You’re gonna have to be SAG and registered to all those other wonderful things and that means you have a little bit more money to spend. If you can do that, great, do it! Don’t be afraid to hear no. If you’re gonna go to one of the biggest actors in the world you’ll talk to your agents assistant and that will be the end. But it doesn’t matter, try it. But if they’re further down IMDb, they’re lower than five or ten thousand, you’ll be surprised you might be able to get one of them to do it for a couple hundred bucks a day for a week just because they wanna do the project because it’s awesome.
Ultimately the thing I did over mine was I used Actors Access. All of my actor friends hate this story but it’s true. I put four roles on Actors Access and I think I had 4300 submissions. It was for a film that was going abroad and all these other things which was exciting I’m sure but at the same time I had so much talent at my fingertips I didn’t know what to do with, I decided to go through the process of going through 4300 people and I found my lead actress through that who’s since been on TV shows and she’s a wonderful girl. She’s an insanely talented young woman. I just happened to find her before anybody else did. And that was through Actors Access.
The reason I’m telling you this is that I think a lot of people come up with a film idea and then they hire their neighbor or they have a cousin that took an acting class once. Don’t do it! Don’t do it, you’re asking for disaster. Give it a lot because you guys it will change your films, it will make them so much better. And the actors are hungry and they wanna work, trust me.
Ashley: Yeah, now that’s very, very sound advice. Really it makes it feel like a student film when you get back acting and something and it really just separates it from the pack. So I just like to end the interviews, what have you seen lately that you felt was great? A TV show, a movie, watching something on Netflix? I’m just always curious to hear what other people are watching that they think is really awesome.
Bradley: Well, what’s the horror film that…Was it A Quiet Place?
Ashley: Yeah, A Quiet Place. I have not seen it yet but yeah.
Bradley: Stop it! You know why I love it and everybody should see it? It’s like it is so unique. The screenplay did almost no dialogue. I mean, I think there may be 10 or 15 lengths in dialogue in the entire movie. So the guys who wrote it, you read the story, they’re getting laughed at in Hollywood after they wrote this thing because it’s like what is this? It’s a 60 paged screenplay. But what they also did is they wrote something that was insanely unique and it was their own voice. And then he did a wonderful job. Krasinski did a wonderful job with the film. I was just very, very, very impressed. So that was one movie that grabbed my attention. I also watch a lot of indie film and you know what, I’m gonna plug a movie I’m watching right now. I was watching this indie film on Netflix and I found it to be so charming.
And when I say indie film you guys I’m not saying the movie wasn’t made for money because the truth is it probably was. It’s called Tramps and it’s on Netflix. Never heard of it. It’s a lovely film, so simple you could shoot this movie for nothing. I don’t know they might have shot it for five million buck, I don’t know. But my advice for everybody is to watch everything because I often find a lot of times the bigger budget stuff is underwhelming because whatever it is that they’re doing is like there’s too much…they put on the cake gloves. Everything’s so safe and sanitized. You know there was that movie years ago, was it called Monsters that was shot in Mexico?
Ashley: Yeah, and the guy went on to direct one of the Star Wars movies.
Bradley: Yeah, but like the movie you watch and you’re like, “Where did this guy just came out of his head is this is so…this world is so exciting!” And the thing I would tell everybody like not to back up or to go…you know, anybody that watches Land of Smiles is just like the experience they have they can feel the energy that went into it. I have a lot of energy, but they can feel that energy of Thailand, like the [inaudible 00:52:48] world we were in. And that is also who I am. It’s like a very passionate, colorful world. And it just came through because I didn’t get it right. If anything, I got it wrong because I made it my own. But what I did do is I was like I wanna be authentic, I’m gonna be honest to myself. This is who I am right now, today.
So that would be another thing I would tell everybody. I feel like Tramps is an example of a movie that’s authentic. There was a movie called White Girl I think a couple of years ago. She’s also going to have a nice career this young woman. It’s just this really edgy, New York film and you’re like, “Man, this is so authentic. Whoever made this, this is them. This is part of them. And so I would avoid anybody that’s out there. Watch as many indie films as you can and you’ll start to recognize the ones you gravitate towards. I gravitate towards the greedier ones. And also just don’t let anybody tell you how to get it right because ultimately that’s their version of the story, not yours.
Ashley: Yeah, for sure. So how can people see Land of Smiles, do you know what the release schedule is gonna be like when it will hit iTunes, Amazon…
Bradley: Depends on the country you’re in, right? So right now I believe it’s on Amazon. So in South East Asia…no, in all of Asia the movie I believe called is called A Game of Clowns, a title that I absolutely don’t love, but that’s fine [laughs]. I didn’t decide that. It did fine. So that’s what it is there. I don’t know what it is in Europe but it’s in various countries in Europe already on different platforms. In Canada it’s on Super Channel, it is called Land of Smiles. I believe in the US it is already on iTunes but I know it’s on Amazon as Land of Smiles as well. The trailer you’ll see on any platform, my distributor actually cut his own trailer because again I cut a trailer that’s fast and exciting the part of it didn’t work for selling the movie.
He needed a much simpler trailer to sell the movie that just outlines the story. So that would be it. And there’s another version that’s gonna come out that’s gonna be called American Tours Nightmare In Thailand [laughs]. I’m not laughing at myself, I’m just laughing at how things have become.
Ashley: Where is that gonna be released?
Bradley: [laughs] I don’t know. I just know that it’s gonna happen. I don’t know. At this point I just…I don’t know but if you keep looking in IMDb you’ll become pretty and if you follow me on any of the social media stuff I’ll always let you know how it’s rolling out and what platform sort of thing as much as I know, because sometimes I don’t even know.
Ashley: Yeah, perfect. And that’s a good Segway into…maybe you can mention your different social media handles, Twitter, Facebook, anything you’re comfortable sharing and I’ll put those in the show notes so people can click over and find you.
Bradley: Yeah, it’s my name Bradley B-R-A-D-L-E-Y. And then Stryker S-T-R-Y-K-E-R. Just look up my name and you’ll find me on everything. And I urge all the filmmakers that listen to this, you guys, by the way I’ve listened to…Ashley, I’ve listened to your podcast for two years. I listen to it at the gym.
Ashley: Nice. Well, thank you…yeah.
Bradley: A lot of the frustration of the filmmakers helps me to lift weights [laughs]. All the glory stories inspire me to run a little further. But I’ve been listening to it and one of the things that I urge all people to do and especially filmmakers and whatnot, don’t be afraid to contact me and ask me questions about stuff. I mean, I’m not gonna be able to devote thousands of hours to anybody but I really love the process of making film and writing scripts and everything. If you have any questions I have no problem sending you a quick answer about things because I really believe for all of us in this community that are yet established on some bigger level, you got to look out for each other.
That’s something that I urge filmmakers to just look out for each other more becaue I feel like people feel like they’re in competition with each other. Go to AFM one time and you’ll realize you’re in competition with too many people to care. So just support each other and that’s why if I can help any way with that, reach out I’ll do what I can do but like support each other. That’s really important man. Anybody that’s chosen to be in the arts for a living, you got to support each other because it’s not an easy life.
Ashley: Yeah, for sure. We can end it on that note. I think that’s excellent advice. So Bradley, I really appreciate you coming on and talking with me for an hour. Thank you very much. And I really wish you luck with this film and I’ll have you on again when you get done with your next film.
Bradley: Absolutely, and good luck with all your stuff as well.
Ashley: Thank you man, will talk to you later.
Bradley: Great, later bro.
Ashley: Bye.
I just wanna talk quickly about SYS Select. It’s a service for screenwriters to help them sell their screenplays and get writing assignments. The first part of the service is the SYS Select screenplay database. Screenwriters upload their screenplays along with a log line, synopsis and other pertinent information like budget and genre and then producers search for and hopefully find screenplays that they wanna produce. Dozens of producers are in the system looking for screenplays right now. I launched this service at the beginning of this year and we’ve already started to see some success stories. You can check out SYS Podcast Episode #222 with Steve Deering. He was the first official success story to come out of the SYS Select database. You can learn about all of this by going to www.sellingyourscreenplayselect.com.
When you join SYS Select you get access to the screenplay database that I just mentioned along with all the other services that we’re providing to SYS Select members. Those services include the monthly newsletter that goes out to our list of 400 producers who are actively seeking writers and screenplays. Each SYS Select member can pitch one screenplay in this monthly newsletter. We also have partnered with one of the premier paid screenwriting leads sites so I can syndicate their leads to SYS Select members. There are lots of great paid leads coming in each week from our partner. Recently we’ve been getting five to ten high quality paid leads per week. These leads run the game, there’s producers looking for specific types of spec script to producers looking to hire a screenwriter to write up one of their ideas or properties.
They’re are looking for shots, they’re looking for features, TVs and web series pilots, all types of different projects. If you sign up for SYS Select you’ll get these leads emailed directly to you several times per week. Also you can get access to the SYS Select forum where we will help you with your log line and query letter and answer any screen writing related questions that you might have. Also in the forum are all the recorded screenwriting classes that I’ve done over the years, so you’ll have access to all of those as well. The classes cover every part of the writing process from concept to outlining to the first act, second act, third act as well as other topics like writing short films and pitching your projects in person. Once again, if this sounds like something you would like to learn more about please go to www.sellingyourscreenplayselect.com.
On the next episode of the podcast I’m gonna be interviewing actor and also writer-director James Morosini. He gives a very candid interview about the process of him making the film Threesomething. It’s a comedy about three people that have a very awkward threesome and kind of where that all leads. He’s a real artist and very open about the whole process and not just the nuts and bolts. We certainly spent some time talking about that, just the nuts and bolts of producing a super low-budget film, but we also talk about sort of the emotional ups and downs. This is a big part of indie filmmaking. I’ve tried to share some of my own ups and downs with The Pinch. Things can get just again emotionally draining and kind of just wondering where does that all lead.
So we talk about that a lot and James is just very open about it. It’s not something that I hear a lot talked about. Everybody is talking about the script or the casting or what camera you’re gonna use and that’s a big part of indie filmmaking. But another big aspect as I said is sort of these emotional ups and downs that you go through as you’re producing the film, as you finish the film, as you get rejected from film festivals, maybe you get into some festivals. It’s just a very emotionally draining process and as I said, James is a real artist and very sort of in touch with these feelings. We talk about that quite a bit and I think it was a very candid and interesting interview. So keep an eye out for that episode next week. Anyway, that’s the show, thank you for listening.