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“I’ve Got My Finger on the Zeitgeist”: Matt Farley on Local Legends: Bloodbath
Matt Farley in Local Legends: Bloodbath Several years ago on my birthday, I woke to a text from a friend: a link to “The Emily Poop Song”. For a minute and twenty-one seconds, I listened to what the album title described as “The Odd Man Who Sings About Poop” repeat my name over and over, often punctuated with the word “poop.” There were fifty songs on the album, all about different people and feces, but that turned out to be only a tiny portion of the odd man’s output—across several Spotify profiles, Matt Farley has written over 25,000 songs.
While some are about our smelly bodily functions, the prolific songwriter also sings about various towns in the US, holidays, Philadelphia sports and a seemingly endless array of other topics. Novelty songs are just the beginning. Since the early 2000s, Matt Farley and his band of friends and local comedians (including Charles Roxburgh and Tom Scalzo) have been making indie comedy and horror movies. The movies are silly, with references to anything from Woody Allen to ’50s monster movies. Using small crews and friends and family as actors, Farley has shot and filmed a collection of cult films for a devoted fanbase. His early filmography includes Freaky Farley, a peeping tom; Monster, Marriage and Murder in Manchvegas, a slasher-comedy and Don’t Let the Riverbeast Get You, a campy play on old-school studio monster movies.
This year, Farley released a follow-up to his 2013 film Local Legends, which follows a comedian named Matt Farley, and his musical and comedic pursuits, as he prepares for an important show. The sequel, Local Legends: Bloodbath, pokes fun at its predecessor and demonstrates Farley’s growth as an artist. The film follows a comedian named Matt Farley (played by Farley) as he deals with the fallout of his approach to creative endeavors, ten years after the release of the character’s film Local Legends. It’s a hilarious, self-reflexive and often cold-hearted examination of the artist. Recently, I got to sit down and discuss the film with the real-life Farley.
Filmmaker: Local Legends: Bloodbath opens the same way as your first film, with your character performing at a comedy show. In both movies, your performance and the audience’s reactions feel so organic and natural. People in the audience are singing along to your songs and your persona is different from the character in the rest of the movie. Part of me was wondering if those were tapings of actual shows.
Farley: Oh yeah, a hundred percent, and the game plan was always [that] whatever happens is what we’re going to use. It’s not like I coached the audience on how to be. In the first movie, they were pretty calm—I think I won them over by the end of the set, but I’m running off some brilliant one-liners and barely getting a chuckle, but that added to the fun of it. They were a little more rowdy at the show for the most recent movie. Plus, I think I’m better at working a crowd at this point. And you’re right, my persona onstage, especially in Bloodbath, is quite different than how I am in the rest of the movie. But the movie is so crazy that I was like “Who cares?”
Filmmaker: It was really interesting how non-traditional of a sequel Bloodbath was. It’s not a continuation at all of the first film—it’s about the guy who made it, having a conversation with its predecessor and making fun of aspects of the first movie.
Farley: Yeah! I cringe a little bit watching the first movie because I make myself morally superior to everyone else. I’ve had a few people in interviews be like, “Isn’t it a little much that every woman in the movie is attracted to you?” [laughs] So I was like, “My character deserves a comeuppance,” so I gave him a major comeuppance. Where everything leaned toward the positive in the first one, I made everything go so far into the negative in Bloodbath. It was tons of fun to be brutal and vicious with myself. I loved it.
Filmmaker: One example that I think of is the attitude towards the poop songs in both of the movies. In the first one, it’s like, “Look at this genius thing that I can do to make money.” Then, in the second one, the attitude is almost disdainful. The poop songs are treated as stand-ins for the commodification of our artistic pursuits, which can really damage our relationships with our passions. I think of the moment when you act opposite yourself, performing the business side of Matt Farley as he gives the real Matt Farley a choice between performing at his weekly comedy show, his one artistic reprieve, or just increasing productivity and making the poop songs instead.
Farley: Yeah, it just becomes this weight crushing the artist, and I love that. It’s the same with the coffee milk, like, “Isn’t it funny? He’s drinking the coffee milk.” But by the second one, the coffee milk is potentially ruining his life, and there are for sure moments where I feel that way about both things. [Laughs] I have to periodically stop drinking coffee milk for months at a time just to regain my pH balance. And the poop songs, there are definitely moments where I’m like “What am I doing with my life? This is insane.” It’s so fun to be able to explore that in a movie that anyone wants to watch. It’s amazing.
Filmmaker: In the film, you discuss a decrease in productivity in making the novelty songs. Is that a reflection of something you’ve noticed in real life as your career has progressed?
Farley: I mean, lately I’ve been doing fifty a month, which is a little bit lower than some other years. But it’s not so much that I’ve been struggling, it’s more just because I’m making more movies and doing more live shows, and I’ve gotten to the point where I’m making enough money to live, so I figured I should live a little bit, you know? [Laughs] I should enjoy the fruits of my labor, at least for a little while. It has slowed down, but everything is completely exaggerated in the movie. In fact, at the premiere, I assured the audience that everything was okay in terms of my relationships with all my friends and family, as opposed to how it’s depicted on screen.
Filmmaker: Including yourself, a lot of characters share names with real-life people. Obviously, I doubt that your wife is cheating on you with your bandmate, but aside from that, are any of those on-screen dynamics at least slightly informed by your real-life dynamics?
Farley: Well, there is this one scene where Pete is writing “Not as nice as everyone thinks” on my poster, then I chase him down in the park and he swings a big stick at me. I gave him a lot of lines that people have said to me in real life, like when they say “You’re too much of a self-promoter,” or that the only reason I do things is so I can brag about doing them. [Those lines were] very true. But as far as I know, my wife is not having an affair, so that’s good, and I get along great with all of my friends. I’m sure I rub some people the wrong way, in that I’m a little bit relentless and whatnot, but it was so freeing and exciting to write this stuff and be brutally honest with myself in a movie that is otherwise over-the-top silly. It’s fun to just inject a little bit of seriousness in there to get people thinking.
Filmmaker: I do want to ask what your writing process is like. A lot of your movies have a sense of spontaneity to them, as if you and your buddies were like, “Let’s go make a movie!” But what does your actual pre-production period look like?
Farley: In general, at all times we have three to four ideas on the back burner. Currently, while we’re making a movie called Evil Puddle, when Charlie Roxburgh and I are lugging equipment to a location, we’ll be chatting about what should happen in the movie Evil Spot, which we’re probably going to make next, but there’s also another one called Losers Out that we want to make. So, we’re just kind of like, “It would be cool if this happened in this movie and this happened in that movie” and keep those ideas organized, and when it gets to the point where one of those ideas is stepping forward and it’s the one we have the most ideas for, that’s the one we should make next. Then Charlie and I meet on Skype once a week, and we have a Google doc and write a few scenes each week. Three to six months after that, we have a script ready to go. We are very strict about doing it on the schedule we want to do it on and being focused. We don’t want to sit on Skype for ninety minutes and realize that we were just talking instead of being productive.
I wrote the Local Legends movies on my own. It wasn’t too dissimilar though. It was really just jotting down ideas and remembering specific events in my life. In college, my name was on the wall at the radio station with my number and it said you could call me if there was an emergency. Next to my name, someone wrote “Not as funny as everyone thinks.” I was outraged but also happy, because I was like “Oh! Apparently everyone else thinks I’m funny!” It’s just the one person who wrote this doesn’t. That happened in 1999 and I was still thinking about it in 2023 when I found a way to work it into the script.
Filmmaker: So, you work only with non-professional actors, most of whom are just your friends and family. Is this due to budget constraints or do you just really like working with them?
Farley: Both. Primarily budget, but in a daydream scenario where we were given a bunch of money to make a movie, I would still want to use all these people and finally pay them. After all these years, they will have earned it! But it’s gotten to the point where the acting in our movies just feels right to me. At first, it was like, “We just have to make do with unprofessionals,” but now I can’t imagine our movies being played any other way. It wouldn’t seem right. If Chalamet comes to me to be in a movie, I’ll consider it, but no promises.
Filmmaker: These films were never picked up by a distributor, but you have your movies streaming on platforms like Tubi and Amazon, and you also sell Blu Rays through Gold Ninja Video. How did you go about distributing these films yourself?
Farley: Early on, with Freaky Farley, Manchvegas, Riverbeast and so on, we would just pay to have a thousand DVDs made and mostly gave them away. The idea was that this was a long-term project and, at this point, no one wants to pay for this, but rather than having boxes of unsold merchandise we should just get it out there. That meant giving it away to people, mailing it to video stores and second-hand shops and hoping that they would put it on the shelves and someone would happen upon it. Gold Ninja happened because the guy who runs it, Justin Decloux, is part of a small group of people in Toronto who are fans of the movies, and he was like “Do you want me to release it?” It’s one of the best things that ever happened to us. That’s big. And then we use a service called Filmhub to get the movies on Tubi and Amazon. Filmhub is just a middleman between artists and streaming sites. We’ve done well with that and I think it adds a little bit of credibility to the movies that people can get them so easily. Ten years ago, I was mailing free DVDs to public access stations, so we’ve come a ways. Hopefully, in ten more years, we’ll be even better.
