I wish I’d had 10 percent more of an idea of what the fuck I was doing. Though I had a very strong sense of what I wanted the story to be, we kept shooting and shooting because everything seemed interesting. In the end we had more than 300 hours of footage, and turning that into an 80-minute movie with a strong narrative just became this living hell. The story would keep unfolding as time went on and things would happen and at a certain point I just lost the plot and wanted to kill myself. I just wish I […]

If the three directors at Ironbound Films had stumbled upon a genie’s lamp or magic wand or some other wish-giving mechanism during the filming of The Linguists, and somehow that mechanism would only grant 10 percent more of something we currently possessed, then that something would unanimously and unequivocally be 10 percent more toilet paper. When we set out with the stars of our film — linguists David Harrison and Gregory Anderson — to India to document the endangered language Sora, we spent our first week in Bhubaneswar, a fairly developed city on the east coast of India. We stayed […]

A large part of my film, The Art Star and the Sudanese Twins, was shot in the extraordinary region of southern Sudan. Its first language is Dinka, its second language Arabic. Casual greetings are unfortunately my limits in both these languages, and this was both the challenge and the beauty of trying to film an observational documentary. My cameraman and I were often running on instinct, interpreting the body language of people we were filming. We’ve both filmed overseas and have gained some familiarity with European and Pacific Island languages. But Dinka in particular has no similarity to anything I’d […]

Penis size was definitely an issue on Baghead. In fact, we could have used a LOT more than 10 percent extra, but we would have been glad to have as much as we could get. Now please don’t think we’re superficial. We generally don’t concern ourselves with such things. We’ve traditionally viewed ourselves as nice, sweet brothers who lean toward more personal, relationship-oriented films like The Puffy Chair. Maybe we were even better off making these sensitive films with the limited equipment God gave us, you know? But Baghead turned out to be one demanding, feisty little bugger. And we […]

You always wish you had more of everything: budget, talent, time, emotional courage, personal magnetism, etc., but part of maturing as a filmmaker, for me, means accepting what I have and doing the best I can with it. That doesn’t mean not pushing as hard and as fiercely as possible during every moment of the process — it just means a willingness to fight for the things I have a chance of getting and genuinely letting go of the things I can’t. In this instance, it would have been nice to have 10 percent more willingness from the financiers who […]

Rasquachismo. Sleep Dealer is a science fiction set in Mexico. In the script I described everything from exploding buildings and fighter-jet dogfights to remote-control robots. The effects were never the focus of the film — they existed to give a politicized futuristic setting for my characters. When time came to actually produce the insanely challenging visuals, my amazing d.p. and VFX supervisor and I solved many, many problems with rasquachismo. Rasquachismo refers to a spirit in Latino communities of taking what’s at hand, cobbling it together, and making something wondrous out of it. Like using parts of one old car […]

If I could’ve had 10 percent more of something on Chronic Town, I would have to say that it would’ve been 10 percent more length on our extension cords. That may sound odd, but when you have to plug in your production vehicles (which on our budget equaled two minivans) to prevent the oil in your car from freezing overnight, then every inch counts. During the winter in Alaska, you need to plug your car into an outlet to keep the oil in your engine from freezing (it’s advised to be plugged in when it’s below zero, which it was […]