For Part II of this interview, go
here.
Question: Can you share some of your thoughts on scripts and the writing process for your movies?
Kevin: There is no easy way to becoming a good writer besides writing a
lot, and over a long period of time. That is the thing a lot of people are not understanding. I have friends, so I feel bad for them, who ask me if I will look at their script. It’s not even spell-checked! I think to myself, “Can’t you at least make sure every sentence has a period at the end?” Those are signs of shoddy writing.
When I was a script reader, I would see submissions like that. When I got one of those to read, I want to say to them “You’ve gotten a script to an agency, you have already beaten the odds by actually getting your script to an agency. But there are spelling errors so bad that I really don’t want to read any further.” My rule of thumb was if you (the writer) don’t make me want to read past page 10, I will probably stop.
I got that job through a friend. I’d read some of his scripts and he knew an agency that was looking for readers. I’d seen some examples of “coverage,” so I could do it. They paid 75 dollars a script, so I said okay. Basically, coverage is a specially formatted script report you mail back to the agents. It is 2 or 3 pages, with a paragraph for the script summary, a three-part
recommend script recommend writer recommend both
option on top that you have to circle. For example, if you circle “recommend writer” then you are suggesting that the agents ask the writer for another script but to pass on this one. You liked the writing but not the script itself. Lastly, there is a section with your thoughts on whether the script works or not. In this part, you analyze the strengths and weaknesses of the script.
How long it took me to read a script depended on how bad and how long it was. Some scripts arrived that were just a thick block of paper. If they are poorly written it can be very slow going. Some were written by people who had no idea how to write a paragraph, and with no dialog, like it was a book. And I had to summarize it! That’s why I would sometimes get to page 10 and then just skim the rest. I am a pretty good speed-reader, though I don’t know where that talent came from, and I would just speed-read the rest if the first 10 pages wasn’t good. Then I’d write a rough summary, which the agents probably wouldn’t read anyway. Towards the time when I knew I’d be quitting soon, I would sometimes submit only a 1 page coverage. I’d say “This is atrocious and not professionally written. I only read 10 pages, but I can tell you right now, pass, pass, pass!” I wondered if they would still give me my 75 bucks, but they did.
In the two and a half years I did that job, where I read 1-4 scripts a week, I only saw 2 good scripts. I wish I still had them! I’d like to re-read them. I had to stop because I was gearing up to shoot
Hunting Humans.
Question: Is
Red Fish Blue Fish your next movie?
Kevin: Red Fish Blue Fish is not my next movie. I wrote the script for Tom Proctor. It is in pre-production. It is supposed to be shot in Cambodia but filming hasn’t begun [
ed. note: as of 2011] and I think they are still trying to raise more money. It is possible it will never get shot.
My next movie is another project with
Luke Theriault, my co-writer on
Garden of Hedon, but we’re not releasing any more information on that. I’ve known Luke for years and years. He was actually the script supervisor for
Fear of Clowns, 2. I first met him after
Fear of Clowns, 1. I’d read some stuff he wrote. He’s a pretty good writer and a very, very good idea man. I can pass him a draft of a script and he will come up with good suggestions. “Have you thought about this?” or “What about that?” - things that go off in another direction I hadn’t thought of. He was the first person to read the script for Bounty and he gave me back notes. He suggested we write something together. I told him I was thinking of doing something “webisodic”, a series of five minute episodes published on the web, where something suspenseful had to happen each five minutes. It would be short enough so lots of people would watch but suspenseful enough that people would want to see the next episode, when that was posted. That led to Garden of Hedon. But right now, we are still breaking the story, we don’t know exactly what the story-line for the next movie will be. That’s why we don’t talk about it.
The
Garden of Hedon might not be released as a “webisode”. The funder is a rich guy who is not that concerned about making his money back. He just wants to get his name as a producer on it, to gain some exposure. How
Garden of Hedon is distributed depends on how
Bounty does on VOD. If
Bounty makes decent money on VOD, then we will probably distribute
Garden of Hedon the same way. The problem is that I do not get paid to write, direct, edit, and the 9000 other things that it takes to make a money. It’s probably about 2 years, start to finish, to do a movie, but writing and editing are the longest pieces of the process. I don’t get paid for any of that stuff, and I need to start getting paid! The producer on
Garden of Hedon told me “Look, I don’t need the money. If you can make money, take it as salary and start paying yourself.”
For the next movie, we have an investor who is willing to put up more money that I have ever spent on a movie before. It’s not great money, but it will enable me to cast some B-list actors. You’ll actually say, “I recognize that person! I can’t remember their name but I saw them in some movie!” That’s where we’re trying to go now.
Question: What comes after hiring the main cast and the director of photography?
Kevin: After hiring the actors and DP, you want to hire a good sound engineer if you can afford it. I’d love a first assistant director but I’ve never actually had the money to afford one. That’s someone who kind of controls the set, makes sure that you’re on time, and so on. My production manager Robert Ziegler is my right-hand man and does a lot of that for me. The production manager deals with the extras, making sure they will show up, and deals with any problems the actors have. There are always problems that arise when dealing with needy actors and there are a lot of needy actors out there! The property manager is typically me. I own the fake guns and real guns and will typically bring those myself. Sometimes I put the actors in charge of their props. A special effects guy might bring his own props, like a head cast or something.
Question: Do you have a preference of film vs digital?
Kevin: I don’t think I’ll ever shoot film again unless I had the opportunity to shot in 35mm. If I could do that, I would definitely shoot film. I remember in
Hunting Humans, where we shot 28000 feet of film, I had nightmares that all the money I had was in that film. It remained undeveloped and unseen and I was worried that maybe the DP screwed up and all the film was black. Or maybe there was a camera glitch and there was a scratch through the all the reels, ruining the entire film. It is a lot of panic not knowing. Halfway through
Hunting Humans we did get two reels hastily transferred by RGB Video. That cost I think about 200 dollars for the transfer. It looked really good and the crew got re-energized. Even I, as director, the guy who has to exude confidence, was having second thoughts wondering “Am I doing this right?” and then I saw the transfer and though “Yeah, I kind of know what I’m doing!”
Rick was definitely getting down during the shoot of
Hunting Humans. He was in the middle of a divorce. The
Making Of special feature for that film was really good since there was so much stuff he was going through. That reminds me, the Making Of also has footage of when the power went out in the location we were filming. The transformer blew, so we had to stop shooting. We were shooting at Rick Ganz’ parents house, and they were not there. Rick and I thought, “Cool, they knew were were shooting, so they left to get out of our way.” It turns out, the reason they weren’t there was that Rick’s Dad had a heart attack that day and was in the hospital! After the power came back on and we had just started getting back into shooting, they came back. His Mom said, your Dad had a heart attack, he’s okay, but you need to stop shooting here and get out. So that scene was shot in 2 places. I had to try to make a match between the two locations. So we ended up going to Rick’s old apartment, that he had been kicked out of by his (soon to be ex-) wife, to shoot more scenes. Right in the middle of that shooting, his wife comes home and pitches a fit! “What are you doing here!?” she yells. That was Day 1 of the shoot of
Hunting Humans. I was thinking “It’s not going to get any better, is it?” Yeah,
Hunting Humans was a bit of a nightmare to make.
You just have to keep going. As a film-maker, you will have huge downs. Huge downs, where nothing is going right. In those times, you just have to trust the shooting script is sound, and you just have to try to get it done. Ignore what you think is going on and shoot. In the scene of
Fear of Clowns, 1 when Shivers comes up the stairs and tries to punch that door lock to get in the theater. The door lock won’t work. At the time,
Mark Lassise (who played the role of Shivers) had his contacts in for 13 hours. He was only supposed to have them in for 6 hours. He’s rubbing his eyes all the time and I’m thinking this is going “This is going to be terrible.” In the editing room, I could see that those scenes came out fine. You just need to keep going, keep following the script.
Question: Do you have any advice on doing sound for an independent film?
Kevin: Every movie has been different for me, but sound is one of the biggest problems in low-budget film-making. For Hunting Humans, I was the sound engineer. While directing, I had to run over to a DAT recorder, since you can’t record to 16 mm film, and listen to every take over headphones. For
Fear of Clowns, 1 we actually had professional audio people, a couple of buddies of mine who had a sound studio helped us out, and they were pretty good. In general, it is really hard to afford good sound engineers because they are expensive. They are worth it but a low-budget film-maker just can’t afford it. For
Fear of Clowns, 2 I had some younger college guys, who sort of knew what they were doing but were not familiar with my equipment. I had a hard drive sound recorder, a Fostex mixer which cost me about 1000 dollars. There weren’t familiar with that so some of the sound they got was not great. In addition, the recorded over one entire take, since they didn’t know how the right procedure for saving to the hard drive. They thought that saving a file appended the new sound to the sound already saved on that file. Instead it replaced the sound already recorded to that file by the new sound. So, we had to loop that entire take. That was not fun.
The great thing about Bounty was we strapped really good Sennheiser shotgun mics to all the cameras and, with a few exceptions, the sound from those mics came out exactly as I wanted. The only exception was that the wind noise when they were all on the roof of the building in Baltimore was too harsh and required looping.
Question: Where were your apartment complex scenes in
Bounty shot?
Kevin: Some of the
Bounty scenes were shot in the apartment complex at Furnace Branch Road and Crane Highway. Some of the apartment complexes we wanted to film in were a little scary. As I was driving around one of them, everyone was checking me out like “You are not one of us,” as in the
Body Snatchers movie! I told Tom Proctor, “This could be dangerous, they really could be wanted, they may think you are Immigration or something. What are you going to do if someone opens a door and points a shotgun at you?” Tom looked at me and said, “I’m going to own me a new shotgun!” I’m thinking “Oh man, that guy’s bad!” He is a cool dude.
The first time Tom and I went to Baltimore to check out locations, I put him in bounty-hunter gear. The gun, the badge, the vest. I thought, “I’ll shoot some B-roll, get used to this
Red camera a little more, and I’ll show him some of the locations.” It was a scary area and we wanted to see in daylight some of the locations where the scenes would be shot. We’re driving around, and we get stopped by the police. Tom did a right-turn on red where he wasn’t supposed to. The cop comes up to the car and looks at Tom and says, “Oh, who are you guys looking for?” He thinks we’re real! This happened for everyone we met. They thought I was shooting a documentary on bounty hunters. I tell the cop, “No, we’re not really after anyone right now, I’m just following him around shooting some B-roll footage for this documentary I’m doing.” Okay, let me see your license. He checks out Tom’s license, comes back, and says, “Go down this road a few blocks and turn right. That’s a real dangerous area, and you might find several people you can actually take in right now.” We get out the car near the area we’ll be shooting at and start walking around. Someone had actually been killed around there a few weeks before and there are blue-light cameras everywhere. I’m in my own world, telling Tom “We’ll do this, then this is going to happen, then there will be a car chase down there.” Tom says “Get behind me, man,” and he picks up a coat hanger from the street and starts bending and twisting it behind his back. There are these two guys walking towards us. But then the cross the street and Tom says “Looked like they were casing us.” A cool guy! We wanted Tom for the
Garden of Hedon, but he was doing another film. We’re hoping to have him back in the next one. One of the best guys I’ve ever met.
Question: Do you have any advice on directing actors?
Kevin: I’ve gotten much better at directing actors over the years but that is really not something you learn in college. At first, you might think that directing is picking the camera angles and how the camera will track the action, stuff like that. The Hitchcock “Actors are to be treated like cattle”-kind of attitude. I used to think that actors would somehow know what I was thinking they should be doing. They don’t necessarily know what is going on in my mind. Especially for my first movie, where there was no rehearsal. I would just block the scene on the day of the shot and then we would shoot the scene. They might have a totally different idea of how the scene works than you do. In
Fear of Clowns, 1 we had a table reading with the main actors, but no blocking. At least I could see if the actors’ reading of the lines matched how I thought of the character. You never want to have to fix a big misconception on set, when you can work out those issues in rehearsal. In
Bounty we housed the actors in the same house and had a full read-through of the script. The actors liked getting to know each other and that helped them grow into the close-knit unit they were supposed to portray in the film. In the
Garden of Hedon we actually had three table reads, since it was hard to get all the actors together at the same time. The more times the actors read through it, the better I am able to see which lines just don’t read well. For example, there might be too many “s”’s in a line and it needs to be rewritten to make it flow better for the actor. Sometimes it’s okay for an actor to ad-lib a line, but sometimes not - when the rhythm of the script is more important. For example, one character says “I didn’t want to hurt anyone?” and the other character says sarcastically “You didn’t want to hurt anyone?” Saying instead, “You didn’t want to hurt anybody?” just doesn’t flow right. The rhythm to the speech is ruined. Mostly, you want to iron out ad-libs and tweaking of lines in the read-through. I do not like ad-libbing at all. It wastes time.
Question: What is ADR and what is Foley?
Kevin: DR stands for “automatic dialog replacement” but there is nothing automatic about it for me. I don’t have one of the expensive ma- chines used in Hollywood studios, which will automatically replace dialog. When I do ADR with an actor, I have to get them to do the line over and over again until it sounds right. For me, technically, ADR and looping are the same thing. It is amazingly time-consuming, especially if you are working with an actor who is not good at it. Some are good, some are not.
Johnny Alonso, a local actor who played Shorty in
Bounty and Ralph the orderly in
Fear of Clowns, 2, is good. He was right on and finished all his looping in 20 minutes. But he is very experienced, and has acted in lots of TV series and movies. Others come in and get too involved with watching themselves and waiting for the moment where they have to repeat their line. I have to tell them “Don’t pay too much attention to watching yourself, just get back into your character and re-act the scene.” That’s looping.
Foley is recording sound effects after the fact, to add into the sound track. Distributors want an M&E track, “mix and effects,” separate from the dialog track. This helps them sell to foreign markets, who can then dub the dialog in their own language more realistically. Making an M&E track is a mammoth pain in the ass. For my films, Foley is done entirely by me. I have to ask if it is worth it to spend all the time adding an effects track. I did that for
Fear of Clowns, I. I brought three sets of boots to my parents basement and recorded different walks and steps and falls. Then those audio files have to be edited and suitably renamed - footsteps-fast.wav, body-falling.wav, or whatever. Incredibly time-consuming and monotonous. We have that problem with Garden of Hedon right now. I need to do more Foley but it was shot at
The Cloisters in Baltimore and we spent all our money. I hope they will just let us back in there to re-record some lines with some actors for free.
Question: Do you have any advice for independent filmmakers for raising production money?
Kevin: We used
indiegogo.com to try to raise a “slush fund”. The film-maker can create their own gifts for various donation levels. For example, donate 5 dollars and we will give you a “Thanks” in the end credits, 10 dollars gets you a signed poster. I had a 500 dollar level which got you an executive producer credit. That’s a pretty big credit but I had only one other executive producer, the guy who was giving me the big money, and I asked him “Do you care if I do this
indiegogo.com thing to raise a little extra money?” He said no, he didn’t care if I added another. The funny part is that a guy I went to elementary school with, and hadn’t talked to since elementary school, donated 500 dollars. When I saw that, I said “Hey, I recognize that guy’s name.” I used to live around the corner from that guy. When I talked to him, he said “Yeah, I saw you made movies and thought I’d throw that in there to get an executive producer credit.” Then he asked if could be an extra, so I said “Sure, we always need extras.” I told him the scenes were we needed extras. Predictably, he showed up for the strip club scene! We had a planned lunch, but didn’t know how it would be run. He asked, “Do you want me to run and buy a couple of 12 foot subs from Subway and bring them back?” So he went out and bought us all lunch! A very, very cool guy. He’s an executive producer.
If you have no track record, it is very hard to raise money. Potential funders want to know, what have you done? I had to pay for Hunting Humans but I had no track record. That’s what Hunting Humans did for me. Even if I have to lose money, it will be out there. Once it was out, I made sure it was on the shelves of every Blockbuster, Hollywood Video, Netflix, and so on. When someone asked me where can I see your money, I made sure they could rent it. That impressed some investors and led to us getting money for the next project,
Fear of Clowns. So really if you get a name for yourself first, it helps investors.
Another thing to do is shoot a trailer. Take the best scenes from your script, shoot just those scenes, and put it into a trailer. You can tell potential investors, this is what I plan to do. In fact, in my shooting script for every movie, I mark the “trailer shots.” I will spend extra time on those shots, since I know the trailer has to look good. There are some scenes where, for scheduling reasons, you have to move forward even if you don’t have exactly what you want. Not for the trailer shots. You don’t move forward until you have exactly what you want. If you are good at cutting trailers together, you can get someone to bite and say “I might have a 1000-2000 dollars to shoot your way.”
Question: After the script is written, what is next?
Kevin: The idea for a script has to contain an original twist. Then you write and rewrite (as many times as needed) the script. That script must be polished and rock-solid before going any further. Next, I start writing a shooting script and a preliminary “guess-timate” budget. I use a spreadsheet to keep track of everything in the budget.
In addition to the shooting script, I might have some storyboards for more complicated scenes - action, or scenes with many characters and lots of dialog. On the set, things get so confusing with many people asking me questions on the set that sometimes I can’t remember things you’d think would be easy. For example, eye-lines, for continuity between cuts, can be very complicated, and storyboards help you remember if a character is supposed to be frame left or frame right. You might also make a last minute change in the shooting script but not the original script, and a storyboard would fix any confusion. For my next movie, I’ve resigned myself to doing more storyboards.
The shooting script is written right after finishing the script, with all the camera angles broken down. The shooting script is divided into sections, where all camera shots from all scenes in one location are described, with lighting setups, then camera shots for all scenes in another location are de- scribed, and so on. That way you don’t have to shoot, then break down the setup in the first location, move to another location, shoot there, and then move back to the first location. That would waste time and money. Ideally, you want to setup only once at each location. It doesn’t always work out that way, but that is the ideal.
The shooting script will be a function of what equipment (cameras, lights, and so on) you have. If you have only one camera and need to shoot dialog, you might have the actors say their lines with the camera shooting over the shoulder of one actor with a close-up of the second actor, then move the camera over the shoulder of the second actor with a close-up of the first, and have the actors repeat their lines. With two cameras, you can shoot those shots simultaneously. And, with two cameras, you don’t need to worry about continuity issues, like if the actor raised his hand in one take and not in another.
Using
Movie Magic, I’ll make a shooting schedule. I’m always a little ambitious with my shooting schedule. If you ask any of my production managers, they’ll go “Wow!” We shoot a lot of 14-18 hour days. It’s grueling but you don’t have much choice if you have only 2-3 weeks to shoot.
The budget is next, but really it is a continuous process of revising the preliminary “guess-timate” budget I started earlier. After finishing the shoot- ing schedule is finished, you should have some idea of how many days it will take to shoot the film. You can even break it down as to how much each day individual day of shooting will cost.
When the script is finished, you need to put out the ads for the cast and crew. You also have to set a date for open casting calls. When I did
Hunting Humans there wasn’t much of an Internet to speak of, so we used ads in Backstage magazine to look for actors. We must have gotten 1500 head-shots in the mail. There were stacks of head-shots in the PO Box. These days, you will mostly get photos by email.
Question: At what stage do you add music to your film?
Kevin: Music comes in after your are completely done filming and editing the movie. I’ve worked with
Chad Seiter, who is a great composer and I hope to hire for the rest of my movies. He creates the music to match your edits. That’s the opposite of what you would do, if you were making a music video, where you create cuts to the music. Sometimes I lay down temp music, just to make sure my edits have some sort of rhythm going, so I know he can work with it more easily. You don’t want to have the musician score the movie and then you have to re-edit the film, and also edit their score. In
Fear of Clowns, I, I made the mistake of sending Chad a longer version of the movie. While he was working on the score, I realized I had to cut the movie down by 15 minutes. he creates his music cues to line up with my edits, and so when I edit the film, it changes his score. It can irritate a musician to have his composition messed with. Chad is very easy to work with though. I have always told him “Look, if there is a place where the music cues are not working out, let me know and I’m happy to change things.” He always says, “No, I’ll just work it out.”
Question: Any advice for independent filmmakers who are thinking of submitting a film to the festival circuit?
Kevin: After winning best screenplay with the
Hunting Humans script, I entered a few other film festivals. Some people say “film festivals are rigged, and it’s all who you know”. Well, I entered Hunting Humans in the Back East Picture Show, a film festival in New Jersey which was run by the producers of one of the films in the festival competition! They play my movie at the same time as a filmmaker get-together where there are free drinks. I wonder “How many people are even going to attend my movie?” But it’s the first festival I’d ever attended and so I didn’t think much of it. Then after my movie one of the producers came up to me and asked “How did you do your sound?” My sound? With a microphone, how else? Then I saw their movie and their sound was awful! I mean
Hunting Humans has some rough audio in parts but overall it sounds good. Their film’s audio was so bad, I thought they really didn’t know anything. Guess what film won the festival? Theirs. Surprise! That festival never ran again. In the 2002 B-Movie Film Festival,
Hunting Humans won 2 awards and was nominated for seven.
Fear of Clowns, 1 won some I think, but after that film, I didn’t enter any more festivals.
Question: How does movie distribution work?
Kevin: Some distribution deals will allow for redistribution.
Hunting Humans (as well as
Fear of Clowns) was signed to a distribution company which re-licensed the film to others. For example, for
Hunting Humans, I agreed to a 12 year distribution deal, and the distributor re-licensed the distribution to one company (
MTI) for years 1-3, then another company for several years, and so on. Of course, the distribution license for the first three years paid more than the next deal, and the deal after that paid even less, and so on down the line.
Bounty has a different distribution deal that my production representative handles.
Question: Why is it your DVD covers don’t have any reviews?
Kevin: The distributor is the one who makes the DVD cover. My distributor, for whatever reason, did not want any reviews on the cover. I mean the glowing Joe Bob Briggs review on the cover alone would have sold some copies. [ed. note: Joe Bob Briggs called it “. . . an extremely well-directed film”, and gave it four out of four stars.] Their response was “Well, he only appeals to the B-movie audience.” But this movie is a B-movie! That is exactly who you want to appeal to! Anybody saying something good about your movie will effect someone to buy it. But the distributors don’t think like we do and they ultimately decide how to market it.
On the whole, I have nothing bad to say about MTI. They were very nice to me. You can actually call up MTI and talk to their vice-president and chat on the phone. He gave me numbers, sales numbers, which a lot of distributors would not. MTI does everything above-board. They sold over 37000 copies of
Hunting Humans, which is a lot for a low-budget horror film.
Question: Any general advice for anyone interested in pursuing filmmaking?
Kevin: Equipment is so easy to get these days. Good equipment is becoming more affordable. The problem is that people don’t spend any time learning the craft. Some would-be filmmakers think that there isn’t any talent to writing. In reality, there is no quick-and-easy writing machine you can buy, like you can with a quick-and-easy camera.
I'd like to thank Kevin Kangas for generously making his time available for the making of this interview!
Maryland screenwriter Jamie Nash being interviewed at Studio A.
Rick Davis and Ann Hornaday on the Studio A set
