As the 7th Annual Hollyshorts Film Festival winds to a close, we took time out from screening the many incredible short films on the program to sit down with some of the filmmakers who brought their work to Hollywood this week. Hailing from all parts of the country (and the globe), from newcomers to fifteen-year veterans, these filmmakers shared a perspective as unique as their films, and viewed as a whole, shed serious light on the process of independent film development, production, marketing and distribution. Topics ranged from how the films were financed, where to find professionals for your crew, how to effectively submit and screen at festivals and what follows the premiere in the life of a short film and your career. Since there’s no one way to succeed in this business, perhaps an exploration in the differences in goals, approach and final product can enlighten and inspire as much as simple success stories.
Full list of the filmmakers we spoke to:
John Irwin – “SOLD”
Andrew Carlberg & Jacob Chase – “AFTER-SCHOOL SPECIAL”
Chris Olsen – “KARL DAHL & THE GOLDEN CUBE”
David Dastmalchian & Jimmy McDermott – “KEEN”
Chris Charles & John Bosher – “THE SMALL ASSASSIN”
Nicholas McCarthy – “THE PACT”
Sonny Saito & Eric Frentzel – “THE NOTICE”
Carl Seaton & Fred Thomas Jr. – “KARIM”
Mike le Han – “MRS. PEPPERCORN’S MAGICAL READING ROOM”
*Update. This year's awards were announced, so congratulations to all the winners, but most especially Jacob Chase ("Patient Zero," Showbiz Store and Café Future Filmmaker Award), John Irwin ("Sold," Best Drama), David Dastmalchian ("Double Black," Best Actor), and Mike Le Han ("Mrs. Peppercorn’s Magical Reading Room," Best Short Film)
Film Slate Magazine: What inspired this particular project?
Jacob Chase: Neil Labute gets the credit for that. Andrew and I came up with the idea and pitched it to him. We had a very rough idea of the character and Neil came up with the story and the reveal.
Andrew Carlberg: Neil and I had worked together in the past in theater, and wanted to work together on something for the screen. Jacob and I had worked together as producer and editor but never as producer and director, so I put the two of them together.
Sonny Saito: I had a very personal experience with two people that were close to me that were diagnosed with lung cancer, and I spent their last six months with them. They had a 180-degree difference in how they spent that time. One person said, “You know what? I’m going to live, to do whatever I can to try and hang on to this life.” The other person said, “I’m done. I just want to enjoy my last hours.” I’m not saying what’s good or bad, but I started to wonder what I would do. I wanted to create a situation where the audience would stop and think about what they would do if there was no way out of this kind of situation.
Mike Le Han: I’ve been a director for 16 years, working in TV dramas and commercials in the UK, but the industry makes it very hard to be creative in a cinematic way. There’s so many constraints, budget and production value is very, very low. It’s been killing me! So we wanted to make something very cinematic that had really high production value. Back in January 2010, myself and my wife Helen, who co-wrote the film, were in our local village in Manchester, England. Right opposite the coffee shop we were in was this little bookshop called The Talisman. It was fantastic. And we thought, wouldn’t it be great to make a film in that vein? I’m not a big Harry Potter fan, but we thought the location was great.
John Irwin: Human trafficking is the third most profitable crime in the world. I couldn’t believe how big it is, and not a lot of people know that. It’s a complex issue, and to try and tell a fictional thriller based on this idea in twelve minutes, without being preachy, is incredibly difficult. It’s a really fun challenge to try and fit a well-rounded story in such a short amount of time.
Chris Olsen: Years ago I started working on this character Karl Dahl with the idea – what would happen if you had a kid’s toy that decided to try and break into showbiz? We started doing one minute shorts that featured him, done quickly, more character sketches than anything. We’d sketch in the morning, animate during the day and finish it at night. Quick, down and dirty. Eventually I wanted to see what would happen if I took the time to do it really well.
David Dastmalchian: "Keen" is based on a real event that happened to me years ago in Chicago. I went out to have a cigarette and inadvertently locked my girlfriend out in a very dangerous winter storm. It evolved into an experiment in writing; how could you, with very little dialogue, assess a relationship in crisis?
Jimmy McDermott: Dave [Dastmalchian] and I were working on a longer form short and realized it had the scope of a feature, and wasn’t going to come together in the timeline we wanted. This came out of the frustration of that realization. It was timely. It was the middle of winter, and we saw we could make it while the weather was cooperating.
Nicholas McCarthy: I’ve always been a fan of horror movies, but I’d never really tried to make one. I feel horror is the most cinematic genre, and though I’ve written horror movies before, this was the first time I’ve tried to put that stuff in a visual category.
Carl Seaton: I’m from Chicago originally, and last summer I read about a youth that was killed, shot sixteen times, and he turned out to be the wrong guy. It’s not just Chicago, but every city that deals with this sort of detachment to violence. I wanted to show the many different people that it touches in one community. And I wanted to challenge myself as a director, to strip out the dialogue and do an entirely visual film. You realize how much of a crutch dialogue can become.
Chris Charles: "The Small Assassin" is based on a short story by Ray Bradbury. It's set in 1947 and delves into an issue (post partum psychosis) during a time when there was little known about it in psychology. The story centers on how this family deals with it and how the resulting paranoia can be contagious. I love Bradbury, the guy is a legend. To try and tackle something written by him was an honor and a privilege.
FSM: What inspires you to make a short film? Is it a standalone story, or part of something larger?
John Irwin: This is my second short film, and I made it mainly to use as a demo for the feature version, to start building momentum. My experience with my first short is that you go to festivals and meet people and get business cards and that’s great, but people want to see what you’re up to next. If it’s just a short film, there’s no ‘next’ stepping stone. There’s no real monetary interest. That being said, I can see making shorts the rest of my life and just having a blast going to festivals.
Jacob Chase: The short film process is very different than that of feature filmmaking. It’s much harder to get someone to connect with the character in such a short amount of time. It’s a bigger challenge, but I like always pushing myself. I had never worked with name talent before. It was a great opportunity to stretch my skills as a filmmaker.
Sonny Saito: Initially, the idea hit me as a pilot for a feature or a television series. I thought, instead of sending the treatment out to producers, I wanted to do something that could be watched, to say this is my vision. But I also wanted the short to have a beginning, middle and end, and to show the potential of what this could be. We’ve been approached by several agencies and managers about it. We’ve been very lucky.
Chris Olsen: I would love to do this as an episodic series. This short was an experiment to see if that would work. We already have twelve new stories we’re moving forward on. It’s so much fun to do it in the style of the true film shorts, the classics that would play before features. It really works well on the big screen, and the audience response to this one has been a nice test.
Jimmy McDermott: This is a standalone short in my mind. There’s probably fewer than 10 lines of dialogue exchanged. I didn’t think about it at the time, but it was a really distilled way of filmmaking, everything had to be conveyed through behavior and images. It felt really like the medium in its essence. Feels like what two years of film school might have been.
Mike Le Han: As we were talking about the short, we realized there was at least one feature film we could make. And as we wrote it the story just grew and grew and grew. We ended up writing a feature trilogy that the short was loosely based on.
Chris Charles: This was a project to lead to other projects, a platform to work on some bigger and more ambitious things. But it’s played several festivals, and we’re in talks for a distribution deal for the film, to get it out into the world. We’re accomplishing all the goals we intended with the project.
Nicholas McCarthy: Getting a feature made was not part of the plan for me. Personally, I don’t really believe that one should make ‘trailers’ or films that are kind of something else in miniature, because you end up robbing something of telling a complete story. I feel my time as a filmmaker is best served making films, not making a film that’s about a film I want to make.
FSM: How did you secure your cast and crew?
Carl Seaton: Everyone in my cast I’ve knownfor years. They’re all actors I’ve seen and have a serious amount of respect for. It was very humbling for me that they would commit on that level, and it made it that much easier to accomplish.
Fred Thomas Jr.: (On starring in the film) I was a little nervous, because there was no dialogue. It couldn’t be too much, it had to be subtle, things going on in this man’s mind that we had to reveal on his face and in his movements. I found some things internally I brought out that I didn’t know was there. I grew up in an urban neighborhood, and two of my best friends were killed, so I went back there to bring that to the character.
Jacob Chase: Sarah [Paulson] and Wes [Bentley] loved the material. The tone is so intensely specific, if you didn’t have actors that inherently understood where the humor was and where the serious beats were it wouldn’t have worked.
Jimmy McDermott: Chicago is full of actors. There’s a really robust theater scene. I was working at the time as a casting director for a theater in town, and was surrounded by a tremendous amount of very talented, theater-focused actors. I like to surround myself with super-talented people.
Nicholas McCarthy: The short came together really quickly. I had the idea and four weeks later we were shooting. The tough part was getting the thing done and looking like you want it to when nobody is getting paid. With Jewel [Staite], I just love to work with new people, and she was a friend of a friend. For an actor like her, who is employed in one kind of role, the best thing they can get is the opportunity to do something different. She’s not usually cast to be more mature than she is.
Eric Frentzel: (Stars in "The Notice") I went out to exercise and I didn’t have my pants with me. I kind of forgot I needed them, so I just went to the audition in athletic shorts. You feel like, well, I kind of screwed this up from the start I’ve got nothing to lose. So it kind of frees you up in a sense.
FSM: Any stories or insights gained during the production process?
Mike Le Han: The story is set in a remote Cornish fishing village, but where we shot in Manchester it’s the middle of the country. We gutted the whole village, dressed the whole place in snow, put period props in. Even the villagers didn’t recognize it when they saw the film!
John Irwin: We shot on the Canon 5D. A lot of the story takes place in the trunk of a car, and the 5D was awesome in that very small space.
Chris Olsen: The animation work I do has helped make me a better live action filmmaker. All the preproduction, storyboards, the color scheme, the graphic composition, it really upped my game from a cinematography standpoint, and vice-versa. The live action rules, the immediacy and the improv, have made me better in animation.
David Dastmalchian: The people I really loved working with are the people who are able to adjust on the fly. Willingness to operate whether you have $300 or $30M, that’s critical. And all the preparation helps you solve problems when you have a strong idea of what you’re trying to convey. Even if you have to come up with a solution in the moment, you’ll always get through it, especially when you surround yourself with people who are really talented.
John Bosher: The period piece aspect was one of the most difficult things to tackle, but at the same time a big motivating factor for doing this. We caught a couple of lucky breaks. Kevin’s (the cinematographer) aunt had just bought a house that they were about to start rehabbing, so we had free reign to go in there, lay down flooring, paint walls. We relied on a lot of in kind services and people’s passion to get this thing done at an affordable rate and make it look as authentic as possible.
Nicholas McCarthy: The hardest part is convincing yourself and others that this is the right thing to do, when nobody is getting paid. You have a certain number of things to get done, and can you get them done, because they’ll never do this favor for me again.
FSM: What’s been the festival response to your film?
Chris Charles: We had very clear goals and a very specific festival strategy. Knowing what festivals we thought the film would do well in, mainstream versus genre festivals. Know who you are making the film for.
John Bosher: The circuit is the ultimate home for these films. We submitted as early on in the submission process as possible, so if they liked it they could program around it. It’s cheaper, and ultimately you have a better success rate. You owe it to yourself to submit to Sundance, Cannes, etc., but we tried to minimize submitting to festivals we had a lesser chance of getting in to, and focused on festivals that fit us. We’ve had a 40-50% success rate while minimizing our submission costs.
Nicholas McCarthy: We finished a rough cut of "The Pact" in time for the Sundance deadline, which lots of people who make shorts use as their goal, and it got accepted. It played there in January and three days after I had a meeting with a company that wanted to finance the feature. It’s kind of a crazy thing, because otherwise it wasn’t like I got tons of meetings out of it. But these guys had seen the short, playing in front of this crazy feature, and it was the film they wanted to make. It’s luck, over anything else.
FSM: Any advice for filmmakers looking to tackle a short film project?
Jimmy McDermott: The best short films I’ve seen are constructed like a joke: there’s an airtight setup and a satisfying punchline. That doesn’t mean they’re comedic, but everything successful operates on that in some way.
David Dastmalchian: Know your budget. Don’t look at a low budget as a limitation, but as an opportunity to find in that challenge how to problem solve as a team. You have 10-12 minutes to take your audience on a journey. If you can achieve an arc with a really strong conflict and somewhere for your characters to go, don’t get concerned with having the best production value. Develop a script that you can convey something interesting with.
Jacob Chase: The most important thing is to do something you are passionate about. A lot of short films are very calculated. Make sure it’s something you would want to spend a year of your life making and traveling with. And don’t shoot until the script is ready. There’s no rush.
Andrew Carlberg: People think it’s easy, but even in the short form you need to do something that elevates you. Don’t be afraid to reach into that bigger world. I’ve been incredibly fortunate in short form work to get amazing recognizable talent across the board, because we only asked a day of their time and they liked the content.
Eric Frentzel: Just do it. You hear a lot of talk from people, about what they want to do. It might not be perfect yet, but just go out and do something.
Carl Seaton: Study the form, because the structure for shorts is totally different than long form narratives. You really want to streamline it, make sure your bests are in there. There’s lots of outlets on the Internet, you could watch short films all day long. You can really study the form and learn the tricks of the trade. And once you write the piece, let it be read by someone who has a credible perspective, someone you respect and admire who is really educated in the craft and can give you some insight in how to pull it off. And prepare. If money is an issue, and it always is, use your time to prepare.
Chris Olsen: Of all filmmaking, animation is probably the one you rely on others the most. There are many animators who are able to do a film entirely from scratch, but it just takes a long time. If you want to produce something with some speed, you need to find other artists to trust, and it’s a lot of hard work. In live action, much of the technology costs have come down, so you can produce a short much more cost effectively and much faster. But animation…you can’t simply draw faster. Get to know good people and work towards a unified vision.
John Irwin: You should keep shorts short. A lot of them go far and beyond 10 minutes, and those are a lot harder to show around. And have another project ready to go when you’re taking your short around. No matter how good the short is, your moment in the spotlight finishes quickly. You’ve got a very short window to reach out and bring people on with you for your next project.
Chris Charles: Know your intentions with the film, who your audience is and what you want to do with the film. And actively approach distributors, rather than waiting for something to fall into your lap.
Sonny Saito: This process took a lot out of me, a lot of time and goodwill from people. My only advice would be to make sure that it’s something you really care about. If you’re going to spend so much time and sacrifice so much of your friends’ and family’s time, money and effort, it has to really mean something to you.
Mike Le Han: I would say think big. Always think bigger, on a feature film scale. Always make sure your production value is as high as possible. Tell a narrative not just in dialogue, but how you choose your angles, the lighting, all the aesthetics behind it are so important. Show your idea is conceptually viable, has interest and gets an audience really quickly. Make sure your narrative isn’t niche, that it’s going to appeal to quite a large audience. Most shorts at the moment are sort of genre narratives that talk about rape, crime, death, murder, immigration issues. Very good subject matter, but in an international film sales market, they’re not going to get noticed as well as something people are buzzing about. Our object was to make something highly commercially viable that’s beautifully cinematic, and hits you in the heart.
