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20 Questions: An Interview with Brad OsborneBy Pete Bauer
Question 2: How did Brad come up with idea for HOM? Question 3: How to make intricate plot twists work with story logic Question 4: How to make the main character react in a believable way Question 5: Does Brad start writing with plot in mind or characters? Question 6: Why he chose DV over film Question 7: The $5,000 (budget) question Question 8: Defining and creating "productoin value" Question 9: How did he prepare to direct a micro-budget project? Question 10: How he got people involved for no money Question 11: Smoking characters and film noir. Question 12: Challenges and War Stories during production. Question 13: Why he used so many editors during post-productions Question 14: Discusses how he composed the effective soundtrack Question 15: His marketing plan and the impact of good word-of-mouth Question 16: The success of VHS and DVD sales Question 17: Being identified as a "DV Director" Question 18: How festivals play into the big picture Question 19: What's next for Brad Question 20: Anything not covered?
Q1: Brad, thanks for participating in this 20 Questions interview. If you could, before we dig into the making of your digital feature HALL OF MIRRORS, please give us a little background on where you started, schooling, past projects, etc.
Then I got a job at a large production facility in Dallas, and suddenly had all these resources available to me! I was like a kid in a candy store. Lights, audio gear... the works. Plus we have a staff of professional video and audio editors here, so I knew if I could get at least one or two of them excited about the script, I could actually pull off a feature-length project of my own. A2: I've always been a big fan of "deception" movies... those twisty-turny gems that broadside unsuspecting audiences. David Mamet is really the modern pioneer of the Con Game genre, and I so admire his ability to manipulate an audience's perceptions about what they think they see vs. what's really happening. It's never easy to construct something like that. You have to consider everything: character motivations, believability, and to what degree the audience is "in" on the deception. But when it clicks, it's very satisfying.
That was enough to start me typing. I conceived of a character who would be vulnerable to deception (in this case a seriously indebted gambling addict), and pulled The Green Goods on him in the script's first act. A cool premise, but if this was going to be feature length, I needed more story! So I began asking questions: what if my character was able to locate one of the people who had conned him? How would he react, and to what lengths would he go to get his money back? What if one of the con artists offered to jump ranks and help the mark get revenge on the rest of the group in exchange for some sort of a cut? What if all this was designed from the start, with a larger, more sinister purpose in mind? You see how the question of "who to trust" comes rapidly into play. You can also see how complex a story can get. I had a detailed plot chart drawn while I was writing the screenplay, complete with reasons why characters made right turns when they should have made left, etc. It was challenging, at times frustrating, but never dull. I had a blast writing this thing! The whole process took about 4-5 months. A3: An important rule for me was to observe was what I call "the law of plot twists," which dictates that any action must be supported by an earlier set-up of that action. Other people might simply call it being fair with your audience. When an idea would pop into my head for a plot twist I would go back to an earlier point in the script and "set up" that twist so that when it happened, the audience (while hopefully not expecting it) would readily accept it. For example, there's a point in the film where the character of Dylan learns from a federal agent that Mara -- who has duped him several times by this point -- spent 5 years of her life as an actress off Broadway (which helps explain how she plays her "roles" so effectively). After I wrote this I went back and rewrote a prior conversation between Mara and Dylan, adding a few lines of dialog in which she tells him that she was forced to be a stripper for 5 years in a little dump off Bourbon Street. As the film plays, then, we first hear Mara recount her tortured past as a down-and-out stripper and see a brief flashback of her gazing blankly into a dressing room mirror holding crumpled $1 bills in her hand. Later, when Dylan learns that Mara was an actress (not a stripper after all), we see a similar flashback of Mara gazing into a dressing room mirror, only this time she's holding a bouquet of flowers and smiling. Voila! A simple plot twist. I think it helps too that the audience was viewing Dylan's perception of events all along…they were seeing what he was seeing. A4: Great question. Motivation is perhaps the single most important element to this kind of story, and definitely a challenge to keep believable. What I kept asking myself while I was writing was: is this action something a reasonable person would do in this situation? If not, I'd better have a damn good reason for making them do otherwise! Personally, I would never steal $10,000 from an employer to buy $100,000 in counterfeit bills, even if I was convinced I could pass them without the slightest chance of getting caught. But I'm not $90K in debt, with bookies threatening to cut off my body parts. Nor am I able to transfer $10,000 from a client's account into my own with the click of a mouse, with 72 hours in which to replace it without being detected. These are what I might characterize as "damn good reasons." Some folks might not agree, and you can always second-guess what a character does, but I think most people would consider Dylan's actions understandable given his situation. (I have to tell you that I was a little hesitant to have Dylan pull a gun on the woman at the ATM machine, but then I tempered it with him having second thoughts and apologizing to her as she flees in terror! That, to me, really summed up the desperation of his character. And a lot of credit has to go to Eric Johnson, the actor, for how he played it.) A5: For me it's the plot...or at least, the concept. I'm of the mindset that if you can't describe your entire film in one sentence, you don't have a solid handle on the story. Story, story, story... that's what drives me. I would have a hard time writing a completely character-based script, you know, "a coming-of-age tale about a man who finds new purpose in life by reconciling his lifelong grief over the death of his daughter..." Yawn. Tell me that a blurry image of his presumed-dead daughter shows up in the background of a newspaper photo, and now I'm interested! Character development and dialog are the "fun" parts of the writing for me, so once I have the story mapped out I look for the most interesting characters I can to play out my plot. Helps me to savor the process, you know, keep it fresh, because you want to enjoy the writing and discover new things as you go along. I think it's also important to add contradictions to characters to give them depth. Dylan (in HOM), for example, is a compulsive gambler, but also a financial consultant. Were the characters based on specific people? Hmm... I think all characters come from somewhere... nothing is totally fictional. I do have a friend who got into deep trouble habitually betting on horses and sports wagering. And doesn't every guy know at least one ruthlessly conniving female who has left him in the dust? Did I say that?
A7: I think the biggest portion of that was meals, actually. Even Taco Bell can add up over 3 1/2 months! And of course, keeping a stocked craft service container around was essential to cast & crew morale (thank you Marc Pilvinsky for that incredible bit of wisdom!) The camera was about $900, a little more with the filters & such, but the D8 tape stock was cheap. We had to pay out of pocket for some props, and I remember writing a check for $150 for two blackjack tables and a dealer. $50 to rent a motel room at the Days Inn. $40 to Home Depot to build a simple dolly. We counted airfare for one of the tips to Vegas in our tally. Basically just a lot of odds and ends. And (I didn't say this) the occasional bribe, but only when absolutely needed! Where we saved the most money was in not having to pay for rental gear, talent, locations, and the biggest potential expense of all, post-production! Since the DVDs are being replicated as we speak, I'm spending more money now. But we don't count that, do we? A8: In the context of micro budget films, I would say that a movie has "production value" if the audience can immerse itself in it without being distracted by production shortcomings. In other words, you're doing okay if the lack of a budget doesn't cause the audience to be too consciously aware of it. There are, however, in my opinion two elements that absolutely must be executed professionally in order for a movie to succeed on any level, regardless of budget, and those are believable performances and quality audio. Virtually everything else can be forgiven, or at least understood, but not acting and sound. If your actors fail to engage the audience or be real, you're sunk. And if your sound is garbage, so is the film! For HALL OF MIRRORS everyone was mindful of the desire to achieve the maximum production value we could under the circumstances, and then challenge ourselves to take that one step further. I really wish we would have had more flexibility with camera movement (a steadicam, jib, and dolly would have been nice to have around!), but instead we spent extra time with shot setups and determining how to frame and light the subject in a compelling manner. Bobb and Marc were really great about this. They taught me much about the art of patience. Blood, guts, and nudity... oh my! Well, the movie features two scenes where I think we exploited the violence enough to get a jarring reaction from the audience (the scene where Dylan's nose is sliced open, and the one murder in the film). I wanted those scenes to be graphic, but realistic. For example, when the character of Bishop is shot in the throat and forehead, you see only black spots on his skin, followed by an arc of blood streaming from the back of the head. When I was a kid I saw a cow shot point blank in the forehead, and that's exactly how it looked. That image stayed with me all these years, and that's pretty much what you see on screen! For Mara's character, Julie and I both agreed we needed to exploit the sexual element. But that didn't necessarily mean she had to be naked on camera. In fact, the mystery of her character is supported by the fact that she always reveals just enough, but not everything. So we proceeded with that mindset. In the movie you might see a glimpse more than we intended to reveal here and there, but for the most part her sexuality is in her character's movements, gestures and actions. She was great at this. And hey, if I wanted to use nudity as the movie's selling point, I'd be making an entirely different kind of film (and I wouldn't be too concerned with production value!).
A10: I think actors (and crew) are painfully aware that so many of these types of projects never get finished, so my first objective was to convince them that, come hell or high water, I was going to complete this one. It also probably helped that I held the auditions inside a theatre at the AMS Production Group's facility here in Dallas, as opposed to my garage. The script was a big part of the "sell" as well. In fact, I can name several of the main players in this film -- both on and off screen -- who accepted based solely on the fact that they dug the script. Now, I don't want to toot my own horn here, but I've been told that, as a director, I "listen to people." What that means is that I'm genuinely interested in what the actors and crew have to say. Taken to the extreme, this could lead to anarchy and a lack of leadership. But I think I tread that line of diplomacy pretty well. After all, it's all about ownership, isn't it? Isn't that why people stay interested in a project like this? Eric's motivation to ride out an incredibly grueling shooting schedule, for instance, was that this film was his showcase vehicle, his first lead role in a feature. With Julie, it was the creative freedom that she could create Mara any way she wanted her to be. With Marc, it was a sole producer credit. And so on and so on... everyone had a reason to stay in. Or perhaps more importantly, no one really had a good reason to walk. Along with that, I think a big part of the commitment of this team is due to the fact that we all became good friends very early on. Good chemistry, I guess, and everyone checked their egos at the door. Hell, I didn't even know Eric when I cast him, now we're writing a script together that we're really excited about. Dameon stopped in to see me at work yesterday and gave me a big hug, just cause he's a great guy. Julie calls me up just to share news about her acting career and her other film projects. We've become a big group of friends... just another wonderful dividend of this whole crazy process. A11: I wanted Dylan's character to smoke almost perpetually, because it's symptomatic of mounting stress. So Eric, a "sometimes" smoker, took up the habit pretty heavily during the shoot. I thought Mara should be a smoker too... it just sort of goes along with the whole femme fatale bit (Julie smoked clove cigarettes during the shoot, which popped like kindling when she took a drag!). But the actors had definite opinions on when and how they should be lighting up, and I let them go with it. It was Julie's idea, for instance, to blow smoke into the face of the guy in the bar, and I love that! Surprisingly, continuity wasn't much of a problem for us because the actors smoked the same way with each take. Now there's professionalism for ya!
War story, eh? Here's one that pops into mind. It was right around New Years and we were riding around in a caravan of cars looking for a location at which to shoot the "motel room" scene. We stopped at THE perfect motel... this run-down, grimy little hole-in-the-wall in Lewisville, Texas (which shall remain unnamed). So all these guys pour out of these cars, followed by Julie in this ass-hugging skirt and heels, and we go to the front desk to ask if we could rent a room, you know... "to shoot a movie." This guy at the desk spoke barely enough English to tell us to turn around and get the hell out. Not accustomed to taking no for an answer, I pushed on, and as it turned out, pushed my luck. He reached for a weapon under the counter and made it very clear that we were to leave immediately. As we quickly turned to B-line it out of there, he shouted at us, "Happy New Year! And go fuck you-self!" So the motel room you see in the movie is much nicer than the one we intended to use. All's well that ends well. Nothing's worth getting blown away for! A13: Although I'm very much a "do-it-yourself" kind of guy, I am not an editor in any way, shape or form. I barely know an Avid from a Media 100, so I had to rely on the skill and talent of others to take the 17 hours of digital video footage we shot and, with my guidance, fashion it into a feature. And let's face it, that's a shitload of work. I had acquaintances who were editors, so I started at the top of the list, grabbed my script, put on my salesperson cap and went about the gentle art of persuasion. The first editor did a rough cut of the first 13 minutes and then realized there was no way he'd have time to put his brain into the project. Editors, you understand, are artists in their own right and as such have a creative stake in what they do. They want the end product to be their best work. So, I turned to Marc, HOM's producer (who's a damned fine editor as well), but he was already deep into his next project and couldn't do the hands-on work. So on and on I went, until I found Shareen Wornson. Shareen's a working Mom raising two daughters and - bless her sweet heart - slaved weekends and evenings all summer long to cut the offline version of the film. And it was fantastic. But we still had the online to do, and the color correction, and the titles & credits, and the music editing & sound design, etc. So I continued on, enlisting help as I could get it, but it took much longer than I would have liked. Money, of course, would have solved the problem immediately. This was essentially the process: all of the keeper footage was first logged, then firewired to mini DV, then dumped to a few digibeta masters. The film was cut on an Avid, and onlined and color corrected on a Grass Valley. Audio was done on Pro Tools. A14: Thanks for the compliment! I've been writing music in one form or another since I was about 13, and I played and toured in a rock band throughout my high school and college years. I've always been a huge fan of film music, and so I started writing scores for little indie shorts that friends of mine had made. I found the challenge invigorating. Music is such a huge part of a movie's impact on the audience, and film composers are so, so under-appreciated by most. But I really wanted to try my hand at a feature score. Unfortunately the opportunity simply didn't present itself. Well, when I decided that HALL OF MIRRORS would be made, it fell into place that I would also be writing the score. Besides, I had such a clear vision of the mood I wanted for the story, and - as it turned out - a lot of time on my hands while the film was in post. I approached the soundtrack in a pretty unconventional way. I set a portable TV/VCR next to my KORG sequencing workstation, and with one section of the rough cut at a time, began writing sequences to the timecode. What's great about film scoring is that you create two or three main "themes," and virtually every other thing you write is just a variation of one of those themes. So it's not like you're started from scratch with every scene, if you know what I mean. Film scoring is a fascinating topic to me, and I could probably ramble on and on about the creative process…but that would be a whole other discussion! A15: I really didn't know how this film would be received (nor did I have much of a marketing plan other than your typical festival approach, which I despise), but one of the things that totally took me by surprise was the reaction from the "no-budget" film community. I really didn't even know a community like that existed until our first review came out on a site called Flipside Movie Emporium (flipsidemovies.com), which reviews everything from the latest Hollywood releases to B-movies and little independents. We got a great review, and I gotta tell ya, there's nothing quite like reading a glowing review of your first-ever film project. I was on top of the world that day! Anyway, I started getting emails and requests from sites that critique films you can't normally see in theatres or even rent at Blockbuster. I started participating in forums and swapping links, and before I knew it HALL OF MIRRORS was a recognized title in certain circles of the Internet. Pretty cool! The Net is really an amazing thing, and word-of-mouth travels so fast these days. Another thing that has helped this film market itself is that two actors in the film, Eric Johnson and Dameon Clarke, are character voices for an immensely popular anime series on the Cartoon Network called Dragon Ball Z. There are legions of DBZ fans (some of them too young to view the content in HOM, in my opinion) who visit the website regularly, post messages, send emails, even purchase the film. I've seen DBZ, and though I really don't "get" the whole anime appeal, it's a very imaginative series. I think the fans are intrigued by the fact that "Trunks" and "Cell" are in a movie where they cuss, have sex, and shoot people! A16: I was never high on the idea of self-distribution, but sales from the website have been surprisingly brisk. In fact, we ran clean out of VHS copies a few weeks ago, so Marc and I decided, hey, why not distribute exclusively on DVD? The film looks and sounds a hell of a lot better on DVD, and we've added some cool stuff like cast & crew commentary and a "making of" featurette entitled PROSE AND CONS: THE MAKING OF HALL OF MIRRORS (that includes some great bloopers & outtakes). So effective July 30th, 2001, HALL OF MIRRORS will only be available on DVD. But we're pricing it right (at $14.99), because we'd rather have lots of people see it for less than only a few people see it for more. Besides, this film didn't cost $50 million to make, so it's not like I have a profit point to cover like the major studios do. It bugs me when indie filmmakers price their stuff so high. I mean, why should somebody pay $29.95 for your VHS indie when they can go down to Best Buy and pick up FIGHT CLUB on DVD for less than 20 bucks? Baffling. We're hoping to get a distributor, obviously, and we'll be sending out DVDs to several potential distribution companies to that end. I really want to see my movie on the shelf of my local Hollywood Video or Blockbuster…but then again, what filmmaker doesn't? In the mean time, you can only get it through a few select Internet sites like BuyIndies.com, or direct from our official site, hallofmirrorsmovie.com. A17: Hmmm, you ask some very interesting questions. My reasons for wanting to write and make movies comes down to one thing: a desire to entertain an audience. When we premiered HOM in front of 350 people in Dallas and I heard them collectively gasp and laugh and shriek and moan and cheer, it was the greatest high I've ever had. It was amazing! When a critic wrote that he "couldn't move" when the credits started to roll at the end of his VHS copy, well…you get the idea. All artists want to elicit an emotional response from their audience, but I never really understood what that truly meant until recently. All I know is that I want to keep doing this! Am I comfortable being identified as a "DV Director?" Sure, why not! It was the medium that enabled me to make my first feature. Will I limit myself to that medium? Certainly not if I can help it. As far as HOM goes, I'd like to be thought of as someone who took a look at the digital format and wasn't afraid to take it into yet another creative direction. I wouldn't presume to speak for other DV or no-budget filmmakers. There's a wealth of creative talent out there, and renegade filmmakers will always find inventive new ways to tell stories. But if I can offer any advice, it's this: don't be afraid to look at the digital format in new ways. Just because it's video doesn't mean you can't do things that, up until now, only film could do effectively, like noir or drama. The flexibility of DV, even low-cost DV, is immense if you use your imagination. A18: Truth be told, I hate the thought of diving into whole festival scene. It's getting to be a bit of a racket. I know a few filmmakers who have produced excellent projects - some on 35mm film - and they've been totally dissed by even the small to midsize festivals. And Chris Gore is right: the odds of some Hollywood player seeing your film at "Festival X" and offering you a three-picture deal are slim to none. I know there's another side to it, and that festivals have only so many films they can screen, blah-blah-blah, but unfortunately it's getting to be a "who you know" thing, just like Hollywood, and you have to accept their word that they're actually screening each film that is submitted. You pay exorbitant entry fees - sometimes $50 a pop -- just to have somebody reject it and send you discount coupons to their festival so they can make even more money off you. Okay, so maybe I'm going to the extreme here, but as you can tell, I'm not chomping at the bit to do this. But it is a necessary step, and I guess if anything leads to more people seeing HOM, then it would have been worth it. So I will - at the very least - dabble. A19: First of all, I'm not that "young" anymore. True, HOM is my first film, but I've got a wife and a baby on the way in a few weeks and I have the feeling I won't have the luxury of "reckless filmmaker abandon" that I had while making HOM. But that doesn't mean the passion isn't there for the next project. I just need to go about it in a different way. One of the objectives with HOM now is to show potential film investors what we did with virtually no money, you know, so that they realize all that might be possible with a little financing. I mentioned earlier that Eric Johnson and I are working on a new script for our company, Innuendo Films, that we're very excited about. I'd love to do this next film the "right" way, not with a huge budget necessarily, but with a respectable one. I won't say anything more about the project now, but check for updates as they happen on our site, InnuendoFilms.com, if you're interested. A20: Yeah. Did you know the wingspan of a 747 is longer than the Wright Brothers' first flight?
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