CINEVUE: How did you come up with such a hilarious, interesting stories and these four quirky characters? Are they archetypes of certain real-life friends, etc, in your life? What inspired such a good story?
Charlie LaVoy – The characters and the seed of the story really sprang organically from this group of four filmmakers that decided one day that they were going to go ahead and make a feature, using themselves as actors and scraping the crew and equipment together however they could. Knowing that their greatest asset was the location of the Wong Family’s lake house, Stanley Wong, Owen “Chip” Hornstein III, Joe Sökmen and Tyler Russell spent a weekend out there to come up with characters and a story. The idea of a botched intervention quickly evolved as the four guys had a crazy drunken weekend, experiencing in real life many of the comedic antics that take place in the movie. They came up with characters for themselves, loosely based on who they were in real life, with of course plenty of liberties taken and other elements of our lives mixed in.
CINEVUE: The four characters in the films are more quirky than “normal’ and “good” people. Besides Steve Chong who writes all of his frustrations on notecards which is pinned on his wall, his three friends have their own problems. What’s your attitude toward the psychological problems and mental health pandemic in America as presented in the film?
CL – A lot of what this movie is about is finding something to live for as a member of this extremely cynical generation that we are all a part of. Between the absolute media overdose that we grew up in, and the universal feeling of frustration and disappointment that many in my generation have shared given the bleak situation with the economy, there’s a lot of factors messing with our heads, and it can be really hard to put things into perspective and realize that everybody is struggling just like you are. There are a lot of people in this country that I think can really relate to where Steve’s coming from, and we knew if we could tap into that our film would really resonate.
Stanley Wong – I think a lot of what the movie is saying is that no one can really solve your problems but you and a lot of the times it’s not really outright solving the problems themselves, as much as it is changing how you see the problem. While I didn’t write out notecards like Steve did, I often found that a lot of the problems I had in my life could be solved by just changing my perspective on it.
CINEVUE: The film’s mise en scene is a goldmine of cinephilic references – for example, the lake house with animal fossils resembles Hichcock’s Psycho and the overall dynamic between the characters is reminiscent of The Hangover soon-to-be trilogy. How have these classical and post-classical films, among others, inspired and affected your creative process, if they have?
CL – Honestly, I have never seen either of those movies in my life.
SW – I have seen these movies and I don’t believe they inspired or affected our creative process in any way. Maybe you’re thinking of Predator?
CL – I feel like we keep getting Hangover comparisons mostly just because Chip somehow reminds people of Zach Galifianakis, but that was never something we went for intentionally. If it’s just the fact that there’s a bunch of funny guys doing crazy stuff, a lot of that came from real life. I grew up with three brothers and we were always getting into some kind of shenanigans, so there’s that. Also, when we made this movie, the five of us were literally living in a big house together, so the dynamic of the group in the film took a lot from our actual lives at the time. With the production design of the lake house and it’s similarities to Psycho – the movie was written around the location to make the most entertaining use of what was there, so you could really say that the lake house itself, and the dynamic that we already had as a group of friends were bigger influences on us than any other particular movies that I could think of.
CINEVUE: Anything you want to say to the aspiring film students?
SW – Just make something. If it sucks, it’s ok. Keep working at it until it gets better. I think there are a lot of people who want to be filmmakers and don’t try very hard. It’s easier now more than ever.
CINEVUE: What was the wackiest thing that happened on set?
CL – We really struggled with the boats. The entire set was basically on a little man-made island of stilts and was only accessible by a 20-minute boat ride at full speed. Getting everything out there was already kind of a logistical nightmare. There were three boats that we had access to, and two of them broke down before we even got started. Our first day of shooting, that boat also bit the dust right in the middle of a take, leaving the entire cast stranded way out on the water. At that point we were totally screwed. We were out of boats and not only did we have more boat scenes to shoot, we were also completely trapped out on that island. There was no way back to shore unless someone wanted to spend an entire day paddling a canoe from sunup to sundown along a shipping canal next to huge industrial barges and ships. That really changed the tone of the production. We all knew we were in for the long haul, but nobody expected that we’d be literally stranded there for days at a time. We didn’t have a choice though; we had to just keep on shooting.
SW – To me, I think the wackiest thing was one of the boat stunts that we pulled off. It involved me falling off a speeding boat and then Tyler attempting to save me. I honestly didn’t want to do it for real, but somehow they convinced me that it was completely safe. While we were shooting it though, I’m pretty sure we could have died very easily. The current in the river that we were filming in was really strong and the water was extremely cold and deep and we just kept getting more tired as we kept shooting it over and over. I remember having a conversation with the production team about how to discern if we were really struggling to get on the boat and almost drowning or just acting and they were just nodding their heads and being like “yeah yeah, ok!”. Sure enough, in one take I literally felt like I could not swim anymore and I tried to tell the director/crew that I needed their assistance or I was going to die and they just sat there and kept filming and I had to yell at them and be like “HEY, I’M NOT ACTING THROW ME A LIFE JACKET!” Good times….
CINEVUE: Any new, upcoming projects that we should look out for?
SW – I’m getting back into regularly shooting shorts and such in Los Angeles while in the early writing stages of another feature. It’s too early to say much more than that though.
CL – I produced another feature, which should be coming out sometime this winter. It’s called the Mourning Hills, and it was written and directed by a good friend of mine, Todd Campbell. It’s the story of two girls that escape from an orphanage and find themselves lost in a stretch of wilderness which is famous for being a place where people come to kill themselves; kind of like the Aokigahara forest in Japan. It’s much more serious in tone than SCFOTSIABI, but both films are similar in that they treat the primary locations as characters unto themselves. Looking further down the road, Chip and I have a number of scripts we’re developing, just trying to find the right story to fit this point in our careers.