Original subtitles

And schlock.

Gorilla interrupted was a horrible mistake.

One. Two. Three. Oh.

It was a collaboration between four people

to make a science fiction comedy film in seven days, with a budget of $0.

I'm poking Christmas lights through a sheet of insulation board

in the attempt of making a control panel for an alien spacecraft.

It was a disaster.

It was a nightmare, and it was an embarrassing experience

for everyone involved.

How do you feel about our entire stay at the, the Rich Evans house?

Say, the.

I need a doctor.

This fucking huge metal chair fucking fell on my arm.

How you doing?

Oh, God.

Oh! Holy shit.

We're screwed. No.

We're fucked. No.

Rich Evans

was involved, in in my short films.

Probably mid to high school.

Oh, God.

My sister falling over.

We come up with

crazy, stupid ideas,

things we we we could never possibly film because we didn't have the resources.

But then we go to his house after school and we'd try anyway.

I put Richard costumes in my parents basement and throw things at him

and, make him embarrass himself for my own amusement.

It's gay fireman. Dad.

I'm gonna hose you down.

You're ever supportive of my career choice?

Gay fireman.

Oh. Oh, he's made a lot of short films.

Mostly after school.

And my parents basement.

The most famous of which is called Richard Edlund versus his sons.

They're coming.

You must get a weapon. Go!

Richard Edlund

was some kind of weird, brash television personality.

And just the most bizarre things would happen on his shows.

Like his his

his children, his illegitimate children would team up to try and kill him.

But I'm one of your sons, Richie.

Till the little kid tried the hat and vacuum cleaner accessory.

You know,

that's that's really.

I'm gonna bludgeon you with my vulgar,

I am breakfast man.

Oh, you're rocking.

That was a movie.

That was a whole movie.

We made another film.

Me and Rich made, we had an idea to create a character called Battle Man.

After, watching a documentary about a man who invented a bear suit,

which was a, a indestructible suit.

That that this this man made that he could fight bears with.

And me and Rich were so fascinated by this, we we thought of an idea

of battle man.

A man who has an indestructible suit of armor.

Battle man was basically just an excuse to build, like, a full armor costume.

We're going for something like.

Like Iron Man.

And what we ended up with was toys spray painted grave.

Oh. Mr.

Evans wore the Batman suit and fought Satan and in his grandmother's backyard.

My nickname for the the Battle Man costume was the mobility limiter.

3000.

Because you couldn't move in this costume.

This is the stuff I did in my high school

years.

So me and Rich Evans were making movies, and, we,

we kind of became part of an online website community of low budget filmmakers

and that's where, I met J.

This was around 1999.

I was,

frequenting a message board on a website

that was devoted to amateur film, an amateur film makers.

And this was back in the days before YouTube, really before internet videos.

People were literally sending each other VHS tapes back and forth.

And so I had met Mike on this message board for some

I haven't really heard of J bomb, and it was.

I watched his movie disconnected.

Independent film was just too sophisticated for you,

which is not being able to braid have to do with anything.

I can't say this about any other amateur movie.

I actually wanted to watch it a second time,

which is unheard of with no budget schlock.

So it was really good. At that time.

I was mainly making sort of vulgar comedies, really sort of, kind of inspired

by John Waters and a little bit of Kevin Smith and things like that.

So, really sort of character driven, more so than plot driven, to a detriment.

I soon discovered we had similar, tastes and humor.

We had made similar kind of comedy films, and we both had, sort of the same.

We took what we were doing a lot less seriously

than everyone else on the website.

The level of filmmaking we were all at at that point was,

you know, they were amateur movies.

That's what this, message board was devoted to.

But there was people involved with that community that were making, you know,

Pulp Fiction knockoffs, the 20 year olds in a dorm room pretending to be hitmen,

but they're wearing shorts

and there's Bob Marley posters behind him and things like that.

And, Mike and Rich were sort of, celebrating the fact that they were making

no budget garbage as opposed to pretending it was something that it wasn't.

I met J.

Bauman in high school,

and I remember going over to Jay's house, and he had like,

VHS tapes that Mike had sent him, and, and we watched

like two hours worth of some of his earlier stuff.

And I remember thinking

the some of it was a little weird,

and I don't remember specifics, but

I do remember there was one feature film that had this creepy,

creepy doll and, it was kind of like a Chucky doll.

Hello there. And talk and,

space baby.

Yeah. Really?

What is that, a space baby? What?

And throughout the whole movie, the doll was just being like,

beaten up repeatedly and just, like, violated.

Ow ow ow ow ow ow

ow ow ow ow ow!

Oh, no!

Oh, no!

Oh! God dammit!

Call an ambulance!

And, the film, I think, ended with a freeze

frame of the doll being, like, thrown into the air.

Did you hear that?

Oh, shoot.

Did you?

Or free.

JS films are very odd

and quirky and had a lot of eccentric characters,

and the stuff I was making with Rich was more vulgar, dumb, blunt stupidity.

My kind.

Where I was about 70 miles north of him.

They were him and Rich were in Chicago area, and I was up in Milwaukee.

So we started talking about possibly collaborating on stuff.

So I asked Mike if him and Rich wanted to come up and be

in a movie I was making called The Trouble with Her Uterus.

Actually first met Jay at the, Burger Barn in

Rockford, Illinois.

My name is Javon

Lee, and that's when we filmed, The Trouble With a Uterus.

I played a character named Big Kay.

K-Mart employee who thought of himself as a gangster.

You know, I get an employee discount at the cafe.

What would you say?

You want me to go get some super pretzels?

Sure. Hot damn.

And Rich Evans played a, an adult baby.

Wasn't really an adult baby.

I think I was supposed to be an actual baby.

Played by an adult Rich Evans.

Oh, wow.

That's a

that is probably the single most humiliating moment of my life.

We collaborated on a number of projects, and, guerrilla interrupted

ended up becoming a feature film collaboration.

Mike didn't do a lot of features, and the ones he did were bad.

So he,

the Mike, Mike and Rich shined at doing these bizarre short films.

They were making these really entertaining shorts and they didn't

do a lot of features. And,

this was sort of an attempt to I don't know

if it was intentional on Mike's part, but it was kind of taking,

elements that were in the movies I was making

and then the schlocky elements from their bizarro short films,

and kind of trying to make something that fit both of those styles.

Jay J joined as, as part of one of the actors

and part of the creative team that made it.

And same with another filmmaker named Garrett Gil Kron.

We bonded with Garrett,

for the same reason that that I bonded with Mike and Rich was that

he was also a part of that community, and he also did not take anyone else

there seriously or respect anyone on that message board.

J lived in Milwaukee.

Me and Rich lived down in Illinois and Chicago,

and Garrett, I think, was in California at the time.

The idea was made for all of us to get together for a week and shoot a film.

I wrote a one paragraph treatment, and I think

that's what I kind of presented to Jay and Garrett and Rich.

And I said, let's film this.

It's got four characters in it.

We can do sort of a sci fi comedy thing.

It'll be schlock, it'll be fun.

We could shoot it in a week.

And the treatment I wrote basically said,

Rich turns into a monkey.

And someone,

someone's a punk rocker.

And then I think at the end I said, J and J bomb in place.

Somebody.

So even though that's a major component of the film, it was not even in there.

Basically, gorilla interrupted was just an excuse to collaborate. And,

when I saw the script,

well, first of all, the script was, like, written in a day.

I wrote the script, I think in a day, and it was probably about 40

or 50 pages leaving room for,

improv and, elaboration and stuff.

So, very loose scripts.

We were kind of just going to wing it.

Most of it, the script was really just an outline.

So the thing about getting a script from Jay or Mike is that on paper,

it's not always necessarily extremely funny.

Like you can have a scene where it's like Rich Evans falls down,

but when it's actually executed and when they edit it together,

Rich Evans falling down

is like the best thing in the world, because he's just so good at it.

And they just edit it together so well that it's just extremely funny.

But I'm sure when I got the gorilla interrupted script, I was like,

yeah, this is good.

But in reality I'm.

Sure it was before.

Before we made the movie, I was just like,

yeah, we're going to make something, let's make a movie.

All right? It'll be fun. We'll make a movie.

And then one day before,

everyone flew into Chicago, that's that's the first time I saw the script.

So the script was written overnight,

and my expectations were, this is going to be impossible.

I didn't think it was.

That's bizarre to try and shoot a movie like that that quickly,

because I was making movies in a similar style at that point.

I was sort of just slapping movies together more for the sake

of having a movie than to take time and craft a scene and do all these things.

I was just trying to slap together dumb comedy,

so it didn't strike me at first how,

sort of unrealistic it was to

try and make gorilla in that short amount of time.

It it dawned on me very quickly into the shooting that it was a bad idea, though.

The script was ambitious.

And I think back then, the decision was made to shoot it in a week.

One because of,

travel issues,

was that all of us were from three different states, and,

we couldn't really, especially Garrett who had to fly out there.

We had a limited amount of time with him, and we wanted to collaborate with him. So

we didn't have a lot of time just for logistical reasons.

And, two,

the second reason of shooting such an ambitious script

in seven days is naivete,

and being completely stupid at the same time.

I think the project was more kind of just for fun.

We weren't trying to make a feature film

that we could sell to a distributor or do anything with.

It was really just kind of a fun, collaboration thing.

And we and we all enjoyed doing improv and,

physical comedy and, you know, we wanted to

have it rich to have this scene where he did,

his blueberry and knock things over and broke stuff.

And Garrett wanted to do his, his wacky,

safari character

where we're trying to film a feature

length movie and we have less than a week to do it.

I just thought it was going to be a complete disaster, and time eventually

proved me right.

Well,

the first day of shooting was also the first day of pre-production,

which I think is how most movies are made.

And I'm kind of scared

and sad and happy all at once.

Mike actually came up to Milwaukee and picked me up,

because I didn't have a car at that point and drove me down,

and before anything else, we stopped at his parents place.

I don't remember why, but we stopped there, and immediately

when I walked down in the basement, my eye just swelled shut

and the first thing that happens when we get here is we go to Mr.

Mike's to class, his house, and my eye swells up.

Not not a good, not a good sign.

I had an allergic reaction to something.

And I think that was an omen of things to come the first day.

I think the first thing we did was we drove around and looked for props.

And I think that's where we came up with the title.

We were just all throwing out dumb ideas, and I, I said,

we should call the movie girl, interrupted part two.

And I thought that was funny.

And somebody, I don't know if it was Mike or Rich, one of the two, I think Mr.,

misheard me and thought I said gorilla interrupted.

And so we said, all right, let's call it that.

I had written the script with the intention of it being short.

It was about,

50 pages long or something like that.

And, I allowed a lot of room for improv, and,

I told Garrett that,

this was essentially

my movie, GMP production movie.

And Jay understood that it was sort of like,

he was we're all collaborating together, but someone needed

to be in charge of the movie.

It couldn't just be complete free for all.

I didn't have any involvement at all with the concept of the movie

or the writing of the movie.

It was just,

I think Mike saying, I'm going to write this movie and we'll make it in a week.

And I said, okay, just tell me what to do.

It wasn't my movie.

And I was going to, make no attempt

to commandeer the movie because I understood it wasn't mine.

I. Yeah,

I got in.

They locked me in the plans for 30 minutes, sir, I don't know.

Why are you running up to us?

I'm gonna kill you.

Well, this is going to be an exciting week.

All right. Howdy, Garrett.

All right, we went to pick Garrett up at the airport, and,

Garrett pulls this script out of his bag.

He came with, completely rewritten script, which was about twice

as long as the original version, with pages and pages and pages and pages of,

extempore pointless dialog added to scenes

when we had a very tight shooting schedule.

He wrote all these lines of dialog that were just physically impossible

to shoot, and the time constraints we had, I don't know why.

I think he just thought it was.

I don't know what he thought.

Nobody knows what Garrett thought.

We shot the movie on my camcorder.

It was a mini DV camcorder.

I think it was a sharp.

I think that was the brand.

I don't know why we shot it on my camera.

It was the worst camcorder.

It was terrible.

In not just low light, but in normal light.

It was grainy and there was no proper

jack to plug in a microphone.

So the entire movie was shot with the onboard mic, which is why almost

every scene is like awkward, weird close ups or everybody's shouting it.

We were at least aware that you needed to get clean audio,

even if we didn't have the proper capabilities to do so.

Oh, and we bought a, a shop light from Home Depot to do our, our lighting.

The first scene that we filmed was the,

the scene with Ray and, Jacob.

Ray is interrogating Jacob, and he's tied to a chair, and,

we started filming and then there was dialog that I was completely unaware of.

As the director of the project.

Come back in,

walk away and say, come back here if you don't like him.

He's wearing a Santa Claus hat for no reason.

I don't know why that ended up in it. And.

And then he told Rich to pour soda on his head.

You're a foul beast of evil.

Y'all sound pissed off.

Involved.

And I noticed at that point, Mike just completely shut down.

What are you trying

to accomplish with this movie?

Well, I'm trying to get you killed in an accident on the set.

I think he's sort of lost.

Lost his mind a bit

about the fact that he had no control over his own movie anymore.

I was trying to direct a scene that, I did not know what it was,

so that was not a good start to a film.

It definitely put everybody in sort of an awkward mood.

Rich is, you know, he's more of an actor, so he'll kind of go

along with whoever's giving him direction.

I didn't know what to make of it.

I didn't know what to do

because I didn't feel it was my place to try and take over the movie.

So I noticed Mike being very quiet,

and I didn't really know how we were going to get around that.

So I think we just kind of stopped shooting for a while and tried to regroup

and sort of, get everybody's mind back on track.

I think at some point,

I came back to my senses and we continued shooting the film.

But I was very annoyed at that first day, and I kind of told Garrett,

we're not shooting any of this stupid crap

or shooting other stupid crap.

Okay, we've had our first injury.

I just slipped my lip right open.

Oh, and if we're documenting injuries, Mr.

Mike's two glasses, has a broken.

He has a broken heart.

So after we came to an understanding of all of our disagreements

and all the hatred kind of subsided momentarily, we,

we shot our next scene, which was all four characters

yelling at each other in the kitchen and said, go fuck yourself.

Go to hell, you cock sucker.

Insurance is also a practical joke, like,

it's like that each, your cocks fucking asshole.

Fuck you.

That's when the movie picked up.

Was just kind of magical. That scene.

I'm not sure why, but that scene energized everybody.

I think it was late at and later at night, and,

we are just sort of, like, getting a little loopy and.

And we filmed this scene where we're all screaming and shouting, I see you

for I'm saw goddamn monkey, son of a bitch.

And everybody was in a good mood after that because we were,

getting into the characters and sort of understanding their dynamics

in a way that was hard to figure out with that first scene, which was just

two of the characters, everybody there was just kind of like

firing on all cylinders.

The characters came into place, the dialog was working, and the movie

finally got off the ground, only to come to a screeching halt once

I got everybody sick.

It's a sickness

spread amongst everyone, not just a sickness of the mind,

a sickness of the body as well, can be traced back

to Rich Evans girlfriend, who gave him a cold at some point.

And then everyone stayed in Rich Evans grandma's house, I think.

I think the story goes, rich and Garrett had had stayed

in Rich Evan's room and were just chatting all night,

and Rich Evan's room had absolutely no ventilation.

And I think it rich gave Garrett a cold and then it just spread from there.

I remember at one point Garrett was throwing up in my kitchen sink.

I had a bathroom.

Of course, he could have gone into the bathroom

and thrown up in the toilet, but instead he chose to throw up.

And the kitchen sink where I keep my dishes.

He, like me,

has just lost

his voice due to the Satanic code given to us by Mr.

Rich and this clown.

From what can I just say at this point,

know my voice?

Oh, my crying

that, there goes the upper registers of our voices

so we can only try to speak in these, disgusting monotone.

Oh, my voice.

That's why there's so much yelling in the movie.

I mean, there's supposed to be a lot of yelling anyway,

because the characters are always angry at each other.

But there are so many scenes where the lines are being delivered

and just this constant yell, because otherwise they couldn't speak.

Let me see these.

I don't know if I'm seeing reality.

Now, we were shooting

blue screen stuff for hell,

and I think all of us had lost our voices at that point, and, I certainly did.

I remember my voice was just gone.

This is probably where everybody was the most miserable.

You call that an argument? You women.

You call that an argument?

Old ladies, I can argue.

Okay, we're here on the set with George

Lucas for the taping of episode two.

How am I clones?

Mr. Lucas, I don't know if I could perform against the blue screen cast.

Any other actors who were like, oh, you fucking

please.

Are you happy to.

The most frustrating scene for me to shoot was the hell stuff,

because there's this whole sequence where I'm off by myself,

and then the other three characters are all supposed to start arguing

and it's supposed to escalate.

And that's what leads to Ray turning into the gorilla again.

And that was a case of there was no dialog in the script.

It was just.

And then they argue. So there was no,

focus as

far as how do we get to that points action.

Nobody ever hits me like that, Jacob.

Well I did did I do good?

Oh, you did just fine.

I think maybe I should you back. Why?

Because it'll hurt a lot.

Yes, yes it will.

What do you want?

Did it's too long or just.

We just kind of were rolling and seeing where it went.

And Garrett didn't want to argue or he couldn't argue or something.

If you hit me, it,

I'm obviously saying something.

Don't talk. You look like a fucking long.

Oh, wow.

That was the lamest insult I ever heard.

Hey, I won my.

The only thing you ever won was a fuck fest.

I was manning the camera

at that point, and I'm watching, and it was just so frustrating

because I kind of knew where the scene needed to go.

But nobody else was on the same page as far as how to get it to that point.

So it was like everybody was in their own little world.

Why don't you go drink out of your sauce bottle?

Were you boozing it up before you met the fucking devil?

You've already done that one.

What the fuck the fuck got?

Everybody was sick.

Everybody had spent the last

72 hours working on a movie

and, at the end of those three days,

we realized we still had about 70% of the movie left to go.

So everybody was miserable.

How much do you want to die?

Good. Okay.

That's good.

So the shoot is like good bad, good bad good.

It was just an up and down kind of thing.

We were just terrible.

We were miserable. We were sad. We were depressed. We were hungry.

We were overworked.

But every now and then there was just this bizarre

creative energy that just it came through all of that.

There was sort of like this weird kind of like,

like like fever dream quality.

Like everybody was just like,

slap happy and delirious the entire time we were making the movie.

And I think that added to it the end of that, that three days

of Chicago shooting, that the house was just completely trashed.

I got to start cleaning the house, but I have no energy.

We shot a lot of the movie in Rich Ivan's house, which really was

nobody's house at the time.

It used to be Nana's house, and it was, of course, Rich.

Ivan's grandmother.

Was dancing

with some a lot of movies there before.

We're just able to get away with a lot of stuff there, so I, like grandmother.

Just did not care.

So by the time we got around to a gorilla,

my grandmother actually passed on by that point.

And at the time, Rich's uncle was trying to restore the house to try and sell it.

So we just destroyed it because we could.

And it was a place to film the movie.

We didn't even have to bring in new things to destroy.

We just could destroy the things

that were already there, because we're trying to get rid of it. Anyway.

Our mass destruction of this house continues here.

We were 20 year old kids, with seven days on our hands,

a house full of objects and things to destroy.

I mean, it was it was kind of crazy action.

I see.

While I was living in the new house,

while we were shooting in Chicago, Garret and I were sleeping on the floor.

I think we had an air mattress and we were sleeping on that.

Maybe there was two or maybe we shared one, I don't remember.

I hope we didn't share one.

It was like a three day commune.

They were out sleeping in the living room and I was in the back.

And then we'd sleep and we'd wake up and we'd film and we'd go to sleep.

It was like all we did for three days.

If you destroy, oh,

there you go.

Oh my nose.

Let me zoom in on the nose.

Got a scar on the nose.

Two scars, two scars and plenty more all over.

Oh, fuck. Look at that.

So now we're going to head up to Milwaukee,

which is a much happier and better place, isn't it? Yes.

Okay.

When will the earnings stop?

We didn't have time to clean it up.

So we we just left the house as it was and went up to Milwaukee.

And then, apparently when we're up in Milwaukee,

my uncle showed up for a visit at the house, and he

he went in and he saw all of that destruction.

That's one that's made.

Think I was out there today.

I thought that he had promised.

And we

had talked about that house and stuff that, I don't know.

You're away. I don't know what's going on there.

How does a cure.

Well, that's the real problem.

When I show the house, I don't know what happened,

with his,

over the front door.

I just busted the register coming in as I stare, I just replace that register.

You know?

About the theater.

Because that asked the house, that look, that part,

I don't know, it's garbage all over the back porch panels.

And in this place.

030 2 a.m..

Here's the carnage here now.

Moved up from Chicago to Milwaukee.

When we moved up to Milwaukee, everything got worse.

We were all in a deep, deep depression.

What do you think about Milwaukee?

There's been far less accidents, far less injuries, and a lot more and far

less enthusiasm, a far less.

And to this year,

it's like with the minute

we came out of Milwaukee, basically everybody stopped caring.

Before today, it was worse than Chicago.

I felt physically ill or more tired.

I had less of a cold, but I just didn't care.

The gray

looming clouds and the cold weather and I think we all just needed a break.

But we couldn't take one.

We didn't have time. Right, exactly.

And that and that looming, fear that we couldn't take a break at all

just said an obscene amounts of depression on everybody.

I think Rich Evans had said it like, he's like,

I wish we just all hung out this week and just had fun.

Because this is a miserable nightmare.

So it got bad. I think J started to hate us.

We stayed at J's place and J was living in an apartment with 18 other men.

It was my first apartment was just like a 20 whatever, 21 year

old and really dumpy attic apartments.

I had two roommates and everybody else,

Rich, Garrett and Mike slept in my living room, and I'm sure

at least one of them slept on that couch, which you see it in the movie.

It's the couch in the movie, and it's disgusting.

And I'm guessing somebody slept on it.

Get the fuck out of my house.

We all stayed in Jay's apartment and slept on his floor.

We had stayed up to like three in the morning

and we were all talking and laughing, and I had to work at like 6 a.m.

or something and came out and he yelled at us.

I said, fuck you guys and fuck your movie.

I have to go to work.

An asshole.

Oh my God,

oh my God, oh God.

Class.

There was a scene where Rich falls down a hill and rolls

through branches and stuff.

I don't remember where that came from.

I know it was a reference to one of Jay's older movies with some,

perfect goes home.

Oh my God.

Yes, branches say hurt.

Oh, the honest truth is, I don't even remember a lot of that.

The actual filming at that point, everything was just kind of like a

a mind numbing slog at that point.

We're just trying to get through the movie

somehow because it seemed it seemed impossible.

I didn't think we're going to even get the movie done.

And it was funny.

It was funny to watch and roll down the hill.

It was funny because I didn't have to do it, and I've done it 28 times.

Yesterday,

barefoot, two right, walked around the forest,

sold the broken glass, bare feet, and I rolled down the hill 28 times.

Oh, I was really optimistic about things at that time,

because I was also making movies that were horribly slapped together,

and I kind of viewed them at the time like, yeah,

they're slept together, but they're funny or whatever.

Even when everybody was miserable and didn't want to make the movie anymore,

I think that thought was still in my brain that, you know, maybe this could work.

We just can't see it

because we're clouded by like, illness and depression at the time.

Do you even know your character's name?

Julie?

Oh yes. It does make,

Lisa came up and filmed all of her scenes, so we,

we shot all the bluescreen stuff with Lisa,

and then we took down the blue screen, and then,

someone wised up and remembered that we didn't get all the blue screen stuff.

The system had

perfect.

I remember getting there, and which I think I only was there

for like a day or two, but everybody was just in, like,

a foul mood, and they were sick and it just smelled.

And it was awful.

No one wanted to make that movie.

You know, it's the great irony about all this.

What it's like we have all these war stories and all

this, like, horror filmmaking, and it would be great

if we were making, like, a quality film that we could do.

But but in the end, it's it's just going to be crap that we churned out.

It's kind of like a plagued production and Police Academy part seven.

That's it.

They're about to leave.

Last last words.

Go fuck yourself.

Yeah, go fuck yourself.

And I mean, what else to say about Milwaukee?

I was glad to leave.

Goodbye. All right.

But Garrett.

Oh, I love working on this movie.

It was the nicest movie shoot of my life.

Oh, God.

I'm dead.

Bye, guys.

Someone dragged his corpse to the car.

They'll ship it back to LA and Fox.

I was not excited to start editing this movie.

And I don't even know why I bothered to do it.

I, I did not like how the production went.

Go fuck yourself.

Go fuck yourself, you asshole.

We filmed all the stuff with the main actors first.

And when

everybody went back to their normal lives, I still had shots of aliens to get.

At that point, the movie seemed like it was going to be a horrible failure.

So we slap that shit together as cheaply and quickly as possible,

and I

filmed the components for the alien stuff without caring at all, even less,

which I think goes into the negative of caring.

Okay, for men beam aboard your spacecraft directly ahead.

I put rich ovens

sitting on a chair and his grandma's living room.

I think the set was a little end table with a computer monitor on it,

and Richard asked, should I change out of my sweatpants and my socks?

I said no, and then there were other scenes where, the alien was talking.

I think I just panned away because I was done filming

aim the Blasters at the city

and blow the fuck out of the city of.

Yeah, no, no effort or care was taken at all.

And strangely, those are the best scenes in the movie.

I think it's hard to explain why those are the best scenes in the movie.

But it's because they're in the movie.

I think the only reason I,

I finished it was just because we had spent so much time on it,

and I did spend a lot of time doing all those initial effects

and, I don't know, maybe I just wanted to see how how it turned out.

The first time I saw the completed movie,

I thought it was the worst movie I had ever been a part of.

I watched it with my roommates at the time, and one of them

was just subletting a room for the summer, so he really didn't know me.

He knew I made movies, but he'd never seen anything,

and I think I had known him for a month at that point, and we watched it,

and when it was over, he said, please tell me that's the worst thing

you've ever done.

And I was like, yeah, I kind of is, God.

And I'm wearing my Star Trek shirt. Jesus.

Oh. They sat next to the sign again. No.

The irony being that now, a decade later, it's the only movie

out of any of the things I was involved with back

then that I can actually still watch and don't just cringe at.

I initially hated it.

And then, despite myself, I started liking the movie.

Over the years, I've actually we've come up

with tons of sequel ideas

for gorilla interrupted, and we've we've never actually made any of them, but

a lot of creativity sprung out of that movie when it shouldn't have.

I don't really remember the plot of gorilla interrupted.

I know I saw the final movie, but I just don't remember it.

I just remember a scene where I'm staring at a fork.

When the movie was completely

finished, my thoughts were that

it turned out better than I thought, which is kind of shocking.

I was disappointed in a lot of the scenes.

And I wish the whole movie had the same energy as the

the argument scene in the kitchen.

I think over the years we we learned

to appreciate it a little more because

it's a fun movie to watch.

It's not a perfect movie that goes without saying.

It's a technically flawed movie, but it's a little time capsule

of where we were at that time, production wise, creative wise, performance wise.

But it's good to make movies like gorilla interrupted when you're younger,

because you learn a lot of stuff about,

how to make movies, time management,

dealing with logistics and,

and how to never make those mistakes again.

What I have always said about gorilla interrupted is that

the movie would have been great if it wasn't for the movie.

So it was 2010, I believe.

It was, probably 3 or 4 months after The Phantom Menace review

was released and had gone viral, and, someone from Paramount Pictures called me

and said, they're doing this project where they would fund

ten feature films at, $100,000 budget each.

And basically their idea was to, kind of

capitalize off the success of the first Paranormal Activity movie,

which I believe was made for like ten grand or something super, super cheap

and kind of invest in a whole bunch of like, weird random

viral video type ideas and hope to hit another paranormal Activity type movie.

So I think there,

searching around the internet and finding what was popular at the time.

And this person called me and said,

we're looking to invest money in something weird.

Do you have a feature film idea? That's weird.

I was like, well, yeah,

I always wanted to remake this movie that we made a number of years ago.

And so one of the first things I did was I rewrote the script,

I wrote a bigger, better version of the script, and then,

Paramount Pictures just decided to abandon the project

and make Paranormal Activity two.

Go fuck yourself.

I think that kind of a renewed the interest in the movie again. And,

we decided to do a DVD release to kind of clean the movie up,

redo the visual effects, redo the sound, and kind of

have a proper release of the movie, which it never had.

I was actually looking forward to going in and re-editing the movie.

I never edited the original version, and I was curious to see

what could be done differently now, with more separation from the footage

and kind of a better understanding of editing and, and those type of things.

So when I started re-editing the movie, what I discovered

very early on was that most of the movie was edited

the way it was, because there was no other choice.

There was very limited, coverage and takes and angles.

So it really a lot of it was edited

as good as it could be, which is unfortunate.

I got to go through each of us individually

and animate the rotoscope, have it follow us for each frame.

So it's very time consuming.

It's very rudimentary effects full time.

So it's kind of fun just taking this crappy old footage

and try and make it look much, much better than it originally did.

It's kind of challenging.

I was trying to kind of stay true to the spirit of the original movie,

and not like I didn't shoot the effects in HD or anything like that.

I thought it would stick out too much.

So standard def four by three filming plastic toys

in front of green screen.

One thing we had to currently shoot

was the scene where we're talking with Jesus, because the original movie,

it was just a still image of Jesus with a awkwardly animated mouth.

Dex, I know you meant well by creating the ultimate weapon of death.

So we had our friend Jack Packard come by and play Jesus,

and we shot it with the onboard mic,

in a wide shot.

On to three.

That's right, Dex,

I know you meant well by creating the ultimate weapon of destruction

and then an awkward close up and true guerilla interrupted spirit.

You may not have your weapons, but you can defeat him by using your inner

feelings or whatever.

But the big one is the ending.

The ending was, of course, takes place in hell.

And at the time, we just, we filmed it against blue screen kit.

Satan afford an air conditioner?

I think I just slapped in pictures of hell that I found on the internet

so much where it was never, lit properly.

I think they actually, the first test we did was with a tarp.

A blue tarp.

I don't know what we were thinking.

It was a shiny, reflective blue tarp that we taped to the ceiling.

And I think we very quickly realized that would not work.

So we went out to a fabric store or something and got,

just giant blue sheet, and but we didn't.

We had one light, we had a shop light, and that's what we lit it with.

So it was all very crude.

And then very difficult to key out

even now with, with After Effects, what it is and things like that.

It's still, you know, you can only do so much with the source footage

and actually ended up keying out a little bit better than I was

expecting for the current version of, gorilla interrupted.

What I'm working on is we're, making a new miniature set.

Now I have my rust ish color paint

here, and we are going to start painting the set.

Let's get paint.

So is that your clothes or is that you were here or.

No, I'm sprayed paint.

It's my my painting outfit.

I don't want to get paint over everything.

Why don't you just wear a dirty shirt?

Oh, was the film Silver Linings

Playbook based on you? Yes.

So this is, This is something called the.

So it's, it's a food additive way.

There is. What color?

Me right there is.

Good. There we go. That looks good.

The whole process of trying to sort of remaster

the movie and and redo the effects and try and get it as good as we can with

what we have available to us now, has been sort of a fun challenge,

because we're still using things that we could have

theoretically come up with back then, had we had more time.

I mean, our whole miniature is, you know, it's papier maché and the spaceships

are just a model toy spaceship on the end of a drill.

So it's it's very low key.

It's very practical,

in a way that's keeping true to how the original movie was made.

Were none of it will hopefully stand out, as being too good.

I still think you

that it's interesting to look back on the movie,

because I have a lot of sort of fond nostalgia for it now, which is weird

because it was such a miserable experience making it.

But enough time has passed where I can look back on it and just be like,

remember the time we made that weird ass movie in a week

and everybody was sick and vomiting and sinks?

The experience of making gorilla interrupted was it was very valuable,

actually, because it kind of teaches you limitations.

And I think like if you ask in hindsight, what would you do differently

and all that?

You really can't answer that because you are who you are when you make the movie.

In hindsight,

there really isn't much I

would say about about what I would have done differently.

I think everything kind of, fell into place.

Unfortunately.

Why are you asking me about it?

Did one of them die? You.