IFFBoston Interview: Make-Out With Violence

Bostonist: What got you started in making films? Why did you decide to make your movies together?

Deagol Brothers: Our entire core creative team grew up in Hendersonville, Tennessee, together and we all became close friends in high school. Most of us aspired to be painters and attend college for fine art, but we had an English teacher - Glenda Stephens - who pushed us to experiment with video for her classes. The Deagol Brothers entire existence is owed to a mutual love of Lawrence of Arabia, but it wasn't until we started shooting these high school adaptations of things like Shakespeare plays that we seriously considered going to film school and/or making movies together.

Bostonist: Why do you work under the name Deagol Brothers?

DB: Theory of Obscurity. We wrote a manifesto entitled "The Neo-Modern," which detailed a world where all art was anonymous and communal. It seemed like a good idea back in college. But then one Deagol quit, one was fired and all failed not only as artists, but as human beings to live up to that manifesto. Now we just stick with the moniker because people tend to remember it. And we're big Lord of the Rings nerds.

Bostonist: All three of you were attending school in different cities when you were doing a lot of the groundwork for the film. What kept you together during these times apart and what motivated you to continue on the project when you weren't able to physically push one another?

DB: Telephones, the Internet, and the excitement of making our first feature were enough to help stick with the project. There's more than just the three of us behind the film, and feeling like you had obligations to the group seemed to keep most of us in check. Thankfully, no two of us decided to quit the film at the same time so there was always someone to keep the project up and running.

Bostonist: In the "making of" trailer on the Make-Out With Violence site, there's a voiceover that mentions that you wanted to make a movie based on your experiences growing up. How did zombies get thrown into the mix?

DB: The idea originally was to make a straight up horror film; similar plot to the finished version, but tonally a world apart. We really wanted to work in the zombie genre because we liked the idea of being able to get a second chance at a relationship as personified by an undead resurrection. All four male writers had unresolved feelings about unrequited past loves, so in order to make the screenplay more emotionally interesting we started to base the majority of rewrites on our shared high school experiences.

Bostonist: There seems to be a bit of a "Sci-Fi" element to your films (the short Robot Movie appears to be about robots, though aside from a few pictures, I can't be quite certain!). Did science fiction have a large part of your overall upbringing, or was it something you wanted to use as a template to explore different aspects of life in an unusual way?

DB: Robot Movie is actually about Rational vs. Empirical thought as personified by an egomaniacal robot scientist vying for acceptance in the robot scientific canon against a genius human rival inspired by his own dreams. Science Fiction is the one genre we want to work in as filmmakers. We grew up on 2001, Bladerunner, Star Wars, Star Trek, and Alien, and have written our own sci fi septology that we hope to some day make.

Bostonist: The movie took a number of years to complete, as you ran into a bit of financial trouble. How did you manage to raise funds for the film in the first place?

DB: There were a lot of life savings that went into the picture. Life insurance policies were cashed in, we borrowed money from every friend and family member we possibly could, worked odd jobs, and formed The Non-Commissioned Officers. Hopefully, we'll sell the movie in the near future because we owe a lot of people money...

Bostonist: You guys made a band in part to raise money for the film by performing around. Was the idea to use the music you made in the band an original component to forming the band in the first place? What's the future of the band?

DB: Originally, the Non-Commissioned officers sole purpose was to play the soundtrack as a way to raise funds to finance the second shoot of the film. They never considered themselves a "real" band and were made up of an ever-rotating lineup of musicians who wanted to see the film to completion.

The core creative group behind the band are brothers Eric and Jordan Lehning, who also act in the film as lead characters Patrick and Rody. Once the movie was finished, we decided to release a soundtrack as a promotional tool. The response we've gotten to the soundtrack has been so great that the Non-Commissioned Officers have decided to become an "actual" band and have already started recording material that is in no way tied to Make-Out With Violence.

Bostonist: There's a strong community element that permeates the film, and it's not just the behind-the-scenes aspects of using community members as
actors. There's a certain sense of Tennesse playing the supporting actor, much as Manhattan in almost any Woody Allen movie. Is depicting your hometown and state with a sense of intimacy as important to you as your story?

DB: Not sure we could separate the two since they're entirely intertwined in our minds. The movie is based on a collective memory of going to high school together and living in the same hometown for the majority of our lives. We never really made a conscious decision to focus on the setting because it's just something we can't imagine not being a part of story.

A sense of time and place is a fundamental component to anything we make. We all love the films of Terrence Malick, Peter Weir, and Ridley Scott, because of the role the environment plays in their pictures. We're interested in movies that create a reality that a viewer can get lost in.

Bostonist: What's next for you guys?

DB: Still trying to find distribution for Make-Out With Violence. We're working on several other screenplays; one's sort of a Peter Greenaway inspired take on the lives of the Bronte sisters, another is about Lovecraftian paranormal investigators on a railway train. And then there's always the sci-fi septology.