Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Amber Benson: Adam has this adage that I really like. He wanted to give the actors
who deserve the roles the roles. People that wouldn't necessarily get to
play these roles in a regular studio film.
He gave James Urbaniak, the office kind of manager hero. Angela Bettis is
one of the most talented actors that I've ever worked with or known.
Adam Busch: No one had really let her do comedy before.
[movie clip: You are from Earth.]
Amber Benson: Everybody got on, on the set. You had people that knew the Acker &
Blacker Dialogue. It's very stylized; very [Preston Sturgis-y]; very witty
back and forth.
Adam Busch: They have a way of talking that is at once extremely modern because
it references a certain kind of irony, or sarcasm, or technology that is so
of right now that it couldn't be anytime. But it's kind of delivered in a
way that's very, very Preston Sturgis-y or just what's the word?
Amber Benson: Screw ball comedy-esq.
Adam Busch: Yeah.
[movie clip: I've got work to do. It's just regular work though not blowing
up a planet where a person keeps all of his stuff.]
Adam Busch: They write in the medium of all old time radio very often. People
have a formality or way of presenting their emotions "this is how I feel"
which has always reminded me of the 50s.
Amber Benson: It's hard to say and a lot of actors can't do it. But we had these
thrilling actors who knew this world, knew how to say the dialogue and make
it funny and really work it. And then you have people like Jonathan
Woodward and Angela Bettis who just kind of stepped in because they're so
talented they can do anything. They just walked right in and were able to
do this dialogue that's very difficult to do; that I find hard to do as an
actor.
Ben Acker, one of the writers, has a very specific way of talking and it
was very odd to be watching Jonathan Woodward delivering these lines and he
was referencing Ben and he sounded like Ben Acker speaking. He had never
met Ben Acker. So, it's the dialogue. It's so specific that you hear the
writer's voice in them, you know in the lines.
Adam Busch: The actor's got the relationships and the stakes that were at hand.
It really became just about shifting the humor around. In terms of working
with Angela working with Jon, it would be like okay we did that now let's
try this. Maybe the joke could fall over here or maybe the truth is this so
then the joke become that. Just being very familiar with Acker and
Blacker's words like we were and what the possibilities were just kind of
shifted humor around. Then ultimately in the editing process, pick whatever
furthers the story the best.
Sometimes it's at the sacrifice of a really great joke but you go with what
furthers the story the best; what brings these people together in the end.
We were very aware of the relationships; of the relationship between the
two writers; of the relationship between our hero and his girl and all of
the other people . . .
Amber Benson: A hero and his best friend.
Adam Busch: Our hero and his best friend.
Amber Benson: Which is as much of a love story in way . . .
Adam Busch: Perhaps even more.
[movie clip: Yo - al - mee - zorp. What was that? Alien noise. That's not
what we sound like. We sound like "Hey Brian. How's it going?"]
Adam: Again, it comes down to like collaboration, to a bunch of people
working together with different views on one thing and can streamline into
one and tell that story. If you're collaborating all of them and then
really streamlining it you have something.
Amber Benson: Yeah. Sundance was awesome.
Adam Busch: It was an amazing experience just to show it to people for the first
time. We'd never shown it to anybody before. So just to get people's
reaction and to get the reviews in...
Amber Benson: What was so great about Sundance was being part of the community of
filmmakers. We knew going in like saying that this is where we wanted to
premiere. It's so fun when you call and you say I want to premiere there.
And then you do it. It's awesome. Al and I talk about it. Sundance was
about filmmakers. It wasn't about being famous, or a being celebrity, or
how many famous people were in the movie. It was about this is a good movie
and we appreciate the work you guys put into it.
Adam Busch: Slamdance runs concurrently with Sundance in Utah. And Sundance,
which used to be known for independent films, now has started for the first
time this year a new thing called Next, which is saluting independent
filmmakers. When the whole festival itself has to create a new category
with which to actually screen independent films called Next, then they're
really not for independent films. And it's not really anymore.
But Slamdance is and they go out of their way to force filmmakers to be
together. People who aren't good at talking to each other. They very
awkwardly force you together. They force you to form some kind of
relationship. Now we've made friends that we'll have for a long time. We
learned a lot through other people's experiences doing what we just did.
Their taste is really great. I can't tell you what you're going to see if
you go to Sundance. But I know if you go and see one of the 10 or 12 films
that are nominated, in competition at Slamdance, you're going to love them
and they're going to be really smart and really well done.
It's the kind of thing where anything you watch there makes you, "oh we
really got to go make a movie right now," even if you've never made a movie
before in your life. You'll see that and go, "oh I can do that. I should go
do that," which I think is not a testament to how easy it is to do it; it's
just to how well they're done. You never see anything limited by a budget,
never see anybody that seems limited by the restraints they have. You only
see people rise into it.
Adam Busch: We're going to be doing sort of a benefit screening for 826LA, which
is going to be here in Los Angeles on April 13th at the Egyptian and
tickets are available through Event Bright. You just go to Event Bright and
type in drones. All the money goes to 826LA, which is a charity that both
of us are really involved with and we feel like they're really doing good
work. It's Dave [Eggers'] charity. They tutor kids after school. They do
all these really cool programs. They teach kids how to write books and
write songs. Actually, Adam's band, Common Rotation, did a song writing
symposium with all these little kids, taught them how to write songs.
Adam Busch: We knew going in what the options were and then we were presented
with lots of offers that were the same things, which is a couple of
screenings in New York and LA and then we'll release it on DVD maybe. Or
some screenings in New York and LA and we'll maybe show it on our TV
station or not. There's no real guarantee. And then you don't own it
anymore and there's nothing you can do. None of that really sounded very
appealing because it's something we can do on our own if we wanted to and
it creates all these roadblocks for people to see it and who likes that?
We knew that audience it was for and we always knew that we certainly
didn't want to create a lot of obstacles between the film and the people
that wanted to see it, which seems to be the thing nowadays to make people
jump through hoops to track down a film and go see. Whereas the option is
always available to you, just let it be available to as many people as
possible.
Amber Benson: Granted, we were definitely going to try to film festival route and
get word of mouth going that way, but we really love what Joss Whedon did
with Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog and we really feel like that is an
avenue that we would like to explore with Drones. We knew that from the
very beginning that this was something that could be accessible via the
Internet to a lot of people.
We rather everybody get to see it on the Internet than like, five people
get to see it in a movie theater and that was always a driving force I
think for both of us and for our producer Jordan Kessler, just wanting
people to have access to the film. We did make it specifically with that in
mind. We broke it down into a week. Each day is a little chunk and you can
put that online and it's very accessible that way. We just kept our options
opened. We want to make it so that people can see it. That's the most
important thing to us.
Adam Busch: I've always had back and forth relationship with science fiction and
I really wanted to make the kind of science fiction that I would want to
see. I like when there's a lot of heart involved, I like when there's a lot
of politics involved. I like when science and fantasy are used as a device
with which to tell a very a very human story. When I see that done right, I
just, I'll just follow that till the ends of the earth. I really want to do
that. I don't know that this kind of comedy has really ever been done in
this kind of genre before that you can find truth in relationships in humor
by way of science fiction. I guess the closet think is Shaun of the Dead.
[movie clip]
Adam Busch: You certainly get more control over the message of what you're trying
to say and how it gets said. Certainly by the time you get to the editing
process which where the true collaboration is of working together and the
story is really vague, you get to tell it exactly who you want it and
there's no excuse for anything that you don't like if it's not the way you
want it, then it's your fault. Through that you get to tell the story you
want to tell and we've got to not compromise on anything. Like, it's there.
Everything we wanted to say, how we wanted to say it, there it is, and
we're responsible for it, which is great and fun.
Amber Benson: That's the future for us. I feel like the product is much better
when we work together. We just have a short hand. We have a couple of
different things that we're working on. We co-wrote a script that we're
trying to get off the ground and then we got a couple of other things that
we didn't write that we're working on. I'm still writing Death's Daughter
books and Adam and the band are going to be going out on a West Coast run
with the folk musician Dan Bern in April and then we're going to be taken
Drones to the Orlando Film Festival on the 16th and 10th of April and then
it looks like we're going to be at the Boston Independent Film Festival and
at Newport Beach.
Adam Busch: There's a soundtrack that will be coming out in by June. You can get
that on iTunes. It features Dan Bern and a score by Jonathan Dinerstein. We
have a song on there too.
Amber Benson: So it will be out there and available to those who want to see it.
Adam Busch: [inaudible 09:36] write a line with just wanting to work on things
that are funny and sad at the same time.
Visit BuzzyMag.com For More Great Interviews!