MakingOf Sits Down with the Cast of ‘The Scenesters’

MakingOf: What were your inspirations in terms of the noir feeling?

Todd Berger: Well I just grew up loving, as a child…no, I’ve just always loved film noir and it’s one of those genres that, I always thought, ‘I was born in the wrong decade. I want to wear a trench coat and a hat.’ I always just loved that genre of film and I wanted to do an ode to that sort of, ‘cause you don’t really see those anymore and I had, I wrote the script because you could shoot it cheaply and mixed in these elements of shooting cheaply, documentary style with my favorite kind of film. I loved murder mysteries and just to do a fun, low budget murder mystery that pays homage to the film noir movement, was to me, a dream. And to do this movie, it was the most fun experience of my life and to be able to get my vision out there was a thrill.

MO: How long was your actual production schedule?

Todd: We shot on the Panasonic HVX 200. And because the whole movie is this ‘found footage’ movie, it’s supposed to look like handheld HD cameras, so we just got a handheld HD camera that we were able to go guerilla style with. And we shot the whole movie in 17 days, six day weeks. Yeah, it was supposed to be 20 [days], but I’m pretty awesome so it was only 17 days ‘cause I figured I would get to keep the extra money, but I did not. And yeah, we shot all in Los Angeles, all on location and it was surprisingly cheap and easy to shoot on Federal property, city property, and state property. We have scenes at the LA River, the cement LA River that you know and love from ‘Grease’ and ‘Terminator 2.’ That’s owned by the Army Corps of Engineers and it’s kind of free to shoot there, as long as you get permits, and Griffith Park, which is a public park, it’s very cheap. It’s when you try to go to a private business, or home where they really…

Jeff Grace: …gouge ‘ya.

Kevin Brennan: Los Angeles, everyone knows, “Oh you want to shoot in my house?”

Jeff: But if you went to a Laundromat where the woman doesn’t speak English,  “We want to shoot a movie here.” And they’ll whip out a contract, “Ok it’s $5,000 for the first day, $2,000 for the second day…”

Kevin: You need a moderator…

Jeff: The woman from the Laundromat says “Oh you can hire my son, he’ll be the $1000 a day moderator.” Like, you think you’ll be like “Oh can we shoot in your house?” and they’ll say, “Oh yeah, sure.” Then you get…

Kevin: Like, in Chicago, or even in Texas, I remember when we did this, I literally just called up Chipotle, you know burritos, and this was when they had first come out I was like, “Yeah, we’re shooting this thing and would you maybe give us some discounts on burritos?” And they were like, “We’ll give you as much as you want for free.”

Jeff: Outside of Los Angeles, you will get extras who will pay you to be in a movie and in LA you have to pay them before they even show up on set and then they leave when they have an audition or something.

Todd: And we were able to shoot so quickly because we shot, 80% of the movie is shot documentary style, and it’s supposed to be ‘found footage,’ so if a boom mic is in the shot and it doesn’t look great in a scene, it doesn’t matter because it’s what those people captured on their handheld HD cameras. So we were just able to move through and shoot very quickly. 

MO: Did you guys improv certain scenes?

Jeff: I think we always started with the script, and I think most of what you see in the movie is what was in the script. And there might have been a few moments…

Todd: Yeah we did a lot of like, we’d shoot it once just going off the script and the best lines in the movie are lines that people just made up. And we thought, well this would be funnier than what was in the script. And we would shoot it once, and because it was on HD, we could just roll all we wanted, we didn’t have to worry about film stock, so we’d do it once as scripted and then by the fourth or fifth time that we did it, it had organically grown into something funnier and there were scenes actually, just complete scenes that we just made up, like with locations. So we had a court house, but in the court house, there was a free jail cell and a free interrogation room, and we said,  “Well, we have four hours free, let’s just do a scene and so we just…

Kevin: Jail cell/interrogation scene is my favorite scene in the movie, that’s not in the movie.

Jeff: And I bail Charlie out of jail and he gets arrested and we actually shot another 30 minutes of legit movie but we just can’t put it in the movie, it will be on…

Todd: The mumblecore scene, the fake trailer at the beginning was all just improvised by the actors and there was an outtake, it’ll be on the DVD, but I just picked and chose from the 40 minutes to make a two minute trailer.

MO: I ask everyone what it was like to get the Sundance call, but what was it really like to get the Slamdance call?

Todd: I mean, I was thrilled, because, not to bag on Sundance in any capacity, but we all are very aware of how political it can be to get into Sundance, and somehow the merits of your film are sometimes inconsequential, if you have the right person in your movie, you’ll just place automatically, and who knows if they even watch your movie, because they get 12 million submissions or whatever. But with Slamdance, out of the 5,000 movies that are submitted, when they call you and say, “We want to play your movie,” it means they actually liked it and it was good, and there’s no way to be political ‘cause we don’t know anyone there, so I was thrilled. I knew that they weren’t kissing our ass because they had no reason to and they just thought the movie was really good, so…

Kevin: We did pull one small trick that we saw in a documentary called “Official Rejection,” where one of the Slamdance founders and programmers says, “If you guys want to stop by the offices and bring us a bribe, we aren’t above bribes.” So we got a case of beer, loaded it up and put all of our “Scenesters” stuff in it and said, “Here’s our official bribe.”

Jeff: It was a hipster survival kit. Basically, BPR Beer, who is the official sponsor of ‘The Scenesters’ during Slamdance…Gotta plug that.