Legendary film producer Jon Davidson once said that shooting ROBOCOP was like being the victim of a violent crime. I would add that making pretty much any movie has that kind of effect. You tend to look back through this weird haze of exhaustion and punishment. That’s what the whole day-to-day grind of cinema at ground zero comes down to. You give everything. It becomes your whole world.
I was the writer on my first thirteen films. I was finally the director on this one.
It’s something I started musing together around 2016, in my free time between real industry jobs. I started thinking about what the most horrible HANDS-OFF method of torturing someone might be. (Because, naturally, that’s what EVERY normal person sits around thinking of, right?) I kept coming back to the idea of duct taping someone to a chair… and then… well, I was off and running. It eventually turned into a pretty far-out scenario about what happens between the guy stuck in the chair and the guy hired to facilitate his slow torture. I realized this was a story I could tell very well, and that I might even be able to direct it.
Now… you gotta be really damn careful when you start thinking things like that, especially if you’re me. My art is dark. And I don’t just say that to make a clever rhyme. I mean, I tend to go to really awful places when left to my own muse. This is partially because I have lived through actual real-life horrors, but also because I believe that when we face those horrors, we shine a light where humanity needs it the most. That’s the big idea anyway. However… it’s one thing to have an idea or even to write a novel or a comic book about this stuff. It’s something else altogether to make a movie about these things. You should be prepared to have it live in your soul a long while… because it will never ever, ever leave you.
I was ready.
About six years later, we had a script based on this story. Another few years later, we started rolling camera, on November 5, 2024. I was in the deep end of the pool on day one, with a crucial scene requiring multiple actors, special effects, ambitious shots on a Steadicam, and a crew much larger than what I’d originally intended when I first conceived of “doing this myself,” rather than taking it to any number of industry people I knew or a studio or whatever.
I learned how to face all this pressure by learning my craft twice, once in the eighties, and then again in the next millennium, when the digital revolution changed the face of indie filmmaking forever. I spent over ten years in those trenches, writing movies for Lifetime. I saved my money and every dime went into this project, which we put together more-or-less along the same production specs. I DON’T mean you will see this movie on Lifetime. You will NEVER see this movie on Lifetime. It’s a hard R-rated “meta-thriller” with all that implies. But what I do mean is that I took a LOT of notes from those LT people, because it was important as a filmmaker to comprehend how those movies were being made. I wrote it all down, step by step. I watched every audition, studied every call sheet, memorized every DOOD report. On one of those, I was even on set for every single day of the shoot, from first call to way after wrap, bugging the hell out of their cinematographer, who kept wondering what the hell I was doing there. I don’t think he realized I was in a sort of graduate film school. See, what a lot of people in the “real world” don’t understand is the bearing Lifetime has on the industry at large. They make those movies using the same machinery (both literal and figurative) that much bigger studios deploy; and in terms of production value, on-screen thrift, and sheer VOLUME, these are the new exploitation films, people. This is something that even old schoolers like Joe Bob Briggs rattle off about, and they’re not wrong.
It used to be that you had guys like Roger Corman plunking down anywhere from one hundred to four hundred grand to make a film. Maybe a half a million, if they were being especially foolish that week. Jon Davidson, incidentally, produced PIRANHA for Roger on a budget of somewhere around two-fifty. But those are 1978 dollars and that was the 1978 production and distribution pipe. NOW, in 2026, that same half million goes into a Lifetime movie, or its direct equivalent, and since digital production has made what we call the “below the line” expenses (cameras, film, lighting gear) a bit easier to cope with, the inflation difference evens out almost completely. Film and lab costs used to eat up a gigantic chunk of your budget. Now that chunk goes into hiring soap opera stars to headline, so people will tune in. (Or David Hasselhoff if it’s a SHARKNADO movie.) Roger did that all the time too. He’d hire almost-famous TV actors for better visibility. And he’d cheap out at the lab. This is Heather Menzies in PIRANHA. She made it big for ten minutes in 1977 playing Jessica in the TV version of LOGAN’S RUN.
You TAKE NOTES from these people, people.
It was time to put all those lessons to use, making something that would be truly dice-rolling and original. A lot of people are doing that too. They take those Lifetime budgets and make what I call Miracle Movies. That is, something shot for pennies (compared to Big Hollywood anyway) that looks and sounds just as good as anything you are likely to see in a theater. That is, unfortunately, a thing the Lifetime movies often don’t completely achieve. Or Asylum movies, for that matter. They all look like they are shot cheaply on video. (There are exceptions but they are rare.) The sad irony is that, in today’s day and age, there’s usually no excuse for that. Your movie can look like anything, if you just put in the hours and push the right buttons. I’ve even seen big-time TV shows that look kinda cheap like that and WHY? They have millions of dollars. The simple answer is that there’s a cinematic state-of-the-art in the new millennium which revolves around an obsession with cleanness and HD clarity. But, for me, that’s all counterintuitive. Those of us who do push the right buttons, and are not making product for the DOV market, and/or give a shit that our movie looks like a living breathing organism, end up with a spiffy little end-product that might even make a few waves at a festival or two.
On that note, in 2023, my amazing wife Julie and I attended Fantastic Fest here in Austin, as full-on psycho-fan-badge VIPs. I was there on an R&D mission, to seek out as many Miracle Movies as I could, observe what the levels of achievement were and find out how they were made. It was a GLORIOUS year for that, folks. There were Miracle Movies of every size, shape and color. I couldn’t have asked for a finer selection of films to prove my goals were within reach. I dressed in my best and hobnobbed with the filmmakers after every screening, asking all sorts of questions.
It was the year Macon Blair’s against-all-odds remake of THE TOXIC AVENGER premiered. Joe Lynch was there with SUITABLE FLESH. The ruling royal family of DIY moviemakers The Adams Family unveiled WHERE THE DEVIL ROAMS, their remarkable new period horror film. LAST STOP IN YUMA COUNTY was an almost unbelievably well made everyone’s-a-bad-guy thriller, financed on the cheap by the producer himself, who sold his house to make it. (The story has since become legendary.) In the lobby, director/editor Francis Gallupi filled my ear on how YUMA COUNTY was made, wide-eyed and happy as hell to be there and share every secret. (His big thing was storyboards, pre-vis, and shooting every part of the process on your phone, which was a major note I took down for later.) THE CREATOR, though higher budgeted, was a miracle of its own: A 250 million-style science-fiction event film from Gareth Edwards made for just 85 million, and its director of photography Oren Soffer was even in attendance, telling me all about how they shot the film handheld, guerrilla style, on location, without green screen, and they added all those effects later. (That also broke the internet when the news got out and it was a lesson Big Hollywood learned zero lessons from.) JACKDAW was a real achievement, too, on a super low budget. The director Jamie Childs and his cinematographer Will Baldy were very kind to me. They were best buddies who’d come through the film industry together and were like two parts of the same mind. Inspiring. So was Pawel Borowski, the director of a film from Poland called MUSHROOMS, which had been made for not much at all and was powerful as hell. It looked just as amazing as any movie there, even THE CREATOR, and I don’t think it’s even been released in America since then. Too many dice rolled on that one probably. But here’s the thing: He took that money and made really good art. He was there to show it to us.
It was… a revelation.
LAST STOP IN YUMA COUNY was somewhat invisible at FF. I kept raving about the thing and nobody had seen it. Still and all, YUMA was released in theaters the next year and Francis got to make an EVIL DEAD. Go, Miracle Movies!
And so, armed with all I had learned making thrifty TV stuff and every bit of inspiration I had received from guys using the same kind of money to make far better art…
Well, we went in search of our own Miracle Movie.
This is our first day of shooting, with actor DC Douglas. I snapped this shot on my phone just before we started rolling.
(Thanks, Francis!)
Our film got bigger and more ambitious as we went through pre-production, as more people came on board. My original plan was to shoot WHAT DID YOU DO? all myself on the modern equivalent of the same camera used to make BLUE RUIN, which I happen to own. But… sigh… I guess I’m not the young man I used to be. So I hired a young man to be my cinematographer. And he brought an energetic group of early-twentysomethings to the set. They, along with the rest of the amazing crew and our incredible cast a made the experience of being the victim of a violent crime much happier.
See, when you watch a movie, no matter how good or bad or mediocre it is, you have no actual idea how much effort went into it. In fact, when you’re WRITING a movie, you don’t even know that. You’ll never know until you DO IT. Because every film is a comic book. It’s a series of images composed and then presented in a certain order. But while making a comic book panel-by-panel requires a lot of intense hands-on work… and I’ve done it many, many times… well, doing the same thing in cinematic terms is far more complicated. Each one of those images has to be made on a set, with any number of disparate elements making up that image, from the actors on screen to the people holding the lights just out of frame. Dozens, sometimes even thousands of people are involved. For each and every image you see in the final film, you gotta go through this whole process. It happens over and over, shot after shot. If you are prepared as a director, you’ve STORYBOARDED and PRE-VIZED your whole movie in advance and you have these things handy when you get to set. Hopefully everyone else does too.
I generated over four hundred pages of storyboards for WHAT DID YOU DO?
That was more than twelve hundred shots.
And we got almost every one of those shots, in some form or another. Even the elaborate closeups on the skill saw you see above. On day three, we achieved what one guy on my team thought was impossible. Fifty-seven set ups in one day. And then you go home and cry a lot because it still wasn’t all you wanted. You sleep maybe an hour. You wake up and finish looking at dailies, maybe cut a few things together to see if your shooting plans are working. (Usually it is and it isn’t.) You go back to set. You do it all again. Everything that happened yesterday seems like it happened a lifetime ago.
Yep, it’s like being the victim of a violent crime, folks.
This is why you have to ask yourself, right at the very beginning: DO you want to live in this forever? Is this a story and an experience you want burned into every dark corner of your mind until the day you die?
If you’re brave, you say yes.
And then it goes like that, oh yes it does.
So how was the DIRECTOR on set? What was my style in the general sense? Did I scream at everybody or was I all Zen and shit? I think if you asked most anyone who was there you’d get a pretty positive review. I was not a screamer by any means. I had a plan and the goal was to follow that plan and few people challenged it, which helped. After wrap, I went into the editing room and cut the assembly as we prepped for some additional shooting in March and April of 2026. I should mention also that when I say I cut the assembly, that means I CUT the damn assembly. I am the editor on this film, as well as the producer, the director, the writer and a lot of other things. I had help with nearly all of those jobs… except the cutting. That’s all mine. A lot of my heroes and mentors have done this, guys like John Sayles, George Romero, Don Coscarelli, Joe Dante, who directed and edited PIRANHA. (And let’s not forget Francis Gallupi, folks; he edited YUMA, and he’s also a rock drummer, just like I am.) To be honest, I can understand why directors DON’T want to cut their films; it’s hard work and one needs objectivity and all. But I could never imagine turning my film over to someone else, because the experience of shaping it yourself in the cutting room is quite… miraculous, really.
It makes the whole violent crime you just went through simply a means to an end.
It’s the joyous moment when you MAKE SOMETHING out of all that film. And of course, it doesn’t all work right the first time; you still have a long way to go and all that. An assembly is just throwing it all together as a rough cut to see what’s up. But, man, when it does work… and you know it’s working... well, very few things in your life as a filmmaker can beat that.
When you’re HERE, on this location, in front of this monitor, everything is different.
It’s now a year-and-a-half since we wrapped the final shot on WHAT DID YOU DO? The film has been in post production an unusually long period of time… for a Lifetime movie. But remember, you will NEVER see this film on Lifetime.
This is far better art, made on the same budget.
It’s our own Miracle Movie.
A fucking men.
More to come, soon.
