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 on you, especially the projects you have a lot of personal stake in, the ones you’re actually on set every day for. 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 fifteen films. I was finally the director on this one. Though I have many other artistic interests, filmmaking tends to combine them all. It’s something I’ve wanted to do since I was a little boy, and I’ve been preparing to do it for literally decades. I was a child of 1976 when I made my first film: BATMAN IN SEARCH OF THE DIAMOND TREE, in which my father played the Riddler and I was allowed to beat him up on cue as The Dark Knight, wearing a flimsy black cardboard cowl. That movie was shot on film. It was three minutes long. My freshman effort was followed up few years later by an ambitious fifteen minute epic: SPIDER-MAN MEETS THE MENACE OF MISTER MOJO. I was ten years old and climbing walls. I’m fifty-five now, and I’m looking back on a career in the arts that’s taken me many places, many of them film-oriented… and though I did direct a movie when I was nineteen, a super low budget shot-on-video horror wonder right at the end of the eighties, the process was so draining and filled with disillusionment that I knew I couldn’t attempt it again until I grew up a little. I kind of felt like I had done that when my second film came along many years later: An actual Hollywood affair with a million-plus budget, upon which I was the co-writer trapped inside one of the ugliest, most pressure-oriented sets you can imagine. I mean, for the life of me, I cannot remember one moment on that production where anyone was having anything that even remotely resembled a good time. Also, my mother died on the last day of shooting.
Um. As you can imagine, this experience also soured me on the process. And, again, I knew I couldn’t come back here until I really had my shit together as a filmmaker.
So guess what? My shit’s together. And we made a movie. And while it wasn’t exactly the “aggressively unhappy set” that Davison describes in his ROBOCOP commentary, and definitely not the wasteland of misery I described to you above … yeah, it was a motherfucker of a shoot. We had a lot to do in a very short time. That’s the story of almost every movie, but ours was a damn deep dive. I’m way into the editing and post-production process now, and it will be quite some time before I emerge with a finished product. I feel like Francis Coppola facing his ten zillion feet of film from APOCALYPSE NOW. It’s one of those five-fathoms-down creative zones where, again, you have to sink your whole soul in. You have to put everything on the line. It has to be your whole world. But I felt, today, that I should take a moment to reflect on the experience so far, and share it with the world, as my first official personal announcement of the project. We’ve had had some online ink recently and a few socials are up. We’re starting to get the word out, just a bit. But there’s nothing like a film director griping about how his career is like being the victim of a violent crime, right? (Which begs the question: Is anyone really reading this?)
Okay, so anyway . . .
The film is called WHAT DID YOU DO?
It’s something I started musing together around 2016, when I was 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. One of those super simple ideas with a potentially complicated narrative. In Hollywood, they call this “high concept.” I don’t call it anything but a good story. So 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 fucking 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.
See that lens? It costs more than some people’s car and takes a LOT of muscle to move around.
Here’s the thing: You always want more-or-less complete artistic control when you direct your first one, especially when you’re telling a not-so-happy story about loneliness, vendettas and bloody mayhem… which also has scenes of people talking for sometimes seven or eight minutes at a time. (It’s hard to imagine the type of “notes” I would have gotten from even a place like A24 on a film like this.) So I self-funded. I’m a writer of movies, as you may have heard. I saved my money and every dime went into this project, which we put together more-or-less along the same production specs as a Lifetime movie, which obviously I learned a lot about in ten years of being involved with those.
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 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 about two-fifty. But those are 1978 dollars and that was the 1978 production and distribution pipe. NOW, in 2025, 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. 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.
I’ve been in this machine for years and 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 Marvel 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, alongside the sexy-grubby 16-millimeter (and Steven Soderberg-endorsed) sci-fi curiosity DIVINITY on the very same night. Macon was excited and overflowing with wisdom. My buddy Joe Lynch was there with SUITABLE FLESH. The ruling royal family of DIY moviemakers The Adams Family unveiled their remarkable new period horror film, WHERE THE DEVIL ROAMS, and I made fast friends with Toby Poser, the amazing matriarch of their clan. Though they were easy darlings of film festivals like this one, they told the big studios to get fucked and made their movie for pocket change, which was jaw-dropping to say the least. 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-VIZ, 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, the jerks.) 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 under twenty grand (I think) 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.) YOU’LL NEVER FIND ME was small-but-incredible. THE BOOK OF SOLUTIONS, a new one from Michel Gondry, was the director’s wonderful pseudo-biographical muse on how movies are made, which couldn’t have been more appropriate. I saw it by myself in the morning, during the first week, when I was checking out around five movies every day. 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!)
It got bigger and more ambitious as we went, as more people came on board. I found additional investment to help with this. My original plan was to shoot WHAT DID YOU DO? all myself on 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 crew of early-twentysomethings to the set. I love every one of those kids. They 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 here’s the thing: 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… 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.
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. I should mention also that when I say I cut the assembly, that means I CUT the 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.
But I think the film is good. I’m proud of what it is.
Looking back on everything that’s happened, it’s a blur that stretches years into a fever dream. All I learned coming up in the film biz, writing this movie, getting the money together, the R&D process, and the whirlwind that was the shoot. There’s lots more to tell, but… well, at the moment I’m standing in a room full of film, making sense out of the story. A few people I’ve shown some scenes to seem to think we have something. That’s the REALLY funny thing about movies. You’re usually never sure WHAT you have until someone else looks at it. That’s why Coppola screened APOCALYPSE NOW for anyone who seemed interested, at every stage of editing. Of course, all films are different. Every project is its own adventure. But if you’re lucky… and if you’ve prepared for this journey all your life…
Well, maybe…
JUST MAYBE….
You will have something special.
