L-R, interviewer Christopher Heron, producer Brian Robertson, writer/director/producer Pavan Moondi.

In late August, nearly a month after wrapping production and in the midst of post-production, we sat down with our good friend and co-producer/host on The Seventh Art, Christopher Heron. Having had some time to reflect on the production process and also view the bulk of the footage and some rough edits, we had a long discussion about the series and the process of putting it together.

Christopher Heron (CH): So I was watching the trailer and what’s interesting to me is the trailer doesn’t look like a web series trailer. It looks like a feature, and it made me wonder, what is it about web series as a platform that you’re interested in? Specifically in regards to the story.

Brian Robertson (BR): Well, firstly I think we’re interested in both. Combining web series and features in the sense that what we make can play as either one. We really want to work on material that can combine the two. Making something that can be screened in a cinema as one large piece or also viewed online over a longer period of time.

Pavan Moondi (PM): That’s true, but I actually did write it as a web series. The script is broken up into ten episodes. The reason it’s a web series at all and not just a feature, is the possibility that a web series allows in having multiple seasons. So the whole season has one arc that permeates all ten episodes, but there’s also a larger arc that this season is a part of. It can stand alone, and I guess I’m okay with where we leave things at the end if we don’t do any more, but it is essentially part one of three.

BR: It’s a character-driven series, for sure.

PM: Yeah, so having that potential for telling a longer-form story, which is something you wouldn’t necessarily associate with web series – long form – that definitely appeals to me.

CH: Is there a lot of improv in the series?

BR: There’s a definite script that’s being read-from but there was some improv here and there.

CH: Who’s the best improviser?

PM: [To Brian] Probably DDP?

BR: Yeah, I mean DDP (David Dineen-Porter) comes from a comedy background. He’s a stand-up comedian. He was the most comfortable just going for it and mixing things up.

PM: We tried going heavy on the improv early on. The first day or two of filming and we found that it wasn’t really working.

CH: Why’s that?

BR: Well we had so little time. We shot the series over ten days, which meant we needed to shoot on average ten pages a day, and some days we were up around 14.

PM: Yeah, I mean if you’re going to rely heavily on improv, the one thing you really need is time. You need time to find those moments that work and we didn’t really have that luxury. So early on we were getting some improvised material that was okay but it was coming at the expense of the scripted material.

BR: We were shooting improv first and then didn’t have time to shoot what was in the script.

PM: Yeah, so after those first couple days, we sat down and had a meeting and we sort of changed around the philosophy and stuck tighter to the script, and only used improv to build on what was there. Certain moments here and there, playing around with line delivery, jokes, things like that. DDP still goes on some amazing tangents, but they’re carefully placed now.

BR: We also started shooting it a little more run-and-gun. Less lighting, a little dirtier, more handheld, smaller crew.

PM: A lot faster.

BR: Yeah we were actually able to go back and re-shoot almost everything we shot on the first couple days.

CH: So not embracing improv was strictly as a result of the time constraints? If you had more time for a second season, would you improvise a much larger percentage of the series?

PM: No, I don’t think we would. The time constraint basically left us with no choice with respect to the amount of improv we used, but there were also other factors. DDP is an incredibly skilled improviser, but our other actors don’t have a background in improv comedy. So what happens is you have one person who is literally putting on an amazing show, and everyone else is kind of just reacting to that and the result is less than natural. It feels performative. It might even be really funny, but if it doesn’t ring true, it’s not worth it. You know, you can have a hilarious joke, but if it isn’t true to the characters and the world you’ve set up, I’ll gladly cut that joke and lose the laugh every single time.

BR: Yeah, I agree. I think if you’re going to use improvised dialogue you either have to improvise the whole thing or just sprinkle it in very selectively. When you try to go half-and-half, those improvised moments stick out.

PM: It’s like you can feel the transition into an episode of Whose Line Is It Anyway?

CH: You had [comedian] Nick Flanagan too, right?

BR: Yeah, Nick Flanagan has a small role. There was a scheduling conflict there, so it’s just a cameo. Those two [Flanagan and Dineen-Porter] would’ve been great. Flanagan…the guy’s hilarious. He can riff with DDP. But 90% of the scenes were with actors, or first-time actors, not comedians.

CH: Was that a budgetary restriction? Using first-time actors. Or is that a creative decision?

PM: It was a combination of a lot of things. We decided to shoot non-union.

BR: There’s no way we could’ve done this union. With our budget.

PM: Yeah, so we’re non-union which means you have a smaller pool of actors to pull from. There are still a lot of amazing non-union actors floating around-

BR: It’s harder to find good actors, though.

PM: Yeah, they’re fewer and far between but they’re out there. But we like the idea of working with a mix of professionals and non-professionals. With Blaine’s background working with non-actors and musicians, we were kind of targeting musicians for most of the roles. He has a very calm style, which is good for first-timers who might be self-conscious about their performance. So it was a combination of budgetary and creative.

BR: And scheduling.

PM: Definitely. Scheduling played a huge part.

BR: One of the issues was that we actually only got the green-light, the funding, about ten days before filming needed to start. It was pretty ridiculous.

PM: Yeah, we had a really small window to fit into Blaine and Nick [Thorburn]’s schedules, but also for me, personally, I had July 2012 circled for about six months and saw that as the point where it was either going to happen by then or not happen at all. At a certain point, and it was starting to get to that point, you’re just banging your head against a wall.

BR: Yeah, we would’ve been back to square one. We would’ve lost Nick Thorburn, we could’ve lost Blaine. We felt kinda backed into a corner and we had ten days to pull everything together. And that short timeframe, coupled with it being produced in the summer- a lot of people are taking their time off to do other things, vacations are already booked, whatever.

CH: So how did you cast the leads?

BR: Adam Gurfinkel (Jason) was a friend of mine and he’s a musician, who had never acted before. Just a really talented guy and I had faith in him. But he [Pavan] literally looked at his picture and said he looks like the character and cast him. No audition.

PM: It completely worked out.

BR: He brought a whole, different…energy to it.

PM: Yeah, I mean we watched him become an actor over those ten days. It was pretty crazy.

BR: It was a bit of a slow start but once he got comfortable, he was just killing it.

CH: What about Coral Osborne?

PM: Coral actually acted in the indie pilot I shot for this series almost two years ago, in the same role. So when I was writing the series I had her in mind for the character. She was actually the only actor at that stage where I knew who would be playing the character. She was great.

CH: What about the lead role? I know David came in really late in the process?

PM: Well, yeah. He was cast on day two of filming…

CH: What happened there?

BR: …It was a whole…basically Justin Rice, he was in Mutual Appreciation, the Andrew Bujalski film. He was the original lead. It was a big get for us. He got turned away at the border the night before filming, there was an issue with immigration, long story. We couldn’t get it sorted out in time and had to re-cast.

CH: Was the role written for him?

PM: Well, no. We were huge fans of his. He’s been the lead in a few really great films and is a great musician, but he actually came in late in the process as well. We had another musician cast who had to drop out a month before, just another scheduling conflict, and I reached out to Justin Rice. He read the script and was completely on-board within hours.

CH: And you lost him the night before filming?

PM: Yeah, I mean it was devastating.

BR: At that point we had flown people in. Rented a house. A ton of gear. Put thousands of dollars on our credit cards, we thought we were just completely fucked.

PM: Yeah, I mean it was one of the worst moments of my life. We sat in this tiny bedroom mostly in silence for hours. Just completely shocked. Drinking beer.

BR: Nick [Thorburn] and Blaine [Thurier] were just taking turns coming upstairs and sitting with us.

PM: We were all just alternating between exhaling and cursing.

BR: They were on suicide watch.

PM: We let depression overtake us for about 3 hours, but then it was just back to trying to pull things together. I think we reached out to every male…human between 25 and 30.

BR: In Toronto.

PM: In Toronto. Those were the requirements. So that night, I went to Get Well [a local bar] and was basically just approaching random dudes and asking them if they had any interest in acting.

CH: Did they all assume it was porn?

PM: Well, yeah, it was amazingly creepy but also so ludicrous because the guys who actually expressed interest were immediately turned off when I told them that the call time was in five hours.

BR: So we completely changed around the entire schedule for the first day to shoot all the scenes without the lead. And luckily that night, David got back to me. I had reached out to him the day before, and he came in and read.

PM: He killed it. The read was amazing. I think ultimately the entire ordeal ended up working out for the best in the sense that he embodies the role in a way that I can’t really picture anyone else doing it now.

BR: It definitely changed the project for sure. I think the version that had Justin Rice and Nick Thorburn as the two leads would’ve been drastically different than the one with David Dineen Porter and Adam Gurfinkel as the leads. Probably a lot more dramatic with Justin than it ended up with David.

PM: I don’t know if I agree with that. Justin can be very, very funny. He’s great in Harmony & Me, and watching him explode and get really irritated is comedic gold. But it definitely would’ve been different. The comedy would’ve been mined from different places. Different ways.

BR: Justin’s a lot more subtle.

PM: Subdued. But yeah, he’s great. We’re gonna be working with him on the next project, Mexican’t.

CH: And you had the benefit of writing the character for Justin on the new one?

PM: Yeah, that helped a lot actually. This new one was my first time writing a script where I had strong visuals in mind for all of the leads rather than some abstract concept. It’s Justin, and Alex Karpovsky from Girls and Tiny Furniture, and the two of them were actually in Harmony & Me together, so that made it even easier, where I knew exactly how those guys can play off each other. The script is basically finished now.

CH: Are you [Pavan] doing the editing?

PM: I cut the trailer, and I’m cutting the two episodes that I directed and about 7 or 8 scenes on top of that. But we have an editor doing the bulk of it, the remaining 60 or so scenes. I’m keeping an eye on the cuts but we have a really great editor, Simone Smith. She’s doing a great job so far.

CH: Were there any takeaways? Things you learned from the production?

PM: We hired an amazing chef, Julia Kennedy [chef Jamie Kennedy's daughter], to cook for everyone at the end of each night. That was huge. At the end of an exhausting day, having healthy, gourmet meals ready had a huge impact on morale. I think we need to do that on every production from now on.

BR: [To Pavan] Was there too much partying?

PM: Well, it’s definitely important for the cast/crew to be able to unwind after a long day. And especially when you’re dealing with a short timeframe and a small group of people, accelerating the bonding process is a good thing. There was a lot of drinking though, especially while Nick [Thorburn] was here. Luckily we had a couple days off at the right time so everyone could recover.

BR: Maybe next time we won’t have an all-night party celebrating the completion of day one.

PM: No, definitely not. I think part of that was the result of having a beer sponsor, though.

CH: How would you describe the style of the series?

BR: Visually it’s a mixture of naturalistic, realistic presentation- you know, a lot of handheld, not a ton of lighting, but then it’s also paired with more stylistic, cinematic sequences.

PM: Yeah, slow motion, cinematic lighting, montages, stuff like that. It’s tough to do that stuff given how little time we had. It’d be great to do some more experimenting if we did another season and had more time to work with.

CH: Were there any compromises you needed to make visually? Because of the time constraints?

BR: The only thing I can think of is the one scene.

PM: The bar scene?

BR: No, the joggers. Pavan wrote a really complex script where there was a lot happening and it was kind of demanding. In the original script, there’s this scene where this character is sitting on the sidewalk and like, 25 joggers come run past him. And we were so strapped for time that it was basically impossible to locate this many people and have them on set. Then by some miracle, this procession of 50 Indian families were marching past our house like an hour before we were supposed to shoot that scene and we just made it work.

PM: It came out so much better than what was on the page. So that’s an example of us being constrained but kinda getting saved, actually.

BR: Yeah, of course. I mean then there are scenes where we’re in a bar and we’re calling for 30 extras to fill the bar in the middle of a weekday. It’s really hard to get those people on the day, but we managed to work around it.

PM: We went into the streets and just begged people to do it. Bribed them with beer.

BR: You really have to check your shame at the door.

PM: Yeah, then there was that one woman who legitimately thought we were going to sexually assault her.

BR: Yeah, this woman came in. She agreed to do it right off the bat and then when she saw that Unlovable [the bar] was downstairs, she poked her head through the door and saw like five men and a bunch of cameras and just immediately bolted.

CH: What was the shooting process like? Was there a big crew? Or were you shouldering a lot of responsibility yourselves? You mentioned being on set all the time.

BR: Yeah, we did shoulder a lot of it ourselves. I mean, with the budget that we were allotted, we didn’t have the luxury of hiring a big crew.

PM: It was an insanely small budget for a feature film.

BR: It was really a restrictive budget, and it was tough, but we knew what we were signing up for. We knew it wasn’t going to be easy, and I think we pulled off something kind of unheard of, actually. We had the luxury of being able to assemble a group of people who were just completely dedicated to the project, and they were the ones who really made this project possible. But we definitely took the brunt of the work in terms of organization. We were basically doing production management and producing, and we were involved creatively…

PM: Yeah, I mean between the two of us we hired the entire cast, the whole crew, booked all the locations, got all the equipment…

BR: Ordering lunches, arranging catering, driving cast to the set, picking people up at the airport, cleaning the house…

PM: Sending out call sheets, doing all the accounting, arranging sponsors, organizing wardrobe, doing set decoration, props…

BR: Everything. And this is all during production. Pre-production and production. It’s beneficial, because we have a lot of control, but it can also be really overwhelming. You just have a lot to deal with.

PM: Yeah, there were points where we definitely wondered what we had gotten ourselves into, and if we were actually capable of pulling this off, I don’t know. [to Brian] Would you want to do it again like this?

BR: Yeah, I think so. Not on this budget again and a little more help would be nice. But doing things that way is somehow faster, and it generally helps us keep the budget down, which I think will kind of be our thing. Making high quality films for budgets that people in the film industry might think are unrealistic.

PM: I’m down with that. But never this low again.

BR: Definitely not.

CH: So where would this go if it went beyond a single season? Thematically.

PM: Well, I like the idea of each season having its own themes. I think this first one is really about the acquisition of hope. Finding some hope but then how that impacts the relationships in your life and also your relationship with yourself. Realizing that you can’t just decide to grow up and become an adult: it’s a process. I think the hypothetical second season would be about expanding your universe, less insular, getting out into the world and really trying to make a go of things. More characters, more places, more problems, and likely much darker, maybe a little more experimental.

CH: What do you mean by more experimental?

PM: Well, there’s a scene in our 9th episode that’s a party scene. There’s no dialogue for 3 ½ minutes, of a ten-minute episode, and it feels a little like a home movie. I don’t think that scene would work at all out of context or even in the third or fourth episode of the series. But as the ninth episode, we’re banking on the audience at that point to have developed a relationship with the characters to the extent where they can watch that scene and not just take it at face value. I think if we did another season, we could continue to use the audience’s pre-existing relationship with the characters to go a little more out there, do some unconventional things right off the bat. Maybe longer episodes, too.

CH: Was there a restriction on this season with respect to length?

PM: No, we wanted to keep it at a length where we weren’t biting off more than we could chew, and having it be feature-length, ten episodes around ten minutes each, seemed to make the most sense.

BR: I think previously there was some pressure to shorten the episodes down to five or six minutes but it just wouldn’t work, not for this series. With something that’s completely character-driven, you really need that time for the audience to develop a relationship with the characters and I’m not convinced you can really do that effectively with 3-minute segments. Our first couple episodes are heavy on the comedy to hopefully keep people interested until the story gets moving, and then the series is largely fueled by those character moments. It’s still very funny, but I think if people stick around it’ll be because they feel like they’re friends with these people and are invested in them.

CH: Sounds great. Thanks, guys.

PM: Thanks for doing this.

BR: Yeah, definitely. Thanks for having us.

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More Interviews:
Interview: Director Blaine Thurier
Interview: Nick Thorburn aka Nick Diamonds (Damien)