Oh gee is boot.
It's showtime. People say good money to see this movie. When they go out to a theater, they want cold sodas, hot popcorn, and no monsters.
In the Protection Booth, everyone pretend podcasting isn't boring.
Don it off.
You bought your sister hooker. I love you.
You're not full of shit.
And when you're out there, remember you are a goddamn fucking machine.
I got the milk of.
First.
I thought it was a shotgun or exploding round.
But this is handmade, like someone carved into the back of his head.
Our job is to intervene before such things happen. Let's just go find Liam.
What about my bike?
I think you did.
There's a dead guy. That guy we fuck, he's dead. Sleep with me?
The signature about homo?
Did you do it?
Man?
You're fun dude.
Hey, folks, welcome to a special episode of The Projection Booth. I'm your host Mike White. On this episode, I'm talking with writer director Alex Phillips. He is the force behind the new film Anything That Moves, which is currently playing at film festivals around the world. I don't really want to talk about what this movie is about, because it is very interesting and something that really should be seen to be experienced. So if you have a chance to
see anything that moves, definitely do so. Thank you so much for listening, and I hope you enjoyed this interview. Alex, tell me a little bit about how you got interested in filmmaking.
I was really obsessed with watching movies at a very young age. I remember seeing going in Cleveland, Ohio. I remember going and seeing like at a giant movie palace, this seventy millimeter series they did, The Bridge Over River, Kwai and Lawrence of Arabia, and I remember obsessively watching Lawrence of Arabia like over and over on VHS. And then when I got a little older, I got a camera, just like a little DV camera and made a lot
of trailers with my friends. We would make these trailers for these movies that didn't exist and never have existed, just coming soon, the Cretan or something. We'd make these weird horror movies and action movies that never came to light, but we'd make these little trailers for them. I was always obsessed with that and just watching a lot of movies, and then I got into playwriting. I did a lot
of theater as well. I did theater in college. I did some like clown stuff, some fringe festival stuff, and I staged my first play that I wrote, and no I didn't direct it, I starred in it. It was one of my few acting roles, is called gun Club. And then that took me to Northwestern, where then I started. I used their cage, their equipment cage, because my undergrad
didn't really have any equipment. And then I just ran a luck with camera gear and started, yeah, directing my own writing because a lot of people would read my scripts and be like, what the hell are you? What do you want from me? And then I was like, I know exactly what I want. I don't know why I need you. And then I just started making shorts and ballooned from there.
This might be a little unfair because I probably should be the one that explains what your esthetic is when it comes to the intro for this particular episode. But can you explain your aesthetic to the people listening at home?
Sure? Yeah, I love every and any opportunity to talk about my work, So to be able to explain myself, I would I relish at the opportunity the way that I talk about myself on Vimeo is that I took too much acid and now I have paranoid sexual nightmares. I really like expressionistic filmmaking, like I believe in film as a visual medium, but I'm also like passionate about
writing books and plays and all that stuff. So I try to like marry those two forms of storytelling to create a Dionesian effect with the budgets that I am allowed to be playing around with, so creating access to instill and evoke emotion in the viewer. And yeah, I also creating like a sort of uncanny tone that's somewhere between like funny and scary or at all at the same time.
I am definitely familiar with your last film, All Jacked Up and Full of Worms. Can you talk a little bit about that? And was that your first feature?
Yeah, that was my first feature. That one was about these two dudes. They have concurrence storylines, and then they collide and they get addicted to these hollocinogenic worms. They kind of take them on this horrific, kind of funny but also totally fucked up journey of I guess a little bit of self discovery and a little bit of just worm discovery. It's like a love story about two bros and also about worms and finding family in the self destruction.
I hate this question, but I'm going to ask it anyway. Where do your ideas come from?
Yeah, that's a terrible question. I like dealing with the personal, like my own life experiences, but I don't really like realism very much. I don't actually think that's the most empathetic way to access or present your own life experiences or what you go through. I think that by like just depicting stuff in a dream or using genre in different types, different modes to access the personal, I think that's a better way to get deeper into stuff and also make it more relatable to an audience.
What was your inspiration for anything that Moves?
Anything that Moves came from the root of the idea came from when I was like twenty two twenty four. I was a bike delivery guy, and I was going through a little bit of a tough time personally, but I and so I was feeling like really like weird and outside of the world. But I also was delivering these sandwiches to these shut in people all around the neighborhood, and I was their only point of contact to the outside world sometimes, and they were very excited to see
me in different capacities. Sometimes they would actually like proposition me or hit on me and try to kiss me sometimes, and all I'm doing is delivering them was sandwich. But I don't know. It gave me a pretty strange outlook on the world, and I wanted to capture the anxiety of that, and then also the kind of I don't know, there was something a little bit fantastical about being objectified by these people too, where it's, oh, they loved me,
even for no reason. So I wanted to, yeah, to capitalize on that life experience a little bit, and then take it from there, pull in a lot of movie references, pull in different ways of telling that story, and bring in love, monogamy and just the tenderness of love and relationships. And then also there's a little bit of a paranoia and horror to it as well, And I wanted to create a world that accommodated all of that.
How do you find your actors, because they're doing some really outrageous things that I'm curious how you get people to agree to go along with you.
I find people who are either my friends or friends of friends, mostly people who either know my work or come from like a trusted recommended person, so that it's not that crazy of an ask by the time that
they're reading the script. I try to present what I'm looking for upfront, also be like, there's going to be sex and nudity and violence in this movie, and we're at a low budget, and I think it's good to have these personal relationships too, in this trust so that there's better communication and better empathy on set because we're working twelve sometimes more hours a day, and so if there is already that pre established ease of communication, it
makes it a safer environment and that also makes people more adventurous at the same time because there's that trust there already. There were a couple of people that I reached out to that I didn't have those relationships with, like Gingerlin Allen or Nina Hartley. They're in anything that moves, but they are extremely experienced, especially in sex scenes. And then they also they've been on camp. I'm wrong so much that they really do have this like star power ability.
They're like amazing actors, which I don't think people generally would recognize from like adult film. The adult film world, but they really do. There's a reason that they were stars in the adult world because they really do have that star quality.
I've talked a little bit about the expressionistic filmmaking. I could definitely see it a lot in that scene with those close ups, those really extreme close ups of their faces. I can't imagine how this is going to hit an audiencing that on the big screen.
Yeah, I'm really really excited. Obviously, it hasn't premiered a Fantasia yet at the time of this recording, so I'm really excited. But it hasn't really been presented for any audience whatsoever. It's been in the editing cave for a long time. So I'm really excited to see what audiences like, what they react to I don't know, and just to get it out in the world. I'm excited.
When did you actually shoot this and how long did it take to shoot?
We shot it in the summer of twenty twenty three, I think I think that's right. It took us like twenty one days of principal photography and then a couple days of pickups after a lot of editing. The pickups were pretty minimal, so this one shot doesn't work, and it's necessary to make this scene make sense. We got to grab this insert type of thing.
And then each said it was a long post process.
Yeah, the post process was pretty long, just because I ran out of editing money for the budget and had to cut it myself and had to work along the side of editing. And then also just I really wanted to do production justice because we really nailed a lot
of cool moves. We were really shooting for blocking and shooting to move the camera around, to move the actors around, and not do traditional coverage necessarily, not like shot reverse, not just like picking up all these little pieces to put together and posts necessarily, so like getting the timing with like a camera move to fit the pacing of the film and really get the language down. Shaping stuff in production takes a lot of trust with the post process,
if that makes any sense. The way that you pace the scene out when you're shooting will dictate the pacing of the entire movie if you're going to try to do everything in one or two pieces.
Who is your cinematographer on list?
His name is Hunter Zimney. He's from New York and did an amazing job. I loved working with him. One of the coolest things that we were able to come up with, and we did it on set basically are one of our gaffers, this guy John jadeer Kowski. He had this jim We were using a doorway dolly, which is just like an old school dolly, and then he had this like cheap jib arm and then we put that on top of the dolly. Like on day one, all of a sudden we had this sort of makeshift
crane chapman thing, like a much fancier device. Like the way to get these moves would be really expensive if we were getting the quote unquote proper equipment, but it allowed us to get in really close and then sweep move away from people, and get like a wide shot all in the same move. And just like working with Hunter, working with Connor and John and this amazing team with people who just are down to experiment and roll with stuff and commit fully, just totally commit to this visual language.
Just experiment, but do it with total authority. It's really fun.
It was great that move on camera really pays off. I can really feel the dynamism of everything that's going on on screen, and so many times with an independent film you lock it down, maybe get a tilt, maybe a pan, but that's about it. But here I just was so immersed in this world with that moving camera.
We were really trying to be cowboys with it. Once we figured out the visual language too, Like Hunter was like really just living it. And there's a lot of really cool stuff where the movie camera is moving really subtly with an actor's performance, where you know, like it'll be like pushing in a little bit or just pulling out a little bit with their words, with what their performance is doing. And that's just the kind of shit
that you can't micromanage. It's not something that you can tell someone to do, and that's I'm really happy to have worked with them to see that kind of before. It's really cool.
I know, making an independent film is one of the toughest things that there is to do. Spout some of the challenges that faced you.
We did so much. There's so many locations, there's gore, there's sex, there's like we said, these camera moves and we shot on film. All these different things that we managed to pull off with a pretty small budget. Was really cool. Shooting this movie. We did so much, but also so much easier than shooting my first all jacked up in full of worms. Like having the support from Missing Link which is Eddie Linker and Vinegar Syndrome just made it a breeze. At least for me what I'm
used to Making a movie is absolutely not easy. I think it probably is the hardest art form. I don't know the other ones well enough, but just the man hours that go into it, it's just a crazy art form. I think we did the impossible that it felt great doing it. When you shoot digitally, you're always thinking about post production. You're thinking about like where are we going to lift a shadow or what kind of colors are
we going to dial in? And when you shoot on film, it's what with your eye is also what the camera sees and what the actors see. The world building is everyone kind of buys into it. The entire environment you're shooting on looks like what the movie is going to look like. It creates this effect on set that kind of gets everyone, all the actors and producers and everyone
there like to buy in on the movie. And when you hit record, you can hear the film moving and it creates this yeah, like I said, the total commitment. So it's pretty cool. Yeah, and then also you can see what the negatives are with film or not negatives. Honestly, I love this. Like we sent the film out and when it got scanned, it got scratched. There's this sequence of the beach where you see these crazy scratches. But
I love it. I honestly think, like you'll watch a Tarantino movie like death Proof or something like that, where he's messing with these film effects. We didn't have to make it up. It's the grunge is there. The real things are there. And then I think it really augments the craziness of that scene and it makes it more fantastical.
What did you actually cut on?
I used Adobe Premiere. It's a program, it's a tool. It works. I lived a lot in it for a long time, and yeah, I don't know. I really like editing. I grew to love it during this process.
What's your day job?
My day job right now. I have a million day jobs, but my one right now is I've been working at this post house doing assistant editing work for like commercials and stuff. But I've also I've taught, I did a little bit of sound recording, I did some grant writing, I did a lot of I've done a lot of different things. I worked as a projectionist for a while. I pick up whatever I can to keep it going, and then also what can give me enough time to write and direct movies and get them out in the world.
When you're doing your editing, are you sending rough cuts to friends to get feedback or is this all just you?
No aspect of filmmaking is just the director. I don't know. Maybe Stanley Kubrick is primo a tour who is the all seeing I I definitely spend a long ass time in front of the computer talking to myself, for sure, But I definitely but I needed someone else to look at it and tell me I'm not crazy. I have all my producers, Spencer, LeAnn Georgia. I would bounce stuff off of them. I did a couple of feedback screenings. I would send it off to other filmmaker friends or
other editors just to see what they say. At the beginning of the edit of this, I worked with this guy, Troy Lewis, who also cut all jacked up and full of worms with me, and so he was a great resource for a while. And so there was there were like people that I leaned on to to be like, Oh this is working. Are absolutely not working. This is terrible. I really need that. I think everybody does.
Yeah, I know your premiere is a Fantasia. But have you had a chance to watch this with like cast and crew or anything yet?
No, I haven't. I've showed it to a couple people more on the crew side, I haven't showed it to cast. No. Yeah, this is gonna be a lot of people's first time seeing it who worked on the film, and so I'm really excited for them to check it out too, especially with the big audience, especially on thirty five. We did a thirty five millimeter print, so it's gonna be It's great, really great. I'm excited to hear what they say.
Did you do a premiere of All Jacked Up at Fantasia as well?
Yes? Okay, yeah nice. Yeah, it's a good home.
Yeah, I was gonna say it's like a homecoming for you. Is there a good place for people to keep up with you in the film? Online?
Vinegar Syndrome is doing a great job posting stuff. There's also I just started Instagram. Paid for the movie which is at ATM Underscore movie ATM meaning anything that moves, and so you can follow the movie on there. I'll keep posting stuff, and once we move into distribution and like theatrical stuff and physical media and all that stuff,
there's gonna be more stuff growing. I know Gindre Lynn will be at Fantasia, so I'll post some stuff and she'll be like signing things, and there's gonna be a bit interes syndrome booth. So we're gonna try to like get people out to see the movie and keep the announcements coming.
Alex, thank you so much for your time. This is great, finally getting to meet you.
Yeah, thank you so much. Thanks for having me.
Don't want to happen. I suthing.
Let it all red w my something And if you don't want to know nothing, I still know nothing.
It don't mean nothing. But if you wanna don't have a thing, let me tell you. I don't lie wout everything.
My father.
Oh no, when I do, let my.
Say six thousands remember FLA say then.
About I love a job?
What's our fall?
Let on your sister and it wi my man and side with my little I d alive, look at I want to side And that's loud it's.
Whip and alley.
It's not too.
Stop by a money, not even fuck you.
I'm un to go the cards and I'm wanting to do the cart.
I go long a home, feeling short a part.
I got the guinea strain. What's looking.
Thin and.
In the twin.
IM fuck anything that news, not even fuck you, and I fuck you too.
I'm fud anything to move said