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In the Projection Booth.
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Hey, folks, Welcome to a very special episode of The Projection Booth. I'm your host Mike White. On this episode, I am talking with writer, director Will Means, and actress Rocky shay All about their new film Junkie. Junkie is currently going around the film festival circuit. You can follow it on Instagram. I will have a link in the show notes. Thanks so much for listening, and I hope
you enjoyed this interview. You two have been working together for quite a little bit here, and I was so curious how did you meet each other?
It was about exactly ten years ago now.
I was living in Atlanta after I just finished undergrad at University of Georgia, and so I started paying on film sets down there, and I was paying on the angly movie Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk, which is like the majority of its centers around like that football halftime show. And my main thing was that I had to check all the background in and out of the set every day.
It was like four hundred of them or something's crazy.
And sixteen hour days.
Yes, And so Rocky was one of them, and so she was a face that I would just see at check in every morning. But specifically I was wanting to make a short film at the time called shit Show that was going to be a house party of a bunch of white trash rednecks just like spiraling into sort of a surrealist nightmare. And I was trying to figure
out who on earth I could cast for that. And there was a day on the set where we were like in between takes and I look across like the bleachers of the football stadium where we are, and I just see Rocky Shay over here and her and her tight little gems that were talked into her ug boots, and she's like jiggling around in her seat seeing Missy Elliott's work. It to the two women on either side of her, who like didn't know her, and they're both just looking at her like what is your problem?
So naturally I went up to her and I was like, do you try to act?
Yeah?
I really like your interviews, She's like, I'm trying to now, So yeah, that's literally how it kicked off was thanks to Missy Elliott.
Yes, oh, thanks to her.
How do you guys work together when you're on set together, and especially when it comes to, you know, your first feature here, I don't think.
It went like really good. We think a lot alike, Like we have like the same energy, so we feed off each other, and for the most part, I'll understand what Will's directing me to do, and if I have a question, he knows I'm gonna ask to make sure that I get it right or whatever. But I think like we'd feed off each other.
Like really, well we yeah, we kinda. We definitely have the same fucked up sense of humor. And like when I made that short film, she has like a really grimy, gross monologue in it, and I always thought, oh, this actor is going to try to just bury this thing afterwards and pretend they never heard it, and then said she would perform it again in her acting classes and stuff like that, and I was always really.
Proud of it.
But yeah, so I like I had known her for or since back then. I always just like really loved her energy. And then almost ten years later, I was out here in LA for grad school the American Film Institut, and she had moved out here doing working COVID.
Department on films.
Yeah, and then I had an idea for another short film I wanted to do, which ended up being my AFI thesis about an orgy in Los Angeles gone horribly wrong, and Rocky naturally was like, I'm down, like.
I'll do it.
But so the nature of it was all very like comedy centered.
But then I was having this idea for Junkie and wanted to do something that was very like heartfelt and very real about addiction, but inject a lot of our chaotic energy into it and show more the lows and the highs of addiction.
And so I justly this knew Rocky on a surface level.
But when I first took her the idea of I'm thinking of doing something like this, she pretty much immediately is, oh, I should tell you about all my years as a methaddict and like the three rehabs that I ran away from, and proceeds to tell me five million other super crazy things.
And I was like, Rocky, what the thought had it know that you had done any of this, and then she gave me a stack of her journals that she kept when she was like in rehab and also something that she wrote when she was high to help me.
Come up with the script.
But so I felt like going in the Junkie really kicked off a whole different era of our work together. Because I didn't necessarily even know that Rocky had dramatic chops. Like I knew she could do comedy, I didn't really realize the extent to which she's just capable of really laying it all on the line like she does in this film. But it's something that I think is so personal for both of us and really coming from something
very personal that we wanted to express. That it was such a like a raw, grimy, grassroots filmmaking process that it was easy for a lot of people to get like uncomfortable or want to complain about, like the working conditions or the hours, just like the lack of assistance
that every department had. But Rocky was always just so committed that it was like I like, I would ask her to get trampled by a mosh pit or run through a blood pit with four wheelers swirling around her, and she would just be like how many times?
How many more times do you need me to do? It was always yeah, yeah, like totally.
I feel like totally changed the nature of our working relationship because I knew it was just like she was willing to do anything, but we were like very well on the same page the whole time.
So rocky. How much did your life inform Junkie?
A lot of it did. I'm ten years clean now, but just as with the journals, I still haven't went back and read back through them. I just don't want to. I just don't want to or whatever. But when I handed unto will that right there. I trust him with my deepest, darkest hurt secrets, everything, just handed them off or whatever. But in doing that, I wanted him to really see what the mind of an addict is. That there's reason why I acted and I did what I did.
There's a lot of pain there or whatever, and trying to escape it and then trying so hard to get clean and get right, and you just fight and fight, and sometimes you just you can't get there. But then whenever you finally get there, it's triumphant. I want to to show that there's hope, there's always hope. Because if you ever just lose hope, then that's just it. You're done.
I think with that, with my experience and sharing that with Will, I just really wanted him to be able to see what it truly is like in the mindset of an addict, and I think that really portrays through the film.
How was it portraying an addict after you had been one?
At first people were like, isn't that going to be like triggering for you and stuff like that, But honestly, it was the exact opposite. It just that made me sick, like never just ever want to go down that road again. But I wanted to make sure that I portrayed Stevie as true to my experiences too, but as Stevie's experiences as well. I wanted it to be a little bit
different than mine or whatever. But I was so focused on getting it right, making sure that she came across to where you actually could pull for her, not just be disgusted with her with all these bad decisions that she's making, And that was that was really important to me. I think that's what drove me, is just trying to get it right. She just really wanted this character to really show what It's truly like, I think that was my main focus, even.
Though I think I definitely even had to worry sometimes, oh, is it good for Rocky for me to be creating a scene where she's like freebasing meth off of tinfoil, even though it's with fake meth and everything. But she always had the polar opposite reaction to being like triggered
or uncomfortable. She became like meth expert on set because she would just be happily and excitedly telling the other actors how they were doing it wrong and how you would actually crush or blaze up some Ethem'll just huh, taking notes from Rocky throughout.
Well, this is your first feature, and I'm so curious as far as how this all came together for you.
I've been making movies my whole life, since it was in my backyard as a kid, since I was eight years old, and I always knew it's what I wanted to do.
And so.
This whole long process of you go to undergrad and then you think like, if I can just get on film sets, all my dreams are going to come true. And so then I was on them as a PA, and yet I'm like crashing my car because I fall asleep at the wheel on the drive home, and like of being worked ridiculous hours. I was like, wait, I
am on film sets now, why am I depressed? And so I ran away from it for a little while and then found my I did like some years of hippie backpacking around the world, but then found myself like really missing it and just missing the artistic outlet and took a chance to apply to grad school, got into American Film Institute, came out here just in time for the pandemic to hit during that But the one like really nice thing about that was during that time I
got to meet Patty Jenkins and she was promoting wonder Woman in eighty four at the time, and since she's an alumni of the school, came into a talk and everyone was like fangirling about Wonder Woman, and I was like, like, I got one question in the Q and A, and I was like, how do you come out the gate as a first time filmmaker, nothing under your belt and managed to make something as niche as I want to do an empathetic portrayal of a serial killer that's also
a queer love story. And She's like whoa, And so it like kicked off a relationship between us, and I started she read another script of mine I've been working on and really loved it and really wanted to develop it, and it was just the whole up and down chaos of I'm in grad school. But I'm also like, oh my god, all my dreams are coming true because Monster, her first film, has been one of my favorites literally since I first saw it when I was like twelve, and you think your.
Whole career is launching right there.
But then financing fell through on one of the ideas we were trying to do, and then she was getting pulled off to have to produce her other projects and develop other big studio movies. So I was like, let me scale it back and try to maybe come up with a smaller idea I could do more easily, which
was this other film idea called Calamity. But then when we're budgeting it out, even though it all takes place in one house, it suddenly was like, okay, but will there's a stunt in every scene of this movie, Like this is going to be almost two million dollars.
So then I'm like, oh god.
I'm really I really feel like I'm in a room full of closing doors. And I finished AFI and you realized that even if you go to a fancy grad school, that like, the world doesn't just come knocking at your door begging you to make cinema after something like that, because there's already enough people competing to do that. It was Patty and also my editor NOILM Clement who both said to.
Me, like, do you are you?
Are you really telling me you don't have a smaller idea somewhere in you that you can really get scrappy with it and pull something together. And so that was when I started just developing this idea of Junkie, because the one before is much more like I said, an add an addiction film in a horror direction, and phivoted being like, okay, what if I took an adic and made them like a superhero. But to me, a superhero is like that they a heroic act is just trying
to do something right, as simple as that. But let's shoot it in action movie widescreen and have these like crazy fight sequences and shit, and let's just go back to my home turf of Georgia and shoot it like in our backyards. With our friends on a bunch of borrowed locations and stuff like that, and that is pretty
much exactly how it happened. And Patty wasn't really involved during it because she was busy, and I knew, I just want to make something good enough that if she sees it afterwards, she'll want to put her name on it. And then apparently it worked.
Yes, I hear that you somehow used Canva to help you with this. No, not at all.
That's the hilarious thing is that Canva wanted us to speak on it, and I was like about prepping and developing a movie with their software.
I was like, you guys couldn't have picked a worst film for me to speak on, because there's no for junkie.
But so, the funny thing was the other film idea I'd had that was also this southern thing in a
horror direction. We had developed for so long, We had made look books, we had used Canva, stuff like that, and then I was having this idea and the other thing I knew I wanted to do was I had heard about this mud bougging festival in Kentucky called Redneck Ravee that it had gone viral for being open during the pandemic, and it was something like forty something people were arrested on warrants at it one year and I
was like, oh my god, I want to go there. Yeah, And the idea was like, if I have no money to make a first film, I don't want people to watch it and feel that and be like, Okay, it's like it's a chain for peace with two sisters in a cabin, like it's I was like, I want people to watch it as it's going on and be like holy shit, like how did the scale of this film like balloon this big as it was going And so I like cranked out a script in a month, and by the time I finished that draft, there was one
monthuntil Redneck Grave was going to happen.
And I was like, I don't want.
To wait a whole other year.
Oh my god.
Okay, let's try to get out to that festival. Unfortunately, because we had done the prep for the other film and with CANV and everything, it was the same like DP production designer like crew that we're trying to pitch the other film, still the same environment. Let's take all this prep work we did transplant it to this other film, but instead of steady cam work. It's all handheld and instead of going into saturated colors surreal horror, it's all
going to be like desaturated like grimy, dusty, junkie. And yeah, and we literally had a month to be ready to shoot it from the time the script was ready. So it's like, is the first thing I did with no shot list, Like the crew didn't see the locations until we showed up to shoot them each day, like very from the hip on the fly, stressful. Yeah, I don't recommend it, but see.
To your pants. It sounds like Rocky. You're in I think, almost every single scene of the film. So how was that for you? How much had you been talking to Will about this idea and like how ready were you to just jump into this project that kind of came from nothing to all of a sudden it's ready to go.
Yeah, it was crazy.
I had a little less than a month to prepare whatever. And of course whenever I read the script, I loved it, but I thought, oh my god, I'm literally on every page except two. This is a lot. But I was actually living in la at the time and my lease was up, and so I was like, instead of getting another apartment and we're shooting in Georgia, that's where I'm from. I'll just move back in with my parents while we're filming this or whatever and put my stuff back in
storage here. And then the strike happened and I ended up just staying out there. But we shot what it was a little bit of a month. Was it five weeks so the sho yay?
Thirteen days?
Oh god, quite so much longer?
No?
Yeah, that it was thirteen basically nonsob so.
Yeah. So basically to prepare because it was I basically prepared the morning of, because for me, I can't prepare for two days later when it's a totally different scene or whatever. I will totally mess up everything. And I just willed the way my mind works. So it was preparing the morning of, getting into that mindset or whatever.
But also I think knowing this scrip pretty good and knowing like what the story was about and how Stevie is, and luckily Will was very lenient on some of the lines that I may have mixed and allowed me to do a little bit of improv queen. Yeah, so thank god for that. But yeah, preparing was like literally kind of like by the seat of my pants, like literally that morning, just making sure I get right. And I
think sometimes I would psyche myself up. Oh my god, I've got to I've got to get this right or whatever, and then I'm like, I'm sorry, and then but I think it all worked out. It worked out for me.
Not to sound like a bitch. But it was like if ever, if sometimes other actors had like a complaint about what the scene required of them, or the lines they couldn't remember or something, it was always just okay.
Rocky has a book that she had that she has to memorize.
It is like she she literally doesn't get a day off, she doesn't get a shot, yeah a lot in this film, Like she has to carry it on her back, put her through the ring.
That all sounds difficult. What was the toughest stuff for you to do? Rocky?
So I don't like to run, and he literally had me in booty shorts and I'm running this entire film. So that was really the most difficult, trying not to because nobody runs pretty and I definitely do not run pretty, But which kind of goes with a character because I'm high or I'm like coming down or just trying to get away from my family or whoever I'm running from that at that moment.
Or what ever.
But that was really probably the most difficult. The scenes were that were very dramatic, and especially the ones with my son or whatever. To me, those kind not simple, but I knew how important they were and I wanted them to come authentic, and I think they did. So I tried not to worry too much, even though I wanted to get it right. I tried not to put too much pressure on me. Oh my god, you've got to get this line has to land exactly like this. I just let it flow and hopefully it did right,
and I think it did. We had some beautiful moments.
The same question for you will what was the toughest stuff for you to shoot?
Oh man, tough stuff to shoot? I'm literally like, which one do I pick?
Because I just remember that the whole nature of the shoot was that we were like every day, we'd be like, Okay, today's a hard day, Tomorrow is an easy one. And especially when we started the film by shooting the climax like in a mud bogging festival, we had no control over. We got the biggest challenge out of the way, but it was like every day would surprise you of like I I couldn't possibly have expected this to be more difficult.
Then it's like you don't expect that, like when you're trying.
To get a toddler to act as seen, that's going to be a nightmare. Or like some of the places we shot in were like real trap houses and like in the real like meth neighborhoods of Georgia and stuff, and it was like we literally had like people on meth, like coming screaming through the sets and stuff.
Yeah, I think those times or whatever kind of it did make me nervous, like to be around the people who would because I can always spot someone who's high or whatever, and I'm like, yeah, we're definitely in the part.
Yeah, there would always be the tension for me if
are we gonna pull something off in time? But I feel like when it came to stuff that felt more stunty or like we need to shoot them pushing through a concert crowd, or we need to shoot a crazy fight sequence in a kitchen, I feel like some of those almost just felt easier because it felt like playing Legos, because you're like it's really just like craftsmanship and that it was easier to be outside of your head during but it would be something like nailing a really intimate
dialogue or something that I feel like would usually be the thing stressing me the most of feeling like I
needed to nail it. And then suddenly we're shooting like one of the most emotional scenes at three am, after a whole day of Rocky already having to run around and Booty short, and then I can tell that like her brain is melting because it's it would usually be more about sticking the landing of something emotional rather than getting her to crawl through a mosh pit, And so those are like a walk in the park compared to some of just like dialogue seeing Honestly.
I know that you probably wrote this with Rocky and mind, but tell me about the rest of your past and how you found them.
It's a whole hodgepodge of actors I worked with before, total non actors, like street casting because there's no time to prep it again. Two of the main supporting people, Jessica and Kean, who play Sherry, her like girlfriend, and Kai, her drug dealer. They had also been in my like two previous short films, and so I kind of wrote with them in mind for those parts, because they've really become like writer or die actors down to do whatever.
But then otherwise it's like the guy who plays her son, who I think does an incredible job, was just my barista my local neighborhood and had mentioned to me that he liked acting. And then the guy who plays her ex boyfriend was like, I was telling people I needed like a gruff like southern guy who can pull that off, and someone sent was sending me links to other actors, and I saw the picture. I saw the guy who it now is in a picture with one of those recommendations,
and literally was like, who's hit? Who's that guy? And just DMed him like one person and plays like the meth head. Bailey, the blonde girl, has been one of my friends since we were thirteen, and she's not an actor, she's a dancer. But I just tour under the bus and making her do this. So it yeah, and sometimes it it literally be shooting a montage and be like, which one of our friends is nearby, Let's throw them in the movie.
Really like very yeah, very all.
Over the place for sure. Other than the challenges of shooting in some very bad neighborhoods. How was Georgia to shoot in?
It was good?
Yeah, I mean humid in summer gat but it was That was one thing that I wanted so bad was to do a different type of Southern film, because I feel like when we think Southern in movies, everyone's brain goes to like desert movies and you think like Felma and Luise, like Texas or like No Country for Old Men, and it's all either orange or it's like blue and gray, and the South that we know that we grew up is very.
Lush, green, humid, sweaty.
One of the few other movies I feel like I've seen that Captain that So what was Patty Jenkins's Monster? When I saw that movie, I was like, oh my god, this feels like where I grew up, and that all the characters weren't. It wasn't that we took a supermodel and had them grow an ugly beard and put a cowboy hat on, and we were like, it's a southern
and Southern authenticity. It was like monsters in a movie where like they took a supermodel and they like uglied her down to make her look like a real person, and everybody in that film looks like a real person, and I've been really happy that a lot of people watch it say the environment feels like a character in the film, because it, Yeah, a lot of people were like, I haven't seen this type of southern before, but it.
I feel like it's weird desk because we're like, that's what we know right so well. But so there was like.
A comfort element of even shooting there because I think I've been trying to make things work in La for so long, and that's where it felt like all these doors were shutting, and so it was like I went back to home base, and it just being scrappy with my friends in the woods felt like exactly how I grew up, made him movies Like.
Ye, tell me about your premiere.
We're freaking out to get ready for it. After these interviews are of It's six pm tonight. Yeah, we're premiering at afi Fest. Sold out, So we sold out like before the weekend even hit, which we can't believe because there's no famous people in our movies.
So we're very happy about that.
But yeah, like Patty will be there, We'll be doing the whole Q and A afterwards. Much I'm saying, yeah, humble, I'm saying this knowing I'm not processing it mentally as I'm saying and I won't be for the rest of the day. But like that we did this scrappy thing with not even enough money to finish a movie, yeah, in our backyard, and now for some reason, people are taking it seriously enough that they want us to play it in a sold out room at the Chinese Theater
on Hollywood Boulevard. It feels like we're getting away with like we duped people and we don't know why they're not onto us yet, Like how did we get here?
It's surreal, But that's how I feel, just and just all the good press that we've had about it, just everybody seems to have really enjoyed it. Didn't just to hear that that's something that we poured our heart, literally our heart and soul into when people were actually recognizing that and liking it, so it's just what. So I'm excited, Like we're excited, just don't know what to expect, but
just my daughter's going to be here. She hasn't seen it, so I'm so excited just to see her reaction, and it's just yeah, it's Yeah, it's just great.
A lot of a lot of the actors, like still haven't seen that you were going to see it for the first time.
Yeah, yeah, so yeah, So I hope they're happy.
Are they going to do the whole red carpet, the photos and all that kind of stuff that really do it up.
We're not getting that like George Clooney Adams and their level that they had the other night, for sure, because I don't think people are clamoring to photograph will Meians and Rocky shot. They'll be clamoring the photograph first heon orenough, but we do have to go through a whole photo op at their like af I backdrops.
A little red carpet.
Yeah, talk to some breath.
I'm mainly going to be I was haggling AFI all week to let me get in the theater to approve the audio levels before they play the movie, So I'm mainly going to be trying to run off to do that,
probably while she's taking photos. This thing has just been so graspers from the ground up, and we're premiering at this huge festival with like no studio attached to the film, like no distribution plan yet, like it, and I can't believe we got it this far, but it's yeah, I really I think we're just hoping that it blows the roof off and that it becomes a conversation piece that helps us get a much wider release for it and all of that, because obviously we wanted to get out
there as far as possible. And I think Rocky and I both still believe in a kind of cinema that we're not seeing anymore. That is movies with just faces you don't recognize and zero CGI and India's hell like yeah, like very handmade, and I feel.
Like people want to see that.
I feel like, yeah, I feel like Hollywood's underestimating how
much easier it can be to empathize with that. A lot of the time, Like even if I'm watching a rugged Southern story, I'm gonna be or even an addiction story, I'm not going to relate to it as much when I know that it's like Timothy Shamalama Bingbong playing the drug addicts, because I know he's like a huge A list celebrity, and I just like, yeah, I really hope that people identify how much easier it is to connect and have empathy with something real, something and something not familiar to you.
Yeah, so I just really I think we're.
Both just really hoping that people like respond to it, get excited about it. And yeah, even the sellout, it feels like maybe we're like the cool kid of the festival because it's all these like these big celebrity dramas and there's just the and then there's just the I don't know what it is movie called Junkie with Rocky flipping a middle finger on the poster.
Very nice image on that poster. Is there a place for people to keep up with the movie and with you guys?
Yes, Instagram mainly.
Yeah, that's where I post everything for it at Real means as mine.
It's our il period means my last name, Rocky's is a girl called Rocky Shay. It's our Instagram handle.
But and then we also were having an East Coast premiere at Maryland Film Festival in Baltimore two weeks after this, and I really love that festival. And they're playing it twice actually on like Thursday and Saturday.
Of that weekend.
And other than that, Yeah, we're out to other festivals and we're starting the like sales talks with people so yeah, that's just we're about to see what happens.
Best.
Maybe we're both about to disappear back into obscurity.
Yeah, and.
Hopefully not, because I loved the movie and I really had a great time talking with y'all. So thank you so much.
Thank you, thank you. Yeah, it's been great.
There's nothing you can say to She's write where if she wants to be out on the edge where.
No one can to know though she's not moving.
I hear the laughing.
Wait till you've tried before you jug He says you you don't you know, No, you don't know.
You don't, you don't don't. I said, you love the junkie, So no, I.
Want to know what You're so good.
You're breaking the hearts of your loved ones like crackers.
Since while you pond off the Silver Cross Watch you in New Mexico gave.
To the seasons over the desert. You, she says, you don't don't, No, you don't know, you don't, you don't don't, I said the Chelsea so long.
I finally found out on the floor of my hotel. Who things filled the pus the custom free and I pulled myself out and stared in the middle. Just for an instant I could finally see it.
She says you.
No, no, you John, don't get out class the jockey.
Jock Jo, don't tell no, no, you don't know, you don't don't you don't know, said Jump. So who.
Oh stop?
Who in name?
S an.
A miter st