Special Report: The People's Joker (2022)

thank you so much for joining me today. I'm really excited to talk with you about The People's Joker, but I would really love to know a little bit more about you and how you got into show business because you've been doing a lot of things for a lot of years.

and stuff like YouTube didn't exist. Digital video was around. But I remember telling people when I was a kid that I wanted to be a filmmaker and them just looking like, what is a hobby? And yeah, I don't know. I don't even really know how I arrived at wanting to do it. I know it was like tied to seeing back to the future. At a very early age,

I was just really obsessed with it. I think it might have been like the first movie I saw that helped me understand that you could build these worlds and tell a visual story like that, and the distinction between reality and storytelling and stuff was just so fascinating to me. But yeah, like how do you get into it? In the early nineties, so I really focused on theater. I was like a total drama dorc and started doing comedy

really young. Grew up in the South suburbs of Chicago, so I would travel with the city every weekend, and

I took him pross classes at Second City. I was like a part of this like very early version of a youth program that I think they have now and a lot of people do, but I was like part of the first wave of it, so I really got a lot of like before of its experience as a kid and pretty early on in my life and then always knew I wanted to go to film school, and I don't know in film school, like I really just wanted to, Like I got jaded a little bit, I

think just by like where movies were at, like I was. I really got into experimental film and got really obsessed with specifically like Kenneth Anger. I was really I wanted

to be the next Kindeth Anger for some reason. I didn't even know I was queer, but I just knew I was apeak kind of angered and yeah, And it was like right around the time that like Tim and Eric started making awesome show for Adult Swim, and I remember like my first time watching it, like I understand do it as like a comedy show, but I really saw it as like this amazing piece of like experimental cinema.

Like it really I think those guys hate it when people talk about it that way, so they definitely get annoyed by me sometimes when I talk about it like that, but it's still the only way that I could, I was ever able to really think of it is it's tyfically its attention to media formats and editing as this form of expression. I had never seen anything like that before, Like maybe the closest I had seen was just in like Kenneth Anger and William Wagman stuff, the kind of

more just experimental stuff. So like that really blew my mind, and I was, Okay, so I don't need to be a broke experimental filmmaker. I can be a broke alternative comedy filmmaker. And like pretty much like right as I was about to graduate, I got an internship at Tim and Eric and I just called their studio and was like,

do you guys see interns? And they were like sure, And they had just finished their movie Billion Dollar Movie, and had just been starting to shoot season one of The Eric Andre Show and season one of Comedy Bang Bangs. So I got in there with the boom of like alternative comedy becoming a bigger thing. It had been a thing since they were nineties, like with Mister Show and stuff, which I had loved growing up, but became cool and

like more. There was just a lot of that kind of production happening, and I got in right at this perfect time. And I don't know, I've made this joke a billion times, so I probably shouldn't make it anymore.

But maybe this will be the last time. I really am the like Transforest Gump of alt comedy, just because I got to work on every single cool Adult Swim show, and like I was on Eric Andre Show and Nathan for You and Comedy Bang and Bedtime Stories check it Out with Steve Brule, Like I got this really amazing hands on experience and just got to incubate around all these like creative geniuses, which was perfect for me because I knew I wanted to be a filmmaker and a director,

but wasn't really quite sure the pathway for me, or like really even what stories I wanted to tell.

can it be sincere or whatever? And when I was working on I Love David, it was just like, I want to try to do both at the same time, really want to walk this line of yeah, it's like a goof and we're really like we made this whole alternate reality for David Leebahart's life when fake archival pictures of him with Robin Williams and his family members and all that stuff. And it also had the first episode has this beautiful song that he wrote about his mother.

It's called I'm Sad that my Mama died, Like really had just this beautiful intersection of that like alt comedy like shit post thing and then this like deep sincerity and there's a lot of intentionality to that as we were starting to put it together, and I think that kind of carried through a lot of this stuff that

I ended up doing with Tim and Eric. I also produced and directed and co wrote some of Tim and Eric's Beef House, which was definitely a lot more silly and outlandish as a show, but I think I brought a lot of that sincere already and grounded emotion to

it as well. I really liked playing with both of those things, and I think the People's Joker was like the pure heroin version of that or something like I really just seemed to see and I wanted you to cry or laugh or be upset or annoyed or whatever.

I don't really know why that is. I've definitely in the past I've blamed it on the fact that I'm a trans woman, but I think it's just that was when Hollywood was really starting to just get a little bit like the whole like bleakness that you hear about in terms of like production and stuff. I think it really started in like twenty eighteen, twenty nineteen, and I'm

not really too sure why. I think part of it's like all the mergers that were happening just politically where the country was at and all that stuff, and I was really feeling that I was just even having a tough time getting people to read my stuff, which was so frustrating, just because I had all this experience and it's built this I think, pretty impressive career and I could do a lot, like I was an editor and

a director and a writer producer. So there was this building frustration and I was just finally at a point where I was like, I need to just write a movie and make it. And the initial ideas that I was having were because I, like I said before, I didn't really ever know like what kind of stories I wanted to tell. It was just Okay, the easiest thing

is just talking about my life. So I'll just process the experience of what it was like coming out as a trans woman in those comedy spaces and talk about this era of comedy and filmmaking. And the initial idea was body horror movie about a drag clean who was like physically addicted to irony and like it was like killing her from the inside, but it was also something

she like needed to survive. I never really got that far into it, but uh, that was really I think where the a lot of the like initial ideas for the people's Joker came from, and it really became like something else when you know, around the time that the pandemic was starting, Todd Phillips, God bless his soul, was in the news talking about woke culture, as is his right as a cis white guy, and he was basically complaining about how like hard it is to make comedy

now or whatever because of sensitivity, and on some of them I agree with him. I I get canceled on Twitter like all the time, usually over nothing. Somebody got mad at me the other day because I jokingly said I was the main spokesperson for the trans community, like all irony is gone and how people appreciate things. So I kind of get where that conversation comes from. But it's exceptionally funny coming from the director of a movie that made a billion dollars and is a comedy. Joker

twenty nineteen is a comedy. I get it. It's a serious meditation on mental illness or whatever. It's also got jokes at it, like it's a fucking movie about a clown. It's a ridiculous comic book movie. So I think that idea that he was complaining about it was just very fascinating to me and my co writer Brie L. Rose. I think also just from this perspective of we're both queer people and we're very rude. We love a quote

unquote offensive comedy. Like this idea that queer people and trans people and people of color can't take a joke is just so weird to me. It's just not my experience in interacting with every marginalized group has to have a sense of humor, especially think about early comedy in vaudeville and like how important comedy it was to Jewish people and stuff too, and that terms of expression, it's just always been there as this thing to process the

fact that we're all other by societies. When that was happening, Brie originally commissioned me to just re edit Todd Phillips Joker, and I actually did start doing that. I started making this kind of big feature length piece of video r and as I was doing that, I was just like, oh, I think I just actually want to make a joker parody.

And I brought those ideas about the irony poisoned drag Queen to it and really just started looking at my life and breathe through her life through this sort of like comic book movie lens and the movie just like really like we wrote the script pretty quick, Like it really came together fast. I think, you know, like most good ideas, it almost feels like it's something that already exists and you're just channeling it or something.

Like she would be in a writer's room for something and then I'd be editing something else, Like upstairs and we would just hang out at lunch and I just thought she was hilarious and we were just the only two queers really at this company at that point, so I think we really just enjoyed making each other laugh and had always wanted to work together, and as we were we really got to know each other and connect.

Very similar upbringings. We were both from the Midwest, we both came out pretty late in life, so there was a lot of similarities there the main beats. And it was a real gift working with herby because very early in the process she said to me, I want to work on this, I want to write this with you, but this is your story. It's your face on screen too, Like we're giving Joker your dead name. This is your thing.

So yeah, whatever people describe the movie as like semi autobiographical, it frustrates me because I'm just like, it's just so auto biographical. The only difference is I'm not actually the Joker. I mean, I'm not just saying that for legal reasons. It's pretty close to just what the first twenty eight years of my life.

ass too, so I think the teachers really happy. Reading was a challenge for me up until my twenties or so, and comics were always this space where it was like I found this cheat code to getting to just read picture books. For most of my life, Batman was always the one. The art was just so beautiful to me, especially like the seventies, eighties, and nineties. Batman's just gorgeous, gothic, and even when it's hoppy, I don't know. I loved

the movies. The first PG thirteen movie I ever saw in a theater was Batman Forever, and I was six

years old and my dad took me to go see it. Honestly, seeing the movie was an early moment and me realizing I was trans I'm not really entirely sure why, but it was something about Nicole Kidman's character, and I think just like I was already so in love with Batman at that point, and like watching just the romance between her and Batman, and it like I just wanted I not only wanted to look like her, I wanted somebody to look at me the way he looked at her.

But that was a memory that had resurfaced while we were writing The People's Joker, so we actually put this scene in the movie that's basically that with young Joker going to see this Batman movie. These characters are just so in there for me, and I don't think I really was aware of it until those ideas started to come. I still read the comics. It's awesome when people give

me Batman comics. Now it's screenings and it's just, oh my god, this makes the whole journey of making this movie worth it, because now I just get free comics. Fucking rules. There's been a lot of like bad ai art and stuff that you could see pop up in some of these comics now and stuff. But thankfully there's a whole backlog of books. I could spend the rest of my life collecting comics and I still will not be able to read every single Batman comic. And I'm

gonna try, but it would not happen, I don't think. So.

comic book movies are. Like we really wrote a script that was based around set pieces, and that was because I wanted the set pieces to be impressive, Like I wanted our batmobile chase to be visually interesting and be like something that was like a batmobile chase you hadn't seen before. And there's this whole like fight scene at the end of the movie that's done in like the

Batman the animated series Bruce tim style. Like I was like using it as this opportunity to just make movies and that really the way studio make movies now, but that like Zamechis Bielberg way, where they like come up with, Okay, we're gonna have a time machine and there it'll be like this is a nuclear explosion. No it's a refrigerator. No it's a laurreent. Like really just finding that and starting from this sort of visual place I think was

really important to me. So as Brie and I were like working on the script, I put out this call on Twitter. It's really the only good thing that I think has ever happened on Twitter was the formation of all the people that like worked on this film. And I just threw it out there if any artists or animators or editors wanted to come aboard write to us that. I wasn't really expecting that many people to come out

of the woodwork, and it was just hundreds. So many people wanted to just see this movie, let alone work on it. Before we even had a script done, we had this kind of crew of this team that was ready to start getting to work, so we started doing character designs. I think in May of twenty twenty, we were barely done outlining the script, and I don't know it's like how I want to work for the rest

of my life. It's driving everybody I'm working with right now completely crazy because I got like a few things in development and they're just like, why are you like talking about soundtrack and it's stup right down. It's just a way to do it. I do think like the script is most important, but it's a visual medium and it's a sonic medium too, so we really need to For me as a filmmaker and as a viewer, I like to be thinking of those things like at a

script stage. And with that process in mind, I was able to build an animatic of the movie before we even got to set. I tried to think of the movie almost as like an animated film, so it was very storyboard driven, and even though there were these scenes where it's very dialogue heavy movie, there's a lot of that classic kind of indie movie way, like a lot

of very heavy conversational scenes and stuff. But even with that, it was like getting those storyboards it out just so we could figure out the pace and sort of the music of the movie before we ever even got to set. And yeah, it was cool. It was really like, I'm really lucky that I got to just have this huge

community of DIY artists helping me make this thing. That privilege was never lost on me, Like from second one of just like watching the team form, it was the motivating factor just to even keep working on the movie. It was just like, I don't know any filmmaker that has ever or will ever again have this many people that wants to help them make her first movie.

prevas COVID. It's funny to think about. I think so much of that year is just like a blank spot in my memory, but I really do remember prepping for that shoot and we all got tested and it's a very small crew, like it was me and my DP, one camera assistant, a sound guy, my partner was there as a PA, and my producer Joey, and then my friend Ember Night as well, just to help like with some of the directing, and we shot in five days.

Just crazy. Nobody ever believes it, but we did. I think it was partially because I had storyboarded and animated the whole thing. Cleared up the line of communication for my DP and I, like we I just pulled something up on his creed and you would immediately know like how it needed to be lit, how it needed to

be framed. I was also working with people who, like I really knew could work in that sort of fast paced environment, like specifically Nate Fauston, who plays the penguin that characters written for him and is based on him. It's his and my relationship that were mythologizing there. We shot his stuff all in two days. He's one of

the main characters. And yeah, it was crazy, Like I remember being nervous about shooting in pre vaccine COVID, but it was really it was that thing again too, where I crowdfunded all this money and I wanted to put all that money on camera, like and into the production which I shot myself in the foot because I didn't end up saving any of it for posts and thefts and stuff, so like I had to end up taking

out a huge loan to finish the movie. But I was glad we did it just because it really allowed us to have a safe production and a production that was like, like it was lit correctly. And I get the movie's been described as being held together by tape and the green screen compositing and stuff is scrappy, but I don't know, I think it's a very beautiful movie like way it's shot, Like we really shot it in this way where the lighting was very specific and our

choreography was very specific and stuff. And you know, I was working with really the best team of actors that anybody could work with at this point in their career.

and I did. I had these like series of sort of guidelines and precedents that were there that I should follow specifically for the parody law aspects of it, and the main the primary one being like pretty much every design, every character design in it is our own. I think the version of the Joker that I play in it is there's a little bit of Jack Nicholson in the wardrobe. But my bigger reference for it was like anime and wrestling and stuff like pro wrestling, Like we really and

we did that with all the characters. We really had to make our own character designs in our own style sheets for pretty much every single one. We did that. It also needed to for the because it's also protected by the fair use defense, which is the same legal defense that allows documentary filmmakers to play with trademarks that they don't own. I always like Cite and it's never to be giving him shit. I really love his films.

But that Room two three seven is a documentary where they show most of Stanley Kubrick's filmography In that and the reason he's able to do that is because he's talking about it and he's providing commentary on it and colaborating, and very specifically is providing a commentary that only he and his subjects that he's interviewing can provide, which is really the most important thing about fair use. It has to be a perspective that only the creator can be

bringing to the table. And so the even bigger guideline for me to follow was just like it had to be my story, Like it really had to be my life story. So I think that was the thing that I was more nervous about, was just like pulling out all my dirty laundry for people to see while I'm playing with Batman toys basically, And but that was the way we were to do it. And like the obvious sort of caveat or I guess not really an exception, but we do have a Jared Leto Joker in the movie.

But the reason we were able to do that is it's a parody version of him, just from the mere fact that it's not Jared Letto. It's a commentary kind of on Jared Leto's Joker as this sort of toxic

leftist comedian guy. And also it was funny, but it's just as like another thing that I had talked about with my lawyers very early on was the fact that we were casting a trans man as a Jared Leto joker when Jared Leto had played a trans woman in something also really brought this other like meta text steel

layer to it. So yet it's funny because like I think a lot of people when they hear about the movie, they just assume that I just said fuck it, and I really didn't, Like I really went out of my way and out of pocket to really like legally figure out how we did it. And I always try to make a point of talking about thank you for asking about it, because it's something that I feel is important

to talk about. Especially I think a lot of like younger filmmakers look up to me and like this film and stuff, and I don't want them just you can't just go off and make the people's Harry Potter like you got to like really protect yourself and educate yourself on where parody laws at. The good news is, I think this movie does set a new precedent for what you can do with these ips.

we're playing it. If we don't. I can't speak for them because I don't really know what conversations they had with Warren, but I know they basically said, we already are doing this, like there's tickets sold. Be a major pain in the ass. You waited till the night before do this, And they did that because they wanted to intimidate me, and they really did. They really intimidated me. They intimidated that everybody, all my agents and stuff like,

really jumped ship to that twenty four hour period. But thankfully Tiff really went to bat for us, and we got to have that premiere and it was really like probably my favorite. It's weird saying that it's my favorite screening of the movie. Because like it's I don't even really remember it. It was such a blur and it was so surreal because we were like playing this movie that I had made in my bedroom that I really was like originally making just for me and my friends.

I didn't think of it as as like a thing that would I didn't know how big of a film festival Tiff even was. Like I'd never been to a film festival before, and like my first day at TIFF, like I was in the same elevator as like Werner Herdzog was like it was really crazy, Oh my god, this is a whole other thing now to like an audience seven hundred people, and it was like the oldest operational theater in North America. Like it just felt it

felt the earthshake, I think that night. And then yeah, I ended up pulling the movie from other film festivals, and a lot of people thought that was like for legal reasons, and there was a little bit of that, like to some degree it was me needing to like go back and arm myself a little bit more because I didn't have a litigator at that point. I had only had legal opinions and legal counsel that I had

been speaking to. I needed to find somebody who would be willing to represent me in case I did need to go to court. And I also was very conscious that the movie could leak and I didn't want that. I really wanted to hold out for some form of distribution. And God, I've never gotten this honest about it, but fuck it, we're here. Like I really had a mental health crisis after TIFFs. It shattered my reality. I didn't understand.

It was so crazy because I had this experience of getting all these everybody in town wanted to beat with me. I had a meeting with Sony the day I got back after Tiff, and it was one of the bigger

meetings that I've ever had in my life. And it was just insane because I was sitting there and realizing, Oh, I'm getting all this attention because people see me as a band filmmaker and I have just spent four years of my life making a movie that I really thought I could just get out there pretty easily, because that was what my lawyers and my team had said. So it was just a lot of things going on. So I needed to hit pause. And the Tiff cut also was just a really fresh paint job, but there are

a lot of mistakes. I needed to recast somebody, I needed to finish a lot of our VSX and stuff. It really wasn't done yet, so I hit pause and also wanted to strategize what our pathway to District You Should was going to look like. And I was introduced to the concept of secret screenings, which was fascinating to me because I just was like, why would you go see a movie if you don't know what it is? Like I go and see movies that like I know what they're gonna be, and sometimes I don't like them.

But it really worked for us because like the we could like plant rumors around town, like whatever film festival we were at, Oh, I think there's gonna be this clown movie playing. And we took this whole secret after we had like our festival cut completed. It was an April of twenty twenty three. God, so only a year. It like a little over a year ago, but it feels like a decade. It's been such a time work for me, Like time really just doesn't exist for me anymore.

It's either why you should or shouldn't make a movie. The a chaos magic but anyway, we did this whole tour in Australia last April, on April twenty twenty two. That was like just all secret screenings, and the way we would promote it's just by putting in these film festival programs an untitled queer coming of age, perfectly legal clown movie or whatever, and then the description of the movie would be like a transclown comes of age in a gothic city and faces off against a crusader with

a tape. So like if people knew what the movie was, or if they had heard about it, they'd see that in the program and they go, I think this is the people's joker. I think we should go see it, or they would read it and be like this sounds fucking weird. Let's go see the Smithee. And that really worked for us, like we really we sold out most of those screenings, and so it really set this like model for us, and then we did a couple more secret screenings and special events like in the US after that,

and eventually had our first public facing premiere. Our US premiere was at outfests last year in July or June.

doing too. But it really always stressed me out. It's like I couldn't explain to everybody, even my friends, like didn't really understand, like why are you like basically shelving this movie, And it's cause it's fucking it's a movie that you're supposed to watch in a theater, like I need at least a short theatrical run in order to feel justified. And how much energy I'd spent making it in the team behind it too, Like it just felt

only right to really try to get traditional distribution. So it was when we got that public screening at Outfest that we were finally able to get intra again because I had some interest at TIS, like there were a couple of big distributors I won't say their names, but people could guess that were interested in the movie, and I'm sure they would have done a great job, but they all got pretty scared off, I think, and also the movie wasn't done, and to be quite honest, none

of them were offering money to finish the movie or license the music that we were using. Like it was really this crash course and how crazy it is to try to sell a movie nowadays. It's not like it was in the nineties. Kids like I'm sorry, don't get your hopes up like I did. It's not all Kevin Smith,

you know, selling clerks anymore. But thankfully Outfest put up this bat signal for Frank Jaffy at Altered Innocence, who is my distribution partner, and he emailed me two days after Outfest and was just like, hey, let's get breakfast. I want to talk about your movie. When I got the message, I started crying. And it wasn't because I was happy. It was because I was basically telling myself

not to get my hopes up again. I was also a huge fan of his catalog and I heard such great things about him from other queer filmmakers, So I really went into this meeting as just like, Okay, this is just somebody I need to know because apparently I'm a trans filmmaker and I consider myself a genre filmmaker, but I happened to be a trans woman, so I felt like it was important to established connection with a

weird distributor, and we met up for breakfast. He had a stack of DVDs that he was giving me, which is definitely a way to win over my heart. I love free shit, free comics, free DVDs. I don't care if there are even stuff that I like, just give them to me. I'm such a fetishist for physical media. Pretty Much instantly into that breakfast, he was just like, I think we could do this. I want to distribute this movie. And I was like, are you sure. I've

been so beaten down at that point. He's like, yeah, let's do it. And thankfully he was also willing to like help pay for some of the finishing costs, just because I was so in the hole and like I needed to like still fix some of the animation, like the soundtrack needed to really be finalized, and he altered innocence.

His company is just him, so that was like the thing that was really appealing to me was like this was a movie that like only could work I think with kind of this home grown DIY distributor, just because that's how it was made. As much as I would have loved to have had the movie play in like AMC theaters or something, I just don't know that was ever gonna happen, just because of the baggage along with it.

And so I finished the movie, and our theatrical run is technically not over, Like we were gonna keep screening this movie in theaters as long as people want to play it in theaters, and I think it probably will be a midnight movie shortly. There's a lot of interest all over the country and all over the world for it to be that. But I think selling point of working with Frank was just these the physical media side of things, because the way he packages his films is

just so beautiful. I think physical media is just so important, like the fact that we're really leaving film preservation up to these media conglomerates and streaming platforms. When streaming, if you watch a movie on a stream the quad, like you might as well be watching a movie on your phone, Like, yeah, David Lynch's fucking phone. Y'all think you saw a movie but you didn't like it's the sound quality sucks. It's all compressed and stuff. Blu ray even you know, regular DVD.

It's just like being able to physically hold something. And I don't know, like I grew up like loving special features. That was before film school. That was how I learned what a director was like listening to John Hughes, like his commentary track on Ferris Bueler's Day Off. I remember, like at thirteen or whatever, like I would watch that every I'd watch it more than the movie, and I really thought that was something that needed to be a part of this movie story just because of how close

it came to not coming out. It felt like it really needed to be something that existed in a physical media space. So yeah, it's available on Blu Ray. It's available on regular DVD two, but our Blu ray is really gorgeous. It's just the best the movie's ever looked. And also comes with this I really wanted to make like a zine just because we had so much art

that we could include. So it comes with this sort of booklet that includes like a lot of concept art and a big long essay about the making of the movie and all that stuff. And we also have it on DHS, which is like VHS is like my favorite format of how to watch stuff like it's what I grew up watching and The People's Joker itself, like just aesthetically, there's a lot of visual like VFX are a lot

of DHS art and artifacting in it. Like the sort of narrative voice and the sort of like cross dimensional stuff is very in this kind of like analogue VHSE space and it's a format that I've always liked playing with as an artist. So yeah, we have a VHS version two that I panned and scanned myself. It's beautiful. Yeah, I never thought that i'd get the chance to pan and stand a movie like it was a dream that I didn't know I had until I was doing it.

about chaos, magic and doppelgangers and stuff. And then I got this other thing that was this heist horror movie that I just love. I don't know if I can really say the title of it or too much about what it's about, but it's It was a script that was just in development for a very long time, and I don't know. I got sent so many scripts in the last year, and most of them were just not right for me, and this was the first one that I read that I was like, I could really bring

something to this. So hopefully whatever I guess make next will be one of those things. But I have a bunch of stuff that I'm developing too, Like I really like after It's funny, because I've said it multiple times on this podcast. I spent so much of my life not knowing what kind of stories I wanted to tell. But the second I started making The People's Joker, all these other ideas started coming. It's like I had to make this movie to free up something in my head

to where I could start writing other stuff. So I've just been writing like crazy. It's just all year, and I don't know if people need their via dru fix though. I just edited a Christmas slasher movie called Carnage for Christmas that is directed by my favorite living director, Alice Mayo McKay. She's an Australian filmmaker, just my sister and trans genre of cinema and I got to edit this movie.

I think that'll be coming out later this year on Shutter, I believe, and it's so fucked up, like she really let me do whatever I wanted, like in terms of like post production and visual effects. I love Alice so much and we're working on something else right now too, so yeah, hopefully there's more. I don't know. It's funny because, like I said earlier, people are so bleak about the industry right now, so I can't really go online anymore.

Like I'm so sick of like film Twitter and how they talk about movies is dying and stuff because it's just not my experience. I've been going to festivals for two years now. Genre filmmaking is the best it's ever been. There's so many fucking movies and there's production happening all over the country. I got to act in Mickey Reese's

new movie. We shot that in Oklahoma, and when I'd walk around the street telling people that I was there shooting a movie, they were not impressed because they're like, oh, yeah, people shoot stuff here all the time, and that's just everywhere. So I again put that out there in case anybody is listening who is trying to break in or make stuff. It's definitely the hardest it's ever been, I think, to break in. But once, once you've made something and you've

told your story. And I think the thing people can take away from my film is like, just do it. Just do it at all costs. Just if you have to burn down your life, do it. If you're destined to make a movie, just do it. Stop waiting for the green light. I've used this comparison before, but it's like downhill skiing. If you're looking at the trees, you're gonna run right into a tree. So you got to

look for the spaces in between the trees. And right now, the film industry, all the rich people are asleep at the wheel, and the punks really have a lot of power to tell their stories and do what they want. I think it's a really beautiful time to be alive if you love movies or if you want to make movies.