Breaking into the film industry is the stuff dreams are made of, but the struggle to merely get a foot in the door often shatters these aspirations. Even if the stars align and all the blood, sweat, and tears result in a finished product, the failure to locate distribution and generate audience interest in the labor of love can quietly bury a promising independent feature.
For every \Napoleon Dynamite"" there are dozens, nay, hundreds of microbudget quirk-a-thons that never see the light of day. Writer/director Sean Anders' debut ""Never Been Thawed,"" a gloriously rude mockumentary spoofing various subcultures, seems poised to surpass the film festival circuit and achieve financial success through self-distribution.
The Orpheum is screening ""Never Been Thawed"" this weekend, and Anders will be present on Friday night to lead a Q & A session after the film. This past week, The Daily Cardinal had the opportunity to speak with Anders about the making of ""Never Been Thawed,"" the obstacles independent filmmakers face, and the touchy, taboo subjects his film sharply skewers.
""Never Been Thawed"" examines the personal fiascoes and relationships of a select group of frozen-entr??e collectors in Arizona. Anders himself stars as the selfish, charismatic leader of the group and lead singer of a heavy-metal-turned-Christian rock band dubbed the Christers.
""So really, the movie ended up being about subculture,"" Anders said. ""Because when you're in a band, you're in a scene, and your band ... seems like the whole world to you at the time. You're in a subculture and meanwhile someone somewhere in the same state is a tractor pull subculture of a bunch of people who are really into their tractors and going to tractor pulls.""
Anders found his actors by casting his friends, including co-writers Chuck LeVinus and John Morris. On the set, actors were instructed to read-but not memorize the script. This technique encouraged improvisation and brought a level of naturalism to the production.
""The idea was that it was going to be a three-month kind of learning process,"" Anders said. ""We didn't really expect to release it or even put it in festivals, for that matter. We just tried to make a movie that would crack our friends up, and we expected that it would probably be pretty awful when it was done because we didn't know what we were doing and we didn't have any actors to be in it. We just had our friends.""
After attaining solid material from essentially goofing off the first day of shooting, Anders and his co-writers went about rewriting the script and taking their experiment much more seriously.
""When all was said and done, it took us over a year to shoot the thing, because we had to shoot around everybody's schedule,"" Anders said. He also noted how ambitious ""Never Been Thawed"" is in regard to its relatively large ensemble of characters and frequent location changes. Budgetary constraints necessitated the decision to film in the mockumentary format, one which has become increasingly prevalent in independent filmmaking over recent years.
""Every low ball filmmaker is making a mockumentary because they're cheap and easy. There's a lot of shitty mockumentaries out there that you have to be heard over, and some people in the industry don't even want to hear the word 'mockumentary,'"" Anders said. ""A lot of people have compared us favorably with Christopher Guest, and it's a huge honor, but you do want [your film] to be judged in its own right, not just as some kind of Christopher Guest spin-off.""
Despite the incessant comparisons, ""Never Been Thawed"" is markedly different from a typically inoffensive Guest-style mockumentary. This darkly satiric envelope-pusher is as edgy as they come, with hilarious, sometimes raunchy digs at everything from religious manipulation of sexual identity to abortion protesters.
""There's a lot of mean characters in it, but I don't think it's a mean movie. The characters aren't depicted as role models,"" Anders said. ""There are things that could be construed as anti-Christian, but if you're really paying attention to the movie, it's anti-Christian profiteering. It's making a statement about people pimping their religion. It's directed at hypocrisy and profiteering, it's not directed at God. A lot of religious people have liked the movie.""
Anders believes the response in Madison will help predict how the film will be received when it premieres in New York and Los Angeles next month. If reactions are similar, ""Never Been Thawed"" could explode and launch Anders' career in the very near future. Based on ""Thawed's"" success, an unnamed Hollywood studio has already agreed to fund his latest project.
""Hopefully it will get a wider audience,"" Anders said. ""If we're really, really pissing people off by the end of the year, then we're doing really well.""
