Being us, we pay lot's of attention to independent filmmaking. The movies that earn national recognition, the movies that just barely squeak into a local festival, and the movies that are premiered in some kid's basement.
Why? Because we used to be the last group, and we'd like to be the first group.
Plenty of these movies, regardless of who made them or how well they do, are pretty damn good.
But let's be honest, plenty of them suck, too.
Looking back
I know there's no shortage of flaws in American Gothic. It was, after all, our first feature. Some of the writing was off, some of the acting was off, we shot the movie using grainy cameras, shoddy onboard microphones, and no lighting whatsoever.
Yet the feedback we get on it doesn't reflect that at all. Lot's of people like American Gothic, and even to this day it still manages to impress first-time viewers.
The things that matter
Lot's of first-time filmmakers (and James Cameron) focus on the wrong things: nice cameras, properly formatted scripts, getting a copy of Final Cut... we didn't have any of these things for American Gothic.
What we did have is a good story. And that's why, regardless of it's shortcomings, people still love the movie.
I think there's a reason for this.
Before we were these movie guys
Long before we made Bad Day, in fact, before Randy and I were experimenting with short films in his living room, we both wrote fiction.
Was it good fiction? Well, sometimes, but that's not important. What's important is this: we'd spent time refining a sense of dialogue, of character, of plot and tension, of what a compelling story looked like. In these early days, we got a lot of bad ideas out of our systems.
And so, when Randy set down to write a feature, even if he'd still spend his life honing his dialogue writing, and even though our sense of how much music we wanted was way off the mark, we could get the story right.
If you can't do that, the best sound production, the greatest editor, and A-list acting can't save you.
This became the Be The Shoe way of doing things
We recognized this immediately after the premiere, and it became our modus operandi. Would we get better cameras? Yes. Would we gradually improve our handling of lighting and sound? Absolutely. Would we continue to focus the writing, become more organized, and pack our casts with the best actors we could find?
Of course.
But we never even reach these discussions until after we know we have a strong story.
