Sunday, February 24, 2008
A+E, Movies
'Signal' processing
Atlanta filmmakers discuss the making of an “instant cult classic”
CREDIT: Spark St. Jude
Clockwise from top: Anessa Ramsey, Dan Bush, Alex Motlagh and Justin Welborn
“THE SIGNAL”
Justin Welborn, Anessa Ramsey, AJ Bowen
Directed by David Bruckner, Jacob Gentry and Dan Bush
Rated R
For locations, visit www.signalmovie.com
By Kevin Forest Moreau
Two years after it was filmed guerilla-style on the streets of Atlanta during a quickie, 13-day shoot, “The Signal” rides into theaters this weekend on a wave of buzz generated by its reception at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival. (Aintitcoolnews.com declared it “an instant cult classic.”)
Divided into three segments, called “transmissions,” each helmed by a different director—David Bruckner, Jacob Gentry and Dan Bush—the movie explores what happens when a mysterious Jackson Pollack blur of whirling color and noise takes over the television screens of a city called Terminus, stimulating the aggressive and paranoid impulses of those who are exposed to it. The film follows lovers Ben [Justin Wellborn] and Mya [Anessa Ramsey] as they fight their way through a town gone crazy, in an attempt to reunite and escape.
A couple of weeks before its Feb. 22 release, The Sunday Paper sat down with Welborn, Ramsey, Bush and producer Alex Motlagh (who, along with Gentry, runs the Atlanta-based production company POP Films) to discuss the film.
Q Tell me a little bit about the experience of making the movie. It’s low-budget, it didn’t have a distributor—was it daunting to commit yourselves as performers (and director) to something that no one might ever see?
JUSTIN WELBORN: Not even a little bit, man. I mean, this is the work that we do, it’s the work we’ve been doing for a long time, and the idea that we were gonna make a movie at all is always exciting. … I mean, one way or another everybody’s pretty aware that nobody’s gonna see the damn thing that you’re doing, so you’re doing it for the work. The fact that we had ambition with it and that it actually was able, through fortune, talent and the graces, to go somewhere, it’s really neat.
ALEX MOTLAGH: We had a little money, not as much as we would have liked, obviously, but having the limitations of resources, capital, kind of frees you up to be a little more creative. You can’t hide behind effects. If we’re trying to compete with the big Hollywood film that has $100 million, we’re going to fail. We don’t have the resources to do that. We have a guy on fire, we have a mob scene, we have a decapitated head coming back to life, a guy’s head getting crushed in, and these are the cheapest effects, they probably cost us the least to do. Know your limitations, but don’t be limited by them.
What was the experience of working with three directors?
ANESSA RAMSEY: I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it for other people, but they handled it amazingly well. Because we shot so quickly, there were times where we’re on a certain location and we’re shooting, say, Dan Bush’s section. But before we moved the cameras or changed locations, Dave Bruckner or Jacob wants to pick up a shot there.
DAN BUSH: First we had to wrap a location before we could move to another, so everything that might take place in a given location, we had to shoot [at the same time]. And then the second concern was blood, levels of blood.
RAMSEY: So because each transmission was so differently flavored, you kind of have to take a second to put your mind there so you can do that before moving on. But because they were all there at all times, that made it a lot easier to do that.
WELBORN: It was a pretty astonishing juggling act, and I would say that if we, as a collective, had not worked as much and had so many friendly conversations and been so familiar with one another, that it would have been harder for the egos to [be] put aside for the movie to come first.
The film actually had its origins in something that grew out of Dailies [PushPush Theater’s collaborative film project]. Can you describe how it came about?
BUSH: One of the projects that we decided to do [at Dailies] was called “Exquisite Corpse,” [based on the Surrealist exercise in which different artists would contribute parts to a whole]. [David Bruckner] did the first 20 minutes and I was going to pick it up from there. … It was such a sprawling idea, it was almost like “Lost” or something like that, where there were so many different sort of conflicts and characters that it wasn’t really adding up quickly to anything specific. I think Jacob and Alex were smart in taking the idea and going, “Why don’t we do this, but let’s have a specific beginning, middle and end and maybe hone it in a little bit, but use the same kind of process?”
MOTLAGH: I had wanted to do a genre film for a while. And I thought, being surrounded with the talent that I am, that we could do a sci-fi or a horror film. … I had spoken to Dan and Dave several times about genre films and storylines, and “Exquisite Corpse” was something that had already begun and we didn’t have to start from scratch. So we were like, “All right, we’ll just do this movie for cheap, do it in three months, get in and out.” Cut to two years later, we’re still working on the theatrical release—which is awesome.
BUSH: I think at first [“The Signal”] was a little too complicated, and there was a certain element—I’ll just go ahead and say it: We had undead people [in the movie]. There was a time when Ben Capstone [Welborn’s character] was undead and didn’t know it, and was battling hordes of other undead people, these big mob sequences with axes and chainsaws. We finally decided, I think quite reasonably, and I’m glad we did, that that was too much.
RAMSEY: I think taking the zombie aspect out of the movie leaves it a lot more up to the audience to decide what type of movie it is. I think it’s entirely up to the person that’s watching it. If you just want to watch a movie for entertainment’s sake, we’ve got you covered. If you want to think about it, that’s in there, too.
The interesting thing about the movie is that the people who are “infected” by the signal aren’t mindless zombies. They seem logical; they’re pretty easily able to rationalize their actions.
BUSH: That’s the leverage by which we’re able to do some comedy, and Jacob [Gentry] gets away with the comedy because from the signalized viewpoint, it’s not horrific. Is Lewis just defending himself? Are you still defending yourself when you’ve killed eight people? Do you have the crazy or not? Once it starts, I don’t think you can define any of that very easily. It’s like war, in a way.
I think of this film as a prompt, rather than a message. It’s a prompt going, “Hey, what do y’all think? Here’s a couple of questions.” And once the questions are asked, then we’re no longer part of the conversation.