/ Don't hate the media, become the media.Jello Biafra

Had you always intended to play "Derrick" and do you think you will appear in more of your films?

Definitely not my intention. It was one of the last roles we needed to cast and Blim actually had the idea. I thought he was kidding at first, but after a few times messing around with the character, I felt pretty comfortable and he and Alex Loynaz were really helpful in that process. I used certain young right-wing talk show hosts as a jumping point with his demeanour. I like shows like Majority Report and The Michael Brooks Show, progressive radio/youtube shows that make fun of the alt-right a lot so that helped. As of now, I would probably act in other people's movies but not sure if I would put myself in another.

You co-wrote Mondo Hollywoodland with Chris Blim & Marcus Hart, how important is the collaborative nature of filmmaking for you when working on a film like this?

It's everything. The role of the director is overrated. It's all about collaboration for this film and any film other than maybe very experimental personal films that don't involve actors. I had worked with Marcus in the past on several films and we originally came up with a basic structure and narration of the original VR doc version. Marcus is an incredible thinker, so he was able to really help me try to convey what I was trying to go for with the Titans, Weirdos, and Dreamers angle I was constructing. Having him around is like having William Goldman around; he knows how to immediately fix what's wrong with a scene or sequence, almost always finding how to have a scene have more purpose that serves the overall point of the entire canvas. He has "writer disciple" which is very rare and absolutely crucial.

Then when Chris came on board, we'd work on the more narrative side of what happens to characters mostly comedically - our very bizarre sense of comedy. Even if no one else thought it was funny, we at least knew we thought it was funny. I can't imagine writing a comedy without other people; you'd lose the funniest part of it, which is laughing when trying to write it.  Aside from comedy, Blim's extremely creative mind let the film expand into sci-fi, fantastical elements that really kept pushing the film further outside the box. He has the sense of someone like Terry Gilliam or Tim Burton; he doesn't just have a vision of the abstract, but the capability of making that abstraction a reality by putting physical elements into sequences and scenes. Case and point being the chair in Mondo. Then, once Blim and I realised what we wrote needed more structure because so much of it was just nuts, Marcus came back into the writing process and helped us with structure, which is probably the most important aspect of writing movies. There are 7 character's stories in the film so it was a delicate dance of how to go back and forth between stories. We knew it would always come across as experimental and "not structured," but also knew if there wasn't structure underneath that, regardless if the audience was aware, none of it would work. 

I could go on and on about all the talented people in the film and why collaboration is so important. Blim and I, for the most part, were the only crew members so I'm mostly referring to the actors and music. So many of the actors improved their lines; a very high percentage. We'd write a scene and then let them know what the basic framework was. The very talented Miranda Hart, who plays Paloma, was kind enough to introduce us to her friends at UCB so, suddenly, a big chunk of our cast was UCB improv actors, making collaboration even more vital when acting out those scenes. Watching someone like Miranda or Alyssa Sabo (Daphne) who is up there with Gilda Radner is always very fun because you know they're giving so many things you couldn't think of in the writing room because they're two entirely new people now being a part of the conversation of what the film is evolving too. All the actors brought something else that didn't just involve acting, but storytelling as well. 

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Where did your passion for filmmaking come from?

I guess there are a lot of stages to that. When I was a kid, family members would put me in the direction of films here and there; my cousins introduced me to Goodfellas and gangster films at a really young age and I loved that. I even made films when I was about seven and eight on those video cameras from the 90s. As a young teenager, in the summer of 2003 or 2004, I was going through some personal stuff and started to become obsessed with films that dealt with finding hope in adversity. That's what really opened it all up; I must have watched over 200 films that summer, starting with the top 250 IMDb list. Whenever I watch any of those classics, I always think of that summer. Then, in my 20s, I got really into politics, human rights, foreign policy, and so on and that morphed my film obsession into docs and films that tackled political issues. Now, I'm probably in some other stage of my passion that I'll understand more in ten years.