I don’t want to overstep or anything, but is any of this autobiographical at all?
Hozie: A little bit. Do you mean Jack?
Yeah.
Hozie: The main autobiographical elements are dealing with death, the mourning aspect of the movie. My mom had passed away about a year or two before making the movie. That’s how we were able to finance the movie. She had left me a tiny chunk of change, just enough to make this movie.
Oh my God, I’m sorry.
Hozie: No, I mean, it’s okay. It’s been a while, but thank you. So yeah. I didn’t turn to cam-girls or anything but I understand how people use addictions and stuff like that to get over things. There’s a version of the movie where it could have started with Jack going to a funeral and then you see that he’s really lost. Then he starts gambling and visiting the cam sites and stuff like that. In Hollywood movies, they give you one reason why a person is the way they are. I wanted him to just be into cam girls. It seems like a more honest way to deal with it. I’ve never been into cam-girls so that’s fiction. I’ve never had a super gambling problem, either, but I do love gambling. I would say he’s 50% fiction, 25% me, and 25% Peter. When I see certain things, I’m like, “Oh, that’s definitely me!” I literally told Peter to say it exactly like this and he’s almost pretending to be me. Then I see other things where I’m like, “Oh, that is so Peter.” I think a lot of when he’s courting Scarlett, He’s really trying to be sincere. That is you getting a glimpse of how Peter would actually talk to someone he was falling in love with. That’s one of the things that’s crazy about movies. They’re undeniably documentaries no matter what they are. You’re studying a person’s mannerisms, but you have the fiction as well.
I didn’t think it was real, real, but it just felt so authentic that I knew that there had to be a piece of truth in there.
Hozie: Well that is my apartment right off the Seneca stop. The whole movie’s in that apartment almost.
“I think my main ambition for the next film that Ben and I do is that Ben doesn’t have to drive the van.”
Oh, that’s amazing, I was going to ask about that. Something I was really curious about is with the cam scenes between Jack and Scarlett, were they just acting in the scenes themselves or how did that work out?
Hozie: It was more done like a live happening kind of feel. So my apartment has two bedrooms and there’s a kitchen in the middle. So in one room is him and in the other one is the cam girl set with all the pink walls and sex toys and stuff. They’re just talking over Skype or whatever it was we were doing. Then I would have one camera on my shoulder, in one of the rooms filming them. It was important for me for the acting for it to actually be real and happening. I also wanted to be able to pan and show the A character and then be able to see another person on the screen so the screen itself becomes a character. I didn’t want to have to do green screen or any of that. Then in the other room would be my girlfriend and bandmate would be there with a smaller camera kind of mimicking what a webcam would see. We would switch back and forth.
David: Did we ever actually switch back and forth, I felt like each part of the film was clearly one character POV or the others.
Hozie: It does once it goes to Julia’s POV. I’m in her room for a little bit. Not a lot but it’s at least a day in there.
