In a way, this all started back in high school, in an art classroom, painters-turned-filmmakers Andy Duensing and Chris Doyle meeting there. Better known now as the pair behind the collective the Deagol Bros., Andy and Chris, working with longtime friends and fellow artist-musicians Eric and Jordan Lehning, have spent from production to final cut the last five years of their lives making the at turns poignant and goofball, genre-defying coming-of-age indie Make-Out with Violence.
As chronicled in journalist Jim Ridley’s feature story for Nashville Scene, the production was beset early by stumbling blocks. Budget limit halts of production, wear and tear on the seams of friendship and at least one very ill-timed break-up roughed up the filmmaking journey. Yet despite these trials, the high school friends, not knowing if they’d ever have another opportunity to make a feature, sought to tell the most distinct and interesting story possible.
Pulling from memories of growing up in a much more rural Hendersonville, TN than exists now, Andy, Chris and Eric, all working from separate cities, began a script crafting process that would, in its final stages, blend styles of many seeming opposites. One part comedy, one part drama, another mystery and the last (very small part in the scope of it all) horror, Make-Out with Violence tells the story of teenage twin brothers Patrick (Eric Lehning) and Carol (Cody DeVos), who after the disappearance and death of their friend Wendy (Shellie Shartzer), diverge in their paths toward after high school futures. While the somewhat obsessive Patrick tends to Wendy’s barely animated (read: zombie) corpse, Carol chases, much of the time ineptly, his elusive, tender sweetheart Addie (Leah High.) Told through the eyes of the brothers’ younger sibling Beetle (Brett Miller), the story unfolds with a necessary level of detachment into its punchy and disconcerting yet graceful, moving conclusion.
With its deftly-handled blends of style and score, Make-Out with Violence is at its best as an experiment; it’s both familiar and unexpected, nonchalant and thought-provoking, slapstick comic and full of all that’s yearning and desolate. As such the film in its festival run so far has had both its fervent champions and its quieter skeptics, those who really appreciate its many layers and those who stand in some confusion as to what is ultimately being said here. It’s undeniable, though, that whichever side holds greater sway for the individual filmgoer, Make-Out with Violence leaves a person wondering deeply, and just a little happier afterward for having seen this mix of ideas, images and songs. As Andy puts it, “There’s a certain amount of room there for the viewer to experience the movie in whatever way they want.”
Talking here in phone conference, Andy, Chris, Eric and Jordan share stories about the film’s development, particularly the crafting of its memorable original soundtrack — the disc length of which is longer than the film itself, “by quite a bit” says Jordan, who worked alongside Eric to compose all of the tunes. In the background of our conversation, Kevin Doyle, one of the film’s directors of photography, folds origami DVD sleeves for screener copies of the film. He does this for a full hour while the four others of the film’s creative core talk.
How do you sustain passion for a project over such a long period of time?
Chris: If there’s one thing that’s kept this together, it’s that we really are close friends. We’ve been friends for ten years. It’s kind of like we were from the Make-Out with Violence world, and for a lot of crew that would come in and out, crew that were hired hands, they would accuse us — everybody who knew each other from the actors to the creative team — of existing in this bubble that they could never really get into. We were very collective and stayed together.
Luckily, when one of us would lose interest in the movie, somebody else would always keep the fire alive; nobody ever gave up all at one time. There was always somebody who rallied behind the film. That’s not to say everything ran as usual. There were a lot of obstacles, some of that being also the fact that we were all in a difficult time. We all moved back to home to make the movie, and we all left different things in order to do that. We pigeonholed ourselves into committing all at once.
Eric also likes to talk about how it was almost like we were in thirteenth grade, that we reverted back to the way we were then.
Eric: For me personally, all of the mistakes that I didn’t make in high school, I made in this Make-Out with Violence we invented. It was a time of baffling stupidity.
(laughs) I’d like to talk about the writing for a bit. Considering that you were writing from three different cities, how did you combine all those efforts?
Andy: Initially, when Chris and I started working on it, we had a general idea of a high school age movie that would take place over this amorphous period of time, the summer, and it was always based on our experiences from one degree to another.
Chris: We wrote a treatment that was just really rough, just the things that we would want to see in a movie like that. Because Eric was the only one of us who was a screenwriting major, the prolific writer among us, we said, “Can you write a screenplay based on this?”
Andy: We’d initially never really thought of making a horror film, but [Chris and I] both considered it…Chris knew that [co-writer and actor DeVos] was really interested in horror films, and that was just fortunate, that he is a good writer, got a perfect score on his SAT.
Chris: So we had four versions of the script going at one time. Then by January 2005, Andy and I were to fly out to California to meet with Eric so that we could finish the script and compile the best ideas from the four different versions. Andy ended up not being able to come, and so Eric and I just took all four versions, laid them out and tried to make sense of them.
Andy: Also, when Chris and Eric were out there working in San Francisco, and we were telecommuting in a way through e-mail, the music, which was always just an idea, really started [coming together.]
Talking about the music, I really love the way you guys not only handled the scoring from the beginning but also the way in which you focus on it for the Web site. I really appreciate those in-depth score notes, and I find the music so pivotal here, particularly because there had to be such stylistic diversity.
On this, how did you go about creating the score, and how does it inform the way in which you all see the film?
Jordan: I had a ton of direction in where to go with the tunes and a lot of the transitions from song to song and song to score…There was the pop song aspect which would sometimes segue into score. I always really liked the idea of really poppy music that’s both dark and interesting.
Eric: We started writing songs before we started writing the script, before the story was put down completely. So I was writing lyrics while I was scripting basically, and that was a really interesting way of pouring thoughts out.
Chris: We also lucked out that Jordan had been working in music for basically four to five years, and because he was in the studio, he was able to change up the music when he needed to. There were a lot of old demos from high school that he’d never recorded; Addie’s songs in the movie are basically Jordan’s demos that he’d been recording before he’d gotten involved in the project. When he wrote with Eric, he had a specific sound that would work for Patrick or Carol, but then when Jordan writes by himself, he does something differently in the working process. So there was a body of music that we could pull from, and that really helped in shaping [the film] because we were cutting to the songs, either right at the edit, or he’d go back in and re-record songs to fit the edit. So it was constantly a give and take. The songs were always evolving, and that made the process a lot more interesting than what it started out as.
There’s a pastiche quality to the film, with its huge amount of alternating humor and bittersweetness that weave in and out of themes of loss, obsession and coming-of-age. In the editing process, how did you guys balance between those styles and themes?
Chris: In general we tried to go with whatever we felt was interesting in a scene, and we had a lot of help from our editor Brad Bartlett in terms of getting a fresh set of eyes. He cut an assembly for us initially, and because of working other paying gigs, he’d come on and off the production whenever he was available. He definitely has a totally different cutting style than either Andy or I have; so he’d cut a scene for us, and then we’d go in to cut it. Then he’d re-cut what we had cut. We’d just go back and forth, keep changing like, “Let’s see what happens if we take this out. Or what happens if we throw these two scenes together.”
In a lot of ways we didn’t know if it was working. It seemed to work for us, but for a while we were worried that the movie would seem herky-jerky; it changes genres so quickly. In our initial test screenings, it seemed like people felt overwhelmed by the whole movie, but it seems like—the movie didn’t really change all that much in terms of editing—through Eric and Jordan doing the sound and music, they were really able to use that to orient you, to tell you what you’re supposed to be feeling and where you are storywise.
Seeing as you all have been artists working in different forms for so long, I wonder what you see as the specific purpose, or even perhaps necessity, of film that differs itself from other art forms. Why are you compelled to make films?
Andy: I really enjoy painting and working as a painter, but I think it’s really difficult for people to look at paintings anymore. Paintings are single entities, and they demand the presence of a person, whereas film seems like it connects more with a variety of people because it exists in time as a series of images and sounds. It’s a much more common way of getting information today, and so it’s much easier to relate to. And, on some level, it’s more interesting an experience to consider making art for an audience.
Eric: For me [making movies] is the most exciting way to tell a story, and I love telling stories, imagining other worlds. Movies are a space in which you can actually adventure, make it anything you want it to be.
Chris: I basically agree with Eric, that whole idea of creating worlds. One of the things I feel is of interest in other filmmakers, people who have a very distinct point of view, is that they are able to portray that cinematically, to make movies that have worlds that can only exist in a movie.
Then down to the practicality of making a movie I like the idea of making things in a collaborative way. That’s always interesting for me. Jordan and I have been doing some work together, whether it be creating a painting or working on his album. When we get together, it’s just about trying to combine all that.
Collaborative art making and filmmaking is not uncommon, but when it comes to directing, it’s a work method we’re seeing more and more of. With all the Sundance alumni—Quentin Tarantino, Todd Haynes, Kevin Smith—we seem in the recent past to have gone through this hyper-auteur stage of American cinema, and it’s nice to see that changing a bit. What is your theory on collaborative filmmaking as not a future rarity but as a common role, especially among the independent set?
Andy: Initially we thought that if we worked as a collective that if any one of us got out there, we’d all get out there. Then once we actually decided to make the feature, it became an actual necessity. In order to shoot a scene, Chris and I were constantly having to change roles; he’d be directing while I’d be producing, scouting a location and vice versa. So I can definitely see that as [a viable working method.]
The equipment now for low-budget filmmakers hoping to make film on a Sundance level is also at a higher level of production. But, you’re always still limited by time, resources; having more people working on a project on a higher budget level allows you more possibility and freedom.
Chris: Also, working on a low-budget, independent level, I don’t think any of us could have made this movie by ourselves…The fact that you have a group of people relying on you for your part forces you to rise to the occasion.
The hardest thing about trying to get everybody on the same page is in having to figure out when decisions have to be made and who gets to make the call about that, just so that you don’t wind up in arguments that last for hours and hours. The four of us, and my brother have been working on the movie the entire time, and we really learned quickly how to work in collaboration with other people and figure out what our boundaries were. That’s sometimes been a difficult process. That’s especially been difficult for me at times in working with Eric and Jordan on the music; I know nothing about music, so it’s hard for me, if I have a strong opinion about what goes in, to justify that, especially if they’ve spent days working on a song. If a song didn’t emotionally fit a scene, there was a process I had to learn to rectify that, some sort of shorthand [I had to learn]. If we wind up making another feature, we’re definitely all in a place now where it’ll be a lot easier to do.
As a branch off on that note about your brother, there seemed to be a lot of family involved in multiple capacities on this film. With that said, I wanted to ask Eric a bit about the acting and particularly those scenes played against Jordan.
Eric: Originally I was going to play the character that Jordan plays, and Cody was going to play both brothers, but his stand-in dropped out of the project like a week before—
Jordan: The night before.
Eric: We were basically picking up all of the film equipment, and we got the call from the stand-in to tell us he couldn’t do it. I didn’t know I was going to be playing Patrick, so I just had a really hard time finding that character. Halfway through the second shoot I felt comfortable doing it.
Acting with Jordan was pretty easy. The only thing that was strange about the scenes between he and I was that Andy and Chris were wanting to do some goofy brotherly stuff; I guess we’re kind of goofy together as brothers, and they wanted authentic brother bullshit. That was tricky to pull off, and I don’t know if we did or not.
How did you like the acting?
Jordan: I thought it was fun. I had a good time.
Eric: Jordan was much more natural, I think, in his role.
I do love the hard-fought anger that’s infused into the part of Patrick, that always under the radar anger. I never felt as if that was discontinuous, and I really appreciated that throughout the performance.
Eric: We had a really good editor.
Everyone laughs.
In anecdotes of levity, what are each of your favorite memories of the shoot?
Chris: I enjoyed watching our friend, DP James King drive his pick-up truck into the front of my car. It had a generator in the back of it, and it looked like it was going to land on the hood of my car. Luckily there was a two-by-four in the bed of the truck that stopped it from smashing. There was just a little damage to the bumper. So that was kind of exhilarating to watch happen.
Andy: I don’t know if this is my favorite moment, but it was definitely one of the most ridiculous. We were in the middle of shooting, and I got a phone call from the funeral director at the funeral home that we were getting ready to shoot at as the very next location, and we had gone through a lot of trouble with him to let us shoot at the home, to let him know that this is not a slasher-horror film. I guess he was very concerned about their image. So right in the middle of this shoot, I got this call, and he was absolutely furious because someone (I won’t say who) printed a request for extras in The Tennessean, which is our local newspaper here in Nashville, that said something to the effect of, “Summer blues got you down? Come cool off with a zombie. Be an extra in a movie.” It basically went on to explain that people could come be in this great zombie movie. So this funeral home director, who we had spent days and days convincing that this was not a zombie movie, was now not going to let us shoot there, and we had, like, an hour before the shoot.
Chris: Just to clarify we didn’t try to mislead people that it wasn’t a zombie movie, but at that point we were having a really hard time trying to describe what the movie was going to be like. So when the funeral director asked what it was going to be like, we gave what we thought was an accurate description at the time, especially because we weren’t thinking of Wendy as a zombie but more as a ghost trapped in a girl’s body.
Andy: Basically in order to be able to shoot there Chris immediately left the set and re-wrote our screenplay so that it would appear much more tame.
Chris: It was pretty stressful at the time.
Jordan: I remember, talking about favorite stories, one night, we were supposed to go in to have a photo shoot the next day—
All the filmmakers laugh in the background.
And Eric had cut his hair the night before—oh, yeah, he said that Mom cut his hair, told these guys that she did but that she had to leave off when in fact—and I think he and I went to go get Taco Bell for everybody and on the way out, he was driving, and he said something like, “I feel like a scarecrow. I feel like a scarecrow,” which cracked me up completely–when I asked, “Did Mom cut your hair?” he was like, “No! She didn’t cut my hair. I tried to cut my hair this morning.”
So, I guess that’s my favorite memory.
Well, here’s the thing: Any day that we knew that we got what we were going for was my favorite day. It was just such a long experience and felt like it was never going to end, and so any day that we knew we weren’t going to have to go back and do that again I felt really good.
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