original self-portrait//red bucket films words//kristina carucci

After showing as part of the Director’s Fortnight at Cannes (their second feature in two years to do so), Red Bucket Films’ latest project, Daddy Longlegs, was one of three films chosen by the Sundance Festival to be released into 40 million homes via video-on-demand. Walking into the Red Bucket Films studios, tidily filled with objects, was like entering a highbrow game of show and tell, emphasis on the (story)telling.

Alex: We love objects that tell stories. We have a collection of things we find in the streets. Which is very related to our films because a lot of our inspiration comes from things we see happening on the streets.

Josh: We try to take advantage of any opportunity to tell a story. Sometimes even with a a wrong number and you’ll hear somebody talking to a stranger for five minutes. But you just keep them going so they think they are talking to Roy.

How did Red Bucket Films form?

Alex: We met in high school in New York and it was clearly a place where we didn’t feel like we were the norm. It was like, “In this whirlpool of high school-ism, who can we latch onto?” We found each other in our mutual sincere and quirky desire to express. There was a finding of other people who look at the world in a funny way.

Benny: But we all took different paths. I almost became a physicist. The more we started hanging out with each other, the less I was interested in the actual math than the storytelling behind it.  We all left separate ways, but we were still holding on to each other and sending emails or packages or whatever, keeping it alive.

Where did the idea for your “Buttons” project originate?

Alex: We started carrying little cameras–

Josh: You got the Casio! We are talking about 100 dollar pocket-sized cameras that you could either take visual notes… or make a movie.

Benny: We would make a short ten-second movie about these funny images, like a tractor broken down in the middle of the street.

Alex: So we started accumulating all of these little moments and started posting them on our site. We were just doing it for ourselves and we didn’t think people would necessarily think it would even be worth watching.

Josh: The name “buttons” was a very utilitarian, pragmatic name. It just was like, they were loose buttons on the website.

Benny: On the first website I didn’t know how to make another page, let alone a button. The first website just said the name and had an enormous scroll wheel. Eventually it was like okay, we can have buttons! So we can have pages, and literally we scanned in like 1800 pages. All of a sudden your screen would be filled with pages. Then we said we need to bind them together.

Is that where the inspiration for your book layout came from?

Josh: It’s always been a book, kind of. We like to think of the book as this anarchic kid in a library, who found this book that had no reference number and he was not allowed to take it out, so he just photocopied everything.

Alex: The website for us is a 24-hour outlet. I think it’s really important for everyone to have that.

Your website features some commercials for big name companies. How do you approach those as opposed to your other shorts?

Josh: We approach every commercial job we get as a platform…We have an innate desire to create weird imagery that makes you stop and say, “Is this real? Is this right?” Anytime we have a job in front of us, it becomes a canvas for us all to throw out ideas to come to fruition. Sometimes we have an idea and just use the job as an excuse.

Was that the situation with your Kate Spade ad, “Ice Cream Soup?”

Josh: Absolutely. Alex and I, when we were in high school, wanted to set up an ice cream soup shop on this empty lot. We were going to have his grandmother run the shop and we were going to be the churners. We were approached by Andy Spade to do two short films in exchange for him funding one feature. We were in a space about a quarter the size of this on the second floor, and you should have seen it. It was a 13-foot space and the cart was 13-feet long when it was built… We had to build a cooling system–we had no idea what we were doing!

Benny: I had to find a dry ice supplier, which we had to go pick up at 6 in the morning.

Josh: And we had to amplify this toy piano. It was like we were in Santa’s workshop. We did this weird video series while we were building it, about being electrocuted. But they made us take the cart and go around during fashion week. They got their money’s worth.

How did this translate into your first feature, The Pleasure of Being Robbed?

Josh: We met with Andy and we wanted to do this other short film. We started shooting Andy’s idea about this character who stole identities instead of stuff. I have a hard time just taking someone’s story and making that. I wrote this 40-page script and proposed it, and said it would get cut down. We didn’t know what we were getting into. We started shooting it, and it became very serious and we realized we were getting involved in a much bigger project. We didn’t know until we were editing that we had a feature-length film.

Your features are shot on 16mm with a lot of handheld camera work. I even read that you snuck a Bolex into the Central Park Zoo.

Josh: The Pleasure of Being Robbed, we shot in Central Park Zoo. They didn’t actually want that much money–six thousand dollars to shoot a pretty simple scene. Then they did not want to be associated with it at all. We told them we were making a movie called Sonny’s Wish. [laughs] So we said, “Never mind,” and entered the zoo as customers. We had the camera at the bottom of a bag with a false bottom. The sound guy was walking around with his large “mp3 player” and he was just a guy with a microphone.

Brett: Everything is done guerrilla style, even if not so crazy as shooting in the museum, just because it works with the language of the movie and the way that the actors perform. For the most part, we just show up and do it.

Josh: It’s another way of involving yourself in the fabric of things. It forces you to be incognito. It forces the actors to be more real. I really like that element of illegal activity. We had this film teacher who told us a filmmaker is one notch above a criminal. He needs to lie, cheat, and steal, and if he’s not willing to do that, then he shouldn’t be a filmmaker. It’s a dirty art form.

As the director, how and why did you decide to cast yourself in one of the main roles?

Josh: I wrote myself into the movie, who I would be. I was terrified of acting. When I was trying to find something in somebody else, Brett and Sammy suggested that I play this role that I just wrote as myself. But that’s the beauty of it, you have to expose parts of yourself if you want it to mean anything. It was a very natural decision. Benny is more of an actor than I am, I can only play like two versions of myself.

The Pleasure of Being Robbed did really well in the festival circuit last year, including Cannes. What has that been like?

Josh: Surprising. You don’t know when you throw a rock into a pond what kind of effect it is going to have. We had been submitting our short films that were really naïve of what was going on in the film world. That developed a certain relationship with some festivals. We sent it to the director’s fortnight at Cannes and they took a real liking to it.

Benny, your short, The Acquaintances of a Lonely John, was coupled with The Pleasure of Being Robbed in screenings. Was that always the plan?

Benny: That was a complete shot in the dark. I did it very secretly; I was very ashamed. I sent in two movies that had very similar titles. They rejected the other one, but because they had similar titles, they rejected what they thought was both. Then I get this phone call and they told me [it was  accepted into Cannes]. I couldn’t believe it.

How did the production of your new feature that you co-directed, Daddy Longlegs, differ from The Pleasure of Being Robbed?

Josh: Daddy Longlegs was a much more traditional way of getting a movie made, but by means of being the least traditional. We wrote a 44-page story–it was very organic.  I have a lot of respect for how something so accidental can be so impacting, I’m very grateful for that.

Benny: We set out with a huge agenda and we decided we wanted to make a feature-length movie, and it’s going to get from here to here. It ended up differently than we set out, but that’s good. We were trying to say a lot of things.

Josh: The script is pretty much dialogue of the stimulus that we are going to throw at them. We did a lot of takes in this movie, which drove us into the hole money-wise. A lot of scenes did not have dialogue written out. Memorizing things is very bad.

The story revolves around two young brothers and their divorced parents. How much is the plot based on your real-life experiences?

Josh: The movie is extremely emotionally inspired; it’s not literal. We just went on CNN and they took a very news line spin on it: “You two were kidnapped by your father–what was that like?”

The idea of reality vs. realism: you pick certain things from reality in order to get to realism. It’s an investigation of why memories form. What kind of programming was our dad doing in order to deprogram what our mom was doing? What goes into these desperate actions?

Benny: We wanted to give somebody else the same memories, emotionally, that we had. In order to do that you have to heighten it and make things extreme.

Your main actor is a director in his own right. What was it like directing him?

Josh: This father character played by Ronnie [Bronstein], who made this awesome movie Frownland. It was like war. We are talking about a guy who is very much a strong director himself. We would have these arguments and conversations about the shooting for the next day. It was never a sense of ego, but a sense of ideas. He pushed each scene.

Benny: Even though he is a director, he is not an actor. Scenes had to have intensity for him. Sometimes he would stop and just say, “I can’t do this right now.” And that was mostly because the scene wasn’t working, and we all knew that. That helped us a lot. We would have to stop and go back to it like two weeks later.

Josh: We shot 30 days straight, pretty much. I really am an advocate for wearing yourself thin. Because when you are thin, all of your ideas are coming out in pure form.

How important is it to you to shoot on film as opposed to digital?

Benny: Depends on the subject.

Josh: We approach every medium with this sense of risk. I think film is really beautiful and important because it forces you to sacrifice. And you hear it in your ear as a cinematographer. There’s this door open–it’s the film gate. There’s a certain pragmatism to the camera… there’s no monitor. It’s like a tool from another time, in that regard.

Benny: There’s something to be said about shooting something and not being able to look at it right then and there. You just have to accept that you got it based on performance and conversation. The fact of going back and watching it, I think, hurts it in a way because you need to develop trust in what you are trying to say. We couldn’t really afford dailies while we were shooting.

Josh: It’s debilitating. You are giving up your life for little pictures. You need instability, to be threatened, in order to get to something important. There’s something to be said about the idea that what you’ve been doing all day could just disappear. It’s all so precious. I like that.

You all seem so comfortable with verbalizing the ideas behind your work!

Josh: To me the problem is that you make this movie, but there is so much more you want to say about it. If anything, movies should propel conversations. We talked about the film for God knows how long. Sometimes I feel like we can never actually get to the core of the movie. To us, it feels like we are not capable of talking about it.

So what is next for Red Bucket Films?

Josh: It was kind of crazy making those two features back to back… A lot of things. A short film when we get back from Sundance. We want to open a museum, a 12 by 12 place of stuff.

Alex: We want to make new potato chip bags for prisons.

Josh: Instead of nutritional facts, it will be a story.

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Daddy Longlegs is now available on cable Video On Demand, under the “Sundance Selects” category. Official NYC Premiere is at Bam Cinematék in Brooklyn January 28th. Look for wider theatrical release dates within the coming months at www.daddylonglegsmovie.com.

The Pleasure of Being Robbed will be released on DVD on February 9th. The DVD will feature a brand new poster and a musical commentary track. Visit www.redbucketfilms.com!