How to Make a Movie

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My boyfriend is a writer/director. He’s been making films for over ten years and his first feature, Mars, debuted at SXSW in 2010. Mars is a love story that takes place in space and stars Mark Duplass, Kinky Friedman, Howe Gelb, James Kolchalka, and Don Hertzfeldt. Geoff shot the entire movie live action, then animated the living shit over the entire movie with a program he created. If that is not badass, then I don’t know what is! The film has traveled all over the world in the festival circuit. Geoff is also currently one of the filmmakers remaking Richard Linklater’s indie classic Slacker and was selected as one of Filmmaker’s 25 New Faces of Independent Film.

I am not a director. I’d like to think of myself a writer though? Last year, I made a movie in my head that starred David Byrne, Danny Elfman, Bryan Ferry, Robert Palmer, and Peter Gabriel. I one time remade the intro to Twilight Zone by putting on a suit and burning a cork to draw thick Jewish eyebrows on my face in order to look like Rod Serling. I once made a science experiment that involved Ecto-Cooler and dirt.

With our qualifications combined, Geoff and I created a script titled Loves Her Gun, that he’s planning on shooting this summer. We started talking about movie ideas one day (Geoff had been itching to start a new project), touched on the subject of young twenty-something women and the anxieties and real dangers they face (ahem), and decided we were going to make a movie! BAM! THERE YA GO! THAT’S HOW YOU MAKE A MOVIE!

Loves Her Gun is a “cautionary tale of transformation, crime, guns, and hipsters”. I’ve never been good at the elevator pitch, so I’ll try to tell you what it’s about:  So there is this girl, right? She lives in Brooklyn and she dates douchebags and she gets robbed one night. And then she decides she wants out of NYC so she heads to Austin and….OH, F THIS! I’m just going to copy and paste what Geoff wrote:

Q: How far will a well educated, underpaid, twenty something Brooklyn hipster go to sleep through the night again?

A: TEXAS!

The narrative film follows Allie as she leaves Brooklyn, New York running away from a violent attack and an uneasy social life. She hooks up with an absurd band of karate rock musicians from Austin and embarks on a fast paced road trip across the south. Once she settles into the slower paced slacker lifestyle of central Texas, she finds new friends, work with her hands, a crummy place to live on the east side, cool water to tube in, and several new love interests. Despite all this some of the same old problems follow her. After the BBQ’s and skinny dipping parties, there is still crime, and possible violence against women is a legitimate fear anywhere. As Allie struggles to find new ways to feel strong and in control here in her new environment, she walks the fine line between reasonable self preservation and paranoid withdrawal. As she spends more time on the shooting range than she does in her apartment, can she maintain healthy relationships, or will the weapons she uses to protect herself actually cause new problems worse than the ones she was fleeing?

We’re really excited about the project and already have a team of people on board. We put the film on US Artists late last night (kind of like Kickstarter for filmmakers) and already seeing some dough trickle in. It’s super low budget in the traditional Austin mumblecore filmmaking way and should be tons of fun! It’s kind of cool to not be on the personal assistant side of filmmaking for once.

(not really sure how to format the video below, but you can also watch ithere)