SXSW Film Interview: Bryan Poyser, Unlike His Characters, Does Not Do Despicable Things

So, we think we know the answer to this question, but do you have any siblings?

I do. I have a sister.

Our relationship is nothing like anything in the movie, thank god. We get along very well. She actually lives here in Austin. But the one thing that I did draw from was the fact that we sort of had these fantasy lives as kids. We'd come up with these fantastic worlds and write stories about them and make little maps and stuff of different lands.

And so in writing this script I just thought about what would happen if one of us took that and actually turned it into something. Would the other one be jealous? Would the other one be resentful? Would they want to be included? Something like that. But in terms of the real contention, it's not from my sibling relationship. But I've had close friendships in the past that have approached sibling-like relationships.

Another part of it is creative people, by their nature, are competitive. You know, the camaraderie you have with fellow filmmakers, you know you're also competing for the same amount of attention, the same amount of interview time, the same amount of accolades. And so you sort of get into this competitive thing, even with people that you're friends with.

So again, I sort of drew on that sentiment. Because you know the two brothers are writers, writing very different kinds of stuff. And just kind of thinking here's a brother who hasn't been successful, his older brother has been and he's so hung up on the fact that he's not successful that it's actually preventing him from doing anything.

You mentioned that it is uncomfortable comedy. Did you intend when you started out writing the film to make all of the characters sort of despicable?

[laughs] Well, in a way, yes. In a way because I wanted to make the movie where the characters, I don't know, the movie is autobiographical to some degrees in the sense that it's about things that I've done in my past that I maybe don't feel so great about or things that I thought about doing and then thankfully thought better of doing and didn't actually do.

I don't know, I'm always interested in making a movie that scares me in some way. You know, like that's interesting to me, that drives me to do it. And in a way like making a movie that you know when you're writing it is personal or autobiographical, it's scary. You're putting yourself out there. Even though it's going to be somebody else embodying those aspects, but you know it's going to make people wonder. Is he like this? Has he done this?

So I think, to me the characters aren't despicable. They do despicable things, but each one of them in a way is really trying to do the right thing. But they're trying to do the right thing both for themselves and for other people. Because for every one they maybe feel like they've made the right decisions for someone else. And with Diana, her character, she kind of feels like she's been holding herself back in a way, to try and help
Rudy, and she's just like done with helping him. And she just wants to help herself, and feels like she deserves it at this point, you know? So, she does what she does and then it has ripples and it has negative side effects, to say the least.

And even with Rudy, he's trying to hold on to some shred of dignity or some shred of power agency in his life at a point when he feels completely powerless. He doesn't have a job, he doesn't have a home, he's splitting up with his wife, his brother is just successful beyond any real measure, beyond where he can really deal with it. And so he's trying to just get his life under control in this really ridiculous, insane, and terrible way. But that's what he's trying to do. He's trying to make himself feel better. And in the process, ruins other people's lives.

We agree with you that the characters aren't despicable. The things that they do are despicable. You do find yourself during the film like wanting something to happen that's good. Like wanting Alex Karpovsky's character and Heather Kafka's character to be able to actually live out this life that hopefully will be this fairytale romance. But you definitely get that from their characters. And they do do horrible things to each other. So you mention that some of the actions in the film are things that you've thought of and possibly your conscience kept you from doing them. Have you ever had anyone after a screening come up to you and say, "That's me, I've thought about doing that sort of thing,"?

Not really, but the whole thing with Rudy being in the house, witnessing this love affair that comes right after him, I think if you've lived a certain amount of time, you've had relationships that ended. And you wonder, where does that person go after me? What are they doing? Are they enjoying themselves? Are they having a better time than they ever had with me? And those thoughts just sort of drive you insane. Rudy is given an opportunity to sort of witness that, and see that, and really see exactly what happens with them. And when the next man happens to be his brother, it's even worse.

I've never hidden in a house and tried to sabotage someone's relationship. I have been trying to tap into a more universal sense of relationships; people feeling like they did the wrong thing, they wasted their time, didn't try hard enough. I think everybody kind of feels that way when you're looking back at the wreckage of a relationship that has come to pass. You're left with a lot of second thoughts and in this movie, it's Rudy trying to do something about that.

Definitely. It's interesting because that aspect of it might force the audience to consider what would they do in that situation...

Yeah. It's an uncomfortable comedy in that it delves into areas that maybe you don't want to. You don't want to be in that space. A lot of people when they're watching a movie are like, Rudy should just leave! Why doesn't he leave? He should just get out. This is horrible. What is he doing to himself? And I think other people who are like‚ he should kill them, he should stab his brother. How dare his brother and his ex-wife do this? They should be punished. But I just wanted to ride that line; not have Rudy do anything too insane or too violent. I definitely didn't want to go towards that area, just because I felt it would kind of turn into a genre movie or turn into a revenge movie. And then Rudy would no longer be a relatable person, at least to me, and he becomes a movie character who's trying to kill them. I wanted it to be psychological violence. His final revenge on them is that he doesn't actually do anything. He just sort of lets it play out and lets them discover the evidence and come to terms with what they've done.

There are moments during the film where I kept wondering, "Is this going to take a turn for a more violent, more sadistic ending?" But it didn't and it really made it even more uncomfortable, because that;s what you would expect.

And that was my challenge. That was the challenge for myself in writing the film is that rather than taking the easy way out—which is to turn it into a real thriller where he's trying to kill them and they're trying to hide—how can I make something that's surprising that doesn't go where you think it's going to go, but still make you feel something. Still make it tense, suspenseful, funny, and disturbing. That was a bigger and more exciting challenge to me than just have it become this movie where he's stalking them in the house.

I heard that before you started filming, you kind of had Chris and Alex and Heather stew in their characters for a little bit?

Oh yeah.

What was the motivation behind that?

Well, it was mostly because I'd never had a chance to do rehearsals before. So I'd mostly written the script for Chris Doubek, who plays Rudy. I'd worked with him a couple times before. Alex and Heather sort of came into the project later, after I had cast Chris and found the start date for the movie and knew that we were going to be shooting it. So I took the month before shooting to rehearse.

And so I'd take the three of them and we'd spend time in this office building at the Austin Studios that was empty at the time. We basically had the run of this empty 10,000-square-foot office building. And we would do like relaxation exercises, we would do theater games, improv games, mirror exercises. We didn't actually work on the script that much because it was more like, okay, we have one month to try and make it convincing that you three have known each other for decades. You know, like the two brothers were supposed to have known each other their entire lives, Alex and Chris knew each other a little bit but they were mostly strangers, and then Heather was new to all of us. So it was rather than figure out how you're going to say this line a month and a half from now, let's just try to make it feel like you guys are a family.

I had them create these secret handshakes; that's one of the first things that I did. I had them develop these incredibly elaborate secret handshakes with like using their legs and spinning around and high fives and low fives. And each pair would have their own set of secret handshakes. And so I would have them do that at the beginning of every rehearsal session and then in the midst of doing rehearsals and scenes, I would have them while they're doing their dialogues, doing those secret handshakes. Again, to just kind of get that comfortable, familiar feeling with each other and with each others bodies, even, so that once we got up to Park City and had to start shooting—we had to shoot really fast—that report had already been built. They knew each other, they knew what the point of every scene was, we had broken it down and got to the essence of what is going on underneath a scene that's not in the dialogue but is just in the interactions. And once we kind of had that down and we were all speaking the same language, shooting seven pages a day wasn't easy, but it was doable.

At that point I didn't have to do a whole lot of directing with them, because they knew their characters we got up there. I would also rewrite the script based on those rehearsals and go into different directions. That kind of came out of rehearsals. I'd never done that before with any of my other projects, and I just really wanted to try and see if it worked. See if it had results. It really did. The days of me casting someone the day before and trying to get a good performance out of them is over, I can't do it anymore.

But you know, I will if I have to.

You can definitely tell. Each of them individually gives a really great performance. Everything seems true to what that character would do in that situation. But also collectively as a group they work really well together.

Yeah. And it's interesting because we shot the Park City scenes first, and then we shot the Austin part. So the Austin part, when you're first introduced to the characters, we had already gone through shooting, you know, where the movie goes to. We had already gone through the ending in Park City. And so then in Austin, we kind of knew where we were headed, so I could change things and I even rewrote some scenes and before we started shooting in Austin to make it more cohesive with what we had done in Park City. I think it made the report between the three of them more believable, too, because they had been through that experience in Park City already when we started shooting the scenes in the beginning of the movie.

On the same line of character, I suppose, we should talk a little bit about the house. Because the house itself kind of plays a character in the film also.

Yeah, totally.

So, we know from the really cool Monofonus booklet about Lovers of Hate how it came about, but other people may not have seen that. How did you guys get a hold of that house, and what's the story behind it? I guess.

Bryan: Well, I work for the Austin Film Society, and we have parties up at Sundance every year for filmmakers that we've supported through our grant programs and other programs that get their movies into the festival. So, in 2008, after we had one of those parties at that house—which is owned by one of our board members, actually it's owned by the ex-husband of one of our board members, but they get to split it, so he gets it during the first half of Sundance, she gets it during the second half—I spent a night there, and spent some time in the house alone, because everyone was out watching movies and I just kind of started exploring, and it is that big, actually bigger. There's rooms we didn't even get to shoot in and ones that didn't make the final cut of the movie, because the house just goes on forever. There are so many rooms, so many hiding places, and I just kind of thought, wouldn't it be really cool to shoot a movie here, and to live here while you're shooting it. There's enough room for a crew of 10 people to live there and shoot a movie. And, just the idea of Chris Doubek—who I had been wanting to write a role—hiding in this house, and trying to ruin a relationship. I just had the idea of him + the house = something that is both fun and interesting to me, and something doable.

So I wrote the script, not knowing whether or not Deborah Green— who owns the place, or who, co-owns it, with her ex-husband—was going to let us shoot there. I kind of craftily I wrote a part in it for her son, Zach. And I didn't feel gross about it, because I spent some time with Zach, like, we watched an episode of The Wire together in their media room.

Watching The Wire with someone is an automatic bonding experience.

Yeah, and I could tell that he's a really funny, cool, interesting kid, and that if I could just get his personality on screen, it could really work, and so, I wrote that part in the movie for him, thinking that would be my trump card. And, that's kind of how it ended up happening, where at first she was like, "Oh, Tom, my ex-husband, doesn't really want a bunch of people there, a bunch of strangers, so I don't think we can do it." And then Zach found out that his dad had said no, and was like, what do you mean no?, I want to do this; say yes! And so then they're like, okay, you can have it for two weeks after Sundance 2009, and we found that out in November of 2008, so basically we had two months to cast the movie, raise the money, get the crew together, get everybody up to Park City, feed them, and make the movie. And so, we did. It was super fast. I mean, I wrote the script that summer, the summer of 2008, and I asked her in September/October and she said no, and then she said yes in November, and it was just like. So alright, I thought, I guess we're going to do it, I guess we just have to put all these elements together, and it was incredible how quickly it all worked out and if we hadn't been able to shoot in that house, I don't know what we would've done. The house is such an integral part of the movie. I wrote it for that house, I wrote it for where all the rooms are. And if that hadn't worked out, I don't know. We just got so lucky, at so many points in this whole process; it's really kind of incredible.

It's amazing that a film can be borne out of just, you know, this palatial residence; like saying to the house, "I must write a film for you!"

Yeah, yeah, because I knew that the next movie I was going to do, I was going to have to do, for nothing. I had been working on this other project, and we were looking raising hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars to make this movie, and it was just, like, I don't know how to do that. I can't do that! I know how to raise a few thousand dollars to make a tiny little movie, so let me just try to focus on doing something like that. But, if we could use that house, and use Park City, and use snow, that would give the movie a sense of scope that I wouldn't have been able to get just shooting something in Austin again. So, yeah, it was all calculated, but I think calculated in a way that made sense for the story.

Totally.

You know, that's kind of the point of the story, is to get them in that house and see what happens.

What was the most difficult thing about the process of Lovers of Hate, from start to finish?

I don't know. It was weird. Actually, raising the money was not that hard, just because we didn't spend that much, so we didn't really have to put that much money together. Probably the hardest part was getting through the first draft of the script, which took me four months, and then, getting through the first cut of the movie, which took another four months. I cut it by myself at home and it took me four months to get through the first pass and then two entire months for this guy David Mallory, who came in and helped with cutting it down to a watchable length. I think it was just sort of sitting with that footage because I had never cut a feature before. It was all just out of financial necessity. We didn't have the money to hire anyone and I didn't want to ask anyone to do it for free because it was going to be a lot of work, so I plugged away at it on my own. You know, it's weird. In a way, it was kind of one of the easiest movies I've done, in terms of not taking that long and getting a really good team together both in front of the camera and behind the camera. It's been kind of... it hasn't been a breeze, but comparatively speaking, it kind of has been a breeze. The other things that I've done have been so hard. The first feature that I did, it was very hard at every step and even the production of the movie was really tough on me emotionally. Whereas, on this movie, I actually had a lot of fun on the set. Even though I was really tired and working really hard, I was enjoying myself. The rehearsal process was really, really fun and everything that's happened with it since has been amazing and fun.

The film has been sold to IFC and premiered Friday on video-on-demand, correct?

Yeah, yeah, I guess. I mean, it's so weird.

Can you talk a little bit about that sale process and what your expectations were for the film and how it's played out since?

From the beginning of making this movie, we knew we were making something that was not going to have an easy sell commercially because it doesn't fit neatly into one genre. It's not a straight-ahead comedy, it's not a straight-ahead drama, it's got this weird suspenseful element to it, it wasn't going to be starring anybody famous, and we were going to make it for very, very little money. So given the state of the independent film world right now, there are so few buyers for movies like that anymore. There's fewer now than there were even three years ago. So, both the chances of it selling and the amount of money that we were going to get if we did get lucky enough and actually sold it... we had to basically tailor the movie for that. So we budgeted for getting an offer that we could actually say yes to. IFC is one of the few companies out there that's actually still buying movies like this and taking chances on things Lovers of Hate. We kind of tailored the production, in a way, for that. To sell it to an IFC.

Getting into Sundance basically just gave us that amazing boost that made it... basically it made it that all of the people who maybe would potentially be interested in buying this movie would see it. They would see it at Sundance, or they would see it right afterward. Then with IFC, the great thing about the deal that we made with them is that it's launching at SXSW, which is a festival that I have been part of for years. I used to work at SXSW; I've lived in Austin since 1993. I've gone to pretty much every South By since 1995. They've shown all of my work, pretty much; every short feature that I've done. Launching it at this festival, having it be part of this festival and putting it the Paramount, it's just really great, all of this stuff coming together. I think even IFC are trying to figure out how this whole video-on-demand thing works. I hope that the attention the movie got during Sundance and will get during SXSW has got at least the name of the movie out there enough that people, if they come across it on their cable box, will take a chance on it.

And the reviews that we've received have been really fantastic. I think in a way it's like we're moving closer to this model where, for small indie films, we use the film festival as a true launching pad for the release of the movie, for the distribution of the movie, rather than the traditional way where you show it at a high-profile film festival, maybe it plays a bunch of other film festivals, and you accrue enough awards and reviews where finally a distribution company is like, okay, we'll take a chance on that movie. I did that with my first movie. It played at Slamdance in 2004 and then finally in 2007 it came out on DVD through a small company that then folded a year later. I just did not want to repeat that. I wanted to launch the movie, get it out there, get it to as many people as possible, starting as soon as possible, because I want to make another movie. I don't want to spend a year, or two years trying to get people to see this one.

IFC is a brand in itself. With the Sundance brand, the SXSW brand and the IFC brand on it, I think it'll hopefully make it so that people take a chance on it and see whether or not they really like the movie. It's interesting to be part of the experiment. This is definitely part of the experiment of, like, how do you do things in this new model? The independent film world that grew up in the early 90s is pretty much gone. It just doesn't work that way anymore. So what's the new model going to be like? What's the new way where you're going to get people to take a chance on tiny little movies? Hopefully this will be it.

Beginning simultaneously with the start of SXSW, Lovers of Hate, as part of the “Direct From SXSW” partnership will be available on the movies-on-demand page of most major cable systems for 30 days, including Cablevision, Comcast, Cox Communications, Time Warner and Bright House, and will be available in approximately 40 million homes. If you don't have the chance to catch it at SXSW, you can check it out from your couch!