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Douglas Horn Back in the Ring for Round Two
by Anup Sugunan

A question I consistently hear aspiring filmmakers ask established ones at seminars and panels is: "What was your first step into filmmaking?" Considering that most of the established filmmakers can only think of highlights and not details, I thought it would be interesting to document the initial stages of a promising filmmaker's career. After viewing Trailer: The Movie!, and interviewing Douglas Horn [article], I had to witness him in action first-hand going from his first project to his second. My main quest was to see what makes his work stand out from the crowd.

So I had the privilege to work behind the scenes on his second short, Back Up, Please [official site]. What I saw on the set made me realize why his short films are so grand in nature. Producer Lisa Guzman ran the set very professionally which allowed Douglas to paint masterfully with his director's brush.

I had a mixed feeling of being completely impressed and it seeming like an insurmountable task which I may never experience - and this feeling was while I was finishing up my first low-budget feature film as a producer, not someone who has never stepped onto a set before.

I then worked with him again on his third project which involved stunt wire-work and was shot on miniDV - again, another set with high production-value. This seems to be a very consistent trait with Douglas which reaffirms my initial inclination regarding this talented filmmaker: definitely one to watch out for in the future.

Filmmaker Interviews: Back Up, Please: a second super-polished high quality short-film!

Douglas Horn: Thank you.

FI: Usually, the rule of thumb is to have a polished short and a feature script ready for studios. I, along with a lot of other filmmakers want to know why you made a second short.

DH: I really wanted to tell this story. I also felt like I should prove myself in a few other areas before I made my first feature. Trailer: The Movie! had very few dialogue scenes, so I wanted to show more range there, also I wanted to expand my dramatic work with actors. These are both for my own comfort and for proving myself to the industry. I want my first feature to be something remarkable that really gets seen. Making Back Up, Please has given me what I need to make that next step.


FI: How?

DH: The only real secret I know is to surround yourself with really talented people. This one went a lot easier than Trailer! because I already had good working relationships with my creative leads.



FI: On your website, you stated that Back Up, Please was inspired by a real-life event. How long after the event did you decide to do it?

DH: The event was a traffic altercation on a Seattle bridge about four years ago. Most cities probably have some similar story. I didn't see it, but for some reason the totally unnecessary nature of that violence stuck in my head. I was curious about how rational people could be driven to such behavior.

What actually inspired me to make the film was a confluence of that idea, plus an idea about how people in a relationship sometimes relate to each other. Somehow the two ideas came together in my mind, and I could see a lot of interesting parallels and contrasts. I think it's fascinating about the transformation that can come over a person when he gets behind the wheel of a car. All together, it quickly formed into a story and characters for me.

FI: What was your time-line in terms of concept to completion?

DH: I played with the idea for some time, then worked on the script till it was what I wanted. Once I decided to do it though, everything came together in just a few months. I showed it to the people I wanted to work with: Lisa Guzman, Clay Westervelt, Paco Farias, Brandon Roberts, and maybe a few others. When they all agreed, we checked our calendars and decided we'd either have to shoot it within six weeks or not for six months at least. So we shot it six weeks later. Production was three consecutive days, and Post was mostly done in a month. From commitment to video master, was probably about three months.



FI: So, you finally had your world and festival premieres recently. Tell me about the audience reaction and yours as well.

DH: The film was selected for the American Cinematheque's "Alternative Screen" series of independent films, so that was the World Premiere. It was at Grauman's Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood, which is just a remarkable place to see a film.

The audience really enjoyed the film. I think when you get that kind of venue, you're attracting people who want to see a departure from typical studio films. The audience definitely connected with Back Up, Please. There were some pivotal moments in the film, where you could hear the audience's response--which is what you really hope for with a story like this. We had a great Q&A afterwards.

The Film Festival Premiere was at The Method Fest Film Festival. I enjoyed the festival because there was such a great atmosphere and everyone was approachable. Unfortunately, there was no time for Q&A after our shorts program, but a lot of people sought us out in the lobby to say how much they enjoyed and identified with our film, so that was very satisfying.

FI: This seems so different compared to twenty-odds fests to which "Trailer" got accepted. Was it frustrating and what would you have done differently?

DH: It's true, Back Up, Please has not had the broad acceptance that Trailer! received. Of course, getting into 20 festivals with a short is rare, so I probably suffer from unnaturally high expectations. What can be frustrating is missing chances to show your work--especially since festivals are the main market for short films. And sometimes there's the double-whammy of getting rejected and later seeing some of the films that were accepted over yours and wondering what the heck is going on. (I'm not exactly impartial!) Honestly, though, I'm much more focused on getting my first feature made, than sulking about the festivals that this short didn't get selected for.

As for what I'd do differently, I haven't really done a thorough postmortem on the film's success or failure yet. In my mind, there's still plenty of time for people to recognize its merit. I think that we might have had a little more immediate success if there'd been a more traditional ending. On the other hand, I think that the ending is one thing that elevates it, so I'd hate to have done it differently just to chase more immediate success.

This is the weirdest business: it ignores and rejects you for years and then it suddenly recognizes you for not having gone away or died yet. I expect that if I hang in there long enough, someday people will recognize what we accomplished with Back Up, Please--just too late to do any of us any good!

FI: Are you getting this one seen without the help of festivals by sending them directly to industry folks who were impressed with Trailer?

DH: The industry response has been uniformly positive. I think that like Trailer: The Movie!, Back Up, Please is especially impressive to people who understand the degree of difficulty that goes into a film like this. This film has opened a lot of doors for me and I haven't even pushed it very hard within the industry yet. This was a pretty crucial step for me because I don't see myself getting a feature directing job from Trailer! alone. But with both shorts, there's a much better case for someone taking a risk on me.

FI: What are the degrees of difficulty (from highest to lowest) for Back Up, Please?

DH: I meant that shooting a film that's mostly dialogue and all occurs in one location is a lot easier than shooting a film with exterior shots, multiple-angle dialogue in a moving car, fight scenes, rolling shots, choreographed Steadicam sequences and the like. I don't ever want the audience to be thinking about the fact that it takes a lot more work to get professional results on this kind of movie. But industry people always remark on it because they know what goes into it.

I won't say which is most difficult. Everything has it's challenges. "Plain" dialogue seems simple because you mostly get angles on actors' performances. But you need to be sure you're really capturing nuanced performance, because there's nothing else to distract the audience.

Steadicam sequences require a lot of blocking. They aren't necessarily difficult, but you have to make sure that everything happens perfectly. And if you're trying to get it all done in one uncut take, then every single thing has to be perfect, because one little miss will throw everything off. That gets frustrating around take eleven.

Dialogue scenes in moving cars are hard because so much is out of your control. On an indie short, you obviously haven't closed off the streets, you just have intermittent traffic control on one street. So you try to get your timing right. Especially so you can shoot different angles and not have it look like you're jumping from street to street between cuts. You've got to manage the car speed, reflections, and meanwhile try to get your actors to deliver their lines with feeling, but also before you hit that huge pothole halfway down the street. It's very demanding on everyone, and if you blow a take, you usually have to pull all the way around the block to set up for another. It makes shooting fast a challenge.

Fight scenes are nice in that you never have to wait to reset and go again. In fact you do that a lot, often without stopping the camera--especially if you're shooting video instead of film. But you have to keep in your mind that every take and every punch is using up your actors. You may want to do something a few more times to get it perfect, but you need to weigh the value of a slight improvement versus making sure your players are still somewhat fresh at the end of a long shooting day. You don't want unconvincing shots, but you also don't want your actors falling apart at the end. Believe me, once they get tired, everything slips.

I've learned to break up fights into pieces, which really makes it easier on the actors and helps ensure you don't shoot things you don't need. On Back Up, Please, we shot everything with one camera, but on Trailer! we brought in a second camera four our big fight day. That really lets you fly through your day. When you get a good take, you know you have two angles that will cut perfectly. You can have the confidence to move on to the next piece without covering yourself.

FI: Please compare the pros and cons of shooting HD versus film (include pre/prod/post stages).

DH: Both really have their advantages. Film is film. You can play with speed effects, exposure, so many things. And if you screw up a little in the exposure, it's amazing how you can pull yourself back. (Not that I'd ever screw up the exposure!)

HD is its own animal. I think the reason that everyone is going to it is that the image is comparable to 35mm and the stock costs are much lower. You basically remove the cost of stock, processing, and telecine from your budget. On anything indie, that's huge because those could easily be your biggest costs. Transfer back to 35mm is expensive but getting cheaper. And on a feature, you don't have to do that until you sell to a distributor. So there are definite cost advantages.

Because the stock is relatively cheap, you don't have to cut so quickly. You can roll through more takes. The pressure is a little less. And you don't have to worry about checking the gate or losing a great take because of a hair. Those are great things.

But you have to be very careful about your whites and blacks. With any digital format, when you hit the limits, everything clips out, so you get a big black or white hole in your picture. With film, you still have some variation you can pull out even at these extremes. The difference is very noticeable projected on a screen. So you really have to protect these areas.

You also don't have any over- or under-cranking possibilities. Panasonic's Varicam does offer this now, but I chose the Sony F-900 because there was, to me, a clear difference in the resolution and color fidelity. Also, at that time, there weren't a lot of Panasonic Varicam VTRs around and the postproduction costs were higher.

HD postproduction is still very expensive. There are lots of wonderful color correction tools available. And that is actually an advantage over film. I know of some productions that are shooting 35mm, telecining to HD for color correction and then doing a filmout back to 35mm. I think that what you'll see a lot of in the indie world soon is shooting super 16mm film, telecining the final cut negative to HD, color correcting and doing a 35mm filmout. That's probably going to be the ultimate low-budget/high-quality solution for a while. Especially while HD cameras are renting for over $1,500 per day. That way gets you a film look, any speed effects you want, digital grading, and a final 35mm print at the lowest cost. And between Kodak's new tighter-grained filmstocks and the HD transfer process, the finished product looks nothing like the grainy 16mm optical blowups we're used to.

One thing I don't see enough of is people treating an HD camera the way they'd treat a film camera, though. A big part of the look of Back Up, Please comes from some physical things we did with the camera: Filtration, diffusion, etc. I think there's a lot of room for experimentation here and that the more of this type of work filmmakers do, the more satisfying and 'filmlike' their HD productions will turn out.

FI: You recently did another action short/promo spot which was shot on miniDV which involved wire work. How was the post-production especially in regards to this?

DH: It was a martial arts-themed video segment for a stadium show sponsored by Dr Pepper and the American Tae Kwon Do Association. Shooting DV was necessary due to the budget and extremely tight post-production schedule, but the tiny prosumer cameras also came in handy in the cramped location. We shot with two Panasonic DVX-100 cameras in 24P mode. I was very impressed with the system--especially the cine-gamma and cine-matrix options.

On set, the wire-work was a blast. We had a very skilled team of riggers and pullers, thanks to the fight choreographer, Dan Southworth. Unfortunately, it was the star's first time in a harness, and even though he performed very well, I think he came away with a lot more respect for the kind of talent required to do convincing stunt performing.

I don't think that DV is a good format for anything requiring a lot of visual effects. The pixels are pretty big, relative the the picture, and there are a lot of compression artifacts. All of these factors make it very hard to get truly convincing wire-removal on a tight schedule. Compounding the problem, we weren't able to shoot background plates for the shots, which meant that these had to be created from the existing footage.

I'd love to direct more wire-work sequences, but I'll be very careful about shooting them in DV. Higher resolution and color sampling really reduce the artifacts and give the digital artist a lot more to work with.

Other than that, however, DV post-production is a snap. We edited on Avid XPress DV, which is very familiar. The built-in color-correction tools made it possible to turn out a polished cut without spending much time. We went into After Effects to do secondary color correction on a few items that we didn't have time to fix on the set. It was nice to bring everything into our color scheme. In After Effects, we also applied an overall color style and film-look. Everything was done on personal computers, which saved the production quite a bit and made the producers happy.

Writer/Director Douglas Horn on the set of Back Up, Please.

FI: Even though it was shot on miniDV, your production value is still very high. Knowing it's limitations, what did you do to overcome it?

DH: Thank you. A lot of people worked very hard for that. That's always the 'secret' of high production values, whatever the budget--a lot of people working very hard.

My own feelings about production value is that the camera format is probably one of the least important factors. What goes in front of the camera, in terms of performances, costumes, props, sets, and lighting are a lot more important that whether you use 35mm, miniDV, or something in between. The fight choreography on this piece was fantastic. The location had a lot of character, and the props and costumes really sold the piece. Richard Alarian, the D.P. did a very professional job of lighting the set and I was also very pleased with the camera work, especially from Seth St. Vincent, who ended up shooting 3/4 of the shots from a Glidecam rig after one of the camera's took a hit with a prop briefcase.

Once you've got all that going on in front of the camera, the shooting format really just dictates how well you can capture what you've created. Of course, that's important, too! When I knew we had to use miniDV, I tested several camera formats and decided on the DVX-100. In addition to the 24P and cine-gamma, it also had the widest lens of any of the comparable cameras. That meant a lot, since we would be shooting in cramped quarters. I think we were also able to coax a little more out of the camera by mixing certain diffusion filters with menu settings. Video wants to make everything sharp, which I don't find aesthetically pleasing. But if you turn the sharpness down, it looks terrible. So we used diffusion in front of the lens and kept the sharpness setting high. This left edges crisp but other details pleasantly soft.

FI: Did working with HD help you in this case or did you feel like it was completely different?

DH: Experience with shooting HD absolutely helped. There's a lot of crossover between the video formats that you might not think about if your only experience is film. At the same time, some of my experience with HD was misleading when it came to DV. DV has much less exposure latitude, so you can compose a scene with too much contrast if you're used to HD lighting. Fortunately, the DP and gaffer were well aware of this and kept us in a very good range.

Also, because of the high resolution in HD, you can compose wide and deep shots that look great. With DV, you are better off sticking with Medium through Close-Up shots because of the low resolution. Go too wide, and someone's face becomes very pixilated. Also, because DV's depth of field is very deep, and the pixels are really big, I don't like the way that deep shots tend to look. We compensated with neutral density filters to open the iris as much as possible, but there's only so much that a 1/3rd inch CCD can do. So we had to compose shots very differently than we would have in HD. Ultimately, I think you have to approach each format as its own animal, even though there are a lot of similarities.

FI: In an industry where one tends to work with a different crew every time, you seem to have the same key personnel in both, Trailer and BUP. Obviously, it worked well the first time so 'why fix it if it's not broken?'. Tell me how you came to meet them and what qualities they had in order for you to work with them again.

DH: I was extremely lucky to meet my core group of Lisa Guzman, Paco Farias, Clay Westervelt, and Brandon Roberts. Each one of them is extremely talented, and being surrounded by that kind of competence and creativity makes my job pretty easy.

I met Paco first. He had gotten his MFA with someone in my writing group, and when I decided to go to LA and start making films, he was the first person I met "in the industry." At the time, he was the vault manager at a postproduction house, training to be an assistant editor, but that was "in the industry" as far as I was concerned. Paco has a very wide base of talents: He has brilliant comic timing as an actor, he's a great storyteller as an editor, and he seems to have a connection for just about anything involved in filmmaking. I couldn't believe the stuff we got for free on Trailer!, thanks to Paco's networking.

Paco introduced me to Lisa, and then to Clay through a friend of a friend. We were looking at several DP reels at that point, but Clay's just stood out, and we knew from talking to him that he'd be great to work with, especially with me being a first-time director who knew less than nothing about making films. Brandon Roberts sent us a reel from a Backstage/West listing for actors. Apparently, that's a common practice because we got dozens of CDs. But Brandon's stood out from the pack. It just had more emotional impact than anything else we heard. When we met with him, it was obvious that we had the same ideas about what was important in a film score.

I probably don't need to say too much about why I keep working with Brandon and Clay. You just need to listen to or watch their work to understand that. On top of how talented these guys are, though, they are very easy to collaborate with. I think Paco is a great editor (he is now the editor for a cable TV show--a long way from running the tape vault a couple years ago) and we work very well together. He brings a ton of great ideas, but still doesn't mind me sitting through all the sessions. I guess the theme here is that all the people I really click with creatively bring lots of great ideas to the project, but can keep it collaborative and fun. Also, all of us talk about ideas for the entire film, not just our departments.

Of all the people who make up the core group, I think that Lisa Guzman is the most rare. The reason that any of us are able to work at all is that Lisa pulls everything together. A producer's creative contribution to a film is easy to overlook because it isn't just one area like acting or cinematography, it's everything. The lighting can't look great if you don't have the lights. The performances can't be their best if you're constantly rushed, understaffed, or worried about getting shut down. I tell Lisa when we're shooting and what we need, and it's there: the people, the permits, the equipment. Plus all the other things that I didn't realize we needed. She thinks everything through for us. And then once the shooting starts, she is great at intercepting all the problems that come our way and fixing them before we have to stop shooting. There have been situations that could have shut us down, that I don't find out about till the end of the day or the shoot just because she solved them and didn't think I needed to be bothered about it. It's rare to find someone who you can trust implicitly with your entire production.


FI: Now, this is completely different compared to your work-for-hire in the commericial/short. How do the two situations compare?

DH: I've had a few situations now, where I come in knowing practically no one on the shoot. To me, there are two great things about working with your friends. First, you're working with your friends--and in this business, the only way you really get to spend any time with people is if you're working on a project together. Second, when you work with people who you have a history with, you don't have to waste a lot of time figuring out how much you can trust each other and how flexible the creative distinctions are.

When I don't have any history with, say, a DP, usually, he'll either have strong ideas coming into the project--and basically wonder why I should even be directing the thing, or else, he'll keep his ideas to himself because he doesn't know how much he can trust me yet. That's pretty much what you're up against until you have a working relationship and some history with someone.

When you work with people for the first time, you blow so much time and mental energy just building the relationship. You have to give people a reason to trust that you're not just going to use their ideas as rope to hang them with, and you have to prove that the producers brought you in for a reason and that you actually bring something to the party as the director. When you work with your own crew, you just bypass all that, and just get down to making the movie.

FI: So, I presume that you have a feature script that you'll be working on next.

DH: A few actually. There are two that I'm really pushing right now. The first is a comedy called TRASHCAN ROMANCE. Some producers have danced around the idea of buying it for a while, but until now, no one really stepped up to the plate. Part of that was my insistence that I be the one to direct it, and my hope to bring in as much of my own team as possible. That's always hard when you're a first time director. However, I'm very happy to report that an independent producer has recently taken on the script with the goal that I will direct and bring in most of my team. She's already made some progress on this, and the odds look good that TRASHCAN ROMANCE will be my first feature film.

While that's progressing, I'm also looking for a home for my psychological/spiritual thriller, DREAMSTATE. While it isn't a ghost story, it has a feel similar to The Sixth Sense, one of my favorite films. I think that the concept and characters will draw a strong cast. But again, it's much harder putting together something like this for yourself to direct and maintain some control over. I'm trying to put together enough of a package at the outset so that producers will trust me to do it my own way.

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