Category: Greg’s Interviews

An Interview with James Merendino, Writer/Director of SLC Punk (But First, A Review Of The Film)

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SLC Punk (1998)
Written & Directed by James Merendino
97 min.

I could never identify the groups in my high school.  We certainly had some jocks, potheads, and even a few hanger-on goths.  But punks, I don’t know.  We had a kid with a mohawk; he was a fucking asshole.  And we had a bunch of kids who loved punk music—a lot of them had safety pins in their clothes and dyed hair, but they seemed to really like some band called AFI, which I always thought was the American Film Institute.  By the time I was in high school, punk music had completely soaked into the mainstream and everybody had heard of Pennywise and Bad Religion.  It was in vogue to go see Henry Rollins do his spoken word shows in Ann Arbor, and if you were really cool, you already liked Bad Brains and Minor Threat.

I didn’t care about any of that stuff and I was tired of every local band sounding like Green Day.  I was like the James Duval character in SLC Punk—the social diplomat.  I could be friends with anybody.  I was too busy getting into movies and figuring out my own depression to bother committing to some specific clique.  Plus, the fashion of punk seemed so childish to me.  It’s music; I don’t wear it, I listen to it.  But that being said, we didn’t have nazis or rednecks either.  Well, everywhere has rednecks, but our punks didn’t beat them with bats.  Our punks were nice kids (except for that mohawked loser) and they got good grades and loved their parents.  They went to Michigan State University and were proud to do so.
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The Bet Still Stands, Larry David: An Interview with Indie Filmmaker Sam Henry Kass

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Through the annals of film history, we generally look to the 70s as the epicenter of the independent film explosion.  And while filmmakers like Coppola, Scorsese, Altman, De Palma, Spielberg, and Lucas were the respective patient zeros, this ‘golden era’ really only marks a midpoint in an evolution that began much earlier and has continued on into today.  There have always been independents and they come in all shapes and sizes.  I like to say the best independent film ever made is The Empire Strikes Back.  It’s ironic to think that the epitome of big budget, effects driven, Hollywood cinema could be considered independent, but it is—and Empire’s spirit, and Clerks‘s spirt, are one and the same.
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An Interview with B-Movie Filmmaker Jack Perez

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You might not have heard of Jack Perez, or his many aliases, but you’ve probably heard of his work.  Jack directed Wild Things 2 for TriStar and the pilot for the popular cult TV show Xena: Warrior Princess. His film Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus is a staple of the B-movie resurgence of the last decade.

Jack has one of the rarest jobs on earth—he’s a working director in Hollywood.  The DGA represents just over 14,000 directors.  They say in SAG about 5% of the union is working—I’d probably halve that when talking about the DGA.  And remember, for every one of those 14,000 there is literally thousands upon thousands of people dying to get in.  Directing is an elusive job, everybody knows a director makes a movie but almost nobody—lay people and cinephiles alike—really have any idea about what the job actually entails.
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An Interview With Jeff Krulik, Documentarian Extraordinaire

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There was a period in film history, after the advent of the VCR and before the Generation Y takeover, where people traded VHS copies of their movies on an underground circuit that spread all over the world.  The modern incarnation of this is the ‘viral’ video, or, a video that racks up a lot of views on YouTube.  But, if you’re old enough, you can remember a time when this was essentially done by hand (or, if you’re a Y-er, you can Google it).  

There’s something romantic about it really.  Each video had to be copied with noisy machines that spooled magnetic tape around heads that needed to be cleaned and would break after so many revolutions.  Each tape was an artifact adorned with the fingerprints of the previous owner, or in many cases, the filmmaker himself.  It was personal and exclusive and you had to be in the know to be blessed with a particular video’s presence.
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