5 More Questions with Stephen Jacobson
The drugged-out tomfoolery meets existential meaninglessness that is “Country Boy” follows two young men on a quest to find their ideal pick-up trucks in the parking lot of Bass Pro Shops, and generally be reborn in 2019. We asked director Stephen Jacobson what inspired the project, how it came together, and deep YouTube…
1) This is quite the left turn from “Hardware.” Can you talk briefly about the inspiration to switch gears stylistically? Was this film planned out in any significant way, or just f-cking around, going where the mood takes you?
Hardware was one thing, stylistically—and I don’t really ever plan on doing the exact same thing. I think it’s a strong start of putting real ideas into my work after making some real stinkers in college. I definitely want to carry certain elements forward in all my work, but I think I’m aiming to keep moving toward making movies that are darker, more entertaining, create more drama, and explore further into characters. Hardware is also the biggest thing I’ve ever done. Country Boy’s budget was the price of the clothes we got in the thrift store plus mushrooms from the grocery store and the fudge we bought at Bass Pro Shops. Ryan (the DP on Hardware) comes to visit once a year for about a week, and leading up to it we said we’d make something. My idea was that we were going to set up something a little more manicured, and I was going to try to cast some of my coworkers in it. That turned out to be too much planning for the moment. Country Boy didn’t start until Ryan had been here for a few days and we had been watching so many homegrown stunt videos that our brains had rotted an ideal amount. The movie follows a very loose structure that consisted of about 5 bullet points. Hardly anything was written out. I’ve always been interested in “deep youtube,” but Ryan coming to visit prompted us to sit down in a group, with Ellen (my girlfriend), Ryan, and myself all on vacation from our jobs, and flood our brains with content. The main appeal of the “found footage” format, if you want to call it that, is that at a certain point, you cannot differentiate it from something that’s found deep on the internet. The goal was for it to be real. All three of us are inspired by the outsiders online who experience the world in a completely different way, who live incomprehensible and absurd lives that we get just a small window into, leaving us to piece things together. And I’m sure that all the time Ellen and I have spent watching Beavis and Butthead, among other things, plays a role here too. In the end, we were mostly just fucking around, but we were committed to the characters. It helped that we defined the characters in such broad terms, that if they were more lucid in some parts than others, it fits their unreliable mental state and warps time in a way that supports the movie.
2) Can you talk a bit more about “deep youtube” — how you find these videos, and what makes them compelling?
Ryan came to our apartment and we let him take the wheel with the Roku. Our main influence is a character we found who’s a bit of a homegrown stunts folk hero. Among the group of people he did stunts with, he was the most removed from reality, and the most eager to destroy his body with reckless abandon. We weren’t brave enough to incorporate that aspect into Country Boy. He also has some “sketch” videos that are purely removed from reality in a way that’s hard to describe. The plots are totally incomprehensible. We see vague impressions of where he lives, and there’s all sorts of weird shit in his bathtub. I kind of want to keep him a secret, but if you search for “cutbonestunts” on youtube you’ll find him.
3) It was filmed over a couple days. How long did it take to edit? Were there scenes you removed or significantly trimmed down / altered? You listed 3 directors on this project — what was the collaboration like between you, Ryan Ackelsberg and Ellen Stringer?
The movie was trimmed down a decent amount, but I didn’t have it in me to cut it down any more. I know that’s ultimately going to end up preventing more people from sitting down to watch it, but I know it’s still watchable because I rely on Ellen to be brutally honest after I’m heads down into editing and she would’ve vetoed if it wasn’t. It’s important to spend time with the characters to absorb their mental state, just like we’ll watch hours and hours of youtube to try and broaden our image of certain characters. And the format made it easy to just use the highlights in chronological order according to the plot, so editing was pretty much a breeze, but it still took me a couple months from shooting to lock it down (we filmed for a few days over New Year’s). I thought about doing some color grading, but there was no point. Mostly what was removed were small bits and some repetition. Something I wish we had more of was Ryan’s character, which was my favorite.
For the most part, “collaboration” was me and Ryan acting stupid for hours in our apartment, with Ellen chiming in to tell us something that was funny or worked or didn’t. In the conception stage, we were all a part of absorbing the content that inspired the movie and thus had a stake in having that vision realized. Mostly the process was just seeing what came out when we turned the camera on. We sunk into our characters after that and a dynamic became more clear. It was hard to plan much before we started doing that that. Ellen helped with the edit as a pair of fresh eyes. I truly have no idea if something is passable until she sees it.
4) I love the music. You did the score yourself? How do you compose — making music for specific places in the edit, or do you already have the music and then slot it in where it fits?
The music, for me, really helped tie things together. I recently financed a synthesizer, which is probably the best film scoring tool you can get. I imported the movie into Logic and fiddled around over the scenes where it made sense until I had something that fit the mood, and provided us with some distance from the characters. It really helps it be a little more palatable. I’m really proud of how it turned out, but I guess I shouldn’t be shocked. You can make a score out of playing one note with that thing if you wanted. The royalty-free music we used in the scenes was there to make us feel like acting stupid, and I was a bit worried it would be too annoying or wouldn’t make sense, but it was fine.
5) I’m curious to hear a little about your life when you’re not making a movie. Where do you live? What’s your day to day like; do you have a regular job, etc? What else do you do to pass the time?
Ellen and I live together and both work Monday–Friday jobs. I shoot and edit product videos for a home and garden decor wholesale company. We go out with friends and watch lots of content—lots of stupid reality shows. I have gamer brain so I fry my brain that way as well. I play music a lot but I mostly just mess around. I live in Richmond, Virginia. That’s my life!
Contact Info:
Email: steviejay721@gmail.com