5 Questions with Caleb Swyers and Kegan Swyers

Kegan (left); Caleb (right)

When a strange customer requests a ride home with a pizza man, the resulting trip turns into a metaphysical freak-out. We asked “Pizza” writer/director, Caleb Swyers, and co-writer, Kegan Swyers how the project came to be, how they form their ideas, and going wild in editing…

1) Can you talk a bit about your background, and how you first got interested in movies?

We grew up in Indiana in a pretty strong Christian household (that is probably obvious from Pizza). Most of our time was spent at church events, or at the Christian university where our dad worked. Both of our parents loved watching movies and so we watched a lot of movies growing up. One of our fondest memories was watching the Kill Bill Volumes with our Dad. We weren't too interested in make movies until we saw the work of Michel Gondry and David Lynch. We definitely respond to their surreal visual styles, but there's also something about the way they employ comedy that's really fun.

2) How did this project start? How did you start putting it together and how long did the whole process take?

Our DP, Tyson, had the really funny idea of a man ordering take out so that he can get a ride home. We took his idea and simply wrote a bunch of nonsense around it. We weren't too worried about story. We just wanted it to be interesting, or at least interesting to us. As far as time, we tend to work pretty slowly. We like to step away from projects for a while and then come back to them. It prevents us from going down rabbit holes. The whole process, with all of our stops and starts, probably took a year and a half.

3) It’s interesting because the first part of the short is pretty straightforward, at least editing wise, and then about half-way through it starts deconstructing... was that always the idea? What was the thinking in starting simple, and then going crazy?

Once we build a decent foundation for a project, we tend to looks for ways we can pull that foundation out from it. We do that in every step of the process: writing, filming, and editing. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. We did write the script to deconstruct the way it does, but the trick was making it feel like it was deconstructing for a purpose and not just because we could. We also found that we need to give the viewer some solid ground to stand on before we pull the rug out from under them. Otherwise, the viewer is a bit more apprehensive to go on the journey with the characters. We had a lot of ideas of where we could go with the deconstruction, but most of those decisions were time and budget related.

4) The film is so much about the editing, I’m curious about how you get to that point. Like, what’s your writing process / how do you write scenes that you know are going to be really fragmented? How much of this was pre-visualized?

Because we are both editors by trade, we enjoy that part of the process the most. When we were writing the post car crash scenes, we tried to think of pieces that we thought were funny and had some tie-in to the Pizza Boy's life. We deal with a lot of unnecessary green screen footage and the moments between takes in our regular jobs, and we thought that incorporating those types of moments would be a fun direction for this short film. Because we're so used to seeing those moments in our jobs, writing the script came pretty naturally to us. Dividing the moments up to feel more chaotic was a little trickier. Our approach was to treat the fragments as one scene and then periodically change the location. We didn't need to previsualize on this short (although we do previsualize on a lot of our other projects) because we had a very concrete idea of how we wanted this section to play. Most of our stuff is abstract, so we're used to dealing with fragmented scenes. Part of that is a cheat, but it's mostly because we don't like a lot of exposition. The original script was pretty on-the-nose with the theme. But, we didn't want to come across as trying to make some point, so we cut those moments. Most likely, it's just confusing, but our mom said she liked it.

5) What comes next for you? Any new projects in the works?

We always have a lot of different projects in the works. Kegan is working on an MFA in creative writing at the moment. I'm working on a script for a feature, and we've started production on another short film.

Bonus question: what’s one of your favorite movies, new or old, that you saw for the first time this year?

Definitely Panos Cosmatos's film "Mandy". That movie reminded us why we like movies.

Contact Info:

Caleb Swyers

IG and Twitter: Twitter @crswyers