The deadpan experimental film, “Scratch Offs,” introduces us to a young lottery winner who doesn’t seem too excited about his win. We asked director Andrew Lewis where the idea started, about his conception of entertainment, and what comes next for him…

1) Can you talk briefly about your background, and how you first got interested in filmmaking?

I’m from a very small town in Michigan and was into sports, video games, and WWF growing up, like most Midwest males. I think because of my mom, though, I ended up developing an interest in film. She was always re-watching the old movies she grew up with, stuff ranging from Sirk’s Imitation of Life to Saturday Night Fever, and I’d usually watch them with her. It’s not like my mom knew who Douglas Sirk was, or that she wanted to give me a film education, she just showed me the stuff she liked -- and she happened to have good taste! What got me wanting to make films, though, and this is a bit embarrassing in retrospect, was the 2001 James Dean TNT biopic starring James Franco. It aired the summer before I started high school and, knowing nothing about James Dean, I cynically turned it on figuring it would be a corny look at “1950s cool.” Instead, I ended up seeing myself in Dean’s lonely and alienated Midwest upbringing (I was 14 and extremely self-involved, give me a break!). Seeing him then journey to New York, struggle to be a “serious, real actor,” work with directors who were fighting to capture his lighting in a bottle energy, all that shit hooked me. I wanted nothing more than to act and make films after that. And no, I haven’t watched TNT’s James Dean since it aired in 2001, I’m scared too, but it kinda changed my life.

My dad had an old, beefy VHS camcorder from, I believe, the late 80s, so in high school I started hauling that around with my friends and shooting little films all over my small town. I loved the freedom and spontaneity of just finding a strange location and making up a movie on the fly. 

Now I’m here pretty much making movies the same way.

2) What’s the backstory here - what was the initial idea and how did it evolve from there?

Travis (Star and Co-Writer), about a year ago, told me this idea he had for a movie about a guy who (spoilers, I guess) wins millions on scratch offs but then continues living his life just as before -- same shitty job, same cramped apartment, same hobbies -- and doesn’t tell anyone about his winnings. I thought it was amusing, and it spoke to me, but I didn’t really know how to develop it. Months later, I was depressed, in a lonely job, and compulsively playing Sekiro (which, if not familiar, is an absolutely punishing shinobi video game from Dark Souls developer, FromSoftware). After dying thousands of times throughout the game, spending hours memorizing the patterns of each boss, I finally beat the game and . . . felt absolutely nothing. It was such a joyless sugar high of an experience. I was released from the game’s spell and had no idea what to do with my time. Then Travis’s idea about scratch offs came back to me.

I started thinking about some close people in my life who’ve struggled with gambling addiction. Whenever I saw them win, say, thousands of dollars on slots or whatever, it strangely didn’t faze them at all. Like most gambling addicts, they would just kept playing until they lost what they won. The winning didn’t even matter and was never the point, in fact, it seemed to scare them. All of a sudden Scratch Offs took shape. 

3) I’m curious to hear generally how you view the idea of entertainment in our culture, and by contrast, what you see as the role of experimental film?

Entertainment is in a pretty bleak spot! When personality and a sense of lively vision can break through all the money and machinery it takes to make a big film, TV show, or video game, it can be breathtaking. When things like Raimi’s first two Spider-Man films or Kojima’s Metal Gear games came out when I was a teen, it was unbelievably exciting seeing that type of big budget entertainment make tons of money. Now, and obviously I’m the millionth person to say this, there doesn’t seem to be much room for anything besides billion dollar franchise films that are written in corporate board meetings and previs’d to death before the director is even hired. TV seemed like a thrilling place for awhile, but now everything feels like a six-episodes-too-long, turgid and grim Netflix series. I just can’t do another one of those! 

What’s the role of experimental film in all this? I have no idea. Even in the indie/art-house/festival space, and I’m generalizing here, it seems like you can only be experimental and weird within certain “professional” and budgetary standards. It’s a wild to me that we all carry HD cameras in our pocket, and yet, you’re not seeing the big festivals flooded with amazing films shot on a cell phone for $10. 

Feel free to tackle this question in whatever way you wish: what do you want people to get out of watching this film? 

People can get whatever they want out of it. But if someone watches and ends up thinking about the connections between monotonous jobs, limited means, and the isolating compulsions that arise out of the lack of human connection, that would be cool. 

4) What’s a film you’ve seen recently, new or old, that you really loved and why?

American Gigolo. I hadn’t watched it since I was a teenager and really getting into film (it was also, believe it or not, another of my mom’s recommendations). At the time, I found it a bit dull and, outside of the amazing “Call Me” opening sequence, not nearly as cool as I was hoping for. Re-watching it recently, though, I was blown away. It’s basically the “Jeffrey Epstein Movie,” almost twenty years before Eyes Wide Shut. It so well captures the thrill of beautiful surfaces and pure material joy of having everything. Richard Gere's male escort character, Julian, is the best lover, the best looking and most charismatic, has access to the finest things and the richest people. But at the end of the day, even he is no more than an expendable tool for the depraved people in power -- he can be impersonally tossed aside and replaced at any moment. And there’s nothing he can do about it, because, as Julian is told late in the film, “the other side will always pay more.” 

5) What’s next for you?

I’m developing a low-budget feature, called The Empty Lot, about a jobless guy in the Midwest scrambling to take back money his destructive, now-dying, father once stole from his family -- before it gets repossessed by the bank. It’s a melodrama full of romantic interludes, pratfalls, and comedic family squabbles. The film is very, very loosely based on a similar episode in The Brothers Karamazov (Book VIII). I made an adventure video game teaser of sorts for the feature that was included in Cosmo D’s “The City,” shown at A.Maze Festival in Berlin earlier this year.

I live in New York, so the last few years I’ve been going back to Michigan to make these NoBudge shorts. Currently, outside of the feature, I’m building a small group of collaborators that I can work with to make the same kind of simple, inexpensive shorts here in New York. So if anyone is interested in collaborating, please let me know! 

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Instagram: http://instagram.com/andrewjlewis