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

I started making comedy videos when I was in high school. By senior year I was skipping multiple classes a day to take the TV production cameras used for sports broadcasts to produce shorts. I went to NYU to study film, but quickly redirected my attention to graduating early and independent production because of the cost. After graduating I made a feature called 'Howeds' with a bunch of my collaborators at the time. I'm very proud of what we accomplished, but I was a bit inexperienced to be overseeing an independent production of that scope. I eventually got to a point where I got a day job making comedy videos at Mashable with Max (Knoblauch, the star and co-producer of Gigging), and we were pretty ambitious with the opportunity. But once the digital media crash hit in the mid-'10s we both became freelancers. That experience played a big role in gestating Gigging.

2) What was the initial idea for “Gigging” and how did it evolve from there?

Max had the initial idea, which was to make a video about a driver who really clung to revering his employer even as his job was kind of tragic. I thought it was a way in to tackle the propaganda we're endlessly fed about worker casualization in the gig economy at large. I think Terence Nance pointed out in his great video essay in Random Acts of Flyness how much of what we watch is essentially about normalizing the exploitive, sexist and racist choices of the currently powerful, or of 'average people' aspiring to do the same, and how much pressure we face to forget that stories really are about what they're about. Since films about people's working conditions can often be very grave, I wanted to make something about the idiosyncrasies, imagination and humanity of precarious workers. And after we shot Max's piece we started to realize that the world needed to expand beyond just his character. The Chunky Bottoms storyline in particular was extremely fun to develop and actually took a bit of research on the soft homophobia of certain men's clothing brands and knocking our heads against the wall to pace out the story. We actually considered all of Gigging it a web series until late 2019, when I got the spark to edit it into a short. Watching the stories interplay together made them each need to function differently in the piece -- Max' essentially setting the theme and tone, Francis' entering into a kind of straight-up narrative, and Lida's working as an almost heightened montage of her go-for-broke character choices. We liked the way they complement each other. Honestly, the main element throughout was that the actors' performances just really excited me.

3) What was the biggest challenge in making this film? And generally what part of the creative process do you enjoy the most, and the least?

The biggest challenge was balancing a resolute commitment to producing the film while remaining ideologically flexible to creative adjustments that suggested themselves over the course of production. New characters, new shoots, multiple re-edits, the ad parodies - often times in production a new idea can first feel like a wrench in the works because of how challenging the overall project is and the perception that complete control is the only thing holding it together. Receiving insight like a blessing in disguise makes it possible. Developing stories with Max was a true pleasure because he's an extremely clever comedic mind. With us that part is pretty old hat at this point, but seeing the actors bring unscripted beat sheets to life was amazing. All that dialogue is basically just Lida, Francis, Ben, Kristen being their naturally charming selves. Many takes were ruined by me laughing while holding the camera, which was actually an issue. And this is the first project in a long time of mine that I've shot, which was very cool. But the thing I think I enjoyed the most was working in the edit towards 'not breaking the spell' -- there are many lines and moments I found hilarious that got cut for functional reasons. Creating art is often a proxy space to work out real personal ideas and issues, and the way the piece challenged me as an editor is probably the thing I'm most grateful for, because just 'solving' for the piece functionally altered my attitude toward my own life position and work situation.

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

Fun question. The films I've loved most recently in my quarantine watchlist have been Chungking Express, Daughters of the Dust, Losing Ground, My Dinner with Andre, and Che. But Che was the one that stuck out the most. The central narrative and production devices of the film are chosen to ground us practically in the immediate, grounded considerations of a highly effective revolutionary who has been Disney-fied as a method to make fantastical his very practical work. Both the heroically presented Cuban revolution and the dismal, claustrophobic collapse in Bolivia both feel equally moving and essential to me. Right now, we're all processing the reality that we've entered a time where our social crisis has become even more apparent, and that what seemed like the big political force advocating for a kind of justice in the Sanders campaign has essentially proven the internal elections of political parties to not really a place where that movement can happen. So when thoughtful films get made about people who are using their wits and imagination to try to create justice and equity in consideration of some of the very painful contradictions that are often forcibly hidden in our world, that's what really excites me. Especially when the form feels like the most natural and creative expression of the story.

5) What’s next for you?

I'm hard at work on pre-production on my next short as we speak, and always looking to write, direct and produce new films. I also write and produce my own music, that's constant. The particular short I'm currently focused on is a romantic comedy about two hyper-competent care/ecology workers, and without going too deep on the story, I can safely say that it has to do with land struggle. I live in LA and the housing crisis is all-encompassing. There's not much more that can really be said about how inexcusable it is that anyone is unhoused, and how directly responsible real estate capital, landlords, political representatives and those enforcing their decisions are for this. Somehow staying at home has become sacrosanct at the same time as renters are facing complete losses of income, and the contradiction is being resolved by existing power through even more debt and austerity. It's hard not to think about those really big, basic questions of: who benefits? Whose land is this? And while those entrenched interests may desperately protect a grotesque order, what can we learn from those who understand that land cannot be 'owned', that our lives are impermanent, and that we can only try to live in harmony with it? I can definitely say that the film I'm working on is motivated by these questions, but I also want to say that making films is only a portion of how I'd like to engage with this, and shout out to organizations like LA Tenants Union for the work being done in this time.

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