5 Questions with Pete Johnston

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

Like a lot of folks I became fascinated with filmmaking as a youngster watching my older brother make movies with his friend on our parents' VHS camcorder. We had a kid's book about Super 8 special effects that I was also obsessed with. Imagine my surprise when I found out that mattes and double exposure don't work on videotape! Early experiments in stop-motion and later skate videos led to more serious attempts at filmmaking. Now I teach film production at Michigan State University.

2) What was the initial idea for this project and how did it evolve from there?

Early on my plan was to make a straightforward documentary about our annual ice fishing tradition, which I've been a part of for about 7 years now. The guys I go with are all environmental journalists and better and more avid sportsmen than me, and they're also great musicians so we usually end up playing music on these trips. I was shooting b-roll in the lead up to the trip and it was just so warm this year... it was like almost 60 degrees the week before we were supposed to go. I started thinking how this could become an essay about global warming, or about how the fish aren't the real point... then I didn't think that I could even pull that off, so I kind of scrapped it entirely. But hey, quarantine got me revisiting it and trying to cut something together and it struck me that, unbeknownst to us, this might be the last time we get together in a cabin for quite a while. so that gave me a new angle to approach the story with.

3) What was the biggest challenge in making this film? And the easiest part?

One challenge in a first-person essay type film is shooting material while at the same time trying to be in the moment. I hate mediating my own life through a lens... I've gone on vacations where I'm filming the entire time, and when I get home I feel like I didn't experience anything, I just watched it all on a screen. So while we were in the cabin I was trying to capture some usable material while also enjoying my time—finding the balance there. The easiest part was deciding to center the story on the disconnect between our expectations and the reality—a lesson 2020 is banging us over the head with.

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

Well, I've been watching some cool old horror throughout October and one I hadn't seen before was From Beyond; the creature effects are a lot of fun and I was really digging the acting. Rewatched Night of the Living Dead and I'm always amazed at the performances and story in that film—a real low budget masterpiece, way ahead of its time. Just watched Kirsten Johnson's Dick Johnson is Dead and found that incredibly moving, this kind of outlandish premise that leads to some intimate realness and exquisitely beautiful, imaginative sequences. She's outstanding.

5) What’s next for you?

The usual: working on the feature script. I've got another short that's winding through some festivals now, and I just finished a short script inspired by our current moment that I'm starting on pre-production. I'm also exploring the challenges of teaching filmmaking online. The students are pretty resilient and creative, so that inspires me.

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petemjohnston.com | IG: @petejohnst