5 Questions with Courtney Bush, Will Carington, Jake Goicoechea ("The Woodpecker")

Courtney Bush (left), Will Carington (center), Jake Goicoechea (right)

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

We recently found out that one of our friends calls us "the hypothetical friends" behind our backs, because for better or worse our social skills devolve almost immediately into speaking in hypotheticals, like "what if they did this," "then she did this," until we've basically created a dense psycho little narrative instead of actually living, so filmmaking is a natural progression of our bad personalities. In a more literal sense, our background in film comes from a background in literature, which we all studied in some form at NYU, where we met and became friends, and from our overactive imaginations, which we developed by growing up in what we thought were heinously boring places (Mississippi, Idaho, Texas). After graduation we made a web series as a little experiment and in the process became addicted to telling stories in the medium of film.

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

We wanted to make something formally simple that could still capture the type of hyper-specific mini-events we think are fun to turn into shorts. Jake and one of his lifelong friends had recently had a phone call very much like the one in our film and we realized a phone call between friends could be a perfect structure for something like that. At some point, we also became fixated on the way the Ariana Grande song "Knew Better/Forever Boy" just changes at a certain point to become a completely new song. We decided we wanted to make our film do that and have it devolve in the end into a music video / fantasy. 

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

The biggest challenge was finding a CVS that didn’t kick us out when we tried to film. The easiest part was working with Richard Perez, who is a very natural, very genius performer.

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

We really loved Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar. We love buddy comedies about female friendship (shout out to Romy and Michele). Plus this one is blessed with the vibe we miss so much from our distant youth, when Kristen Wiig was in every sketch on SNL and they were all good. There were also surprisingly a lot of parallels to another movie we re-watched recently and think is brilliant: Spy Kids. Both movies feature amazing super villains and kids driving submarines…

5) What’s next for you?

We're gearing up to film a short this summer about a party girl vampire, a basic gay oracle, and a risk-averse vampire slayer. Thinking about turning it into a pilot. The same thing everyone is doing.

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doormatproductions.com | CB > Twitter: @anitagrape | WC > Instagram: @willcarington. Twitter: @willcarington | JG > Instagram: @beingjake. Twitter: @JakeAlwynSwift.