On Saturday April 21, AtlantaFilms.com raged abuzz with the news that the Atlanta Film Festival blimp had been stolen by a soldier recently returned from Iraq. The theft came as a protest to the “blood for oil” theme of Alex Orr’s Blood Car a satire about a vegan elementary schoolteacher Archie Andrews who, to compensate for the fact that no one can afford to drive anymore as gasoline prices have climbed upward to $30 a gallon, unwittingly develops a car engine that runs not on wheatgrass as he hoped but rather on blood. Entranced by the sensual Denise, who swaps Archie sexual favors for car rides, the normally peaceful teacher falls into a murderous rampage to feed his sexual escapades. Despite the absurdity of the high-concept film, the protesting soldier Ron insisted that the film be pulled from its screening before he’d return the AFF blimp.

While it seems now that the scenario was an elaborate prank, the social message of the stunt drove home many pressing issues about freedom of speech in the arts. Ironically, an over-the-top, fun film with incidental social commentary stirred serious questions, consequently playing both the jester and king of the film festival.

The morning following the packed Atlanta premiere of Blood Car, cast and crew members of the film—Alex Orr, Adam Pinney, Tony Holley, Hugh Braselton, Mike Brune and Katie Rowlett—gathered to talk about the filming process, the script development and why it is that they all make films. The conversation runs as if at an Old Boy’s club; there's lots of laughter, little in-depth reflection and a general sense of how good-natured this particular group of filmmakers are as friends and creative collaborators.

SM: In terms of the socio-political bend of the film and the way the satire is being used, do you think that it’s meant to be taken seriously?

Alex Orr (Writer, Director, Producer): If you don’t read the synopsis of our film, I guess you could take it seriously if it’s not agreeing with your politics, but ultimately—we definitely have a political agenda—the film is to make fun of the politics of the situation. It’s more for a laugh. It’s not like our movie is going to change anyone’s mind about policy.

Adam Pinney (Writer, Cinematographer, Co-Editor, Producer): We hope people take it seriously but as a joke off them taking it seriously. It’s a silly movie; it’s ridiculous. So, I wish there were people protesting, and I wish the guy who stole the blimp—I hope he’s real.

Hugh Braselton (2nd Unit Director): It would have been nice if he’d showed up. He wouldn’t have done anything different last night, but it would have been nice.

Orr: I posted on his blog, but then he didn’t accept comment. It didn’t go up, but they were arguing about what’s American in this either, “You’re with me or against me,” philosophy of looking at the war. It’s a Rush Limbaugh way of just poking at people to get them fired up. No believes there’s just one side to an issue, the way that people are responding on the website. It’s just goading people.

Pinney: As long as it starts a dialogue, we’ve done our job.

Braselton: Oh, god a dialogue.

SM: What message do you want your audience to take out of the film? Is it just entertainment, catharsis? What do you want them to think when they walk out of the theater?

Orr: Ultimately, to entertain them is our first goal. I don’t know what people take away from it. I just hope they have a good time and get a good laugh out of it.

Pinney: One thing that Alex’s has been saying in terms of a political film. They are made to make you think about them and discuss them. We just wanted to take a different approach and say, “Hey, let’s just take this topic and make it funny and entertaining.” So, when you leave the theater, you’re not depressed; you’re not down about it.

Orr: If you want to dig deeper into the satirical aspect of it, why we do things, it’s easier to draw your own little conclusions about what it means to stuff a Vietnam veteran into the truck of your car or shooting a school kid.

SM: Here’s an overriding question for everyone. Mike and Katie, why do you act? Hugh, Tony, Adam and Alex—that’s a lot of names to say all at once. I shouldn’t have done that—why do you make films? It’s illogical just in the sense that you put so much work in and half the time you get so little tangible return. So, why do people do this?

Orr: I have no choice. I can’t hold down any other job. It’s either this or—

Mike Brune (Actor): And, you can barely hold down this one.

Orr: Yeah and I can barely hold down this job. Hardly anyone will hire me. These are the only people who talk to me, and they make movies. I just go along with them so that I have friends. That’s a horrible answer.

Brune: It’s funny though, and it’s true to a certain extent.

Orr: To a certain extent it is true.

Brune: You’ve had a lot of jobs.

Orr: I have, and none of them worked out with my favor.

Pinney (to Brune): You have no job history whatsoever.

Brune: Excuse me.

Orr: He’s had jobs. He’s a bagger champion.

Tony Holley (Producer, 1st Assistant Director): Bagger champion?

Braselton: Yeah, Brune’s a bagger champion.

Brune: Oh, god.

Orr: I don’t know. It’s something I’ve always been drawn to. I’ve always been drawn to film, and then when I first started putting quarters in the machine, I won. I was like, “Yeah.” It’s like when you put out your first short, and people liked it, it’s like, “More of that.”

Holley: It’s doing what you love to do, and it’s what I’ve wanted to do for such a long time. To be able to earn a bit of a living at it and then be able to do what I want at the same time, that’s the ultimate high for me.

SM: Do you have to have an inherent desire to make films in order to be crazy enough to do it?

Orr: If you don’t like it, you are a very unhappy person.

Braselton: There are a lot of those.

Orr: They’re usually called grips and location managers. They’re angry; they’re pissed that they’re still in this business. The hours are awful, and it ruins your social life. When you're on these movies for so many hours, it makes it hard to see your family…

Brune: It can make you really cynical and really bitter, really fast if you don’t really love it.

Braselton: We’ve only seen a few people who went to (Georgia State University) film school with us that are actually on set. There are only about seven or eight if that many. A lot of people do it, and they’re just like, “We’re done. I can’t handle twelve hours of work a day.” So they give up.

Orr: It’s also vicious in every aspect.

Braselton: Yeah, it’s not a nice business. 

Orr: Say you’re acting or making a film, whatnot, the name of the game is to rip stuff apart. That’s what I do. It’s very mean, cruel, but I love it. I wouldn’t want to do anything else—except play a base for the St. Louis’ Cardinals. But, I have no skill in that area. Now, she asked why you guys act.

Brune: I act because I like to make people laugh.

Orr: That’s why we all make movies.

Brune: Most of the films we’ve made at usually comedic in some respects. There are a few exceptions, namely Adam Pinney.

Orr: Adam is excellent at making people laugh, and he refuses it so much. He’s like, “I don’t want to be clowns like you guys.”

Pinney: I hate making people laugh, but I’ve been touched by God in that way.

Orr: Even if you look at his face, you’re already laughing.

Braselton: Oh. Go ahead, Mike. Sorry.

Brune: No, no. It sounds really childish, but I like to goof off, pretend and make people laugh and improve. I love to do those things. It just goes back to what Tony was saying. I just adore the cinema, and that’s why we do it.

Katie Rowlett (Actress): I too like to pretend.

There’s a general burst of laughter here at the understated humor of Katie's first comment in the conversation.

Rowlett: I can’t really act in the movies like I do in real life ever. It’s fun. I love movies and funny stuff so that’s why I’m doing it. I’m very self-centered I guess. I love the attention.

SM: Actually, you have a handful of the best comic lines in the film. How did you get through the scenes without bursting out laughing?

Rowlett: The way we talk to each other regularly is pretty absurd sometimes so it wasn’t hard not to bust a take. I love saying those lines. It was really hilarious to me.

Braselton: It’s always good if you get your grips laughing though.

Orr: I was completely humorless most of the time.

Brune: Yeah, we didn’t think it was okay to have all those outtakes that you see on sitcoms all the time. They do two takes, and they can’t get through one line. We were so afraid that Alex would lash out at us that we didn’t really do that. We came to an understanding of, “Okay, we’ve got to nail this on the first take otherwise Alex will fire us.”

Orr: We were shooting 12 pages a day.

Brune: It was hard.

Orr: I curled up in the fetal position every time we were on set and cried.

Brune: There was time to goof off, but not much.

Braselton: Not much time for you to goof off when you’re covered in blood, and it’s 40 degrees outside.

Rowlett: Yeah, it was cold outside, and we really wanted to get things done quickly. I know I did because I was nearly naked the whole time. It’s pretty hard to burst out laughing when you’re freezing.

Orr (to Brune): I have a question. When you were younger, and you started goofing off to make people laugh, were you any good at sports at all, or anything else? I’m sure you were a smart kid, but you don’t really get any recognition for that as a kid. I always wanted to play sports, but I was awful at them. All I could really do was goof off, crack jokes and make people laugh.

Brune: I was really good at catching pop flies in baseball and rebounding in basketball.

Orr: But, you weren’t a sports star. Now (Hugh Braselton) was. You were a little superstar?

Braselton: Little bit.

Orr: So what drove you to make movies—because this is the only way I could get attention when I was younger, just being silly? 

Braselton: I had a real bad attitude. I got in fistfights at basketball games. I was very competitive then I just decided, “I want to make movies.”

Brune: Didn’t you see—wasn’t it Jurassic Park?

Braselton: Yeah, I saw Jurassic Park, and I told my dad, “I want to make movies.” I was thirteen, and I had chills all the time. I was like, “This is amazing.” I had never seen anything like that kind of stuff. I was very sheltered too. That might have been the fifth PG-13 movie I’d seen. I got to see The Good Soon with Macaulay Culkin, and that was only because the Culkin was in it. 

Orr: See I was the opposite. I was like, “I’ve set something on fire. Look over here.” What about you, Adam? What drove you to making movies? It’s like insanity. What drove you to this?

Pinney: It was also Jurassic Park as well. I saw it like three times in the theater with my parents. My parents took me to movies that—I went and saw Who’s the Man? with my dad. I would see everything, and then when I saw Taxi Driver, I was in high school, that was it. I was like, “Oh, it doesn’t just need to be dinosaurs and funny cops.” Taxi Driver for me was the, “Woah. It can be art.” That’s what I wanted to do was go into art. I thought I’d be a famous fine artist. There’s not a lot of those anymore. But, film combines all the aspects of art: writing, photography, drawing. So that’s why I do it. It’s the ultimate art form. It just sucks that it’s also the most expensive art form there is. That’s why it’s crazy to do it. It makes no sense. We should just write novels.

Orr: Then you wouldn’t have to care so much and depend on so many numbskulls.

Pinney: Every other art form you don’t have to rely on other people. This one you have to rely on everyone.

SM: From film school to now, how have you seen the progression of your work develop?

Braselton: We try not to rip off as many people as we did.

Brune: You mean, as many filmmakers?

Braselton: Yeah, yeah.

Orr: We try to mask the rip-offs or use something a bit more obscure. Mainly what’s changed though is that the more you do it, the more you learn, the better you get.

Brune: Part of what you learn, the more you work in the industry, is that half of what you learn you should forget when you go to make your own film. Half of what you learn is, “Oh, this is really complicated, and it takes 50 people to do all this.” But, it really doesn’t. You can do it with a lot less. So that aspect of learning the logistics, and what an uphill battle it is, that stuff you just want to forget about once you make your own film. It’s happened to a lot of filmmakers we’ve gone to school with. It’s just like, “Oh, it’s too much work to make a movie now.” They don’t make films anymore which is sad so you have to revert back to the willful idealism you had in film school.

Orr: It’s like, “Yeah, there’s four of us. We have all the people we need.” Two in front of the camera and two behind it. What else could we possibly need?

SM: I don’t even know that it’s the work put in so much as the fear of failing and knowing (a feature’s) a long-term progression. With a short term progression—well, with Blood Car you guys had a shorter term progression than most at about a year and a half, right?

Orr: From start to finish it was a little over a year. As soon as it was written, Adam and I were figuring out how it could be shot. Because we had no money, there was nothing to wait on. (Cast and crew will) either do it for free or they won’t, and we’ll figure something else out. It made all the decisions very easy. There weren’t all these decisions about what actors we could get or picking where we would shoot. It was basically, “Is this free or not? Okay, that’s that.” Having so many limits like that really made things go quick.

Braselton: Well, I remember when you and Adam were writing it, you were like “No re-writes.”

Orr: Did we?

Braselton: Yes, you both said that.

Pinney: Oh, I don’t know if we said that, but we didn’t do re-writes.

Braselton: That’s what one of you said. I remember that because I was reading through the script, and I was like, “Er?”

Brune: Which would make any writer roll over in his grave.

Orr: The whole editing process was basically fixing how awful the script was.

Pinney: When Mike first read the script, I asked him, “What do you think?” and he said, “Oh, it’s terrible.”

Orr: And, we were like, “Well, we wrote it for you. You’re in it.” He said, “I’ll do it. I just don’t like it at all.”

Brune: When they said I was going to be in it, I was like, “Alright. Give me this piece of crap.” But, when I read it as an actor, I said, “This is going to be really fun. I’m going to enjoy this.”  It had a lot of wonderful things that I’d always wanted to do in my dreams: kill people, get covered in blood, ride on a bicycle with a hachet.

SM: Despite that initial scripting concern, do you guys have a favorite line of dialogue or moments now in the film?

Orr: My favorite stuff is at the end, the nonsensical monologues. It kills me. And, when the firemen run by with the ladder.

Braselton: That’s the best goddamn joke in the movie.

Orr: There were several jokes that Adam and I battled over, whether or not people will get them and find them funny, or should be thrown out, and that was the one that on set half the people were like, “What is that?” As we were shooting it, he was like, “I don’t even know what this means.” But, they don’t have a car.

Brune: Gasoline, it sells the world.

Orr: That’s kind of a tough joke so that’s why I like it…What’s your favorite stuff guys?

Rowlett: One of my favorite things in the movie is when Mike goes back in the movie to get the spare key and the voice-over comes up at the end of that scene. That was something that was changed; there was a different choice for the voice-over, and I know that Alex and Adam were just trying to figure out how to make that work. Someone came up with the idea of having the pillow talk voice-over. It was so fun to do that, and also when I saw it, it works so well for that scene, and it hadn’t even been planned that way at all.

Brune: Collectively one of our favorite moments to watch with an audience is when Archie is screaming at the car, and then he sees Mrs. Butterfield.

Rowlett: Everyone figures out what’s going to happen.

Brune: As soon as I say, “Mrs. Butterfield? Mrs. Butterfield?” they all know I’m going to take that woman and put her in the trunk.

SM: What is one question collectively that you as filmmakers have always wanted to be asked but never have been?

Braselton: Mine would be, “Who gave you all that money for your movie?”

Orr: I would love to be asked by a huge group of reporters, “Do you want to comment on the charges?” That would be so great. With flashbulbs and everything. “Do you want to comment on the charges?” “No, no. no!”

The filmmakers are all working on new projects, the next up for production Hugh Braselton’s heartfelt comedy. “It involves dirt track racing, a guy who won’t get out of a swimming pool, watermelons and hotdog eating contests,” Braselton says. ‘My tagline is, “What’s funny about life is that it falls apart.’”

Orr: It makes you think that the film will be very touching, which ultimately I guess it is. It’s in that Hal Ashby ballpark.

Braselton: Yeah, I’m trying to live up to that guy.

Orr: We’re all really excited. The goal of Blood Car was just to go for laughs, poke people with a stick and say---

Pinney: Here we are.

Orr: Yeah, “Here we are. Look at us.” We have the nerve to piss on each other for a movie. Now, we want to make a movie with some substance, and Hugh has written that.

For more information on the film and the filmmakers visit www.bloodcar.com. and www.fakewoodwallpaper.com.