HENRY LeROY FINCH (Writer/Director): The shooting schedule, what you're seeing up on the screen, was a little over two weeks. The joke is that Susie and I were talking and I said, "let's just make a movie, we'll do it in six days, we'll post it in a couple of months, and we'll be done with it, you know, and here we are three years later." But the post production took the longest period of time.

And as far as improvisation, we had a fairly loose set, so I allowed the actors to improvise and work with the script, but we ended up not using as much of the improvisation as I thought we might, we ended coming back to the original script, but I think it kept things very fresh and alive. And there are a couple of great lines that are peppered in here and there that I know are improvised, but there are no scenes that are improvised, it's all scripted.

You guys are the first audience that we've played it to that actually get that it's funny. (Audience laughs) Believe it or not, we have played this with a dead blank reaction... and you don't know what they're thinking! So thank you for being sophisticated enough to get the dark humor.

Q: What time period is the film set in?

ROY: We consciously chose not to be specific about that. Working with Eric Matheson (production designer) and Matt Clark (art director), I didn't want any cell phones or anything, so we were thinking it's sort of this nebulous American time, late 40's to late 70's, it could be any rural place in the country possibly. And good old vinyl records, no CD's.

Q: Was there a lot of film cut out for character development in post production?

GUS CARPENTER (Editor): Ah, we had some good characters to work with, and they're all up here and they were all up there, so yeah, stuff went in and out but mostly it was all them, "our boys." (audience laughs)

ROY: That's it pretty much. The rehearsal process really enabled them to become brothers and work on the characters so when we got to Maine to shoot, this was all shot within that house, they really had everything formulated in terms of their interplay and who they were.

Q: This is for Mr. Gibbons and Mr. Harold. When you work on creating your characters what kind of process do you go through?

BLAKE GIBBONS (Raymond): Well the first thing I did was I called up Dionne Warwick at the Psychic Friends Network to see if she thought I should do this with Mr. Harold, and she said 'go ahead,' so that was my first step, how about you Mr. Harold. (audience laughter)

GALE HAROLD (Kyle): Well she said that I shouldn't, but probably that was a bad voice-mail....uh, you know, so you started it so you have to finish it.

BLAKE GIBBONS: Well, you know, we hung out a lot, obviously aside from the things we did separately. I knew Dihlon before we shot the film, but I didn't know Gale so it was perfect for this kind of relationship. These brothers who were simpatico and yet estranged. And being in Maine and working in that house in this kind of "flying-by-the-seat-of-your-pants" way, we were able to bond.

DIHLON McMANNE (Sebastian): We also slept together, that helped a lot. (audience laughter)

SUSIE LANDAU FINCH (Producer): I want to add to that a little bit. From the casting process all the way through watching them in rehearsal and then watching it come to life in Maine as a producer was really exciting, because the kernel of each character was in each person and they just kept growing. And there are scenes, like the black and white scenes, that were rehearsed in Los Angeles, then they did improvisations on those - that was source work, then they shot them and they were structured when they were shot, so all the work that went into all those steps is visible to me. I think you guys did an amazing job with that. And I think the music compliments that. So it was a lot of source work and exploration that then got structured in a very short period of time.

GALE: Also Roy wasn't very selfish on set, like he said, it was pretty loose, and a lot of the things that happened that maybe weren't seen or were seen, by their omission, happened there, you know they didn't really happen here or in rehearsal.

And there were a lot of days that were obviously, from a time point of view, like getting the day done, you know, fucked by the first 45 minutes, but that was because we were allowed to do things that provided a platform for us to connect on, and you can't really get that in 2 weeks of rehearsal, cause what is that, like 3 days, 4 days of rehearsal with all the driving and logistics factored in? So being able to do it in the room in the place with the person and being able to improvise on that, I mean even being able to sit in a room and look at somebody for 15 minutes while they're getting to do all the takes they should be getting to do.

BLAKE: Roy created an atmosphere of total play. He gave us the opportunity to be wrong and to experiment, and it was totally ego-less and supportive. And more importantly, instead of having a pre-determined plan and having us plug-in specific emotions at specific times, he allowed the story and the characters to evolve, so as time went on we were able to really get to know each other and things would change day by day. The more me and Gale hung out and got to know each other, and I don't mean talking about the movie, I mean just hanging out, me and Dihlon, things just kind of....if it was music it would be jazz.

ROY: And then of course, really none of that's true. It was all real whiskey! (audience laughter) That's actually real whiskey they're drinking the whole time, so that was the freedom. Nothing to do with ego-lessness or anything.

DIHLON: Roy also made me sign a special contract that I would be willing to humiliate myself in this movie. Being tied up and abused by my brothers. (audience laughter)

ROY: And a lot of that also was possible due to the editing process, because we had all this footage. We shot on digital so that means we could do some very long takes, but that also means it's more work for the editor who has to actually go through it and make some sense of it. Between Chris Anderson (co-composer) and Gus Carpenter (editor) , they really had a lot to do with the shape of this film ultimately.

Q: That music, it wasn't present during the actual shooting, it was just added in post-production?

ROY: Which music are you talking about?

Q: Well it's just that throughout the movie the humor was mixed with the creepy feeling of the music, and that was a great duality. I was just wondering if any of that was present during any of the shooting.

ROY: No it wasn't. Chris Anderson has done a lot of scores. He saw this and really got it, and we came together to create something. But some of the Ramsay Midwood (original songs) stuff we were playing on the set. So the party where everybody's kind of getting naked, that was on set, that particular piece, and I think that might have been the only one.

SUSIE: Roy co-composed the score with Chris, and his musical background I think was sort of driving a sense of rhythm in rehearsal and his work with the actors. So I think the music may have been present a little bit inside Roy before it was composed - co-composed.

Q: What cameras did you use?

PATRICK KELLY (Director of Photography): We used a SONY DSR-500 WSP - Widescreen PAL. We shot in PAL, we did all the post in PAL... 25 frames.

ROY: And then what you saw tonight is actually pulled down to 24. So it's a film rate which helps it look a little less like DV.

Q: Mr. Landau, thank you very much for being here. To the other actors, did you feel a sense of importance knowing that you were working with an Academy Award-winning actor?

MARTIN LANDAU(Older Sebastian): I am honored to work with them.

GALE: Absolutely! Have you ever heard of the phrase 'scared shitless?' No?

DIHLON: Yeah, it was a bit intimidating, that fact that I was essentially playing Martin Landau, but he's incredibly gracious and brilliant-

MARTIN LANDAU: Actually, he played the older Sebastian, I was the young one. (audience laughter)

Q: What was the budget on the film? Are we allowed to ask that?

ROY: Well under a million.

GALE: Well under the ground.

SUSIE: We'll just call it micro-budget.

Q: What was the source of the story?

DUSTY PAIK (April): Roy's sick mind!

ROY: My own sick mind! My Mother had three brothers, and they're all good hearty drinkers. So a lot of it was just imagination, and just thinking of what they might have been like when they were younger.

And the house was a very strong character - I mean we were in Bath, Maine where my mother Maggie lives, and we saw this weird, old house and I thought, "what would it cost to make that as a set?" you know like a high-budget Hollywood movie. So we got to know the person who lived in the house, and he allowed us to shoot while he was still living there, and everybody got to know Gene Rittal quite well.

Gale was also an inspiration for this piece, for Kyle. So it was pretty much tailored - I wanted to tailor something that was quite different from the other material he was working with.

Q: What exactly happened in that shed that he (Kyle) keeps remembering? And what exactly did the other brother (Ray, played by Blake Gibbons) do to send himself to jail?

ROY: Ah, questions, these are questions... (audience laughter) We're purposely leaving it ambiguous. On a second viewing you might find one or two other clues that would help answer these questions.

MARTIN LANDAU: In life there are more questions than there are answers. (audience laughter)

Q: I was wondering if you added more footage to the shack scene?

GUS: No the shack scene was actually one of the first scenes I cut, and it has remained unchanged for about three years.

ROY: Also, one of the things that Echelon was kind enough to allow us to do was we bumped up to a High Definition Master. So that gave much more detail to what Patrick actually shot and Gus actually cut together. So it's always been there but the other screenings that we've done have been more low-tech, so a lot of the detail gets missed. Actually, what we're seeing now isn't even the high resolution master, this is still a standard definition print.

SUSIE: This was slightly lighter than the film usually plays, it usually looks a little more saturated.

ROY: Yeah, it has a more richness and tone to it than what you saw tonight, we had some technical issues tonight, but you know it's the struggles of independent filmmaking, and video.

Q: What are you all working on next?

ROY: We have another piece that I've written, that Susie is producing with Martin in it called "Sleepwalking." And Gloria and Eric also are involved with that in getting the funding together, and hopefully we'll be making that by the end of the year. It's very different from this.

SUSIE: And Roy also wrote a romantic comedy, sort of moved into very opposite material, so we're looking into doing that.

My father, Martin, just came back from Poland doing a performance we saw a trailer for the other day that was incredible. Do you want to talk about that?

MARTIN: I just finished a film in Poland. A World War II piece. It's quite wonderful, I think. It's basically, an English cast. And I just got back, I was there for five plus weeks. It's a piece about a Jewish industrialist who makes a deal with Heinrich Himmler, to give him everything: his steal plant, his art, his home, if Himmler allows thirty of his family asylum to Palestine. In which Himmler is a character, Adolf Eichmann is a character, and, uh, I'm a character. (audience laughter)