Dan Bush, Jacob Gentry and David Bruckner are three guys from Atlanta who formed the independent company POPfilms. Used to making small films on the streets of Atlanta with friends, The Signal is no different. The main cast is their friends from the same city who got involved with POPfilms, though you wouldn't guess it from the professionalism displayed. During the interview, I kept asking vaguely specific questions in roundabout ways, and to my pleasant surprise they understood immediately what I was grasping at. Though smart and precise, they still nonetheless look like they're fresh out of film school, joking around with each other—which makes them and their film that much more impressive.
I eased into the interview by asking which one of them came up with the idea, knowing that they would say it was a team effort. But Dan Bush quickly jumped with a "I did!" and started us off with a laugh.
How did it even come about? Because I know it's a tricky process, like, the three of you wrote and directed the movie…
Jacob: I think it's kind of like, "Oh I'm thinking like this," and its like… "Well, what if you did this to that?" and you know somebody else would go "Oh—Well, also, what if you take that and you do this, you take both of those things and do this with it," you know? And I think that sort of organic process of creative thinking [is] the fun of getting excited about ideas and making some movie about the world around us, and I think that kind of comes together. You just end up with what you [see in the movie].
So that's pretty much how you guys wrote the entire movie? You just sat down and --
David: We wrote the story together. It was sort of a collection of a lot of themes and ideas we have been playing with in other movies; and then we consolidated them into one specific thing and then went off and, I think, came back with our individual ideas or takes on how we wanted to play with that. From there, we wrote… "Okay, he has this idea, he has this idea," and we threw those into the pot and wrote the story. And then we each went off and wrote our screenplays of each act—Act 1, Act 2, Act 3—so that's kind of [a] rough [idea of the] process for how we wrote it.
And is that the same way you guys directed the movie? Or did you guys actually come to each other's set and interfere with each other's work?
Jacob: Yeah, we were all there the whole time.
David: Yeah, we had to.
Jacob: We had to crew for each other.
David: Yeah, it was such a short process to begin with. We were having to share our resources so much and we all kind of had -- We were all sort of there our to serve each other's vision of what this type of chapter should be, what should be the tone of it, what's the story, what are it's obligations to the larger scope of what has to happen and what is individual about it. So we were all there to help out and we sort of a tag team director system. There were days we would have, you know, several shots we have to pick up right here in one room and then we have to trade off and work a little bit on a different act in the same room. So we literally like trade our positions and tag team it. At any one moment one of us would be directing, one of us would be running camera and one of us would be either in other rooms prepping something [from] another scene or working with some actors, doing anything they can.
Do you find that easier? The collaborating process, did it help? Or did you actually complicate things a little bit?
Dan: Both. You know? It's a battle and it's a blessing. But, I mean, in the end it worked, I think. It feels like it worked, you know? We came to a consensus and we each had sacrifices and we each fought battles, but we came together in the end and ended up with something we're all really proud of.
David: Films are a collaborative medium anyway. We just drew the lines differently.
How hard was it in maintaining a singularity? Because the movie is in three different parts but it's really one part, one big story.
David: I don't think it was predetermined you know. I think it sort of happened that way. I think that's --
Dan: We never once said, "Oh, we're gonna amp up the comedy in Act 2. It never happened, you know?
One thing that grabbed me immediately was how you opened the film with this sort of… almost like an exploitation style of the thing that you're dealing with. But then it almost like jumps out of "the movie" and it becomes about these people and the "real world." And I was just wondering if you could talk about that opening scene itself. Why did you decide to start it off that way?
Jacob: We sort of called this punk rock filmmaking, because it's kind of down and dirty and we're doing all this stuff ourselves and it's kind of DIY grass roots stuff, and that opening part is kind of the opening act of it, you know? The band that opens it up.
[Laughter]
David: Yeah, I think that's well put.
The movie, obviously, is a horror movie and that's the base. But it takes genre turns and then it takes inspiration from different genres. And I was wondering what, specifically, what kind of inspiration did you guys take in when you decided to go into this specific direction, in this segment or this scene?
Dan: One thing that happens to me is, I think of all the movies that I love the most and all my heroes that are filmmakers. I get really overwhelmed and nervous and I have to do this process of stepping back and going, "Okay, I don't… I have to forget all that stuff that I learned and all that theory and everything and start with something that just—you know, close my eyes and start with something that's just right there." Because the more I think about all the influences that are the biggest to me, it's just daunting. It's overwhelming. These guys are geniuses. So I have to say stop that [Laughs] and start with, "Okay, here's a character and they're trying to get from point A to point B," or what have you. And for me that's the beginning of a conversation with the character itself. And it's the only way I can get past my nervousness of trying to compete or compare and just let all that go and just go, "Okay, let's start with these." This situation, this character and what is this character going for. And [then] to what degree any influences that are there start to shine in that conversation I'm having. I don't know if [it's] at that point a conscious [decision]. Sometimes it's extremely conscious and I'm like, "I want to quote this movie," 'cause it's an homage to it or something, but most of the time just… How can you limit the sea of experiences including all the films you've seen and how can you determine how much that's creeping into your water?
Jacob: It's tough because it's like, how much do you learn from the movies about life? [Laughter] It's like, man, I don't reeeeeally know how people would behave if everyone was running around in the streets with various weapons out of their garage, killing each other. Like, what exactly would I do? I don't really know. You try to get in the shoes of that and a lot of your version of that reality is panned from other movies on the corners of cinema. So it ends up becoming an amalgamation of both. But like, yeah, I'd hate to start naming names after what you just said, you know?
David: I think a good way to sort of add on to what they are saying is you collect all these influences and then and you forget about them. So that they're sort of in your DNA and you've sort of consumed all these influences and you have so much input that it becomes a part of you where it sort of floats around in your subconscious and you're using it as inspiration to channel through to make your own ideas.
One of the things that I thought was really unique was how… Well, we've seen movies of people going crazy, like something happening to civilization, but what I thought made this movie really unique was how they saw it as a form of self-defense in a way. How much of that creeps in from your own outlook of the world, imposed on how people are behaving, where the only means of surviving is to actually, you know, kill other people?
David: I think one of the things that we were talking about—we talked about this earlier—was that there were rules and stuff like that. I think one of the kind of rules that came about was not letting anybody that was a core character… and all of our core characters were signalized, to some degree it's affecting them all… but not letting one of our core characters simply become irrationally crazy because when you call somebody crazy you're dismissing them and you're dismissing your character—letting them off the hook. It's a different convention that\'s fascinating in it\'s own way. That\'s kind of the zombie thing: now you have turned and therefore you cannot be trusted and that\'s what it is. We weren\'t going to allow that to happen to The Signal. One of the challenges was to find a way to get in their point of view and have them make the decisions that they made. When you get done with it you start looking at it and go, "Wow, that\'s like the rationalization [of going to] war" or something. You don\'t set out to make points like that and i don\'t think the film really does that necessarily, but any similarities drawn are just, you know, coming from the character. And given their circumstances, being in their shoes it seems very reasonable that they would make the decisions that they\'re making. And it\'s not that much different than the real world.
Well, it\'s really interesting too how the two core characters have this love between them that drives them. It\'s kinda like the cure, if you will, to the signal and it\'s a really, you know, it\'s kind of a pacifist idea. They\'re embracing their love and they\'re not participating in this crazy activity and it contradicts the violent nature of this pretty bloody, pretty gory film.
Jacob: How would you rank us in the movies you\'ve seen as far as violence?
Well, it\'s pretty bloody. I wouldn\'t say it\'s excessively so. It\'s more of a grisly type of violence.
Jacob: Right.
And I really appreciate that, but the motivations for the characters aren\'t exactly violent and they\'re trying to get somewhere, trying to reunite, and all this violence is happening around them. I find that to be a really interesting contradiction.
Jacob: Maybe I\'m just optimistic. Maybe I\'m not as cynical as I should be or something. I just sorta think that everybody justifies in their own mind that they\'re right, you know what i mean? I don\'t think that people are evil from [their own] standpoint. Our movie is about perspective, so it\'s really trying to get inside the heads of these people and what is going through their minds. And I think that from the people\'s point of view they are really justified in what they are doing. I think just in the world in general… [When you get into] a car accident, both parties are like, "It\'s your fault." I think that it\'s the other person\'s fault and I think that people justify that. So therefore that\'s where the chaos comes into play and that\'s what is interesting to make movies about, because you can really get into all kinds of psychology, you know?
Dan: But then there is this thing like what you\'re talking about, maybe a specific thing… and we argued many times a day about why does one of the characters not act, why does he not pick up a hammer? You know, what is the thing? And I think that there is this weird conversation we\'re having in our movie, if there are some really decent characters that you can tell are good—they want what\'s good—but they\'re inspired to violence by the signal and they lose in that case. So if ultimately getting into violence you lose, then how do you win? And I think that is part of the question we\'re asking. If violence begets violence then how do you win that war?
