Although Buzzard is technically the third in a trilogy of films by Michigan filmmaker Joel Potrykus, it is in many ways an ambitious departure. Rooted in his collaboration with musician Joshua Burge (a.k.a. Chance Jones), Buzzard is a metal revenge fantasy comeuppance story. Burge plays Marty Jackitansky, a lazy temp at a mortgage company who sees an opportunity to rip off the bank and takes it. This misstep sends Marty into hiding, and his geeky coworker Derek (played by Potrykus) lets Marty crash in his basement, a “Party Zone” of endless Mountain Dew and video games. When things turn rotten, Marty escapes and goes on an increasingly desperate journey, ending up in Detroit with only his homemade Freddy Krueger glove for company. Sharp and funny as hell, with loud bursts of violence and metal, Buzzard shreds conventional ideas of what an independent film can be.
Finally the beast is loose! After catching Buzzard at last year’s SXSW Film Festival, the film is now available in theaters and on VOD. TMT talked with Potrykus and Burge about the rewards and challenges of making the film, from Bugles-fueled basement improv to tracking down a functioning payphone in Detroit.
You’ve done a few films together. What’s the story of how you met and started working together? What was the process of creating this film?
JP: We both live in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and we both went to the same school. Josh was in the film program and I was too, but we didn’t have classes together. Josh is a musician; he was the guy who would be playing at the coffee shop on campus there, so I kind of just became aware of him through that.
JB: A few years went by, and Joel had a film called Gordon that he had made. I had seen that film, so I became aware of his work that way. I was playing in a band at the time too, and we knew each other from shows; Joel would film the band sometimes. So when Joel decided to do another short film, we talked about me maybe being in it, and I jumped at the idea.
JP: Yeah, that was maybe six or seven years ago. I mean, it’s a pretty tight-knit crew in Grand Rapids; all the musicians and artist people kind of roll together. Yeah, I mean, just seeing this guy’s live show, it’s like, man, if I can get a little bit of that energy… His band is Chance Jones. I shot a couple live videos of theirs, and you just see some of that energy onstage, it’s like, yeah, this dude’s a performer.
But you hadn’t acted before?
JB: Not really. No, very little. I think I had taken a semester.
JP: That was just a pleasant surprise that he could act too. Because I thought, “I just want to get this guy and get this persona on screen.”
JB: Yeah, it was performance. I mean, the way I viewed my onstage persona was a character named Chance Jones, whatever my ideas were behind that, but that was all performance.
JP: The best actors aren’t actors. I think the best actors are just people who are able to inhabit some other persona and have just that innate ability to perform, like the kind of people who go to a party and perform. They need to be somebody else at that party, they need to be somebody else for their parents, they need to be somebody else with their girlfriend or whatever. The ability to… not to say that you’re multiple personality…
JB: No, we all do that anyway. So it’s just embracing it, I guess.
So Joel, you write the scripts?
JP: Yeah, I would write the characters, because I would never write with Josh in mind. Because I don’t want this to be about Josh. I don’t want his personality, I want this other personality. I want him to bring something to this character. That’s the funnest part. I can in my head create the character, but it’s only halfway there. And then once I pass it off to this guy, he fleshes it out and does the other 50% of the work.
JB: Yeah, and I prefer that Joel doesn’t write with me in mind. I’ve had people bring me parts before [that] they say they’ve written with me in mind, and I read it, and it’s like, “this is what you think of me?” [Laughter] You know, it’s great, and I love Joel’s voice, and I’m just a fan of his work in general.
Loser is an easy catch-all word that people will understand a lot better than a complicated, deep, sad hustler.
When I was reading descriptions of Marty, a lot of people called him a loser or a slacker, and I found that interesting because I saw him as more of a hustler or a trickster, and I actually think that takes a lot of intelligence and a sense of humor.
JP: He’s way more ambitious than any kind of loser or slacker! A loser would just sit in his mom’s basement and feed off unemployment. He’s ambitious!
JB: He’s a very confident and headstrong guy.
JP: He’s trying to earn $50 on his lunch break. I mean, it’s a three-hour lunch break, but he’s always trying to hustle and make a buck. He knows how to do it, how much he can get away with, and how much he can’t get away with; he’s pretty savvy about that. I mean, the term slacker, I don’t even know what that means anymore. Both Marty and Derek and are just guys who are stuck in their place in the world and they don’t know where to go, and that’s pretty common. But he’s got a job and he’s always out for something; he’s got intentions and goals, even if they’re misdirected or negative.
JB: His scams might not be the most lucrative scams in the world, but…
JP: But he put effort into them! I don’t look down on Marty at all, I wouldn’t call him a loser. I would never want to waste a whole year of my life writing and filming and editing a movie about someone I don’t want to know or I don’t like. He’s not the most likable guy, but I like him as a person and feel like he’s got something good down deep inside; it’s like a sadness. I definitely don’t see him as a loser. I like Marty and I feel for him.
Were there any particular characters or films that were inspirations for the character of Marty or for the story?
JP: [to Josh] Did you watch anything for your version of Marty?
JB: I mean honestly, really, Vincent Gallo was probably a big inspiration. [Laughter]
JP: I never knew that! Buffalo ‘66? [Laughs]
JB: Something going on there probably.
JP: Yeah, yeah, he’s got some sadness with the family and everything. For me, I wrote it just based on what I had gone through. I temped at a mortgage company for a year, making $9 an hour and taking three-hour breaks. My version of going to the bank and getting the money for the free checking promotion was a little different. I didn’t have the balls to quite do it at the same transaction. I don’t know, that’s fun to me, to cheat these things and just see how much I can get away with little things. A part of the little silly scams comes from me, but as far as having this really abrasive vendetta against the world and just looking out for myself, that just comes from [thinking]… it was a more interesting character at that point, to start injecting some of that wrath and almost evil into him. It just kind of happened in the script.
JB: I guess I shouldn’t necessarily say Buffalo ‘66 or Vincent Gallo, but that idea of his persona, whatever it is, in the entertainment industry… a me-against-the-world, chip on my shoulder, I’m an ultra-right-wing conservative guy in liberal Hollywood, you know? That idea that everyone’s against you, that general idea.
JP: Even the people who like you are out to get you. Because a lot of people are pretty nice to Marty in the movie. Derek’s nice and wants to be his friend. Marty just… once he starts to feel like he’s gonna be sincere, he lashes out. I don’t know, he’s a complicated character. I don’t want people to write him off as just a slacker or a loser. For me at least, and for Josh, there’s some pathos there for us.
Yeah, definitely. For me that for sure came through, and that’s why I was kind of surprised that’s how people were describing him, because that didn’t seem apt to me. To me, that’s classically American in some ways, that kind of hustler, someone who’s able to navigate that.
JB: Yeah, me too.
JP: I think it’s just easier. If you’re a journalist, how do you describe a character in one or two words? Loser, slacker, that’s just easier than saying, “he’s got this background with his mother that’s very hard for him to articulate.” It’s just hard to describe a character quickly in a review. Loser is an easy catch-all word that people will understand a lot better than a complicated, deep, sad hustler.
JB: There is a lot of sorrow to him.
JP: The most important stuff we shot was the phone call with his mom.
Did you consider writing scenes with the mother?
JP: No. We need to know the mom through Marty’s eyes and not the actual mom. We didn’t put her voice on the other end of the phone. We’re not sure why he’s lying to her, if he’s trying to make her feel proud of him, or if he feels shame, or he just can’t not lie, or in his head he really does think he’s doing great and everybody likes him and he’s doing great at work. I want that kind of ambiguous relationship with his mother. The whole movie is told through Marty’s eyes. Basically every shot is of Marty, and so we just see his world, and we don’t even know what’s real and what’s not by the end.
In interviews, you’ve mentioned things like the 99% and corporate America and the middle class. I guess this question is for both of you: would you consider this a political film?
JP: When I first starting writing it, I was almost afraid it was too political. It was very obvious it had a political agenda. It was much more, like, “you know what? These corporations are holding us little people down! We have to fight back!” Once I started drifting away from that and injecting some of the more absurd stuff, like the Mountain Dews and Bugles, it [became] a political film that’s disguised as a slacker comedy. The politics were definitely important; the third act takes place in Detroit, and that [city] just crumbled from the mortgage crisis, or the casinos and corporations. It died the same way that Marty feels like they’re oppressing him. That city represents what he thinks is happening to him. Like, it’s not me; they’re bringing me down, they’re taking me down! But it definitely started off as the 99% fights back against the 1%.
JB: I kind of like that it developed in that direction as well, because for whatever street smarts or cunning or cleverness that Marty might possess, maybe he is sort of ill-informed about that type of injustice or politics that is going on. When he’s freaking out at the check-cashing place: “Corporate America thievery!” These are just buzzwords he heard; he’s really not that politically savvy of a guy. He’s just existing in that world with all these conditions around him.
We’re not out to say you’re right and you’re wrong; it’s just through the eyes of one character who thinks he’s right and he’s probably wrong.
JP: He’s a naïve guy; he doesn’t understand the system that he’s fighting against. He thinks he does, but there’s a gray area. It’s not just 99% and 1%. But for him, he feels that’s how it is; like, no, you’re either against me or you’re for me. And I don’t think anyone’s for him; he feels like everybody’s out to get him in some way, either rip him off or watch him. He’s paranoid about the outside world.
JB: That begins to inform his own morality.
JP: Yeah. I’d say it’s more of an allegory, even for some of the people who go and protest Wall Street. Are you really understanding what you’re fighting against here? Because, you know, you may be drinking a Starbucks coffee while you’re doing it. So there’s a lot of different levels, and I guess Marty is someone who’s not as informed about the political world as he thinks he might be, and that’s kind of the standpoint of our film. We’re not out to say you’re right and you’re wrong; it’s just through the eyes of one character who thinks he’s right and he’s probably wrong.
The scene in the end is somewhat triumphant though. It’s funny, that reference was in Frances Ha as well. That seems to be a visual motif right now.
JP: Sometimes you gotta just end a movie with a burst of emotion. It was our take on Mauvais Sang by Leos Carax, but the heavy metal version of it. And we just needed Marty to have a release. He just needed to feel on top of the world.
JB: The act of violence didn’t give him the release?
JP: No! [Laughter] It’s the act of thinking that he got one up on the corporate world and that his boss got fired and he’s free. He just slashed somebody, but he’s like so far over the edge at that point that he doesn’t even realize what he’s doing, that he’s standing there wearing a Freddy Krueger glove in public. That moment, those two or three minutes of ecstasy, end with him realizing, “Wow, I’m always going to have somebody watching me. As good as I felt a minute ago, I feel bad again right away.” We wanted to end it on kind of a haunting note there. But he’s got those headphones on for so long he just needed to put them on, so when he did, it had to be big and loud and happy.
I’d love to hear a little about the production itself. How many shooting days you had, if you had rehearsals or did improvisation, what camera you shot with, anything you want to share about your process.
JP: It’s pretty bare bones and minimal. The crew is basically just me and the producers, and we shot on a Canon 5D Mark III that I bought on eBay, and then after we shot I sold it on eBay. So no harm done there to my wallet! We shot for 30 days straight, which is pretty abnormal for us. On our last film we [shot] weekends for six months.
JB: Whenever we could fit it in.
JP: Yeah. But for this one we took it way more seriously. We actually rehearsed for eight months once a week. For four or five hours, we’d meet at Josh’s house and go from the beginning of the script to the very end, just to make sure that it felt right, it felt real, that the dialogue fit.
JB: Just establish everything so well so that by the time we were on set, we didn’t waste any time.
JP: I would always read for the character of Derek, and after awhile, all of the producers watching would just die laughing and were like, “come on, you gotta be Derek.” So that’s kind of how that worked out. Josh and I have a different chemistry and had been rehearsing for eight months, so when you try and bring in an actor, as good as they were, they just didn’t have the back and forth that we could do. By the time we got to set, we knew the important things that we needed to nail in a scene, and we could just goof around the rest of the time and throw in crazy lines and try to make each other laugh. That was the funnest stuff. We shot the first weekend in that basement, and so everybody could just loosen up and we could improvise.
JB: We ended up doing quite a bit of improvising with dialogue at least.
JP: Yeah, there are a lot of good deleted scenes that exist out there, because we shot a lot in that basement and just goofed around. Even the treadmill with the Bugles on it; that was shot in our producer’s parents’ basement and they happened to have a treadmill down there.
JB: That wasn’t in the script.
Really?
JP: Yeah, it’s just, like, we can do some funny stuff with this treadmill here, let’s open up that bag of Bugles, let’s do this. Even for the angrier, darker stuff, when Marty’s mad at Derek, it was important for Josh to feel comfortable enough to be mean, [to be] really nasty to me, and he could say whatever he wanted, and he knew it was just Marty and Derek; it was nothing personal. When we had to fight, it was, like, let me have it, man — get real. There’s a level of comfort there that you just can’t act your way through. So that was important.
Did you have a D.P. who shot the movie?
JP: Yeah, this was actually the first time I’ve had an actual D.P. It was my friend Adam from high school, and he’s a photography major and real camera nut. But I had picked him. I wanted him to shoot this one from the very beginning so that it worked out a little easier when it came time for me to play Derek. Because on our last film Ape, I was the D.P. and camera guy. So I wanted this one to be a little more… I wouldn’t say slick-looking, but not as dirty and noisy as Ape. As much as I love that, some shots are a little rough. So he was able to bring his knowledge as a photographer to be the D.P. on this one. And he’s a lot more patient than I am. I’m very impatient. So sometimes I’m like, “Come on, come on, let’s go, let’s shoot it,” and he’s the guy who’s like, “hold on, give me five more minutes.” And that’s important to have somebody I’ve known for a long time being able to tell me, “give me five more minutes, man,” and not feel pressured that I’m the director and what I say goes.
You’ve talked a lot about DIY filmmaking. I’m curious why you decided to go with a distributor for this film?
JP: They’re Oscilloscope. As much as I think we can do everything by ourselves, we can’t. And just having a distributor has opened up so many more doors than I ever thought possible. Just having them attached to it makes things so much easier. The distribution world, DIY, it’s exhausting. I don’t think I know what I’m doing. To have somebody as cool as Oscilloscope have our back? That’s totally awesome.
JB: Yeah, I only know DIY creation… [Laughter]
Could you talk a little bit about the music you used in the film? Did you always have those songs in mind?
JP: In the script, I think it always said, like, “loud metal bursts through the soundtrack.” And it took me awhile to find a lot of that music. I’m really picky. Especially the last scene, the run scene; I didn’t realize that there’s a rhythm that you have to match to Josh’s running. I measured his BPMs, the beats per minute of his run, every step. So it took awhile to find the right song that fit not only the beats and the rhythm of his run, but it had to be loud and angry and also had to have a feeling of… I mean, most people listen to the song and it’s just loud, but for me, I’m a big metal fan, so that song feels uplifting in almost a weird way. It feels like a U2 metal song. I actually went to high school with the drummer for that band, and so I’ve been aware of them for a long time. I’m a big fan, and it was, like, “yeah, this is right.” The music had to be very specific for Marty’s stuff. It couldn’t be dopey heavy metal, and it couldn’t be rap metal. There’s a very specific sound I was looking for, that was more from sludge thrash metal music. It’s hard to pinpoint, but there are certain bands that just fit the Marty vibe. And we had other songs that we put on there [for] the run scene, and it was amazing, but it just wasn’t something Marty would listen to. I was very particular about what would Marty listen to.
So you chose all of the music yourself? You didn’t work with a music supervisor?
JP: No, no. That’s super important. I can’t imagine putting that in someone else’s hands.
JB: It’s all your gut instinct.
JP: Yeah. I scoured albums for months and months before I found a good fit. It’s really important.
By the time we got to set, we knew the important things that we needed to nail in a scene, and we could just goof around the rest of the time and throw in crazy lines and try to make each other laugh.
As a musician, did you have any input? [to Josh]
JB: No, I trust Joel on that stuff. I know when he knows what he wants, it’s gonna be the right call.
JP: I’m gonna let Josh pick all of the music when we do our Motown tribute movie. [Laughter] Our different Detroit movie.
JB: Yeah, I’ll demand input then.
JP: Josh and his band Chance Jones are very much digging on the Motown scene.
JB: It’s really close to my heart.
JP: A lot of the folk world too.
JB: British invasion.
Is that a future project that you have in mind?
JP: I don’t know.
JB: It is now! [Laughter]
JP: We’ll make our British invasion movie, which means two characters go into Britain and just fight people in the street.
JB: Yeah!
JP: “What are you doing?” “It’s the British invasion!” “No, mate, that’s a musical genre!”…A weird, misguided British invasion film, that’d be a great short film, just a couple of Americans attacking people on the streets of London.
JB: With the best intentions.
JP: I don’t know what it would be…
Last question: which scene was the funnest for you to shoot and which was the most challenging?
JP: The funnest for me was watching this guy shove all of this spaghetti in his mouth. Because that wasn’t written into the script, that was just him; he just started eating it that way. I was just mesmerized. And when I yelled cut, I gave him a big hug and just felt like this is the kind of movie I want to make here, just a guy enjoying spaghetti so much, just in a whole different world. The most challenging — and it might be the same for Josh — was the phone call to his mom, for two different reasons. He had to hit an emotional beat — it had to be one take — but we had to find the right location. That was one [scene] where we didn’t have the location set. It was, like, “Let’s just get a car and drive around. We’ll find a payphone.” Well, that’s way harder than it sounds nowadays.
JB: There aren’t very many left.
JP: Not only are there not very many left, but there aren’t very many that have decent natural light near them. Because we didn’t bring in lights for any of this movie, we just used whatever light was available.
You used all natural light?
JP: Yeah. So we had to find a payphone with some good light, one that wasn’t near a freeway or a lot of traffic. And we found one, but believe it or not, people were using it, like waiting in line! And Josh is trying to be in character and deliver this emotional call to his mother, and people are waiting for the payphone? And I was like, “sorry, man, we gotta go somewhere else.” It just took so long, but it was so important. How about yours? [to Josh]
JB: The stuff that happened in the basement was the funnest. Because it was just hanging out and me trying not to crack up, but as soon as the word “cut!” was yelled, we were busting up. But then I think the most difficult thing also happened in the basement, which is us fighting. Because it’s tough to get to that part, where you’re raging and beating up your friend.
JP: There were a few technical problems too with continuity and sound and stuff, so we had to reshoot that scene quite a few times, and it was exhausting emotionally and physically.
JB: It really was, yeah. The basement stuff was all the first weekend too, so maybe we were just going for it.
JP: And we had a lot of time to just loosen up and improvise. Yeah that was a lot of fun.
