Pete Etep of AZ Kaos, a punk rock blog, has published an interview with Travis Mills of Running Wild Films about filmmaking in Arizona and Running Wild’s recent feature The Big Something. The whole interview can be read here and we have included some excerpts below:
Mills on Guerrilla Filmmaking
“Film school is great, but the only way to really learn how to make movies – in my opinion – is to just make them and make them fast.
I think it’s best to just do it quick. Edgar G. Ulmer made (the film noir classic) Detour in seven days, so I was like, “If he can do it in seven, then we can easily do it in fourteen days.” It seems like people get stuck, as independent amateur filmmakers, making it on the weekends and it takes them two years, where they run into so many issues.
Mills on Phoenix as a Career Stepping-Stone to Hollywood
“If people want to do that, it’s fine, but they need to be brave enough to stick around here and make an indigenous film community happen if it’s ever going to become something. So the only stepping-stone, I would say, is getting to the point where it’s happening constantly. Making films, and we need to be competing on a more creatively aggressive level. It’s that attitude in hip-hop culture that I most admire, “Who’s gonna be the best rapper?”, that breeds some really creative stuff. That’s the kind of community I’d like to see, filmmakers in Arizona competing with each other, seeing who can really define Arizona and tell the best stories. That would be sick.”
