How long did Speed Freaks take to shoot?
28 days in April of 2000. Generally the call was 8:00 a.m. and we wrapped every day before dinner except for two.

What was the budget for the film?
I had about $13,000 to make the movie. When all was said and done, it probably ended up costing $15,000. Everyone got paid and we supplied breakfast and walk-away money for meals every day.

Where did you shoot?
Speed Freaks was shot in the old loft office of Axis Company, a theater company with whom I am very close to. The office was on an upper floor of a building on West 14th Street in the Meatpacking District. The room was small, but our set was smaller, so we fit in there just fine.

What format did you shoot it on?
Speed Freaks was shot on the Canon XL-1 mini DV camera which belonged to my good friend D.J. Mendel. It recently died, god rest its blessed soul. It saw a whole lot in its life. The lighting and grip “package” consisted of several theater fresnel lights and small film lights and c-stands. It was totally bare bones, but Rick Martin and Sal Interlandi did just fine.

Why did the editing take so long?
The editing actually didn't take long at all. It was just stretched out over seven years. I began editing immediately after we wrapped. I had never edited before so I was learning by doing it. From the beginning I had been told that the sound would be the biggest headache and every time I heard it I would nod my head. Once I got into doing the sound I realized that everyone was absolutely right. I had a hell of a time and painted myself into many corners. I boosted the levels too much and then everything was clipping — all of my foley stuff was god-awful. The room that we shot in had a wicked echo. But I forged ahead.
At the time I had the most current pro-sumer editing suite available to me — an Apple G3 and a whopping 30GB hard drive. I edited for approximately six months, screened a first cut in November 2000 and then, somewhat as a result of the sound issues that I encountered (or created), I subsequently banished the project from my mind for several years. At a Christmas party in 2002, my good friend John Collins, who is an incredible sound designer, was waxing poetic about the film and I expressed to him the desire to re-do all of the sound. We began meeting shortly thereafter and, in fits and starts for the next two years, we met once a week at the old Elevator Repair Service office on Avenue B and, over countless egg and Taylor ham sandwiches from Dawgs on Park, started adding what would end up being thousands of sound effects.
Since so much time had passed between my first edit and the second sound edit, technology had moved on, therefore we were forced to work with my initial sound mix as an uneditable file. Buried deep beneath all of the sound is my original mix, with John’s brilliance laid right on top.
Once we finished, I became swamped with work and the film once again sat for several years without being touched. In April of 2007, my schedule freed up, so I went back in and color corrected, gave it a 1:85.1 matte, re-edited the opening sequence, made several small cuts and proudly called the movie finished — seven years after shooting it.

Where does the story come from?
So many places, it’s hard for me to trace but here goes: back in 1997 I satisfied a fascination with serial killers by reading a number of books on Charles Manson, but more importantly, Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka — the Canadian “Ken and Barbie Killers.” Around the same time, I read an article in a paper about a chemical company that had become so entrenched in its own operation, they had developed a very insular, secret society that skirted rules and regulations and ended up putting the public in a tremendous amount of potential danger. I was interested in doing a grand guignol play, but everything that I read seemed so dated — I wanted to do a modern grand guignol piece. I started writing a play about a team of idiots who had this secret chemical operation and a boiler that was about to burst. Then I read an article in Details about a new drug that was sweeping the country called “crystal methamphetamine.” I pulled a lot of the language from that article. And finally, I read an article in The New Yorker about Amish kids getting hooked on speed.

What was the most difficult aspect of the script/story?
Forcing myself over and over to stop trying to make sense of the story and explain everything. When I wrote the play version of the script, it was the first full-length thing that I actually wrote. All of my plays before that were very physical and action-based and I really was flying by the seat of my pants and going on instinct. I was really able to achieve a level of anarchy on stage that was something that my creative work had been leading up to for years. In addition to all of the scenes in the film, there were many more scenes in the play that really had nothing apparent to do with the story, scenes that bordered on dance and so forth.
When I decided to turn it into a film, I didn’t alter the script one bit. I really just wanted to literally shoot the play as a film. We did that, and then when I sat down to edit it I encountered a tremendous amount of tension coming from the script. I realized how different movies are from plays and then started making judicious cuts (which I don’t regret one bit).
But once I started cutting, I also started second-guessing everything and felt compelled to “get the story straight” and explain everything that was happening. The first cut was bogged down with that intention. Once John and I got our hands on it again, I started to relax with my fear that things were clear enough. Then when I went in to finish it up in 2007, I had the following realization: to make the story clear would be the biggest disservice that I could do for the film. I remembered my original idea: I wanted the play to be like looking through the window of that secret society doing very dangerous work, seeing a lot of weird things happening and wondering “what in god’s name is going on in there?”. This cut finally achieves this.

What acting challenges did you encounter on the set?
Since all of us except for Josh Stark had already performed the work as a play, we knew what each moment needed before going into it. For most of us, this was our first film, so the biggest challenge was just trying to keep our performances in the frame (oftentimes, literally). A common misconception about doing film vs. theater is that you have to temper your performance for film. In this case, I wanted everything to be done just as big as we did it on stage. It was the only way that the maniacal energy we achieved on stage could be replicated on film.

Talk about your style.
Obviously I like absurdity, slapstick humor, a good deal of controlled mayhem. What is perhaps not as obvious is my love of these two things: texture and comic books. Regarding texture: one of the first and most influential things that I did when I arrived in New York in 1992 was to become an intern with Richard Foreman at the Ontological-Hysteric Theater. I worked on Samuel’s Major Problems and then ended up acting in three of his shows. Anyhow who has seen one of his shows and sees one of my works will notice the obvious influence he has had on me, but one of the most incredible aspects of his work is the element that you feel but that you don’t actually see. Richard demands on rehearsing his shows in the space where they will be performed, so over the course of the long rehearsal period, he has and then discards thousands of ideas — but the great thing is that there is shrapnel from many of these discarded ideas littering the stage. This “litter” creates such wonderful texture and, although it has no superficial relevance, it creates a texture that really resembles our everyday surroundings. Look around your home and you will see layer after layer of texture — old relationships, unfinished ideas, lost loves, broken attachments. Speed Freaks is littered in such a way. There is a level of grime and dirt, but deeper than that, there is a level of old relationships, unfinished ideas, lost loves and broken attachments in that tiny little room. Much of it can truly only be heard, seen and understood by me, but it definitely builds out the world of the film. And a lot of it exists in the sound design. Deeply embedded is my original sound design and all of the foley that I did in my old apartment in Williamsburg — the sirens are from Bushwick Ave., there is a chorus of cicadas that accidentally made an appearance, etc…
And what many people don’t know about me is that I have had a deep love for comic books since I was about nine years old. I have a big collection. I’m really not interested in much since the 80s, but I love the stuff from the Sixties and Seventies. I never went to film school, so I attribute much of my filmmaking style to the herky-jerky, panel-driven, somewhat hyperactive style of comics. When I was thinking about a postcard image for the play, I called up my friend Bob Sikoryak and asked him to design an EC Comics-style postcard. It’s a perfect image and one that I particularly love.

How about that musical number?
A long time ago I heard someone describe good musicals as the kind where the songs come at places in the story where the character cannot adequately express their emotions anymore simply by talking, so they break into song. I loved that explanation. At the point in Speed Freaks where Ivan swallows the pure chunk and freaks out, we’ve already seen so much maniacal behavior that the only place he could go would be break into song.
I always have had a pretty easy time writing new lyrics to old songs. In this case, for the stage version, I used a fast Duke Ellington song that I sped up even faster. Once I got the lyrics, I took the song to my friend, Johanna Meyer, and she choreographed the bear dance.
When we shot the film, we recorded the song using playback of the Duke Ellington song but, in order to avoid copyright issues, I asked my cousin, Riley McMahon, to write a brand new song that sounded similar enough. He did a fantastic job.
Although I love the number in the film, it always makes me a bit sad because in the stage version it almost literally brought down the house. As the bears keep accumulating, the stage was completely packed full and then, when everyone starts jumping up and down, we shook the stage and house. Performing that number produced many of my all-time favorite moments on stage. I had previously developed a bit of a reputation as a creator of insanely energetic theater, but this kind of raised the bar to a new level. I had been using dance in all of my shows but this number embraced it in a Broadway-meets-Off-Off Broadway fashion like never before.

What films or filmmakers influenced Speed Freaks?
I've never really been saddled with influences very much when it comes to film. I watched the original Texas Chain Saw Massacre a lot before we shot. I really admired the composition and the lighting and the incredibly real feeling of that film. Movies get buried very very deeply in my subconscious the second that they are over, so what happens to me more often is I'll be watching a film that I've seen before and suddenly realize where a moment originated in something I've made. This happened with Delicatessen and Speed Freaks. I saw it in the theater in 1992, shot Speed Freaks in 2000, then saw Delicatessen again a few years after that and was stunned to see how much I had subconsciously been influenced by that film. For the record, Jean-Pierre Jeunet is one of my favorites. The same thing happened with Citizen Kane. I had seen it a long long time ago, made Speed Freaks, then saw it again and was a little shocked to see how much "See the Bears" resembles the musical number in the middle of Citizen Kane. I was really embarrassed, thinking that people would just assume that I was stealing from that movie. Of course, Orson Welles had no dancing bears. And as I think about it, "See the Bears" can be traced all the way back to me playing Harold Hill in The Music Man in high school. Part of me thinks that I'm just not yet ready to let those incredible first big moments on a stage dissolve into my memory. I find myself trying to re-create them over and over again.

Talk about the sweat.
I’m always frustrated with movies that have intense physical scenes and the actors don't have a drop of sweat on them. Having done the play on stage, I can safely say that we all knew from sweat. By the end of the play, David Cote could literally pour sweat out of his yellow rubber boots, I sweat through my pants and could ring out my tie. I’m not exaggerating. In terms of sweat, the movie is actually pretty tame.

What about the set?
In the stage production, the set was four feet deep by eight feet wide (yes, that’s right). For the film, we had an eight-foot square box with removable walls and ceiling. The mind-bending effect in the film that I love is that the room seems to be spinning and turning and expanding and contracting all throughout, never really letting the audience get their bearings. This was somewhat unintentional and a result of my constant desire to put the camera in as many positions as possible.

And the crew?
Director of Photography, Assistant Director, Script Supervisor, Gaffer, Sound, Production Designer and several PAs. I had my friend David Letwin come in whenever he could to keep an eye on things, as I was in nearly every single shot of the film. And that was it. Some of us, most notably myself, had never been on a film set before our first day of shooting on Speed Freaks. Over those 28 days, I have never laughed so hard, learned so much and worked so hard in all my life. We had a blast.

Any good war stories?
Being my first film, I made sure to assemble a small crew of friends who maybe didn’t have a ton of film experience but who, like me, would relish the learning curve. I avoided strangers with film experience who would come in and tell us how we were doing everything wrong.
Rick Martin, my expert theatrical lighting designer, had a gig already scheduled during the last week of our shoot. But three weeks of Rick was better than no Rick at all, so we forged ahead and looked for a replacement gaffer.
Over the first three weeks Rick lit about 300 shots on our eight-foot square set. He has an incredible knack for maximizing time and money, so we used theater lights (which were much cheaper than film lights) and he jury-rigged everything with gaffe tape and scraps of wood and foam core. It wasn’t pretty behind the camera, but in front of it he was doing amazing work and defining the look of the film.
The last week came and our replacement gaffer, let’s call him The Mole, came in. Rick showed him our Rube Goldberg-ian way of making a movie. The Mole raised his eyebrows but didn’t seem to have a problem…until Rick was gone.
I would tell The Mole what the shot was, he would sit there for a good minute and then say, “O.K., but it’s going to look like shit.” I would say “We’re not making a romantic comedy. Just light it.” The Mole would then laboriously try to use our paltry but effective package to light the set the way that he was taught at film school. When he was done (which he would never tell anyone), we would look at the lights then tell him how they were supposed to look. He would sit for a minute, then grumpily trudge over and shove the lights into Rick’s configuration, muttering how each one of us was doing everything wrong – from the script supervisor to the cinematographer to the actors.
I fired him after two miserable days and we lit the rest of the shots ourselves, making fun of The Mole at every possible opportunity. Oh, and he left his gaffer gloves on the set. I use them these days to do yard work.