INTER-STATE

INTER-STATE was born from a dream I had as I fell asleep at the wheel at 75 miles per hour. I was driving back from a videography gig a couple of hours from my apartment. As I passed out, I thought I saw an old man in a tracksuit running in front of me. My tires slid off the pavement and into the grass. Remarkably I was completely fine, and more importantly, there was no damage to my car. I took a deep breath, slapped my face, and got back on the road. I proceeded to fall asleep at the wheel several more times over the next year. Eventually I decided that 16 dollars an hour was not worth that commute.

At 21, upon graduating film school, I declared that I was ready to make a feature, and I would shoot it by the time I turned 23. Predictably, this did not happen, and I spent my 24th birthday lamenting my failure. While I had written most of the script, bills were due and I had found myself devoting most of my time to working for a handful of sleazy corporate video producers, who managed to squeeze even more unpaid overtime out of me on the promise that it would help my career in the long run. Like many film school graduates, I quickly transformed from a wide-eyed youngster with big dreams into a tired, trepidatious cynic worried about when the next gig would come.

All of these experiences locked in the character of Ben. In the final script she is a young scientist stuck in a small town, enamored by this tech startup that promises her a chance to make something of herself. It’s a long commute from her place, but she decides it’s worth it for the opportunity. As that long commute continues to drain her, she starts to wonder if it’s all worth it. Just when it seems she’s going to make it work, things escalate to life or death.

Eventually I was able to take 2-weeks off work to shoot the whole movie with a small team of friends with similarly grueling film industry experiences. It was a chance to tell a story we could relate to. Shot on a shoestring budget, the film is gritty, grimy, and fast. It often wears its heart on its sleeve, carried by a terrific authenticity by Aubrey Clyburn (who is an actual programmer outside of acting). The original script was filed with farcical elements that feel more and more real as the years tick on. It incorporates horror sequences as Ben begins to find herself and her ethics challenged by the pursuit of doing a “good job.” It’s crass, there’s a bunch of splatter shots and a handful of dumb jokes. Sometimes it feels like The Prestige on a home movie budget and sometimes it feels like Bad Taste on pretty much the same budget. But at the center of it all is Ben and her growing disillusionment with what she thought the real world would be like.

After 2 years of editing this on nights and weekends between days at a job I eventually found out was illegally underpaying me thousands of dollars, we received a generous grant from the New York State Council of the Arts. With that I decided to quit my job, move in with my parents for a bit, and work full time on following my dreams. In pursuit of giving the film its own unique look to match the raw shooting style, I ended up creating an overcomplicated system involving transferring the film to Super VHS, distorting the VHS, transferring that back to digital, and blending the original high res footage with the decayed analogue transfer. To my eye, as someone who has been spending virtually every night and weekend for two years looking at this movie, it looks significantly different. As the film finishes up I find myself feeling like Ben at the end of the movie, back in the small town she felt stuck in, with her own machine project. But like her, I love this machine, and I love the team behind it even more. Though I'd never pretend this story of young disillusionment is revolutionary, it's certainly felt more and more prescient as we get deeper into the 2020's. Ben's fight to keep her dream alive through the machinations of the capitalism is a fight I know very well, and I aspire to fight as hard as she does. I hope audiences see some of themselves in that fight too.