CraveOnline: I’m a native Los Angeleno. I love movies about Los Angeles that are shot in Los Angeles. You shot some pretty recognizable locations, like Amoeba Records or the Century City mall. Did you have to shoot those on the sly, or did Amoeba go, “Paul Schrader wants to shoot here?! Come on in! Do it for free! Take some free CDs!”
Paul Schrader: We had to shoot at Amoeba, we had to be out by 9am. So we started at 6, and we had a three-hour slot. We had no permits for anything. The Chateau Marmont was given free because we had friends there. We had to be in there by 2:30 in the morning and we had to be out by 4:30 in the afternoon. So that’s how we worked it. We were going to shoot the Santa Monica mall guerilla, and we got busted by the cops because the paparazzi discovered Lindsay [Lohan], and the security came, and it was revealed that we didn’t have permission to shoot there. We were thrown out of the Santa Monica mall. The only location we actually paid for is, we paid for Century City but we shot before they opened the stores, because we had got caught at Santa Monica.
You also talk about how you never funded a film like this before. You went through Kickstarter, and one of the prizes you gave away was a script critique by Paul Schrader.
Yeah, I’m sitting here in a room, I’ve just signed 900 posters, and I have 220 scripts yet to sign. [Laughs] So I’m working my way through my obligations. Bret has five or six books he has to read. So yes, it’s a lot of work. We’re having our Kickstarter screening here tomorrow night, and we already had our screening in New York.
How many script critiques did you end up selling?
I don’t know. I’ll probably find out when I see somebody.
Do you give notes regularly, or will this be like exercising an old muscle?
This would be honoring an obligation. [Laughs]
You’re one of the filmmakers who rose from the ranks of a critic to become an acclaimed filmmaker in your own right.
Yeah.
Does that interest you when people critique your films? Do you read the reviews and go, “Your criticism needs work?”
Well, I mean I read the good ones. There’s so much trash journalism involved with movies now. So much snarkiness, so much gotcha. “Say something bad about Lindsay so they’ll double-click my site.” That’s annoying. But unfortunately it’s the kind of open garbage dump of social media that movies have to wade through. There have been some very smart reviews, and some of them that have not been positive are still smart, but for the most part, you do have to wade through all that “Lindsay” junk. But you know, I’ve had complaints about that, and on the other hand I manipulated it. I created it. I created it so we could have a profile and lift our head above the crowd, making a film for a quarter million dollars. But it is a little hypocritical of me to complain about it, because I sowed the wind and I really can’t complain about the whirlwind.
