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Your new movie The Lucky Bucks - in a few words, what's it about?
It's Alex the deer's first mating season, but he gets his antlers in a
lock with a rival, Mortimer, and they remain locked for the rest of
the movie - even after Mortimer's head becomes separated from his
body. Mortimer's detached head begins speaking, and he has a very
negative outlook, tormenting Alex by telling him how meaningless life
is, drawing inspiration from the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer.
This makes it hard for Alex to have a successful mating season. It's
like a cross between Bambi, The World As Will and Representation
and American Pie.
The Lucky Bucks
is based on a short story of the same title of yours - so do talk about
the story for a bit, and how close did you remain to your source material?
And have you written the story with a movie already in mind in the first
place? The movie is shorter with a few scenes removed, but it's essentially
true to the story. The main difference is that in the book, Alex and
Mortimer are cousins, because it's a short story from a larger book
called Cousin Calls, which has stories which all start with someone
saying "you don't know me, but we're cousins." In Cousin Calls, the
story is told in the first person by a mounted deer head on a pub
wall. What were your sources of inspiration when
writing The Lucky Bucks
- both the short story and the script? The first inspiration was a photo I saw of a deer with another deer's
decapitated head stuck to his antlers. There's many pictures of this
because it happens a lot, two deer with get their antlers locked and
they can't get them apart and one dies. After generative Ai came out,
I wanted to try to make something in a friend's painting style. It was
going to either be a feature length movie based on my book The Last
Feast, or this. I decided to do the short one.
The Lucky Bucks
contains many a quote from the writings of Arthur Schopenhauer - so what
does Schopenhauer's philosophy mean to you personally?
I was only vaguely aware of him at first. I wanted Mortimer's head to
be ranting about some obscure German philosopher and I was going to
either go with Hegel, Heidegger or Schopenhauer, because that was the
most annoying thing I could imagine a deer head ranting about 24 hours
a day. I read a little for research and ultimately Schopenhauer won
out because his pessimistic philosophy matched the story perfectly. He
basically thinks that the essence of the world is a great lust and
hunger that can never be satisfied and every aspect of reality is a
reflection of this. I think it's a bullshit philosophy if you take it
literally, but not if you read it as art rather than philosophy. He
came up with a philosophy which expressed his misery and depression in
the same way an Edvard Munch painting might. I wanted to represent
his philosophy accurately, but I don't need to believe it to do that.
You of course also have to talk about all your allusions to the
Addams Family for a bit?
I came up with that as a mirror to Mortimer's Schopenhauer quotes, I
thought it would be funny if Alex's metaphors were all something much
lighter. I added the scenes where Alex is watching TV through the
window to explain how he knows what
The Addams Family is, and that led
to the perfect way to end the story. Do also talk
about The Lucky Bucks's
brand of humour! It's a comedy in a sense, but it's pretty dark. A lot of people won't
find it funny. Stylistically, you have based your
movie on the paintings of Vanessa Steinhilb - so what can you tell us
about her, and what inspired you to pick up her style for your movie?
She's a friend who has been painting her whole life. She plays with Ai
and we show each other things we made, but she doesn't have any
filmmaking aspirations. I wanted to see what her paintings looked like
animated, and I liked some of the tests, so I asked if I could make a
whole movie in her style. The Lucky Bucks
has been created by AI - so do take us through he process of making your
film? It started with photos and sound recordings I made in
upstate NY. The ambient forests sounds you hear through the whole movie
are not AI, they're real recordings. Then I took the forest photos I took,
used MidJourney to recast them in Vanessa's painting style, and
used generative expand to make them wider and stitched them together into
a long strip in photoshop. Then I did it in an almost a traditional
animation way from there, where that strip was my background and I had the
characters on another layer in the foreground. I generated keyframes with
this, and for simpler shots I animated it in MidJourney, keyframe
to keyframe. If I needed something more complicated, I used Pika,
where you can use up to five keyframes with a lot more control over the
timing. For a few shots I incorporated bits of random photos I took, like
sidewalk photos, my kids' cat, a photorealistic image of a deer. The $64-question of course, where can
The Lucky Bucks be
seen? It's free on YouTube: https://youtu.be/L93jE6zVAgI
Anything you can tell us about audience and
critical reception of The Lucky Bucks?
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Most people who watch it tell me they like it, but your review is the
first one. Any future projects you'd like to share?
I'm going to publish a movie called Incorporeal Man
soon, either in November or December. It's a feature length movie about a
drunk who can walk through walls. Here is the trailer:
https://youtu.be/BtmkuHlY4I0
Your/your movie's website, social media, whatever else?
I have some info about other movies and books on my site,
zebharadon.com,
and my only social is BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/zebharadon.bsky.social
Thanks for the interview!
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