Interviewed by John Paul Horstmann

creation@pitt.edu

John Paul: First off, tell me a little bit about yourself and what you do right now.

Dave Jose: I've been working in film since- I guess like '93 so that's nine years now. I started off in special effects, moved from effects to production, started doing camera work, grip work, electric work... I've worked pretty much every major department. Now I'm back to doing production work and assistant director work.

JP: So what sort of things do you do on a day to day basis?

D: It depends on the film-it depends on how the upper echelon of the film, like the AD's are set up but normally I'm in charge of the production assistants. I do the call sheet for the next days' worth of shooting. I do some of the hiring.

JP: You're in charge of going and getting the actors as assistant director?

D: That's normally what the second AD runs but the way that we tend to split up our AD department we have the second second AD handle the actors and have the second AD and the first AD on set most of the time.

JP: So are you working on a big production right now or an independent film?

D: It's an independent film. It's called Into the Sun-I don't remember the director's name-we're out in Walla Walla, Washington starting in about two weeks, maybe.

JP: And what would you say the budget is on this film.

D: I really haven't heard but I'd guess that it's probably about maybe one to two million.

JP: What's the largest production you've ever worked on?

D: Oh God. I haven't seen the exact numbers but I would guess that it would either Wonder Boys or The Mothman Prophecies. Both of those ran into a lot of surprise charges. With The Mothman Prophecies I know that about two weeks before they finished there was a bit of a meltdown because they realized that they had been doing the budget incorrectly and there was like 4 million dollars-

JP: Was that from the bridge?

D: Well it wasn't from the bridge. I'm not sure how that much money slipped through but there was just one day I was hanging out with one of the producers and he got a phone call and somebody did the math wrong I guess.

JP: Just day to day shooting stuff.

D: Yeah. And with Wonderboys there were just so many things that they hadn't planned on-just because of the snow and because of the weather.

JP: Well they faked the snow right?

D: Yeah but when you shoot in the wintertime you run into tons and tons more problems. Stuff is slower.

JP: The equipment breaks?

D: Just the set-ups take longer, everybody's in a lousy mood. And they ran into tons and tons of problems. There were times when I was making more money on my meal penalties because they had to shoot into lunch than I did normally out of my entire day.

JP: You make more during lunch if you have to shoot through lunch?

D: Yeah. If you're working one of the union jobs they need-let's see-for the first six hours you get a standard rate, and if you don't break for lunch at the six hour mark, every 15 minutes that you go over you get double time. And then it's like another four hours after lunch and you get time and a half. Everything after that is double time base. So yeah they would go into five or six hours worth of meal penalty, and everybody on the crew, their rate would then double or triple for the course of the day.

JP: What was your position on those two films?

D: On Wonderboys I was one of the grips and on The Mothman Prophecies I was-I jumped around a bit. I was in the locations department...

JP: Any scouting?

D: No. It was all like set location stuff. I was like unofficial second AD for a lot of the second unit stuff. The stunt shots.

JP: You said you were in the union?

D: I'm in the local IATSE Union. IATSE is the stage technicians, it's the grips and electrics.

JP: What's that stand for?

D: International Association of Theatrical Stage Employees. I have an invite into the Director's Guild but I'm holding off right now because most of the AD work that I'm doing is non-union stuff.

JP: What have you directed?

D: I haven't directed anything. Assistant directions falls in with the DGA. I'm going to hold off. If I join the union now I'm not allowed to do the non-union stuff.

JP: Are the majority of the things you do independent productions?

D: I usually do maybe three union features a year. The commercial work-just doing commercials-those are all pretty much non-union. And then I'll do like another three or four independents non-union.

JP: Any commercials we've seen around here?

D: Oh, PNC [Bank], couple PNC. Couple Fox Sports commercials. Giant Eagle [Supermarkets]. Tons of stuff.

JP: The one with the milk?

D: Not the one with the milk. We've just finished one up a couple weeks ago for the "I Care" thing. It's something that Giant Eagle is running now where if you sign up for this special service, whenever you make a purchase they donate a certain percentage of that to a trust fund.

JP: So, what I want to know is how did you get into all this? What steps did you take and how did you break into what you're doing and find a place?

D: I really lucked into it a lot. I decided I wanted to be a special effects artist when I was in middle school and that was like all that I focused on. And I was at a convention when I was in tenth grade, and ran into the guy who was my idol at time, an effects artist named Tom Savini. And he had said to me that if I was ever in Pittsburgh, to look him up. You know, I'd hang out at the shop and stuff. And I knew that he used to teach at CMU a long, long time ago so when it came time to pick a college I just came straight to Pitt.

JP: Is he one of those Night of the Living Dead guys?

D: Uh huh. Yeah he did Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead. Tons of stuff. Tons of stuff. So I came out here looking to work with him. Ended up just by chance running into him a couple years later and he gave me my first job. That was on-there was an old PBS kid's television show called Ghostwriter, and he was doing the Halloween episode. So that was my big break. And then after that, Sudden Death started filming in town, and a couple of the guys that I had worked with on that [Ghostwriter] were working on Sudden Death and put me in.

JP: So just... meeting people...

D: Yeah it was more of a contact, more of a contact thing.

JP: What's it like to work on a set? How do you act? How are you not supposed to act?

D: It depends on how big the picture is. The more money there is involved, the bigger the egos, and the more lightly you have to tread around everybody. But then yeah I've been on little tiny budget things where because it's all local people everybody's a family.

JP: Is that preferable?

D: The money is definitely better on the bigger films, but one of the nice things about working in Pittsburgh is that you always have a good chunk of the normal guys. So it's like a bunch of friends hanging out most of the time.

JP: What's the smallest production you've ever worked on?

D: We did little independent film called Mary and Joe. I guess that was last summer. That's probably the smallest non-student thing I've been involved in.

JP: Was it full length?

D: Well, he wanted to make it full length. It was a first-time director and I would really be surprised if with the stuff that he shot if he was able to even put together half an hour of film.

JP: Did he make a lot of mistakes or was it just like a learning process?

D: Yeah it was a big learning process.

JP: I did the same last summer with another guy. I learned from watching him and his mistakes. Would you recommend doing that, for students to try and get involved in a local production?

D: Oh yeah. Try to get involved in whatever you can because you're always going to learn something. Even if you spend the entire time doing the wrong things, at the end of it it's pretty easy to figure out what things were right and what things and what things were wrong.

JP: Did you ever work on a small dynamic film that really worked out well, that did well, or that was taken someplace?

D: We shot a trailer a couple summers ago-I guess it was about three summers ago. There was nothing going on in town, and one of the AD's that I work for, he's had this idea for a project called Rain of the Dead. It's a zombie-I think I might have even shown you the tape or something like that. He had an idea that he had been working on since he was like a high school kid, and nobody was doing anything so he just scraped together a little bit of money and we shot over three days and we shot a trailer for it.

JP: On film?

D: On 35. And he just recently heard from-it just got picked up, the trailer got picked up and he's rewriting the script right now.

JP: So he used the trailer as kind of like a teaser for-

D: Exactly, exactly. And we pushed it around a lot. The way that we shot the trailer we set it up so that it could fall really into anything. If they were looking for like an 'X-Files-ey' sort of TV show they could go for that. If they wanted like action and comedy-The way that we pieced the trailer together, depending on what they wanted to see we would hand them a different trailer. One was like the conspiracy, 'comic-bookey' angle, and the other one was the band of friends marching through zombie territory.

JP: So it was a very comic book type of movie?

D: Yeah, that's the basis for it was a sort of comic book.

JP: Did you like the Spiderman movie?

D: Did I like it? Yeah, I liked it a lot. [laughs]

JP: You worked on Dogma right? How involved were you with Dogma.

D: Pretty involved. I worked two departments. I was one of the production assistants and I worked on the special effects for Nomad the Shit Monster. When I was on-set I was right in the middle of everything and on the effects days. There were two major sequences that we had the Shit Demon involved in. One was in the bar and the other one was in the hospital-the hospital scene. It was a lot of fun. It was a great group of people to work with, on both sides. The cast was awesome. The crew was awesome. And that was one of the-

JP: The hospital scene?

D: They kind of cut it out. I don't even know if they introduced him at the end there. She goes into the hospital where God is. Well, the Shit Demon originally showed up and they had some stupid thing where when she pulls the plug on God, the Shit Demon turns into flowers and I think they cut that. I don't know if they re-introduced him at all at the end there but...

JP: Yeah I don't remember that part. It was playing a lot on digital cable...

D: Yeah so they probably cut that part out.

JP: I like the monster. Can you tell me a little bit about the process of making it?

D: Well there was a main foam-latex suit, there was a stunt mask, and then-like for the close-up shots of the head it was a cable driven head that could do-I don't remember how complicated it was. It had two eyelids-yeah two different eyelids, the eyebrows, the eyes could move. The mouth had like four different points of movement. The nostrils could flare...

JP: No CGI?

D: Well, at the end they end up CGI-ing it. Not all of it, but they CGI-ed over a little bit. Just for the scenes where he's throwing the shit. The little bits and pieces of that were CGI-ed. And then after they had made it, after they had made the suit, it was coated- it was covered entirely with this fake shit.

JP: Oh yeah, how did you make it drip?

D: There is this stuff called methylcellulose that is- you'll find it in almost any slimy thing that you buy, anywhere. Milkshakes-McDonald's milkshakes has it in it. Toothpaste.

JP: Chinese dinners?

D: I don't know if they use methylcellulose.

JP: The slime in Ghostbusters is the same thing I think.

D: Yeah, yeah. It is. It's methylcellulose. You mix it with water and it just turns really, really mushy. So we had like four different- we called them 'flavors'-of varying colors and consistencies. Then we used like oatmeal, sawdust. A couple of the raunchier colors had like corn and stuff mixed in. [laughs] It was so horrible.

JP: Did you have to keep dumping it on?

D: Yeah. And the worst part about it was that we'd made-I forget how much we made at first, but we made something about like five hundred thousand gallons of this stuff and we kept on mixing it in these big ten-gallon drums.

JP: Now the actors weren't on the location when you were doing it were they?

D: Not when we were mixing it but when we were using it in the bar scene they were. But the worst part was that we would mix it, and then they would keep on pushing that scene [back] and this was all food-based stuff and it was in this hot warehouse so it would start to go bad. And when it would go bad it would like ferment and bubble up out of the thing so once in a while we'd get a call from the warehouse saying, "Uh, the shit's gone bad again." So we'd have to come in, clear it all out, it would smell horrible, and then we'd mix up more. So they kept pushing and we brought it down to the set that one day-

JP: They kept pushing the date back?

D: They kept on pushing the date, so we kept on having to scrap it and make more, scrap it and make more. And so the day that we were shooting it, we brought the stuff down, and we had it in these black steel drums in the back of a truck. It sat there for two days, in the sun, cooking, before we actually got around to the scene where we would use it. So we start smearing it around the bar scene, putting it on the guy, smearing it all over the room and everything- and it stank. It was really- it didn't smell like shit but it was still really nasty. And it was slippery, and everybody's like walking around, you'd wipe out and fall in this stuff. It was horrible.

JP: Now the process of making the monster, how do you learn something like that? Is this something you learn from people, working with them over time?

D: I learned it all-the majority of it I taught myself looking through books, through different magazines, while I was growing up...

JP: Which magazines?

D: Fangoria. Stuff like that. Order videos and stuff out of the back of that, order books. So I had a good working knowledge of most it. And then once I got down into the shop it was honed down a lot. But most of the times I jury-rigged stuff.

JP: Have you ever made anything like [the shit monster]?

D: Not entirely by myself. I did a couple of small hand puppets when I was in high school, but nothing as big and complicated as that. And I've fixed up a couple of things...

JP: So you were entirely responsible for it?

D: No I wasn't entirely responsible. The Shitman himself was made by a guy named Vince Guastini and I was working for him, for mostly just the design of the shit itself,* but I helped him with the cable control and stuff while we were filming Nomad on set.

*Guastini was in the Makeup Department. Dave is credited on Dogma as David 'Yoko' Jose, "Fecal Effects Wrangler"

JP: Well, we want to get some advice for actors. Do you have any advice-

D: Most of the acting I've done in town is all like small theatre, murder-mystery, and improve stuff.

JP: So you've acted yourself?

D: Nothing on film other than extra work but a lot of stuff on stage. It's so important to get your name out there with a couple of casting agencies. If you're staying town here there's a couple of really, really good ones.

JP: What are they?

D: There's Donna Bellajec is the big one, but there's also Nancy Mosser Casting. She does a lot of the smaller stuff. She does a lot of the extras for the bigger productions. Those are the two who do most of the film stuff here in town. There also a group called The Casting Agency, which is a little bit pricey, but it's still worth it.

JP: You have to pay?

D: Yeah. With Nancy Mosser it's a free service, because she does the lower-end stuff. And Donna Bellejec and The Casting Agency both charge- I don't know what their charge is off-hand.

JP: Do most productions use local actors?

D: A percentage of them use local actors. It really depends on where the production's out of. If it's a local thing, it tends to be more local actors.

JP: How do you keep yourself working constantly?

D: Right now it is incredibly hard to get work. The percentage of unemployed film workers right now is horrifying. I had a nine month period after the September 11th attacks where I only had four commercials. There were three features that I was supposed to be working on starting in November. They've all been pushed to the end of the summer.

JP: I want to ask you about independent productions. How important do you feel they are? How much of a future do you think someone who wanted to be a crewmember could have just working independent productions?

D: It's tough. The amount of work that you put in a lot of time for independent films, you don't have the same pay-off as you would get working on the larger pictures. Right now independent films are really, really doing well because there's such a push. We've had so many good Indy films come out that people are spending a lot more time going through the different circuits of independent films and the different Indy film awards ceremonies-they're paying more attention. Unfortunately, because of that though-and also because of how easy it is to do Indy films now with digital cameras-there's such a glut of them though. There's so much stuff out there that isn't worth it, that the ones that are really, really good get lost in the shuffle a lot of times.

JP: Do you think it's feasible to make something if you had a good story.

D: Oh yeah. Definitely.

JP: It's feasible to make something that is good, great quality?

D: Yeah. You see them all the time.

JP: Where do you think would be good places to send it, to get it noticed?

D: The only local one I can think of is called- something "Sink"... "Kitchen Sink"?

JP: Film Kitchen?

D: Yeah that's it. Film Kitchen.

JP: What about nationally?

D: Throw it up on the internet. That's the easiest way to get people to see it.

JP: LA. You went out to LA, didn't you?

D: Yeah I work there-usually I do like one or two shows out there a year.

JP: So what do you think about moving to LA?

D: I really don't like it enough to live there. I love working there, I've got lots and lots of friends there, I like to go there for vacation, but it's a tough town to live in.

JP: Why is it tough?

D: Personally I tend to feel that the majority of the time when I'm dealing with people out there, it's almost always on a work relationship. People only want to deal with me in a, "Well, what can you do for me?" sort of way.

JP: People are less genuine?

D: Yeah. And I'm sure that I'm imagining a good bit of that, but...

JP: What about professionally, the way you relate to people. Especially in doing work. What kind of relationship do you maintain?

D: You have to start off very, very business-like. Just so you can get the feel for everybody. Like I was saying before, the bigger the film the bigger the ego is so you have to do a lot of testing to see where the boundaries are.

JP: What sort of egos have you seen?

D: Actors of course who, they ask for water, you bring them a water, they smack it out of your hand because it's not the right bottled water. Just insane stuff like that.

JP: Would you say that actors or directors are the worst offenders?

D: I've lucked out- the majority of the directors that I've worked with tend to be really down-to-earth and... at least try really hard to be normal people.

JP: Right, that's what I've heard.

D: And the actors too, like Jean Claude [Van Damme]. Jean Claude was a complete asshole. And uh- what-was-her-name in Diabolique? Sharon Stone was horrifying. But everybody on Dogma was awesome. Every single one of them.

JP: What I like about Dogma, it seemed like Matt Damon and Ben Affleck had this really cool chemistry that I've seen in other things.

D: Well, they're friends in real life, so a lot of that comes out.

JP: It just seemed like on the set it was there, something behind the scenes that was coming out. Is that how it was?

D: Oh, exactly, exactly. Yeah, they were continuously- they could have passed for brothers, the way that they acted together.

JP: What about Kevin Smith? Is he easy to work with?

D: Yeah. He was great to work with. Great to work with.

JP: How'd you get that job with Kevin Smith. Just a friend or something?

D: No, just when films come into town now, I'm on the short list of people who gets the call when the work comes in, so...

JP: How do you think Pittsburgh could attract more films to come to town?

D: More than what Pittsburgh needs to do right now, the U.S. in general-we're losing so much of our film work to Canada right now. That's the biggest thing. Pittsburgh still has all of the things that attract films to come to Pittsburgh. They're still there, all that it really comes down to right now is the money. You can save 20 percent if you're filming up in Canada. As long as the people who have the money want to make more money, they don't care where it's filmed. They're going to do it where it's cheapest.

JP: Any more advice for aspiring directors, film students?