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Scotiabank, you're richer than you think. Hello everyone, Kyle here, and we are back with another thing. I don't know what to call this yet. I don't have a fun name.
If you have a fun name for what this segment might be, you let me know. But I am here with another filmmaker friend of mine, and this is not just a filmmaker friend who I met out in the world. This is like a roots. This is roots filmmaker friend of mine.
His name is Ben Warhead. Say hello, Ben Warhead. Hello, hello. Thank you for having me.
This is awesome. Yeah, man. It's really awesome. I'm so happy to have you here.
We go way, way back to college. We go back to Syracuse University. And I'll skip ahead to what we'll be discussing here. But when you came out with a horror short, it seemed kind of necessary to have you on the show to discuss it.
But we will get there. And I just wanted to have the folks meet you. So go ahead and give a little introduction about yourself, where you're from, what got you involved with filmmaking, and what was your favorite memory of me in Syracuse? I'm staying with you for the last part out.
Well, first of all, Kyle, you're one of my first memories from Syracuse Film School. Because you were the first friend in our film class that I spoke to at that trap hole at Hendrix Chapel. Yes. We were sitting up in the rafters.
And I did. Yeah, we were in Hendrix Chapel in the rafters. Oh my God. I didn't know anybody at Syracuse.
I didn't know anybody, certainly not in my film class. And I turned to this bespepled, long-haired gentleman next to me. And I was like, hey, are you in the film program? And you were like, yeah.
And then, you know, it was like, oh, it's like, nice to meet someone from the actual film program. So actually, you're one of my very first, very specific memories. And I cherish that memory, Kyle. Yeah.
Yeah. Oh my God. I, yes. Up in that balcony.
Because I mean, what are the odds? You know, there's like, that's all the art school was like, in that chapel, like that day. And our film, I mean, I guess when we started, maybe the film class was like 30 kids. Maybe we had that.
And then we ended up with like 15 on the way out. It wasn't a lot. People started dropping with flies. Yeah.
Yeah. What got you to Syracuse? What got you to film? Like, what was that?
What was that? Like, you know, I like any other film nerd in high school and in middle school, you know, was obsessed with movies. My earliest memories of watching movies were my dad bringing home VHS tapes of James Bond and the three stuges. When I would be sick.
Oh, nice. I'd be homesick from school or pretending to be homesick from school. And my dad would bring me a new James Bond and a new three stuges on VHS. And those are like my, I remember those memories distinctly as, you know, my first, like, foray into like getting enveloped in a story and getting enveloped in movies.
And then that progressed, you know, in high school, you know, like every other kid obsessed with film and wanted to be a filmmaker, running around with a handicam and making incredible music videos. Yeah. It's a fully licensed music. Yeah.
And, you know, just really getting lost in the art of filmmaking. And at that point, I didn't really know what else I was going to be doing with my life. I was really getting very into it, very into the arts. I was very into music.
And I didn't even know film school was a thing, you know, that you could do in college. And when I started learning that that was possible and that I could focus in it, I was from New York. I was from the East Coast. And so East Coast schools were just on my radar.
And so Syracuse, I knew had this great program and I knew there was a connection to the prog abroad program. And, you know, for me, it was close enough to home and far enough from home and at all the things I wanted in a film school. And actually, it was incredible film school experience. I mean, Kyle, you know, we shot on film our freshman year and our sophomore year, which doesn't occur anymore at Syracuse.
That doesn't happen anymore. And I really believe those were incredibly formative experiences. It was incredibly hard. Steve Darby, our friend and I shot an entire short film with the shutter closed and didn't know until the film was returned from the transfer.
And then we had to reshoot it. But, you know, those are the... And you had to pay for that. And we had to pay for that to develop the non-film.
The fully black silent film. And, you know, but that's how I got to Syracuse. And from there, I actually ended up falling into, by happenstance, falling into the documentary world. And that's where I've been working very consistently since then, since 2013.
So what is it, it's 2026 now? So 13 years going on, sorry, yeah, going out 13 years. So, and I've been in the Doc Space ever since as my day job, you know, primary focus, you know, between nine and five. And amongst all that, trying to stay as creative as possible, making music videos.
When I was in New York, I made a bunch of music videos, making short films. But then actually, there was quite a large gap of time between, you know, my previous passion project, or the project I was moonlighting doing beyond the nine to five or nine to six job. And this current film, Jack Attack, almost 10 years. And...
Was that right? Yeah, 10 years since I really could sink my teeth into something that was fully my own. And boy, am I happy that I took a chance on it? Yeah, yeah.
Well, I mean, between having to, you know, move New York to LA and then figuring out, like, career stuff. And because you have been working so consistently, it's hard to do that. So I commend you for taking that chance. And we were talking a little bit off Mike before, but just like rallying the troops, just as anybody and everybody and anything that was around to make a thing, you know?
It's like, a lot of... I mean, I know we've seen a lot of people not do that, you know, or just let that kind of fall behind them. And so I'm glad, I'm more than glad that you were able to get something like that. Yeah, so we're talking Jack Attack, which is now streaming on CripTV, which is very cool.
So it is very accessible for anybody listening. Sometimes we have people come on and we're talking about a thing that might just be on a festival circuit. It might be on the festival circuit for like two years. So no, Jack Attack is available to watch.
After you listen to this episode, you've got to check it out. The link will be in the bio. But where did Jack Attack come from for you? Jack Attack came from, you know, a burning desire to make a film after a long time of not making one.
And that burning desire built to a tipping point. And that feeling just so happened to coincide with me getting into surfing as an activity. I'd moved to Southern California. And as cliche as it is, as one does in the cliche world of Southern California, you pretend you're good at surfing.
And, you know, I would... You've got to try. You've got to try. And I'm still not particularly good at it, but I enjoy doing it.
And I would go surfing with my very good friend, Jack Taylor, who actually went to Syracuse with us, who I reconnected with after I moved here to California. And Jack lived in Newport Beach on a part of Newport Beach called Balboa Peninsula, which is incredibly specific and insular part of Newport Beach. And he lived in a very peculiar apartment. He lived in a surf shack that was incredibly small, was a bedroom and a tiny little living room and a little kitchenette with a surfboard hanging on ropes on his ceiling.
It had a grill and a very peculiar alleyway and a shower. And I would go there with my dog, Millie, who is the co-star of Jack Attack. And I would go there and we would surf and then we would come back from surfing and barbecue and basically watch movies. And while I was there while this burning desire to make a film is brewing, I'm looking around at this very peculiar location going, we got to shoot something here.
Because it required zero set deck. I mean, zero. And it was just incredibly authentic. And in that alleyway, he had tons of surfboards and wetsuits and towels and all the props we would need.
So my producer had him going for a location, tons of props that we could need to create a surf movie. And then Newport as a place is very odd because wherever you go, whether it's a coffee shop or a restaurant or a bar, everyone always asks you, if you had been out surfing that day, are you going surfing tomorrow? And how were the waves were the waves firing? But that's authentic Newport beach.
That's amazing. And so I'm in my head going, this is hilarious. Everyone just keeps asking me about surfing. And so that started if someone got murdered in the surf town, but anyone even noticed.
And that was the curl of the idea of like, let's create, like could we make a murder mystery. And then I just looked around at everything I had accessible to me. I was like, all right, I got my dog, Millie. She will work with me.
She comes wherever I go. And Jack had never acted in anything in his life. And I said, we're going to make this film and why don't you just star in it? And he was game.
He was like, yeah, it sounds fun. Cut to six, eight months later where this is becoming really like a real thing. And I said, you know, you really have to act in this film we're making. I've attached a large crew and we're doing this.
And then he started to get really nervous and he signed up for acting classes, like private acting classes and used our sides as his material. And I got it. I got it credit him for really like taking me very seriously. So that's I mean, I could go on and on, but it was really very organic of how it all came down.
And what started kind of as a joke snowballed very quickly into a very real movie that we were making with a really big crew. And I leaned on, you know, when I wrote the script, which was originally called killer waves. Yeah. That was our first title soon became a working title.
Yeah. You know, I immediately went to a producer friend of mine, Chloe Simmons, who's a very accomplished documentary producer and asked her, you know, what do you want to make that helped me make this short film? And then I went to a DP that I worked within documentary film in Tonya Sisneros and many of my other documentary colleagues. And that was fun because we really, in documentary, you don't get takes.
Right. You know, everything is you have to be ready to capture it, especially if you're doing verite. You know, interviews one thing because the camera is sitting in and as the interviews unfold, you don't know what might come, right? You still got to be under toes, but it's different.
Whereas in verite, you don't know who you're following and where they might go. And you just have to follow the action and not ask if you can do it again. And so my philosophy on Jack Attack was, look, this is a micro budget short. We don't have time.
We don't have resources. We need to keep the takes at an absolute minimum. One, two, if we go to three, I'm not doing my job properly. You know, and I think that was actually very helpful because perfection is a privilege if you have the resources to be perfect and we did not.
And so I didn't want to sacrifice making something good for the sake of trying to make something that was perfect. Perfect, sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Question about those other documentary folks that you brought in.
Where did they have kind of a similar feelings or backgrounds that you had? Did they have the itch to do something like this? Were they also feeling that sort of like buzzing that you had to just like do something narrative? Or were they just like, hell yeah, let's go help Ben.
Like, what was their sort of approach to them? You know, I can't speak for them. I think it was more of the ladder of, hey, Ben's enthusiastic about this. Let's go out and do it.
But I think everyone was game. And certainly all of the same rules apply in filmmaking, whether it's a documentary or scripted, right? I mean, it's the same gear. It's the same type of lighting.
You know, it's just a different way of doing it. It's more of a stop, start approach as opposed to rolling a camera for four hours straight. And we're going to figure it out in the edit as opposed to we already figured it out. Now we need to execute.
All the significantly less pre-production when you're making a doc because you can only plan so much. You don't necessarily get a scout. You don't get the scout sometimes. Everybody was game.
And I think it was great because I can only speak for myself. But I had to dust off some cobble-ups making this film. You know, and you know, I'm glad I did because I can't wait to see what I can try to pull off on the next film. I think more than I did what this film did was it reinvigorated the desire to make more films.
Yeah, that's good. That's good. You know, you don't want to leave something like this and be like, all right, fuck that. Not doing that ever again.
You know, that's not the opposite of what you want. So that's good that it gave you that fire and kept it going. No, no, Canada is up to nil. That is the most dangerous lead in soccer.
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It's farmed to frosty. Get a small 99 cent frosty until August 2nd, and participate in what he's had to sex around. I think I love about Jack-Attack. And I got to see a cut or two of it before this final cut, which I really enjoyed in the process of seeing you work with multiple genres.
There's, you know, we're talking about it as a horror piece. It's on a horror platform, but I mean, there's a lot more to it than that. And even the initial approach being like a murder mystery, there's a good bout of comedy. There is some of that doc style that comes in during the surfing stuff.
Like you can just kind of feel like you're almost part of the server. Yeah, what was your approach to combining those things or allowing those things to? It honestly wasn't that intentional. We didn't go into making the film saying, you know, let's blend genres and make this weird horror comedy thriller mystery.
That was not the intention. I think I inherently love those movies. My North Star that I use as an influence on this film is Fargo. I think that film is so funny.
Like, laugh out loud funny. But I watch it with a lot of people where I'm cracking up during scenes and people are dead silent. Perhaps even disturbed. You know?
And that is, I think, incredible filmmaking. You know, you can get two very specific types of reactions from completely different people, whether you intended to or not. And so I think I just kind of went in that direction. It wasn't necessarily intentional.
American Psycho is another example of a film like that where I am rolling on the floor laughing and other people are, you know, very scared. Yeah. And so certainly wasn't intentional going into the film that way. But I think it just kind of naturally went that way.
I don't know. There's something about Tim and Eric that I think also kind of applies in this world sort of a weird characters that don't, that are outsiders and pariahs that like, how are they even. I don't know. I find that to be very funny and weird.
And I just kind of go in that direction. I love how genuinely you came to that story. You know, if you had this itch to make something and then you just let life happen around you and you pulled all those components to make, to turn this into a thing. You know, I think that's a very natural organic way to do it.
I built a story based on the things I had access to. I was like, I've access this location. I've access to a dog. I've access to this red truck.
I have access to the ocean. And I've access to all this surf stuff. Yeah. So make it make it make it make it make it.
I was trying to make something that had laughs and it because I found the world of Newport surf culture to be hilarious. But no one else was laughing except for me. Yeah. Yeah.
It sounds bizarre. It was bizarre. It is bizarre. There's also something really beautiful about surf culture, but there is something inherently funny about it.
So I knew that that was going to be an element of it and how we would die all the comedy. It's certainly something I'm still working on and hope to really dial in even more on the next short because perhaps what you think is funny doesn't necessarily translate on film. And I think I wanted this film to be an opportunity to shake off the cobwebs and actually kind of learn how to tell a story again. How do you make someone laugh?
How do you make someone feel scared? How do you raise tension in the filmmaking process in the editing process? And I think it was incredibly informative in that way. I think you were able to nail a lot of that in that final piece.
Which you were able to bring out to some festivals too. What was that like? What was the response like when you brought it out to the screen? A lot of initial rejections.
You know, we did. It's so brutal out there. It can be brutal. And as the rejections came in, I think we got 20 initial notes.
It hurts your feelings. But then eventually, I think we kind of made a game out of it. Maybe we won't get into any. We will go over 35.
Or we'll go over 50 festivals. We'll do 40. But then it felt good to get in. When we got into Holly shorts, that was very vindicating.
I was like, okay, this is a real festival. This is going to play on a big screen with a proper system. We're going to create a DCP. This is not just going to play as an MOV file.
And I was super stoked because we were making the film. I certainly knew we were going to finish the film, but I didn't know if it would ever play for anyone. And actually, as we started getting the rejection, I started getting really nervous that we'd never get anywhere. And so I set up a private screening.
First we did a screening here at my house just on the TV with a sound bar and tried to make it as cinematic as possible for casting crew. And then it was kind of like a rap party. And then I actually rented out a theater with another filmmaker and we kind of did a double feature for our horror shorts and that was really fun because that was in a proper theater. And then I thought, okay, it played on the big screen.
I don't care if I get into any other festivals because people saw it on the big screen and then it got into some places. Which felt awesome. It was awesome. It was great.
We didn't get into that many, but I felt like with Holly shorts and then with Studio City, those were, you know, those made me feel like, okay, we created something that people enjoyed watching and was, I guess, you know, up to a certain bar where people were willing to program it in their thing. And then the Crip TV, part of it, you know, once we ran out of the, once the festival room was done, I thought, then we came up on the two year anniversary, which was the two year anniversary of the first day of filming is November 3rd, 2023. So when we came up on November 3rd this past fall, I thought, okay, that feels like a nice way to kind of re-enounce it. And put it on YouTube and just be like, it's out in the world, you know, you're out, it's in the wild on YouTube.
And when I did that, it was a little anti-climatic for me. You know, some people posted it and it was fun that it was out there. And then I just always remembered Crip TV because Carlos Arrada, who's a colleague of ours and former Syracuse classmate and very talented filmmaker, had a horror show that was on Crip TV once and I remember he enjoyed it. So I, you know, many moons ago, you know, six, seven, eight years ago.
So I thought, oh, maybe Crip TV would be a nice home for this. And I cold emailed them their info at Crip TV. You know, I dressed, I sent them the link, I made my pitch, and then they got back to me like a week later. And they said, we love it, we love to put it on.
Hell yeah. Now it's so nice, though, there is a home that is not like your channel, as much as you want to just like, but having somebody else just like how's the thing is great. And Crip TV is huge. Like, I mean, they have millions of subscribers and they have a great selection of shorts.
I'm so glad that Jack Attack is on there for people to see. That's great. It's great home for it. It is tough.
It is tough to somehow just like, sometimes shout into the void, into the abyss. All I do is shout into the void, Kyle. That's it. All I do is shout into the void.
Personally, it's brutal. That's so awesome. Thanks, man. And to, like you said, there's a lot of years between the projects that you set out to do.
So congratulations on how awesome it is to have it out there into the world. That's fantastic. Thanks, man. I can't wait for the next one.
Yeah. Okay. Any inklings, any thoughts, anything about the next one that you have on your mind or is it just sort of brewing stuff? I just actually finished writing a short the other day, first draft.
It is a monster movie. It has some comedy in it. I tried not to worry too much about how it was going to get made. I just tried to enjoy the writing process.
I'm not sure it'll ever get made. And then a bunch of other silly short ideas that I have and a couple features I've been kicking around, but trying not to put too much pressure on it about there being a follow-up or what that next project might be. Because Jack Attack happened so organically, it just kind of happened on its own. I didn't force it.
I mean, I had to force actually getting it done on my own deadlines. But in terms of like the creativity, I would all kind of coming together. It was actually really easy because it just kind of sparked. And I'd like to think that they all come that way.
Sometimes they do and sometimes they don't, I'm sure. No matter the artistic medium. So I don't know when the next product will be, but I know there will be one. And that was the most important thing about making Jack Attack was do I want to do this?
Yeah. Do I want to make films? Like check in with yourself, you know, as an artist and be like, is this? Yeah, I was very frustrated.
Like I should be making films. And then I was like, do I make films? So do I want to make films? And so I said, you know what, I'm going to make one and then let's see how I feel at the end of it.
And I think more than anything, it is totally reinvigorated. My love for film and making films. I love that it did that, man. Because it could go the other way.
I'm glad it didn't. Totally. I've known you for a long time. You're a talented filmmaker.
You're a good guy. I'm happy that you got some good shit going on out there, man. Thanks, man. Because we are, we are Hormovignite.
I do have to ask this. You mentioned American Psycho as a formative film. Any other horror films or horror things that you gravitate towards or that you really like? I mean, the shining is the shining, of course.
I loved weapons that came out this year. Weapons ruled. Weapons ruled. Sinners ruled.
I mean, you know, this elevated horror genre is really working in theaters. And it's awesome to see it crushing at the box office. It's really inspiring. It makes me believe that movies are not dead.
If anything's going to save it, I think it could be horror. I think you're right. I think you are right about that, sir. I think it is saving in a lot of ways.
So, yeah, I would say certainly the shining. Fargo's not a horror film, but it's a dark comedy. There's some things that apply. I think it's a good conversation.
Fargo's a good conversation. That's a great band. I told people that they can find Jack Attack on CripTV, and like I said, I'll put the link in the bio. But where else can people track you down?
Should you want them to track you down at all? You can track me down on Instagram. It's just at Ben-Wer-Hit. It's just my name with a dash in it.
A lot of Jack Attack content there, a lot of personal content, you know, family and friends and stuff like that. But that's where anyone can track me down if they want to talk with me. Awesome. Ben, thanks so much, man, for coming on.
Jack, it's been a pleasure. Absolutely a pleasure. You're listening to the e-scape network.