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Interview with Writer & Director Todd Rohal

Can you sort of set up this scene? Tell us how this scene fits within the rest of the movie.

This is a story-within-the-story that serves as an uneven parallel to the film’s main story – the disappearance of a main character. It’s meant to give our characters some hope that, despite attempts to rid one’s self from the planet or remove yourself from the lives you’ve affected, you’re not in total control of other’s memories and thoughts – that no matter how badly one might want to disappear, they continue to live on.
Cory McAbee, who wrote, directed and stars in one of my favorite movies, The American Astronaut, plays Spank Williams, the troubled children’s morning show host.

There are amazing performances in this film, can you tell us how this film was cast?

We cast many of the roles by finding people in the towns we shot in – retired business people, secretaries, school kids and a number of people from a retirement home. I had written some roles for folks I knew or had wanted to meet – Will Oldham and the fellow who plays Barnard. I found Barnard through a video his high school nephew made that was showing at a film festival in Baltimore. There is a couple in the film that I went to college with who had dated each other, but had since broken up. I thought that bringing them back together would add a nice uncomfortable factor to their performances. It worked.

What was the inspiration for this particular scene?

This scene was originally written for a 7-foot-tall black man, but when telling Cory McAbee about he film he asked if there was a role for him and I let him have this one. The scene came about from writing and rewriting ideas about how to unsuccessfully kill one’s self in a rock quarry.

Where was this filmed?

We shot this scene in an active rock quarry in central Pennsylvania. We shot the whole scene in the rain. The rest of the movie was shot in the tiny towns and communities outside of Harrisburg.

Name something that you’ve lost.

No one has ever asked this before, so I’ve never been able to use this answer…but this entire film is based around the loss of my best friend from high school and college, who suddenly stopped communicating with everyone he knew and soon after disappeared entirely. I haven’t heard from him in over 10 years. I wrote this movie centered around that weird feeling of loss, the inability to do anything about it and the strange reactions it spawns from different people affected by it.

We think that forcing labels onto things (read: it’s a Mumblecore Film!) is generally lazy and lame, especially in the case of this film, which is really in a league of its own. How has this categorization hurt and/or helped you along the way? Was it a conscious decision to be part of the “movement?”

Joe Swanberg asked me to be a part of his film Hannah Takes the Stairs. Since many film writers had not seen my film, they did what most great journalists tend to shy away from – made assumptions.. Those assumptions were copied and pasted into other articles and so on and so on.
It’d be even nicer to be lumped into the movement of what’s actually happening in independent film right now – filmmakers taking their movies on the road and embracing their ownership of their work. The old model of selling your movie to a distribution corporation for a huge sum of money doesn’t happen anymore (for films like ours). There’s little respect for self-distributing your films right now, but the growing movement of filmmakers doing so (Cory McAbee with The American Astronaut, Crispin Glover with What Is It?, Lance Hammer with Ballast and Ronnie Bronstein with Frownland) are shucking all of that and setting out to find their audiences. I toured with this film for 2 years, taking it from theater to theater and making sure people saw it. I survived off of my film during that entire period. That’s the movement I’d like to see and continue to be a part of.

Guatemalan Handshake was your first feature. What was the hardest part about making it?

We set up some impossible tasks for this movie – shooting on 35mm anamorphic with a budget of $70,000, casting a lot of kids and animals, using a lot of unreliable cars (one of them being fully electric), being in a different location every day (in rivers, power plants, race tracks, roller rinks and rock quarries) and having no solid back-up plans. That was tough, but it was all a joy compared to fighting to get the film seen and presented properly. That’s been an uphill battle all the way.

What are you working on now?

Two new movies – one based around a real-life moment I had in the Boy Scouts, when we found our scoutmaster impaled by a tree branch in the middle of the woods and later found out it was all a first aid test, and the other film is an ode to the Little Rascals and Blazing Saddles called The Black Man’s Butt. I look forward to them both shattering all box office records in the next few years.

The feature film, Guatemalan Handshake is available on DVD distributed through Benton Films.

For more information, including podcasts, cast bios, and video, visit their website, http://www.ghandshake.com.

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