Josh Braeburn talks "720"

Jingoistic Claptrap spoke to Writer/Producer/Director Josh Braeburn about the movie 720

Josh Braeburn is about as Californian as you can be without actually being part of the landscape. He has the looks of a twenty year old, tanned, blond, effortlessly at ease.
For reasons I decide not to ask about, Josh insists on being interviewed in his suite, and on his bed.
"It's just the best bed," he enthuses "and this trip, I want to spend as much time in it as I can."

Josh is not exactly over-run with journalists and interviews. He's not promoting anything this trip, which is unusual for a man who has been described as one of the great creative mousewheels of Hollywood. He sits back, stacking another pillow behind him, before telling me what he's up to.

"Well, we did decide that we were going to promote '720', which is the latest movie, but then we decided that we'd really cut back on the publicity and just remove all the hype. We're not even talking about it."

This abrupt change of marketing direction is an unusual step. These days, trailers and tours are a key part of getting attention and ensuring that an audience knows about upcoming releases.

"We got this new marketting guy" says Josh "and he said that viral marketing and big campaigns are out, and that the way to go is with a concept that he called 'asymmetrical marketfare'. So, what we've done is, we've agreed that we'll just go places and mention the title of the movie a couple of times but not to say anything else about it. Like, nothing at all. And we've had the cast sign non-disclosure agreements so tight that if they even admit they've been in the picture they don't get paid."

Isn't this counterproductive?

"You didn't hear the genius part yet. The movie isn't getting a cinematic release. We're not moving it to DVD, it will not be at Blockbuster, you cannot get it through Netflix. I'm telling you, it's genius."

So how do we see it?

"That's the really cool part. We've done a lot of work, looking into the most efficient way to distribute the movie and we've discovered a model that we think is going to be the next big thing, and we're using the currently most popular movie format."

Can you tell us about that?

"Yeah. I am so stoked about this. Look, the movie is oficially in Post-Post. What we're doing is, we've hired a small local movie house in a place called..uhh...Dipthong, or something...somewhere like Cambodia, so it has subtitles. We show the movie there to a selected audience. Then we get some guy to tape it with a hidden recorder, and then we put is straight up on The Pirate Bay so people can torrent it!"

That's certainly unusual.

"The hell it is!"Josh is bouncing on the bed with excitement."Look, every single movie released by Hollywood last year was distributed this way eventually. We're just cutting out the middle man and going straight for profit."

And how does releasing the movie as a torrent make any money?

"Well, we thought about that, and we've decided to encrypt the whole thing. We're using something called "256-bit" encryption, whatever that is, and we're selling the key that allows you to unencrypt and watch the movie. Which I think is neat, it makes the whole movie experience into this James Bond deal where you have to go on a mission just to see the film. And the key is a one-shot deal, so once you watch the movie you have to buy another key to see it again or pass it on to your friends. This is real NASCAR stuff, you know?"

So, you're releasing a movie as a badly taped handycam version, direct to bit-torrent, but encrypting it to NSA-frustrating levels in order to make it more desirable?

"Yeah."

Josh says the release date for the movie is also a closely guarded secret, but that it should be out at some point this summer.

"In the meantime" he says "we've got this really cool project in development. The way it's looking now, it's really going to explore that whole slow-motion bullet time type combat scenario. I think that's a very interesting way to work. So we thought we'd base a movie around it. Multiple angles, slowmo, bullet time, really visceral and real-looking action, just done really, really slowly."

How slow?

"Well, let me put it this way...we're looking at a running time of around a hundred minutes for one extended fight scene that, handled in real time, would last maybe seven or eight minutes."

At this point, Josh goes into an incredible level of detail about the fight. He gets so enthused he acts out several moments from the first draft of the script while standing on the bed.

After Housekeeping have dealt with the broken light fitting and Josh has got his head bandaged we shift venues - sitting at a small table near the window, because Josh has become very nervous of the bed ("bed-fu man, I'm telling you. That's one Shaolin duvet"). We've got a decent view out over the immediate area, and Josh decides to expound on his vision of the future.

"Couple of years back, people were talking about virtual actors and that kind of thing, but I think what we're really heading towards is real actors and real sets with virtual directors. If you think about it, a movie is just a theatre performance but with explosions, so why not just hire actors to repeat a performance to order and let people get online to control cameras and such? Then they could do all the Post, like the editing, and the effects and everything, and we could pre-record ADR incase they want to do that too. So it could all be about the viewer making his or her own films, to their own standards. I've got this development plan worked out where people could colaborate online to be a film crew; the director can give performance notes via Teamspeak, and the actors can use the sound equipment to scream at the DP, so it'll be as authentic a Hollywood experience as possible. I even think we might be able to have a script-production service where budding writers can have their original ideas turned into shooting scripts, and then the public can be in charge of the whole process.
Of course, we're still looking at the revenue model. We're pretty sure people will pay to direct and produce and such, we're just not sure how much we should ask, and whether we should do it by the hour."

Wouldn't this make quite a lot of skilled technicians very unhappy?

"You know" says Josh, and suddenly there's some steel in those wide, slightly unfocused blue eyes "all I ever hear from fans is how the movie raped their childhood or was focused in the wrong area, about how we did it all wrong and how much better they could have done it. So I'm thinking that we should definitely allow all that hidden talent a way to be expressed."
And all of a sudden, he's got that blissed-out thousand yard stare back.
"I'm really looking forward to seeing what people come up with!" he says.

720 goes on bit-torrent release this summer.

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Interview with Josh Braeburn #1

Jingoistic Claptrap: I hear you're working on a new concept?

JB: Yeah, actually the team is kinda retooling it at the moment, we're pretty excited. Y'see, the numbers show that redesigning and updating old TV shows can really work. First you have that ready made nostalgia base, then there's the family factor, plus you have a lot of old scripts lying around that you can pretty much reuse, generally without too much work. The hard parts are already done.

JC: Like?

JB: I always have trouble with character names. I can never think of anything with any punch, you know? Last time I was over here, I asked Russ Davies about it and he told me he just opens the Swansea telephone directory at a random page.

JC: Did that help?

JB: I guess you have to pick your times for that technique. We tried it, but the story of an Old West trauma surgeon called Jack Patel...it didn't fly.

JC: Back to the current project. What's the property you're currently working with?

JB: Ah, you'll love this. See, back in the late seventies there was this show on the BBC. Cutting edge stuff. It was actually on in a really pushing the envelope timeslot, had supernatural elements, asked questions about the nature of the human soul and what awaits us in the beyond...astounding stuff. So when we heard the rights were available we just went for it.

JC: That covers so many shows of the era.

JB: Really? Well, you might even have seen it. It was called "Rentaghost".

JC: Rentaghost?

JB: You didn't catch it? That's too bad. It's got everything. So in the process of updating it for the 21st century audience, we've have to tweak a few things.

JC: Like?

JB: Well, first the name. I mean, no one really wants to rent a ghost...right? So that had to go. So we're calling it "Mumford". It's a working title. We might add "The" and "Files" to that.

JC: The Mumford Files?

JB: Hey, when you say it in that order it sounds even better. OK, lemme blackberry that to the team. So there's this guy, Jack Mumford, who when he was alive was an average type guy with all the worries of an average type guy, but then he falls off the Staten Island Ferry...

JC: You moved it to New York?

JB: Vancouver. The whole ferry thing is backstory, so we don't have to film there. Anyway, he wakes up a ghost and then has to figure out how he's going to make his way in the world. You know? Is he going to keep in touch with his family? Is he going to try to find a way into the light? But we want this to be a little more dark and gritty...so we're going to have him haunted by the failures of his past life. Like he was never there for his kid, or something, or he needs to come to terms with his wife's infidelity.

JC: Are any of the other original characters going to make it into the new treatment?

JB: Sure! In the original there was this giggling guy with a stupid hat in tights. So we thought we could bring him into the update if we changed the wardrobe a lot. So now there's Tim Claypole, who's a standup comic from the 70s - to catch that whole perception that the 70s were about sex and drugs and booze we're going to make him an alcoholic addict with rage issues.

JC: In the original, he was a poltergeist.

JB: Yeah, well, we might want to look into that ethnicity a little, see if it's a demographic worth not offending and all - we're normally really careful about that - but we wanted to show this guy as kinda struggling against his darker side by, you know, telling jokes.

JC: Jokes.

JB: Vintage jokes.

JC: And what about the other supporting characters, like Mr. Davenport the Victorian ghost and the landlord Harold Meeker?

JB: They're in! We were kinda concerned about Mr. Davenport because there really didn't seem to be a lot of directions to take him in. In the end we decided to keep him English, as a little nod to the original show, and to keep him from that whole 1880s area. We'll be hinting that he has a really dark past, and all that, because there's only one thing coming out of England way back then.

As for Harold Meeker, we thought that we could build him up some more too. We're thinking that he's the show's Big Bad and that he's maybe a kind of Tony Soprano figure.

JC: He doesn't sound very much like a Tony Soprano.

JB: That's why we set it in Vancouver. With a name like Meeker, what else are you going to do? Is there a Canadian Mafia? I don't know. Sure as hell don't want to end up calling him Patel...or worse, Jones. Anyway, we're working our way up to the pilot and we hope to premiere the whole thing in time for next Spring. It's an exciting time.

JC: Josh, thanks for your time.

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