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Young People Fucking: Or, Ways Tease Your Audience
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MM: I think there’s been a lot of that in recent years, movies with intertwining stories where the characters pass each other on the street here and there. It does seem kind of forced.
MG: Yeah, and totally unnecessary. A movie that is bound together by a subject or a theme, the audience is putting those characters together anyway. They all live in the same world. There’s no need to have them all hang out at the same coffee shop.
MM: Was directing always a long-time goal of yours?
MG: Well, I started wanting to be a director and then when I was much, much younger I realized, ‘What the fuck am I going to direct?’ So I stumbled into a career making a very meager living as a freelance writer and then got staffed on this show called “Stargate: Atlantis.”
That’s basically been the greatest film school ever. I feel like it’s my Roger Corman days. I was always envious of those guys that got out of film school and just got to work with Roger Corman for two years and made seven movies and figure it all out before they really had to start risking their career cache.
MM: But still, even though you came in prepared, being a first-time director with all the sex scenes in this film and just the general subject matter, were you ever worried about gaining the actors’ trust?
MG: Well, yeah. This had to be the best film set ever, basically. With the exception of Aaron and Ennis [Desmer] and Peter [Oldring] to a lesser extent, these were people I did not know until we worked on the movie. So I needed to find a way to have them not only trust me, but trust the whole crew.
People always say that casting is most of directing’s work, and I agree with that, but they forget that that means casting your crew as well. We needed the nicest people in the world working on the movie.
Also, it was really important to me that 50 percent of the crew was women, which is not always the easiest thing to do. The worst, for when girls show up to do a nude scene, is for it to just be a sausage party.
MM: What are your thoughts on the future? Do you want to continue directing?
MG: Yeah, I love it. I feel pretty happy with the movie and it’s been fairly blessed with how easy the process has been, but it’s really tough to get your movie seen. Whereas if you can get anything on TV, it’s got an automatic, built-in audience. So I’d kind of like to keep my feet in both worlds. I have a few TV projects in development and Aaron and I are just about to start our next screenplay.
It’s tough, because I really like the preciousness of filmmaking. You really get obsessed with that 90 minutes for forever. For years. There’s something really refreshing about television where you’re making 20 hours a year and there’s almost this deal you have with the audience where you’re like, ‘Listen, not all of these are gonna be awesome, alright?’
Like, what’s your favorite TV show? You forgive an episode or two. What that allows you to do then as a writer and as a creator, even a director, is say, ‘Well listen, I don’t know if this is going to work, but let’s try it! Who knows?’ If it fails, it’s a shitty episode. You don’t necessarily have that freedom with a movie. You’re more compelled to get the edit right as opposed to take that chance and I think much more interesting stuff comes out of chance.
MM: If you disappoint people with a 20-minute episode or a 40-minute episode, they’ll come back next week, regardless.
MG: Yeah, exactly. Whereas you show people a 90-minute film and it’s not so great they’ll be like, “Fuck you. I’m never seeing a movie from that guy again.”
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