Interview: Craig Zobel

The Great World of Sound is a charming portrait of the sleazy underbelly of the music industry. Martin and Clarence (played by actors Patrick Healy and Kene Holliday) are hired as first time record producers and sent out on the road to find the next big name in music. What they don’t know is that they are hucksters, scamming musicians for down payments on an illusory album. The film’s director, Craig Zobel, and his team posted real audition notices in North Carolina and Georgia papers in order to get documentary footage of musicians in the throes of desire for that big break. The auditions were filmed with secret cameras as the actors led on the musicians with false promises. The result is beautiful, yet heartbreaking, scenes of people giving the gift of song not knowing the cruel truth.

Luckily, most of the real life musicians filmed by Mr. Zobel agreed to participate in the film after they discovered that they were on ‘candid camera’, so to speak. Zobel explained to them that he had good intentions and a powerful message in mind for his first narrative feature. He wanted to show the innocence of the people who get hurt by these scams as well as make artists aware of the dangers of the industry. Zobel also was intent on exploring the moral dilemma of a person who thinks he’s doing something good only to discover that he is part of a corrupt system. Martin and Clarence are as desperate for money as these musicians are to make a name for themselves.

Zobel is a quirky young man who looks likes he’s fresh out of college. He is genuinely amazed at the acclaim and success THE GREAT WORLD OF SOUND has enjoyed thus far. It did well on the festival circuit, including the grand stamp of approval of getting into Sundance; but it’s not all champagne and caviar just yet. For the opening weekend, Zobel is actually working as a Production Manager on a shoot in New York. He may be the next big director to emerge on the scene but until then, he’s still got to make a living.

Laura Newman: How did you come up with the idea for this film? I’m especially interested in how you came up with this idea of having improv and real footage with a narrative plot.
Craig Zobel: I like the idea of looking at a guy who is doing something that on the surface you would say is wrong — that you would make a snap judgment about somebody who’s doing this. You’re like, “He’s a scam artist!”  The people who do these things don’t do them thinking that they’re doing anything bad. Nobody goes into anything ethically grey thinking that they want to. Nobody sees themselves as a bad person. So I wanted to make a story that talked about that basically, that was compassionate toward that. Born out of that was the idea that when people make movies about scam artists or drifters they always make them very slick. Those guys are gross but there is something attractive about it that the filmmaker decided to do. To me, it’s not fair to the people getting scammed and I really wanted to show something very naturalistic. 
   
I was totally taken advantage of once.  I bought stereo speakers from a dude. Like half way part of me thought I was getting a deal and the other part of me thought I had just gotten myself into a situation. I felt like I should just pay the 50 bucks to get it over with. That kind of feeling you know. That’s what gave me the idea for doing it as reality based.  It’s hard, it’s not impossible, but on an $82,000 budget level it’s hard to get actors of the caliber that are going to be able to nail that. Later on when I was like, “Oh yeah it’s also a commentary on American Idol.” But that wasn’t the original idea.

LN: You were influenced by your father’s life, right? 
CZ: I probably heard about the song sharking from him. He was a DJ who moved to Atlanta to be with my mom in the 1970s and he couldn’t get a job as a DJ when he first moved there so he got a job as a talent scout for this record company. He initially thought he was helping people out and as he started realizing, “Where are all those 7 inches we were suppose to mail out to radio stations? Oh we didn’t make any 7 inches.” He had always told me that story and like I was saying, my Dad is not a bad guy. He’s actually like a really soulful cool dude who thought he was doing something good. He just needed money really bad so he convinced himself that this was an okay thing to be doing. You quickly judge somebody as being a bad guy who is like a scam artist but obviously they can’t be operating under that themselves. That is what gave me the idea.  I knew my Dad wasn’t bad but I kept thinking, “I can’t believe he did that.”

LN: Was your Dad involved at all in the making of the film?
CZ:  Yeah.  It was awesome.  He came to set when we were shooting the natural stuff and he would talk to the actors with me. The actors would ask him questions like, “How would you deal with this?” My dad would be like, “Oh we would always unflinchingly say this.”  Actually, Chris Gebert who did sound and is a good friend of mine, he whispered in my ear between takes one day, “Your Dad talking to Pat and Kene is amazing, you should put him in the movie.”  And I was like, “We totally should.” So we shot this one scene where they come back after some of the auditions and he works at the company and he goes down what he thinks they’re doing good and bad. You see him in other scenes in the movie walking around because I thought well, crap, if he works for the company we have to have him work at the company the whole time. But ultimately the movie was too long and it just didn’t quite fit where we had written it. For one reason or another it didn’t seem right for the movie. Hopefully it’s going to be on the DVD.

LN:  Was it hard to cut him out?
CZ:  It was awful. [Laughing]  He was really mad cause he got all excited.  But I’ll put him in another movie.  When I was looking at it again recently I thought, damn my Dad is a good actor. I want to put him in a movie.

LN:  Did anyone else get angry?  Like the people you auditioned.  How did you deal with them afterward?
CZ:  We would be very open about what we were doing. We would just be very, very sincere. “This is what we’re doing, we’re making a movie, this is what we’re trying to talk about with our movie, this is what we’re trying to say.  Will you participate?”  We would try to answer all their questions and take as much time as possible. If you feel comfortable, then we would love to have you as a collaborator on it. Some people would come back in the room and re-sing a song. Most people didn’t get mad. I actually just showed the movie recently to most of those people in Charlotte, North Carolina and it was like the best screening of the movie that we’ve ever had. They all responded really well to it and liked it a lot. People would say to me, “Yeah I felt embarrassed at first but I feel like it’s about something good and that it does it well.”  Out of 70 groups that came in, like 6 or 7 said no. Some of those people said no for reasons that had nothing to do with us. Some people were like, “I talked about my friend in that and I don’t want him to know.”

LN: Would you prefer the audiences to know that it’s real footage or just assume that it’s all actors?
CZ: It’s not important for me to have the audience know. I don’t know if I would prefer one thing or the other but it’s not important for me to have the audience know that they are real people. I don’t usually tell people that before they watch the movie. And it’s not so it can be a zinger, it’s because I feel like that wasn’t the only thing we were doing with the movie.

LN:  You did it for $82,000?
CZ:  Yep

LN:  That’s amazing.  How did you pull it off?
CZ:  It was really hard.  It took forever.  It’s that whole thing, I’m sure you’ve heard the saying about Time, Money or Quality. So obviously we didn’t have any money and we didn’t want it to be bad quality so it just took a really long time. We cast it months and months before we shot and we had tons of rehearsal. I had ADed (Assistant Directed) a bunch before and I was a production manager a bunch before so I had dealt with practical money parts of making a movie for a long time.  It was like, “If I just do this for 2 weeks instead of getting a bunch of people to do this in 2 days then we save all this money.”  Or, “Alright we can shoot at an airport for free it’ll just take a while to go through all the layers of bureaucracy.”  You can make all these things happen, you just have to be really patient.  I’m proud of that as much as anything. And we built sets for $82,000. All the hotel room sets have hidden cameras. Honestly, if we hadn’t done that or shot on film, we could have done it for even cheaper. When all your friends are working for free that helps a lot, which people wanted to do because they liked the idea for the movie and I think because they wanted to help me.

LN:  It’s done really well so far in the festivals.
CZ: Yeah, its won a few things and been to a million-gillion of them.  I was just saying about the movie the other day, you make a movie for $82,000 and it is definitely the long shot that you’re going to be able to get to Sundance and for it to be released nationally by a real company.

LN:  I’m curious, because you obviously improvised a lot, was there also improv in the development of the script?  How far did the film stray from your original material?
CZ: Oddly a lot less than you would imagine. Obviously the parts with real people in them were improvised but the scenes that were narratively scripted were written before we had any actors. When actors came in I would rehearse and if in the rehearsal it kept feeling clunky, well….  There are things in any screenplay that no matter what you do are going to sound a little clunky and either you’re the kind of director who changes it so it sounds good, let the actors do their thing so the lines sound natural coming out of their mouth, or else you become a tyrant about your precious words. I think that’s the wrong way to make a movie. So there were definitely times when the actors would say, “Hey, why don’t I say it like this.”  And especially because we shot all the reality/documentary stuff first, we knew what the sound of the movie was, how people talked. So there were times when we’d say, “Okay, this is starting to sound fake, like a movie.”  So that part was really cool.

LN:  What was the most fun part of your experience?
CZ:  Doing the documentary stuff was so energetic and crazy and like the tone on set was so nervous and amazed, awe inspired by the people who came in.  There would be times when everyone would be so inspired that when the musicians came backstage they would say, “Oh my God you were so great!”  It was such a crazy energy. I’ve been on a bunch of movie sets and never felt like that. We would all look around at each other and say, “What a weird movie!”  This is so not how we normal work.  Most of the guys had worked on indy movies before and there was definitely a feeling of, “I haven’t worked on a movie like this before.”

LN:  It must have had a huge impact on the performers to start with filming of the documentary footage.
CZ: Part of the movie is about them getting to know each other and that was all happening organically. I think it also informed how they were able to think about the ethical issues in the movie. Being able to do all that stuff at the beginning and not have to pretend to know what it’s like to be one of these people but to have actually done it. I think it was very useful. They got good really quick. I would be like, “Alright, alright, alright. You guys are still in the part of the movie where you suck, so start sucking more! Don’t convert them all.” Cause they had gotten to the point where they could get anyone to say yes.

LN: What do you think this movie will mean to people who are really into American Idol?  What do you think you’re saying in that context?
CZ: I don’t really know if I want to pinpoint what that’s all suppose to mean.  That’s somebody else’s job maybe. I don’t think it necessarily just says American Idol is bad or wanting to be famous is bad.  Shit, I wanted to make this movie.  What am I doing?  I’m freaking out, spending all my money and time and four years of my life trying to make a movie so that it can get into Sundance?

LN: Well in some respects having steady work means having a certain reputation and fame, just so you can work regularly.
CZ: Yeah.

LN:  If you want to be a director, or a singer
CZ:  …of a certain level

LN:  You have to reach that fame just to have an income.
CZ:  I don’t have income from the movie now. I’m about to go to work on an industrial video just to pay the rent. I have a movie coming out this week! Isn’t that weird?

Magnolia Pictures releases Craig Zobel's The Great World of Sound in theaters today!