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Your new movie Final
Heat - in a few words, what's it about?
It's about a family with shared trauma, that reconciles through the heightened
stakes of sports. Specifically functional fitness, where the goal of the
game is literally to push to "failure." That kind of pressure,
physically, psychologically, spiritually... reveals a person. I've always
been fascinated by the ways in which sports reveal character. What's the
truth of a person? It's often the opposite of what they project, and a lot
of times, how they perceive themselves. Final
Heat
forces our team to
confront their truths, so that maybe they can re-define themselves. I
think there's an idea that ultimately, redemption must spill outside the
contained arena of the ring/gym, and into the messier realm of life. The
real accomplishments happen out there, with others, as a team.
With Final
Heat being set in the functional fitness scene, is that at all a
world you're personally familiar with?
We actually were developing a tennis movie (as former pro and D1 level
players) and wanted to get ahead of the ball by training to get back in
playing shape. At the time, I actually hadn't been doing anything fitness-related for years. But Brad was a coach at a crossfit gym,
Crossfit Hollywood, and convinced me to try to it, and we struck a partnership deal
with the gym to train there and promote both our movie and their gym.
Well, pretty soon we were training every day and I started to feel like I
was coming back into my physical self, sort of remembering what it felt
like to be an athlete, and to feel like, oh yeah, this is who I am. I
loved the competition aspect of it. I loved having a goal. But most of all
I loved just showing up every single day, getting a tiny bit better, and
being anchored towards progress every time I got out of bed in the
morning. And now, I wasn't just training alongside of Brad, but the entire
gym, who became great friends and surrogate teammates. And the story
organically evolved from there, we thought we were making a tennis movie
but now we were living a story about self-rediscovery, and it came out on
the page. Oh, and we did compete in the Open for a couple years, and at couple local
crossfit competitions. Let's not discuss the results. It's hard out there!
Instead, I'll point out that we had two athletes in the movie, Maddy
Curley and David Page, who did make it all the way to the Crossfit Games.
(Other) sources
of inspiration when writing Final Heat?
Even though the film was primarily set in the main gym location, the nature of
the story, with its sports competition arc, was pretty expansive and high
budget. Since we didn't have that, I was looking for ways to enhance the
scope. I borrowed a trick from the first movie I produced Know Thy
Enemy,
where paparazzi and videographers are constantly recording an aspiring
musical artist, and we bounce around in cinematic format to give it a
dynamic, wide, energy. The "found footage" aspect also gives us
a more raw, intimate close up with our people, and this being a movie that
wanted to get very personal, I thought it would help. So I looked at lot
of films and shows that used hybrid formats and zoom lenses, like
End of Watch, Southland, Friday Night Lights. Ultimately we wanted to
maintain picture quality as high as possible, and to pull off the zooms
with quality, it would've taken us out of our bracket. But we retained the
essence and of course the mixed media. That specifically, was a piece
where I just wanted us to capture anything we could, the more candid the
better, we could figure it out later. Let's mash it all together.
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Storywise and tonally, the TV show Bloodline, with its unspoken family history and
tension, was a big inspiration. As well as the rivalry between
brothers/friends in Brothers and believe it or not, Lost. Laugh if you
need to. And you can't beat the regret element of The Wrestler, the
fraught psychology of Black
Swan, and of course, a whole host of things from Warrior.
What can you tell us about your
directorial approach to your story at hand? We
actually had a pretty unique development process. Like I said, we didn't
have much of a budget, but we had big ideas. So our workaround was to make
a webseries, 10 episodes of 10 minutes each. A linear story, with a
feature arc, broken up, but essentially a feature. Only after we finished
it did we look at it and realize, hey, this cuts together as a feature.
But I think we backdoored our way into making a series of little self
contained beats, with high stakes every few minutes. Definitely a lesson
I'll use going forward. Aside from that, my lens into directing is
primarily acting and story-based. I knew we had a primary location. I also
had a core group of actors who I'd worked with for years and were good
friends with. We spoke a shorthand sort of language. It was a big luxury. So I
focused on taking my ensemble, and using the box as a proverbial sandbox,
giving them a lot of freedom to come up with ideas, to improv, and knowing
that I was also acting alongside them, making it even a more play space.
I'd like to think that our relationship was more collegial than
directorial. My goal was to make it feel as real in the space as possible,
so we could just live in it. You also
appear in front of the camera in Final
Heat - so what can you tell us about your character, what did you
draw upon to bring him to life, and did you write him with yourself in
mind from the get-go? Yeah,
in general, in writing and directing, I try to always come from a personal
place, even if the events are fiction. My character was a combination of
my own background and regrets I had, (heavily fictionalized), and a couple
important people in my life. My dad, who's a Vietnam vet and has dealt all
his life with aspects of PTSD that he's very quietly handled, and a
roommate of mine at the time, who was an Iraq war vet. Just before writing
this, my dad came to visit, and I watched how instantly the two hit it
off, and had a such an obvious unspoken bond and shared knowledge, it
really made a powerful impression on me. My roommate helped me a lot in
crafting the background of my character, both on the page and later in my
performance. You know, this is going to sound cliché, but I feel anytime
you get to do a role where you embody people who've made such a sacrifice
or have lived through such extremes, there's a sense of duty, and you try
to carry that into the performance and honor them. So I hope I did. I'll
also say I tried to merge those external circumstances with my own
internal ones, and the details serve as a metaphor.
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Do talk about the rest of your
cast, and why exactly these people?
I mentioned earlier that the primary cast were friends that I already knew
and had worked with many times. Four of us were in an acting class
together, and I knew what they brought so well. Specifically in Brad
Benedict's
case, creating the story together, we drew so much from his life, his
background and really his deep vulnerabilities, I'm so grateful that he
was willing to visit those deep wounds
with me. And not just in the writing stage, in the rehearsals and on set.
We'd find stories from his real life, and it would find its way onto the
camera. I approached it that way with all my cast, again I was lucky to
have people I knew very well, but it allowed us to treat everything as a
sort of workshop. Even on set. We could find new things and build them
out. So I tried to make each role as personal to the actor as I could, and
then benefit from the organically adding as much to it as they could. It
was a true ensemble.
You of course also
have to talk about the fitness studio the majority of the film was shot
at, and what was it like shooting there?
Crossfit Hollywood! I want to say a major thank you to first Neil Mahoney and later
Andy Thompson, for being so generous with the space for quite a long time.
The initial reason we started there, training, expanded dramatically, as
did the time we spent there. But it was our home and as responsible for
making this as anything else. When we finally started shooting, after
spending so much time training there, it felt a little surreal, but it also
felt incredibly safe. I remember people just helping out all around,
shooting BTS, supporting us, giving us an extra bit of buzz. Again,
forever grateful to Crossfit Hollywood, and the pied piper of Crossfit
Hollywood, Andy Thompson.
The $64-question of course, where can Final
Heat be seen? On May 14, 2024 the film will be found on streaming platforms including
Vimeo, AmazonInstant, Vudu and iTunes/AppleTV and on most cable platforms
across the US & Canada. Just search On-Demand on your cable provider! Any future projects you'd like to share?
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Absolutely.
This release has given me a lot of inspiration to make a few more projects
in the sports drama genre, for now. I'm working on a project slightly
adjacent to my background, a TV show set in the world of beach tennis, and
with tennis number one at the box office right now, thanks Challengers,
I'm developing a historical epic about an iconic, but largely under the
radar, tennis legend. What got you acting in the first place, and did you receive any formal
education on the subject? Funnily enough I started after I shot a commercial about young athletes, as I was
struggling financially to stay on the tennis tour, and looking for
alternative funding means. But I fell in love with it pretty quickly, and
with the mindset of training hard and immersing, I kind of dove in
headfirst. I was really lucky to have a great mentor early on, Marc Durso,
who was steeped in Uta Hagen technique, and he really influenced me to
always make the search for truth the primary goal. That shaped my whole
viewpoint towards art, and writing and filmmaking later. But yeah, I
studied there, then at many other places along the way.
What made you pick up writing,
producing and directing eventually, and which side of the camera do you
actually prefer? Coming from outside the mainstream of the industry, I had this idea that, as an
actor, why do we have to rely on others to tell our stories? I felt like,
in music, most of the musicians that I loved the most wrote their own
songs. So when they sang, you felt it was even more personal. I wanted to
try that with the art of acting and filmmaking. Tell your own stories and then
embody them, make them as personal and truthful as possible.
Can I say which I like best? Nope. They're all intertwined to me, but all
provide specific thrills.
Your/your
movie's website, social media, whatever else?
Instagram:
@finalheatmovie
@jeremygimz
@bradbenedict
@VisionFilmsInc
Thanks for the interview!
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