Aaron Ploof
Jeremy Snead, the owner of Media Juice Studios and the director behind films such as Video Games: The Movie and Playing with Power: The Nintendo Story, recently released his newest film, Matter of Time. After seeing and reviewing the movie for himself, Aaron Ploof from Film Obsessive interviewed the director about his inspirations and experiences directing the film. The following transcript has been edited for space and clarity, with the full video available in its entirety below.
Film Obsessive: So, the first thing I wanted to ask you: obviously, the movie has a big star in it, Sean Astin. Did you purposefully cast him as a wink to The Lord of the Rings, because there’s a magic ring in the movie? Was that your reasoning?
Jeremy Snead: That’s a funny story. So, Sean and I have known each for, coming up on, 15 years. I met Sean in probably 2011, when I was working on my first documentary which was called Video Games: The Movie. That was kind of a freshman effort for me, but it turned out good. It’s kind of a love letter to video games. I had met him during that; I interviewed him, and then ended up becoming the narrator of that documentary, and we just became buddies, we just hit it off.
Sean has either done voiceover, or been on camera, or produced, or all three for all of my documentary projects the past 15 years. As a part of that, I’ve just been close to him and his family. He had always encouraged me to direct. Documentaries are obviously my wheelhouse, and I’ve been doing that for 20+ years now at Media Juice, my production studio.
He always encouraged me to direct narrative. He said you’d be a good director. But, directing a movie in practice vs. in theory are two different things. You need money. To quote Orson Welles, “A painter needs a paintbrush, a filmmaker needs an army.” Once we got a script that I liked, which was Matter of Time, I shared it with Sean, and he said, “That’s it. I want to be in it, I want to produce it.” Once we had him signed on we were able to secure our funding, and we were off to the races.
What was it like working with him as an actor?
Sean’s a pro. Definitely a movie star, so he’s a professional. Also, Sean doesn’t suffer fools. So, if there’s something that isn’t making sense to him, whether that’s in the script, which happened. He gave a lot of feedback on the script. We addressed all of his notes. We got to a point where he said, “Yes, this works, this is good.” To then being on set…I’ll tell you a funny story.
So, we had all of his costumes and his wardrobe person, Catherine Baumgardner, she’s great. We had it all lined out, ready to go. His Onyx Guild, to the Toy Store, sort of front piece stuff. Day of, he’s like, “I had an idea for my wardrobe!” And, we all kind of held our breath, “Do ya? We’re shooting in 30 minutes.” He said, “What if he wore these T-Shirts, with every one of them having a sort of nerdy thing on it, like a hashtag, or a question mark, or an ellipsis?”
To my costume designer’s credit, she was like, “We can do it!” They sent a runner to buy some t-shirts in his size, and they got them, and they all started drawing them. And that’s what he wore in the movie.
Yeah, Sean’s a lot of fun. You got to kind of match his energy, though. He’s excited, he’s got ideas, he wants to collaborate. You tell me though, it serves the project.
What was working with Ali like?
Ali’s great! She’s a total pro, knows her lines backwards and forwards, and everybody else’s. And as you saw, [Sean and her] only had a few scenes together, they’re in the warehouse, but it was great, she’s a delight, she’s her father’s daughter.
I loved all of the video game references in the movie. I wanted you to tell me which ones were your favorite, which ones did you like to include. One looked like Red Dead Redemption.
I’ve always enjoyed apocalyptic games like The Last of Us and Left 4 Dead and all that stuff, and I’m from Texas. So when we wrote the line, which really was just on a whim, when he’s pitching the game, it’s Rambo meets the apocalypse in Texas, we kind of backwards engineered the game from that line. That’s literally the whole summary of the game. Because the game itself, we built it in Unreal Engine, but it’s all held up with duck tape and super glue. You couldn’t actually play it. Those were all kind of scenes that we animated. So, yeah, we just create a Rambo meets the apocalypse in Texas, which does look like Red Dead.
What other references could game players look for in the film, for those who haven’t seen it yet?
Lots of references to Mario Kart, Rainbow Road. Charlie’s sort of a child of the 90s, so if you look closely in his bedroom, whether it’s when he’s young or gotten older, he’s got all of his favorites. Doom, and Quake, and all that fun stuff.
What about the video game animated sequences in the film. How did you come up with the idea of creating those? The ones where it transitioned into the computer animation stuff?
Kind of the old saying, necessity is the mother of invention. We’re definitely a micro-budget film. Boot strapping it, and shot it all here in Dallas. It’d be great to have a picture car, and have our actors travel from Charlie’s house to work, and on and on, that’s really expensive. Travel shots can add a lot of complexity and a lot of budget to your film. So, we thought, how do we get the traveling shots that we need but don’t break the bank? I just thought, in service of the concept of the movie, which is he’s a game designer, what if we travel but we create this sort of blocky 16-bit, 32-bit, animations of Charlie and his friends and we just animate them?
We kind of did it as a test, with the whole team looking at it, and we thought, yeah, this is cool. Which hopefully you liked it?
Yeah, I did. It was fun! Something I like about the movie: it was very fast and zippy. Especially with his voiceovers and the transitions, and the montages.
If you look back through my body of work, that’s very much my style. And that’s probably as a result partly of being a… I don’t know if you know much about my studio, Media Juice?
Tell me about it.
So, Media Juice Studios was founded in 2004, and we’re probably most well known for producing video game commercials and video game documentaries. And so, when you produce video game commercials for 20 years, it kind of creates a little bit of a bit in you. Things need to be fast, things need to be zappy, things need to be transitions, don’t let people get bored. So that’s definitely informed me as a filmmaker, as a documentary filmmaker, as a narrative filmmaker, definitely as evidenced in Matter of Time.
What led you to create video game movies and documentaries?
So, rewind to a million years ago, so 2001-2004, I worked at a company called Funimation. I think it’s now been purchased by Crunchyroll. Me and my team brought Dragon Ball Z over from Japan to the U.S. In doing that, I met everybody in the entertainment industry, video game industry, consumer products industry, toy industry, because everybody wanted to make products based on Dragon Ball Z because it was so popular on Toonami.
So after doing that for about four years…I’d always had the creative itch since I was a kid. I grew up watching Walt Disney leaning on his desk, talking about how they made Bambi and what went into that. I always thought I’d be an animator as a kid, I want to draw pictures, be an animator, but in working at Funimation I was able to scratch the itch a little bit, in that you’re working with the anime and the manga, and I was working with the video game companies creating Dragon Ball Z: Budokai, and all those great games. I still wasn’t really creating myself, and so out of that came my desire to start my own thing.
So, I started my own agency, Media Juice, and I called some of the video game companies that I had worked with at Funimation. Atari was our first client, and one video game company led to two, led to ten, and it kind of became our niche. We’ve branched out to do other stuff too. Corporate work and documentary stuff, but we still work with the game industry, yeah.
So, if you were to adapt a video game to a movie, which one would you choose and why?
Gosh, the long-storied history of licensed video games into movies.
The Last of Us is fantastic, obviously, and Fallout is really good, so it can be done successfully.
That’s what I was gonna say. Those two examples, exactly, are showing that it can be done. You just have to hire competent, talented screenwriters and filmmakers to do it. It can’t just be a business deal. I think Resident Evil has done a decent job in that franchise. Some of them are not great, but for me, there’s so many. Obviously, they’re doing Mario. I’ve always thought that Contra would be a great movie. Do it in that ’80s retro Arnold Schwarzenegger, Predator style. Mega Man, I’ve always been partial to Mega Man. It’d be cool to do a live action, not animated, and probably a dozen others if I sat and thought about it for a while.
Is Mega Man your favorite video game?
Probably as a kid it would have been Super Mario Bros. I played, and played, and played that. Speed running was a thing, and it’s evolved. Probably as an adult, The Last of Us is probably my favorite. It’s just such an amazing cinematic, narrative experience with amazing gameplay.
So we’ve talked about video games. I’m also a fan of tabletop role-playing games and board games. Are you a fan of D&D?
I am. I’m not, I’ve never been a huge MOBA, for your audience, sort of top-down battle arenas, never been a huge turn-based RPG in games, like Final Fantasy, and stuff. I respect it, and I’ve played some of those games, but RTSs and turn-based stuff is just not my go-to. It’s more like action adventure, The Last of Us, Uncharted, but when it comes to a tabletop RPG, I have enjoyed some campaigns with some friends for sure.
What was it like implementing Dungeons and Dragons into the movie? With Gibbs and the Onyx Guild, with them all supporting each other. Did you write that into the film? You were part of the writing team, correct?
Yes, yes. So the script that we optioned, it’s funny, Chris Dowling, who’s a buddy of mine, he’s a filmmaker. He wrote the script with a friend of his. He watched a rough cut with us early on, and he said, “Man, the only thing you kept was the title and the character’s names.” Originally, it wasn’t a toy shop; it was a comic book shop. Originally, Charlie was not an aspiring game designer; he was an aspiring comic book artist.
We changed everything wholesale. During that changing process, it was all in service of the theme of the film, and the theme of the film is self vs. tribe. So, Charlie learns the lesson, as I’m sure you saw, as they say in Legend of Zelda, “It’s dangerous to go alone,” and that’s a lesson that a lot of young men need to learn, and I learned in my own life. So, as a proxy for that, we were like, okay, Gibbs needs some community. It can’t just be him as the toy shop owner servicing his customers. He needs a real community to show that he values that, to express those values to Charlie in real terms.
We had a lot of different versions of it. Like he’s got a men’s group, or this or that, but we’re like, well, he owns a toy shop, he would have the most epic setup ever, ’cause he’s got all the toys for D&D. So it kind of came out of that. We’re like, it’ll be called the Onyx Guild, he’ll be the DM. Yeah, that’s kind of how it came about.
How did you find Myles Erlick? I thought he was amazing in the movie, great energy, really charismatic. What was it like working with him?
Working with Myles is a joy. He told me the first day on set, “I’ve read the script 58 times.” He knew his lines and everyone else’s lines.
Honestly, it was a recommendation from one of our producers, Ian Campbell. We were getting really late in the game. We had looked at dozens and dozens of Charlies. Some people would have a good look, but the performance wouldn’t be there. Some people had the right performance energy, but they just didn’t have the right look for Charlie.
We were two weeks away from shooting. We still hadn’t cast our Charlie. My producer, Ian Campbell, had worked with Myles recently. He said, “Hey, I’ve worked with this kid, he’s a musician, he’s super popular on Instagram. Maybe just let him do an audition.” So we auditioned him. He sent us a video. And I was immediately like, yep, that’s him! There he is! That’s the one!
And he delivered. You know, Matter of Time is Back to the Future meets video games as well. And he’s got that Marty McFly energy of just gotta do what I gotta do!
So, last question. What’s next for you? What kind of imprint do you want to leave on the industry? What kind of legacy do you want to leave?
I’ll speak to the legacy question first. Legacy’s always tricky, but if I had to surmise it, it’s so much less important what you’re doing or where you’re going and more important who you’re going with and who you’re doing it with.
Like the tribe.
The tribe, exactly! It’s not about what movie you’re seeing with your friends. It’s about the hang. You giving and receiving from them. We’re all vessels. We’re all being poured into and need to pour out of ourselves to the people around us. Because that’s what life’s about. Life’s a journey, not a destination. That theme probably shows itself in a lot of my documentaries. If there was a legacy, that is probably what I would want it to be.
My next project has a working title. It’s called Love in Hall H. Think Notting Hill meets nerd culture. We’re working on it, writing the script now. I have a list of documentaries and docuseries in development. We announced this last summer; we’re doing a sequel to my first documentary, Video Games: The Movie. That’ll be called Video Games: The Next Level. I can’t say the name of it, but we are working on a gaming IP-related project with Warner Bros.
Thank you very much for this interview today. Nice meeting you, I really enjoyed your movie and I’m looking forward to any other projects!
Yeah, Aaron, I really appreciate you watching my movie. Have a great day and maybe we’ll talk again on the next project!
