A middle-aged artist obsessed with his young assistant, a precocious 12 year old, and a neurotic lawyer with a possessive mother make up three separate, but great New York City tales…
“I grew up between a Blockbuster and the local library and I just fell in love with stories. It’s pretty much that simple – I read a lot of books, watched a lot of movies, and had parents who encouraged me to try to express myself. Also, I was terrible at sports.”
We sat down with Patrick Muhlberger to discuss his new short, “Pop Music” among other things…
Honey Wagon Confidential: You shot on a RED. How did you like this? Would you shoot on it again?
Patrick Muhlberger: I did like it. I really enjoyed the extra resolution we had shooting 6K, which came in handy a lot during some of our slow motion scenes or if we ran behind on the shooting day and ended up having to punch in on footage to cheat mediums as close ups. In general I find RED footage a little sharp, so we worked to soften it up a bit and had a pretty distinct LUT on the camera and monitor during the shoot. This helped me get a better idea of what the final shot would look like, rather than trying to guess based on the RAW files. We had these beautiful Panavision Primo lenses which really brought a lot of great qualities to the picture.
HWC: Sound has a huge role in this film. How’d you get in touch with the composer, Seth Earnest, and what was your angle on the sound?
PM: Seth and I met a few years ago when we were both working at a digital company in Los Angeles. I walked in on him trying to recreate some pop song for a parody video and I was immediately impressed. I hired him to work on a few commercials and he knocked the music out of the park. I remember he mixed the sound of a train into one of the scores and it blew me away. I had written POP MUSIC and was looking for a composer so I wrote him a long messy email asking him to be a part of it and he read the script and jumped aboard. I kept a google drive full of pop songs and music references for the piece, along with a document outlining what I liked about them. We used this as a backbone for both building the final pop song but also the overall score of the piece. Basically we looked at tons of examples and references, and then I just let Seth take it from there.
My whole view for the piece was that Trevor’s character was trying to turn his reality into the heightened world of a music video. So Seth and I looked for places to emphasize that with the music and sound. We decided that Trevor’s soundtrack would be more of a garage rock/BikiniKill vibe, but once he really learned his lesson from Jessie, it would evolve into the more standard pop music that plays during the climax. Writing it up, it all seems pretty complicated and messy, but I swear it made sense to the two of us.
HWC: Where’d the idea for this film come from?
PM: I was stuck in traffic listening to a ton of top 40 radio. And I was frustrated with the content I was making – commercials or kids videos – because I didn’t feel like any of them were an accurate representation of my voice. So I tried to write something that represented me, and this is what came out. I had a ton of visuals I wanted to play along with, I was listening to a ton of Katy Perry, and in general I like stories about youth and love.
HWC: You wrote and directed “Pop Music.” Is it hard to keep perspective on a project when you’re so involved?
PM: Yes, definitely. I have a close group of friends who I constantly show my work to, hoping that they can make sure I steer it in the right direction. But I had times where I questioned my choices, or the script, or the directing – and it was moments like that where I had to relax and trust the preparation. Also, this was a purely personal project, so when I started to question the “right choice” I tried to just lean in to my instincts and hope that it would result in a final product that I loved.
HWC: This film has a really unique style. How’d you go about achieving this style and what were some elements you knew you wanted to include?
PM: Once it was established that we’d be seeing the world through Trevor’s point of view, it gave me license to really just go crazy with some of the style. I knew I wanted the piece to reference a lot of music videos, so I made a giant folder of inspiration and then tried to see what would fit. For example, the “ghosting” effect as Trevor storms the house is from the Clubfeet “Everything You Wanted” video. There is a light effect during the flashback from a Doogan O’Neil music video for HAIM. Some of the visuals during the climax were taken from videos by people like Joseph Kahn, DANIELS, and Saman Kesh. The text projections behind the singing were influenced by Kanye West’s SNL performances.
PM: I grew up between a Blockbuster and the local library and I just fell in love with stories. It’s pretty much that simple – I read a lot of books, watched a lot of movies, and had parents who encouraged me to try to express myself. Also, I was terrible at sports.
To check out more of Patrick’s work, head over to his site!
Written and directed by Woody Allen, Small Time Crooks follows the misadventures of an ex-con dishwasher and his manicurist wife. A plan to rob a bank turns into something much sweeter…leaving them rich, but not how they expected.
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