Hyperreal Interviewer Extraordinaire Justin Norris sat down with Amy McCullough and Jimmie Buchanan Jr. to discuss their new film Work Dreams, the push and pull of the nomadic lifestyle, and terrifying dreams.

Hyperreal Film Club (HFC): Why was Galveston chosen for this film’s setting? Was that always the first choice?

Jimmie Buchanan Jr. (Co-director, co-writer, co-producer, JB): The thing about making basically-no-budget movies is that you need a good location. You have to look for a place that’s captivating and take advantage of it. We always run into weird situations and people in Galveston. It’s a place that inspires strangeness, which is something we like documenting.

Amy McCullough (Co-director, co-writer, co-producer; AM): Definitely. People talk a lot about cities being their own characters in books and movies. We wanted to capture the quality of this Texas coast town. This movie would not be what it is without Galveston.

JB: We also needed to involve the ocean. That’s a key factor in Work Dreams, the ocean lifestyle versus the factory lifestyle.

HFC: What inspired Work Dreams? Was it these trips to Galveston or something beyond that?

AM: Jimmie and I spent a year living on a small sailboat. This was in 2008. During that experience, we quit our job, sold all of our stuff, and sailed from Oregon to Baja. Since then, we’ve always felt this push and pull between regular life and the attraction of going off the grid, being free and loose, similar to the Jomar character in the movie. For us, this is an examination of the good and bad things about toeing the line and being a regular working stiff. Then on the other end, looking at the pros and cons of having a beach bum sort of lifestyle. We've seen both sides of that situation, so it's something we're always interested in exploring.

HFC: The whole aspect of that work versus free lifestyle is such a big thing in this movie, especially with the contrast between Jomar and Hank and with the ToyCo factory. A specific piece I want to touch on is the music. I saw Jimmie that you were credited as the sole composer. What was the process like for this film, in particular, when it came to crafting the score? And Amy, how involved were you? Are you in the booth as well throwing ideas around?

JB: Amy and I have been making music together for a long time now. We have a couple albums worth of traditional rock and pop songs. But for this movie, I'm pretty in the synthesizer realm. I love that kind of thing. So there's that path that I go down on, where I'm coming up with electronic music. And then we work together on pretty much everything else. I come up with a spooky synth track, but I'm still looking over at her to see if she's bored or excited.

And there's also this element of the live performances—the scene with the guitar on the porch, for example. Amy wrote that song for the main character. And we had to commit to recording the audio live and only allowing people to do one take. But yeah, it would be a ripoff to say the music's just by me.

AM: But it's Jimmie on the synthesizer for what would traditionally be considered the score. And the score is a huge part of the identity of our movie.

HFC: What was a favorite musical sequence in this movie?

JB: For the music in the factory, there's a thing you can do with synthesizers where by assigning certain signals you can almost make a song generate itself. And so, the factory song is sort of writing itself. I set it up to go on for eternity, and it kind of slowly evolved and became erratic in different ways. I got such a kick out of that.

HFC: With how this film flows, and, especially in the factory scene, it felt like a musical; I was almost expecting the conversations in that scene to follow a rhythm and a beat. It almost matches how the factory is moving. But it all makes sense how the whole film, the music is such a big part and flows interconnects naturally with it.

JB: That's another one that's like, you gotta do what you can when you don't have other resources. It doesn't take money to write music, right? You just do it. So it's something that we can compete in even though we don't have as much money.

HFC: Just one more piece on the music, the saxophone pieces, or the occasional riffs Jomar would be pulling out, I was curious if that was original riffing or pre-written pieces from you.

JB: I'm more of a trumpet player, to be honest. A couple years ago, Amy's grandfather's saxophone was gifted to me. So I figured I should learn to play it. I think that really helps actually, because I know how to improvise and make up tunes from being a trumpet player. But I'm not very good at saxophone. So it gives Jomar a more believable beach bum vibe. You don't really want to have this guy seem like a professional musician. It was in keeping with wanting to make everything super honest.

HFC: So, your big thing between y'all two as filmmakers is you'll you'll do everything almost everything, right? And I was curious about the visuals and the set design, especially in the factory… How much of that did y'all make from scratch? What was that process like to do all the set creation and contraption gizmo?

AM: We spent about three years on the movie altogether. And the factory stuff was one of the later things we did, probably the last year. Jimmie designed and built all the factory walls and things, and the conveyor belt. I was more interested in goo, like the polymer that they make the toys out of, how to make a brain out of jello and stuff like that.

JB: A super fun thing you can manipulate is the use of light. It looks alright, and then you hit it with green light and it looks amazing. When it comes to that stuff, it's tricky, because the hard part is figuring it out. Sometimes we would build something thinking it was gonna be cool, completely set it up, light it, then you go, “You know, this looks kind of stupid.” So you’ve got to make something new. All these iterations you go through, and it had to be convenient because all that stuff was shot in our garage. We made it modular so that we could readjust it for the different rooms.

HFC: When it comes to filmmaking, especially as indie filmmakers, we always have to contend with time and budget, among other things. It sounds like there was a couple of different iterations of stuff that y'all made that didn't really work. Was there anything in particular that y'all really wanted to add to the movie that just didn't make the final cut for one reason or another?

JB: We don't have any kind of time constraint issues ever, because we're just us. No one's waiting for us to finish the movie. So we get to work without pressure like that, which is very nice. We obviously want to get it done, but if we wanted something in there, we just would have figured out how to do it.

AM: One thing is we wanted to shoot the final scene on a Ferris wheel in Galveston. And we rented a place down there, collaborated our schedules to go, and then they took the Ferris wheel down, like they removed it from the pier. We're like, “What're we gonna do? It's out of our hands.” They put it back and we got the shot, but the waiting and uncertainty were tough.

JB: There was also this early version of the script that had a vastly different ending where Hank and Jomar go back to ToyCo and blow it up. Then we thought, “This is a huge cliche. Let's do something a little more meaningful.”

HFC: For both y'all, what were some of the big inspirations for your film?

AM: It’s strange. Through the course of our making movies together, we've had the experience a lot where someone will go, "Oh, are you guys into whatever?" And we're like, "No, we've never heard of that," and then we look into it and think, “Holy shit. How have we not seen this?” With our previous movie, Gary and the Underworld, Richard Whittaker from The Austin Chronicle compared it to Jean Cocteau's Orphée, and there's a scene in that that seems like it must have inspired us, which is really fun! It often opens us up to things we really like that we didn’t know about.

JB: I intentionally try not to do that. Because it's like, okay, my favorite movie is Robocop. I'm not gonna make a better Robocop. I'll just take my awkward energy and do my own thing, you know? We sort of let our story come to us and just take advantage of what's available. We think generally more about notions, like can your attitude change reality around you? But we've never, ever been like, this is going to be just like Superman.

HFC: What was the most challenging aspects of the film?

JB: We went to Galveston for about a week. It was basically 24 hours a day shooting: Get up in the morning, shoot all of the beach, all of this stuff out in the sand. Then go back to shoot all the stuff in the apartment. And that was rough. Especially the first night, when we were shooting a really important scene, we were looking at the footage and feeling like all the shots were boring and it just didn't look good. So it's a soul-sucking moment to have to go, "Okay, well, tomorrow night we're going to redo all this and be better." Just the morale challenges.

HFC: Kind of back to the story, there's this whole idea of things not being what they seem, In essence, creating that question of, can you trust what we do for companies? When it came to deciding on a company that you could use to have these ulterior motives, what made y'all gravitate towards a toy manufacturing company?

JB: The key thing for me was that for a lot of people in the age we live in, they work in jobs where what they're producing is incredibly vague. Like a computer chip factory. You send away the computer chips and then someone else then puts them in a car or something. But what am I making if it's something that goes somewhere else and becomes something else? So I definitely didn't want them to be making toys. They're just making a component of toys. It's weird that the world is so complex in manufacturing these days that there could be a giant corporation that just produces latex for toys.

HFC: Taking a step back to focus on you both as a filmmaking unit. What was the origin of that partnership?

AM: When we were living on our sailboat, we wouldn't have a lot to do once we anchored. That's a lot of good time to be doing creative stuff together. So we were writing music, and because Jimmie had some video production experience, we thought, “What's more fun than music videos?” So we did a handful of music videos for songs we wrote on our sailing trip, and then once we re-settled in Austin, we made our first movie which was a horror film. We were having a Halloween party and we decided to make a movie for the party, show it to our friends. That was such a fun experience. We learned that we can do a lot with very little, and it just sort of snowballed.

HFC: This is a question I always ask anybody I get the chance to interview. If y'all can make a sort of curated playlists that's like, "If you liked Work Dreams, you should check out this stuff." What other pieces of art would y'all recommend as a nice pairing?

AM: Somebody likened it to Cronenberg meets Halloween III, which seems pretty on point. Musically, recently Jimmie has gotten pretty into this one Gary Numan album….

JB: Yeah, Telekon would be an album you should listen to.

AM: In the making of this movie, some friends of ours were saying, "Have y'all see Severance?" And we're like, "No." We watched that recently and thought people might think we were ripping it off. So you should watch Halloween III, listen to Telekon, watch Severance.

JB: One reason we're able to avoid directly ripping off certain styles of other movies might be because a lot of times the experience for us feels more literary. When we were coming up with movie ideas, I was really thinking about books.

AM: We're both pretty big Larry McMurtry fans. There's this book called Duane's Depressed, and it's about this West Texas oil man kind of dude. And he just decides at some point, “I'm not gonna ride in cars or drive my truck ever again. I'm just gonna walk everywhere I go.” And I think that really struck both of us, so maybe I would throw that book on the playlist. Thinking about somebody going, "All these perceptions that I had about the kind of person that I am, I'm just going to throw them out the window."

It feels similar to Hank, the main character in Work Dreams. He's like, I've got a permanent job and am suddenly living a really traditional kind of lifestyle. Is that really who I am? I don't know. There's a real exploration of identity that kind of jives with Work Dreams.

HFC: For both of y'all: One actor you'd love to work with.

JB: Personally, I'd want a young Brad Dourif or a young Jeffrey Combs.

AM: This is kind of a no brainer for me: Peter Cushing. He sounded like he was a wonderful human being, and I love how he always employs all these props. I would love to give Peter Cushing a table of things he can use in the scene and see what he does.

HFC: Going off that, one filmmaker you'd love to watch a movie with and what movie would it be?

JB: I wouldn't mind watching Showgirls with Paul Verhoeven. I find that movie to be fascinating, and I think he's an interesting guy as well. The movies of his that I like the most are the ones that are these super-intense commentaries on America. And Showgirls is just so good at that. I'd want to hear exactly what he was thinking about.

AM: Women in Love because it's a fascinating film with really interesting actors, and I'm sure Ken Russell would have crazy Oliver Reed stories to tell even if nothing else came up to talk about (which I doubt, considering the nude fireside wrestling scene!). Edgar Wright and Last Night in Soho is another because Wright is both a writer and director. I feel like directors often get too much credit for films as a whole, so I like that he wears both hats, and the story in Soho is told really uniquely.

HFC: Final question. What's the weirdest dreams y'all have had?

JB: I'm sort of fascinated with dreams because I used to suffer from sleep paralysis, which is where you can't wake up. It's like you're trapped, you can't move your body. It's a terrifying experience. If you're having a dream about someone coming to kill you or something, you're paralyzed and you can't move. I'd have dreams where it's a terrifying dream, and then I wake up, and you open the door and you're still dreaming. So then you wake up again, you eat breakfast or you're driving to work, and your car crashes and turns out you're still dreaming. This is such a nightmare scenario.

AM: I had it in my head as a kid that the person my parents bought their house from died in the house—in my bedroom, of course. And I'd have these recurring dreams that she would be in this wheelchair in the corner of the room just glowing. It wasn't particularly threatening, but I found it frightening. That's what I think of when it comes to dreams, this old woman I never knew that may or may not have died in my parents house just glowing in the corner of my room, with this creepy, vibrating energy.

Getting Hyperreal with... Amy McCullough and Jimmie Buchanan Jr.