#1915House

Hey, Matt, you live in a hundred-year-old house, right? I do, in fact. Is it haunted? Uh, it might have been. Do you have it exorcised? No, but anything I thought was haunted, I demolished immediately. 'Cause I was taking no chance for this place. [laughs] [laughs] Hello and welcome to the indie film lodge, a podcast about the nuts and bolts of independent filmmaking from the bottom up, I'm Matt Jackson.

I'm Robb Padgett, and today the conversation much like my high school love life will all be about doing it yourself. And today's guest is Justin DiPego, who made 1915 House, or is it #1915House? I, uh, actually don't know, what is it? It is #1915House. Very cool. Hey, nice to meet you, Justin. Thank you for coming on the show. Uh, nice to meet you, and thank you for having me on the show. Well, thank you for doing something cool,

so that you could be on the show, and we could talk to you about it. See? Yeah, that's awesome. Well, that's why all these years ago, I bought a house in 2015, and I was like, "This 100-year-old house just might get me onto a podcast." There you go. That's the long play. I appreciate that. Yeah. Uh, so tell us about #1915House. What is it for people who haven't seen it? Well, it is, I mean, what it is is a found footage horror film,

ghost story about a guy who happens to be named Justin DiPego, fixing up a 100-year-old house, and discovering as he does so that it is indeed haunted, and how is he going to deal with that? Uh, the sort of the log line was one man, one camera, 100-year-old house. Nice. I really enjoyed it. I like the, uh, the structure of it. I like to have it played with the, um, I don't know, is vlog the right term for this?

It might have been when he started. Yeah. I really like the, the structure of it, because I felt, I felt like I was getting sucked into the, the story. I actually learned a lot about, uh, DIY stuff, about breaking down walls and stuff. I was like, oh, this is nice added value. Yeah, score the paint before you try to take panels off the wall. There you go. Tiles off the fireplace. Yeah. Well, all of those things are real.

I mean, the real in the sense that, if it's really my house, I really am fixing it up, and I really am making how to DIY home improvement videos.

And at a certain point, I got, I know I'm jumping ahead, but here's a piece of advice. How dare you jump ahead? Yeah, I know. Don't do, uh, videos of yourself fixing your house. If you care about actually fixing your house, in a reasonable amount of time, because I'm sure you won't be surprised to hear that, especially if you're doing this by yourself, just putting a camera on yourself, and then doing the project makes the project take

probably three times as long. And then editing it and all of that. So it's like, I was, it was taking forever to actually do the renovations that this house really did need. Did you ever purposefully not finish a renovation because you wanted the continuity for the show? No, because what happened was, as I reached a certain point in the shooting of the real videos, and I was like, I can't keep doing this.

This is, uh, I have, but I have all this footage. And what am I going to do with all this footage? Because I'm not about to end up with a legitimate beginning to end record of me fixing up this house, because I'll never finish if that's the goal. But there had been a moment when I took the mirror down in the bathroom, when a friend of mine, because I was posting videos as I go, the real videos, no ghosts.

And a friend of mine commented on the video where I took the bathroom, the sink down in the bathroom. And he was like, you have to paint something on that wall. I was like, oh, shit, you're right. I have to paint something on that wall. And that's when I painted sort of the signature image of the entity that is sort of the spirit of the house. But it's this sort of ghoulish silhouette with clawed hands coming right at you.

And so I really did, in real life, paint that behind the mirror before I put the mirror back up. Can I talk about that for a second? Because I was very impressed with that painting that you made at the time, especially when you zoomed in on it and I saw the brush strokes. I'm like, oh, this was considered. Oh, this is-- he was making art back here. Yeah, yeah. Well, I go deep. Is it still there behind your back?

Oh, yeah. Yeah, definitely. Like in another 100 years or so, someone will either renovate or knock this house down. It'll freak the hell out of them. Yeah. Yeah. And I will be so pleased whatever I am. I'll tell you, my life goal is to leave some kind of weird ass notes in the walls of this house just to freak out whoever moves in next just to-- Hell yeah, yeah. Do it. There's the scene where I'm crawling through the attic.

And I find the list of names. That was real. I mean, I found a list of names. But then I recreated that because there was no audio of me crawling in that attic. And so that was actually the only-- that scene inside the attic that was all still photos. That's the only scene in the whole movie that was scripted. Because I had to go back, and I knew I wasn't going to be on camera. And I was like, well, I'm not going to ad-lib just audio.

Sure. Doesn't make sense. And so I scripted it. And then I like, army crawled around the floor in my office while I was recording the audio to recreate me going from joist to joist in the attic. But indeed, that list of names. And it was the real names that I read out. That's amazing. I don't know who those people were on this hit list, but they're no longer with us. I just love this image of somebody walking in on you.

Army crawling on the ground, broad daylight, like, oh, I found this thing. If this is this, what are you doing? There are a lot of things when you're making a movie all by yourself, no crew. Yeah. There are a lot of things that you're doing that are somehow more embarrassing than if there was a whole crew there watching you do them. Well, when you have somebody else there, you walk in on it, you assume there's an understanding.

I mean, the person who's watching knows what's happening. So it must be OK. This makes some kind of sense. Yeah. I mean, totally. Otherwise, what are they doing here? I feel like there's a critical mass that, you know, if it's less than five and one person is doing something weird and four people are watching it. And a sixth person walks in. There's some explaining to do. But if you have a crew of like 10 and one person is doing a weird thing,

you're like, oh, I get it. It's a group thing. It's a pickup. Yeah, totally. One thing that won't happen if you have a crew is you won't get trapped in a full body, including the head green suit.

And that did happen to me. There's no dexterity on the fingers on those things. So I'm trying to undo the zipper behind my head. And I'm alone at home. And I'm like, I can't be sitting here in this green suit when my wife gets home. It's like my greatest goal in life is to not be wearing this green suit when my wife gets home. I don't know. I think you could have played it off real nice. Yeah. I mean, I'd like to pour yourself a scotch, just a downright fire.

What are you doing? You know, hanging out. Just green it out, man. So then I guess we can go to the inspiration. And was the mirror the inspiration for the whole thing? Once the thing with the mirror happened, then I was like, oh, I know what I'm going to do with all this footage that I shot. And then I went back and I started adding all of the weirdness into the stuff that I had already shot. So everything up to--

you know, I watched it kind of recently, but I didn't pinpoint where did I actually have any start shooting new footage. I should have done that. But almost all of it is original footage, except that I've adding layers in the background of like the little exposures and the little smoke monsters. Little smoke monsters and that mirror gag in the very first tour of the house. I love it, it's sort of like locked in, like, oh, shit.

And figuring out how to do that mirror gag was-- That was-- So I didn't like-- God, I figured it out. I got a green screen off of wish. And for $19, I got a 10 by 12-foot green screen with a stand. And so anyway, so I went back into the original footage and just started adding these little weird touches because that was the inspiration, was that painting behind the thing and it solved my problem. What am I going to do with all this footage?

So I remember-- I've known Justin for a long time. I remember when you were making the actual thing, when you bought the house and you were fixing it up-- Right. And then there was a point in the middle, like you started talking about ghosts in the promotion of the videos. Right. What the hell is he doing? Yeah. What did he talk about ghosts? I couldn't figure out what was going on until you released--

you know, when you still-- you talked about the project more. Right. I was like, oh, what a cool idea, but I was so confused for so long. Me too. Because I would just see it on Facebook, or wherever, or wherever, and stuff. Exactly. And it was because I was working backwards, I was working from all the footage I had already shot. There was no script. I'm a writer at my core. And so to be making-- for my first feature to have no script

was this really weird backwards thing for me. Sure. But I also love editing. I mean, I don't mean film editing. I mean, as a writer, I love editing myself. Sure. I love working on my second draft more than my first draft. Everybody. And I also love upcycling. And so that's what this was. It was this upcycling project. I have so many questions real quick. Do you have any reality experience? I have literally no experience with reality.

That's so crazy. Because-- He means I have a reality. He means I have a reality. Yeah, I understand. Well, because I spent years as a story producer. And a story producer, you get footage, and you just kind of like, you figure out how the pieces fit together and figure out new ways to put it together. Right, right. It's really exciting. I call it writing in reverse, where it's carving from stone as opposed to building with clay.

Like if you're a sculptor, you get the clay and you kind of build up your image and you kind of build out from there. But the other kind of sculptor is like, you have the block of marble, and it doesn't change. And you're like, all right, well, I'll get them to get a chip away these pieces and find the master piece inside. And that's-- honestly, I'm not a huge fan of reality, but I love the practice of finding this story that's

hidden in the footage. And that sounds like exactly what you were doing. Exactly. If the bottom hadn't dropped out of reality, it sounds like it would be a good place for you to be. Yeah, I mean, that kind of storytelling is fascinating to me, just because I'm always curious about what's happening. I had a professor in college that described it as the elbows of the action, right? So like if you imagine a proscenium stage,

as if the actors are being manipulated by giant hands on the proscenium, moving the characters around and stuff like that, but what are the elbows doing? And it's always been fascinating to me. Like, oh, well, what if you just move your perspective over? And that's kind of what 1915-- I'm sorry, #1915House-- was because the ghosts, especially in the first half, all of the supernatural things are really the elbows.

The hands that you can see, all the-- is me in the foreground installing a sink, or this is how you take down paneling and stuff like that. Actually, you see me build very few things in the movie because when I actually had to start building things in real life, was at the point where I was like, I can't keep shooting footage of myself doing these projects. Because for instance, the drywall-- you don't see me install the drywall in the movie

because it's not a process that I enjoy doing. And so I'm going to spend three times longer installing drywall than I should just because it's a camera on me. No, I would rather fight a ghost. [LAUGHTER] I did like the pedestal sink that you fabricated. Yeah, it was really nice. I learned a lot about how to fabricate all this nonsense. So I was like, oh, hey, I feel like I could do that. If I had a jigsaw, I was afraid it was going to cut my face off.

Oh, yeah. I was really jealous of the space you had to work on at your house. That my garage, I mean, I really did inherit this incredible workshop garage from the previous owner who had lived here for 50 years is incredible. Yeah. Yeah, it looked like such a great space, too. And then I utilized that space. OK, so here are the only things that I spent money on. I spent $19 on the green screen. I don't know how much money on the full body green suit.

But then I took the green screen to Home Depot, and they scanned it. And I used that to buy paint. Oh, nice. So I bought a gallon of green screen paint for like 20 bucks. If you buy the real stuff, it's like a hundred bucks a gallon. Yeah, right, yeah, yeah. You just need a solid color. So you're in a vicinity of green and it's-- Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. And then I built flats so that I turned my back patio into a studio.

So I had two eight-foot tall, 12-foot long flats that were green on one side. And then on the other side were-- you could see the bare framing. So all the scenes that are like me between the walls. Yeah. I was wondering about that. I was like, you don't have that space in your house, do you? Right. Because that would be cool. So those are the two flats parallel, like back-to-back parallel to each other.

But that was also one of those flats lying down on its back. So the framing was facing up. And then the other one basically lying on top of me, that was the scene where I'm in my own attic. Where I'm like, I'm in the attic with all my stuff. Those are the flats. I didn't shoot that in the attic. So the lumber for those flats, the gallon of paint and the green screens, that's the only thing I spent money on.

And the house. Well, and-- That probably shot your budget through the roof. Yeah, that was more budget than I had. That probably makes me the most expensive show that's been on your podcast. Because you're right. You have to buy the house, but I do still have the house. Well, there you go. That's true. And the green screen. And now you're getting those tax incentives from California to turn it into a studio.

Yeah. Wait a minute. Yeah. You're good. You're right. Your house is a movie set. Like, come on. Work the system. All right. So I want to take just a quick step back. I love this. I love this. I love what we're doing. I love hearing all the stuff. I am so inspired by this whole thing. But before we get deeper into the DIY stuff, I want to know, not just for me, but for anybody else. Like, did you look to any other movies for inspiration when you're making this thing?

Or were you just kind of carte blanche? You're like, I mean, I guess I'll make a ghost story. Was there anything you looked at? Yes, definitely. Because I was trying to-- I watched a lot of 1950s, 1960s, B horror movies that were like

super low budget horror movies, monster movies where you don't ever really get to see the

monster because they didn't have the budget. And so I can't even name them because they're-- I mean, but it's the kind of stuff that's all over Tubi now. Sure. And I just consumed as much of that as I can because I was like, where are they putting the camera? And what are they doing with shadows? And especially when I got to the point where I was either some of like the last, I don't know, 10 or 15 minutes of the movies is new footage.

And so that's where I was really trying to figure out my lighting and stuff like that in terms of making it spooky. The other stuff, the earlier stuff my lighting was all about not making-- I don't want it to be spooky. I want you to be able to see what I'm doing with the hammer, you know? So knowing that, how do I back in the monster, but you can't see the monster?

And so I watched a lot of those. And then I knew that I wasn't going to be able to have a score for the film because I wanted

it to be all found footage and all diegetic sounds. Right. So it's like, it wouldn't make sense for me to have like eerie strings or or or anything like that setting the tone. So that was all room tone. And so I did watch quite a bit of Stanley Kubrick stuff.

I was actually The Shining, but also 2001, just listening because his room tone is so specific.

And so I really liked #1915House. I'm happy with what I did for as janky as some of it looks and all of that. But the sound design on it, I'm really proud of. I almost all of it is me. There are a couple of sounds that I got from a library. Anytime you hear me use a power tool, there's a sound underneath the sound of the tool that's the name of the sound is something like kindergarten recess or something.

And so you hear all these kids laughing and screaming every time I pull the trigger on a power tool. And so that's just weird. But everything else is, yeah, dialing in that room tone. How do you achieve those silences that are unsettling? Yeah, they're kind of oppressive. Yeah. Room tone that echoes in your ear. Right. So I ran the tub and it's just like with water, just gushing out of it and then I changed

the pitch of it and slowed it down. And you never, it just sounds like a hiss at the end. But still, there's always something a little bit wrong with it. Yeah. I remember talking to Travis Greene. Travis Greene was all about the importance of sound and how. It's the thing you don't notice that adds the layer of storytelling to the whole thing, like having kindergarten laugh every time there's that nail goes in the wall.

Yeah, power tool. That's awesome. That's incredible. I didn't quite notice it, but now I want to go back and rewatch it so I can hear it. Oh, you know what the sound, the name of the sound is, you're like, oh, yeah. That doesn't sound like a drill. But that's crazy that you were looking at those and not, I watched it and reminded me of

I Am a Ghost. Have you ever seen I Am a Ghost? No. It's this movie came out in 2012. It's a ghost story from the perspective of a ghost. I got that from that time. Yeah. But it is a very mundane vibe to it. And slowly you see like other people like the real people and you hear the them like do stuff with a poltergeist. It's terrifying. It's so cool. But this, this had that that kind of rustic lo-fi vibe that reminded me of it.

Yeah. Also, it reminded me of a show that I cannot find and I am so frustrated. A buddy of mine wrote this thing called Hellhole, which is not the version of Hellhole that is all over IMDB, but was them. It's about somebody who bought a house and opened up a floorboard and discovered a portal to Hell, but then just ended up like hanging out with it. So it just seems of him in his lawn sharing a beer with his portal to Hell.

I love it. I love it because that's essentially the conclusion, no spoilers, I guess, but you know, I mean that we live with our ghosts in the house and it's part of my bio and you know, it's like you know, living in a haunted house in South Los Angeles with his wife and their dog and they're not exorcising the house. We already have a problem with the living homeless. Yeah. We don't need the dead homeless.

We don't need the homeless. You don't need the homeless. You don't need the homeless. You don't need the homeless. You don't need the homeless. You don't need the homeless. You don't need the homeless. You don't need the homeless. You don't need the homeless. You don't need the homeless. Yeah. That's how you get a Ghostbuster situation and nobody wants that. So then the next stop on our journey is what we call the OPM.

We've heard the show before that we're not totally in love with how we've named this thing, but it works. It sounds like a medical condition. It does. It does. You have OPM. Oh, no, probably. I guess. We probably get some kind of pill that might give you suicidal thoughts. It will also give you suicidal thoughts, but there's three elements to every movie.

It's the thing that got you super obsessed that you're like, I have to make this. It's the pivot, the moment that you're like, oh, no, nothing's working. I need to totally shift my whole thing. And then the miracle of this shouldn't have happened and it did. So you kind of explained your inspiration for starting #1915House.

But was it the medium you want to do something? You're not just fixing up your house without a camera on you. Well, I think that's where my obsession comes in because my obsession, and this is going to sound really pretentious, it's the right place for it, but I am. Yeah. This is a podcast. That's what we do. Yeah, right. I'm a guy with a microphone on a podcast that gets to be. My obsession is storytelling.

I try in every endeavor to use all the tools at my disposal to tell the given story.

That's my obsession. Applying that to fixing up my house, how am I going to turn fixing up my house into a story?

And the story that I was telling, and this is where the pivot comes in, the story that I was telling wasn't working for me. It's telling the story of fixing up a house from beginning to end. I was like, I'm bored. If I'm bored, nobody's going to want to watch this. I don't want to set up a camera and show me putting up drywall. Nobody wants to see that. I would like to see that. I don't know how to put up drywall, but I understand your point.

Yeah, I do. I'll do a special episode. I'll get the ghost back in here. And the ghosts and I will put up some drywall. So that was the pivot, how am I going to-- and also, I think it was before we started rolling,

but I was sitting at this corporate desk doing home improvement DIY content.

They had a huge home improvement website. And under that umbrella, I was creating the kind of content that #1915House in its original

iteration was destined to be. But all of a sudden, I had left that corporate world because I hated it.

That's a different podcast. And so I'm not there anymore. All of a sudden, I'm by myself making this DIY content. And my YouTube channel went from essentially having hundreds of thousands or maybe millions

of eyeballs on my work every week to having dozens because I left this huge juggernaut.

And then now I'm doing it by myself, literally DIY. And so I was like, you know, this isn't-- I can't do this. I can't do this by myself. I mean, maybe other people do. I'm not saying it's impossible. I'm saying I was not in a place where I can keep doing this. I'm not enjoying it. And so I had to do that pivot. I turned it into a ghost story. And now I have a story to tell. Now I have something to offer that you're not going to get from all of the other drywall

videos on YouTube. So that when you watch me make a sink that I'm calling the skeleton sink and there's a skeleton swinging in the background, it's like, aha, now I know why I'm watching this guy build a skeleton pedestal. So that was my pivot and it was like, I was myself again. Yeah. It's a big thing. That moment, because I'll have that when I write scripts where you're writing it and you're like, this sucks.

Or you're just get bored with a scene. You get bored with the character and just like, oh, this sucks. But I should finish it. So it's finished. And you've got to realize that, like, no, if it's boring for you, it's boring for everybody else. And I'm fucking bail out. Or find a way to make it interesting. And I think realizing that before you amassed another 100,000 viewers that just wanted to watch

you put up drywall, you could make something that actually interested you. And I suspect there was also a sunken cost sort of deal with the footage that you already shot of your house. And at the point, you're like, oh, I'm going to turn this into a story. So like you said, found footage. You found your own footage. Exactly. Yes. Because I love to repurpose stuff too. In fact, if I wish I had more drive, I would take old projects that I made and turn

them into something else. My father was an artist and he always did that kind of stuff. So we got art in our living room that I have to explain to my kids. Like, here's this collage that he made out of other pieces of art he had made before, which is kind of annoying to me because I like the old art, but he was always cutting it up and turning it into something else. Sure. I can't stop myself from doing that.

In fact, I just recently took 1915 House, sorry, hashtag 1915 House.

You've got a 1915 House. We're not going to call the cops on you until we're done with it. I'm apologizing to myself. I'm apologizing to the entity of my home who insists that I say it correctly.

I took it and I edited it down into between like one and three minute segments and I put it up on TikTok. It's 1915 House. I actually shot it between 1915 and 1916 and then the movie 1915 House came out in

20. You're old. I know. The movie came out in 2017 and then I just recently revisited it, edited it down into

these little segments depending on the creepiest way to draw them out. You have to find the natural little breaks. Yeah. To keep my subscribers going like, "Wait, how can I stop on a cliffhanger?"

Sometimes it was in the middle of a segment but anyway, I put it out on TikTok but what TikTok gave me was the captions. Oh, yeah, yeah. And so now I have subtitles and everything that I'm saying that are auto-generated. It's this transcript of what I'm saying and I think the inception of this came from the auto-generated subtitle was giving away a punchline and I was like, "I can't.

I don't want this to give away the punchline." I was like, "I'll just have it say something else." This was in maybe the fourth or fifth episode, if you will, out of, I think it ended up being close to like a hundred. But at that point I was like, "Oh, of course. The captions never have to say what I'm really saying." Because that was part of the thing and so the entity that was possessing the house started

leaking into the subtitles and saying things like, "You can't trust him and don't listen to what he's saying." Or I can see you, I can see you've moved closer to your phone, you know, and the little little things like that. And that was the other thing that was amazing about TikTok is that there was this immediacy from my audience. Hashtag, 1915 House ended up on the festival circuit in 2017. But it was never in a festival that I could attend.

And so I never experienced any audience reaction. But then on TikTok, in the comments, people were commenting to each other and being like, "Did you see the subtitles?" "Oh my God, they don't match." And so it was so cool to have this other way to make a collage out of this stuff that I

had, and then not just cut it up, but also add another element to it. Yeah, recontextualize it a little bit. Yeah. Using the tools of the new medium to expand your story, that's awesome, man. That's incredible. Yeah. Because I mentioned the festivals, that's where the miracle came. And I know I'm stealing your thumb. No, no, no, no. I was just trying to figure out how to do it. Yeah, listen, we try to hire people to do our transitions for us.

And if you do it, man, that's even better. Boom. Yeah. The miracle came after the movie was done. There were two miracles that literally changed my life. They weren't just for Hashtag, 1915 House. The first one was I cut this thing together and I was like, well, now what am I going to do with it? I mean, I could just put it up on YouTube, but that kind of defeats the purpose of why I made it. I was trying to escape this YouTube DIY setting, the home improvement setting of YouTube that

I felt trapped in. And I was like, oh, I'll submit it to a short film festival. And I did the very first one that I submitted it to reject it. And I was like, oh, all right. I mean, I'm not devastated by that. I've been in the entertainment business for a long time. It's not like I was destroyed, but I read to the end of the email. And they said, sorry, we can't accept this film into our shorts festival.

Fibubububba. And they were like, please resubmit to our sister festival for feature films.

That's pretty cool. And I was like, wait. How did I make a feature film? Well, you made a short feature. For the price of a gallon of paint. You know, I was like, that's why I say I accidentally made a feature film. I mean, it's like, oh, wow. OK, I thought I was making a short film, but I made a feature film. Awesome. I resubmitted it. It was accepted into the festival. And then from there, I was accepted into every festival that I submitted it to.

That's incredible. And then, whatever, the festival that was the second miracle and that really did change

my outlook on myself as a filmmaker, as an artist was the Thriller! Chiller! Film Festival

in Michigan." And they made me the headliner. It was a three night festival. And Friday night was grindhouse night. And they made me the headliner of grindhouse night. And I was like, not only did I make a feature film by accident, I made a grindhouse film by

accident. And that really made me like, oh, it's not just like micro budget because any movie, any

genre, any can be micro budget. Yeah, I made a Christmas movie on a micro budget. Right. Yes. And the grindhouse is such a specific thing that I actually really dig. And it's also not a genre. It's a vibe. It's like rock and roll. Rock and roll is a big genre of music. There's lots of things that are rock and roll and lots of things that aren't. And a micro budget Christmas movie is not rock and roll.

I mean, it's, you know, maybe alt is easy listening. It's a Christmas carol, Rob. But I mean, your movie definitely has that grindhouse sort of vibe to it because it's so DIY. Yeah. It has a verisimilitude of like, of realness, which I think is the thing with good grindhouse is that it feels real and then you reach out and touch it. I always think, and this is a duh, but The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is the platonic example

of what grindhouse is. Right. It feels like they're really murdering people with chainsaws. And you don't question it at all and it's cheap as hell and you know, probably they got out of it, but you know, you don't. And that's what this felt like, where it was like, yeah, and the guy probably survived. And probably wasn't posted by his redhead lady friend, but you never know. I feel like, yeah. Yeah, like grindhouse needs to be made by the people who you could see in the movie.

Do you know what I mean? Yeah, totally. The people who like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, you could imagine maybe the people who made that have thought about massacring people with chainsaw. Right. And also you see the actors like in the movie, the guy like pulls up and you know that that actor is driving his own cars. Yeah. Or his own motorcycle or his own motorcycle. It's his gun that they use for the shoot.

Right. Totally. And so, so to be characterized from the outside by people who never met me, I'm not going to be, I'm not even going to this festival because I can't go to Michigan for this festival. Legally, I'm not allowed to Michigan. No, no, no. It's a house. But for them to go like, oh, you, you made a grindhouse movie, made me go, oh, shit. That means that for my next movie, I can just say I make grindhouse movies.

And not just to say it to somebody else, but say it to myself. Like while I'm writing the screenplay and be like, oh, this gives me license to like, because before, and I'd be thinking about a screenplay and I'm thinking about budget, I'm going to produce this myself or whatever. And so you can't blow up an ambulance. Wow. But, and so I would write around, gags like that. Oh, okay, well, instead of that, we'll do this, we'll instead of that, we'll do this.

But if you're, if it's a grindhouse movie, you can blow up the ambulance because you have the license to show the ambulance, ambulance, ambulance, cut to an explosion and then cut

back to like a burning tire. Yeah. But everybody knows they're watching a grindhouse movie. Right. And it's not a joke that you did that. Right. Storytelling. Yeah. And it's stylistic in, in the vein of it's like part of the link, the cinematic language of the style. Yeah. And so that gave me this license to like, to go like, oh, okay, I'm like the grindhouse guy.

Like, like, I'm coming from a similar ethos. I guess that's the word I'm looking for with grindhouse is an ethos. It's sort of like punk rock is an ethos more than it is a music genre. Sure. I mean, punk is like a big part of my identity or whatever. And so it's like taking that punk rock vibe that I had sort of compartmentalized away from my creative space and going, like, oh, no, wait, that is who I am.

And it made me as an artist be more sort of accepting of myself. You know, it was almost like removing a mask and being like, ah, yeah, I am, Rob, you said something in one of the earlier episodes of this very show about how the budget for your,

in your low budget, indie stuff, doesn't have to be a ladder. You know, and so it's like if you're going to make five or $10,000 movies, that doesn't mean that your next movie has to be 20 and then 50 and then a million and then, now, all of a sudden, I'm the Russo brothers or something. You could have a whole career making grindhouse movies. And kind of the worst thing that can happen to somebody who does that really well is give

them a $50 million budget. I mean, I know that it's silly for me to say to Steven Spielberg, but Jaws is a much better

movie than Jurassic Park. You should have taken the millions and millions of dollars that you had to make Jurassic Park and made a grindhouse movie. Because Jaws is a grindhouse movie. Yeah, but I don't know how punk rock Steven Spielberg is. Oh no, he's not. He's a polar bear. And I like Steven Spielberg, but so the latter thing is something I talk about with my wife too because I said that thing.

I was like, you know, I was on Facebook in some indie filmmaking forum thing where they were talking about the budgets of movies and they're, they're all very down on themselves because nobody watches their movies or, you know, like, why are we even doing this? You know, everybody, it's the existential problem that indie filmmakers have all the time. And they're getting really down on themselves and they're like, if nobody sees my $10,000

movies, like I can make those forever, but this was their words, I will never get better is what they said. And I was like, if you made $5,000, $10,000 movies, you're telling me that fifth one wouldn't be better than the first one? Like, you can get better. The budget doesn't make you better. You can be a better filmmaker with the same amount of money and resources. I didn't comment back because I don't want to get in a fight with some 22 year old Lithuanian

kid. But guys, you have to be a little more optimistic about the budget. Filmmaking isn't about the budget. It's not about the budget at all. I mean, the idea of the ladder, I think, can kill you creatively. And also economically, it sort of like don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. And then the problem solving, if you have a limited budget is where you get the gold, you

know? Like that shot that I described of the ambulance blowing up or, or, oh, God. I mean, I'm going back to Spielberg. The storytelling in the first 20 minutes of Saving Private Ryan is shocking.

But the storytelling of the same scene of the exact same beach in The Big Red One is better.

And it's because Samuel Fuller doesn't show you any of it. He shows a dead man's hand with a wristwatch on it in the surf.

And every time you cut back to it as this hand is being gently moved by the surf, the water

is redder. And you know that horrors are occurring and time is passing and blood is being shed.

But the storytelling of that is so much more intense from a guy who was really there than

I'm going to show you every horror that happened on that beach, right? The first time you see Saving Private Ryan, including me, I'm not saying it was bad filmmaking, it's great. It's amazing filmmaking. And the first time you see it or the first time I saw it, absolutely speechless after that first 20 minutes. But there's no storytelling. There's no beginning and middle and end to it. There are no characters.

It's just like a document of what's happening.

And there's nothing, again, there's nothing wrong with it. But in order to do what he did, what he did, that 20 minutes, the budget for that 20 minutes is larger than I'll ever have access to to make a movie. I wouldn't even have access to the catering budget. So, go ahead. You guys said a bunch that I do agree with, right? The ladder, the budget, and all that. And quality storytelling that you can do without showing.

What you show the horror, the horror becomes real. What you don't show the horror, the horror is whatever the viewer imagines it to be, which is more powerful, depending on the kind of movie you're making. And depending on who the audience is, if the audience is watching more. But I just got to stick up for your poor Lithuanian kid, because while, yes, you don't need a budgetary

ladder to make these movies, I do understand the struggle of, I can't get better if nobody sees this because there is that element of you're doing it by yourself with no feedback. So, you don't know what works and what doesn't work. It's like exercising without a personal trainer, you know? Like, you could be doing push-ups and you feel like it's working. You feel like you're getting gains, but you're not because you're not doing the things you

are supposed to have because you don't have another eye on you being like, "Hey, man, I see what you're doing, and it's cool, but you're going to fuck up your back, you know?" Yeah. To me, that's the value of an audience, and that's the problem if you make something low budget, then nobody sees. I mean, yes, you want people to see it because you want it to be successful, so you can use it as a bargaining chip when you're making budgetary moves on your next ones.

But also, it's just nice for people to watch me like, "Oh, I think this movie is a grindhouse movie." Oh, fuck. It is. You're right. And just that that moment of realization when you see it through other eyes, and you're like, "Oh, I see what I was making now in a different way." I think is so important to the process as opposed to just doing it. I wouldn't have jumped down a throat, but he was talking about, "How can I get better?"

Yeah, no, sorry. I didn't mean jump down a straight. Yeah. No, again, I didn't comment, but it was the way he phrased it. Thank you. Movies are worthless if you can't get more of a budget. Sure. And that always triggers me because I find worth in the thing itself. Well, but I do think that point, your budget doesn't equal audience. And I think that is a line of thinking that is destructive. Like you're saying, Justin, with #1915House, that your budget was essentially a hundred bucks,

and it was successful. It got eyes. It opened up your perspective as an artist, as a filmmaker, which is in value. And it's not that you needed a budget of $25 million or $1 million. You just needed to do it and for it to be seen. Yes, absolutely. And just because we are talking about budget, because it's like, for me to say that I made that movie about a hundred bucks is true, but in defense of this Lithuanian kid.

I don't know if he's from Lithuania, but he's probably the guy that's going to go to the studio now. He is now. He's actually on the show right now. Ladies and gentlemen, hello there. You've been talking shit about my movies. Like I said, it went on the festival circuit. That means that my budget needs to include all of the entries for these festivals. So it's like, money, money, like for me, I know, I wrote a screenplay for the sequel to

#1915House. It's called #SmartHouse. And I wrote it knowing all the lessons learned from the first one and also that I was going

to be shooting it intentionally, which means that I'm now setting up shots and blah, blah, blah, blah, all the stuff that we were talking about earlier. And so I wrote it for that. And I know that in a grindhouse kind of way, I could make that movie for very little money.

But no one would see it. Not because nobody wants to and not because it's not good or not because the people who do see it, if I just put it up on YouTube, wouldn't enjoy it. But you do need money to get eyeballs on your work. So it's like the money that I would love to have isn't really so much for production. It's for access. Yeah. It's the post post stuff. Post post post stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, cause I get it.

They are just kind of pre-production, all production, maybe a little bit of post. And then you stop counting the money. Right. And you send something out to a film fest and it's $85 a pop or $100 a pop. So add that to 20 festivals. That's two grand, right there off the top. You want to go there. You want to produce all the materials for it. You want to get a poster. You want to do this and that, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Unless people are like, why don't you go to more festivals? Because I only spend like a hundred bucks on festivals. I'm like, I can't do that. I'm not doing that. Yeah. It costs too much money. Right. And there's a value in obfuscating how much your budget is. I know that when we were going to run with LITOM, we didn't tell them that our budget was a quarter million dollars because it looked like a half a million dollars.

So we're like, yeah, of course, it's half a million dollars. Because then you get into better rooms because they think that you spent more on it. Right. There's the number, like where are the numbers? Like you only spent $5,000 on this movie? It's amazing. We're letting you into the room. But then if it's more than that until you reach a certain threshold, they're just like, oh, this is cheap. Yes.

Yeah, you have to be under a certain amount of money and have made a masterpiece. Or you have to say, yeah, it was cheap movie. It cost me 650 or 700,000, no big deal. But I mean, I was doing that with Heistmas for a while. Like, they're like, how much was it? It's like, well, it's under 20 because contractually that's what I signed a contract for. But I haven't told people what the actual budget was.

It's under 20. Right. Where? I mean, that game, the margins on my game are a lot smaller than the margins on the game you

were playing. But you're right. Some people don't want to see it unless it costs money. Right. And it's crummy to figure out that game. But it's an important game to figure out. However, it works out for you. But it is also important, as a filmmaker, you make films. Yes. Oh, yes. And if you can't make a film for $500,000 and you can make one for $200, then you make them one for $200. Absolutely. One of my favorite books is Make Your Own Damn Movie! by Lloyd Kaufman.

And Lloyd Kaufman and the Troma stuff is such a weird fit. I don't love most of those Troma movies. But I do really appreciate the ethos of like, put whatever you want into the movie. Oh, you want to blow up an ambulance? Do it. Figure out a way to do it because there's always a way to do it. But just know that if you're going to spend $200 to blow something up, like, that's $200, you can't spend somewhere else.

So what's the cheapest way you can do that gag and then do it? You would have used people going, "Oh my God, the ambulance blew up." Yeah. Some yellow lights and smoke. Exactly. You know? You have to realize that you can do it cheaper. You can just do it. But to start, you just got to go. You just got to do it. Yeah. I grew up around the business. My father is a screenwriter. And so I didn't have the kind of, I don't know, pie in the sky thinking about Hollywood.

It was just a place that people work. So I vary early on. This is like decades before someone called me grindhouse. No one actually has ever called me grindhouse, but that would be a good nickname. I can start calling you grindhouse now. Thank you, grindhouse, for being on the podcast today. Yeah. But like my, like, ethos and that punk rock thing has always been, like, how can I steal

this? Like, and I don't mean like, how can I steal this idea? But like, oh, it's going to cost like, you know, like $5,000 to shoot at a given location. How can I steal that? How can I, how can I steal this location? How can I, how can I steal this ambulance blowing up or how can I, how can I, how can I blow up a, ambulance in a movie, but it's, it's not very expensive to do it in real life. Exactly.

You will go to prison, but you know, you get to shot. Someone will, someone will. It just, you go through other people, you hire people who are skilled at blowing things up. Yeah. I met a lot of people when I was, when I was a PA in like low budget, kind of scary Hollywood, you know, these are like, I worked on a lot of erotic thrillers, let's say. I, there were a lot of people I met in that world where I was like, I'm writing your name

down because someday I'm going to need somebody killed. You know, you know, disclaimer, do not blow up anything, do not commit crimes in the, in

the name of your film, unless this may be shooting without a permit. Unless, unless you have a nice cover story and, and blankets of other people to go through. Why? In a media area. He's proxies. Always have a fog act. Yeah. Don't write anything down. Um, all right. Listen, we're doing great. Everybody. We're doing wonderful. We talked a lot about the DIY topic that we wanted to talk to you about today.

I'm so inspired by everything, everything you're saying. And I love it because it's true that you get caught up in how things should be done that

you forget you should just go out and do things. But specifically about hashtag 1915 House, I did have a couple of questions about how you made this movie because there's so much of it that felt so both planned and surprising and I don't, I don't know how you did it. Like for instance, you cut into the wall, which is incredible production value. Start ripping stuff off the wall and then you discover that there's a larger window behind

the wall and you just played it off like there's no big deal. How much of that was improv and how much swearing did you cut of yourself off camera? The original footage cut together of me discovering the window buried behind the paneling in my

wall exists on YouTube just as a straight ahead home improvement DIY video and with no ghosts or anything. I mean, you don't need a ghost in that situation. I was absolutely shocking. So my reaction when I pulled that paneling off is real. And at that point, there were so many things about this house in real life that I think my reaction was to just sigh. You know, it was just like, oh, okay, here's something I've got to deal with.

And so I'm glad that you that you're asking about that in particular because that to me is what I look for when I'm watching whether it's a horror movie or anything where the

stakes are heightened and people are in precarious situations in real life.

I have never and I have been, you know, I've worked with horses and I've worked in construction

in places where people get really hurt in real life. And in real life, I have never heard someone scream. I have never, ever, ever heard that. I saw someone get his finger zipped off by a lead rope when the horse jerk back pulled the lead rope and his finger basically got frictioned off when the rope tightened up.

His reaction was like, oh, shit. Everybody else was like, oh, wow, right? There was no, there was no screaming. No one has ever, I've never heard that in real life. And so I'm always, I always appreciate in a movie when I see that, when I see these honest reactions, it's sort of like in a, I spend a lot of time on TikTok because although I am

the oldest person in the room there, it's where I get the most interaction in my social media. I don't know. It's the only place that I've ever really had a, been able to make a connection. But anyway, you see a lot of these, there's a lot of like food influencers, right? And so you'll see it, they'll put a bite of food in the mouth and immediately go, mmm, but in real life, nobody does that. You know immediately that they're not tasting the food because in real life, you put the food

in your mouth and then you taste it, right? And so there has to be that little pregnant pause there. And that's the same with the screaming and that's the same with me pulling the paneling off and just going like, oh, God. Well, now I got to buy new windows. Did you put windows in those windows spots? I put insulating. So there were the two windows in the movie that are smaller and those two windows are now

bigger. But the two windows that had no window in them at all, we just covered them up. But it's like, this is too much money. So we just covered them back up. It's like, do you know, no, no, you're going back in the wall. It's just like exactly what we did with the ghost. It's like, no, no, no, you can still possess the house, but you can't fuck things up.

Yeah, Rob, what do you got? I have one thing I wanted to mention because you don't have any music. You don't have a score in the show, but at the end you have a song. Then I assume that's a public domain tune. It is, but I did have to prove it because I immediately got somebody was like, no, I own

that song. Yeah, the movie is called #1915House and that song came out in 1915. So you can fuck off. And so like even for Heistmas, I went to the Library of Congress and I would look for public domain recordings that they still have on there. And like, that's a great resource for anybody who wants to put music in their, I mean, it's old. And you might have to clean it up a little bit. It happened to be perfect for my movie, but yeah, you can definitely find stuff that's

usable, that's in the public domain. But it's also, it's also really tough because we had a sequence in LITOM or we were using a bunch of stock footage and audio and whatever. And it was a whole deal where he had to like, just because the song was written in 1915 or whatever is in the public domain, he had to make sure it was the right recording of it. Yeah. It's not that it killed us, but it was really tough.

We were trying to find the Star-Spangled Banner or something like some kind of America song that we'd find the version that was done by the Navy brass band because that's owned

by all of us. So that was a big deal. But you really had to dig in there. So it's such a great resource, the public domain thing, but also just keep in mind that, you know, specifically the Library of Congress. Sure. You can go there and it'll tell you if it's in the public domain or if it's copyrighted. And if you do want more recent stuff than like everything at all of NASA's footage,

right up until yesterday is in the public domain. So if you want to do anything that takes place on the moon, you've got access to all that if you want it. Yeah. Anyway, I just wanted to bring that up because I heard the tune and I liked it. Well, it's great. I couldn't believe it when I found that song. I mean, that was, I guess that was the third miracle. What's finding a song? I was like, I'm afraid to go home in the dark.

Yeah. I mean, I was like, holy, wow. Oh, my God. They wrote a lot of spooky songs at the turn of the last century. It was a spooky time. There's a lot of ghosty stuff. Yeah. And talking about the sound design, one of the things that I did, there's a voice, it kind of a drone of a voice in the background through a lot of the, especially through a lot of the later stuff. And that's me reading aloud from a real book like this German psychiatrist from the early

1900s, who is a believer talking about this young girl or young woman who is a medium

and so you'll hear this German-accented voice in the background talking about ectoplasm and the ectoplasm was very thick this time and she levitated off the floor and was apparently wearing a shift of some kind that she wasn't wearing when the séance began. And so if you listen really closely, you can hear me doing that and like, my modulated and stuff like that. But yeah, that, again, that was like from the period of the time that the house was built

when people were really into all the mesmerism and the séances and all that.

Before Harry Houdini shut them down like he should have. Yes, right. Right. He's coming back though, man. He's coming back. It's going to be one of these days. One of these days is going to be incredible. So, this has been fantastic, but let's bring her in for a landing here. Now that you're at the end of the road of this whole process, making the movie, if you could go back in time and tell yourself something before you started the process.

What's the one bit of advice you would give yourself? You know, I know that this question is one of your standard... What? Standard questions. I meant that in a good way, in an inside the actor studio kind of way. I've been thinking about that though, because I began this movie so unintentionally and I

think that works so well that when I thought about making the sequel, I really had to think

about how do I make the sequel in such a way that it's obviously intentional, but how do I keep that same vibe? So, I don't know if I would go back in time and tell the guy who is making the original actual DIY videos anything. But I know I would tell the guy that was doing the pickups, you need help.

You know, it's like, not just you need help getting in and out of a green suit. And I did have help. I mean, you saw the brief credits roll at the end and my brother is on there and my wife is on there and Zach, my brother, he was in town for a weekend and he wore the green suit and some of the stuff so that we could have this sort of like bubble of a figure walking around behind me. But I know that my performance as an actor would have been better even though I was directing

myself and I've done that before, but my performance at the end is so heightened that my character

is going through it in such a big way that I really did need another set of eyes. Even if it was just let's say an AD to go like, take that one again. I really think, you know, it's like you can auteur too hard. Yeah, I know the feeling on that one. Yeah. Oh, but you know what? I might have gone back in time to tell original #1915House guy.

This is a tough one. Maybe, maybe to not have him use the name Justin DiPego because that just logistically

made it really confusing. Because Justin DiPego in #1915House is a character, but Justin DiPego, the writer, director,

producer is me. And so it made it hard to talk about. And it also like for instance, doing the sequel, I necessarily have to name that character Justin DiPego and that's awkward. It's just awkward. It's not bad filmmaking or anything like that, but it's awkward. You could always like evil dead this whole thing and just remake the #1915House the first

part. Just remake it real quick at the beginning of the second movie. There you go. Rename your character. That's part of the plan. Or you just sell the house to a new person. That looks to a new person. Oh, different. Yeah, yeah. I sold it to this strange man in a hat with a mustache. Yeah. Yeah, everything's the same. Just a different hat. Yeah. Okay. So I guess we will come in for the landing then.

We're still we're still landed. We're still landed. We're still landed. We're still landed. We're still landed. That was okay. Mustache continuity and tattoo continuity. Those were big challenges. Uh, to a smart man said once, uh, continuity is overrated. I did. I did. I say that in scene one. So yeah. All right. Well, thank you, Justin, for coming to talk to us. It was amazing. What a pleasure. Yeah.

Thank you. Thank you. I can't wait to make another movie so I can come back. Yeah. Well, when you do definitely come back. Absolutely. Um, so tell us where they can find you. Or more importantly where they can find you on the internet. I, I alluded to TikTok that is where I am most active. I am JustinDiPegoAuthor on TikTok. I'm also JustinDiPegoAuthor on YouTube and, uh, you're on threads.

On Instagram and on threads, I am just Justin DiPego. Oh, you have no identity. Just you. I know. I tried to, I tried to tack on the author thing and I, they wouldn't win. Oh, is it the, are you the character Justin DiPego on Instagram? Yeah. Uh, probably, probably. Uh, does your movie have any kind of, uh, broader distribution or is it just self distributed? Uh, you know, I did. It's completely available on YouTube right now and you can watch it as 16 episodes or

you can watch it as just one feature. It did get a distribution on some, this is like 2017 now, but there was like a Tubi-style

thing back then which no longer exists. But, um, so for about a year, you could, you could stream it. But, uh, but now you can, you, you can watch it on, it's still streaming. It's just, you don't have to pay for it. It's great. Absolutely. That's how I watched it. I watched it on YouTube and it was, it worked out great. Yeah. I love the comments by, just real quick. I love the comments of people referring to it as a real DIY video.

There's a bunch of those comments that are like, uh, great job building this thing. I was like, did you watch the whole thing? There was not one comment. Like I said, it's 16 episodes or a feature, right? And on the feature or the episodes, not one of the comments refers to the fact that there's a ghost. It's so weird. It is so weird. Like, did anybody watch? I don't know. People see what they want to see.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Nice hammer. We missed to hit himself in the thumb. Well, Justin, thank you. Thank you again for coming on the show. But that does it for us. And so if you have any questions about filmmaking movies in general, please email us at indiefilmlodge@gmail.com.

We'd love to hear from you. And we may feature your question on a future show. In the meantime, tell your friends about us and remember that the only thing holding you back is you. So get out there and shoot your feature. I'm Rob. I'm Matt, and we'll see you next time. Woo! [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] (gentle music)