Fighting To Make A Movie While Staying True To Its Core — CROWN AND ANCHOR Behind The Scenes
Bringing the DIY spirit of punk and hardcore music to indie filmmaking.
How’s it going? My name is Matt Wells. I’m an actor and producer on the independent feature film CROWN & ANCHOR, which will be released theatrically in the fall of 2018.
CROWN & ANCHOR is an intense family drama which examines the effects of childhood trauma and it is scored entirely with punk and hardcore music. Bands like GORILLA BISCUITS, YOUTH OF TODAY, DYS, JOHNNY THUNDERS, X-RAY SPEX (just to name a few).
I made the movie in my town of St. John’s, Newfoundland which is where I am right now hiding from the rain under the trees.
I made the movie with my best friend Michael Rowe and I met him when I was in a band. We were in a band together and that’s how my journey started into filmmaking, it started with music. We started to have some success on music television in Canada. We were touring with bands like SLAYER and FISHBONE and D.O.A. Eventually that journey led me into music television. So I all the sudden I went from being a singer in this independent band to interviewing some of the bands that I admired. I became a music and film journalist on music television and through the years I got to interview people like Lou Reed and NO DOUBT, Greta Gerwig and Quentin Tarantino.
But somewhere along that journey I started to feel I wanted to do something different which was acting and filmmaking. And you can imagine what an aspiring actor and filmmaker can learn from interviewing people in that world. I did thousands of interviews and it was always sort of percolating in my brain.
To be quite honest with you what I learned as a guy in an independent band, that’s what gave me the tools to be able to make a movie. This sort of D.I.Y. (do-it-yourself) spirit of punk and hardcore music, that’s what I lived, that was my whole life. We were putting up our own posters, we were raising money to make albums and music videos, running it like a small business so we could go on tour and sustain ourselves to continue doing something that we loved and that is exactly how we made this movie and exactly how we’re approaching the roll out of distribution.
And when you think about it, those worlds (independent film and independent music) that punk and hardcore do-it-yourself culture and spirit, they are very similar and that is exactly the tools that we used to make CROWN AND ANCHOR…(Watch the video on Youtube here).
Watch the trailer to CROWN AND ANCHOR here on Vimeo!
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WATCH THE CROWN AND ANCHOR TRAILER
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CONNECT WITH CROWN AND ANCHOR
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