Brian Holcomb: A Massive Talent We Lost to Covid
An independent filmmaker who wove colossal narratives
What follows is an interview that I conducted with my friend Brian Holcomb in September 2013. It was originally intended to be published on the Tribeca Film Festival website, but like so many of our other joint ventures, that somehow didn’t happen. Brian and I had become lifelong friends and creative collaborators 28 years earlier to the month when we found one another as incoming seventh-graders at Edgewood Regional Junior High in Atco, New Jersey. Finding a living being in the wasteland suburbs of the Pine Barrens with whom you could share a passionate obsession for films was no easy task, so we stapled ourselves together right away. Over the years, we worked on countless projects together: numerous short films, a few feature-length films, and an unquantifiable number of screenplays for the most part. We grew up together and—with the help of our core group of friends—spent our adolescences and young-adulthoods teaching one another the craft of storytelling. (Though, if I’m being honest, he always had a lot more knowledge to bring to the 3 am diner table than I ever could ever hope to share.)
The project discussed here, Deadwood Falls, is a sweeping insanely ambitious cinematic passion project of Brian’s that was started as I was preparing to move away from South Jersey in the late ‘90s, and it remained incomplete when Brian succumbed to COVID-19 on April 11, 2020.
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You suggested “So, how did you expect to make a zero budget independent film with a nearly 400-page screenplay?” as a good opening question. I honestly wasn’t aware the script had gotten so big. So, how DID you expect to make a zero budget independent film with a nearly 400-page screenplay?
Once I committed to the concept, It just grew like topsy. Part of the reason I chose that particular project over many other, much simpler ones was the lay of the independent filmland at the time. This was around 2000–2001 when feature films began to be shot on Mini-DV and festivals were taking these “films” seriously for the first time. Dogme, Lars Von Trier, and particularly the work of cinematographer Anthony Dodd-Mantle on FESTEN (THE CELEBRATION) had this air of the French New Wave. I had heard that director Thomas Vinterberg and Dodd-Mantle had used a PAL Sony Mini-Dv cam, the PC5-E, on that film and I was amazed at the look of it. It was raw, freewheeling, and exciting.
I ordered that very camera immediately and began thinking about the right project for this particular medium. I have always been very sensitive to what type of story fits into a certain style and aesthetic. This was not a pretty image really-but it had a real immediacy and ease with which it captured light. There was also the need at the time for the final product to be converted to film. So you would have this strange video type image that would then have this film grain on it. Landscapes looked like watercolor. Faces worked best…closeups were very intimate…something we have lost again with HD/DSLR filmmaking and the current obsession with Bokeh and lenses. You could get this little camera right up to an actor and feel this warmth. So whatever I chose to film needed to be about people as much as my interest in doing something ambitious from a “cinema” point of view.
We didn’t have access to movie stars of course so I had to ask myself “Who would want to watch two hours focusing on one unknown and maybe not so great actor in a standard goal-oriented story?” It felt so boring to me, even I thought I’d rather not watch such a thing. I knew the best course would be some kind of ensemble piece so the film would not need to be carried by any ONE actor and also I could cut from one storyline to another briskly and hold the interest from that standpoint. It would also help in casting by limiting the amount of time each actor would need to commit to the project.
So, nearly 400 pages later I found myself lost in the labyrinth of a novel-sized gothic horror story set in a small town. I had used as my model the modern gothic horror novel as defined by Stephen King and Peter Straub among others and thought that the film versions of these novels were all harmed by the fact that character detail and just detail were cut away from them leaving nothing but a terrible B-horror story behind. I thought I would just shoot it all, length be damned. And even more than that-perhaps the length and SIZE itself would be something of interest. As in who the hell from the pine barrens of NJ makes a ZERO BUDGET horror film that runs over three hours with a cast of almost 70 people? THAT guy must have some cojones. Or is insane. So I took the plunge. What I did next was both smart and stupid. I began to just look at that script as nothing more than a blueprint. Once casting began, I saw opportunities for more characters or different ones and began to rewrite to tailor the script to the kind of people I was getting in auditions. It was long my belief that the script is the script but the director makes the movie and the director should never fight the environment or the cast. If it rains, use the rain-it makes the scene more interesting. If an actor cannot play the role as written, change the role to fit what he or she does best. So much rewriting led to more story, to an even larger script and soon no script at all as I just wrote things on the fly. The original script had come completely off the rails and I was delighted that it had because what I was getting was so much more interesting.
It is important to also note that shooting in digital video meant something in particular. Back in the day of 16mm and blow-ups to 35mm, every second of raw stock counted and costed. One or two takes only and try to get as close to a 1:1 ratio as possible. With DV, one hour of tape was less than ten dollars!! I could imagine a long film with a large cast and I could do as many takes as I needed to hone the performances. This also fed into tackling a large scale project.
You’ve now been working on this one movie for more than ten years. I might be remembering incorrectly, but I feel like you had already started the screenplay while I was still living in South Jersey back in 1998. Why has it taken you so long? And were there points when you thought it would never be finished?
No, I committed very hard to finishing this movie somewhere in the middle of filming it. I think it became some kind of mad challenge for me-I seem to need this kind of “impossible” mission in the DNA of a project in order to get excited by it, along with a certain kind of chaos in order to really get my creative juices flowing. It’s probably incredibly self-destructive but there it is.
There are stories of Orson Welles coming in at the last minute for rehearsals of MERCURY THEATER ON THE AIR and with only twelve hours to go, basically dismantling all that had been done and rewriting and reworking almost the entire show before it aired, just in time for it to air. I think some people are excited by the constant immediacy of creation. I, for one, still hate the idea, the very thought of taking a script and “just” shooting it as planned. I always tell actors to just show up and we’ll invent something. This is something that goes back to my VHS camcorder and Super-8mm film days as a kid-having people over on a Saturday afternoon and just making a film up out of thin air, usually built around whatever props or locations were available.
But to the specifics of your question-WHY HAS IT TAKEN SO LONG: the first thing that has to be understood is that even though the film has taken so long to make, in terms of total days of shooting we are probably somewhere between 35–40 days over that entire time. Which is the length of shooting on most Hollywood films. I had to wait for actors to be available on the same day, for locations to become available, for the right season to match what had already been shot( Which forced filming to simply shut down in spring and summer except for interiors), for actors to grow or lose facial hair, for recasting and reshooting to be done when certain actors simply vanished from existence, etc. I also wanted a large scale look for the film so some of the shooting days involved eight-hour roundtrip drives into Pennsylvania in order to capture the right location. Days which perhaps gave us mere seconds of usable footage. Eventually, I got fed up with all the waiting and shot a large percentage of the movie over 6 straight days in a rented studio with constructed sets. We had actors coming and going timed to the minute to get the scenes in front of the camera. I basically shot an 80-minute feature film over that week.
But anyway, around the second or third year of shooting on the film I realized that no matter how tempting it was to jump ship and shoot a movie set on a couch, I had something pretty amazing already “in the can”. That I was so deep into the film that it was worth it to see it through. I decided to just strap myself to the wheel like that ship captain in DRACULA and see if I made it to shore.
As for whether or not there were times when I thought it would never be finished — OF COURSE. But not that it would NOT be finished. More that it would not be finished in the right way. That I would be forced to just put it together without having all of my scenes shot. I knew that come hell or high water I could find SOME way to cut that footage together. Maybe not into anything coherent but it would resemble a movie. In fact, this is what I ended up doing but not from fatigue or disgust. About 2 years ago I realized that there was something else in the footage that was much more interesting than the film I had originally planned. Watching the edited scenes one night I had this moment of illumination. That the very nature of the film, shot on various cameras-PAL Mini-DV, HDV, HD some scenes shot widescreen while others 4:3 depending on the year-actors who have aged sometimes in the middle of a scene, fall leaves giving way to winter snows in the images, felt like a dreamlike collage of old memories. Like getting lost in some stranger’s collection of unlabeled home movies and trying to figure out who was related to who and what everyone was up to… I was looking at this large, surreal fire breathing dragon, a HOUSE OF FICTION as Jacques Rivette referred to his own films-quoting Henry James description of a vast narrative with many rooms. What if I told a story from the point of view of someone who had lost both his memory and his own identity? He would be asked about his past and of what exactly happened to the town whose people all vanished one night and would only say he could remember things, see things like “images reflected in the broken fragments of a shattered mirror”. He would then move through these images and people in a kind of stream of consciousness-never sure of who he was in the story itself, and not sure of which memories were real or fabrications of his mind. Things he could not remember would be seen-like the contents of an old journal, featuring words that looked like incoherent scribbles. Or people he could not identify being shown with no face. Certain parts would be seen in subjective POV-these would be his REAL MEMORIES which would puzzle the real truth about what happened in the town of Deadwood Falls. These scenes would TEAR/RIP into the body of his storytelling as his mind was forcing him to remember the reality… well, this idea melded with the real-life story of an old Japanese mass murder-where 30 people were killed during one long blacked-out night in a single village- the Tsuyama Massacre and particularly the sad, lonely man at the center and what he felt he needed to do. I recreated the structure and the main character would be a version of Mutsuo Toi who was attempting to write a terrible Stephen King type novel set in the town and this novel’s pulp story would get wrapped up with the real people in his life and the horrible murders his mind was trying to forget. Basically he would have Dissociative identity disorder.
So, how much remains to be shot? And how far are you from actually finishing the movie? When will people actually get to see it?
I’ve edited the film as I shot it, scene by scene and I have completed editing the body of the film. On a purely technical level, I have had to up-rez some of the footage to match the HD—basically, I have split the difference at 720p, the smaller gauges up and made into 16x 9 anamorphic and the HD footage down.
All that’s left to shoot is the wraparound sequence, the doctor interviewing PATIENT X, the only living survivor of the Deadwood Falls Incident. That and the pieces that tie together with that-a character discovering the key everyone is looking for and unlocking a chained old gothic door only to find himself in the modern doctor’s office with the Patient telling the story. It’s at this point that the Patient sees “himself” and suddenly puts all the pieces together—all the things hidden in the footage earlier, the journal entry, the faceless people suddenly come into focus or clarity. This will be shot in November over Thanksgiving break. Following the sound mix and scoring, the final cut should be ready by Spring of 2014, and that’s a very easily achieved schedule.
How do you imagine Deadwood Falls will be received by the world once it’s complete?
I think it will be a very impressive looking movie regardless of the content. So I think people will have their eyes and ears dazzled by a certain level of pure cinematic spectacle and a storytelling style that is quite unconventional. It’s the kind of film that I love-mixing genre elements with experimentation.
The editing is designed around graphic changes rather than narrative while still working as a narrative so you get these shocking Nic Roeg type cuts as a street goes from a rainy day in fall to suddenly SNOW, from me crossing the street in London as birds fly by left-to-right to another scene where the birds fly by right-to-left. Sound and image juxtaposition to tell the story. But I also think the story will be very interesting, especially with the added level of metafiction involved. I personally love films that are like layer cakes. If you want entertainment, that is first and foremost the reason the movie exists. But there is more if you want to look for it and the fun is in engaging the audience on multiple levels.
I really hope the film will be seen. These days that is not as hard as it once was—you can even personally distribute through Amazon and stream on there too. YouTube and Vimeo as well. Obviously I would love a deal with Netflix and Redbox! We’ll see.
In the end, I also hope that the film will aid me in raising small budgets for future films. We’re not talking millions here but rather budgets less than $100,000. Budgets around the size of a Larry Fessenden production. I could cast SAG actors that way, build sets or rent locations, and even have a small crew.
I have to thank all of the actors who stuck around and kept returning across years to allow me to finish it, everyone who kept their faith in me and my crazy ambitions over the years so I could keep on going. The film was co-produced by Glenn Mercer and John Boggi, and the two of them really worked tirelessly over the years to do anything to help me. Even cleaning fake blood off of floors at 2 am. Actual hard work while I played director.
Do you have plans for future, less time-consuming, projects or is everything focused on getting this done?
Well, what happened is that I actually broke my leg last December. I was bedridden for months with a broken tibula and fibula and had surgery where a long nail was sent down into the center of the bone to hold it together, so I began to write a bunch of new stuff. I am now casting several projects for the next few months. I have found that on this level—with actors and myself having such tight schedules—shooting more than one film at a time is a smart thing to do. I should’ve done that years ago. If actors are not available for one project, they might be for another, and you shoot scenes for that. Apparently, Terence Malick is working like this too—shooting three movies in Austin, Texas at the same time.
Deadwood Falls evolved immensely over the years. How did it land on its current form?
About two years ago I realized that there was something else in the footage that was much more interesting than the movie I had originally planned. That the very nature of the movie: shot on various formats-PAL Mini-DV, HDV, HD-some scenes shot widescreen while others 4:3 depending on the year; actors who had aged sometimes in the middle of a scene; fall leaves giving way to winter snows in the images. It felt like a dreamlike collage of old memories. Like getting lost in some stranger’s collection of unlabeled home movies and trying to figure out who was related to who and what everyone was up to…
So, the idea emerged. What if I told a story from the point of view of someone who had lost both his memory and his own identity? A classic unreliable narrator. He would be discovered burned from head to foot and having no memory of his own identity. Bandaged like a mummy, Patient X would be the sole survivor of the town’s mysterious disappearance.
He would be asked about his past and of what exactly happened to the town but could only remember things like “images reflected in the broken fragments of a shattered mirror.” It would be these images, moving in and out of context, that would be the center of the movie. The audience would be led in an almost stream of consciousness manner through this hall of broken mirrors always asking themselves what was or wasn’t real and just who exactly was this mysterious Patient X. Clearly he is someone in the story but strangely he seems to have omniscient knowledge about them all.
[Here, Brian decides to expand up some of the answers he gave earlier]
First, everyone wanted me to abandon this project the moment I announced it. The scale was too large, the risk too high. It broke every commandment of what a smart indie film was supposed to follow. It had tons of locations, huge roles for at least 30 actors including children. What was that famous show biz advice? Never make a film with children or animals? Well, at least there were no animals. In its place, I had scenes on water.
I remember how, even you, warned Boggi that this was likely to be some kind of folly and that it was dangerous to follow me into the dead-end of ambitions way too large. My problem then and now is that I had been going at this since age 7 and made so many films both in reality and in my head that I felt so far advanced over the CLERKS/SLACKER model of indie film. Not to mention those types of films were not the kind of films I grew up admiring or wanting to make. I wanted to make CINEMA-I wanted big images, huge set pieces, dazzling storytelling on an epic scale. I wanted to be Orson Welles, Michael Powell, Stanley Kubrick, and Roman Polanski all at once and my ego was large enough that I felt as though that I fit in right with them.
You were right about the timing too-I did start writing this following the end of production on High Road to Hell. At first, it was going to be a more John Carpenter/Lovecraft type of film, shot again on Super 8mm film called Servant of the Darkest Night. But with the changes that came with digital filmmaking, the more modest drive-in movie was allowed to grow and grow. Eventually, it became a BBC mini-series in size.
Over the many years of production, I had to keep the overall picture and goal in mind. I watched as may of my friends and colleagues went on with their lives and settled into them nicely all while I still tolled on this absurd dream. I watched as indie film just kept changing and watched the environment of the Sundance pickup just disappear. No longer were these small films being picked up for major release by companies like Miramax or Artisan for a nice million dollar sale. Most of the ones that did failed and soon those companies either vanished or were swallowed up by the major studios. Sundance became the place where movie stars could make their own “serious” indie movie and show their dramatic chops, not where the next Richard Linklater or Quentin Tarantino might emerge. The market for films like “Deadwood Falls” simply dried up. Add to this the death of the DVD market and all you have left is self-distribution and streaming. The idea of making a living let alone a fortune at filmmaking seemed to be impossible. To this day, no one knows how to really sell a film like this one let alone spend a large part of their lives making it.
I look back on this with no regret though. I could’ve made ten movies in the time it’s taken to do this one but this is the one I wanted to make. I find it hard to fall in love with a new project. Over the years and between phases of shooting I have tried to get other films made. But at that time, no other project could hold my interest as much as this one. There was something enigmatic and powerful about this movie that held me in its grip.
What advice would you give to artists just starting now?
First, ignore that bad advice everyone gives about just going out to shoot. That’s fine to do but without some understanding of craft that is really just nonsense. It’s like telling a carpenter to just go out and build a house without knowing anything about home construction. Study your art form. Understand the history of what came before you so you can build on top of that and innovate. This means go to Netflix and watch some Hitchcock, some Hawks, some Godard, some Kurosawa, and Kubrick. Study the way Polanski uses lenses. Read. Understand storytelling. Most of what matters comes down to the screenplay. Many famous filmmakers basically just pointed a camera at the action without much style. But the content was what mattered.
What do you know now that you didn’t know when you started?
That control is an illusion. That you actually begin to have more control the moment you give up trying to wield it. I’ve learned to accept a nice dance between organization and chaos.
What would you do differently if you were starting today?
Make more films, simpler ones, while waiting to finish the big complex one.
Who was the one person who gave you the biggest leg up?
My parents have always been my biggest supporters and without them, I would never have been able to do any of this—financially and emotionally it would’ve been nearly impossible. But really everyone around me, from my wife to all of my friends from years past, has always been so encouraging to me. I always felt that they had some kind of faith in me which was nice to know when things weren’t going so well.
