![Derby City Film Festival spotlight: 'Overtime' [Movies]](/sites/default/files/u4217/overtime.jpg "Derby City Film Festival spotlight: 'Overtime' [Movies]")
“Overtime” is playing at the festival, but it’s already been shown around, right?
“It has only shown publicly once. We showed it at the Fright Night Film Festival. We actually went in and changed a couple things after that, after seeing the audience reaction; we used it as a bit of a test screening… We submitted it to other festivals later and got word back from which one’s it’s going to play, and we’ve been looking for distribution… We’ll probably hit a bunch of genre festivals in the next year or so and try to screen wherever we can, but our focus after this is trying to find distribution.”
Are there any plans for future features?
“I actually just finished production on a documentary that I shot in October. It’s called ‘Monsters Wanted.’ It’s about the haunted house industry. I followed a guy, he was a computer programmer making about $120,000 per year, saved up a bunch of money, quit his job, and sunk every penny he had into building a haunted house, which is twelve days in October to try to make that money back. I used that as the backbone for this documentary, and then from that branch off, go to conventions, go to other haunted houses. These are people who spend nine months out of the year working on haunted houses; I had no idea it was that much of a passion for them.”
Since your movie is about zombies, maybe you can tell me what’s up with the craze right now.
“I think they’re appealing just because they’re such a great metaphor for just about anything: military, consumerism, modern society. There’s the germ phobia that ’28 Days Later’ picked up on. They keep coming back because they’re so applicable to whatever’s going on in any situation.”
Do you use zombies as a metaphor?
“Oh, no, not in this one… We don’t actually use the word ‘zombie’ in ‘Overtime;’ we call them aliens. They’re zombie aliens, and the way it works is it’s an alien parasite; you get stung, and that puts the parasite inside you, and control of the body gets turned over to the alien parasite.”
What’s your favorite zombie movie?
“I love ‘Shaun of the Dead’… I love that they took a Romero world and put characters in it that have a different focus; they’re just funny people in this horrific world. I love that there are actually deaths in it, whereas something like ‘Zombieland’ is something where you feel safe the whole time…
“I guess I should say ‘Night of the Living Dead,’ but that would be a lie… I like the first ‘Dawn of the Dead’ a lot. I like the remake a lot, too…. I wanted to hate it… but then I watched it, and it’s a fun movie. It doesn’t have the social commentary of the first one, which I think is smart. If you’re going to remake it, don’t try to redo the social commentary.”
Do you have a least favorite zombie movie?
“There’s a movie that I saw called ‘Deadgirl.’ Everyone loved it… but, to me, it was just really bad acting – bad acting is one thing; there are some really low-budget movies with bad acting that I can get behind, but when you’re doing bad acting and you’ve got something really important to say, that can kind of kill it. It felt like they had some really heavy themes they were going for, and they didn’t quite pull it off.”
“Overtime” plays at 10:00 pm on Saturday, February 18th. The filmmakers will be in attendance for a Q&A following the film; they will also be participating in various panels. Full information on the Derby City Film Festival can be found at its website.
Image courtesy of the Internet Movie Database.
