So you’ve been doing the podcast for four years now, right?
“We just, actually this week, had our four year anniversary, so we are just now heading into the fourth year of this thing.”
How did you get started in the whole podcast world?
“I think it goes back really, really far as that weird teenager who was watching ‘Pump Up the Volume’ and wanted to have his own radio show… It’s funny how technology has caught up with us and now you can actually have your own audio show and essentially it’s the exact same thing, and it goes out to whoever, and FCC’s not fighting you, so far... As of now you can kind of do whatever you want. So I didn’t really go into the radio end of it, I just sort of had that seed planted. And then I did start doing a lot of interviews; I started doing print interviews with actors - I was doing general people: sometimes musicians, sometimes writers, or a lot of visual artists, but I kept getting drawn more and more towards the movie stuff because I’m such a big movie geek. So as [print stuff] became harder and harder to do, and because I hate transcribing, I’m like, ‘I’m already sitting here with all this audio recording, why don’t I find a way to use that anyway?’ So I sort of took it upon myself to figure out the audio end of it. It’s amazing going from not really knowing anything to being able to produce the show every week and now striving to get good sound everywhere I go, which is an uphill battle… I was bored listening to the same music I have on the iPod and thought, there’s gotta be something else, and I found one [movie podcast] and actually, the first one I listened to, I hated. And I think that’s what kicked in; in the middle of me not liking this show because it was just badly done and badly put together and they weren’t saying anything interesting, I was just like, ‘I can do better than this.’ And that kicked in: if you can do this, then maybe I need to do something like this. So all of those things came together, wanting to continue doing interviews with actors or directors, so I started shifting it more towards the movies and put together the other group discussion thing which I’ve been toying with doing for years.”
As far as the actual discussion goes, do you do much editing of that, or just keep it all in?
“Well, not much anymore. Usually it’s just tightening up spots, like if we’re sitting there for a minute figuring out what to do next - nobody wants to hear that... But in the middle of the discussion, not too much really. I’ve realized it’s almost impossible sometimes because once you get into something and you take something out of the middle, it doesn’t make sense over here anymore... Whatever we’re rambling on about, that’s the ride, and once you get on-board for the show, you go on with it. Who knows what we’re gonna say next, but sometimes it pays off and we have a really great conversation, so I kinda just like to let them go. Same thing with the set up; I’ll sort of have my intro and have a framework of where we’re going by the end of the show, but the rest of it I’m just like, “OK guys, go to town.” None of it is scripted; none of it is planned ahead as far as what we say.”
[Talking further about the structure of the show, Bryan discusses an occasional segment called The Grind.]
“We have somebody come up with a question or general topic to address, and then it’s just a free form, ‘Ok, what do you think of this?’ Those are pretty interesting. The last one we did, we addressed the closing of video stores and there was a lot that came out of that, talking about us being nostalgic and remembering as kids wandering around [the stores]... We tried to pull in a good angle on that and looked at the technology now that is a big boost for filmmakers, but then what happens to the film market when you flood them with all this new stuff. There’s a lot of aspects that come out of those general topics, so I kind of like when we do those episodes.”
How do you go about snagging actors and directors for your show?
“Luck. [Laughs] Luck and determination.”
I’m currently on season seven of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, so I got excited to see you got Emma Caulfield on the show recently.
“She’s amazing. Yeah, listen to that episode, she is so much fun. I’d sort of seen a little bit of her ahead of time and heard she was kind of a geek.”
Well, she was on Buffy, so…
“Well, yeah, but not necessarily. Sometimes actors are just actors and then you talk to them, and you’re like, ‘oh… they weren’t really cool at all.’ It’s sort of a letdown sometimes. So, from what I’d seen of her she seemed really cool and seemed like she had her own geeky interests so we had that battery of questions I ask our own people when we’re doing our little bio thing... The first half of the show was just her rattling off these answers to ridiculous questions like, ‘what’s the coolest spaceship?’ and ‘who’s your favorite director who’s dead?,’ stuff like that. That one she wasn’t actually physically near, I was just trying to get a hold of her via the internet.”
So they’re not all necessarily here in Louisville.
“Usually they are. I’m not really big on phone interviews; I really don’t like Skype at all... If I can, I really like that dynamic of sitting there with the person… I think you get a very different vibe from sitting there and talking with people in an actual room, so as often as I can I try to actually sit down with them and do it… I don’t think [Emma Caulfield’s] even been in this area. The closest I’ve seen her is Chicago at one of the Comic Cons, but I don’t think she’s been around here, so I figure if we can do it one way or the other I’ll do it via the phone version.”
