Producer John Charles Meyer sits down with The Pulse to talk about how an adventurous film came to life
As always, the Chattanooga Film Festival is kicking off this weekend with a truly exceptional film, Dave Made a Maze, which is sure to set the tone for the entire event (the director says he aimed for “the four Gs: Goonies, Gondry, Gilliam, and Ghostbusters”).
It combines the all the elements of the festival that make the CFF the best single event in the south: inventiveness, humor, character, and style. Last week, I caught up with John Charles Meyer, producer for Dave Made a Maze, who gave some unique insight into the project itself.
The Pulse: Dave Made a Maze is a fascinating idea. How did it come about?
John Charles Meyer: One day in 2011, Bill Watterson told his friend Steven Sears a story from his childhood: Bill had built what he considered to be a truly epic pillow-and-sheet fort in his bedroom.
Before heading over to a friend’s house for dinner, Bill left a note for his mother, telling her that he was at his friend’s house and that she was not to touch his epic fort. Mom came home, missed the note, panicked when she couldn’t find Bill, and tore the fort apart looking for him.
Three days after hearing Bill’s story, Steve handed over a 60-page script that eventually became Dave Made a Maze. Bill co-wrote it from there, and went on to direct it.
TP: What was it about the project that drew you to it?
JCM: It was ridiculous. I’d never heard of anything quite like it. And the idea alone made me laugh…my first creative project in LA was editing, co-producing, and appearing in a series of short films that Bill wrote and directed.
We have very different tastes in almost everything, we frequently disagree, and we have diametrically opposed skill sets, but we’ve learned to trust that we’re both aiming for the same finish line. So far, it has worked pretty well.
TP: Obviously, the film has a very complex, visual style. What are some of the influences behind the distinctive look?
JCM: Bill had a very specific vision for a lot of the elements he wanted executed, but honestly neither of us had much of a clue as to how we would pull them off. Thankfully, starting with co-production designer Trisha Gum (whose primary gig in the previous few years had been at the stop-motion animation studio behind Robot Chicken), we slowly built a team of talented artists with specific areas of expertise, and excitement about the project snowballed.
People were drawn in from the worlds of traditional animation, animatronics, puppetry, and even the Cardboard Institute of Technology (the existence of which was news to us).
Every new artist brought fresh ideas and a different perspective on how our movie’s world might appear. Giant credit must also be given to art director Jeff White, and Trisha’s production design partner John Sumner, without whom this film would not be what it is today.
TP: From a technical standpoint, what were some particular challenges that came about as the style was translated from storyboard to screen? What was the hardest thing to get right?
JCM: The biggest challenge during production was keeping the art department ahead of the camera team. We were constructing (and even designing) set pieces every single day of filming, and most sets were assembled mere minutes before they were lit and shot.
Very few sets existed for more than 24 hours. This was partly due to the limited space we had in the warehouse where we shot the film, but also a result of too few funds and too few hands.
Cutting and shaping and gluing 30,000 square feet of cardboard into 26 unique movie sets is a gargantuan undertaking, and we were eternally threading the needle with time management.
We only had access to our warehouse for twenty 12-hour days, so all teams were working at the same time. As soon as the First AD yelled “cut” on a scene, all manner of hammers and saws and staple guns came to life on the other side of the room. Probably the single most-complicated visual was the final thing we filmed, on a single day of filming more than 18 months after principal photography.
The movie’s climactic scene involves, among other things, a working zoetrope. Constructing and painting 16 nearly-identical figurines, attaching them to a round motorized platform, and timing the entire mechanism against the shutter speed of a motion picture camera was probably our biggest technical challenge.
TP: Did the original idea evolve or did the film turn out exactly as expected?
JCM: Absolutely. Steve and Bill put words on paper, and those became the images we all dreamed of. But does the movie look like what we expected?
Not in the least. Our art department went so far above and beyond our expectations, in virtually every scene, and the finished sets wowed us over and over. Suffice it to say that Bill and I had no idea what was really possible from our team when we started this film.
Dave Made a Maze premieres this Thursday at 7:30 p.m. at the Majestic Theater to kick off the Chattanooga Film Festival.