Killer Film recently got to talk with director Monty Miranda about his film Skills Like This, that recently came out on DVD from New Video. The film was a festival hit, as it told the story of some shiftless friends get a huge wake up call, when one of their buddies, Max (played by the screenwriter Spencer Berger), decides to rob a bank. After he successful does, he learns that maybe stealing is his only good trait. The film was a festival hit amongst moviegoers, who enjoyed the humor, as well as, the well-written characters.

Here’s our interview with Monty.

Jon: Skills Like This is your first feature. How did you come across Spencer Berger’s script, and how did the film get started?

Monty Miranda: I had been directing TV commercials since I got out of film school. The first producers I contacted right out of film school was Donna Dewey, and she was working with Paul Arron on another project, and they both knew my work from TV commercials. We had talked about doing a film together, and while they were working on a film at the time, Paul Aaron, who produced Skills also managed Spencer Berger. They sent me his screenplay, and it was one of the first time that I laughed out loud while reading one!

I was in Denver at that time and we flew out to LA and met Spencer, as well as Gab (Dave) and Brian (Tommy), and saw them perform at a sketch comedy performance in Hollywood, and Spencer and I hit it off. From there, we did a table read of the screenplay, and although it was really funny, we all collectively agreed that it needed some tightening in the story department. So Spencer and I worked on it for three hours a night for about a year, rewriting it, adding certain developments, changing, adding characters, and whatnot. About that time, someone suggested we shoot a screen test with the actors we wanted to cast. I thought it was a good idea, while I’ve been directing my entire career, I never done a feature before.

I thought this might not get people excited, this screen test, so I said let’s shoot this as a movie trailer, to show people what it will be like.  We shot that in three days, all the while we worked on the screenplay. At the end of the summer, we had this trailer and a screenplay we all were pretty happy with. Donna [Dewey] went around trying to get money raised, and she did that in about a month. That’s sort of the whole story of how it began.

Jon: When was it decided Spencer would play the lead, Max?

Monty: He wrote it and always wanted to play the lead character. In the process of seeing his sketch comedy being performed and getting to know Spencer, he fit the bill really well.

Jon: Now, Spencer has some outrageous hair in the movie, and as seen on the poster and DVD cover art. Did he grow that for the film, or is that just who he is in real life?

Monty: No, that’s not who he is in real life. (laughs) The hair is a bit of a character in the film, but when we were writing, Spencer had never been to Denver before, and as you know we shot it there. We brought him out so he could learn the city, since I felt the film was a Denver movie, although it was original set in Queens or Brooklyn. When we were brainstorming between LA and Denver, his hair just out grew itself. We needed a disguise that he could get away with, and that’s when I said: “Dude, maybe you should just let your hair grow?”

With a knit skull cap on, he looked like a normal person. That hair is so outrageous. “People see you in this cap,” I told him, “and then see you without it, they won’t make the connection.” So that’s how that got going, and about that time I decided to have him rob the bank with the gun to his head. In the first draft, he was waving the gun at people, and not threatening them…well, if you have a gun waving at people, you are threatening them, but it might be an engaging way for the audience to not get disconnected with the character so early on.

He was so happy to get rid of the hair! Spencer likes to talk about how when he had the hair, he was the center of attention where ever he went. It drove him up the wall! The hair was more complicated to shoot then we thought. It’s hard to hide that hair, and some people thought we should use a ‘fro wig. I’ve seen $50 million dollar movies, where they looked fake, imagine our small movie? We shot a lot of it in order to well, I don’t want to give spoilers away…you know what I’m talking about.

Jon: Yeah, yeah. The cast had great chemistry, very natural, and to me, that’s why the film works. But besides the script, what else was done to build such good chemistry?

Monty: Spencer and Gab went to college together, so they were friends. Brian met them later on, around the same time I did. When we made this commitment to get this film made, they all became friends and started to connect. They would come to Denver and we would test shoot on a mini-DV camera, and they started hanging out together. They lived together, and I do believe they have really god chemistry together, and that was something that I could really relate too. Even though the characters are a bit outlandish, I had friends like that at school, you know? That was the goal; to capture that comradely. You always have that friend that is outspoken, but harmless, and sometimes gets you into trouble like the Tommy character. Then spent some quality time over the year before our 17 day shoot.

Jon: Skills Like This has a good soundtrack. If I’m not mistaken, the music is from Denver bands. How did you, [Music Editor] Andy Monley, and [Music Supervisor] Shawn Amos, find this music, and what did it bring to your film?

Monty:Well, I’m sort of a music fanatic, and I love music just as much as film making. It’s really important to me, and for this particular movie, I wanted to hear the music of the characters, instead of a traditional score. So, a lot of those bands, I had worked with before in the commercial industry, and with my commercials I try to bring some new music into it, instead of buying a needle-drop piece of music. Or license a really huge track. A lot of those guys I personally knew, and for some of the bigger bands like the Wedding Present and New Order, I have been a big fan of since high school, and they were really generous to give us the license for really cheap, since we had a shoestring budget.

So, Shawn Amos was license everything and pushed me to find more music cues, since I originally had bigger tracks to use. He, in the initial cut, really responded to some of the unknown bands I discovered and wanted me to find more like that. We had a few bigger names, but it wasn’t a lot, so he was really instrumental to me for finding some unknown acts that helped the movie.

Andy, who I had worked with for years, wrote some songs, and I listened to his stuff when I was doing TV commercials way back when, so we been friends for a while.

Jon: Like you said, the film was shot in Colorado. Was there any advantages for you and the crew shooting there?

Monty: You know, for my first film, it felt comfortable, like shooting in your back yard. When you take on a 17 day shooting schedule, with the budget I had for some of my commercials, I felt like the added advantages were I knew where we could shoot extensively, I knew where we could live and breathe in an area, without us learning a new territory. Also, the story felt like a character in the movie, and I wanted to share the city. Denver has a cool music scene.

Denver is a pretty good size city, but while it can feel like a big city, it can also feel like a small town. Those are things I appreciated about Denver, that I thought fit nicely in the story. That some of the advantages, to me. There was some resistance at first, since we could have shot it cheaper in Canada or in New Mexico, but we felt that it would work best shooting in Denver.

Jon: Denver, feels like my city of Omaha, but has Skills Like This opened up anything in the film culture there as a city or state?

Monty: Denver has a tiny film incentive to shoot there, and the film shot a tiny spotlight briefly on it. I know they use to shoot bigger films there. When I was in film school, I use to intern on some TV movies-of-the-week, and they shoot a lot of commercials there. Lately, a lot of that left onto places where they offer really big tax incentives like Louisiana, New Mexico, Michigan, and Canada, of course. It still needs an incentive program to get more production there. Skills was the first film to get a theatrical release that came out of Colorado.

Jon: What does winning a film festival award like SXSW Audience Award mean to an independent film like Skills Like This?

Monty: I think it puts a spotlight on the film and gets people to notice it. When we won that award, we were immediately contacted by a lot of distributors. We thought the film would get picked up immediately, so we were pretty confident. But with the economy, a lot of independent films got hurt, even though the big studio stuff has done good at the box office. A lot of distributors who were interested at the time, actually went under. We were really fortunate that ours was doing great, because we could be sitting on a shelf somewhere. That’s a scary sort of a position. I think when you win an award like that, you get invites from other festivals, you get some coverage, and it’s just one of those things that really, really helps an independent film. Especially, one with no name actors and doesn’t have much of a budget or marketing.

Jon: You touched upon my next question with that answer, but IMDB said the film was completed in 2007. When did New Video get involved and why did it take a few years to come to disc?

Monty: After we won SXSW, and with the advice of our sales rep, they felt we shouldn’t do a lot of festivals after we won that SXSW award, so we just sat back. August came around and they felt we should release the film at Edinburgh Film Fest in Scotland and I think it’s one of the world’s oldest film festivals, so we got in and had a wonderful time there. At that point, as a film maker I just wanted my film to be seen, and since we did good at SXSW and Edinburgh, this company Shadow Distribution came in. Once they got involved, about 10 months after SXSW, Shadow wanted to wait to Spring ‘09 to release it. They felt they knew how to release the film, since they been in business a long time, better than we did.

Then they made a deal with New Video, who originally wanted to release it on DVD in September 2009, but we were still playing in a handful of theaters, so we waited until now [November] for the DVD and iTunes release.

Jon: What’s next for yourself, now?

Monty: Spencer and I are writing another project we’re pretty excited about. I developing some TV shows and reading some scripts, as I continue to direct some commercials.

Jon: Well, thanks again for taking some time to talk to us at Killer Film about this neat little film.

Monty: Great, of course! I’m glad you enjoyed it.

If you seen the film, or been to one of the festivals it played at, or if you have anything else to add, feel free to leave a comment below oe send me an email at jon@killerfilm.com

Tags: Monty Miranda, Skills Like This, Spencer Berger, SXSW