An interview with Molotov Mitchell, director of “WASTERS”

There’s a band called Waterdeep that once wrote, “Tell me a story that’ll make me feel, Something far flung but something real. Something that’s human but not depraved. Somebody endangered, but somebody still saved.” Those are the guidelines for me. And that’s a great description of movies from the eighties. I’m a huge fan of the eighties, because that was a brighter and simpler time. Kids were king, we had great heroes. Ronald Reagan, Mr. T and Hulk Hogan. Saturday morning cartoons. And we had a very clear enemy in Communist Russia. And the movies were near-mythic in their imagination and inspiration. Rocky 4, the Goonies, Mad Max. Those films boiled things down to the basics, in a way. Especially Mad Max. I love postapocalyptic stories. When things are really simplified, it makes us ask if we would make it in that situation, you know? So putting the two together felt natural. That’s probably why Mad Max took off in the eighties. So our stab at the postapocalyptic, WASTERS, aims to boil things down even further. It’s almost exclusively hand to hand combat because bullets are scarce in the Redlands. I like how one reviewer described it: “Chuck Norris meets Mad Max.” There’s just not a lot of shooting. There’s even less talking. WASTERS only has seven spoken words in it! I just want viewers to feel like they’re on a really fun roller coaster, so it’s pure action for 15 minutes straight. I’d like to believe it’s deceptively simple, but obviously, they can be the judge!

I already own Triangle Krav Maga, a combat training center in North Carolina, so we have an amazing pool of talent that we rolled into a film program called Fight Dub. With Fight Dub, participating Kravists learn how to fight for the camera. For WASTERS, we had Fight Dub weekend camps to get everyone ready for principal shooting. I play one of the two main characters (Cole) and the other’s played by my wife (Sawyer). It’s difficult training with your spouse, at least for me, because I’m pretty demanding when it comes to Krav. And my wife’s actually a doctor with crazy hours, so that made things complicated. But she managed to hunker down, put up with me and she absolutely killed it. They all did! In fact, just yesterday, Greer won Best Lead Actress at the American Golden Picture Awards, so woo-hoo! Way to go, babe!

Ah, yes. I knew from the beginning that the postproduction was gonna be a lot of work. I don’t know if you’re aware, but with the exception of drone shots, we shot the whole thing on an iPhone 8. You’d never guess that from watching the final product, but that’s because I had to go hard on the post. In addition to the eighties intro and eighties cars, I wanted the film to have that late seventies to eighties grindhouse fun vibe. I folded the footage on top of itself over and over with old LUT’s, a dash of film damage, threw in some cheesy happy ending stuff, straight cuts, fade outs. Very eighties. There’s even an intermission (laughs)! But also, once Cole and Sawyer (the protagonists) have been through a lot, the damage they’ve suffered starts to affect the footage itself. Once they leave Bill’s Shop, the cabin, they start experiencing “warping” effects, where time pauses as the screen blurs and stretches. It’s meant to communicate time dilation, which is what occasionally occurs when you experience extreme duress. And that’s meant to make viewers sympathize with the heroes more deeply. They feel woozy, too. But they’re also drawn in by the soundtrack, which was a whole other planet of work. Each scene has a song with a specific vibe and sometimes even specific lyrics to describe what’s happening and where we’re at in the Redlands. Choosing the right music…well, we started with over a hundred really great songs, so it was a big challenge. I think we made good choices. In the end, I hope that the final cut helps viewers glide through a world that’s got nostalgia, scares and fun all at the same time.

That’s an interesting question, because I have more of a problem with brutality than violence. I tell my Krav students, “Good people speak a language of love and respect for one another. Unfortunately, others choose to speak a language of Violence. Therefore, we must learn to speak Violence as a second language, so that when they talk to us in that way, we can make our points with vim and verve.” I value violence when it’s used to protect good people. As I alluded to with the Waterdeep lyrics, our story’s not depraved. Somebody’s in danger but somebody’s still saved. The violence is powerful but it’s never dwelt upon. Our protagonists are doing what’s necessary to survive. One reviewer wrote that WASTERS had “more murders than a serial killer with a permanent pardon.” I think that’s a really funny line, but technically they aren’t murders. They’re justified, self-defense killings. The techniques are savage, they’re also entirely necessary! If our heroes just stood there stomping bad guys over and over, well that would be depraved, and I think that those films are hurting viewers. Torture porn dehumanizes people and inspires some dark thinking, and there’s plenty of data out there to support that. That’s not us. Our heroes are in danger but somebody’s still saved, but the only way to do that is to bash, break and bang their way through a horde of murderous commies, you know?