A Conversation with Matt Grue

Red Deer will be hosting the premier of the feature film "Year after Year", an original musical directed by Dustin Clark and written and produced by Matt Grue. The story of "Year after Year" dates back four years ago when Matt invited some friends over to his house to have a pow wow and talk about certain things that would be influential as a blueprint for an original stage musical.

Once the play was produced on stage, Matt, who was slightly unhappy with the finished product decided to collaborate with Dustin on a filmed version of "Year after Year" which would allow them to do things with the story the theatrical production couldn't.

I've known Matt for a number of years first meeting him in theatre school and then taking the motion picture arts program with him. We were actually roommates for a couple of years in the same house that Matt had his pow wow that started the story of "Year after Year". I asked him to talk to me about his experiences with the film.


J: Now that you’re doing the premier of the movie, how are you feeling about your whole experience up to this point.

M: Ummm, wow that seems like such a loaded question. But it’s Good, I think one of the coolest thing that’s happened has been my renewal in my love of movies. I think it had gone away because I had been so theatre focused for so long., and because also we were adapting a stage musical. It wasn’t until we got into post (production) and in the editing that I started getting really invested in what film was again. I learned a lot as a writer, and as a filmmaker, I learned things that I had either forgotten about or ignored or whatever about filmmaking. I started pulling out movies I hadn’t seen in a million years, or pulling out classic films or criterion films and I had started watching movies with an old perspective that is back now for me.

I think ("Year after Year")is the movie we set out to make, and the story we wanted to tell is the story that we’re telling. It’s weird being in this time frame where we’re about to show it to people. The way I describe it is the movie is fresh out of the factory but it still needs that new paint job and the new car smell that will be added after the premier which isn’t to say it’s not finished. We still get one polish before it’s totally out of our hands but it’s scary, right now it’s still ours but that isn’t for much longer, then it will be out there and we have to accept it for what it is. It’s a lot of jumbled emotions combined with exhaustion but generally I feel really good about it.

J: So what made you want to make this movie in the first place?

M: It’s weird because that’s evolved for me a lot. I felt that at the beginning, the stage production felt incomplete for me. I knew that basically in the first run of the show that it didn’t’ work for some reason, and every night I sat in the back and was thinking “how the fuck do you fix this?” I tried tweaking scenes and rewrites but it still wasn’t solving this issue what I couldn’t identify. Then Don (Don Armstrong the film's cinematographer) said “you know this would make a great film”, that in hit me, that was the problem.

When we wrote it we decided that we were making a musical where the songs served as subtext not as plot advancement, and on stage they would sing the songs but nothing happens. On film we can go inside their heads and see what the characters are thinking and what’s provoking each song that happens in the story. Instead of doing a super expensive stage production where we could fly in sets and have big choruses it seemed that film was a way to do this. So what made me want to do it initially was a sense of closure on this story that I was so personally invested in. I also felt this responsibility to my friends a little bit to tell our story even though if you really thing about it, it seems so trivial but somehow it really resonates with people, especially those around our age. I think it’s an important story to tell, and it’s grown from there but those were the main reasons we went for it in the the beginning.

J: So you’ve been working on this story for four years.

M: Yes

J: Do you feel it’s gotten to that place where you can let it go. Is there a part of you that wishes you can tinker with it a little bit longer?

M: Dustin would answer this completely differently but I’m happy with what it is. To me the story represents a moment in time, a moment in my life where the story really resonated with me. I was asking the same questions that the film is asking and still am to some extent. In the beginning it was cathartic, I was working through my own shit in this weird universe of musical theatre which seemed like a bizarre place to work through those kinds of emotions and questions. But I think for what the film is and what the film is meant to be, I think we achieved it. As a filmmaker, I think there are always stuff that you go back to and think “Oh I wish we did this differently”. As a writer there are a lot of moments I wish I had written differently but I just didn’t have the experience to know any better. There’s always going to be things you wanna change, especially after making your first feature with a micro budget. Technically I wish we could’ve afforded the big post production facilities to get a crazy sound mix or the most intricate color done to it. We worked within our means but we fought above our weight class a lot and won. But to me it represents a moment in time and I’m content to put it out there and let it exist for what it is. Personally I hope to grow from it artistically and I hope somebody out there sees it who has the same questions and thinks “That makes sense to me, even though they’re singing right now.” I think Dustin would answer in the exact opposite. I think he’ll want to refine it until the day he dies. But I think he will get there, once he sees an audience see it and respond to it, I think he will begin the “letting go” process.

J: What was Dustin like as a director from what you observed?

M: I was on set everyday so I got to watch him and use it as an opportunity to learn. Dustin is one of those guys where…I don’t know if it was different for you, but for me growing up it seemed like only rich families had video cameras. And I don’t think of there being this huge age gap between me and Dustin, but there is because he had a video camera as a toy when he was a kid. For me it was if you had one it would be on the top shelf of your parent’s closet and you weren’t aloud anywhere near it. So Dustin’s been making movies since he was a kid where I have been sort of appreciating it and learning it more from a distance.

What amazes me about Dustin is I think he lives in a film world; he talks in real life in film terms. When he talks through a scene he’s like “we’re gonna cut to this, then the camera will move, and we’re gonna cut to this, and then the music will swell, but not swell too much.” He’s always seven steps ahead of himself, you realize very quickly that the best approach is just to trust him. He seems very scattered and all over the place and very intense and you’re like “I wonder what’s going to happen here”. Then you see the thing cut together and you see that he knew exactly what he was doing all along and it’s really brilliant. He trusted his instincts and I had to learn to trust his instincts, and at the end of the day it’s his language and he knows how to communicate stories that way so the best policy is to give him a lot of space so he doesn’t feel creatively boxed in.

Because he speaks that language, he can adapt at a moment’s notice. He can adapt on the fly all the time, and that’s by far his greatest strength , adapt on the fly and how to take something that everyone else might give up on even a tiny moment that someone might say “it doesn’t matter, it’s not significant, we’ll do the next moment better and make this one suffer”. He never lets any of that happen, every moment is so crucial to him. Until he gets the take he wants, he won’t move on, and sometimes we were good at two takes, and sometimes we were good at twenty takes, but he was not afraid to push it until he got what he wanted.

It instills a lot of confidence knowing you have someone with a vision and will more likely than not execute it. He’s just brilliant and experimental and knowing ("Year after Year") is his first crack at it is humbling. For me I’m like “Oh God I’ll never get there.” I’ve said this to him and he’s all humble and weird about it, and I don’t say this about a lot of people but I legitimately think that he’s an actual genius. He really gets it, he understands how the camera should move, he understand how lighting works. The only thing I compare it to and it’s not even that great of comparison is the way I sort of see theatre. I know how long a lighting cue should be and when it should happen and how to maximize it and with film he can do that but in a broader scope. He’s just brilliant.

J: I wanna talk a little bit about your role as a producer. What did that mean to you?

M: For me it’s different than what it probably is for a lot of people. Everyone had to wear a lot of different hats for this film and we just labeled them as something. The process at the very beginning was primarily as a writer but also as a producer as we were writing it. I was there as a creatve influence but also as a pragmatic influence to say “let’s watch how we’re doing this, and let’s work within our means."

My process was I made three budgets: an ideal budget if money wasn’t an object, a realistic budget like what is realistic number we think we could achieve in a best case scenario, and then a worst case scenario. I established each of those budgets then Dustin and I talked a great length what those meant. If we go for money, there would be a good chance they would bump Dustin as a director, they’re gonna wanna hack up the script pretty significantly and probably not involve me in that, and probably they would buy material and hire other people to make it into more of a compact 90 minute sellable movie. We looked at another budget where we could comfortably pay everyone and give ourselves enough time to really do a good job but it was still in the mid to high six figures. Then we had to ask ourselves, “Could we really raise that much money”? The worst case budget is basically that middle budget without paying anybody, which cuts it down significantly but which would mean everybody would be working for a percentage of what the film is worth. We went back and forth between those two we involved a lot of people along the way as an Executive Producer type role. WE thought maybe we would go for a big investment push where we would literally get people to invest in the movie and treat it as primarily a commercial venture, but we realized that was still going to put boundaries that we weren’t interested in. We didn’t think it was realistic and it might put the movie on the shelf for years while we tried to put that kind of money together. We also knew that once people invested their money that we would have obligations to them, so we talked more and we realized that what we want for this movie in this time in our lives is to make the movie that we want to make, and we wanna make it with people who share that same vision. We weren’t gonna get paid, we believed in the story, so we sought those kind of people to work on the film very intentionally.

The next thing I did was organize multiple fundraising avenues (special events, 24 hour short film competitions, silent auction) When all was said and done we raised roughly $7000 which was a lot for us at the time cause we finally had money to spend for the film. We had a successful Indiegogo campaign where we raised more than our goal. Our silent auction was moderately successful, but moore importantly a lot of people privately gave money to us after the fact. Then we had backers basically with the Matchbox foundation which was still behind it and two other Exectutive Producers Maureen and Wayne Gerry. They put up money at the time and resources no questions asked, so we didn’t have to give up anything. Raising the budget was the next step, and then came casting the film, which I was very much involved with, then scheduling the movie, then just managing the whole team basically. When we were shooting, I’d be off on the side working on the next day. Once we hit post it’s sort of like doing all the stuff I’m doing now like managing the media, setting up the premier, trying to get us into theatres just so we can see the movie. We hope to play in three of four theatres in the next two or three months for a week or two at a time so we can sit in the back row and see how the movie plays. It won’t hit the festival circuit until the new year so it gives us the opportunity to make some final tweaks until we leave it alone.

Now I manage the sale of the film and what the distribution strategy will be and trying to make everybody happy and cutting royalty cheques hopefully. That’s the thing, as long as this movie exists I will always be working on it. If it’s on amazon, it will always be on amazon, and even if it sells one DVD a year, that means I have to write a seven cent royalty cheques to everybody. It’s now a a permanent part of my life now. I think that’s what I do.

J: So we kinda touched a little on your writing. You wrote the original musical, did you co-write the film with Dustin?

M: I wrote the screenplay, then Dustin went and filled in the filmic blanks.

J: Do you find writing easy?

M: No not at all. It always feels like it before I start. I’m always like “This is the one”. Then you get into it and you realize you really write yourself into corners or you start going down a path cause it feels really good and then you realize that you got too far away from your actual plan and you realize this is a totally different movie now. I find it incredibly challenging because not only do I want to write a really great story but I know it’s a blueprint for everybody else to work off of. “Year after Year” was particularly challenging for me because you have to write a movie like that with such broad strokes. You have to realize that you’re trying to set up songs so a lot of your scenes are intros and outros of songs so you’re really limited as to what you can do when you want to put in your own flavor or you want some exposition so you can get some dialogue in there cause that’s what I want. As a writer I want “talk and say my words more”, but you’re really serving a purpose and that’s what I really learned with this project in particular.

It’s better to underwrite than to overwrite, typically speaking for something like this, but also don’t be afraid to make it “you”. The times I get most jacked up to write is during an episode of “The West Wing” or “The Newsroom” and I hear that Sorkin dialogue, then I wanna a write and I write and I stop and think “I suck compared to this guy”. So I’ve had to learn to not write trying to be somebody else and try to embrace who I am as a a writer. There are certain writers like John Hughes or Tarantino where you can identify their script because their voice is in it. And I learned that is what makes your movies awesome and it might mean that your audience goes from big to small but those are your movies and your stories. Just as an actor would say “it’s really hard to be yourself on stage”, it’s really hard to write yourself on a page and be honest. Lately I’ve been trying to write what makes me happy, what I think is interesting, what I think is a good time. Writing a musical is also challenging in that you have to support three other writers, you have to support the composer and the lyricists, because it’s a lot harder to write a song than to write a scene so I’d rather support them than the other way around.

J: What do you want people to come out of seeing Year after Year?

M: The reason I love the film personally is that it means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. I don’t think it’s a movie that has a singular focus or message. I think a lot of moments when they really sink in can mean a lot of different things. It’s got this universal quality that I know everybody says, but I really think it’s true for this. What I don’t want is people to go in and see the movie and just be impressed because we did it. I don’t want people to say “Hey it’s fuckin impressive that they made this for $25 000 in Red Deer.” I want them to enjoy the movie in some way. I don’t think it’s an Oscar contender, I think it’s one of those Netflix movies where you think “What the fuck is that” or a straight to DVD kind of a thing, but I still think there’s merit in the story . I hope the audience thinks about it afterwards, and people who are experiencing it think “Oh thank God I wasn’t alone in thinking all these things” . I want people to think “That’ was a good movie, and I don’t want my expectations to be any more than that. I just hope they have a good time with the movie, and they figure out what it means for them.

J: Do you have a favorite moment in the movie and just from making the movie?

M: This is me sort of dodging this questions but Joel’s performance on the whole. The character I latch onto the most is Joel’s character and when I go on that journey with him, I always feel that pain that he feels at the beginning when he’s struggling with questions like “Did I make a wrong decision some where” or how he’s afraid to commit to the woman he loves because he feels that being with her will make her some how less of a person or she won’t be able to reach the potential she could reach. Then getting to the point where he knows that he’s a little bit full of shit and admitting that he’s scared for the first time which I think comes out in anger for him. A moment that really means something to me is when he get’s into a big fight with his best friend on a roof, and his best friend finally calls him out on all of his shit. That idea that these problems aren’t unique to these subset of people,that they are again universal issues.

For shooting the movie it would be when we were shooting at Great Chief Park and it was the opening sequence to “Wedding Night” which is the “Grease” song. We’re on the bleachers and we have like a mile long track set up and we have the crane, and the camera, and the dolly, and the choreographer’s on set and they’re going through their dance moves, and it was a full crew day, everyone was there that day. And I remember just sitting back and you could just see the monitor and the crane sweeping down and the dolly sliding across and there’s people dancing with the music blaring and I was like “Holy fuck, we are making a musical right now. My dream is literally unfolding.”

J: So what’s next for you?

M: Dustin and I are batting around two different feature ideas, but we’re really trying to let this one go away before we get too heavily involved. But Dustin and I definitely want to work together again, we think that what we both bring to the table compliments each other. In the more immediate future, I started developing a television pilot that I’m gonna pitch at the Banff Television festival, so that’s just starting now. The idea’s there and the outline is sort of in place to put that all together. It sounds weird when you say TV and I think the stigma of it is still there for me. But TV is not what it was ten years ago, it is where real things are being done, so that idea gets me really excited. But I guess the biggest thing for me is transitioning out of theatre which is something I thought I’d never do. I remember in film school thinking “why am I in film school, film is stupid” but I think I’m going to continue with film. Another thing I really wanna do is produce, I think there are a lot of untold stories out there cause people are too afraid. They are still seeing film as this impossible dream and if Year after Year proves anything to those people it’s that you can go a long way with a little now a days . I would hate to see an amazing script collect dust because nobody had the balls to say “let’s go out and do this”.