Gut Instinct: from zero to the big screen
Filmmaker Doug Dillaman explains how he made a film inspired by a bout of food poisoning, and did it without spending any money.
When I think about the New Zealand film industry, my impression is that, for the most part, it’s populated by people who love film, who work hard, who can get things done quickly and efficiently and inexpensively, who have a strong work ethic, and who believe in what they are making, and support each other.
Its more a community, less an industry.
“I ran into a filmmaker that I really appreciate the other week, and there was an international producer, and I started raving to the producer about him, and she was like, ‘oh, you guys seem to all get along really well here’,” says American-born writer and filmmaker Doug Dillaman, the man behind the brand new zero budget film Gut Instinct, which is making its way into cinemas early next month. “And I was like ‘is that not how it is everywhere else?’”
Dillaman is no stranger to making films on a tight budget. He tells me that his wonderful debut film Jake, released in 2014, was made by calling in every favour he could; “there's a million dollars worth of favours wrapped up in this sub-$100k film,” he explains.
“We made Jake with a very conventional first film process and and what I took out of it is that I didn't like that process,” Dillaman explains. “I found it very hard. And, you know, you spend ages writing a script, and then you get there on the day, and you're just trying to make the best you can to film that script.
“And as an inexperienced director, I didn't have a lot of tools to feel like I could make changes in the fly,” he continues. “You're getting asked a lot of things. Everybody's working for free. Some people show up. Some people don't. Changes happen. You do what you can, and then you spend the next four years of your life trying to make this wounded bird fly.”
That experience changed the way Dillaman approached his next idea.
“I just want to do stuff that I like, and if people are into it, that's a bonus,” he says. “And film is very expensive because of the way that it's made, actors moving in space and performing physical actions and delivering lines is very popular.
“But it's not the only way to make a feature film.”
Dillaman’s brand new film Gut Instinct is, in short, crazy. According to the official description: ‘After the alien gut microbe invasion that brought about the collapse of civilisation and the death of 93% of humanity, life has been ... less than ideal. But no longer! Interself’s revolutionary Gut Instinct purification programme will free your mind - and your guts - forever!’
I’m hesitant to say any more than that: I saw the film last night and went in knowing only that description, a few bits and pieces from my interview with Dillaman, and having seen this trailer a few times:
And honestly, it was so much better that way; the thrust of Gut Instinct moves in a number of surprising directions, and is presented in a number of surprising ways. Its also surprisingly funny, though dark in equal measure.
So how did Doug Dillaman make this film?
“When I started this movie, even though I wasn't going to go through a conventional funding process, I put together a five page pitch document, almost as much just for practice as anything else, because I’d never done it before,” says Dillaman. “So I'm like, ‘let me put together a thing that I can then share with collaborators if they come on board or use to explain to people’.”
The challenge, then, is to give people a sense of what he is thinking.
“The movies I mentioned as reference were Tribulation 99, The Wild Blue Yonder, Beyond The Black Rainbow and Operation Avalanche,” he says. “Now, most people haven't heard of those movies, and a lot of people who have seen those movies really don't like them.”
Dillaman laughs. “You know, Tribulation 99 is like sub-sixty minute. It's found footage except it uses stuff from Hollywood films, but it sounds like some guy operating a CB radio at 3am delivering, you know, the Messianic prophecies and explaining the CIA involvement in the Bay of Pigs. And then suddenly he'll start talking about how the Wolf Man was involved too.”
(Side note: the only one of those four films that I’ve seen is Operation Avalanche, and I recall thoroughly enjoying it.)
In terms of the story, the narrative through-line of the film, Gut Instinct delves quite deeply into gut bacteria and microbes. But the event that inspired this somewhat esoteric storyline? Food poisoning from a chicken dish.
“So I took a chicken pot meal to work and forgot to put it in the fridge,” Dillaman explains. “And then I didn't want to waste $8 and I thought ‘what's the worst that could happen?’” He shoots me a knowing look at this point.
“This was November 2017, and when I was first telling this story, I'm like, ‘for some reason I was really depressed and drinking a lot of craft beer’. And then it was only after a couple times, I'm like, ‘Oh yeah, that was the year of President Trump Volume 1’, and, you know, everything was a bit apocalyptic and all that”
Dillaman continues the story. “At some point, about a day into [the food poisoning], I threw up what felt like a lining. And so after the dust settles on all of this, I felt great. I felt full of energy. I felt better than I had all year.
“I'm like, ‘what if there was something in my gut that whole time’. You know, some combination of yeast and whatever, just like making me depressed, making me groggy, making me behave in a certain way. Hence, the idea.”
The best ideas come from the strangest of places. Dillaman took this notion, that something in his gut was affecting his entire life, combined it with his own unique creativity, and started working on something utterly original.
“Some of the first things that I did were I printed out medical diagrams and painted them and shot them on light boxes,” he explains. “And even though [Gut Instinct] probably seems like quite a visually experimental and aggressive film, the early style treatments were probably twice as fast and twice as intense and just a barrage of fragmented images that you could barely perceive.”
After going down a number of online rabbit-holes - “as one reviewer noted, there's much more attention to the hydrology of Pennsylvania than you might expect in a film about alien gut microbes,” Dillaman says, laughing - he eventually realised that he needed to make the film more accessible for audiences by lingering on ideas and shots, and stretching out the length between cuts.
Dillaman’s experience as an editor was also key to the success of the film, as it became about from scouring footage and combining them with original shots he had filmed himself, including those early experimental shots.
“I don't know how anyone who wasn't an editor would make this film,” he says. “I was writing at the edit suite, so it is just an outgrowth of my daily process when I work as an editor. And I think it's a film that a lot of people would find next to impossible to make for that reason.”
“But also as I started downloading more and more stuff, and not having time to be watch another nine hours of films, I was more almost just doing needle drops,” Dillaman continues. “I mean, in some ways it's like a mixtape of just like, ‘ping, ping, oh, that sounds interesting, bring that in’.
“But, you know, maybe it was gut instinct too.”
GUT INSTINCT is in selected cinemas from December 5, and is currently on a whirlwind tour of the country with Q&As featuring Dillaman and film narrator Sarah Watt; next stop: Christchurch and Wellington.
For full details, visit the official website.
Thanks for reading today, everyone - the NZ film industry (community) relies on our support and patronage, so make sure to get out and see something local whenever you can. Mā te wā, Chris