When you've got a film that involves characters talking with the actors that play them in a fictional movie, based on an actual book, on a non-existent talk show and mix in some flashbacks that blend the real events with the acted ones, there’s a chance things can go a little sideways – but in the hands of J.J. Lask, you end up with a refreshing and stylishly eccentric directorial debut. Since premiering at Sundance, On the Road with Judas has been a staple on the 2007 festival circuit. And it’s no surprise. With it’s colorful “Let’s Do Drinks” set design, a cast that delivers funny and poignant moments, artistic camera work and a cool eclectic soundtrack, we suspect that for J.J., this is only the beginning.

You mentioned you stopped going to school after the 10th grade right? How did that lead up to filmmaking?

Yeah well, I was not a good student growing up. In reality, I think it was my sophomore year of high school; I cut school for six months. They finally caught me on the last day of school and my parents had to come in… it was a big disaster.

Did you have some sort of elaborate scheme to cover your absence?

No. I just didn’t go to school. I went to the Meadow in Central Park and partied, smoked pot and drank – I wasn’t a bad kid, I was just having fun. There was nothing at school that was keeping me there. I always thought, “Well, I could always be a painter.” You know, you could always paint. But I was a horrible painter, I couldn’t draw, but I always wrote. So I wrote a book called On The Road With Judas. I wrote it for myself and you can tell. It’s a book that’s special. It’s not written for commercial purposes. It’s a book about my youth. The people that have read it – and the numbers are small – they are fascinated because it’s also their same story. Eventually about fifteen years later we made it into a movie.

I thought the book was published in 2002?

Yeah… it took me about ten years to write the book because I’m a high school dropout! (Laughs) So it took me about ten years to write it, and another five years to get it published, and then it took about three or four years to get the idea to make the movie after that.

There’s a scene in the film where J.J. is talking to Sara for the first time and she says she read his last book and it was crap. Is that taken from your experience?

Yeah. I mean everyone tells you, you can’t do this and you can’t do that. You can’t make a film with two people playing the same role. A lot of people say you can’t do it. Well, I’m here to tell you that you can do it – I did it. It may not be as big as Lions for Lambs, but it will last longer then that kind of movie, it will last for a good twenty years. People will still watch it, be refreshed by it and it’ll have that cult following.

How did the process writing the book differ from the process of the screenwriting for you? Was it very hard adapting your own work?

Yeah it was very hard. I struggled for a lot of years trying to make a screenplay of the book and I really just gave up. I said, “Jeez, this is not going to work. You need a lot of money to make it into the way the book is… it’s just not going to work. So there’s got to be another way.” Then I had an idea, I am a big fan of Charlie Rose – I always watch his interviews every night – one night I saw Julie Roberts and Stephen Soderberg and they were talking about the movie Erin Brockovich. So I thought, what if you had Judas (the real Judas), and an actor playing him, and the writer (of the book) all in a room talking about the events of what happened? It’s ironic because the events in the movie are… it’s such a non-event. It’s about a guy meeting a girl and the relationship not flourishing. It’s about a non-event. A real event is a guy meets a girl and they hookup, but here they don’t hook up. So they deconstruct the moment and why they did not flourish and hookup. The movie is a play on everything. It’s about a non-moment made into a 90-minute post-modern deconstruction.

Your portrayal of Ruben Parker Jr. was hilarious. Did you always know you wanted to put yourself in the film?

Well, we shot the interviews first and I always thought it would be easier if I were just there talking with the actors. So I wouldn’t have to be off camera, we made it like a talk show. So we rehearsed a lot but we also improv’d all the interviews. It actually worked out very well that way. It was convenient. (Laughs)

So you had a lot of opportunity to play around and try different things?

Yeah, we had a list of questions that I was going to ask all the actors. I have tons of tons of footage – for every event of the movie, I have ten minutes of them talking about it. So and then we edited it all that down for specific sections of the movie.

They must’ve had a really good sense of the story and what happened...

The actors had a great sense of their characters from the book – they read the book. So at the early stages of filming there was no script, it was just the book and these questions I asked them on this interview set. We edited all the footage together, then I went home and scripted scenes, and then we came back six months later and filmed those scenes. So even the way we shot the movie is unconventional… That was the goal, to make a movie that is unconventional.

The quote that J.J. says two or three times in the film right at the beginning is really interesting. It’s the quote that starts with, “Some men are born great…” Was that actually is taken from your original book?

The book is filled with those pontifications. (Laughs) Looking for Richard is another huge influence in the making of this movie. The way Al Pacino – to him, making Looking for Richard was an exercise and it became a movie. He didn’t go out and try to make a movie. He was using his actor’s muscle to get to the depth of the character and that is basically how I approached making this movie. We didn’t go out to make a movie that would play at Sundance and AFI. We did it as an exercise. We went out to deconstruct a non-event and we got a movie out of it basically.

It makes you wonder if the people who misunderstand the film are trying to put it in a specific category or looking for character arcs or certain climaxes.

Yeah and it doesn’t have it. It is very much like Looking for Richard, it’s all over the place, it’s madness, it’s chaos – that’s what Al Pacino was going for and that’s what I’m going for. It’s a process, it’s an exercise.

How did you go about finding the right kind of cast for the film?

I’ve been friends with Kevin Corrigan for 15 years. So when the opportunity for me to do this came up, he was always the guy I wanted to have on my team. He added a lot of validity to the project. We said, “Kevin Corrigan’s going to be in it,” and that brought in some other actors… he has a huge following. Even for a small firm like this, you have to go through agents to get actors and they heard that Kevin was in it, so it gave us a little validity. You tell an agent, “We want Eddie Kaye Thomas in this role and there is no script. You think he’ll do it?” And they’re like, “What are you talking about? No script, it’s based on a book, you’re going to improv it?” And we said, “But Kevin is in it.” “Oh, well ok. Maybe we can do a meeting with him.”

Our casting director put together some list of people and when I saw Aaron Ruell’s name on it I said, “Boy, that’s the gutsiest move you can make.” Going for a guy like that who’s known as Kit (in Napoleon Dynamite). That’s the most un-Hollywood choice you can make. So I was like, “let’s goes for that!” (Laughs)

Aaron plays the “insecure guy” really well – he was totally different then what was going on in Napoleon

Oh very much so, yeah. He prepared well and I was very lucky to have these great actors, I mean I couldn’t have done it without them.

The scene where Aaron is trying to pick up the actor who plays Sara backstage is really funny. Because he just heard everyone talking about how ridiculous he was trying to pick up the real Sara and here he is again going through the same motions. He didn’t learn anything at all!

That’s how you are. In real life you really don’t change. (Laughs) You don’t learn from your mistakes you just keep repeating them.

It was interesting how you used editing and camera moves to jump back and forth from the actors to the real people. Did you do anything while editing to keep those things straight?

Well yeah… We tried to keep it back and forth a lot. There were a lot of conscious decisions and definitely there are gimmicks and devises like panning over and then panning back and it’s a different person – using a lot of in-camera tricks. Very basic tricks and that’s why they are called tricks. They work. (Laughs)

But it works well because you do the camera move in the middle of a conversation.

Yeah, in the middle of a line. We really tried to rehearse – like they’d turn a corner and it’s the actors and then they turn a corner, the camera does not cut and then it’s the reals (real people). On a Saturday we went out with regular people and tried that and it worked. We said, “Wow that worked so easy!” We thought it was going to be so hard, we would have to fake a cut in there. We had people drop to their knees on the ground to does those in camera tricks. Like you see people, and you don’t see it, but they are underneath the camera trying to hide… It is amazing what you can do when you try to think out of the box.

It’s great that you tried to do it all in camera.

Oh yeah, no cuts. As an editor, the best editors are ones where you don’t see the cuts; you don’t even realize an editor edited it. It just looks like they just shot it in one go. So that’s how we tried to do it – to make it look seamless.

Do you think your background as an editor affected to your shot choices?

Totally. Every single set up, everybody would say to me, “Don’t you think we need coverage?” And I would say, “No we don’t, believe me we got it.” They’d say, “You’re not going to shoot that?” And I’m like, “No. You don’t need it.” It was all edited in my head. You just let things play out. Let the actors go. One of my favorite filmmakers is Woody Allen because he does long takes and let’s them go. You really don’t need to cut. So a lot of people were scared, but they trusted me because I’m an editor and it would be me who would be complaining if I didn’t have the right stuff to cut to.

Did you ever come to that situation? Where you thought, “Man, if I just had this one shot I could make all this other stuff happen.”

No. Actually as an editor editing this film, I wished I had listened to myself more and not done as much coverage as I did and really tried to do less coverage. So next time I’ll listen to myself even more…

There was a lot of variety in your music choices. Everything from Van Halen, to Louie Armstrong and going to the Depeche Mode cover – it was great!

We really lucked out. Human (a music company in New York and LA) did the score. They did some versions of Depeche Mode. They did the covers of those songs. They were amazing. I mean the score is just incredible.

Is there anything that you found particularly challenging during the production?

Yeah… The hours, the egos of actors are challenging, there is a lot. It’s hard to keep your head on straight.

What format did you shoot?

The camera we shot on was a 35mm Kinor camera, which is a Russian camera that we bought in England. We actually bought the camera, we didn’t rent… It’s a Russian camera with Russian lenses. So some of the [lens] flares you see American audiences have never seen before… because of the glass. It’s engineered completely different than German lenses because it was a Communist Russia that built that camera in the 1960’s and 1970’s. And the film we shot, you don’t see film like that. It’s a two-perf camera. It’s a 2:35:1 aspect ratio, and regular film has four perf and this has two, so each roll of film, instead of 12 minutes, it’s a 24 minute roll. So we were able to use twice as much film – or save twice as much money on film basically.

Was using the Kinor more of a budget thing or were you trying to get a certain look out of it?

Well both. We wanted to get a different look and then the best part about it was the budgetary thing also. It saved us a lot of money in film and it allowed us to shoot 35mm, which is great!

We spoke earlier about how this has been a somewhat misunderstood film. What are aspects of the film that some people aren’t catching?

In the hard facts of filmmaking and festivals and going to movies, people are, what’s the word, not mean but people are sarcastic. People love to hate movies. (Laughs) I’m guilty of it too; I go to see other movies and I say, “I could have done that so much better.” Even with some of my favorites movies I’ll say, “Oh yeah, I could have done that. I could’ve done that so much better.” So people are not mean, but critical – especially at film festivals. Huge critics – because mostly they are filmmakers, aspiring filmmakers or past filmmakers so they are very critical. If you put out a film this bold, people are just going to kill it because you’re giving people a huge target. I’m not doing it out of ego or anything like that; I’m just doing it because I think that’s the way film should be made. I mean you’ve got to take chances. You’ve got to take a risk. Also, I wrote myself into the movie. (Laughs) So it’s even a bigger target. I realized that right when we were filming it like, “Oh my god, people are going to hate me without even knowing me” because you’re putting yourself out there.

You know, Lee Strasberg – the great acting teacher who developed the method for Brando, Pacino, Paul Newman – he said when you get off stage, if you don’t feel embarrassed by what you just did up there then it wasn’t truthful. When I watch the film I am embarrassed, because it is a true representation of my thoughts and fears and it is up on screen for people to see. I mean, I’m very proud of the film, technically and the story – I love it but the content is very embarrassing because it is so truthful. So I watch like cringing because they are talking about, it’s like me up there. I think a lot of people feel embarrassed by it too because it is so truthful, because it’s stuff that happens in their lives too. Everyone I know has met a girl and it didn’t work out because she’s sleeping with somebody else or something. It happens to everyone. It’s an embarrassing, cringing thing. Love tears you apart. It’s powerful stuff. So there’s a bit target out for this film. A big bold bull’s eye!


What were your thoughts about bringing in the artifacts (shots of inanimate objects)?

It’s like I come to California to the AFI film festival, I go back to my apartment in Brooklyn, I’ll unpack and I’ll find an ashtray from the hotel or a matchbook from a restaurant and I’ll have those things in my desk seven years from now and when I look at it I’ll say, “Oh that’s from the AFI film festival, when I was at the Roosevelt hotel.” These are the artifacts of your life. So those little artifacts are Judas’ artifacts for the story.

Well they’re interesting because you start to realize that each object has specific meaning. They each represent a certain moment in the story.

Yeah. They represent memory triggers. It comes from the Lee Strasberg method of sense memory. These objects possess a lot of deep emotions and feelings to people.

Have you gotten any comments about the book that were similar to comments about the movie?

Not a lot of people have read the book. It’s a very underground book, you can only get it online and you can only get at it certain times when the publisher wants to release it. It’s a very weird publishing company and I kind of like that. You try to order it and it’s backlogged and then all of a sudden you can order it with ease – I like the mystery of it. I’m even debating just stopping the publishing of it completely, so it’s a rare collectors item – out of print and you can never find it. By accident on Google Books – they put up extensive excerpts from books – and they had it! I had to email them and say, “Take this off immediately!”

So any news about distribution?

Well, we sold it to the Sundance channel. So I think in August 2008 it will start to be shown on those channels. So more people will see it in one night on the Sundance channel than all the film festivals combined. That’s where I think the movie will really get a lot of legs. People will say, “I saw that movie on TV last night. What the hell was that? I’ve got to go look that up or see when it is on again!” So I think that’s what will really drive it and of course I’m hoping to get a small theatrical release…

Do you have any thoughts you would like to share for new filmmakers out there?

Yeah... a lot of people say you can’t do this, you can’t do that – and you can. So my advice to young filmmakers, old filmmakers, first-time filmmakers – and this is my first film, this is the first time I’ve ever directed – you can do it, and do it the way you want to do it because that’s the only way it is going to be good. Don’t do it the way you think someone else wants you to do it, or someone else tells you to do it. Do it the way you want to do it. Because you’re going to watch the movie more than anybody! (Laughs) So if it’s not the way you want it, and you don’t run to the theatre to watch your film all the way through at every festival screening, then it’s not good. (Laughs) I sit through all my screenings… I’m constantly amazed because the film is always fresh to me. So many people told me I couldn’t do it this way and I fought them every step of the way. You know twenty-four frames a second, twenty-four problems. I mean there’s not a lot advice you can tell people. You can’t say do A, do B, do C. Just do it the way you want to do it and it will all fall into place.