The Hollywood Outsider – Film and Television Podcast | Reviews An award-winning film and television podcast for the fan in all of us
On this special episode of The Hollywood Outsider, our own Scott Clark and Aaron Peterson interview Video Games: The Movie director Jeremy Snead! Jeremy has put together a documentary detailing console gaming from its infancy all the way through modern day, including numerous interviews with industry types, celebs and even everyday gamers like us. A very interesting interview with a director on the rise about a film we found very entertaining (read our review here).
Whether you listen to the episode above, or just read the transcript below, be sure to enjoy this special episode of The Hollywood Outsider!
SCOTT: We’re here with Jeremy Snead, director of the new documentary “Video Games: the Movie”, which releases in theaters on July 18th and on Video On Demand July 15th. Jeremy, thanks so much for taking the time to talk with us. We really appreciate it.
JEREMY: Absolutely. Thanks for having me.
SCOTT: Glad to have you. Just want to get right into some questions right away. This movie is obviously about video games, so can you tell us what it is about gaming that made you feel that this is the story that you really need to tell to your audience?
JEREMY: Sure, sure. Well, the short answer is that it was a movie that I wanted to see that, that didn’t exist, you know? About three and a half years ago, I had taken my nieces and nephews to Dave and Buster’s, and had dinner, and they were playing all the shooters and driving games and I saw this poor little “Donkey Kong” arcade in the corner that nobody was playing and, you know, kind of got nostalgic for it, [and] went over there and played it. Of course they all won by one “game over”, and [asked] ‘Hey, Uncle Jerry, what is this?’ I tell them ‘This is where games first started.’ So later that night, I was just nostalgic for it, and I thought ‘I’m going to get on Netflix or Amazon or iTunes and see if I can find a documentary on video games.’ Because surely it exists, right?
SCOTT: Right. You would think so.
JEREMY: There’s a documentary on everything, right? But long story short, I couldn’t really find one that I felt like covered all of the peaks and valleys of the subject matter, so the next day I just set out to make an outline, and once I had that I just started calling people for interviews, and here we are almost four years later.
SCOTT: Wow, four years it took to get that all done, huh?
JEREMY: Yeah, from the germ of the idea, of the outlining, even before the script it was almost four years, yeah.
SCOTT: Some of our listeners might not be aware, but your film was partially funded through Kickstarter. Now, we’ve talked about other movies getting made this way and how much we personally appreciate this as an avenue for quality content. Can you share why you decided to go this route to get funding for “Video Games: The Movie” and what that process was like for you, especially when you exceeded your own goal?
JEREMY: The first couple of years of principal photography, shooting the interviews and B-roll and on-location shoots at game companies and game developers I sort of funded out of my own pocket, which is somewhat possible now with digital cinema, digital filmmaking and the tools that are out there. But once it got to the point where I had all of the footage (or nearly all of the footage) I felt like we needed to make a good movie. Post-production is a little less forgiving on hard costs. You have hard costs for the score and for the narrator, for editing, and motion graphics. So I knew that Kickstarter was there. It’s a little bit intimidating because there’s so much competition and so many projects, but we did it, and I was blown away by the response of everybody reaching our goal in almost ten days.