Episodic series pushes the limits of guerrilla filmmaking
Drew Rosas is a one of the minds behind Shangri-LA, and episodic series depicting a group young people trying to “make it” in Los Angeles but living very close to the bone as they do so. Cinapse sat down with Rosas at this year’s Austin Film Festival to discuss the storyline, his approaching to guerrilla filmmaking, and the issues the series addresses.
Rod Machen: So because the premise is “Making it in LA,” tell me about yourself and your cohort, and just a little history of what brought you guys to LA, and what brought you guys to make this.
Drew Rosas: I’m a midwesterner, originally. Minnesota born, Wisconsin raised. I went to film school in Milwaukee, which is a really experimental, DIY, guerrilla film school. It’s one of the few schools left in the country that you start on film. They teach you 16mm before you touch anything video. It was a really great opportunity. It’s really different from Hollywood programs in that they kind of teach self-sufficient filmmaking: how to pull yourself up by the bootstraps and create your projects in a self-sustaining sort of do-it-yourself kind of way.
So I shot a film in Wisconsin called Blood Junkie. It was picked up for distribution with Troma. I did it on my own, and I made the whole film for like, seven grand. Then we got distribution, it was a really cool experience. After shooting it, I was like, “I gotta get out of here.” It was a really brutal winter, and I just headed west. I had some good friends in LA, and that was what brought me out there. I cut the film when I was basically couch-surfing in Los Angeles for three months, and just cutting it on my computer.
I was thrown into this other culture of Los Angeles. That’s where the idea is, that seeing LA from a midwesterner perspective really started drawing me in. The idea that most people are from somewhere else chasing that dream. It sort of started the seed for Shangri-LA. It’s about encountering all of these people in the city who have chased that dream, maybe lost it, maybe still chasing it. Literally, you meet people that are transient folks, living on the streets. There’s all different levels of that, but the most common theme that I’ve only ever encountered in Los Angeles is this castoff of the industry. That was really fascinating to me.
People always say, “Make what you know, write what you know,” and so I really wanted to do something with that chase for Hollywood, because I was sort of in the middle of it myself. It’s such a commonly told story that I wanted a different vantage point to tell it from. That’s where the street perspective came into play. Also, by setting it on the streets of LA, it allowed us to sort of structure the production around stealing footage and occupy the same public spaces that people do occupy in LA, but as a production. We got away with a lot more. So I took my Milwaukee DIY filmmaking style, and was like, “Will this work in Los Angeles, the biggest filming city in the world? Can I get away with producing stuff in the shadow of that industry?” That was the challenge that I had for myself.
RM: So what is the biggest takeaway? When you think about midwesterners seeing LA through these other eyes, what is it that you see that people that have been there a long time maybe don’t? What just jumps out at you? It can be small or big.
DR: That’s a good question. I think for me, it’s just this eternal chase. Everyone in Los Angeles is fighting their own fight and climbing this ladder, in a way that you don’t really see in other places. I guess, from an outside perspective, there’s this beauty in the chaos of it. Los Angeles feels almost third world at times. There’s this juxtaposition of the richest city in the world combined with the poorest city in the world, living in unison. You’re literally watching people step over the most extreme poverty to get into one of the craziest rent situations in the country. That juxtaposition is so drastic to me. The midwest is very vanilla, so it was such a mind-blowing exposure that it inspired me to create this project and others.
RM: How did your DIY background serve you? Were you able to pretty much take it and plan it, or were there new things to learn?
DR: It worked pretty much perfectly. I’ll tell you this: In the midwest, filmmaking is much more rare. So when you have a project, everyone’s really impressed. They all watch movies. They watch more tv than us, probably. But that’s such a mystery to them. So when you do something, everyone in the midwest wants to be involved. You get every location for free; not only will you get some mansion to shoot in for free, you can just go show up there with a crew, and people are loving it, but they’re baking you cookies. They just love it. So that’s just the midwestern style, but LA, there’s just this expectation of the industry where if you’re like, “I’m going to shoot a tv show,” every shithole corner and bodega has been filmed ten times for these tv shows and movies. So even these scrappy little garbage locations have an expectation of Hollywood budgets and studio.
So the idea was to get around that and create something where I can actually go and steal footage everywhere. So that’s where the street setting came in. Yeah, so it worked amazingly well. We only had to run from the cops twice, and we got away. The technology these days allows you to get away with filmmaking like a film ninja. I’m walking around Hollywood Boulevard, I’ve got my friend in a hot dog costume, and I’m filming him from the other side of the street with my little DSLR Sony camera with a really nice lens on it. But my camera is actually smaller than the Asian tourists that pass me every minute. They’re walking around with these huge telephoto lenses, so these guys are more conspicuous than me. I’m going to get away with it, because my production is smaller than the tourists’.
It starts to raise that question: where is the line of what’s allowed? You’re a tourist, you can shoot video on your camera, or you have the new iPhone, you can shoot 4K video on a bus, you can do whatever you want. Back in the days when you were shooting film, you had to bring a light with you, you had to have a generator, then you needed a permit. It falls in place, but where is that line now? I think it’s being redefined. So okay, if I’m filming my family vacation, that’s okay? I feel like that line is so blurred right now, that I really like pushing that envelope and trying to redefine those boundaries.
RM: Yeah, kind of not care.
DR: Yeah. If you get away with it, that’s the thing, honestly. It’s the age-old, “better to ask for forgiveness than permission.” It’s very true. We had to ask for forgiveness a couple of times, and nobody really cares, especially if you’re trying with a small camera. We had park rangers talk to us one time like, “Sorry, you can do this without a permit.” We’re like, “Oh, really? Sorry, we’re just student filmmakers.” We don’t look like a huge crew. I’m sure if you looked like a huge crew, you’d get stopped. But there were actual moments when we were filming our show in an alleyway without a permit and literally half a block down, there’s a Netflix production happening in the same block. So we look like we’re just part of their crew or something. Nobody knows. So you can get away with a hell of a lot more than I ever expected, even in Los Angeles.
RM: So my final question is about the choice to go with an original series and have that be the product. How did you come to that, and where do you go from here?
DR: I came from a feature background. I made two feature films before this, horror comedies. Then my co-creator Nick Summer, who I write and he’s the lead actor, we write together and we co-direct it. So we’re really co-creators in the project. We talk a lot about one of the problems that you run into with special features, is that you’re really outside of the studio system. You don’t have a huge marketing campaign, you don’t have the celebrity name recognition on the front of your poster, so how do you get people to watch it? TV is really coming into it’s own right now, we don’t even know when the peak is going to happen. The storytelling has come so far in the last ten years, it’s really become an acceptable medium to do high-quality content. So that’s one part of it, but also just the availability of streaming platforms.
Right now, we’re all fighting for people’s eyeballs. If you’re an independent project, you’ve got a ninety-minute feature film, that’s a lot bigger ask from a viewer. I watch a lot of stuff; it’s hard even for me to click on a lot of indie stuff on Netflix. Part of the idea is that the structure of a season almost takes place like a feature film. But it’s broken into chapters, so that you have an eight to ten minute, bite-sized, streamable content that you can hook people in with. If you watch through a whole season, it’s like watching a feature. You can binge right through it, it’s just over two hours, you know? But you’re able to grab people with a smaller little chunk and run with it.
For more information about Shangri-LA, check out shangri-lashow.com as well as stream it on Prime Video.