Erica is responsible for everything good about the whole movie, including its very existence. The 1st location (inside the ppl) was her Buddhist friend’s apartment. For years I always said if buddhism was so great how come it never did anything for me personally but now I don’t say that anymore. The 2nd location was her brother’s apartment (he was on the first season of The Apprentice for all my Apprentice heads out there, where you at! just kidding sit down!) and his girlfriend showed up about halfway through the day and wasn’t real pleased with the enormity of the production inside her home. Erica spent the evening smoothing that over and dealing with me unravelling and being horrible. Erica is a very nice and tolerant person. She writes TV and feature scripts which you can learn about from Coverfly, or request directly from her website. 

I met Erica at a BBQ in Texas where I was really uncomfortable. It was an industry joint so a lot of really insufferable people were giving elevator pitches to a lot of disinterested looking other people and I wanted to finish my meat and die. So anyway Erica introduced herself and soon there was a whole circle of people who seemed equally uncomfortable in these environs and it turned into a really fun day and then a really fun weekend fueled by guacamole the waiter makes right at your table and complimentary Stella Artois. I found out later she was a great writer and I’m happy she was my first friend in film. I owe her more than I can express.

Maya wrote and directed an extremely well-executed short called Gashole with her husband a few years ago. I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone write a film for themselves that’s as perfectly suited to their abilities. She’s naturalistic. She’s funny. She’s bizarre and over-the-top. Maya is also a fantastic dramatic actor who is nimble and believable, but she’s really a pleasure to watch in big, sloppy comedy like this.

I don’t think she was so happy with her performance in We Are Brain. She lamented her “mugging” on screen. I, of course, loved the muggery and held it in the edit longer than any actor would ever want. I was aiming for a stylized, exaggerated reality, as I usually am, and unfortunately that doesn’t always make actors look their best. On a proper production you have that conversation beforehand, but unfortunately we didn’t have the wherewithal or presence of mind for that here.

I’d like to watch a movie like Clockwatchers with Maya in the Parker Posey role. In person Maya is cool and normal, but she has this other gear on screen where it seems like she’s from another dimension, but because she’s so naturalistic you always buy it. She seems like she lives in the movie, not that she’s an actor on earth. You can see a bit of that in this short. She’s amazing. She’s so crooked.

I could write 3000 more words on her because she really broadcasts herself when you’re with her. You learn and learn and learn. She definitely wound up in the right industry. She’s alive in a fun way. But she’s also a rascal. Mischief coming out her eyeballs. She’s the kid you want to be friends with when you’re 9 so you can spend your summer days somewhere hidden with someone dangerous. She’s the person you wanna be stuck in line behind then later after you’ve ditched it you find out she didn’t know what she was in line for. She’s the weirdo you wanna meet in a crowded doctor’s office pretending to read an upside down magazine. Maya can do it all. 

I was really more of a technician than a director at the time we made We Are Brain, so when Erica and I were setting up the key crew members, those were the phone calls I handled. This was wise, as I was the only one around who knew the difference between shooting on a RED or a high grade Canon DSLR. More importantly, I knew what we could get away with so long as the quality was sufficiently impressive.

Anyway, Nick did sound and I fell in love with him over a phone call that should have taken 7 minutes but instead took over an hour. I chatted with him at my parents’ place, pacing around their bedroom, nervous I’d lose his interest in a weird little project where he was underpaid. Instead we talked about everything, music, movies, Anchorage. He even knew a ton of deep cut stuff about Canada, which was weird because technically I was supposed to be impressing him.

Nick worked on Maya’s Gashole (lol), so obviously the quality of his work will keep you coming back. Before I left LA he even offered to come up to Toronto to work with me on anything I had coming up, gratis, provided I covered his flight. I mean come on, the guy rules.

Film sets are incredibly exclusionary. There’s a lot of in-language and if you’re not hip you get exposed pretty quick. The first indication that you’re gearing up for a shot is when the sound guy says he’s “speeding”, and so Nick’s voice was the first one I heard that indicated I was missing pieces of film set parlance which threatened to collapse the fiction that I belonged there, directing something of that size and nature. I’ll never forget that. Nick’s voice set off a trigger in me that said “okay Schuyler, shut the fuck up, look legit, hold it together for 3 days. That’s all you gotta do.” I failed, of course, but it was cool that at least it was Nick who triggered those thoughts, instead of some dumbass I didn’t respect. You’d always prefer a friend tell you you’re a fraud instead of a stranger, if you get to choose.

Jeremy was our Director of Photography. We’d already had a DP slip through our fingers with like 2 weeks ’til shoot day so I was on pretty high alert when he reached out to our Craigslist ad. I kind of got the feeling that these mid-range DPs just getting started in the industry would make soft commitments to productions our size and then ghost us if something bigger came along in the interim. (Granted, I am a paranoid nutjob and I assembled this idea entirely from that first DP I mentioned, who did exactly this.) Anyway Jeremy was so available that he ended up negotiating against himself in our emails, but he was paid his initial rate, don’t you fret. His reel was so incredibly strong that it’s still the only one he has up 11 years later. Or maybe he’s just lazy. Either way, it’s all he really needs to recommend him. Super pro. Nice kid. Amazing product. Also he has a lowkey kind of good-old-boy, shit-kicker vibe to him, if that’s to your tastes. Like he transported the rented lights and gear in the box of his pick up, you know? The kid’s first kiss was definitely behind the generator at a fish fry is what I’m saying. 

The last cinematography job his IMDb page lists is in 2017, and it looks like he’s been working his way up the chain on bigger productions from grip to 2nd camera assistant (dawg I have no idea what either of those titles means but I guarantee they both know where the black tape is.) If you’re in need of a quality DP in Los Angeles and his schedule permits it, call him up. He knows what he’s doing and deserves to ply his craft: jeremy.glen.peele@gmail.com (yeah his middle name is Glen. Don’t worry it doesn’t come up on set.) 

Leslie Korein is a lunatic. She’s like if you were roommates with downed power lines. Every second of your life would be exciting but also terror would always be present. 

The reality is, Leslie only had two scenes and the 2nd one was just a long conversation that wasn’t written in a way that could be delivered naturally. Her and Marcy were pretty hemmed in. Anyway they were great and fun to watch and their voices are mellifluous in a kind of opinionated way, so what more could you really ask for?

Leslie is a great writer and maker of Beetlejuice-style pottery and she also played a recurring character on a Nickelodeon show a few years ago which seems like a great place for her charisma and bombast. She was also on an episode of Hacks which I understand is pretty popular.

What you Hacks fans don’t know is that Leslie makes the sun shine brighter and she’ll take you for a wet, flyover-style breakfast on your last day in LA and then drive you to the airport and then gift you an old green T-shirt that’s been in her trunk for months. She’ll do all that. I don’t mean hypothetically. She will do exactly those things. I’m wearing the shirt now.

I’m not sure what Marcy’s up to. My favourite thing she ever did was a short where she was recording sex sounds for a video game in a recording studio which I just spent 2 hours looking for. Am I insane? Does this exist? I feel like I’m losing my mind.

Anyway, she wrote a few episodes of Brooklyn 99 when it was still on the air. As with Leslie, and because I slept on their couch for a week, most of what I think about with Marcy is nice happy fun calm times. 

Nice happy fun calm times with Marcy are the days you spend working across the kitchen table from each other, tip-tapping on your laptops, intermittently chatting. Marcy chats from her abdomen (she could fill an amphitheatre with her inside voice) so sometimes it feels like she’s yelling at you. It takes chatting to a whole new level, but overall it’s a good time. If she still lives in Los Feliz you can see in the kitchen from the street so if she’s working in there right now just invite yourself in and experience it for yourself. Tell her Schuyler sent you. 

I got to see her perform at UCB one night which was fun. And I made her a theme song for a web series she was making that never came to fruition. Wonder what happened there. It was a cool idea. 

Mike Still is great in everything he does. The last time I saw him he popped up in an episode of Happy Endings I was watching because I hate myself. J/k bro. Sometimes you just need something mindless on in the background because it feels good. Sometimes you need to eat Doritos for dinner.

I probably have 80 takes altogether of all the shots Mike Still appears in. And I have 80 subtly different scene renditions from him. He put on a fucking masterclass. Actors of his caliber get a bit shortchanged because the audience doesn’t get to see that professionalism on screen, and thus can’t appreciate performers like him in as complete a way as they deserve. His IMDb page of late is a bit sparse so he may have transitioned entirely into improv, or maybe he’s selling insurance in Missoula or something, I dunno. But it’s really incredibly devastating that somebody as skilled as Mike doesn’t get to display that skill set to the blithering masses week after week. A heartbreaker. You ass-heads don’t know what you’re missing. You should have drafted a petition demanding his talents. But instead you did nothing. Instead you had Doritos for dinner.

We barely spoke. He wouldn’t recognize me in a lineup of 5 Schuylers. He clocked me for a novice about a nanosecond into our table read and I don’t think he was too happy about it. And that was before we got on set and I started doing line readings, which actors obviously hate. (Try not to do them, new directors. I did because I was exacting about the script and while the talent was all looking for a place to display their immense skill sets, I was trying to create a piece of work that would go down curious and get stuck in the viewer’s mind well after they’d watched it, so unfortunately I had to resort to line readings a few times at the expense of my credibility.) Not sure how he felt after he saw the final product. Anyway he’s a nice guy and a pro’s pro and he should be on lots of shows instead of a small amount of shows.

Tony has a bat-phone in his apartment that rings any time a production needs a topless gay latino. That’s just a guess.

Maya and Erica originally set it up so Tony and Mike Still would be playing the opposite characters. Flipping them was the only thing I pushed for. I saw Tony in a short (I can’t find now) where he did some great piece of physical comedy, and since the “main” We Are Brain character didn’t have too much dialogue, Tony was my preference in that role.

The thing I didn’t consider about casting Tony/Mike that way is that Tony is gay. I’ve never been accused of having the most well-functioning gaydar in the world, and from the 2-3 shorts of Tony’s I looked at when we were finalizing the cast, I couldn’t tell that he was gay. Most viewers think We Are Brain is a story about a guy discovering his sexuality, but it’s actually a film about two aspects of a guy falling into harmony with each other, and him finding a practical peace to use moving forward in his life (funny stuff, huh?) The theme of homosexuality is used in the metaphysical plane, first to imply distance between the two roomates, then later to affirm their connection, but on the “reality” plane, there’s nothing whatsoever that implies the main character is gay, and rather a whole lot of indicators that show he’s heterosexual. 

Anyway, in terms of casting, it might have been better to have a straight actor play the main role to minimize confusion, I don’t know. That was Erica’s advice and she’s almost always right, but I just saw Tony as this great physical actor and that’s what I wanted. Fuck it, you know? The movie is what we say it is. Your preconceptions are your own.

Yeah I know. It turns out Tony, who I view primarily as this amazing and hilarious physical actor, is crushing it in the voice over world right now. He was Renaldo Racoon in the Tiny Toons reboot. And he was cast as Julio on The Simpsons (the background of which can be heard on this podcast.) 

So was I wrong about Tony being a sublime, Jacques Tati-level physical performer? Or is The Simpsons wrong about Tony being a hilarious and charismatic voice over artist? Listen, this is what the 2020’s is all about people, we can all be wrong.

Tony really is the nicest person in the world. He has an undeniable humanity both in person and on screen. There was so much material that I had trouble getting away from in the edit because of it. It’s really an excellent place to start from as a performer. I think humanity like that is what gave people like Chris Farley, and Adam Sandler, and Patrick Swayze—and other performers who may be a tad limited—their endurance. Stack a dollop of talent on top of humanity like that and that’s how you get the Ellen Burstyns and Eddie Murphys and Jenna Fischers of this world. At least that’s how it feels to me.

I wish I coulda spent more time with him. My parents met him at the LA Indie Fest when We Are Brain premiered and my dad really did like him a lot, that wasn’t a joke. Maybe my mom did too but she says less than Harpo Marx so who knows what the fuck is on that woman’s mind. 

Londale definitely had the most hubbub around him when I arrived in LA. A few of the girls were buzzing about how talented he was. Then during his topless scene they really wouldn’t shut up about how talented he was. J/k y’all. I mean not really j/k. LLL, nahmean? (“Ladies Love Londale”)—but I am j/k-ing about that being the source of the hubbub. The guy is electric, there’s no question. I wish he’d had more to do in this film.

He’s an interesting dude. I asked him to spark a joint during the shoot but he wasn’t comfortable with it. At the time I was a little cheesed cuz it was kind of important to the film’s coherence (lol), but then later I heard he was a vegan so I figured maybe he was like a “purity” guy. You know those guys? I don’t know what you call those people. They have pink lungs and clear skin. You know them? They always smell good but they eat food that doesn’t smell good? Then now I just saw UCB released this whole stand up set where I don’t think he even swears. He’s like the black Brian Regan who only eats beans. Imagine asking the black Brian Regan who only eats beans to light a joint on your film set? I’m at fault in that scenario. That’s on me. 

He’ll be on the long overdue revival of The Joe Schmo Show so hopefully that’ll have the same effect on his career that it did on Kristen Wiig’s. Yeah, you didn’t know she was on that show, did you? That’s right. Drink in my knowledge. Ingest it like a purity guy ingesting granola under mung beans.

Alright we’re officially in the vibes zone now. I only had a few specific make-up requests for Leah, and I think she was more from the cosmetics world than the special make-up effects one, but she was on. point. 

As importantly, she has a smile that can pull the paint up off your walls. It’s nuclear. It makes you happy to be alive. Her IMDb doesn’t show any credits after 2016, so maybe she’s doing something else now. But anyway, this is the type of person you want on your film set, in your workplace, on your intramural softball team, or stuffed into your van full of mercenaries, whatever. If you’ve somehow found yourself on this page after Googling “need co-worker ASAP; no conditions”, find Leah and thank me in the morning.

I’ve been in what seems like 100 bands and the only one I liked was the one I was in with my best friends. And we fucking sucked. 

It’s the only piece of creative advice I would give my kids: prioritize the quality of the people working with you rather than their skill sets. I would rather make something mediocre with someone amazing than the reverse (what a motherfucking cliché. I’m aghast at myself fwiw.) I was really fortunate to work with extremely talented people on We Are Brain, but as you can probably see from my memories here, the stuff that really sticks with me and keeps me moving forward in my life, both creatively and otherwise, are the teeny tiny intangibles contained within somebody Good; Tony’s humanity, Maya’s generosity, Londale’s scruples, Nick’s enthusiasm, Erica’s clemency, Leah’s positivity. 

Not many people saw We Are Brain, and overall I’d probably call the film a failure, but I’m still here and breathing and making shit that matters to me and everything I make is enriched by those little intangible elements those ppl carry around with them. Leah Takahashi probably never thought about me again after the film wrapped, but her fearlessness, happiness, and warmth is part of everything I’ve made since.

Diana Chang was the same damn thing, but where Leah was all warm rays of sunshine, Diana was a cool cucumber indeed. She was only with us for a day and a half, and I rode with her to the location the first morning. The anxiety coursing through me probably emitted an audible hum, like a fluorescent light about to go kaput, but she got my mind allll the way off it with this great story:

A few months earlier, at a crossroads in her life (either the completion of school, or temporary liberty from work, I can’t remember exactly now) she sent out an open call over Facebook requesting companionship for an upcoming trip to Hawaii. She only got one respondent, a guy she didn’t know so well, and upon arriving to the island it became clear that his idea of their time together wasn’t as platonic as she’d intended. The whole thing just amounted to an awkward time, nothing litigious, but the crux of the story was clear; this girl was unflappable, she could handle motherfucking anything.

It was a nothing anecdote she probably preferred to forget, I can’t remember what spurred its telling, and maybe she never thought about it again; I think about it once a week. The idea that I share my time here on earth with people with wills so ironclad they can navigate weapons-grade awkwardness like that for an entire calendar week penetrates my psyche like a sword to the brain. I haven’t even answered my cellphone in 15 years. And yeah, it’s true I don’t derive anything actionable from that knowing, but it just feels good to understand that whatever challenges face me there’s probably somebody out there in the world who could lick it without so much as a blip in their heart rate. It’s amazing. And all that from one throwaway anecdote to cut the 7am silence. What a world. 

Diana is now Comms Director for Tony Mejia, LA City Controller, and her Twitter account is a spotless record of one woman’s fervent opposition to the injustices of our time; the interminable atrocity in Palestine, the selling out of public funds to feed the war machine, the dearth of shelter space for LA’s unhoused population, police violence, lack of mutual aid, the squashing of collective bargaining, you name it. The dog’s breakfast of corruption, violence, and inequities that are silently colluding to expedite the resolution of the American experiment. If you find your mind boggled by bite-sized culture war talking points and would like to see what real progressive action looks like, smash that follow button, baby.

And if you’re a facile nincompoop who thinks progressive causes and action are passé or odious or quaint or whatever the fuck it is you weirdos find yourself thinking in your private moments, allow me burst your preconceptions. Diana is not a fool or a scold or a lemming, she’s informed and cool and tenacious and good, and is so on-the-ball she found herself in the best Conan O’Brien bit of the 2010’s, plucked by Conan himself who always has an eye out for a straight person possessing just enough of Tom Smothers’ surreptitious smarts and timing to make his remotes sing.

As consistent a wind as you could ever hope to find in the wild. I’m proud to work with anyone with such unassailable values, even if just for a day and a half.