By: Sue
Dan Fogler has just kicked off his west coast tour to promote his new film Don Peyote and he took time out of his busy schedule for a little interview.
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Yeah, we’re leaving on the west coast bus tour tomorrow. And we’re going up and down the coast and spreading the word, doing Q and A’s and then we’re going to Big Sur and we end up at Lightning in A Bottle festival and, yeah it should be Rock n’ Roll fun. It should be Rock N’ Roll fun, at least.
There are so many different ways to interpret the movie Don Peyote, how would you describe the movie?
Okay, I would say it’s a little bit early Woody Allen mixed in with a little bit of Cary Gillian and then you have a lot of Saturday Night/Reno 911 aspect to it. There’s a lot, there’s just a lot. But at its core I think it’s a transformation story. It’s a modern prophet journey. Like, how does a guy with the end is near sign become that guy. Like, how does the street prophet become that guy. I’ve always been fascinated with that story and so this is the story of Warren Allman, who is searching for answers and he gets so caught up with the fear of not knowing what’s coming that he transforms into this street prophet named Don Peyote who walks the earth and performs odd miracles and genuinely tries to save the world.
Read the entire interview after the Jump...
You have a bunch of surprising actor cameos. You have Anne Hathaway, Jay Baruchel and Josh Duhamel in roles that we’re kind of not use to seeing them in. How did the idea of those roles come about for them?
Well, the process was very organic. I kind of wrote to their strengths. I let them add to their characters, to improvise. What was the question?
Well I mean, like with Anne Hathaway’s character. It’s not a role we normally see her in, so it was really surprising, so I was wondering was she the person you had in mind when you wrote that?
Yeah, I think that there are reasons why I put all of these cameos in the movie, cause I knew it was a small movie, and I knew if it was going to get a wider audience I had to put faces on posters, so that was one reason we did it. And what attracted these really big names to Don Peyote was the ability to do something new, to show other sides that they don’t usually get to show, and we gave them a nice playing ground and they got to add to their part, and improvise and really put a stamp on their characters. I always had her in mind for this part. It was suppose to feel like a dream, you know. Anne Hathaway walks into your life, and starts beating the shit out of you, and then starts downloading all of this insider information, kind of like Trinity for the Matrix. She invades his dream and so I had her in mind from the beginning, simply because of our relationship. I looked at her as someone I could actually call and see if she would be interested. Baruchel was the same thing. It was perfectly catered for him, he came and could improvise about conspiracy theory for days. And then Josh Duhamel, I met him on the scenic route. And on the way there, we shot that in an alley. On the way there we were talking about Alien abduction, underground military bases and pyramid shit like that, but I was like this guy’s down. He came onboard, but that was like in the middle of the process. We were already shooting the movie, editing it already, and then I met Josh, so the whole thing was really fly by the seat of your pants film making.
This is the first movie that you starred in and directed. What was it like making the movie, having to direct, write and act?
Well I had a co-director and a co-writer, Michael Canzoniero, who I work with on other projects, and we’re apart of Studio 13, and Hystical Psycho he was also a big apart of that, really my first movie. You really need someone to watch your back when you’re in it, you need someone to watch your performance. Because there’s no way you can do everything. You can’t have your eyes on everything. My strengths are with acting, and with directing actors. I let him have an aesthetic idea how I want a shot look, but it’s not my expertise so Mike picks up there with the nuts and bolts behind the camera, working with the crew and he does that. And then, we bring in great production designers who are just really artistic and know how to stretch a dollar. They come in with gold, because they’re allowed to be creative. And you have people come in, and you say “Hey man, this is the idea for the scene,” and they say “mind if I go away and write the scene” and they come back and they just bring gold. So it’s a big collaboration of people being allowed to put their stamp on their particular contribution.
You were in a couple of episodes of Hannibal. Are there any other shows you’d like to guest star on, and who would you play?
Oh, yeah there’s a bunch of shows I would like to jump on. I think it would be really cool to do something on Mad Men. I think it would be really cool, be on like a couple of episodes on the Walking Dead or something. Or maybe, like play Dinklage’s cousin on Game of Thrones.
That would be kind of neat.
Oh, no. You know what would be kind of cool? I would love to do something else. I hear they’re doing a spin-off on Breaking Bad, called Better Call Saul, I would love to do some crazy criminal character on there. I’m a big fan of what’s going on TV nowadays.
So you want to show off a little bit of your darkside?
Yes, yeah. I would sprinkle a little bit of comedy in there, but yeah I really want to do a lot more darker stuff.
What are you working on now?
Well you know, we’re going on the bus tour for Don Peyote, to get the word out for that. There’s several different projects that are in development for TV, vehicles for myself and I got this graphic novel Moon Lake, which we’re turning into a TV show, and so there’s a lot of creative stuff I’m doing with my own studio. And there’s a lot of movies coming up and coming out. Barely Lethal is out soon. That one is really trippy, it’s a wild movie. And there I have this other movie Evil Nation so there’s a bunch of stuff going on. But we also have a lot of projects that we’re writing. If Don Peyote goes well, I’d like as I said before, I’d like to do something dark. Next thing should be something totally serious, to surprise people.
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