52: American Movie (with Sean Armstrong) (Patreon)

Veteran boom operator Sean Armstrong (who worked on every episode of Hannibal!) joins the podcast to discuss Chris Smith’s 1999 film American Movie, a work by a determined documentary filmmaker about a determined independent filmmaker: it tells the story of Wisconsin’s Mark Borchardt and his determination to finally finish his abandoned short horror film Coven and sell enough copies of it on VHS to finance his long-planned feature film Northwestern.

Sean and I are both film school graduates, and we talk about how this great documentary depicts the reality of low budget filmmaking, chronicling a filmmaker who commits to chasing their artistic dream (against very long odds) who then has to live with the consequences. Borchardt became the star of a cult documentary, perhaps ultimately at the expense of his original directing ambitions.

Plus: Sean tells us what it was like to work on Hannibal with tha god Mads Mikkelsen!

Follow Sean Armstrong on Twitter.

Trailer for American Movie (Chris Smith, 1999)