A few years ago during the pre-theatrical release of Gigantic, I met up with a college kid named Joe Swanberg. Joe was attending Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, where a year earlier we had shot footage of former US Senator Paul Simon for the introduction to our film. Joe asked to do an interview with me for his website and a few months later, he screened Gigantic in Carbondale during their student-run film fest Big Muddy. Joe and I stayed in touch over the next few years as he began working on a DV feature with some of his friends. We talked about it occasionally and I was intrigued by the process (the four actors would co-write and co-direct) as well as the subject matter (a no-holds barred look at sex and body image). Occasionally we would disagree, as Joe would be talking cinematic revolution (DIY all the way, who cares about festivals or distributors), while I encouraged him not to sell his idea short and assume from the beginning that fests and distribs would be uninterested. The truth ended up somewhere in the middle as Joe's film Kissing on the Mouth debuted at the 2005 SXSW Film Festival and went on to play several other festivals in North America. Distributors, however, were less inclined to pick up the experimental, graphic film (with full-frontal nudity, erections and more).
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