After a preview screening of the darkly comic Thunder Road, writer, director and star Jim Cummings himself stopped by for a Q&A session and talked about his experience making the film.
He was funny, friendly and had a number of fans in the crowd – people who’d watched some, or all of his other shorts. A shame he wasn’t rocking the same moustache he had during the movie though. Here are some highlights.
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Cummings cited the comic characters of Alan Partridge and David Brent, as well as Pixar movies, as some of the big inspirations behind Thunder Road’s blend of tragedy and comedy.
He also called the process of turning the 12-min short into a feature film ‘terrifying’, noting that his small production company spent months knocking on doors in Hollywood to try and get someone to back the project. Things didn’t pick up until they launched a Kickstarter campaign for the film about a year after the short’s release.
“The public took it seriously and we took ourselves seriously. […]We were like, November 1st is when we’re gonna shoot it. We sort of spread the rumour and made it true.”
The film ended up under budget and ahead of schedule thanks to a number of clever workarounds. One scene was set in a police station, which Cummings points out would usually require renting an actual police station for a hefty sum.
However, since they only needed the setting for a small scene, they instead just made use of an abandoned warehouse. ‘If you move the camera two inches to the left or just any other direction of where that frame is, [you’ll see] this completely fallen apart, broken warehouse.”
One noticeable difference between the short and the film is the titular song, which Jim’s character (also called Jim) sings and dances to in the short – in the movie, he can’t get the the cassette player to work and ends up dancing to no music.
Cummings notes that the change was brought about for two reasons. One is that they shot the scenes both ways on the same day – nine times with the song and nine times without. ‘The performance was so much better at the end of the day, when I was exhausted’ he says.
He liked how some of the takes without the song turned out so much, that he decided to go with them – a decision the producers were quite happy about since Bruce Springsteen’s lawyers weren’t so keen on the song being in the film.
Cummings called himself his biggest critic and explained the lengths he goes to during the creative process to ensure the quality of the work. He says he records a podcast of himself playing all of the characters and then listens to it to see if it works in an audio format.
The moderator asks if he’ll ever release that podcast. ‘No, absolutely not.’
On casting himself as the main character, the writer and director says that they were auditioning a different actor for the short, but the way he played the part didn’t find the right balance of tones. ‘It was just so sad, it wasn’t funny at all. […] It wasn’t really what I was thinking for [the part].”
Cummings recorded himself playing the character, in order to give the actor a better idea of what he had in mind for the role, but when they saw the footage, his producer and his cinematographer said ‘Dude, you gotta do it.’
‘I started growing my moustache the next day.’ added Cummings.
The rest, as they say, is history.
Thunder Road is distributed by Vertigo Releasing and comes out in the UK on May 31st, 2019.
Read Outtake’s review of the film here.