My Filmviews interviews… Director Kurt Kuenne

shuffle, dear zachary
Kurt Kuenne has written and directed several movies and documentaries, including Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father. His latest movie Shuffle was recently released on DVD.

The idea behind Shuffle is a very unique one about a man waking up being a different age each time. It almost feels like something you’d see on The Twilight Zone.
What was your inspiration for it?
The concept came out of a conversation I was having with a development executive in Hollywood who had read a script of mine called “Mason Mule” that had just won the Nicholl Fellowship in Screenwriting from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences at the time; he really liked my writing and was thinking about hiring me to write something for his studio. He had noticed from my previous work that I liked playing with structure, so we started chatting about ideas in which I could do that. “What about a guy who lives his life out of order?” was one of the ideas floated during that brainstorming session. I didn’t even know what the sentence meant, but I liked it, so I went home and came up with the outline for what eventually became “Shuffle”. It turns out that the exec I was talking to was looking for something more comedic in nature, so we parted ways on that particular idea, and I decided to go write it on my own. Continue reading

My Filmviews interviews… Director Roger Lay, Jr.


Roger Lay, Jr. was the cinematographer for the documentary 95 Miles To Go about a comedy tour comedian/actor Ray Romano did. He has also edited and directed several movies, including the upcoming documentary Toy Masters.

First of all, thank you for taking the time out for this interview. You were picked to film the road trip of Ray Romano and Tom Caltabiano. What was it like to join these two men? I understood you were still in film school.
I was about to finish up film school as the opportunity came along to join Ray and Tom on the road. I’d like to be able to tell you some inspiring story about Ray coming to the USC Film School and plucking me out to join him on the road, but that’s not really what happened. In fact I had already known both Ray and Tom for a year prior to the tour — if that hadn’t been the case Ray wouldn’t have felt comfortable with the idea of having me tag along and follow him around with a camera during his time on the road.

I’d actually met Tom at the USC film school a year earlier — he was there taking a summer class in TV directing since he wanted to make the jump from writing to directing on Everybody Loves Raymond and so he felt it would be good to take a multi-camera directing class before attempting that. We weren’t in the same class together but we wound up meeting up through one of our professors and we hit it off right away. We have a similar sense of humor and we both loved jazz so we started to hang out and soon after he introduced me to Ray when the show went back into production. A year later when I was looking to do an internship he helped me out by introducing me to the production people on the show and at the same type he got the idea to try and document his road tour with Ray so everything sort of fell into place. It was a case of being at the right place at the right time and having the skills they needed to pull this thing off. Continue reading

My Filmviews interviews… Director Ana Barredo

The Table

Ana Barredo is the director of the documentary The Table, about a group of people who help each other out in the challenging world of Hollywood. My review of the documentary can be found here. More information on the movie can be found on its website.

First of all, thank you for taking the time out for this interview. You were invited by Marc Zicree to attend a meeting of The Table after you met him during the production of the definitive Twilight Zone collection. What was your first impression of the group?

Marc knew I made movies on the side and has been mentioning this group to me ever since, but I didn’t get around to going to a meeting until 2009. It had been a while since I made a movie and quite frankly, I had no intention of making another one. The only reason I went to the meeting was just so I can finally tell Marc I went, and call it a day. Hearing the Table members’ projects, war stories, updates, etc. that evening got my creative juices flowing once again! By end of that first meeting, not only am I back to making movies, I found the perfect subject for my next project! Continue reading