The Past Is Ever-Present in Season 4 of ‘BoJack Horseman’
For better or worse — most often for better — BoJack Horseman, both the show and its titular character, have always been deeply invested in the past, and generally speaking, the idea of time itself. After all, for much of the series, BoJack is still riding the high of starring in a very famous TV show, and from almost the beginning, we’re brought back into the past (1987, 1997, and 2007, most notably) to see what influence the events of the past have on the present. And, looking forward, if you’re damaged and badly broken, do you even have a shot at happiness? If not, why bother trying?
These themes are just as present in BoJack’s fourth season, if not more so. The audience has the opportunity to travel even further back with BoJack than we have before — albeit not in a full period-specific episode, exactly — but in a way that truly recontextualizes what we know about BoJack’s family and pays off in unexpected ways. BoJack has never hesitated to go to dark places, so naturally the audience shouldn’t expect anything different this season. But one of the best things about BoJack is that it rarely leaves you hanging in this darkness, alone, for too long. There’s often a great joke around the corner — or at the very least, an act break.
WHAT WILL TODDLERS EAT? Food used to be one of your top five things—remember brunch?—but toddlers ruin food. You try to serve them healthy things, lovingly crafted, only to see them reject or smash them. Just a short bit ago, you were trying so damned hard to get them off the bottle, and now eating [...]
Splitsider - the comedy insider’s site for what’s what - has an excerpt from my book, Man Vs Child: One Dad’s Guide to the Weirdness of Parenting “What Will Toddlers Eat?” and “Food Can Be Fun (Sounding)”
If you’re cheap and only like to read pieces of books in excerpts, this is for you! But if you like it, think about picking up a copy.
I recently interviewed the makers of Nirvanna the Band the Show for Splitsider. Below, for superfans, are much longer edits of the interviews.
Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol
How would you describe the new series to current fans and to new people?
Matt:
To people who knew the web series, we say it's the exact same show. Matt and Jay are still trying to get a show with the Rivoli. Picture it as more episodes of the original series.
And the people who have never seen the show before, we try not to say very much. What's interesting about the show is that it's masquerading as this stupid sitcom about nothing. It's pretending to be something extremely innocuous. Explaining that it's really this crazy show where there are no rules, and that we're trying to have our characters do things that you can't ever do on TV—that's very difficult, to describe a show that way to somebody and have them take you seriously.
We actually try to make it just as difficult to approach as we did with the web series. I think it’s more approachable in the sense that it's structured like normal television, whereas the web series just wasn't. Now because it's actually on TV, I think that we've established trust with audiences in a way that we never could've before.
There’s a lot of recognizable music in the show, like the Jurassic Park and Star Wars soundtracks.
Matt:
Making the feature films that we did, we learned an amazing amount about Fair Use and what you legally can use without permission. We're at the tip of the spear in terms of what you can get away with legally on television. You'll notice that in the first five episodes of the show, three of them are scored wall-to-wall with John Williams music.
Is it the same with the Ben Folds stinger?
Matt:
That we're paying for. And believe it or not, Ben Folds stars in a major episode in season two, where he replaces Jay in the band. We struck up enough of a relationship with him that he was happy to give us that song for every episode of the show.
Season two? You're already shooting that?
Matt:
We've already shot season two and some of season three. Think about it from our perspective. We're basically ten friends in Toronto that are all working out of the same house. It's not like we need to get permission or do even too much planning to go and shoot something, so because we don't need to run things by the network, and we don't need to pour a ton of preparation into each thing, it makes so much sense for us to just be ready to go out and shoot if Jay and I come up with something.
Yesterday for example, we said, "Oh, we should really do an episode about the stock market based on the movie Hook." I'll play Robin Williams from the first act of Hook, and Jay will play Jack, my son. We're talking about shooting that episode at the end of the month.
Because it's the same group of friends who are writing, editing, and shooting the show, you don't need to catch anybody up. It's not like when the footage gets delivered they're like, "Well, what the fuck is this? Season three? What the hell are you guys doing?" There is no like, boss who's saying, "You guys can't do this." And the network is really trying to make it so that we can do this the right way.
When we talked about the web series, you said you guys would do a lot of re-shoots and re-edits. You would re-upload new versions of episodes months later.
Matt:
It's worse than before! Jay and I are more guilty of doing that now than we were then. In the process of making these two films, and working on this show as closely with Jay as I've been doing, you realize that that was the key to good work. We talk about it as though it's this scientific process as opposed to the creative process. Jay and I now recognize that that exchange of being like, "Okay, we shot it, it's not quite perfect, let's put it together ... Okay, let's completely change this now"—now that's a part of our creative process. We don't see that as a mistake. We see that as step one of the writing. So we aren't even into the hardcore writing of an episode until we've already shot the entire episode.
Jay and I, we just did a first pass screening of an episode where we steal a kid from the sick kids hospital and steal his "Make a Wish", and we take him to an amusement park. We shot that episode in the summer, edited it up until now, re-shot a bunch of stuff for it two weeks ago, and completely and totally changed the story twice. Just this week did we watch it and say "Wow, okay. Yeah, we've got something here." The number of times it changed made it what it is.
I'm really glad to hear that that process is still part of it. I would have thought you’d lose that going to TV.
Matt:
Dude, we should've lost that part of the process, and that's what we found when we started pitching similar shows to networks in the States. There's no way in hell that they were going to go for that, because they wanted to control the production of the show. No production company in the world that's trying to turn a profit is going to be like, "Yeah, we're going to keep production on this one episode open for a year." That's ridiculous, right? You go shoot it for two days, you edit it for maybe a week, a month, and then you deliver.
Jay:
It helps that our whole team are friends. It's a lot easier. We can look at each other and be very honest when something's not coming together. When everybody's bleeding for the show, we're not happy until it's good. There's no one that's going to be pumping the brakes saying, "Well, you know, this is good enough. This is good enough and I want to be home for dinner tonight."
Matt:
That is what works everywhere else. But we for some reason have found the respect for one another to be like, "Okay we shot something, it's not working, and that's good. We're happy that it's not working, because we're going to use the part of it that worked to create something new that’s different than what we all decided would be funny." We're faced with the fact that what we thought would be funny on the page, or just in conversation, is not funny or compelling or fill-in-the-blank when we shot it and cut it together. We're going to use that as the jumping-off point for the real episode.
You actually see that breakthrough of using production and editing as writing, and viewing it as writing, and not being down on yourself, and not feeling like, "Oh, we failed. Oh, we're stupid or we can't shoot." None of that language enters the model at all. It's, "All right, yeah, okay, so, for step one what did we find? Oh, we found this and this and this? Great. Let's link them together with step two."
Jay:
The episodes are like Frankenstein monsters that go through makeover after makeover until they’re gorgeous.
Matt:
I can give you a perfect example from the pilot. This is a testament to how a team like this can come together to really make an episode work. In the pilot, Jay and I decide that we want to take a photograph with us with cigarettes, because we think that will help make us look cool. It was a very stupid idea, and eventually those cigarettes end up burning down a banner with the very picture that we took of ourselves.
Now, so we knew that we needed cigarettes so that we could light that banner on fire. What we had written was, we ask people on the street about cigarettes, and hopefully one of them will say that cigarettes are relaxing. And then Matt and Jay are, later are like, "Okay, so I'm really stressed out. How can I relax? Oh wow. That person we saw in act one told us that cigarettes will relax you, so that'll do it." So that's what we had written.
We went out and shot all this stuff with real strangers. We got footage of people telling us, "Oh yeah, cigarettes will relax you." Then when we edited it together, it just wasn't thrilling. There was nothing fun about it. So we thought, "How else can we do this?"
So Rob Hyland, one of our editors, said, "Well, you know in the montage, you guys watch Jurassic Park for fun." It was just a little throw-away moment where we watch Jurassic Park and are having fun. What he did was, he used all of the footage of Samuel L. Jackson smoking to give us the "cigarettes relax you." So from that moment, we worked backwards and made Jurassic Park the central idea of the episode that we connected everything together with. It's way funnier. It's way more on-concept with what the show is, and in my opinion, it's the best moment in the whole episode.
Jay:
We did stuff like that all the time.
Matt:
It'll be somebody with a great idea that's always too late. It's always a, "Boy, it sure would've been nice to have known that when we were shooting." Our model accommodates that. The episodes are always open until we deliver. If somebody's watching the show, and they have a great idea, we go do it.
It seems like you're also making a lot of practical choices so that it's affordable and possible to go re-shoot.
Matt:
Yeah. I think advice for any young creators doing anything is, own your production company. That doesn't mean you need to actually start a production company, but you need to be the person who the budget is going through. You can't be service providers for another company that is trying to have things delivered in a certain way at a certain time. That's how you get fucked. You need to be in total control of your production model.
[For the web series] Jay and I owned our cameras, we owned the microphones, and that was a small thing. We didn't really think about it, but it was huge in terms of our model, because then we could go shoot whenever we wanted to. We never needed to think about production versus non-production. You have to meld all these things together to teach yourself that you don't need to make a big thing about going out to shoot. It shouldn't be a big thing. It should be the same as sitting down with a pen and writing, right?
If you remove the sanctity of what people think of production as, then all of a sudden, you get rid of all that bad voodoo that's on this. "Oh shit, we're spending money. Oh God, we're running out of time. We're running out of daylight. We gotta go now, we've got 10 people on set."
The show has a much bigger budget than the web series did, but in terms of how we shoot, it's the exact same model. The cameras are functioning identical apart from being HD cameras, and the mics are better mics, but otherwise everything is, we still don't use studio lights. Because we built the set, Jared and Andy set up the house with practical lights everywhere. They've got lights and lamps all over the place. It's all practical lighting.
So you're not lighting Jay, and then lighting Matt.
Matt:
Exactly. Never. I would never. And because Jared's been shooting this show since we were kids, he knows that we can't take two minutes to reset a light, because then the scene's dead.
Jay:
They've developed a good counterpoint to our dramatic style. Because it's unscripted, Matt and I know what we've got to do to get a certain read to facilitate some sort of plot point. But we want to be able to use the space as freely as possible, and not be constrained to a frame or something that the camera guys are telling us. So we use the space. Jared is so used to doing his sort of ballet-like dance, jumping around the room and hopping over couches in real-time. I would say that's how we spend most of our time.
Matt:
To be honest with you, when you watch the old web show, I think one of the great joys of it, is that you feel like it's out of control. That you're watching this show made by these kids in Toronto at the time, and you're like, "Well, what are they going to do?" An episode starts and you really have no idea what you're going to see these characters do. I think one of the biggest things that happened, was when Jay burned down that person's apartment. It was like, "I can't believe that. I can't believe this show went there." That was something that we wanted to keep up.
We really want people to sit in to listen to the pilot in particular, and be like, "Okay, so this is a super low-budget, super stupid comedy about two people who are obviously friends, and they're just going to try to make us laugh with the dumbest shit that they can come up with." Then we take it to these unbelievable "You Can't do That on Television" places, and try to defy the expectation that the framing, the sound, and the lighting set up. We try to tell you, "Don't worry, this show is a piece of shit, and you don't need to take it seriously. This show will never do anything interesting, because it's just a stupid comedy. You can relax. In fact, you can even turn it off, because if you don't want to watch this, don't worry, nothing fun is going to happen here."
Then when all of a sudden these insane things start happening, you can't believe it's the same show, and it really does make it feel like it's out of control, hopefully. That's one of the things we're doing very consciously, is we're trying to use the budget that we have to actually do things that are unbelievable.
You were talking earlier about pitching to other networks. How far did you ever get with any other network?
Matt:
We had a pilot deal with FX last summer to make a show. We were actually really happy about it, and then out of nowhere Vice offered us a full season of any show we wanted. So we thought, "Well, are you willing to let us do sort of whatever we want?" They said yes, and it was like the exact right timing, because if that offer had come like one month later, we would've been making this other show.
One thing for sure that everywhere you go when you try to make a TV show, they're going to try and oversee it every step of the way. Which is smart! It just goes against everything about how we make this show.
Submitting scripts is just so meaningless. If we submit a script for the Nirvanna the Band, there's no way the final product is going to resemble anything about it. It's not indicative of anything that they're going to get. With Nirvanna the Band, we submitted scripts or outlines for ten episodes, didn't think about them. Then we started delivering the episodes, and the network was like, this is nothing close to what you told us it was going to be. Luckily they liked it, but it was definitely a learning experience for them where they were like, "Oh I see. So, these scripts mean nothing, right?" We kind of had to be honest with ourselves and say, "Well, they don't mean nothing. They are an honest departure, like that's where we're starting, but we're trying to deliver you guys a good show, not the show we pitched."
The thing is that they gave us the chance to do it our way, and then show them that, "Hey, this is what we're going after here." When we showed them even the earliest sort of roughs of one of the episodes, they went over really well. Spike Jonze, an executive producer and president of Viceland, responded really well to it. He's just great. He saw that we were kind of in the same vein. They gave us a chance to do it our way. They still make notes here and there, but they're very good at it. It's not like any network that we've worked with before.
In fact, I think it's because of Spike that we even have the deal that we have. It's rare to have somebody with as much creative experience, and who's so unbelievably respected in the industry, as the head of programming. Normally it's a bureaucrat or an industry person who's making these calls. But because it's someone like Spike, I mean, who's going to argue with him at the network? It's almost like we couldn't make the show unless he was there saying, "No, they can do it."
He talks to us about how they would do things with Jackass. His producer Derek Freda is also giving us the most practical advice on how to get things done on a day-to-day basis. Those two have so much experience in this space, that anything they tell us to do, we take very seriously.
Do you two argue as much as you did back in the making of the web series? Matt would talk about the "no but" approach, where you argue over what the story is, and once you can convince each other to buy in, that's when things start rolling.
Matt:
Yeah, that's what every single episode is. I think Jay and I do that less now, because we're a lot more on the same page in terms of what a good story is, but with every single episode there is a major convincing element to it that works into the plot. I need to be pitching something that's a little bit too far, and Jay needs to have a slightly more sensible attitude over it.
Jay:
If I'm resistant to an idea, Matt will snap into action and in real-time pitch me harder, and it'll refine itself right there on the spot. Just because he was chasing some piece of magic that maybe wasn't even fully thought out yet. Likewise if I'm pitching to Matt. We don't go forward with it until we convince each other.
Matt:
One of the reasons that Jay and I were at each other's throats so much back when we were younger, was because he and I were doing everything with only Jared. It was a three-man operation. Now Jay and I only need to debate the creative side of the show, because all the hard work is being done by other people. Matt Miller, our producer, is in charge of all the shit that used to make Jay and I fight one another. We're in the office right now with the production team. They go after clearances. They figure out how to clear music. They talk to the lawyers. They figure out locations.
I would say our biggest line item obviously is staff, and the next is music. So we spend all of our money on staffing and music, and then what's left at the end we make the TV show with. Even then, it's like way more money than we made the web series for, so they still feel it. Also, because the show is so easy to shoot, we're really good at making a small amount of money look bigger than any TV show.
[The pilot] cost probably a tenth of what an episode of any other sitcom on TV would cost—a sitcom that’s a bunch of people standing around talking to one another where nothing dynamic happens. You would think that a show where we're running all around a city in twenty-five different locations, lighting things on fire, sneaking floats into parades, it seems like that would cost way more, but it's nowhere close.
Since you guys are doing everything so fast and loose, has anything really gone wrong in a shoot? Has anyone literally been injured?
Matt:
Our team is too cautious to let us do anything like that. The most dangerous thing that's happened is probably me driving that truck.
Jay:
I almost got beat up too.
Matt:
Oh yeah at Sundance.
Jay:
I was trying to get into a party that Matt is in, which is in character. I'm trying to get into this prestigious film party, and I'm showing these fake credentials, and I've got this attitude where I belong in there. I have to play that for the part, and the bouncer's just having none of it. I'm not being rude, per se, but just being pretty ignorant, and kind of pushing. Finally he kind of snaps on me, takes a step forward and saying, "All right. You know what? I'm not letting you in here buddy. I'm about to throw you over the edge." When we went up to him afterwards, and told him, "Hey, it was just for a shoot," he's like, "I don't give a damn. I'll throw you over the banister here."
It sounds like even in the midst of doing publicity, you guys are also still in production?
Matt:
Yeah. We're actually shooting a few little tiny pieces to fill in one episode of season one that we've been working on for a while. And we're shooting a bunch of episodes for season two, just sort of piecemeal here and there. We plan to be working on this show for the next year and a half.
Afterwards, we're going to go make a movie. Right now it's a movie about Albert Einstein building a time machine to send an assassin back in time to kill Hitler, but everything goes wrong. It's a bit like The Bourne Identity, except with an assassin going to kill Hitler. It’s not in the style of the things that Jay and I have been doing before. It's not a fake documentary.
I remember you were working on an adaptation of Lord of the Flies.
Matt:
That's funny, yeah. I was. But as soon as I realized how much work it was going to be to do all these things, I was like, "All right. I'll do this when I have time."
I think that the way things worked out, we were given the best possible opportunity we ever could've asked for, and it only made sense that once we got that, it would be like, "Okay, so I think this is all I'm going to do, and I'm not going to worry about all these other things.” I want to do the work that I love, and right now that is making Nirvanna the Band the Show all the time, and not thinking about anything else.
Matt Miller and Jared Raab
On how the team came together:
Matthew:
I knew Jared, who worked on the first feature I made. We had gone to the same film school and when I was working with him, he was also working on the web show. I remember he gave me the DVDs one day and he was like, "You should watch them." And I threw it aside and I'm like, "This is ridiculous, I don't even like Nirvana that much." He was like, "No, no, it's not about Nirvana." And then I finally watched it and I thought it was the funniest thing I've ever seen and I demanded to meet Matt immediately. I met Matt about it, in 2009. I believe his words were, "I'm done with Nirvana the Band, I never want to revisit that material. I have this school-shooting comedy that I'm really interested in making." And then I ended up producing The Dirties with these guys, and Operation Avalanche.
On the production process:
Matthew:
The writers budget line versus the editorial budget line is probably a total inverse of what any Hollywood production’s would be. They spend a lot of money on the writing development, but that's the cheapest part of our process. Even production is pretty cheap. Where we spent all of our money is on the ability to re-shoot, and restructure and re-shoot again, and re-cut. The turnaround time is—we shot an episode at Sundance literally a year ago and we just wrapped it this year. These episodes are taking about 10 to 12 months, almost like if we were animating them or something. TV is used to turning things around pretty quickly. We're an odd show.
Jared:
We came out of a film school experience that was extremely collaborative. It was such a shock to me when I graduated film school and learned the industry didn't work like that. It wasn't groups of close friends working together on projects they really cared about.
[Working with the Nirvanna team] felt like kind of recreating that quintessential film school experience: working those long hours, down to the wire, trying to make something really great and inexpensive, giving your own sanity in some cases. The other thing is that I'm a huge music fan and I grew up with music of the 60s from my parents. The music scene really works that way, where collaborations are familiar, where everyone plays on each other's records.
I look other collaborative [film] teams and they have a very different setup in terms of directors’, cinematographers’, and producers’ relationships. There seems to be this rigidity that doesn't always serve the personalities well. In general filmmaking would be pretty well served by adopting a few more relaxed methods of crewing up and dividing up the labor.
I would say the way that we do things is not about having no rules, it's just a completely different set of rules. Like having no bad vibes.
Matthew:
Yeah, we're a very vibe-dependent institution. From my perspective, the producer's job on every other production is always saying no. To me, no is the last resort, which is hard sometimes if creatively I disagree with an idea or I'm looking at the budget or I'm looking at our schedule. It's very easy to say no. “No” costs nothing. Nobody's putting their neck on the line with a no. It also doesn't lead to the best results.
My number one rule is to not say no. To sort of figure out how we can do the stuff that we want to do. That involves things like always leaving time and money for re-shoots. We always talk about how crazy it is, that people don't re-shoot stuff because they have to deliver, or because they're out of money. It's integral to us that we have that flexibility later in the game.
It's as simple as not settling. It's easy to say, "Well, you know, we tried and this was the best we could do. And we made six pretty good episodes so if this one's not that great." We take this stuff pretty personally and we think that we're going to have to live with it forever. We all feel that we've been given this tremendous opportunity and we don't want to fuck it up. It's ridiculous to talk about this show like that because it's sort of such a silly irreverent show. But if we're going to kill ourselves and sacrifice everything—our personal relationships, time with our families and friends, significant others—then it's got to be a good reason to be doing all that.
Another rule is that you can't just not like something, whether it's a story idea or at the concept stage, or something in an edit. You can pitch a solution, or an idea. Again, it's very easy to say, "I don't like that." It's much harder to say, "Well what if...” or “Can we try it like this?” or “What happens when..." It leads to positive energy.
Jared:
Another is, people are constantly eating their own ego. Inevitably I think, people get so proud and so happy with the work that they're doing, because they're putting so much into it. But you must constantly check your ego. I think that happens in the edit, it happens in shooting.
As a cinematographer, I don't even have words to describe how little ego I can have with how footage looks. It has to look so bad. I think that that's something that you may not have to do on a show that you are as proud of otherwise. I think normally people would say, "Oh yeah, I did the best work I can do and it shows on screen and you can attribute this piece of it directly to my work.” It's a show where no one is really going to be able to detect who did what and how it came together, and I think everyone is getting very comfortable with that idea.
Matthew:
Yeah, we're used to having Matt take credit for all of our genius.
On maintaining the fluid approach on their biggest shoot:
Matthew:
Ninety percent of the time, the production consists of our field producer Matt Grayson running around the city with Matt and Jay and Jared. They're so good at doing their thing, and Jared's so good at giving notes and feedback—just kind of thinking on the fly where it's not even like he's thinking about it, it's just like muscle memory.
On the last episode of our first season, that's the closest we got on the show to kind of making a movie. We had over a hundred people on set between cast, crew, background actors, security, etc. That was humongous [for us]. Suddenly it's like, "Okay, we only have this location for a certain amount of time." You're faced with all the challenges that a regular production is faced with. Keeping the flow, and keeping what is special and unique and natural about this process alive in the face of all that, is really about tuning everything else out. It's on those days that the role definition and everybody understanding what it is that they're supposed to be doing is the most important.
Jared:
Interestingly enough we did it the same way, where everyone was throwing in notes, and it worked out okay. It went pretty smoothly considering we were doing a much more high-budget model. There are people on set that work on normal productions, and they were shocked to find out even who the director was.
Matthew:
I would argue that we have just as much fluidity even then, because the on-set portion of the show and of these movies is tiny in comparison to the post-production process. Curt Lobb, the lead editor, has been on set maybe three days the entire production. But he's one of the most integral collaborators we have and his voice is the stronger on the show than anybody's, Just because of how he is able to influence the show through the edits.
On how the show came to be:
Matthew:
Matt met with some of the folks [at FX] and they really liked what we had done. They committed to giving us a little bit of money to shoot a pilot or a test reel. That was not Nirvanna the Band, it was a completely different property. We really like the people there and obviously FX is a terrific brand, and we like so much of the stuff on that network.
Then this network Viceland was watching, specifically Viceland Canada. We had tried to do stuff with Vice prior to when we did the show, and it just never ended up working out. So when they came knocking it seemed like, okay we could go and make a season of Nirvanna the Band, and keep everybody who had [worked] on Avalanche, and they would have jobs. Or we could go and do this pilot and develop it for who knows how long and maybe get nothing at the end of it. That seemed like a no-brainer to us. I think FX was disappointed but I also think they understood. I hope that that door is still open.
Jared:
Part of what made the show happen simply was coming on the heels of Avalanche and The Dirties, which was made with the [production] model being part of the form. So the creative depended on the model, and the model depended on the creative. I think that that was part of the picture in the very beginning: "Oh, not only is this a show, it's a whole new system of doing things." And there's a team that is well versed in how to pull things off in this crazy style, where we'll be shooting right until we deliver. It's less scary because we had these two examples to point to, where it did work and the work was finished.
Matthew:
With Nirvanna the Band, we were never going to make a pilot. We’d get stuck in development, the executives wouldn't get the show, and they would try to morph the show into something else. Our argument was always, "We don't need a pilot, there’s a ten-episode web show. If you like that, then let's go, and if you don't then we'll go somewhere else.”
On working with Vice:
Matthew:
I'm sure if any other producer looked at what we did they would think we were crazy, and a lot of them do. Which is why it was so great to partner with Vice on this show, because of their background and their executives like Spike Jonze and Derek Freda. These guys come from making stuff like Jackass and shooting in the real world with real people, shooting without permits, getting clearances retroactively—things that are integral to our process. We're not needing to explain every step of the way. They get it.
On the show’s team:
Jared:
Pretty much everyone on the team is either somebody who was there from before the features, like me or Matt and our other producer Matt Grayson. It's gotten a little bigger, so we've been able to bring people in. Almost everybody was already a collaborator of a collaborator. There are very few fresh hires. I'd say there are almost no open-call positions.
Matthew:
It's pretty much twelve people who work on the show every day, specifically on the show. And then there's a roster of people over at Vice that are working on the show. Everybody either basically went to York University at sometime in the early aughts (which is myself, and Jared, and Jonathan, and Matt Grayson), [or is someone] I used to teach. Our three editors were all students at a place called Humber College here in Toronto. When we needed help on The Dirties, we had no money, so I went to these students who were clearly top of their class and really sharp. They came and worked for free, happy to be in assistant editor positions and stuff like that. When we got money to make Avalanche they all elevated up the ladder and now basically the entire editorial department of our show are my former students.
Jared:
And there’s people from the Toronto film scene. It's a very tight knit group. We're working very closely together and it's an incredibly hard show to make and I think, not only would it be difficult to work with people for whom it was just a job, it would be impossible.
On influences:
Matthew:
I grew up obsessed with American Zoetrope and the independent film movement of the 70s in the US: George Lucas with Frances Coppola, and Brian De Palma, and Walter Murch, and all these guys living together and working together. When I came to film school that was my dream. Then I had some experiences working on bigger productions with more money. It was unionized. I was getting yelled at for moving a sandbag because somebody else was supposed to do it, and that’s how they were going to get overtime. That didn't appeal to me at all.
I remember at the beginning of 2000s, like when David Gordon Green was making those first couple movies. George Washington and All the Real Girls, he seemed to be working with the same crew and roster of actors over and over again. Then he and Jody Hill were doing their thing. Much in the same way, the Apatow kids all sort of double up. I don't think it's quite the same, because I suspect it's not quite as collaborative. Literally we could have an intern give a note on a cut, because that's a safe space and they feel like they can do that. And it’s hard to get to that.
Advice for aspiring filmmakers:
Matthew:
Just make stuff. When I was finishing film school—I’m a little bit older than everybody else, and we were still shooting on film, and we needed to get grants and equipment and all these things. You kind of had to know what you were doing because that technology was more cumbersome and challenging.
All of those barriers have disappeared, so it's kind of like ... It used to be like, "Oh this person made a great short film, let's give them $500,000 to make a first feature." That would never happen in a million years anymore. Now you have to come to the table with that first feature. What Matt did, which was really smart, was he didn't make that first feature right away. He was like, "Oh I'm just going to go make a web show." It happened to be, in my opinion, a fantastic web show.
Jared:
Then remember, after we made that web show, we thought, "Man, we made this great show. Okay, now people will come knocking, we'll get to make a real TV show."
Matthew:
Nobody cared.
Jared:
It took ten years for that real TV show to come. Ten years of working.
Matthew:
Ten years and two movies. Just keep making stuff. It's also important to finish stuff, because it's very easy to write something and then not make it. Or shoot something, and then stop halfway through or not finish the edit. It's so important to see it through to the end and to screen it for people. If you saw the first cut of either of [our] movies or any of these episodes you would think it was just garbage, the worst thing you've ever seen. You've got to finish it, you can't just give up halfway through.
BoJack Horseman creator Raphael Bob-Waksberg has been fielding questions from fans via his Tumblr this week, and his most interesting response yet comes from an anonymous question that referred to a female character (a crocodile voiced by Kulap [...]
