hello i'm goldstein and welcome to another edition of focus on our focus tonight is on filmmaking and my guest tonight is mike messi who's coming to us from rhode island and mike has won twenty four awards as a screenwriter director producer and he's also a playwright and an acting coach he's his words have spanned things such including a regional emmy nomination for work as associate producer on the documentary haiti he's won two awards at and that's film festival for his works thanksgiving and breakfast with kurt and also he was the lead writer and also acted in a horror film the manner which was recently released by lion's gate in may which starred christina rob from dexter and kevin nash from magic mike so we're going to talking to him about filmmaking and his career filmmaking also what it takes to get into filmmaking and hopefully we'll have a good conversation mike thank you very much for killing away from your schedule show to to bob smith who played roger who was the father in your film thanksgiving and we were sending our condolences to the smith family and friends and all his you know circle that knew him so well so basically we're dedicating this on his behalf and i'm sure you'll be able to talk with him about that in a little while so first so let's get started with the first let's talk about you how you got into how you going to acting in filmmaking fifty when i discovered that if i took the v c r s and a boom box i could at my own music videos together using footage from t v or wrestling tapes and i made a music video for the elton john song rocket man junior high school class project and one of my have been here a camera we went around and we shot ourselves and we shot this kind of sit in module video game at the arcade and very archaic stuff by today's standards but really just kind of a do it yourself mentality i took a few production class in high school that we had a lot of fun with and then really put this on hold once again until college when a friend of mine moscow asked me if i had any ideas for a film that were low budget and they happen to have an idea for a low budget film which became man and you problem in this little story and this was a project that was about a year and a half to make me never had us it's what we would outlines and we made this literally on a no budget i mean we'll say no budget today but that can mean a couple of thousand dollars in have enough money to buy paint kick some nights and yet we made  experiences and really the words just ask me perseverance and just never quitting never surrender when you get some of your ideas for your movies like where to get the idea when you're thinking about thanksgiving when you get the idea for thanksgiving well we mention that my buddy bob smith on fortunately robert ellis smith just passed away last night and he's part of this great comedic turn by bob you know it was bob smith and nick gifford at the time  responded very honestly here love to work with you guys but i can't afford to just make a movie every time one wants to make a movie so if one of the both of you wants to produce meaning pay for it then we'll make a movie and to nick gifford's credit he kind of he had a father and son dynamic that i'm anyway and then i really fell on my catalogue of actors that i've worked with who is an actress that can bring a dynamic you guys that's a little bit different and who can i really trust to pull films and i was kind of looking for a project for her and i basically wrote that piece about an hour and fifteen minutes so that's what i came to that quick yeah once the dynamic there was l sometimes if i know which writer which which actors i'm writing for in those circumstances i can write a short film pretty quickly whether it's an hour a day a couple of days a feature film scripts were various reasons is exponentially tougher usually because of a bigger story arc you have more characters you have more settings you have more ages of nothing else a short film i'm pretty confident in my abilities to turn over a couple of hours or day or to a short film strip  a feature whether it's as a theater or a birth film is much longer more involved ok we're going to take a look right now at thanksgiving and we'll show a clip of thanksgiving so the audience gets a taste of the movie which as i said before won the awar the that's a film festival last year so let's take a look here's a clip from thanksgiving from mike messy going to be warm in here frank thought i'd take my jacket off sir i've got to call me dad yet let me introduce you to somebody  is everything ok dad projects right now let's talk a little bit about disregard the vampire if you give your strength on that this regard the vampire was a piece that i wrote in two thousand and thirteen around september of two thousand and thirteen it started as a thirty film and basically what happened is we had some issues with the weather we planned this thing for march of two thousand and fourteen and suddenly there was this giant snowstorm predicted which was unusual at that time for march and even more unusual the snowstorm never showed up i mean they were predicting this giant that a straw fix nope storm of the century and it would happen inches but of course in preparation and not wanting people to risk life and limb in this  situation i cancelled the day a shooting but there was other problems and the biggest problem honestly is that i schedule the movie around a certain actor and i even gave them the first day of shooting off and over that that you could kind of have its mechanisms up and ready to go we shot a whole day without the guy because we special them for the second day and that the end of the first day after we had already film everybody else i got a text and then eventually phone call from the gentleman that he couldn't make it that some dumb thing that happened with his work his day job someone passed away unexpectedly eccentric cetera so suddenly i was left without a lead actor or a film that was really on tight schedule as it is and long story short i was able to use a rock musician things for p o who came in and was just a house of fire a great guy and really salvage this piece for us by just putting himself into fire of production unfortunately because of the weather this is the replacement but not because of the replacement to be as the scheduling changes and other circumstances including audio problems and all types of things what really became of the situation was in my mind at the time i said the story behind the movie is more interesting than the actual movie but what we're filming is great but the fact that everybody is showing up at six or seven in the morning every day and working nine or ten at night why move on to another movie that recently screened at nasa film festival and that was breakfast with kirk and maybe you can talk a little bit about that and the inspiration behind that movie where as a writer sometimes by a script that might need a ten million dollar budget were or a five hundred thousand dollars budget even to be paid and sometimes what resources aren't available to me right now to be honest though seem that for what it together and we just shot this thing half a day and we were really inspired by the movie with a charter member i think it's us terms of endearment or also the one with the this the son who passed  away ordinary people i believe it's all and just just really trying to get into the dark drama of this but really it's based from a comedy and what it's really about is the of mother and the s dealing with the loss of this son's twin brother who's kirk we don't see kirk we see chris that i play and we see a picture of kurt who's the den brother and they're both kind of living with the memory of what kurt gotta mean and that's what this family is dealing with right right and i know that it was well received as we discussed earlier but i think one of the recent movies that we talked about earlier which was released by lions gate may twenty eighteen you know is is the manor and there's an author a title called anders manner which was starring you know christina robinson from dexter and kevin nash for magic mike he tell us a little about how the film got made and the theme of it and you know and these guys glenn jeffrey and matt o'connor to be exact they had a story they had a kind of like a back eighty four film they found my buddy tommy was a pretty well established director out of rhode tommy was very serious with these guys we got a teaser in the summer of two thousand and sixteen a five minute teaser which is really quite good and then about six months later the cousins said hey tommy we want to make the whole thing what's our next step and to be television or the movie the craft if played dr tripping act which was a character that i named after a doctor from my own experiences in life so there's a lot of cuts to the bone real life things that even when you're collaborating with or five other people tribute of lee you still say hey i can hold on to this you know i could hold on to this part of it you know i mean those are really cool it's good so influences or teachers that you'd like to mention as far as you know any role models or who has been a big influence in your life well there's a gun in tom kane that i'd like to point out tom's kind of advisor to the film world tom was a producer on the show direct but not a lot of people want to be you or i want to be a first aid and tom is a master of those really hard hitting nuts and bolts down and dirty positions so tom let a workshop that i knew about i was worse manager for the workshop in providence and that was ten years ago and we're still good friends and he's in seattle now barry primus was knocking coach mine there is there's a house afire man he was on  books so people really if they want to get involved in the film industry they don't necessarily have to have an uncle or a cousin who's already doing it but they have to get educated and effect can come from a book or from the from the website master class which i totally recommend it's a great deal and i don't get paid for them for mentioning them but there's a lot of ways to get educated in film and it are and even now lou the last two years i've learned more about theater than i ever knew before because i've been doing hands on stuff in theaters well let's talk a little more than that so in the world of theater what i've been doing well in two thousand and seventeen a good friend of mine michael was do something he called play in a day out of manic massachusetts and mike i don't want to speak for him but i will little bit he got sick of the local actors playing that there weren't opportunities and so michael set up a thing where the twenty four hour period playwrights would white  that minute script directors would be assigned and actors would be assigned and we'd sell tickets to the audience you know for ten or fifteen purposes shot the audience would talk and see the shows in the navy six shows  like a set up to of seven to ten minutes each and a lot of film actors from new england who never really did it or were forced to get some either acting for my part i was mostly a director or a writer and a host of these events and what it really caused me to do lou was challenge myself as a writer what can i write this venue which had a very high so then i'm learning things like ok the more that the actors are forced to direct it right to the audience like a soliloquy to the audience the better my play is going to be you know because the actors are forced to communicate with the back row and if they have a good director assigned to him to learn that or so in a very it's last amount of time what works and what doesn't your life better and i'm happy to say that some of these shows some of these short scripts have been picked up by a group in orange connecticut as well and do one of my shows who's your daddy and group in wrestling why pro wrestling well pro wrestling is a great combination of actual athletic ability and fiacha so if there are if there's ever a marriage or a combination of actual athleticism real fighting and a mix of cali that's pro wrestling and even in the world of pro wrestling there are so many divisions you know sometimes people say pro wrestling  they think of whether they think of john scene or the rock or roman reigns or a whole hogan report also marty you know but there's so much more to it there's wrestling in japan there's all women's groups out of chicago there's local groups in massachusetts and i used to be a part of i've wrestled myself so there's there's different groups it's not just the w w e w e does their sports entertainment for me right now i've been doing  business of wrestling is so big that they're taking money from the saudi arabian government and shows the biggest downside is not allowed by the saudi arabian government to let women wrestle on these shows so i called to task for what i perceive as my pockets not a lot of people are going to do that and i did that in a very public forum very very loudly in terms of wrestling so when i see something morally bankrupt or morally corrupt with pro wrestling all speak up about it and some people don't want to hear it because that's their escapism entertainment right it's my escapism to what i suspect equal to be ethical no matter what's going on because that's just a way to be in my opinion but who knows not everybody has projects that they are working on and for real wrestling as is a whole nother world i just said and there's many aspects of it but before we get off the air can i i'd like to talk to you about your projects you know what's on the her for her mike what projects you got looking at and you know what helped you need financing some of these projects well right now the distance from avalon project to doing what they have on stage and also as a film it's said men there hasn't been a funny show like the producers in a long time but i'm going to write it and i wrote this piece called margins that i started years ago and just in this past year i rewrote it to kind of update the script and that's just a fun  low budget mainstream you know i've got a script that the rock could be and but i've also got scripts that would work just as well for your local actors or undiscovered talents however you want to put it so i'm flexible mike hopefully anybody who's listening will be contacting you and taking you up on your offer but that's all the time we have for for tonight but i want to thank you for coming on and sharing your thoughts and good luck in the future with all the projects i'm sure we hearing more from you