You had written four short films before your feature, how do you think those short films helped The Guatemalan Handshake?

Well three of the shorts were made in school (when I was in Ohio) and one of them was made when I was out of school. That one was called Hillbilly Robot. I pretty much just stuck with the short film thing, I never really thought about doing a feature right off the bat. There were other folks in school that were attempting that and… I just didn’t have the money, I barely had the money to make a short film. To do the short films… it wasn’t me, it wasn’t like I was making the decision between feature or short.

After I had the first of my short films done there were people from Paramount that I’d met with that would say “You don’t need to make anymore short films. You just need to go to Hollywood and start selling scripts.” It was just something that… it just didn’t click with me. That device just didn’t seem right. I know people have gotten jobs off of short films but to me it just felt like… I had much more to pursue and to figure out what I wanted to say. I was like nineteen or something. So it just felt like I need to keep figuring out what I wanted to do and what kind of films I wanted to make.

So I finished two more films and they just kept getting stranger and I kept experimenting a little more with structure. The last film Hillbilly Robot was made out of school just to see what would happen outside of a school environment where everything is provided for you… and because I just wanted to keep making things. So that was almost a test like “Ok… how low of a budget can I make something that looks really good and that I like a lot and that’s you know out there with no resources provided.” That was kind of a test for the feature knowing that… Then once that film was done, I took that and had some really good experiences with it and actually had one of the worst experiences of my life at South by South West…that made me say “Ok, I’m done with short films. The next thing I have to do is a feature.”

So what was that bad experience you had?

It’s really hard when you’re making films that don’t follow a narrative structure… It’s just something that I’m interested in a lot and something I like to watch and I question it a lot you know? I mean it’s so hard to make just a regular indie film and get it sold and stuff…Why would you make something that people are saying that they’re not even buying and telling you that right up front? Why pursue that? I don’t know, I mean you ultimately in the writing stages you say why am I writing something that’s… why would I even think about spending this time writing something I don’t even want to watch. So you have to make something you want to watch. You have to make something that you’re ultimately going to want to sit down and watch… and unfortunately (laughs) these are the kind of films I want to watch.

So I made this short film that was, pretty far out there, it’s pretty experimental but still it’s a comedy and it’s got a great mood and all these amazing places and people that we found to put in it. We’d show it sometimes and you’d see that division of the audience, people would really love it because they haven’t seen anything like that, or there’d be people that were completely left as if they’re watching something in a different language and it was just blinking lights you know?

That reaction was really heartbreaking when they see it because you just want to take the person and rub their shoulders and say “It’s all right… just relax. No one’s trying to alienate you.” It just like seeing a confused kid in class who doesn’t get the lesson and is just freaking out because everyone else is.

So South by southwest, we go there and we’re in this midnight screening at the Alamo, which is like the greatest movie theater in the country, and so I’m really excited about it I’m thinking, “Man, the midnight show is great for this film.” So it fills up and Harry Knowles from Aint it cool news is there and the guy from FilmThreat is there, you know just a bunch of people, just completely packed.

The movie starts showing and I’m realizing that they’re all like a minute long or two minutes long and they’re all like web animation things. Like really funny one joke kind of things… they’re in and out. People are getting drunk and they’re laughing and then my film comes on which is 25 minutes long and programmed in the middle of these short, short, animated, really funny, poop joke kind of movies which are great but… putting this (Hillbilly Robot) in the middle of it was horrible.

On top of that, they had dubbed the tape from one format to another and it picked up these audio pops that would sound like a microphone being unplugged. Just these loud pops and the picture would break-up… like every twenty to thirty seconds. And all the stereo was mixed to one channel, so half the music wasn’t coming out. So on top of it being a confusing movie, it was just a horrible experience. But no one else there seemed to notice there were technical glitches going on. I mean people started talking during it…

So I got up in front of the crowd (for Q & A’s) and some guy who had made this one minute short, that really wasn’t the best, patted me on the back and said “it’s alright, your movie was very interesting…”

That experience was just like ugh… you know you kind of got to be in control of when people walk into the theater and walk out. And that all hit me… What’s cool is that I thought that whole audience wanted to lynch me but a guy just sent me an email like a month ago and he was at the screening. He’s been thinking about the film for two years or three years since we screened it there and he was like “I want to get a copy. My friend and I’ve been talking about it since we saw it, we loved it.” I had no idea that there was even a soul for miles around that would’ve even thought about that film without thinking about how badly they hated it.

So there were some amazing things that still came out of that but there were still people that latched onto it despite all that. Regardless, it was just like a time when I really had this realization that “Why am I doing this?” I mean it’s how easy it is for things to just go horribly wrong and for people to really just dismiss you and write horrible things about you on the internet.

What things did you learn about writing a feature length script?

I wrote the script like three or four times over. So what the film is now, the original draft was nothing like that. I’d done a lot of writing and I had stacks and stacks of like short film ideas or short short ideas, almost like one scene, one take kind of things. I started compiling all of that and then [I] wrote a first draft of the script and then pulled out things I like about that. Then basically started the rest of the script and pulled those elements and wrote another script based with those and just kept going from there. So it was kind of like this painful process, it was about two and a half years of writing and rewriting. And when I say rewriting, [I mean] not revising, like taking the entire script throwing it out and starting it over. That was a really hard process.

So it was a difficult script to write and I don’t know if I’d necessarily want to go about it the same way again. Starting without a structure. I mean finding the structure within these elements I already had with these characters and scenes and stuff and figuring out how they’re related. I started with the elements and found the structure within those elements. I wasn’t putting a spine and then adding things to it. I had all the stuff and then just…took one element from another story and combined that with, pulled stuff that seem to make sense and related, and made that into something that had It’s own feel and was unique. A unique-ness to it that sort of guided itself to the end. I didn’t know exactly where it was going at the end. I mean at some point I figured that out instead of you know… in the beginning of the film I maybe started in the middle of it and started building from there. It’s kind of like starting out to make a painting your just like: “I’m going to paint a picture of my Dad” and that’s one thing and maybe that’s a good painting but I think a lot of artists work in different ways and they’re not really sure where it’s going to go. I kind of felt like that was my way of attacking this film.

How did you go about getting funding for the film?

Well, this is a pretty amazing story. I should tell you right off the bat too, regardless of what anyone would think I very much [do not] come from a wealthy family at all. So I mean you see people that definitely can make those movies and just go ask their parents for it. A lot of my family and friends contributed to the film but that being said, they contributed what they could which was a lot for them but not for what you would think would make a film. We originally you know just said: “I’m going to hit up every single person I can…” I just don’t know any wealth people so I had to go to my friends and say “Do you know any wealthy people?”

I live in Washington DC now and the first person that wrote back to me was this girl I went to school with and she works for the Republican National Conference on capital hill. And she was like: “I know this guy. He’s a lobbyist. He owns restaurants. He owns a summer camp for kids. He produced a film called “Red Scorpion” with Dolf Lundgren in the ‘80s And the guy I work for knows him really well and he’ll set us up with a meeting.” The guy agreed to take a meeting and told us he charges $800 dollars an hour just to consult… just to talk to you. But he waived the fee to talk to us about our film. He was very interested in hearing about independent film in DC.

Ultimately he told us that he’d never invest in a film again and if he did it would have to have boobs and guns in it. He tells us… I mean this is like 1984 when he’s putting his film out, very different from right now. So he’s like: “We made buttons with the name of the film on it, we’d wear them around and everybody wanted our buttons and we made a poster and…” He still thought that’s how things would go.

Nothing came out of it. He went on a two hour speech about the film and wants to write a book about it. The guy’s name is Jack Abramoff and he’s the guy who embezzled money from Native American interest groups… while he has probably sitting there! This [news] didn’t break for another year. He was like the top of these horrible things going on. But once all that Jack Abramoff stuff started to come out we were like: “What were we in the middle of!”

So it seemed like, ok I’ve got to go back to what feels right and raising the money through people who understand the film. So we made a bunch of t-shirts, that this guy out in California who did stuff for urban outfitters, designed us a logo for the shirt. We printed those up and sold them and through fundraisers, having parties, screening films, having people donate their short films and then charging for screenings. We raised ten thousand dollars just doing that alone.

The [we] got other investment money from friends, family, college professors, other friends cousins. People who just seemed to latch on to the sensibility of what we were doing. People didn’t ask for a script. No one wanted creative control or any kind of part of that. They had seen my short films, they knew who I was… they believed in that. It wasn’t like a rich guy coming on and saying I see this as this big opportunity. It was much more like we believed they want to see a film that’s different, they want to see me make a film like that because it’s not out there and that’s what we did.

And then otherwise things were donated, borrowed, the crew worked for free, the entire cast worked for free… we all lived together. That was how we did it, just super cheap.

The film was shot beautifully, how did you get Richie Sherman involved?

Richie’s just a friend of mine actually. He teaches at Penn State University and he teaches the film program there. A significant part of the crew were friends of mine from school in Ohio. I went to Ohio University and everyone kind of scattered and moved across the country but a lot of them came back to work on it together.

Richie had just shot a couple features and I think our visual styles worked really well together. I mean locations had already been picked, actors had been picked, production design, the people who did that, there’s a lot to their credit as well. To the other folks credit it was almost easy to get some of these shots because there were so many amazing things to fill the frame with. We’ done a lot of work ahead of time. So to set up a camera and just lock it off, you’ve got this great looking person in a great looking location… and we were shooting 35 anamorphic which is a really good medium to use for something visual I guess.

Did you have any problems shooting anamorphic?

Not Really. This was the first time we had done 35 and it was just a step up to bigger equipment. Like when the cameras came in it was really funny, we got the camera equipment from Joe Dunton Camera in Wilmington North Carolina and we had it driven up to Pennsylvania. Richie comes in with it and opens it up and everyone gathered around and he open the case and the lenses were like enormous. We were all like: “no way!” It was the day before we were shooting too.

It was sort of a camera lesson for all of us. We were all used to just having 16 handheld and here we had a 100 pound camera that we had to big rigs so we could hand hold stuff. A lot of the handheld stuff is actually two people carrying the camera because the camera we could afford to get was an old movie cam which was made out of lead and is the most quiet camera you can get but it weighs a lot and it’s not designed for handheld. It was very funny. Every time we’d all look at the camera… just shake you head and be like I cant even believe that there’s something that big…

There’s a great shot in the beginning where the camera is following cars down the road from behind. That must’ve been quite a challenge. How did you pull that off?

We had a grip truck which we rented for the shoot, which made us all feel much more professional, we just tied the camera on top of the cab of the truck and then just drove behind it. Richie and I sat on the top of that and just shot from there. It wasn’t a very complicated rig. You’ve just got to make do with what you’ve got.

The casting was also fantastic! I read that you used a lot of non-actors, was that your approach to casting the film?

Yeah very much so. There were a lot of parts that were written for some of the characters but the other parts that I didn’t know were left open to us finding people. I tried going through some casting directors and for some parts and it just didn’t… we talked to some of these actors and it was almost like they had very little interest in acting or trying something different. So we did an open call. We found the towns we were shooting in Pennsylvania and did and open call to anyone. Basically saying, if you have a headshot, don’t come to the audition… Just come is this is something brand new to you… we’re not casting a film that’s going to be a bunch a pretty faces talking about relationships.

The most amazing people came in. The audition process was a blast! There was no script to read from it was all improv. Every single audition was a different one. We video taped all of these and I’d come up with a different scenario for each one and then we’d just go from there.

One guy, was this truck driver that was just passing through the area and we couldn’t cast him, I don’t really know why he showed up because he didn’t live there... (laughs) He gave the most amazing audition, it was sort of like a gay love scene. We put him together with this other guy we had and it was the most bizarre thing I’ve ever scene. He did anything we asked him to and he was very, very funny.

A lot of the most famous actors are just fortunate people that walked into things. There’s a heck of a lot of talented people out there… with great faces and all kinds of hidden things. That’s how we found a lot of these people was just doing these sessions with them and talking to them and seeing how comfortable they are just doing whatever… So it was a very fun easy going cast. I’m still in touch with all of them and a lot of fast friendships were made that way.

The casting process was a lot of fun but from the beginning… my intention was always to have these new discoveries and new faces. Because if you cast Tom Selleck or someone the film… [it could] definitely take away from the mystery of really what was going on in that it would be too familiar.

How was it working with non-actors?

It was interesting. I mean I don’t have experience working with really professional actors so it’s tough for me to say but… The closest professional actors in the film is Will Oldham who plays Donald and he’s a really famous singer/songwriter now. He was in John Sayles “Matewan” when he was like 13 years old. He plays the boy preacher in that film and he’s really good. That’s the closest I’ve gotten to really working with somebody who just really takes their job seriously and comes in with a lot of forethought.

Working with the non-actors was really interesting because… a lot of them had maybe done some theater and stuff or something locally and [so] it was just conversations about how to just be yourself and how to be natural. So much of the acting was going to be where you look and when you look somewhere and by not reacting and not moving. What your actually thinking about when your doing it so there was just a lot of discussions about that… like how to just seem very natural and how to be yourself and not think of this as a movie.

The main girl, the little girls who plays Turkey Legs would respond to things in ways I just didn’t expect. We’d do a take and then go over and talk about it and she would go back in and fill in all these amazing little subtle things that came out of our conversation. She was really paying attention and really listening which really was amazing to witness. It was really cool to see what she would pick up on and respond to… she was really thinking about what she was doing.

The ComutaCar is a character in itself. How did it become part of the story?

That’s my car actually. I found a beat up one along the side of the road in Ohio and then tracked another one down that this engineer had rebuilt and that’s the one I bought from him and put into the film. I don’t know what to say about that thing. It’s pretty amazing. We had a bunch of other weird vehicles. There was a lot of cars and kids and animals in the movie…

We had another scene with a car that was an amphibious vehicle. It was this 1960’s… looks like an MG and you can drive it down the highway and if there’s a ramp you could just drive it right into the water and it turns into a boat… We had a scene that was supposed to take place right in the water outside three mile island… in this amphibious car with the guy that plays Stool and Turkey Legs driving around together. And the guy that brought it out and actually sank it! (laughs) The scene got scrapped. I mean it got completely submerged and the entire town that had been evacuated from there decades earlier came out to watch them pull this car from the river of three mile island which was really surreal in itself.

How did you go about finding music for the film?

A lot of LimeWire searching late at night. I had some stuff lined up in this iPod list that we listened to during the shoot and I gave to some of the cast and crew… Other than that Moldy Peaches song which they sing in the middle, there really wasn’t anything that we ended up using… because of rights issues and things like that.

I found this tuban throat singer and a lot of his tracks are used in the film. He’s from this little tiny country called Tuva and there’s a movie about him called Gengis Blues… His throat singing just worked really well with a lot of the scenes just because I didn’t want to use Bluegrass music, I didn’t want to use banjo picking music because this was rural USA and that just seemed… The minute you put that in your heading in the wrong direction.

So I kind of wanted to play it as if we shot it in another country. If we’re describing these landscapes and it’s not America what kind of music would we have and it’s got to be something that's coming from a different place. So we found that and that really fit and luckily I got in touch with the right people for that and had to track down a few other weird labels in Russia to get rights to another throat singing band.

Then David Ringo did the score, he came on almost a year ago today. [He] started composing music for it. He did the scores for David Gordon Green’s films “George Washington”, “All The Real Girls”, “Undertow” and his new movie’s called “Snow Angels” with Kate Beckinsale. Which features a shot of Hillbilly Robot in it… somebody’s watching TV and their watching Hillbilly Robot on it. That’s like my proudest moment ever…I can’t wait for that movie to come out.

But David came on and started composing tracks for it. Then another friend of mine did music. Greta Cohen, who plays cello in the bands Cursive and Bright Eyes and the Saints, she contributed some cello music which is really great. Her and David collaborated over email actually and sent tracks back and forth. We all worked that way… I didn’t meet David until actually a couple months ago actually face to face. We all just worked over the phone on the score together. That was actually a really rewarding, fun experience with the film where, someone else is sending you these amazing songs and they fit right with the film.

What was one of your biggest challenges with production?

It could be right now. Just getting it seen. Throughout the whole film I never knew if it was going to get made or not. We could’ve been shut down at any day of the film and I really did think we were going to at certain points. Any crew member could’ve just said “I quit”, and we would’ve fallen apart. Any cast member could’ve walked away. That was hard. Everyday getting up and thinking is this film going to continue. You know? Like am I going to cut this into a short film with what we have or what? Even up to the point of shooting, I mean it didn’t really seem like reality until we were on set shooting. Because everything was so fragile… no one would’ve ever insured this film that’s for sure because everything was all based on trust… every single person contributing to it.

But right now, it’s a huge challenge just getting it seen because there’s just so few outlets. There’s so few good distributors left that can take a challenge. A lot of people that love the film and would love to put it out but just can’t. That kind of response. I feel like I’ve read that in so many interviews of people saying “We meet people that say I love your film but we don’t know what to do with it”, and now I’m living that.

So that becomes hard but at the same time, it’s kind of like I’m looking at what do we need to do. I just want anyone to see this film… I just want to get it out so we’re basically looking like city by city and getting the film out there. We’ll go through festivals as well but… it’s more of a challenge I guess because I thought at this point there would be somebody coming on and saying we really believe in this, we want to help and we want to get it out in France... in random places or whatever. But it’s more like people saying, “I really like your film but I can’t do anything for you”, you know?

So distribution is the hardest thing right now?

Yeah… but I guess everyone says that, and people that have distribution, have problems with their distribution. I’m not complaining I guess. I have a finished film that I’m proud of, that I really like, that I’m definitely going to be showing my kids.

We’re getting it out there and people are seeing it and people are interested. There’s definitely a lot of opportunities now where people can actually help you get things put together. People can hear about the film without having seen it. Easily through this MySpace thing…like there’s other folks writing in from England and saying I’ve heard about your film and I really want to see it and we’re booking screenings in England. Which is great! Like I’ve never even heard of those towns so how would I know to book it there?

How was your premiere at Slamdance?

You know reading about other people experiences, it’s always like: “Oh man, I was crying at the premiere. I was so happy…”. The premiere of this film, I had gotten a rejection letter from South By Southwest right before I was in the festival...

Then right after (the screening) someone sent me a review from Variety which … this was the first time we screened the film so they had somehow gotten a copy of it and… It was one of the worst reviews I ever read. I mean, I don’t know…it was horrible. It was like someone said, review this film as if it’s going to be released in every theater in the country. It was heartbreaking. That really hurt us. It kind of felt like an attack, like someone was literally trying to bring the film down. Other people said that too after reading it. Luckily I could pull a good quote out of it…

That made it pretty hard because it really felt like the screening went really well. There were people in there that were really loving it and really into it, it was packed people were on the floors and in the isles… then you walk out and it’s like deflated again. I realized that this was going to be so much more of a struggle. Like people are going to like this film and it’s going to be a struggle and that was a really hard thing to face up to. But you go to every screening and the reaction is really great but then your turn around and your still fighting a lot of negativity out there because it doesn’t fit into a certain genre, or it doesn’t fit into a preconceived notion of what a film should be I guess.

Did anyone’s reaction to the film surprise you?

There were some things in Boston… that was the most mixed audience we had. The was a screening where some people were really angry and another person told me I was better than John Wayne. I still don’t understand what that means. I think I was talking about how the screen size of the film was anamorphic and it was a wide screen film… and I said like the movies that John Wayne used to make and someone in the audience shouted “You're better than John Wayne!” I had no idea how to react. I didn’t know if I was insulted or what…

What would you like people to take away from the film?

That’s hard to describe what is that people do take away from the film. There is a sense of completeness when you watch the film. I can tell when people aren’t fully into it because maybe their asking questions about what happened or they’re concerned with things that the film isn’t really concerned with. The best films that I’ve seen, I always walk out just feeling like this euphoric feeling where it’s like, that took me to a place I hadn’t been before. That’s storytelling that was told through picture and sound and not from someone onscreen photographed telling a story. It’s not all dialogue… I know that so much of film is based on that now. Everyone says have an amazing story and just make sure it’s all in the script and I think that's a great way to get a film done because then your guaranteed that no one can screw it up. But I think that the best ways film can be used are by getting a story and emotions across without telling you what the story and emotions are.

What would you say your learned from working on your first feature?

I guess the things that I learned definitely was to just trust your gut. To always trust your gut about the people and the thing that you want to accomplish. Because so many times we would meet somebody and it would seem like this persons offering a lot of great things but your gut was saying this isn’t going to go to a good place. You know, you wanted to believe what they were telling you but there was something about it that just didn’t seem to click and those feelings were generally always 100% right.

Who are some of your influences as a filmmaker?

For this movie I was reading a lot of Chris Ware. He wrote this book called “Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth.”. His book is… I promise you, you will like it. No one has every read that and not liked it. It’s a really depressing comedy. That really worked for getting the mood.

I listened to a lot of Will Oldham’s music too that helped…

Oh there’s a documentary I taped off of government TV in Ohio. It’s called “Tiger Town”. As far as I know, I have the only copy of it and it’s on VHS. It’s this documentary about the Massillon football team in Ohio. [It] was the only movie that I should to the crew and cast to give them a feeling of what I wanted to accomplish.

It’s a movie about a football team but it doesn’t interview any football players… (laughs) which makes no sense. It was a huge inspiration for me because it had this feeling of… no one was telling jokes, but it was very funny and it had this really melancholy sad feel about it. It was about a bunch of people that were in a place that they really didn’t want to be. It was just a really entertaining documentary. The characters in it are amazing.

It’s like this little half hour thing that was on between the governor’s speech and the city council meeting. I just taped it and I watched it over and over and over… that was the biggest inspiration for this film.

I want to put that on the DVD too. If I can track down the rights to it. Because I think it really is an amazing movie. I’d love to meet the guy who made it.

What’s next for Todd Rohal?

Beside distributing this film myself and taking it around the country in the back of my car and booking movie theaters and using my email a lot. I’m hopefully finding the time to get this other script idea written down. I’ve been doing this idea about French girls in west Virginia. Just a strange idea that involves Senator Robert Bird a lot in it. And I want to shoot this other film idea… that we want to shoot in Bulgaria actually. I think it would be fun to take the whole crew and cast people from all over the world and shoot a movie like in eastern Europe or something. Just go to a totally different place and have that affect us and see what comes out of that. I’m trying to write a kids show idea and I’m also really gunning to try to direct the next Pee Wee Herman movie. I’m trying so hard. They still don’t have a director for it… but I’m trying. I called his mom when we were in Florida and talk to her. It was the Sarasota Festival and all the people working there went to high school with him so they had his mom’s phone number and I called her invited her to the film and told her how much I liked her son. That’s a shoo-in for sure.

What advice would you give to new filmmakers working on their first feature?

It would be just to not base your movie on other movies and just find that film that's coming from that voice, in your stomach rather than in your head telling you what to do. I think that’s more important. I think more things can be discovered that way. But then again I’m not sure who’s interested in moving movies forward or backwards. (laughs) There’s faster ways to getting famous than making movies but… I would hope that people making them are looking to discover new things and saying new things because there’s a heck of a lot more to go and whoever says everything’s been said or every story’s been told… I just think that’s a bunch of crap. I think there’s plenty more to do. It’s not advice that’ll make anybody any money any faster.