With console gaming becoming more popular than ever, few people think about the classic arcade games much anymore. But for his first feature documentary, Seth Gordon, director of The King of Kong, discovered an epic battle going on in the world of competitive classic arcade gaming. A middle school Science teacher finds something he can finally be the best at, while the world record holder, will do anything to continue his twenty-year old rein. After The King of Kong’s regional premiere at SXSW, we had a chance to talk to Seth about his new doc, the remake that’s already in the works, and being entangled in the strings of a true puppet master.

How did you move from Architecture into filmmaking?

I’m a computer geek first and I think that’s really the way it happened. Through architecture, I had to learn how to draw on the computer and that involved Photoshop – which isn’t very far away from After Effects – which isn’t far away from Final Cut Pro and Avid. All those things kind of came together. Really if you think deeply about architecture, you think of the story behind the building, and I think that inevitably had me thinking about story when it came to movies too. There’s more overlap then you would, I guess, initially imagine. People who have sat next to me when I’m editing will know that all the doodles I do while editing help me out a lot – which is definitely inherited from architecture.

You’ve had another feature in the festival circuit before right?

Yeah… the producer of Kong was my fellow producer on a doc we did called New York Dolls, which was at Sundance 2005. That was a feature and then I’ve had a couple of shorts there. One was called Fear of the Clown another one, which was at Sundance, was called Squirt… some of that stuff I think is online at my site.

How did the story come to you? How did you discover Steve Wiebe?

The person who discovered the story is Ed Cunningham, he’s the producer of Kong. One time when he was in Seattle – he was up there to visit one of his friends, Mike Thompson who appears in the film – Steve [Wiebe] came out and had Drinks with them and the goons had just come to Steve’s garage… Ed latched on to this very peculiar story, and told me about it.

I did some research about it online, and I saw the Wiebe might go to Funspot. Funspot is one of my favorite places on earth. We would go to New Hampshire for family reunions, and my folks would leave me in the dark at Funspot. I would play games day after day… So I saw that Wiebe might go to this holy land as far as I was concerned, that’s when I signed on. Once we met Billy, we knew we had something interesting for sure. Whether or not anyone would believe it, is another question.

Do you have a background as a classic arcade gamer?

A bit… I mean, I’m terrible compared to these guys, but I enjoy it a lot. I don’t connect with the Xbox and the Playstation – I’m terrible at all those things – but the simpler and more classic games, I just love. I love the environment [at Funspot], I love the community of the place, I love just the games themselves like: Karate Champ, or Paperboy, or Missile Command, whatever it is I connect with it. It clicks. It wasn’t until I saw this sub-culture that I knew how bad I was at all of them! [Laughs]

It’s was surprising to hear that most people don't get past the third elevators screen in Donkey Kong.

And it’s totally true. It’s a matter of just raw hand eye coordination, and the ability to track a lot of things at once. It’s absurdly difficult, and I can’t get anywhere near clearing that board – even on accident. You really have to have some natural ability that I don’t have and it’s said in the documentary – it’s sort of subtle – that Wiebe and Billy are head and shoulders above anyone in the world at this particular game. They can get past that screen every time – you have to do it twenty times over a course of a three-hour game in order to get to the end – and they’re the only two guys that can get to the end. So anyway, it’s extraordinary to see how it’s done right.

The science of their game play is insane. Like when Mario’s at this one certain spot, you have to run one direction, stop, and then quickly look the opposite direction to control the barrels.

They’ve broken down these games to an amazing degree. Steve did it all by himself, and Billy and the gang collaborated on all of these games like Pac Man, Mrs. Pac Man whatever… Steve is just naturally quite gifted, and analytical, and figured it out all on his own. It was in his explaining of that stuff that I realized, since he’s a middle school science teacher, he’d probably do a good job teaching us how to play Donkey Kong. That became the inspiration for this one section in the film I think you’re referring to, where we used a grease pencil overlay to show how the game is played. That’s also the tip of the iceberg by the way, in terms of the strategy necessary to get to the end. A couple simple ideas we could get across on film, but the rest is so complicated I barely understand it myself.

How long does it take to get to a Donkey Kong kill screen (end of the game)?

We’re talking like three hours. The game is never the same twice, so that’s a little bit loose. But if you’re trying to max out the points, get to a kill screen, and also break a record it takes a little longer. So it’s between two and a half and three hours. Wiebe can get to the kill screen pretty much anytime he wants when he’s not trying to point press and get a record. That takes about and hour forty-five, something like that.

It was pretty funny when Brian Kuh was running around Funspot saying, “Hey, we’ve got a Donkey Kong kill screen coming up!”

When we originally envisioned this story, we imagined a sort of basic head to head competition between two gamers. What made it really interesting was seeing the people behind the competitors, and the politics behind the scenes. I think that’s where it really started to come to life and got quite a bit more universal. Brian Kuh is one of the best examples of that. Because he cares so much about, not only Billy’s opinions, but also having Billy stay on top, and the lengths he goes to sustain that, I think are really entertaining.

There was this real dichotomy between the two main subjects. They really fell into the good guy (Steve Wiebe) and the bad guy (Billy Mitchell) roles. It was also surprising to see the lengths Billy went through to keep tabs on Wiebe.

I completely agree. The archetypes of Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker are very present... There’s a lot of stuff we couldn’t include that Billy did just because of inter-state telephone rules. We only could use stuff where we had a camera pointing at Billy. All I’m saying is, the stuff he did to keep tabs on Steve and control him, was far greater than we could actually show. He is a true puppet master – and really rules this whole group of guys. He tells them where to walk, where to be, what to do, what to say… it’s unbelievable. Billy is such a good gamer that when he’s finished beating the games, he moves on to play games with people and we [even] became part of that. Especially Ed who had to deal with him the most…

Are there any specific examples you can recall?

Yeah… he’s a master of information control. We thought this whole film was leading up towards a showdown at Funspot, so we arranged to have a lot of camera people there in New Hampshire… We thought Billy was going, and then he surprised us. He goes to the airport with Doris, we see him with these bags and we assumed that he was going to Funspot. Instead, he drops Doris at the airport and he doesn’t go – we freaked out! Because everything we’d been working on the previous month was going to be all for nothing… So we begged him to have a cameraman come to his house. Even though he wasn’t going to go to New Hampshire, maybe we could still be with him on this important weekend – and he agreed. That was a great example where his behaving unpredictably made the story a lot more interesting than we could of ever imagined. Not having him there allowed us to see a lot more sides to his personality, and all of this puppet master stuff came out. That was really interesting for us.

There’s a really strong narrative thread throughout the film. What do you think helped that? Did you spend a lot of time in editing to get the story to come though?

We looked at about 300 hours of footage and didn’t know what the story was that we really had. But when I would casually describe to friends what we had witnessed, it became clear that if we can be faithful to the story we witnessed, we would have a really great film. Beyond that it was actually serendipity, we got very very lucky along the way. Like we went to Walter’s and… we just happened to be there when Guinness called Walter to tell him that they were going to have the scores in the 2007 edition. That was basically dumb luck. We happened to be at the right place, at the right time – that’s when we realized instantly we had an act three.

So that was really interesting for us and then the other… general notion that allowed us to make the film, was just to let go of the original idea. It went from a portrait of a competition, to a portrait of two competitors. Once we realized that our original idea wasn’t matching up with what we were witnessing in front of us, we just had to let go, go along for the ride… I think that was the big break for us, allowing something unexpected to happen and letting reality take over.

Would you say that was your biggest challenge in making the film?

Absolutely. Every time we tried to plan something, the truth was more interesting. Eventually we gave up trying to plan. Just keep showing up with the camera. Just stay with it and figure out what you’ve got once you’re in the editing room.

The ending was great how you allow the audience to think the story’s over but then…

We thought the movie was over. In fact we finished the film to submit to festivals and then Wiebe called us and told us that he broke the record. We, of course, were thrilled about that and it’s presented as an epilogue because that’s exactly what it is. After we thought our job was done, he went ahead and gave it a great ending. The truth is also, the saga continues, like Billy just got kicked off the board of Twin Galaxies; he’s trying to have Steve Wiebe’s record nullified again; the whole group there is falling apart… I mean Empire Strikes Back might be the next one. [Laughs]

So this whole thing is really tearing Twin Galaxies apart?

Yep. And the other thing that made it interesting is the notion of the remake, because New Line is doing this remake and I’m going to direct… That meant for the first time ever… their story was going to get out there in a big way and their true colors really showed. That’s why there’s been a lot of fighting and there’s been a lot of name-calling. There’s been people hired and fired and kicked off the Twin Galaxies board, it’s really been dramatic.

New Line is going to do a remake of the film?

Yeah. Picturehouse bought the film for distribution and then New Line bought the remake rights, meaning they’re going to turn it into a fiction film. There’s a writer who’s going to pitch his take on the best way to turn it into a narrative feature… with actors and whatever. A lot of them think it’s going to be tricky, it’s sort of a too good to be true scenario. If you saw this written as a fiction film, you wouldn’t believe it. Especially if you saw Billy as a fictional character, you wouldn’t believe him, he’d be exactly the way he is in the doc. So it’s going to be really interesting to see how that unfolds.

If you look at the doc it already looks like a great casting job… but those are the real people!

Figuring out Billy’s character in the story telling… once we realized that he’s essentially stuck in his glory days – in 1982 – he does everything he can to recreate that scenario from the way he talks, to the way he looks, to the sort of relationships he surrounds himself with, I think that’s when we unlocked his character and were able to do it justice. I think it’s going to be an incredibly fun film to cast for the remake.

The film was bought pretty quick too right?

It was pretty fast yeah. I signed on with an agency called Endeavor… One of the things they do is help sell independent films and match them up with distributors and buyers. One of the places that got wind of Kong… was New Line and this one executive there, Richard Brenner, who watched it a lot of times – and in fact saw some things in the film we hadn’t seen ourselves because he watched it so carefully. He put together an amazing package for us, including this opportunity to direct the remake, and I am very grateful to them and him.

Do you have any advice for new filmmakers who are working on their first film?

I would say trust your gut and trust your sense of story. I mean we found a story that I don’t think anybody would have – from its initial description – thought it was a full movie. But we stuck with it and it really grew into something special. Because it’s so easy and so cheap now to make a movie, the barrier to entry is no longer the equipment. I mean, we made this on cameras you can buy at Best Buy and we cut it on Final Cut Pro for nothing, so it’s really all about trusting your sense of story and just sticking with it.