I was so flattered by the response to my Captain Murphy project. I still am. There are kids who got Captain Murphy tattoos and that’s so crazy. I never thought I’d pull off that project and get away with it. I had a really good time doing it and I think that’s probably translated in the music. I always believe that people will be able to hear or see me having fun doing what I’m doing. If I’m really in it, it’ll show. You may not love it but there will be something in there because of the passion and the attention to detail at least. You maybe hate the content but you can tell I worked really hard.

What You See Is What You Get

My new film Kuso was definitely a passion project. From a young age, I always wanted to pursue visual storytelling. I believe that once I went to film school it kind of ruined my mind. I started adopting this idea of what you’re supposed to do to make film, what it means to write a script and what the process has to be, should be, whatever. I really think that experience really messed me up. It took me so long to unlearn a lot of things and to feel confident in my own abilities, sensibilities and style.

When I was in [film] school, they always made me question why I do things. With art, film, writing or music, you don’t always need to know. You just have to trust your gut and go with that. School tries to talk you out of listening to that voice to make everything logical. That might be good for conventional films, but for what I want to do, it has only held me back.

As far as I can remember, I’ve always been interested in making films, but I didn’t really feel like I could actually do it until I started hanging out with people like Kahlil Joseph, Eddie Alcazar and Alma Har’el. In the past few years I have spent a lot of time with these people, having worked on collaborations with them and scoring their projects. I would see what these people were doing and just be like, “Oh, well, I guess all you really need to do is be able to describe things really well to people and you can make a movie.”

I think you need to be able to describe things well as a filmmaker. That can pretty much get you a movie made if you can do it. If someone asks, “What does your character’s sweater look like,” then you need to be able to say, “It’s red with white stripes and the collar is black.” If you can do that for every little piece, you can probably make a movie.

It took me a long time to get ’round to making Kuso, my directorial debut, because music was so heavy and took off. I didn’t really have time to jump off that and try and make a film. I had to carve out time for it. Once I got into doing the film it was so cool to know that I’d be doing the sound, too. That gave me more room to grow as an artist. Now, when I’m working on music I think of where it takes place, which is something I didn’t really do before. Now I think of the setting of the sounds and how that informs the music. You know, giving things space to breathe and setting up a mood before the song even starts. Working in film and music has informed each of the disciplines.

To me Kuso is about five characters that are confronting their fears after a giant earthquake hits Southern California. That’s essentially what it is. Sometimes those fears are really ridiculous and some of those fears are really deep. It’s just a kind of dark vision of a post-apocalyptic world. I felt like in this kind of world, this post-Trump world we’re in now, Kuso is relevant. But when I was writing it, I didn’t mean for it to be that relevant.