Well, the story behind Clown is the best. It started out as a prank. If I had done this on purpose I would have been so smart. But it was a complete accident. Um, so Chris Ward and I – the guy I also wrote Cop Car with – we’d also, with our friends, make videos and we’d put them online. This was a couple of years ago.

We’d just make dumb little sketches, or fake movie trailers, fake TV shows. Just playing around in our spare time. Um, we all went to NYU together, so filmmaking is fun for us. Um, so… One weekend. We had always been joking around, with this idea of a Cronenberg body horror, but with a guy who’s turning into a clown. You know, instead of a fly?

Um, and we had worked a lot of it out just joking around. In the way that you do. And one weekend we were just like, ‘let’s go make that. Make a fake trailer.’ And we shot it, and it turned out – the idea was like, to really be realistic about this. To make it seem like a real movie. Um, so we tried to be really serious with the performances. And things like that.

So we shot it, and cutting it together, was like ‘oh, this could really be a real movie – it looks like a real movie.’ Um, and so our cherry on top of it, when we were cutting together this fake trailer, we were like ‘let’s see if we can really fool people. The ten people that watched our videos on YouTube. Let’s see if we can fool them into thinking this is a real movie that’s coming out.’

Our whole plan was – we were gonna credit ourselves as the co-writers, with, like, a big Hollywood writer who we had never met. And then, we said that it was directed by Eli Roth. I had never met Eli, but we were like, ‘not only his he totally awesome – and another NYU guy, so it makes sense in that way. But also, by putting his name on it, people will fill in the blanks in the trailer, and assume that a bunch of really terrible things happen.