Part 1 of 5 – “Red State” Roadshow Tour & Sales

Are you planning to make any changes to the film after the tour is finished?

I went to Sundance and watched it; that was the first time I got to see it with a real audience, and it was 97 minutes [long] at Sundance. And when I sat in the back, I sat down to watch it as a director at work, seeing it onscreen for the first time all of a sudden, I put my editing cap back on, and I [said], ‘Why did I keep that? Ooh, I could lose that. Ooh, I should tighten this. I’m not doing anybody any good service by leaving this long.’ So suddenly, by the end of the movie I found a bunch of time that I was like, ‘Ahh, I guess I can pull more time out of it.’ But I came home, and now the cut’s, from end to end, it was 97 and now it’s 88, so I guess I pulled out about nine minutes. And it runs so damn fast right now. I mean, from picture to picture you’re talking about 81, 82 minutes, and then you’ve got about six, seven minutes of credits in the back end. So it’s a lean, mean fighting machine, to borrow from John Candy back in Stripes.

Part 2 of 5 – International Distribution, Indie Film

Is there a similar plan for international distribution for Red State, or will that depend on how this tour does?

What a good question. No. It was never a factor for us. Our logic, and when I say ‘us,’ I mean me and Jon Gordon, my producer on the movie and my partner, and The Harvey Boys, which is the company we made the movie with. We always felt like if we do this we don’t even know how to release a movie in the United States, let alone elsewhere, you know what I’m saying? Let alone outside the country. So we trained under the Weinsteins, you know, he (Gordon) worked on Harvey [Weinstein]‘s desk for years before he became a creative exec and whatnot. We were like, letís just do what Bob [Weinstein] and Harvey always did. Basically, keep the movie domestically, and just sell it off internationally.

Part 3 of 5 – Looking Back, Haters, Tweeting

How many tweets would you say you post each day?

I don’t know; it ranges, man. It kind of depends. Learning Twitter is a personal experience for everybody, but I had to learn how to do it without overwhelming people, and some people are like, ‘Are you kidding me? You write too many tweets now,’ but it used to be way worse. And I figured out how to do it in ways, and it also depends what you’re tweeting. Like, at the end of the day, they will forgive you 100 tweets in a row if the content is real. Somebody asked me a question where I’ll do these things called SMonologue, where I answer back, and it should be a blog, but Iím doing it there in Twitter, in real time and some people like reading it that way; it’s just fun for me to do it that way; something of a challenge, figuring out how to express yourself 140 characters at a time.

Parts 4 and 5 are coming later this week. Stay tuned! One of the best Q&As we’ve read in a long time, so be sure to click over.