Musical Mavericks

Great World of Sound Directed by Craig Zobel

Craig Zobel’s directorial debut, Great World of Sound, explores the psychological impact of a music industry scam known as “song sharking.” The basic plot focuses on aspiring music producers Martin and Clarence (Pat Healy and Kenee Holliday), who become cogs in a scam requiring them to recruit aspiring musicians and convince them to pay up front. Unlike the central characters, the auditions in the film are real. Healy and Holliday conducted interviews with people who had responded to newspaper advertisements. Then Zobel shot through a two-way mirror and inserted the auditions into the movie’s plot. An affable young filmmaker with a decidedly noncommercial slant, Zobel spoke about his experiences since the film premiered at Sundance in January.

NYPress: Great World of Sound has been widely praised on the film festival circuit, but you’ve also got a few strong selling points outside of the movie itself: Your background as a founder of Homestar Runner helps, and your longtime collaborator, acclaimed director David Gordon Green, has a producing credit. CRAIG ZOBEL: The Homestar Runner thing has been useful for getting people to see the movie, but I don’t think that Magnolia Pictures was like, “Great. We can buy this movie because it’s the guy who did Homestar Runner.” If anything has been useful like that, it has been David [Gordon Green]’s name. That might’ve helped it seem legitimate to the hardcore, film-nerdy people who know who he is. But it’s hard to put that into the trailer.

Green recently screened his stoner comedy, The Pineapple Express—which stars Seth Rogen and opens next year—to a group of select friends. Did you see it? Yeah. It’s funny as shit. David said that after the first test screening they had for it, [producer Judd] Apatow said that it ranked better than the best test screening they had for The 40-Year-Old Virgin. People who are fans of [Green] are going to hate that he made it. People that need him to be artsy are gonna hate it. But a lot of those people walked away after Snow Angels [which premiered at Sundance]. [Somebody] said, after he saw Snow Angels, that it was the death of America’s last formalist.

Wow. Speaking of presumptuous statements, what do you think about having your movie discussed as a response to “American Idol”? Honestly, I feel like the “American Idol” thing is an easy way to talk about this, and it’s probably relevant at some point. Reality television is something that I was definitely thinking about. There was something about that in my head, but I feel like it’s a little simple to say, “Isn’t it just like “American Idol’?”

My understanding is that you didn’t want the auditions to feel distinguishable from the rest of the movie, even though most of them consisted of documentary footage, while other scenes were tightly scripted. Right. And “American Idol” is just a big audition show. There’s a reason I put a job interview in the movie. When you go into a job interview, and you have this pressure on you. Even if you disagree with where things are going, you’re going to be agreeable and try to make it work. That was what I wanted to get out of the [auditions]. We basically shot and edited the whole movie as if it were all written scenes, and then I just pulled out certain scenes and inserted real people. We have a version of the movie that would have only actors on it. That was my backup. But the main intent was to get that uncomfortable feeling of performance that you usually don’t see in a movie. That’s why I did it—not so it could be sold as a “Borat-esque” whatever.

A Borat comparison is even more misleading. Yeah, I definitely wasn’t trying to make my movie like Borat. People want a controversy, but we talked to all those people [who auditioned] backstage. We’re showing the film in Charlotte to all the people that auditioned. I’ve been personally calling everybody. I felt that would be the noble thing to do. We’re going to show the movie and musicians from the movie that didn’t originally know about it are going to play.

It’s going to be awesome. We’re flying [soundtrack composer David] Wingo down. We’re going to tape it, so hopefully it’ll end up somewhere someday.

What do the musicians think about all this? It’s been interesting to talk to all these people now. I keep saying to people that I don’t think that I was being exploitative. A lot of what this movie is about is rationalizing things. That’s not a bad thing. Every character in the movie does it. They’ve had responsibilities in their lives that have stopped them from being able to pursue [music] full time. I’m probably rationalizing how I did it.

Well, you had your rationale. Anyway, nobody else has made a movie about song sharking, have they? Not that I’ve seen. The cool thing is the people that I’ve met. I met one dude who said he was a recording engineer and was the guy who did the recordings for the song sharks. They would shake hands, the next musician would come in, and they would just rewind and tape over the last one. He used to do that. A lot of people think it doesn’t make sense that there’s a recording studio [used by song sharks in the movie]. That’s what’s really weird—they keep the illusion up.