The Making of The Legend of God's Gun

(An interview with Mike Bruce)

How would you describe The Legend of God's Gun to someone?

The Legend of God ' s Gun is a rock-n-roll-spaghetti-style-western/ glorified music video feature film with a plot. It is another stop along the western genre trail, which appears to be never ending. A lot of the Italian filmmakers of the 60 ' s and 70 ' s, filmmakers like Sergio Leone and Sergio Corbucci, were obsessed with the American west which inspired them to make their own brand of the western and inadvertently created a new genre later dubbed as the Spaghetti Western. There are literally hundreds of spaghetti westerns but they all share a few distinct characteristics - one being the most obvious - bad ADR (automated dialog replacement or additional dialog recording) or bad voice dubbing. (This one characteristic can be a deal breaker for any girlfriend you may have coerced into watching The Good, The Bad and The Ugly with you for the first time.) Another characteristic is the music which drives the whole film (namely the music of Ennio Morricone) and seems to give it a somewhat added surrealistic quality. The Legend of God ' s Gun is inspired by the Spaghetti Western genre and a rock-n-roll life style, which is not dissimilar to the cowboy of the old west.

The film was written by you along with Kirpatrick Thomas. How long have you known Thomas and how did the idea come about?

I met KP three years ago in New York.   His band Spindrift was playing with my old band (Low Flying Owls, who also contributed to the soundtrack) as part of a showcase with our record label for CMJ. Before the show I browsed their merch table and was struck by one of their CDs entitled " The Legend of God's Gun " . It was supposedly a soundtrack to a spaghetti western. Kirpatrick ' s girlfriend was working the merch table. I asked her if there really was such a movie. She said no. I continued to hold that CD in my hands and started to imagine what the movie would be like. I was certain there had to be a movie made called The Legend of God ' s Gun. At that point I hadn ' t even heard the music. I was just so in love with the title and artwork of the CD.

Later they played their set and to my disappointment they didn't include any of the God ' s Gun material and I couldn't afford to buy their CD so that was that.

A year or so later we ended up playing a show with them at Spaceland in Silverlake. I was happy to find that night they were fully embracing their own original take on the spaghetti western genre. I was completely blown away. The next night we all met up at Little Joy. Fueled by several vodka tonics I passionately expressed to KP how much I loved his music and how I would love to make a movie based on The Legend of God ' s Gun at which point he revealed to me that he had written a treatment. He sent it to me a couple weeks later. It was pretty rough but I knew there was something there in the heart of the concept that we had to dig out.

How much did the script evolve over time? Did the final turnout as you planned?

A few months after KP sent me the treatment I moved to LA and started writing scenes to go out and film. At first we were just going to make a trailer. After three or four days of shooting I edited a couple sequences and showed them to everyone. We were all pretty excited with what we had so we thought - why not make it a short film so we could at least play it at festivals. From that point it started to become like we were painting the Taj Mahal red. Except we didn ' t know we were painting the Taj Mahal and we didn ' t have a crew. I kept writing more and more and we kept returning to the desert to shoot more stuff. It became like a running joke - the film that would not end. I think we had something like three wrap parties. It wasn ' t until 18 months after the first shooting day that we actually wrapped the production side of things and then we didn ' t even have a wrap party because it was the case of the boy who cried wolf. That ' s the last time I do that.

Sergio Leone and Ennio Morricone were influences there is a definite amount of surrealism in the film. From what we ' ve heard shooting was a bit surreal. How long were you in the desert shooting? Being so far out & in the heat, did you run into any hardships?

Just sit right back and you ' ll hear a tale, a tale of a fateful trip. It started with some mushrooms and some Silverlake musicians who didn ' t know the first thing about making a movie. We were in the desert with some rattlesnakes and wild dogs and no one knew how to act. Need I say more? If anything, I would say The Legend of God ' s Gun is a manifestation of pure movie magic. Who would have thought we could do what we did? This movie was not your typical film shoot and I don ' t think anyone in the filmmaking industry, especially in Hollywood, would condone a lot of the things we did during the making of this movie and therefore they will never find out.

Some (all?) friends of yours were cast did a lot of improvising happen once you got to shooting?

On the second day of shooting we shot part of a showdown scene that involved some dialog. We started to improvise and it was absolutely awful. At that moment I decided I was going to put a lot more effort into writing since most of us weren ' t very good at improvising. But then there was Colin who was too good at improvising. That ' s a whole different movie altogether.

Spindrift ' s music plays an integral part to the movie. Did you work with them at all in the formation of the soundtrack? Give any instruction? How did that work exactly?

We knew from the beginning the movie was all about the music and, with the exception of three songs, it was all from the pure musical brilliant mind of Kirpatrick Thomas. I just said things like - " We need another song here for this sequence. It should be sad and epic like Once Upon a Time in The West. " And then there was the music video in the movie - Conversation with a Gun.   We knew we wanted to have a musical sequence and we were trying to figure out what the song should be. So I thought about KP ' s character, El Sobero, and I said - " You should sing a song to your gun. " We ' re all very happy with it. They do it live to the video sometimes. It ' s cool. You should see it.

                   Courtesy of Penny Ante Magazine.