The Nashville Film Festival was very good to the self-christened, Deagol Brothers. The tenacious young filmmakers from Tennessee were able to achieve high accolades at the 2009 festival. They were also kind enough to answer some questions.

Make-Out With Violence dominated the Nashville Film Festival by winning the Tennessee Independent Spirit Award for a Feature Length Film, as well as the award for Best Music in a Feature Film. How did it feel to do so well in Tennessee where the movie was made, and how did that success compare to your expectations?

It’s safe to say that none of us expected to win in all of those categories?we would have been thrilled to just win one. We’re honored, of course?especially to have earned the vote of confidence from Elvis Mitchell, a critic whom we all respect. There’s a sense of closure as well: the five years since we started working on the movie have been marked by a number of false starts and near-misses, and we encountered a lot of obstacles to actually hosting a hometown screening once the film was completed. Only the small inner circle of people who were actually involved in the production have been able to travel to the other festivals we’ve played in, so the Nashville awards, in addition to the material benefit such as the opportunity to screen in Los Angeles, were also a chance for everyone who actually participated in the production to enjoy their accomplishment.

How did the music come about for the film?

Jordan Lehning began composing music very early in the development process. The screenplay was written cross-country through e-mail by four different writers and it was difficult to keep everyone on the same page tonally. The music became something we could all listen to and try to maintain consistency. Initially the process started with the Deagols sending Jordan mix CDs containing music we thought appropriate for the type of movie we wanted to make: Terrence Malick inspired/John Hughes rite-de-passage zombie movie. We sent Jordan a lot of obvious ’80s sounding tracks but we felt that Brian Eno’s four pop albums were a good match for the material and so included that as well. Jordan began recording with his brother Eric (lead singer of The Non-Commissioned Officers and Leading Man “Patrick”) in May 2004 and from there kept recording over 5 years. They were faced with the task of not only writing a wall to wall pop-song based score but also making sure those songs spoke to the integrity of the narrative as well as oriented the audience in the various head-spaces of the ensemble cast. The idea being that each character had a different style of music they listened to and the cross cutting would be less disorienting if the music guided you through the edits.

Based on the overwhelmingly positive response to the music on the festival circuit, we’ve recently released a 2-disc, 44-song soundtrack through our website. Additionally, The Non-Commissioned Officers (the band originally formed to raise money to finish the movie) have now decided to be a “real” band and will be touring this summer with the Lehning brothers at the helm.

Aside from the NaFF, you have taken the movie to the South By Southwest Festival in Austin, TX, the Independent Film Festival in Boston, and the Salem Film Festival in Salem, Oregon. Did I miss any?

We’ve also shown at the SFIndie, Boulder, Sidewalk, Maryland, Memphis Film Festivals and won Best Feature at Atlanta, Oxford and Magnolia.

You showed vigilance at the NaFF by running a booth throughout the entire festival. You are obviously very dedicated. What have been the major benefits from doing the festivals, and have there been any negatives at all?

As far as negatives: we have some really great posters by graphic designer Ed O’Brien and people love to steal them. It first started happening at SXSW and initially we were flattered but then we ran the numbers and replacing them is not cheap. We’re down to one poster at this point and still strapped for cash to make more?maybe we’ll have The Non-Coms play a fundraiser. The principal

drawback of doing the festival circuit is cost. Festival fees and making whatever specific master a festival requires really add up after a

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year or so. It’s a very expensive process and there’s no guarantee that those festival fees are going to be worth it. We have a spread sheet somewhere (no one wants to look at it) that details the monies spent on festivals that rejected us. DVD’s, DVD cases, Bubble Mailers, Press Kits are also costs you don’t really think about until after you wrap post production.

The production of Make-Out With Violence had to stop and restart at least a couple times over the years. Your tenacity was rewarded with an award-winning film. What advice can you give other independent filmmakers, and what are some of the pitfalls that can be avoided?

On a practical level: shoot in the summertime, and you can use college students as crew. There are a lot of film school “dont’s” like shooting in multiple locations, having a seasonally-dependent setting, using dogs or child actors, and using special effects, but we basically ignored all of them. So do whatever you want, but know that all of those decisions add up to a lot of time and added expense. On an artistic level: your project is going to take more time than you expect, it’s going to cost more than you expect, and you’re going to sacrifice more than you expect if you want to finish it. So don’t even bother starting a project that you’re not prepared to lose a lot for, and once you start, push hard and get far enough that quitting is not an option. And work with friends you trust, because the entire process is going to put a lot of strain on most of your relationships. Especially with your collaborators.

What is next for the Deagol Brothers and Limerent Pictures?

Most of the interest we’ve gotten from festival exposure is regarding other screenplays we have in the works. We’re still trying to secure distribution for Make-Out With Violence but have begun writing new scripts based on this interest. Ideally our next movie would be a story we’re working on very loosely inspired by the lives of the Bronte sisters and done in a style akin to Peter Greenaway. It’s a personal project for us but we’re also writing more commercially-minded spec scripts that we hope to sell. Our main goal as filmmakers is to give ourselves the opportunity to write/direct a sci-fi septology we’re working on.

The Deagol Brothers can be reached at makeoutwithviolence.com.