Portland based Mike Bruce is the film maker whose name may not ring a bell just yet but be patient.

Before long, music fans and movie buffs alike will gather around candle lit tables to discuss and praise the marvellous discovery that is Mr Bruce’s first feature, "The Legend Of God’s Gun", a spaghetti Western for the new generation with ‘cult hit’ stamped all over it.

This movie is the result of a chance meeting between two passionate individuals, Kirpatrick Thomas, front man with LA band Spindrift, who had written a soundtrack for a movie which needed yet to be created and Mike Bruce, better known as a member of quartet The Low Flying Owls, enamoured with film making and waiting for an interesting opportunity to come along.
Two men, a few friends, one album full of stunning tracks, one camera, one vision et voilà !

But the course of even the most beautiful of love stories never runs smoothly. Many years in the making, this demanding endeavour has in turn been an affliction and a revelation, a slight burden and a life enhancing experience but all ends well for multi talented director Mike, as “ God’s Gun “ will officially be presented to us in the next few months.

In the meantime why don’t you get to know Mr Bruce and his journey a little better ?

Warning: This interview contains many plot spoilers and may compromise your enjoyment of the movie. Mike Bruce and Florence Achery decline responsibility if this happens to be the case. Hopefully you’ll have forgotten reading this piece by the time the movie comes out.

Florence: Mike, are you happy being introduced as a musician turned film maker or would you describe yourself differently ?

Mike: I trained as a musician to start out but the first thing that I was really passionate about, before music, was film but I never did anything.
I was just a film nerd but I went into music and played in bands and actually taught music for quite a few years but it wasn’t very satisfying so I just decided to start making films.
That’s what I find most rewarding but that said as a film maker I find that music and films are so intrinsic. It’s nice to focus on both.

Florence: So you haven’t turned your back on music as such ?

Mike: Music is where I get a lot of inspiration from for films.
I haven’t been performing or recording in a while but most of my friends are musicians so that’s gonna have a huge effect on my film making and the choices I make.

Florence: Can you see yourself one day going back to composing, recording and being on stage with a band ?

Mike: I could. I love performing but films take so much time and energy that you’ve got to choose your time wisely.
There is enough things I want to do with films to keep me busy for the rest of my life!
I would like to reach a level of success...financial success where I could plan my life out a little more and play music on the side. That would be a nice relief but right now I am just too busy.

Florence: Let’s talk about “The Legend’s Of God’s Gun”, the story goes that you heard Spindrift’s soundtrack and then decided to make a movie out of it. Was it as straightforward as that ?

Mike: I met KP in New York at the Mercury Lounge.
My band, The Low Flying Owls,  was there playing the CMJ music festival and Spindrift were opening up on the showcase we were doing. Before they went on I was looking at the cds they had of ‘The Legend Of God’s Gun’. 
I was holding one and was completely fascinated with what it might possibly sound like.
I asked if they were gonna play any of it that night but they didn’t and I was really bummed!!

Florence: Was that their way to incite you to buy a record ?

Mike: Actually I was so broke I couldn’t even afford to buy it and I didn’t ask if I could have it. I figured that I could get it another time.
Then we played with them again in LA at Spaceland, and that night they played all the music, I got the cd and KP and I went to a bar on Echo Park afterwards and we were like: “Let’s make this a real soundtrack, it’s got to be done “.
At that point KP said that he actually had a treatment that he would send me when I got back home to Sacramento. A week or so later I got the treatment and it was pretty out there!
It just wasn’t something that you could just go and shoot. A few of the characters were there and there was enough with the music that I was definitely inspired to bang it out and create something that we actually could go out and shoot. So that’s how that went!

Florence: So it was love at first listen!

Mike: Absolutely!  I thought this has to be a real soundtrack because the music is way too good.

Florence: You have given so much of yourself to this project that it’s pretty obvious that something emotionally powerful happened to you right from the beginning.

Mike: At my end, the making of this movie has spanned over three years.
I’ve given it everything I’ve got.... emotionally, physically, financially, spiritually. Making a movie is a small miracle. We did it with no outside help really, a lot of people contributed to it but ultimately we didn’t have any kind of real help, we just kind of went out and did it.

Florence: Doesn’t the fact that you didn’t get any ‘real’ help and yet managed to complete the project by yourself make you feel even more satisfied, if a little ‘smug’ about it ?

Mike: Yeah! Absolutely.
However I think that it’s hard no matter how you go about it, whether you have millions of dollars or beer money it’s always difficult.
If you have millions then you’re gonna be dealing with a whole set of other problems but it definitely was satisfying to me to be able to not rely on anyone, we just did it. A lot of people want to do something like that but never get around to it and that’s understandable because it takes a lot but we just had a passion to do it.

Florence: Because it stretched over such a long period of time did you ever lose faith or wondered about what you let yourself into ?

Mike: I like to compare it with trying to cross the Pacific Ocean with a canoe. You’ve got in the middle of the ocean and you’re just like: “Oh my God! I’m never gonna make it, there is no way! “
That’s what it felt like at times and at one point I got really ill from the stress, I thought I was dying as I couldn’t eat or drink anything.

Florence: So eventually this venture did become stronger than you!

Mike: There were different points. In the first stages it was all exciting as we were doing these little scenes that looked really great, having cut together these little action sequences that were awesome but then we started to make a trailer, we went out for one weekend, I put that together, it was great and so I thought about making it into a short film  we could take to festivals or something.
So I wrote some more scenes, we went and shot those but I wasn’t satisfied so I just kept writing until eventually we thought: “ Well, why don’t we just make a feature and then we can actually sell the movie and it ‘ll get out there.”  
During those middle stages I was just trying to assemble a feature and when I had the script together it seemed to work but then when I got all the scenes together it was just a mess so I spent close to a year, if not more, just trying all kinds of different things, really forcing myself to get outside of the box and do something really different to bring it all together.
I knew that we had all the elements to make a unique feature film but it took a lot of thinking and experimenting to find the pulse of it.
There were periods during that time when I thought: “What have I done?
This is three years of my life and it isn’t working, it’s just a mess! “
I mean there were so many technical issues, I can’t even begin to describe....just the computers I went through and the hard drives.
It really does get overwhelming.

Florence: Did you have to learn a lot as you went along ?

Mike: I knew enough from doing music videos and little films to know that I could do this but at the same time it was the best film making school you could ever have. I’ve now learned every single aspect of it from preproduction all the way to production, post and distribution.
I had no clue at all about some of that  so I’ve been learning for the last six months. It’s a milestone in my life.

Florence: What about casting, how easy was it to cast the various “actors”  and did KP have some input into that ?

Mike: It’s very kind of you to call them, including myself, actors!
I went to LA and we had a preproduction meeting, one of a few, and KP called over all his friends which were mostly members of Spindrift and The Brian Jonestown Massacre and KP thought that Bobby Bones should play the Preacher and he would play El Sobero etc...
I discovered a few things as we started shooting and then I just tried to work around that as far as the actors go.

Florence: In that respect KP had his own vision.
Was it also his decision that you should be the Sheriff ?

Mike: Yes I think that was his decision and I didn’t want to play the Sheriff actually but due to the lack of people I agreed to it.

Florence: Did you just want to stay behind the camera ?

Mike: I have a love- hate relationship with being in front of the camera.
I do enjoy it but I also find that if I have lines then I do stress out on them.

Florence: As far as I can see there is no hero, every body is flawed or devoid of any morals. Is that your view on society as it is now or maybe as it was in 1882, when the film is set ?
Or could we blame KP for that ?

Mike: That’s a good question and I wrestled with that for a while.

Florence: Even the women are bad!

Mike: I don’t know how that reflects on me but I kind of wrestled with the idea of having a more traditional hero character who was good but I gave up on that pretty quickly...I just don’t know why I did that. 
I just couldn’t find it within myself!!

Florence: Mike, it’s not looking good for you right now!
Actually this is another point that sets “God’s Gun” apart.
In every movie there will almost always be someone who comes along and saves the day and unfortunately that’s not representative of real life.
Your own part, Colt the Sheriff, is also very interesting. There you are, this pretty worthless human being, hen pecked, nagged and cheated on by his wife....
Was it your choice to portray this character in this manner ?

Mike: Yes it was!

Florence: Did you play the opposite of who you really are or are you telling us that you like nagging women ?

Mike: I guess that I’ve found myself in relationships where I get pecked at quite a bit I suppose!

Florence: So you’re just playing yourself really. 

Mike: I’m actually not as tough as Colt but I wish I was.

Florence: Visually the movie is absolutely stunning as you’ve used so many technical tricks and play on colours, frozen images and split screens...
Did you believe that this would add to the story or did you self indulge a little ?

Mike: First of all you work with what you have and I think that the second scene we shot was when Colt and El Sobero face off with each other and we didn’t know what we were gonna say, we just said a couple of lines to each other and it was immediately apparent that we weren’t going to make a serious Western.
We don’t have the depth of acting to do something convincing. 
I looked at what we had and we had this incredible music to start with which was inspiring enough and I knew that visually I could create something that was really exciting and powerful to look at, in many different ways. I wanted to create a lot of action and go all out visually and use every trick I could come up with and make something visually spectacular. I did my best and it took a couple of years to really nail it down.

Florence: Those kinds of “ special effects “ do give the movie its very arty feel.

Mike: Another thing is that if we were under a studio or another producer and they were calling the shots I wouldn’t have been able to do that. I would come home from work every night, I would open up the project and approach just one shot as a painting and I would spend maybe a week just on that one shot.
Nobody has that luxury when they’re making a feature.

Florence: Having secured distribution which also means that the finishing line is in sight, retrospectively is there anything that you should have done differently ?

Mike: Yes definitely some little things, like I would have made sure that I wipe the lens before every shot!
I would have rehearsed with people more but it was so hard to wrangle everyone. As Courtney [Taylor- Taylor] told me the other night: 
“Working with a bunch of musicians is like trying to herd cats! “ 
On this movie it was very difficult to organise and schedule, imagine trying to get these people up before sunrise!!

Florence: The locations are beautiful, did you know of these places beforehand ?

Mike: Right away I thought that they are so many low budget films that don’t take advantage of the one thing that they can do to make their film so much better and that’s finding a really great location that’s not gonna cost you anything.
KP is an absolute lover of the West and he has been scouting out all of Southern California for the last few years, he just loves going out into the desert to all these different locations so he knew of all the great places we could shoot at.
We shot at probably twenty different locations and the furthest we drove was Death Valley, that’s three hours away.

Florence: You worked with musicians rather than professional actors so how respectful were they of your directions, ideas...

Mike: Ok for the most part.
I remember the first weekend we shot, nobody really knew who I was or what I’d done but they all thought that this was fun, but after the first five months or so people were getting resistant and they didn’t want to go out and shoot anymore.
They didn’t know what was going on, actually none of us really knew what was to become of this and they just wanted to get this over with but it’s the film maker’s job to keep the fire burning.

Florence: Let’s have a plot spoiler for our readers.
Did you really have to kill the Bounty Hunter, [Dave Koenig], he was only doing his job and he is so sweet and cute... 
Why would you do that ?
What kind of sicko are you ?

Mike: It was decided from the very beginning that the Preacher was gonna kill everyone.
You know I am writing a sequel right now as our distributor has asked for it, and finally there is talk of a budget!
With KP we want to do like the Sergio Leone’s trilogy where he had a lot of the same actors playing different characters and we want to bring back the characters into another movie. It would almost be like in South Park, how Kenny gets killed in almost every episode!
Once in a while everyone dies.

Florence: That’s really good news and I wish you the best with that.
Would Spindrift be once again responsible for the soundtrack ?

Mike: Absolutely!  I have already set aside some tracks and I have the theme song to the next movie. It is amazing and it’s not on their forthcoming album. 
KP is the man!
KP and his buddy Marcos who also writes some really great stuff.
Nobody does that cooler than they do and I really want to see KP get successful because he really deserves it. There is no-one out there doing what he’s doing. It’s like a certain flavour that you’re not gonna get anywhere else.

Florence: You recently went to the Sundance Film Festival which must be really exciting for someone like you, please tell us more about that.

Mike: I went there as a guest, part of Quentin Tarantino’s crew for the latest movie he produced called “Hell Ride”, starring Larry Bishop, who also directs, Dennis Hopper and Michael Madsen among many. The editor of that film, Blake West, went to a Spindrift show a year an a half ago and decided there and then that this was the music they needed for Quentin’s movie, we also had the trailer for “God’s Gun” playing and he immediately loved it, saying: “ This is exactly the thing I need to do with Quentin’s movie, this kind of campy badass comic  book thing...”, so he bought the soundtrack and poster and then a mutual friend introduced us at a Halloween party last year and we immediately became friends and he asked me if I wanted to go to Sundance. I had never been so it was really exciting.
I had a Tarantino badge and I went to all the cool parties.

Florence: You mentioned to me that a Premiere for “God’s Gun” should be scheduled soon.
Any idea when ?

Mike: I am finishing up some delivery items this week and once that’s with the distributors they’re gonna start to schedule in a premiere, but that should be in the next few months and then the movie may do a limited US theatrical run as well.

Florence: What about Region 2 DVDs ?

Mike: We also have foreign distribution so yes.
I have been putting together all the extra features to go on the DVD and there’s gonna be a lot of cool things on it.

Florence: Let’s talk a little about your current projects.
You’ve now moved to Portland and have been working with The Dandy Warhols for the last few weeks. I would imagine that’s a lot of fun!

Mike: I am doing all their videos for the new album and right now I am in the middle of editing the first one, which I am really happy with so far.
When I find the time I try and write the next movie. 
Ultimately I would love to just make feature films and I have quite a few screenplays I am working on that need to get done.

Florence: And finally would you have a message to the world please ?

Mike: Don’t talk about stuff, do it!

Words: Florence ACHERYPhotos from MySpace

www.myspace.com/razortreefilms