Interview With Dave Kebo(1/3) By Steve Rudd

(1/3), (2/3), (3/3),

It's funny who you bump into when you're traveling. I recently visited Istanbul, and though I was only there for a couple of weeks, the people I met were amazing. In the space of just a few days I met a firefighter from Colorado, a Mexican woman who worked for The British Embassy, a man from London who was aiming to cycle around the world ... and then a guy from LA by the name of Dave Kebo. It was Election night in the US when we got chatting over a beer in The Backpacker's Café. It turned out that Dave was ensconced in the movie industry, having lived and worked in LA all his life.

Having worked with movers and shakers of Lawrence Kasdan's caliber, Dave's love of telling a good story has got him far.

He doesn't deny that it's hard work, but so long as you have the drive to tell a good story, then - according to Dave - sheer perseverance can get you a long way. Since working with Mr. Kasdan on the post-production of French Kiss (starring Meg Ryan and Kevin Kline) and Mumford, Dave has gone on to make his own name in Hollywood, his clear-cut talent for writing, producing and directing knowing no bounds. Here, in an exclusive interview, he bares all about how it's not always necessary to attend expensive film schools, the dubious joys of shooting reel in the desert in December, and how the highly original format of a movie he made called The Confession could change the way people 'embrace' movies and literally make them their own...

Without further ado, it's over to Dave...

Hey Dave, how are things? Good, man. Barack Obama won. A month later, I'm still on that high. So, yeah, it's all good. You are a moviemaker based in LA. Have you always lived and worked in the so-called 'City of Angels'? Born and raised in LA, although I've shot projects in other places as well.

Did you realize from a young age that you wanted to work in the movie industry? I always wanted to tell stories. So, from a young age, I knew I wanted to be a writer. Movies came later. I never really shot anything until after college. I guess there was always a technical mental block that I had to get over. And also, back then, shooting film was expensive, and video just looked like shit. So, it wasn't until I actually got a chance to make my first short that I realized three things. 1) It wasn't brain surgery - I could do this. 2) I wasn't half bad at it. And 3) It was fucking awesome.

Do you think that most people who live in LA aspire to work in the industry by default? Nah, not really. Most of my friends do other things. Creative stuff, but not necessarily film related. Did you 'get into the movies' as soon as you left school? Just out of college I got a chance to shoot a 3 minute film on 16mm. That was my first experience.

It ended up going to Sundance and I won the New Filmmaker Award. So, right out of the gate, I was hooked. What was the first feature that you got involved with?

The first feature I made with my friend, Rudi Liden. We were writing partners who wanted to direct, but no one would give us money. So, we decided to write something that we could make by ourselves - hire friends to play the roles, and pay for it on credit cards. We wanted to do something like Hitchcock's 'Rope' - a murder who-dunnit all in one location. On top of that, we decided that we'd shoot it all in one take, on Security Cameras. So, we rented twelve security cameras, wired them up, rehearsed it like a play for six weeks, and shot it all in one take. The movie was called, 'The Confession.'

The reason we shot it the way we did is that we wanted people to be able to switch between cameras on the DVD. So, that essentially, the person watching had the power to watch from any angle. And after we released the DVD, we decided that it would cool to give people the chance to use our footage to cut their own version of the film. So, we created something called Film School in a Box, which has all the footage on a hard drive set up in a multiple camera view. If you have Final Cut Pro, you can essentially cut the entire movie in the time it takes to watch it. Anyway, you can check it out at my website: www.filmschoolinabox.net

Continued .... Next Page (2/3)

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