MRH: During shooting of Keep Your Distance, did you have the DVD already in mind, and were there certain moments during production that you decided to schedule in some extra footage for the making-of featurette, interviews, etc.?

SP: Absolutely, and that's another huge difference between going in, as evidenced by the story I just told you about Nice Guys :

a) It was my first feature, when we shot it in '98, and

b) I didn't even know what DVD was in '98.

Things that we actually did [for Keep Your Distance ] were not out of the ordinary on a studio level, but... I hired an experienced director of special features for DVDs named Greg Tillman. He not only shot all of my behind-the-scenes on digital video... but he also sat all the actors down and interviewed them.

When we wrapped principle photography, we had 12 hours of cast interviews, and well over a 100 hours of behind-the-scenes footage. We also made sure we had a still photographer on hand for every day of the shoot; I think on Nice Guys, we only had one on hand for a week out of four weeks, and that was an economic decision. We went out of our way to get that behind-the-scenes team – the still person, the video person – on board from day one, so we could make a damn good-looking behind-the-scenes featurette.

And I suppose one other thing we did was shoot a 'one year later' sequence for the film - which did not make the final cut of the theatrical release of the movie - but we always knew going in, even though we had some questions of whether or not it would end up in the movie, [that we'd] keep this on the schedule because this could be a fun special feature: an alternate ending.

MRH: There's a schism that exists between filmmakers and the studio marketing department, where a director is occasionally given the chance to release his/her preferred version of a movie on DVD, and while that may reflect the director's original vision, it could also be a version that lacks the smarter pacing decisions made under pressure during post-production that created in a leaner, tighter work - the version that won praise from critics, and the attention of mainstream filmgoers.

I guess that from a marketing standpoint, the studio gets to trumpet a new and improved version, but for filmgoers, that revised version sometimes becomes the only way to enjoy a film - thereby obliterating the one people arguably preferred.

What's curious, though, is whether having the knowledge of being able to later expand or refine a scene or entire film can affect the initial editorial decisions for the theatrical version.

SP: During the cutting of the film, I always want to make the best possible movie that I can, and at an early stage in my filmmaking career, there was the adage, ‘When in doubt, leave it out,' or ‘Shorter is better.' One of the prototypical good news/bad news things about doing things independently is that you're your own boss; so you have complete creative control, but you also have complete accountability.

I think there's somewhere between 8 and 10 minutes of deleted scenes that'll be on the DVD in a special section, and not put back into the movie... I do think that, on their own, each of the scenes we cut out stand up well, and are well-performed and executed, but it really did come down to a pacing issue that slowed the movie down.

MRH: Returning a little to the topic of distribution, did you find that it's easier to present yourself as a filmmaker at festivals because your entire film résumé can basically fit into a pocket?

SP: In the business plan for Keep Your Distance, I had a binder with five sections... One through four were the offering memorandum and the subscription agreement and the appendices and all that, but the fifth and final tab was simply my DVD in a sleeve for Nice Guys. I think the perception is that if you've got your film on DVD, it's got to be a quality film right away; I think that's accurate to some degree, because it takes a lot more effort to author a DVD than to just lay off a dub.

A DVD is so compact... I know it was a big part of what got [Keep Your Distance] made, because if I had had to put a bulky VHS in a traditionally packaged plan, I don't think it would have gotten watched. With the DVD, they can plop it out, [and] can put it on a laptop on the plane if they want to.

MRH: Because you personally handled the distribution of your first film, did you discover any serious pitfalls, and did the experience exceed your initial expectations?

A: Well, I don't know what I expected. There's a friend of mine who runs the U.S. Comedy Arts Festival in Colorado every year, and it was the first festival to play Nice Guys. When I saw him at another festival in New York, he goes, 'You're going to self-distribute?' and I said 'Yeah, I've got to, because I believe in this film too much,' and he goes, 'You know, that'll be at least a year of your life.'

And he was right, and then some.

In terms of what I expected from a time commitment, it was probably more than I expected. It was a lot of work, but the flipside of all that is it's exceptionally fulfilling; I learned so much and met so many people that are involved with the distribution of film that it put me in a much better position to talk confidently about what I could expect to do with my new one.