Interview: John Charles Meyer of “The Millennium Bug”
Twelve years following the blood-curdling dread of Y2-Chaos, the guys of No CGI Films and Squire Film Shoppe are finally seeing their first full-length independent feature The Millennium Bug hit the festival circuit. With a select number of screenings happening worldwide, I was lucky enough to catch the second official international screening of The Millennium Bug here at Edmonton’s only annual horror film festival, DEDfest. I was even luckier to have had the opportunity to sit down with lead star and associate producer John Charles Meyer for an interview and shit-shooting session. Honestly one of the easiest-going and kindred spirits I’ve ever had the pleasure of speaking with. John has been, to date, one of my favourite interviewees. Here’s what he had to say.
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Lacey Paige: What initially turned you on to acting?
John Charles Meyer: My father has done community theatre his entire life and my parents put me on a stage when I was six. I spent my entire childhood acting, that’s all I did. And then I went to college and decided you have to be fucking loonie tunes to try to pursue acting as a career, so I stopped doing it for 14 years and came back to it in my 30s.
LP: And what brought you back into it?
JCM: Basically my life falling apart. In the span of one year I lost my job, my marriage, my house, my dog and my band, and kind of decided I was done with what I was doing. I’d be living in Washington D.C. for about 15 years and I worked in politics for about a decade. I was just tired of it and I wanted to get out and do something different so I went back to acting.
LP: You’re still doing theatre stuff also?
JCM: Theatre, film, TV, whatever I can get my hands on. Theatre is my favourite by far but it pays the least by far. You have to balance it out. If you can land all three, at least for your first few years doing it, you need to.
LP: How does acting on stage in theatre productions differ from acting in films and on TV?
JCM: In a hundred different ways. First and foremost, it’s the instant gratification that you get from the audience. You perform something, [the audience] cheers and it makes you feel great, it reminds you of why you started doing it when you were six. But also, film and television are so regimented and specific and for that part, smaller, meaning you don’t act big, you don’t act large. When I was a kid I was always taught to project and to carry your voice and make sure the back row hears you. Film and television are not that way at all, you need to underplay things considerably.
LP: How does acting in a feature-length independent film differ from that kind of stuff?
JCM: In a lot of ways there aren’t a hell of a lot of differences, at least when you’re comparing apples to apples as far as budget goes. I haven’t done a feature-film with a 50-million dollar budget. I have done television shows with multiple-million dollar budgets per episode, which is pretty phenomenal when you think about a single hour of television costing that bloody much. But feature films, I haven’t done any with giant budgets yet so the indie features don’t feel that different than the indie shorts except that you a little more of a sense of family, a little more of a sense of community cause you work with people that much longer. A short film you can literally shoot on for one day, so you meet your cast mates at 8 o’clock in the morning and at 7 o’clock in the evening you might never see them again.
LP: You’ve taken on some production responsibilities with the Millennium Bug and El Tio Sam. Tell me a bit about your experiences as a producer.
JCM: About a year ago, a buddy of mine who is the lead producer on El Tio Sam…he came to me with the script and said I think I’m going to produce this film. He’d produced several features already, he was fairly experienced in the business. He said, ‘I think there’s a role in here for you, I can get you a meeting with the director’, and ultimately I got the role, and suddenly their production schedule got crunched and they were shooting it in much less time than they wanted to, much sooner than they wanted to. So he asked if I’d be interested in basically learning the ropes, and I said, ‘I don’t know what I’m doing’ and he said, ‘I say jump, you say how high’, and I said, ‘I can do that’. That pretty much started it. That was less than a year ago.
LP: Is producing something you’re going to be involved in with future projects?
JCM: Definitely going to be involved in, I don’t know that I would say that I’m going to seek it out the same way that I seek out acting roles because ultimately acting is why I’m doing this and it’s what brought me to it in the first place. But I enjoy the production stuff a lot and I think that in the future I’m going to find myself playing dual roles in productions that I first land as an actor—just going into a production once I’ve been cast in a role and say I’m happy to help with X, Y and Z because I’ve done it before on a couple other films, and if they say yes, great, and if they say no, fine. I’m happy to be just an actor too.
LP: So you prefer being in a more hands on position with filmmaking as opposed to on the other side of the lens?
JCM: Unlike Millennium Bug, where I came on as a producer after the movie was finished shooting, I came on for Millennium Bug basically for festivals, press, social media, those are my responsibilities for this movie so I wasn’t a producer when I came on set. El Tio Sam, I was a producer and an actor at the same time and it can make you a little crazy because everything about being a producer is solving problems for other people on set—the caterer’s late, the prop guy can’t find something, or somebody needs to borrow a car, or we don’t have the right union contract, or whatever—and you do that day-after-day on a production and you suddenly get to the days when your character is shooting his scenes and you just kind of have to shut off half of your brain because you can’t be acting in a scene and be waiting for somebody to come to you and say I need that union contract. You’d go insane. It’s interesting juggling both at the same time.
LP: What about writing and directing? Are these things that you would consider pursuing in the future?
JCM: Directing, I really don’t think so, I just don’t know that I have the right temperament for it to be perfectly honest with you. I enjoy leading in things but I don’t enjoy—producing is putting out a hundred fires at once, directing is putting laser-focus on one single, specific thing. I’m not A.D.D. or anything but I think I prefer the hundred tasks at once to the one laser-focus one. As far as writing goes, I’ve written a handful of things and I’m shopping around right now, we’ll see where that goes. I have one full-length screenplay that I’m trying to get some interest in right now that’s just been completed. We’ll see where that goes. It’s not a priority but it’s a fun side project.
LP: How did you get the lead role in Millennium Bug?
JCM: I auditioned. I did a short film four years ago called In Twilight’s Shadow. It was a lesbian vampire short film and the director of that short film is a writing partner of the casting director for the Millennium Bug and she recommended me when they were doing the auditions. I had to do the audition like everybody else but that was my in for the audition.
LP: Are you directly involved with Squire Film Shoppe?
JCM: Now, yes. I mean am I technically in an office at the company? No. But yeah, it’s a pretty tight-knit family. There are a handful of guys that make up the company and I think that will continue to be the case even through what we plan to do next, which I hope will be a sequel to the Millennium Bug. I think it’s going to continue to be a pretty tight-knit family and I hope and expect to continue to be involved.
LP: How did Squire Film Shoppe come to fruition?
JCM: Squire Film Shoppe started quite a while ago, No CGI Films is essentially the same group of people but it is more focused on specifically avoiding CGI in all films. Squire Film Shoppe has done a handful of short films as well, they did one a couple years ago called The Night Caller and it was started basically by two brothers, James and Kenneth Cran, the producer and director of the film.
LP: Do you think that the budget and location restraints impeded the original vision of the film?
JCM: I only know what I’ve read and seen in interviews with Ken where he’s addressed that exact question, the original script went through a lot of changes but they weren’t all budgetary, some of them were actually stylistic. I know that in one case he felt as though his script was too similar to another movie, I can’t recall the title, but there was something that came out after he finished writing the script and he felt that it was way too similar so he scrapped what he had an he started over again. So the script went through a lot of revisions. I would imagine some of them were because of budget constraints but I think that they pulled off a lot of stuff despite the budget constraints.
LP: With it being the year 2011 now, do you think that some people might find the premise of the film outdated or obsolete?
JCM: You know, I’ve read exactly that from a number of people, even movie reviewers, and it strikes me as kind of an odd question because there are movies that are set 20 years in the future, there are movies that are set 20 years in the past, what’s the difference? I think maybe why it strikes people as outdated is that the Millennium Bug itself, the Y2K computer bug, strikes a lot of people now as sort of this quaint notion, it was this silly thing that everybody was panicked about for apparently no good reason, and because of that it makes it seem more dated as a concept. But movies come out about the 70s all the time. It doesn’t strike me as all that strange.
LP: How would you describe the Millennium Bug to someone who hasn’t seen it?
JCM: Somebody compared it to some horror movie meets Little Shop of Horrors, which I think is kind of fun. I’ve heard Hills Have Eyes meets Godzilla. I feel like no matter how you describe it you’ve got to make sure people understand that it’s about a giant Kaiju monster. It’s the old-school Godzilla-type rampage of an animal of some sort. I do think it’s different because of the no CGI and I do think it’s different because it’s not a bunch of naked teenagers running around in the woods, and I do think it’s different because it’s campy too.
LP: Are going to be attending any of the other festivals/screenings?
JCM: We are attempting to send one representative to every festival. I know I will be going to Washington D.C., I will be going to Atlanta, and I will be going to Nice, France. We have other people going for sure to Saskatoon, for sure to Buffalo, and for sure to Indianapolis and to England as well, but I won’t be at those myself. We’re kind of trading off. I get a little bit of deference over the other two guys who would be going, the producer and the director, because I’ve been setting up the festivals but more importantly cause I’m in the movie. They did way more work on this movie than I did but people see me on the screen and they can connect to that a little bit more.
