2008 Fargo Film Festival Begins Today
After months of planning, dozens of meetings, hundreds of volunteer hours, and thousands of email messages, the 2008 Fargo Film Festival gets underway Tuesday, March 4, with the special showing of Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation at 7pm at the Fargo Theatre. A virtual shot-for-shot replication of the blockbuster classic, Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation is a testament to the magic allure of moviemaking and its intersection with feverish adoration.
Already emerging as one of the best-known “fan films” of the last twenty-five years, Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation more than makes up for its lack of professionalism and polish with a sense of joy, fun, and dedication. Constructed by a trio of Mississippi boys over a period of six years, with a total budget of roughly $5,000, the feature-length experiment celebrates the can-do spirit of childhood.
The Fargo Film Festival recently talked with director Eric Zala about Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation.
We are excited to have you and Chris visit Fargo. How much of your time is spent traveling to presentations of Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation?
Chris and I are highly anticipating our trip to Fargo! Our time spent traveling and doing screenings varies widely, from once every other month, to three times a month. Gosh, there’s been many places and people that have been exciting to us over the past three years or so… from premiering at the Alamo Drafthouse in Austin, Texas, and returning several years later to find Quentin Tarantino in the audience, chatting with him in the lobby afterwards… to showing it on a little island in Sitka, Alaska… to showing it to employees of Skywalker Ranch in Marin County, CA, touching the actual Ark of the Covenant prop afterwards.
More recently screening it at ILM… showing it at Pixar… traveling to Oldenberg, Germany… Chris showed it in Australia… Boston, Seattle, Boulder, Chicago, San Francisco, Manhattan… and especially the smaller towns… Driggs, Idaho… Athens, Georgia… Galesburg, Illinois… Oxford, Mississippi.
Now that your story is being adapted into a studio feature, can you talk a little bit about what kind of involvement you and Chris and Jayson will have? Do you plan to participate in the production?
Our involvement in the Paramount Pictures-Scott Rudin movie about us is limited, as unofficial creative consultants. Screenwriter Daniel Clowes (Ghost World) interviewed each of us for about three hours over the phone initially. Since then, we’ve also met with Dan in person on a couple of occasions while in his neck of the woods, so we feel like he’s taken the time to get to know us, and clearly cares about doing our story right, which we appreciate. Time will tell whether we’ll have the option to be on set while they film. That would be pretty surreal as I think about it.
Many of the stories about the making of Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation describe the variety of source material you used to stitch together the shooting script, including a collection of storybooks, comics, making-of publications and action figures. At any point in your process did you actually use a VHS copy of Raiders of the Lost Ark as a reference? Were there things you saw and thought, “We really nailed that,” or “Wow, we were way off there”?
Nope, when we started initially, in 1982, the original Raiders of the Lost Ark wasn’t available for rental. Video stores were in their infancy. So when the movie was re-released in theaters in 1982, we went two, three times, and tried to commit everything to memory. From there, I spent a whole summer drawing 602 storyboards, to capture the shot list, compositions, and details. Then Raiders of the Lost Ark came out on laserdisc and eventually VHS and Betamax. Watching it again, at last, by that point, was akin to a religious experience. And yeah, some details we felt we’d got… and some we didn’t. But it was already storyboarded, so we stuck with that.
Was there ever a point during the long process of shooting your movie that you thought about quitting? Teen-age boys are not often known for having the attention spans and stick-to-it-ive-ness to spend six or seven years working on a project like this. Tell us a little bit about how you and the other moviemakers managed to negotiate responsibility, collaborate, and resolve disagreements.
We had our conflicts, some fallings-out over the course of the seven years it took to make and complete our film. Thinking about it now, it’s remarkable that we didn’t have more tribulations in our friendship than we did, when one considers the amount of change you undergo as a person while growing from age twelve to nineteen… changing interests and priorities. Plus, add to that the fact that the three of us were (and are) such different personalities. One of the strengths of our trio is that being so different, our different strengths complemented when they could have clashed a lot more, one would think.
Over time, for example, Chris and I have reflected that one such pairing of complementing strengths is that one of Chris’s strengths is that he’s the starter, an initiator. It was his idea in the first place to remake Raiders, whereas I don’t think that I would have gone there on my own. On the other hand, we’ve also reflected that, of the two of us, I’m the finisher. I have a drive to push things to completion, to do whatever it takes to do things right.
Usually, these different strengths complement, although there were rare occasions on which they clashed, as when we all got in a big disagreement over how much work to give the sound in post-production. We had a blow-up, and we parted ways, not speaking to each other, at least not until the following summer when Last Crusade came out, and we came together again, renewed, and finished.
So, in summary, there were times where our friendship was indeed tested, sometimes ironically by our very differences that enabled us to both start and finish this huge project. We’ve mutually learned from our childhood experiences and apply those lessons even now, when as adults, we once again find ourselves tackling a big collaborative project together – an original feature film, a southern gothic action-adventure to be shot in Mississippi.