Moviemaker Interview: Colin Froeber & Allison Schmidt
Fear Itself, a movie by Colin Froeber and Allison Schmidt, won first place at the 2008 2-Minute Movie Contest at the Fargo Film Festival. A comical account of unusual phobias, Fear Itself played to enthusiastic audiences at the second venue and the closing evening “Best of the Festival” program at the Fargo Theatre. Colin and Allison spent some time answering questions during an interview that took longer to complete than the brief running time of their enjoyable short.
Describe how you collaborated on Fear Itself. Did you co-write, co-direct, and co-edit, or did you divide up the duties?
Allison: We pretty much “co-everythinged.” It was a really relaxed process because we had a check and balance system. You could always see the strengths and weaknesses in the other person’s ideas. Colin acted because his scream is a gem.
Colin: Allison and I did separate research on phobias we thought sounded interesting or humorous and then worked together to figure out how to present them. We both have similar loopy senses of humor, which helped a lot during the process. During the shooting, Allison was in charge.
When planning a 2-Minute Movie, how do you approach the time limitation? Where did the idea for Fear Itself originate?
Allison: First of all, we limited the characters to two. There isn’t enough time to build a good scene or have the audience identify with more than a few. Usually the script becomes condensed, so we had to be flexible with lines. Long credits also take up too much precious, precious screen time.
Colin: Fear Itself was originally intended to be just one part of a longer film. A couple of years ago, some friends approached us with the idea of getting a bunch of moviemakers to create their own short films around the subject of fears or phobias, and combining the shorts into one full-length collaboration. As far as I know, Fear Itself was the only thing to come out of that original concept. That’s partly why it’s so short - the other reason is that people probably would have stopped laughing and started being annoyed if it had gone on too long. I think there’s a certain window of time in which constant screaming is funny, and that window is probably somewhere around two minutes.
Many of Colin’s reactions as an actor are clever and inventive. How much of Colin’s performance was improvised during the actual shooting?
Allison: I don’t think we ever micro-managed his performance. It was basically like, “Okay, scream!” In retrospect, what Colin does so well is Franklin’s delayed moments of realization. For example, in phagophobia (fear of swallowing), Franklin starts munching on cereal but only screams when he begins to swallow. Why Franklin doesn’t immediately associate chewing with its result is beyond me, but it’s still pretty funny. We did usually decide before shots in public locations exactly how Franklin was going to react.
Colin: To be completely honest, most, if not all, of my performance was improvised. I think if we had written a script it would have been nothing but a single stage direction reading “Franklin screams in various locations.” We shot everything in one afternoon, and we did end up doing several takes for each shot. You can definitely tell if you listen closely to my voice - it’s pretty near to gone in some of the segments. I had a sore throat for a few days after the shoot.
How did you decide on the various types of phobias to include? Were there ones that you definitely said “We have to do that one” or ones that you wanted to add but didn’t?
Allison: We were initially pretty smitten with the fear of death and fear of trees. We basically just took out a phobia dictionary and looked for variety, what could be pragmatically shot and hopefully not offend people. I felt the shots and the reactions were more important than the actual phobias. Switching from a medium shot of Colin in a room to a wide shot of Colin running between trees is dramatically more interesting than a series of medium shots in a house. Plus, it was important that each physical reaction was different as the scream was pretty monotone.
Colin: We were toying around with maybe twenty different phobias before we settled on the ones we ended up using. We considered a lot of things when deciding which to use. What I think is so funny about the film, and what still makes me laugh every time I see it, is how outlandish the situations are. You see the title card with “fear of bicycles,” and you think you know what’s coming, but instead of seeing the character riding a bike, he’s just standing next to one, screaming. Instead of the “fear of cars” part showing Franklin in a car, he’s just standing next to a busy street. Instead of seeing him shower for the “fear of showering” part, he’s just standing fully clothed and screaming in a bathtub.
The humor comes from this ridiculousness - it’s not like we see the character accidentally stumbling into or coming across frightening situations, but instead he seems to be purposely putting himself into them. This unexpected quality is something we really worked hard at capturing, and it’s something that couldn’t be utilized for every phobia we researched. We also looked for unusual or highly abnormal phobias. Arachnophobia? It’s been done, and I refuse to work with spiders. Everyone’s scared of clowns, but being afraid of trees, or speaking? Now that’s funny - and it makes for a good movie, too.