Following the online premiere of Mickey Dogface, Fleming discusses the challenges and rewards of independent filmmaking
Making a film is nearly impossible and offers little extrinsic reward. At its best, it’s about community and the joy of creating together. Zach Fleming got into filmmaking through friends, and now earns a living producing commercial work as a way to create space to play with people he loves through his own film projects. I talked to him about his approaches to filmmaking and life, the appeals and downsides of the short form, and how hard it is to move through the world with confidence.
For October Horror 2023, Split Tooth spoke with Fleming and hosted the online premiere of his latest film, Mickey Dogface. The plan was to just focus on Mickey, but, unsurprisingly, the conversation stretched far beyond Fleming’s Halloween-set horror short. Some of the following was previously published as part of the Mickey Dogface premiere in October, but is presented here in the broader context of their discussion of Fleming’s career and what it takes to work as an independent filmmaker.
Read about and watch Mickey Dogface (2022)
Jim Hickcox: Are you a New Yorker by birth?
Zach Fleming: I grew up in Maryland until I was 12 or 13. Then I moved to the suburbs of New York. I went to NYU in 2006 for the General Arts and Science program and have been in the city ever since.
Which school is that general arts and sciences under?
It’s just called the College of Arts and Sciences, not Tisch or Steinhardt. I had a bunch of friends who were in the film program, but I didn’t go to film school.
Do you feel like it was better to not go to film school?
For me at least, I think so. I feel like I got a lot of the same connections just by going to NYU that I would’ve gotten from going to a traditional film school. I got pretty lucky falling into a bunch of relationships with people that led me to filmmaking.
That wasn’t what you were chasing at the time?
No, I majored in classical mythology in undergrad. I was briefly like, ‘I’ll just go to law school and figure it out later.’ In undergrad they don’t care what you do for pre-law. It was either English or Classics and I went for Classics. For a while, I was thinking I might go to grad school and get really into Ancient Greece. I met with a TA who had recently gotten his masters. I went to his office and told him I was thinking about doing grad school and pursuing Classics and asked him how it had been going for him. I remember he got up and closed his office door and sat down and was like, ‘Don’t do it.’ (Laughs) He prefaced it by asking if I was independently wealthy or if my family had a bunch of money and I said no. He was like, ‘Stay away. No one in Classics knows what money is. They don’t know what jobs are. I’m going to work at the one random school that would have me. If you can’t support yourself, don’t do it.’ It’s the kind of thing that would be amazing if you had unlimited money and time. But I don’t. (Laughs)
I ended up majoring in Classics and after graduating fell into advertising through a family friend. I started working in production and fell into films from there.
I know a lot of people who went the other route of ‘I’m going to be a filmmaker, how can I live? Oh, I guess I’m working in commercials or television production…’ It’s interesting that you came from the other way.
When I first got out of college I worked as an assistant at a law firm answering phones and printing and organizing emails. But while I was there, my good friend, Molly Fisher, an NYU Tisch screenwriter, had written a short film for somebody else. It was kind of on commission, but mostly just a collaborative, friendly thing. This guy said he was a filmmaker and pitched an idea to her that was based on a situation that he had lived through and thought would make a good short. She wrote a draft for him and thought she would just see where it goes. So she turned in a first draft to see what he thought and he didn’t respond, went off, made the short off that first draft. A few months he later sent her the short and was like, ‘It’s done! People love the performances, etc.’ then mentioned something to the effect of, ‘But people felt that the script could’ve used more work.’ (Laughs) So that experience with him, and being proxy to that, was part of the final push to her and I to be like, ‘Well, we’re going to make movies now.’
We can do better than that!
Exactly! That’s a big thing, that for most of my life, I just thought making movies was something that other people did. It was very foreign and magical to me for a large period of my life. There was just something about that experience that broke the mystique of it and made it feel more like a tangible thing we could do.
Nothing against that guy, but there’s a lot of those guys out there… Dumb-dumbs just slugging their way through the industry.
So much of that guy… We can all learn something from those guys, unfortunately.
Yeah, there’s something about that level of confidence, I guess.
Yeah, which I still don’t have, by the way. (Laughs) But chippin’ away!
Same. I think a lot of people are just born there and the rest of us have to work towards that absolute brazen disregard for anyone else. You’ve directed several shorts and produced a ton. Do you feel like you’re a producer who sometimes directs, or a director who produces for friends?
I definitely feel like a producer who sometimes directs, just because of my lifestyle and day job. Most of my life is producing at this point and then I direct when I can. I would love to one day be a director who produces for friends. But I am so happy to have worked on everything that I’ve produced. It has all been super rewarding and I’m super lucky to have been able to take on those projects. And I’m able to do that because my day job is flexible occasionally and I’ve been doing it a while. So I’m able to essentially not pay myself to work on a bunch of these things that I’ve produced and worked on for months at a time. Which is both a luxury and exhausting.
That’s always the hardest part: finding a way and the means to make the things you care about. How much can you give up in order to make a movie? That sort of pushes me towards a question that I was thinking about last night. I’m always pushing people to stop making shorts. Whenever someone is talking to me about an idea for a short, I’m like, can it be a feature? You’re really living in a shorts world. What do you get from making shorts? (Laughs)
Honestly, nothing. (Laughs)
I know we are all losing money. None of us are making money on movies! But why so many shorts?
I think it’s the short-term nature of the production. It makes it very feasible for me to do it with my day job. I don’t really know how producers on features do it, the between gigs kind of thing. How do they work on things for years at a time and not have a steady, daily income? I don’t know how they juggle it. It’s gotten me a lot of great relationships. I love everybody I work with. I have a giant database now of people I’ve worked with and would love to work with again. And I’ve met a lot of great people because of the festival circuit. It’s kind of a small world. You end up meeting the same people in different contexts. It’s interesting because my most recent short, Mickey Dogface, has played the most festivals of any film I’ve made and I don’t think it’s made any substantive difference in what I’ll be able to make next. (Laughs)
It does look like each film you make goes more places than the previous; there is a positive trajectory.
Definitely, but I don’t know what that even means anymore… Especially after the pandemic, so many fests have been gutted and there is no support. I have so much empathy and sympathy for the people who work at these festivals because it is so fucking hard and there is no money for anyone. Programming is hard enough but it is so hard to try to get people to come to things with no marketing or insane PR budget. It’s been interesting being part of some of the smaller regional festivals, seeing how they are trying to reach out to local communities to come back and watch short films, or films in general.
I think it is a cultural problem that we don’t have a venue for short films that isn’t festivals. We don’t package them with features or play short programs in normal theaters. Short films are great, but they just aren’t as culturally respected as they ought to be.
And there are so few outlets for them online that are consistent and have real reach. There’s what? There’s Vimeo Staff Picks, there’s Director’s Notes and Short of the Week, and then NoBudge. That’s one hand of platforms on the entire internet that are respectable for shorts. It’s nuts!
That’s like five websites and one of them is just Kentucker Audley, and he is probably on vacation right now.
Hopefully! (Laughs)
He deserves to be! Do you usually go to all the festivals?
No, I can’t afford to, unfortunately. It’s so hard to do anything. (Laughs) I did get to go to a couple for Mickey. I went out to Tallgrass, which had a great local turnout, really enthusiastic and awesome audiences, and I went to Chattanooga which was also really fun, same deal. Really well curated. Great people. I was very lucky to play Brooklyn Horror as a hometown premiere. Their curation is fantastic.
A smart thing about your movies, from a production angle, is they are all made with one to four people in a remote space. Is that a thing you are going to continue?
Both of the ideas I’m currently working on use very isolated locations — a family in a house or someone working at a remote site.
That also seems to be a big part of your anxiety. (Laughs)
Yeah, I don’t know why but there’s something appealing about remote or isolated places… I want to stay there and be in that world. I’m always amazed by big features with large ensembles that weave from A to Z because that’s just not how my plot brain works. And for most of my shorts, I’ve written for locations that I knew I could get access to. The burned-out house in Mickey Dogface was an actual collapsed shed that I found while hiking behind my friend’s place. I went in with Sophie Porter-Hyatt, the production designer, to make it safe. We dug out the floor, laid out tarp, and smoothed it out, and made sure there was no glass or nails that could hurt people.
What do you reckon your next phase is? Something bigger?
I’m trying to do a feature next. But as I’m writing things, I keep thinking of shorter things that could be fun to knock out on a weekend. I just want to get in and make something else. I think a big hurdle for a feature, in my brain, is that I just don’t know how I’ll be able to afford it, ever. It feels like an untenable thing to fund anything, so I put up mental roadblocks for myself and start to write other shorts. I’m trying to push through that though, and I’ve got two features that I’m poking at and they are definitely more in the slow-burn direction than splatter. So kind of threading everything from what I’ve done.
Do you work with a lot of the same people from short to short?
I’ve worked with different DPs on every short – there’ve been pretty long gaps between each short, so it’s nice to experiment with different partners and working processes. And I’d work with every DP I’ve worked with again in a heartbeat. There are so many talented DPs that I would love to work with. Most of my consistent partners have been on the post-production side, like editors and colorists.
Is it mostly folks you know from the commercial world or from elsewhere?
It’s kind of 50-50. There’s a DP, Remington Long, who I work with a lot, who shot In the Flesh (2022), a short that I produced that was directed by Daphne Gardner that went to Sundance this year. I met her through an advertising job at Code and Theory. She was one of the interns, funny enough. We became friends and she was a camera op and we started working together. She was the AC on Mickey and donated her Alexa, and I’m producing a short that she is shooting in the next couple of months. I also met Sunita Prasad, a wonderful and talented writer/director/editor, via commercial world connections and produced a short called Sleep Training with her. But it’s also just an extended network of friends and other directors, like Chris Bell and Tyler Rubenfeld. Tyler did the poster for Mickey Dogface. He did a feature called Wake Me When I Leave (2015) and I produced a short of his with Alex Megaro called Another Sinking Sun (2023) that is starting to hit the festival circuit. It’s just a weird, wide net of New York indie folks that I’ve met. And a lot of it started through NoBudge back in the day. My first short, Outside (2012), which is definitely the most bleak, dread-inducing film I’ve made — which was just me going, ‘Can I even make movies? This is terrifying! What’s happening!’ being channeled into a short film — was rejected by everywhere I submitted, except for NoBudge, who loved it. Kentucker wrote me a great note about it asking to host it. He got another writer to write about it. It was such a good boost. I met so many people, like I mentioned Chris, Tyler, Alex, Frank Mosley, Brandon Colvin, Tony Oswald. And then there’s Phil Chernyak who edited Mickey Dogface, and directed (You’ll Make It In) Florida (2020), which I also produced – he introduced me to Beck Kitsis and Chris McNabb which led to me producing Valentine (2022), which led to me meeting Katie Matthews and working on her incredible short film Dark Moon (2023). I’ve been very lucky that so many friendships have led organically to great collaborators and projects.
Our effects person on Mickey Dogface, Matt Weir, is also someone I met via the extended NYC/NoBudge community. He’s worked on The Last Drive-In with Joe Bob Briggs, created the mask and the latex for Mickey.
Funny story, once we got the mask on Nick [Corbo], Nick couldn’t hear anything. He was essentially blind and deaf while in his Mickey costume. We have some great bloopers of me trying to get him to step slowly out from behind the tree and he can’t hear me at all. Just waddle shuffling… (Laughs)
Those are the joys of filmmaking! I was talking to some Split Tooth people about the Ju-On: The Grudge movies. Craig had a quote from the director about how he loved making movies because it was just so fun on set. I think a lot of sets are fun, but definitely horror sets, because someone is wearing a dumb mask and doesn’t know when to leap from behind a tree. There is a special level of stupidness that you get when you’re making something scary.
It definitely enhances the already-summer camp vibe of making a movie.
It’s hard to bring money together for a feature. I feel like for $20-30,ooo I could either make a really nice short or a really sloppy feature. It’s so hard for me to not just make a really terrible feature film. Is it just self-restraint that keeps you saying, ‘I’m just going to make a good thing?’
Just knowing that you have to live behind the movie that you make, for like a year at least, once it’s made. You have to go out and repeatedly stand behind it and talk about it. It makes me so anxious to think about making a feature that… Even with Mickey Dogface, I have problems with it. I don’t really ever want to watch it again. (Laughs) I’m happy enough with it but I definitely have problems with it and there are things I wish I could’ve done better. I just imagine on a feature that I’ve made sloppily, it would be that times a thousand!
That’s definitely true.
I need to work on that level though. I feel like it’s been getting harder as I get further into my 30s. Including myself, I don’t know anyone who works for free anymore. This isn’t film school anymore, nobody is going to come just hang out on your set.
I guess that is part of why I feel like I can’t call in favors anymore. Calling in favors on a short feels like a waste of a favor. (Laughs) If I’m going to make something, it’s gonna have to be a feature.
That’s true. I am definitely inching more into that direction as I continue. It’s becoming whatever I pull together, just put it into a feature, pretty much.
I have one feature and it was shot in 11 days for $20,000 — and I wouldn’t recommend doing that actually — because you end up… (pause) I thought I was going to make a thing and I would be medium proud of it — which is true, although there are so many things that make it so I can’t watch it… But I thought people would be like, ‘Oh, you can do this with such limited resources, certainly let’s help you find money to make something with more resources.’ But that’s not what people do: They look at it and go, ‘Oh, that’s what you can do.’
Yep. It’s such a weird thing that I think a lot of people are experiencing now in the industry. We came up with these myths. First, it was ‘make your short and then someone will fund a feature from that short.’ It wasn’t even that the short had to be a version of your feature, it just had to be a cool short. Then it became, ‘make a short that’s a part of a feature.’ Like, that will get people excited about the feature. Then it was ‘just go make your feature with all your friends.’ But it doesn’t feel like there’s an actual next level… and I honestly don’t understand how anyone does it besides through nepotism or random connections or luck at this point in time.
Yeah, you need your Classic mythology money to make the jump.
Exactly. But I do think there is something to be said for trying to make a feature for as little as possible and getting it done.
It does feel like a hurdle, but also is that dumb?
It’s all kind of dumb. Filmmaking is basically a mental illness. And that’s fine.
I teach, and I often tell my students, ‘If you can do something else [other than filmmaking], you should.’ (Laughs) There’s some compulsive reward about it, but I don’t know what it is.
I really don’t know what it is. I just love being on set with people. And working on commercials, I’m often on sets where it’s just like, ‘Let’s end, please. Just get the client’s thumbs up and let’s go!’ It’s the opposite of seeing how much you can squeeze out of a day with a bunch of people who are passionate about telling a story together. It’s truly the inverse.
If I were an eccentric millionaire, I would give you money to make Mickey Dogface into a feature.
Well, thank you. That’s great to hear! I need to find more of those. I don’t know what I did wrong in my life where I don’t know, like, five people to give me $50,000 each. (Laughs)
I was talking to a filmmaker one time who had a feature that played South By Southwest. It was made for like $350,000. I asked how he pulled the money together, and he said, ‘Oh, my manager found five people to put $75,000 in each.’ But I feel like that doesn’t even happen now. This was like five years ago, probably.
I don’t feel like managers are scouring film festivals, which is silly.
But just think of some great foreign films you see where there is a comical amount of production company logos at the start. Like, three minutes of logos popping up. Every time I see one of those, I think, ‘Damn, it really takes a village.’ Each of those companies probably put in just enough to make it happen for like a $1-to-3 million movie.
And the producers probably spent a year and half courting all of those places.
That stuff melts my brain; thinking about how the financing works and how once you hit a certain scale for features, accountants need to know when money is in versus paid out… It all melts my brain. I can’t imagine working where that infrastructure comes in.
Have you gone the crowdfunding route before?
I actually did a Kickstarter for Mickey Dogface. I never want to do it again, but I’m so grateful for everyone who kicked in. I’m still doing rewards… I’ve been very terrible about it. Sending updates gives me great anxiety for no reason. But I do feel like Kickstarter is a one-and-done thing. Maybe one short and one feature, but then you’re done. I’m feeling nauseous just thinking about maybe asking people for money for even some part of a feature down the road. It all gives me a stomach ache, but again, I can’t stop, for no good reason.
I remember thinking that Kickstarter was a thing where you put a thing on the internet and random strangers gave you money for projects. But that’s not what it is; it’s people you love giving you money and you feel incredibly guilty about it.
And they don’t want you to feel guilty! (Laughs) That’s not part of it. They’re very happy to do it. But you’re going to feel guilt. The whole time!
Oh boy, are you gonna!
But I’m glad that we feel guilty! I don’t trust people that take money from Kickstarter and don’t feel a little guilty about it.
Your movies often flirt with horror. Staycation uses horror elements to tell a romantic comedy, or tragedy. Several of your other films are not exactly horror movies, but poke at similar human emotion. Do you feel like trauma is a driving element for you?
I don’t know about trauma, but I’m interested in dread and the feeling of dread, and like, paralyzing anxiety. My films have kind of been on a trajectory of ‘trying to have more fun’ with each one. They’ve become a little less bleak. Mickey Dogface, especially, I wrote during the pandemic, when I was locked down and depressed, like everyone was obviously. I just wanted to make something comforting and silly with my friends. I find a lot of comfort and solace in horror. It’s a very cozy genre for me and I think that’s what gave Mickey Dogface that Are You Afraid of the Dark? or Goosebumps energy. It’s not like the feel-bad older stuff, which I still love. I really do love feel-bad movies, but I was feeling bad enough, so I wanted to make something just a little more fun.
We’ll Be Happy Over There is not a fun-time horror movie, and not necessarily a horror movie at all; it’s more a drama exploring horrific things. But the editing of it is formally experimental. Do you feel like that makes a movie into a kind of genre movie? By approaching the editing in a more experimental way? How would you bill that movie if you were sending it out to somebody?
I guess I would bill it as an experimental ghost drama. There’s some tension and anxiety and dread there, but it’s really the past taking vengeance on the present in an inappropriate, or not A-to-B kind of way, which is where that experimental edit style naturally emerged from. Tony Oswald was the editor on that and we had a great time playing with the structure. Early-20s me was reading a lot of Raymond Carver and wondering, ‘Can I make a Raymond Carver ghost story?’ So that’s pretty much what came out of it — past and present couples in the same location with some ghost vengeance. The title comes from a gospel song that’s playing on the radio, that our sound designer, Matt Scott Baker, found that I just loved. He’s another great example of a creative partner who brings a lot to the table.
I feel like I’ve known some directors who want to… Or, let me spin this around the other way: How do you feel about auteur theory?
I think there’s something to it. But it feels to me more like they’re just the conduit that everything flows through. I think it was Kubrick who said he would listen to anyone’s idea because it’s his name on the end product. Which is pretty egotistical, but also a funny way to interpret the auteur thing. But each film is so much the culmination of every department’s craft and what they put into it. To some extent, it’s who the director chooses to work with and the conversations that are had to get that work made. But, in general, it would be nice if people had brain space for more than auteurs — film crew recognition! But I recognize that, given where we’re at culturally, that’s probably not likely.
I do know some directors who really buy into it and need to be in charge of all the things.
I very much do not want to be the smartest person on set. I want people to be smarter and better at what they do than I am.
And then your name is on it and everyone says, ‘Zach Fleming is a genius.’
Exactly! (Laughs) Chris Bell did a great thing on one of his movies, I think it was Trammel, where he did the credits like, “A Film By” and then everyone’s name and role. That’s very much the spirit of what credits should be. But I also love the inverse of that when you watch a Z-grade movie where it’s like, ‘Lighting: Whoever was there… Grip: What’s that?’
That’s so much of the joy, as you’ve already said, in letting brilliant people do brilliant things.
It should be egoless. In a perfect world, it’s about the communal experience of making it. At a certain point, you’re just making a thing with a group of people and it isn’t just yours anymore. And that’s OK.
Watch Mickey Dogface and more on Zach Fleming’s Vimeo page
Visit Zach Fleming’s website
(Split Tooth may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)
