Special Report: Oscar Harding on A Life on the Farm (2022)

Old you is, folks. It should people pay good money to see this movie. When they go out to a theater. They want cold sodas, hot popcorn, and no monsters in the projection booth. Everyone for ten podcasting isn't boring off.

Follow me down. I've got something to show you. I don't know where to even begin with his story. When my grandpa passed away, we went to his house and started clearing out his possessions, and one of my aunts found a video tape. Have you got your video set up?

I'm ready to players from Lovely Pictures. Charles Carton. This farmer, Charles Carson, a neighbor of my grandparents, made this feature length home movie right what are you doing there? That is a truly special work of art. And I know that he did take sort of quite bizarre photographs of things by Monty Python video.

When you think of that, it is a little bit reminiscent of the serial killer Edgan. I can't tell this guy as a genius or a scope. It's not just exactly how I remember it as a kid. It's even more insane. Here we go, It's all I say.

Go with the shops, buy yourself some bath it's side to show, so love us three weird roll the book Club Pictures. It looks like a horror movie and you have a jolly good look and a place you'll go down in history. There's more to it than that. Kept watching, I couldn't believe what i'd seen. I mean, it is a twist A yeah, I'm not expecting that at all or smile listening.

Hey, folks, welcome to a special episode of the Projecting Booth. I'm your host, Mike White, and this episode I'm talking with Oscar Harding. He is the director of the new documentary film A Life on the Farm. It is a documentary about a very special video. It is currently being distributed by al films out there in their venues.

It should be out on streaming and physical media a little bit later in the year. If you want to find out more about where it's playing or when it's into streaming or physical media, take a look at their website, Sonderbar Pictures. That's so O n d RBA R dot COO dot UK. Thank you so much and I hope you the interview. So before we even start to talk about Life on the Farm, I want to know more about you.

Tell me more about how you even got interested in filmmaking and one of those annoying kids who I was boy years old, mom told me to see Lady in the Tramp of the Thids and it was too late. I was at the hooked. So yeah, I've been trying to do this since then. It only took about twenty five year just but we got there eventually. I didn't grow up in Somerset, where the film is based.

I grew up very very close by in Bristol. My mom is Philly irishowed kind of hop back and forth between a town just outside of Dublin and Bristol like a yo yo as a kid. Yeah, fully half English, half Irish, a little bit of both there reel really and yeah. I went to college in Canterbury and at the University of Kent in the UK, where I met my two production partners Dominate, and yeah, we've been in business ever since. We'd always planned to do more on the narrative side of things.

That's kind of our first loves. And I love dogs, I really do, but I never saw myself making one, just because it's a very particular skill set that you need to tell those types of stories and we didn't really feel we had it, and then of course this tape comes along, and you know, we would have been crazy not to have done anything with it. And then, yeah, a couple of years before we discovered that I didn't exchange here in Milwaukee as a college student met my now wife. We did a long distance for a long time. But no, I've been living in Milwaukee the last four years.

Now, how did the tape come into your life? And I know you talk a little bit about this in a Life on the Farm, just for the folks listening at home. Tell the little bit of the origin story here. Sure, So it's a story of two parts. First of all, my grandfather passed away in two thousand and six.

Family goes down to the house to clear out the possessions my dad and my aunts, and one of my aunts finds this video tape and she and my dad and my other they had this vague recollection of their dad showing it to them, and she happened to digitize it and then gave every sibling a copy. And Dad just thought of be kind of interesting for us to watch it. He mentioned that my mother, my grandmother, was on the tape, and then he switched it off our way through, and then I kind of all the images seered into my brain for the longest time. And when you're a kid, I imagined, you see things and then your imagination takes hold and it seems something grand than it actually is. And then when you're an adult you see it and it just seems very underwhelming.

And then we moved house and lost the copy of the tape, and in theory, that's where the story ends. So then we got forward to twenty seventeen, twenty eighteen, and my partner Dom and his girlfriend and their family, they go down to the West Country and they stay in at B and B and he pulls me up and he gets out of the trip and he says, I didn't think I was going to make it out alive about like sending out the Texas changed, so massacre and it immediately just clicks thing my brain. And I told him, it's funny you mentioned that dot dot dot and I bring me up this tape and then he starts saying, oh my god, if you got the tape, obviously we didn't. I happen to bring it up in conversation with my aunts and she says, well, I don't know why you didn't ask me years ago.

I've got it stashed away in the assic, and then I got the tape back from when the rest is history. What is the process though, for you to go from here's this really bizarro tape that's been kind of passed around in things too, I'm gonna make a movie about this. I'm going to track down all of these people that are involved in this and make this, you know, hour and a half documentary about this just bizarro character in all these things in his orbit. You take one look at that footage and you have so many questions. I was just naturally curious, and the fact that my parents are both in it, there was a family and a personal connection for me.

It wasn't the only reason we'd sided to make the film, but everyone I showed it too was just absolutely an awe and I thought, I feel that we need to find out there's something that could be done with this, even if it's just finding a way to show people this tape because it's remarkable. And then we just started asking around locals in the area. I used to have personal connections down there with people, and the more we found out about this guy, it became that much more fascinating than the footage itself. And it was originally going to be a short film. So then we start shooting here and there, doing a lot of detective work.

It took a long time to get the cameras rolling, just because we had so much research to do and we're starting from ground zero. We don't know anyone involved with him. My parents don't know anyone. So yeah, we start rolling the cameras around twenty nineteen, and we're doing detective work and we're trying to find people who know him, and as that story becomes far more interesting, it takes on a life of its own. Was originally a short and I got this job in Milwaukee, told my partners, I'll come back summer twenty twenty, We'll finish this little short film mark and we all know how that went.

But pre covid, I'm kind of stuck there and I'm not able to shoot, and I find out this this found footage subculture, and it just so happens with the whole bunch of them are doing shows in Milwaukee. So I reached out to them, including Nikau Foun Footage Festival, show them that footage, and it just escalated from their kind of snowboard. They were absolutely fascinated. We discover more footage, and as more of his story becomes clear, we all take this hard look at ourselves and realize this kind of has to be a feature, a very very short feature, but there's enough here to tell that kind of story at that kind of length. Had this teep been passed around?

Was this kind of like a Winnebago man or shut Up little Man and Jerky Boys type of thing, or was it a pretty small subsect that we're familiar with the life on the farm, Well, it was when a bagel man. If Jack Revney had been the one to pass out the tapes himself. When we start doing with thinking ethically, is this the right thing to do? Did he ever mean for this to be circulated? Then we find out that the copy of the tape I have with my grandparents is a custom edit.

And it turns out that he's in this farmhouse in the middle of nowhere. He's in his sixties seventies. He learns video to video technology, which isn't easy for anyone, let learns someone like that who's just learning from scratch at that age. He creates custom edits at the same feature length poem movie for every villager, with footage of each of them, and he goes to their houses with these two three hour tapes, gives it to them, comes back a week lady to quiz them to make sure they've watched him paid attention to the details. If they haven't, he gives them another week to hold on to it, and then he'll be back to quist them again.

And that's very clearly someone who wants the footage to be seen. That's before we even go down the rabbit hole of where he was sending it outside of the village. He was sending it off to national TV programs. This is a guy and clearly wants his stuff to be seen. So you're finally making his dream come true all these years later.

Yeah, we just had our first screening in Hollywood last night. I'd give anything for him to be here. He gets such a kick out of it. We've played all seven consonants at this point. We did Antarctica about a month back.

That was not easy to arrange. I really hope he'd be proud of I hope we've done him proud, and I really don't think he would have imagined he'd played all seven consonants close to thirty countries at this point. His stuff so reminds me of there was somebody on a public access where I grew up in very much like narrating family photos and family stories, but they don't remember it being as possibly morbid as I don't want to talk too much about the contents of this movie because I want everybody to see it. It's tricky without getting into spoiler's territory, but I mean, you make a really good point, and this is one of the points we're trying to make in the film. There's a Charles Carson in every village and every public access He's not alone in what he's doing.

And I think sometimes we overlook these people. I think sometimes we laugh at them and miss the real kind of depth and substance that they have to offer with their work, including your public access game. Being a detective is not easy, so we're some of those pitfalls for you. You know, the detective stuff wasn't too much of a chore, just because I used to work in film research, so we kind of had that background. So being a little bit of a detective just comes a second nature.

What became tricky was production because at least half of what you see on screen, I wasn't physically present to direct, which is a horrible, horrible way to make a movie, because we shot the vast majority of this in between lockdowns and the UK and doing that height of the pandemic as his own challenge, and then I'm going out to the up and Michigan. I'm going to displaze just outside of Chicago. I remember Milwaukee. We shoot a New York and l and I couldn't even fly out for that. And we're doing all this sober FaceTime, and my DP and my assistant director are a bad Wi Fi connection and an ocean away.

It only really works when you've got a team that you trust and everyone is on the same page in terms of the vision of this thing. How do you even find backing for this or is this all self funded? There was a little bit of self financing at the beginning, and then when we met Nick and Joe, they said, do you have a proof of concept trailer, which we did, and he was still a short film at this point. And then as soon as we realized there's a feature in this, we go to Kickstarter and you know, we got very very fortunate to get it fully funded by backers. The budget is low, really really low.

It's a miracle we got it made on the budget that we did. But again, no private investment. Really, it was mostly Kickstarter on a little bit of a seed fund from Nick and Joe. Did you end up having to get permission from his family or anything for the video? We first and foremost when I wanted to set out to make this, I wanted family involvement, not even just from an ethical standpoint, which is common sense, but also I thought it would make for stronger storytelling because before he's a filmmaker and before he's a farmer, he is a father, he's a husband, he's a son, and that family element is really really important.

So we start to reach out to family members, and we got his first cousin, Charlie, who was in the film, and he's the one who got him into filmmaking, and from what we can ascertain, was his best friend. They'd be up late nights looking Charles's films together. And yeah, we reached out to the kids and they're aware that the film was being made, and we've sent them a copy of the film. I certainly hope they like it, but you know, I respect their privacy. They didn't really want to be involved.

I'm just really glad that we had Charlie who had so many insights into him. And then, you know, we only really show the footage in it that needs to be shown. There is some stuff that's on the cutting room law and a lot of that relates to Mole to sort of family history and for the average viewer who doesn't know, but it's not quite as interesting. And also, at the end of the day, you'll make your feature film, you've got to keep the pacing going. So there is a little bit on the cutting room wall.

So you didn't show up at the kids house a week later and then quiz them about the movie? No, No, it crossed my mind. But nice. So when did the film have its premiere? We premiered other Lwaukee Film Festival last April, so by the time we wrapping up our theatrical run with Drafts Films, we it would have been about a year, which is kind of a nice little ribbon on it.

So are you doing a physical release for this as well? We are. Yeah, We release on DVD and blue ray possibly VHS on July eighteenth, I believe We hit vod on May ninth, and we're in the theaters right now across America and Canada and Australia and New Zealand. When that DVD or Blu Ray or VUS pipe comes out, will it have the original video on there as well? It won't, And in part it's just because of the length.

It's partially because you know, all the best stop is already in the film, and also I completely get the interest in it, but it's partially the quality is a particularly good. That was one of the big technical challenges. We did not scare with AI or anything like that, but when you're ripping off of a DVD that's already ripped up of vhs, it's kind of a nightmare. I mean, the post production for this was such a headache, in large part because of the archive potage. So it's just not going to hold up visually for all two hours on the DVD.

Yeah, I think you make them intion at some point about another copy surfacing that was better. Oh, well, that's additional footage. And it's tricky. We're getting into spoilers territory there to give away the big reveal. But it's a lot of fun and there's a reason there was another tape discovered that kind of really opens up his story more.

It's amazing that this documentary has so many twists in turns to it, and I think that's really a credit of trusting your instincts and figuring out, oh, this is a feature. This does have enough to sustain us and to make this what could be a pretty dry subject manner, just it's so compelling to watch. I've put that all down to one person and one person alone, and that's our editor, Hannah Kristensen, and she is just the absolute unsung hero of this movie. We very intentionally try to edit this so that the audience goes on the exact same journey that we did. And I get when you're editing, you've got to cut for the benefit of the audience, hasten in a certain way to keep people interested, and sometimes you're going to manufacture twists and turns.

But this is exactly how we went about it. It's exactly how we discovered the tape. It's exactly the revelations when we discovered them during production, right down to there's that moment in his footage where everything gets turned on its head. I imagine that the audience reaction to this is just has to be palatable to be in that theater and to watch the rest of the audience go on that same journey that you took. It's been wonderful and what's been this huge relief is that people got it because we very intentionally at the start lean into this concept.

I think people have upon first view of laughing at him, and we set this thing up as though it's going to be like one in a million generic Netflix true crime docs. I mean, we have the Queen of true crime, Charicle Gareth of my favorite murder in there, comparing him to ed Gean, and we've got to lean into that to subvert expectations and to make you ultimately empathize with him. I've been in live screenings and you see people laughing at him at the beginning, which is completely understandable when you have no context. That was all of us the starts, and then by the end of it, not only they laughing with him, but immensely satisfying known we did our job right. When I've got people coming up to me in tears saying I love this man.

Basically everyone who's seen its completely they've got him and they've got what we've tried to do, and they understand that this is a celebration of this guy. I think you'd have to be a particular kind of person to spend four or five years of your life to make a feature links film with other people's money, in multiple countries just to laugh at someone and to mock them and exploit them. Now, even if I wanted to have done that, when you showed that man's footage, it's impossible not to get what he's doing and not to fall in love with him. That footage shines through. Do you now have the documentary bug?

Is that you're in now world? We did shoot another doc about child refugees in World War Two because there was a personal connection for one of my production partners, and that's hopefully in the festival circuit soon, and we're in the middle of shooting one in Milwaukee that it's a really interesting story and I can't give away too much, but it's about a king in exile. Have I got the documentary bug? One or two stories fell into our lap same way the Life on the farm? Did you know?

Genre is our first love? Narrative as our first love. Just right now we're riding the wave of this thing and having a lot of fun. We've got one or two other things in development, so we'll see. Where can people keep up with you in all your production news?

Well one of those annoying people where every social media hand was slightly different. But I mean if you just google a Life on the Farm or sonder bar pictures so O N D R B R, then you'll see what we're up to again. Life on the Farm is amazing. Thank you so much for making it, and I really look forward to seeing what else you do. Thanks for having me on about you down on the farm.

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