Special Report: Simon Glassman on Buffet Infinity (2025)

M hm oh, he is bote. It's show tied. People say good money to see this movie. When they go out to a theater, they want cold sodas, hot popcorn, and no monsters. In the Protection Booth, everyone pretend podcasting isn't boring.

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On this episode, I am talking with Simon Glassman. He is the director of the new film Buffet Infinity. There are times where I watch movies for this show, or just watch movies in general, and they really resonate with me. Movies like The Greasy Strangler is the one that comes to mind immediately. Buffey Infinity is a movie that I have started recommending pretty hardcore to my friends that enjoy this kind of movie.

This movie, it's out there and I really am here for it reminds me a little bit of some of the adult swim stuff, maybe a little too many cooks, maybe a little bit of unedited footage of a bear, maybe non adult swim stuff like the was it the w n UF Halloween Special. It's out there with some of these really good titles, and I'm gonna sing the praises of this one for a long damn time. Really very happy to be speaking with mister Glassman about it. I don't think we ruin anything. Really might explain to more things, so no spoiler morning on this one.

Thanks so much for listening track down Buffet Infinity. You will not be sorry. I hope you enjoy this interview. I want to know more about you and how'd you get into filmmaking. I started mostly as a cartoonist, and then I was mostly doing storyboards in school for my projects and my friends projects, and then moved into doing some music videos and eventually got the web series that I was working on, and then that ended up becoming in a television series for a short period of time, and then I took a break from filmmaking for a couple of years, just in my mid thirties, and then once COVID started, I needed a big project and I was still always making like little videos, usually commercial parities.

I just always I always thought commercial parities. But my favorite thing on SNL, so I always had an idea for Originally it was going to be like a show that was told through just at the end of the world, but it's like being told by the television and pretending like it's not the end of the world. So it'd be like I don't know, I think I had some my name was like Channel X or something, but I don't know. I left that that was like many many years ago. So I just revisited that idea and a lot of stuff that I've been thinking about for a couple of years, maybe like a sentient brand that was that was malicious and you could only ever hear discerning the story through a bunch of lives, almost like an oral history.

I always thought that would be way to tell a story because it's all you have is a critical thinking to tell whether what's happening in front of you is actually real, and we all have that. It's like whenever somebody tells you what they are, you're like, you're immediately suspicious. And Buffet Infinity is constantly telling people what it is and constantly being proven wrong. So it's like this is the most unreliable narrator in the universe. There's a lot of moving pieces to this film, and I'm so curious how did it pull less?

Like when you said, Okay, I want to revisit this idea. I want to bring this to life. How do you go about it? How do you approach that? It's just time, Like I think like I could have probably had this done like a couple of years ago, and I would be medium happy with it.

But it's just making a mountain or same stroke at a time. I work on one short, and really I was thinking about almost as a short, like each one is their own individual chapter with a bunch of the those like filler commercials in between, as like window dressing or look up facade for what's actually happening, But the story, it's like there's like each of the shorts like they have their own kind of because it wasn't written as a script. It was written as like individual shorts. And then I'm like, how do I build context or build in conflict with that one? And then I add another one or I add something to another one that ends up changing another one.

Then we reshoot that one, then we shoot another one to bump up when that one is bumped up against something else. That's why it took five years, was the conflict had to make sense but also makes sense inside of like the the format that we've set up. Was it five years more of the writing or did you shoot for a long time too? Sometimes I'd have alts where I wouldn't be sure where the story would be going. There's some really funny stuff that got cut out.

But I had to have stuff that would make sense if I up keeping it in and also if I ended up cutting it out, So I had to be I'd a had two different versions while I was while I was shooting, but most of the writing came out from editing and just like going over it and over it and just watching it. I was watching it for the first time, and where'd you find your actress? At that's all Edmonton's stand up comedians. I was curious because I know this is a Canadian production. I can hear a little bit of accents at times that this is Canadian, but I'm seeing a lot of like Baltimore references.

Was there? Is that just a coincidence? Because I like some of the street names and stuff for the locations. I was like, what is going on here? I guess it's just universal, No, No, it's it was all Edmondon.

I think that maybe Baltimore just has a lot in common with edminstonating, But yeah, everything is Edmonton, like West Gridger's analog for Edmonton. The whole movie is a big reference to this place in Edmonton called the West Edmonton Mall, which is like a really really big mall that we have here. That's our a primary landmark that we've defined ourselves with in the nineteen nineties and eighties, not realizing that malls would slowly maybe go down in value over a couple of decades. What are you actually shooting this on it? That would just depend on who is shooting it.

My primary director of photography was a man by the name of edgarup and Zom who was really great and just a he's a super professional with lighting and making sure this everything was set up, and he was sometimes doing it all by himself, but sometimes he wasn't available, so I get one of my friends. And sometimes that's kind of all you need for something like Ament's farm or it's the idea is that we're directing it like in character, and Ahmed is the one who's meant to be directing, and so we don't have to make it look too fans. Yeah, it's got to be a little bit of a challenge to make things look pardon my French, but shitty. But that's too shitty to have that aesthetic of public access and local commercials.

Yeah, and that's actually like kind of a hard thing. There's parts of the movie that I think looked really good, and that is Edgar, But there's also things where I'm like, you know what, my buddy Charles can just set up a tripod and we can shoot this song just outside my house or in my basement, shooting all the mostly rows and stuff that was mostly my basement, and it was like, oh man, when you get used to shooting in your basement, that is sweet? And is it almost all green screen? No, there's a lot of live locations, like all of them it's on We had to go to this place called Ponds on Light, and we couldn't do that for free as they're pawnshop guys and they want to barter with you. So we ended up I had one of the only locations where I really had to spend money to let us shoot there at night for like six or seven hours.

They were great guys, but I was the only location where it's just like, man, this is healing my wallet. Yes, shooting in his studio is cheaper than shooting in the bunchhop. That's pretty wild. Yeah, you said that these are mostly comedians from Edmonton. Are you into that scene or how do you know these folks?

I am actually a stand up comedian in Edmonton. Also, that's how I know them. Yeah, it's my community. I know that they're probably better actors than they are showing on screen, which I also appreciate that whole idea of we have to encapsulate what these local origination commercials are like. Some of them are not.

A few of them is their first time ever appearing on a camera. That's what kind of makes them so funny is that they don't. There's something really raw about them, and there's a little bit of nervous energy. But especially as like the movie goes on, like they're clearly hiding something. Every character is hiding something.

That kind of community theater energy is Actually it makes a lot of the film feels so unique. To be I love just the way that you're telling a story through these other pieces, because when you first get into it and you start watching this, you're just like, Okay, this is just a bunch of commercials, and then your brain starts telling you the story that you're telling me, and it takes a while for my brain to catch up with what your story is, which I loved. That's great. Yeah, good to hear. This whole idea of editing and finding the story as you go through this sounds like a really arduous process.

Yeah. I am like a filmmaker, like I like regular ass movies and traditional scripts and traditional narrative structure. But I also I felt like if I was going to make get any attention for a low budget movie, I had to do something really really weird, and they had to do and I knew that it wasn't gonna be easy. Like I knew that it would take at least a few years if I was going to turn it into a feature, But I don't know. I was just willing to be that because I really liked the people in the movie.

I like the people that I was working with, and I felt like a lot of obligation to them. And going back to the editing, the pace of the movie is fantastic as well. How do you know when to make those cuts and like how to form that structure of just like, all right, we're going to start to amp it up because it really feels like the movie gets quicker the farther it goes along. That's great to hear. It's just a sucks the things that you get how you have to cut because you're like there's some parts where it's like, oh man, that could be some of them are just like other scripts.

Now, Yeah, there was just a lot of ideas. We just keep generating ideas and then the world's sort of unraveled, so it's like you're exploring the world while also hopefully keeping the narrative tight. When it comes to the asthetic of the film, obviously you're not shooting on VHS. How are you giving it that asthetic look? Am that's pawn will show on like a like a ten ADP SLR, but some of it will shot on ari Ari's and a lot of it was done with four K, And looking back, it's like we did not need to do that.

If I was gonna go back and shoot it now, I just not do so much that I would actually probably have done less involved camera work because sometimes, like a record, photography wants like a lot of wants of a big lighting set up, and they have no idea that later on I'm going to turn the whole thing black and white or I'm going to be adding some kind of filter to it. It could have been, but also like that that kind of adds to it. It gives the certain parts of it, like maybe a little bit of texture. I imagine it's got to be easier to go from good quality footage to shitty footage rather than trying to make shitty footage look like a Caulday footage. Yeah, and it also that's the way special effects look fast when you're downgrading the footage is when you look at District nine, that's like those those are the best special effects I've ever seen.

Is there are moments in that where I genuinely can't tell what is CGI, especially at the beginning, during like the found footage segment. Yeah, district kind of would you call it like a found footage movie. That's a good question, yeah, because some of it does feel like that. But then we break once we get back into the actual district itself and follow along the Charloteau Copley character, that feels more like a narrative. But yeah, they're definite that the news breaks those kind of things.

Yeah, it still feels vaguely I think like it's all handheld and stuff like That's that's what gives like the those special effects, like such a great vibe because you're really just following around this guy and it's like almost almost like after Hours like that sporsesean movie, but it's just one guy turning into a slowly turning into a shrimp. What did you use to actually do those effects? There's actually a cc CV filter I forgot ht M, HTML HDMI. I think it's like a sharpening tool that they use for HS, but you can just use it as like an Adobe filter, and I use that and then I use a couple of overlays and some of the commercials got more overlays than other ones like Comment's Pawn or mostly Rosen.

Each of them has their own style, Like I wanted to make sure that they kind of using their own different cameras and Spot the Infinity as it's getting better, it's like using a better camera, even though it's like the early two thousands. It's like, oh, you know what this weird otherworldly entity is now spot a red camera. Yeah, now it suddenly looks better. Yeah. The whole idea of these local origination commercials is a bygone age, and I was curious what appealed to you about that and did you have any favorite commercials when you're growing up from that.

Mid youth definitely appears. I just love that period because it's I think we're probably around and sat age. I'm I'm boardy and so I'm a millennial and that period in the nineties. My dad worked in a CBC, which is like the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation for forty years. It's not just like sentimental, it's like that's when I see that logo, I'm like, oh, that's dad.

Yeah. And also in terms of the actual story itself, I wanted it not just to be nostalgic. I think that there's like a lot of function to the forum where because it's all commercials and all from that era of like early two thousand's, late nineties. The idea is that all of the things that are happening right now that are troubling, like AI, your phone, algorithms, media kind of consolidation, all of that stuff all hap happening all at once, but all in the early early two thousands, and if it all happened all at once, if you actually a terrifying horror movie. I found it very funny that your car dealership commercials were all about this superhero character, because we had a superhero car dealer here as well.

So I don't know if every town had to have a superhero car dealership or not. Yeah, I actually did the commercials for them because I did the storyboards for the animation assets had the same production design as this, not exactly, but there was like an animated version of it. It was like a Honda dealership in Sherwood Park, Alberta. It's such a fun thing to do because it's like they're not looking to have it look super good, but also there's a lot of there's like a weird amount of ego to go along with it too, where there's a guy who was like, I am a superhero of savings. We had the Melfire super star.

Mel Farr was a former Detroit lyon and he opened up a series of card dealership here and he would fly off at the end of every commercial. It was pretty great, even occasionable appearances by Tito Jackson of the Jackson five. Oh wow, yeah, he was getting in there. Oh yeah, yeah, I'm waiting for the Tito biopic. Now Tito by a twenty four.

Where did the film premiere premiere to. Fantasia Fest in August of last year. I went home and I immediately cut like ten to twelve minutes out, like right away, but like it was the best reaction ever. I'd say reaction wise, Fantasia was the best because that was the world premiere. Our families all came from Edmonton to Montreal.

It was my first time in Montreal. But it's not like a super fun memory because it's like mostly we had to bring our toddler with us, not had to, but it's like we got to bring our wonderful toddler with us. Montreal is just not a town to hang out with a baby. And when we went to Germany last week, we were just like, sorry, you're staying with grandparents. This is mommy, Daddy's on.

Yeah, where all has it played at? It's had a really really good festival. And so it went from Plantasia to Stitches to brook Brooklyn Horror Film Festival to it was in Calvary Underground last week, then Germany the Hardline Film Festival, then the Overlook and then there's a Slash Film Festival Indiana and yeah, I think it's it's at a I can't pronounce the name of the French film festival that it's at right now, but it's I think it's on this weekend there and south By Southwest in Sydney, Sydney south south By Southwest. It's it's so cool. It's and I didn't get to go to all these places, but it's like, without having ever made a movie and just start our producer telling me that all these this is like a really good run.

It makes me, Yeah, it makes me super happy. I was like, I made this in my basement. I had no idea that people in I guess South Korea are going to see it in a three months. So what's next for the film, and what's next for you. The film's gonna be on demand in about a week or so.

Really excited to have like lots and lots of people hopefully be able to see it. Then they'll go to a streaming service and not named streaming service at some point down the line, hopefully. And for me, I'm going to shoot a feature this summer really really quickly. When I say really quickly, I just I'm like, I got to do something. When is the Blu Ray release with all the extra footage on it that will probably be a little bit after the summer, and think I think it'll be Blu Ray And I'm trying to convince them to do dhs, but I don't know.

Yellow Bill is really cool about They've been amazing as like a distributor and guiding me through everything. But they also are just like very dedicated to physical releases, and especially for films like Buffy Infinity that don't always get a lot of attention. They've been Yeah, it's just really cool about everything. And I would like to having a DVD of your own movie would be so cool. I've been recommending it to all my friends who I know that would enjoy this film, and hopefully people listening to this will pick up on that and also check this out.

And yeah, pick up the Blu ray when it's available and see when it's available a to rent and oh, is there a good place to keep up with the film or you online? You can follow me at Simon glass Man with few ends and you can check out what's happening with the movie at the Buffy Infinity Movie on Instagram with. Thank you so much, great talking with you. Oh my god, thank you so much for chatting machine. This is awesome.

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