Filmmaker David Lehre Interview

David: Everything I do is zero budget. I live in a very small town called Washington, Mich. There are not many people in it. It's mostly woods, deer are in my backyard. It's a small town. There's not much going on so when I make movies, that's like the most that's going on in town that day or whatever. Everyone knows who I am and what we do. I have a great support group, a great community that really supports what we do. There's even the local movie theater with only two screens and they always screen our new movies and we have parties at our local movie theater and everyone from town comes. It's like a little event.

I went to school romeo high school in Romeo, Mich. Then I went to Oakland Univeristy in Rochester. All my teachers started asked me for jobs so I had to drop out. Iwas doing [filmmaking] full time before but I was also going to class because my parents were pressuring me to stay in school. I wasn't even taking film classes, I was taking general ed stuff. At first everybody started asking me to be in movies and that was OK. And then all my teachers asked me for jobs and give me demos. I was like, this is getting ridiculous, why am I even paying for this if people were asking me for jobs and giving me resumes. It was just too much.

Sara: So are you making any money off this now or is this all pending on the Fox deal?

David: I've been making money off this since I was 17 years old doing this stuff, for four years now.

Sara: Where do you think Internet video is going?

David: It's hard to say. I think that Youtube is very primitive right now. Internet video is very primitive, it's low bit rate, crappy resolution, small. You can't have a family huddling around a TV screen watching it. It's more for personal enjoyment. I see the whole industry moving toward something that's not even invented yet. I see everyone moving towards one screen, like one plasma screen that's going to be called the 'Google screen' or something and it will be everything all in one. You can download your movies on it, you can watch good quality Internet video, it's going ot have a hard drive on it. I see it all going into one screen eventually.

Sara: Yeah, but what about in terms of the format for allowing just anyone being able to put video online..

David: To be honest, I don't think there's a lot of good Internet content out there. I'd say 99 percent of Internet [video] content is really, really bad. There's not like professional people doing strictly Internet video. It's mostly like kids lighting poop on fire. So I don't see the Internet being the place to go to harvest new talent. I see it being a pure enteratinment forum where people turn their brain off and watch what's silly.

Sara: So you're the exception rather than the rule.

David: To be honest, Youtube is driven by T-and-A videos of girls lifting their tops and stuff. I want to be an all-around entertainer. I want to have the freedom in the entertainment industry to do whatever I want. I want to be able to do my own TV show. I want to be able to do a feature film. I want to be able to able to act in a movie, in a tv show, even in theater, to product a movie, produce a TV show, just do directing. I want to have that freedom. There's a lot of people who have careers like that. I don't necessarily want to model myself after anyone but I want to carve my own niche in the industry