UFO mayhem descended on theatres this weekend thanks to Jimmy & Stiggs, from writer/director/star Joe Begos. Made on a shoestring budget over a period of four years with a close group of friends, Jimmy & Stiggs is pure midnight madness shot on glorious, grainy 16mm film. The scrappiest movie of the year, and maybe the most ambitious too, Jimmy & Stiggs is an ultra-gory wild ride and should be seen on the big screen with a rowdy audience. It’s a real party movie.
We were fortunate enough to sit down with Josh Ethier, co-producer and editor of Jimmy & Stiggs, as well as Matt Mercer who also co-produced the film and starred as Stiggs! We talked about how the movie took a staggering four years to complete, what dried alien goo smells like after you’ve let it sit for days, and how they got away with using a real chainsaw(!) in Joe Begos’ actual apartment while shooting the movie. Below is a truncated version of our chat, editing slightly for clarity and length, but you can listen to our full conversation HERE in the Nightmare on Film Street Fiend Club 🤘
“Joe was living in an apartment that had slime and blood covered walls, dead alien parts all over the place. It was like living in a haunted house attraction.”
Jonathan DeHaan for Nightmare on Film Street: The one thing that everybody keeps telling me about Jimmy & Stiggs is how long it took to finish but how did it all start?
Josh Ethier: Well, Joe wrote it when we were in the pandemic. He saw a lot of people making movies on Zoom, people were making movies just at home with digital cameras, shooting on their iPhones because we were all so incredibly bored. And Joe was like ‘well, I have 16mm cameras here and my editor lives a quarter of a mile away, and one of my favorite actors we’ve worked with lives another quarter of a mile away.
We were all in the same neighborhood, and also we were all in the same bubble. […] Joe had the idea that ‘most of the people I would make a movie with, if it was a small movie, are inside of this bubble right now so I’ll just write something that takes place in my apartment, which I think now he realizes was not a great idea because we had to live on a movie set for four years.
Matt Mercer: And when Josh says living on a movie set, this was a particularly slimy, bloody movie set so Joe was living in an apartment that had slime and blood covered walls, dead alien parts all over the place. It was like living in a haunted house attraction in the Midwest or something. It was just covered in stuff all the time.
NOFS: What does that smell like after like a month of just laying around? It couldn’t have been good.
JE: It’s a little bit like melted plastic and farts.
MM: Yeah, it’s a particular patina [laughs]. It smells like rubber and BO because in order to keep the blood on our outfits, we didn’t always wash them. They would get saturated and that alien goo is like methocel or slime or something. It’s the kind of stuff they use at EDM concerts to spray people down and it’s supposedly non-toxic. The results of that have yet to be determined, but it was just so much easier to reapply if it was still in your outfit because it would dry up and kind of create a base layer. If you washed your wardrobe, it was just so much harder to saturate it and you’d have to do like three or four layers before you could really see it for some reason. But it would be like putting on something completely saturated in Scotch Guard. Really crispy and stiff.
JE: Like dressing yourself in a cardboard box.
MM: Exactly. Pretty nasty but, yeah, four years of that.
“[It smelled] like melted plastic and farts.”
NOFS: So why did it take four years? What happened? Is it just that everybody got busy?
MM: We started right when the first vaccine came out and the initial plan was to shoot for a straight seven weeks, a block shoot. It ended up being nine weeks, and that was in May of 2021. So we did that and we just didn’t quite finish. There were some unfinished effects. It felt like we’d gotten further than we had, but we weren’t quite finished.
JE: The other thing to underline about the movie is just that, on any given day, the most people on set was about four. So you’ve got Joe and you’ve got Matt, who are the two actors in the scene. You’ve got a camera person, be it our DP Mike Testin or Brian Sowell who (actually both of them) on both sides of this movie shot other films for us and worked together on this one depending upon who was available. Then, hopefully at least one person running sound and they would have to wait for me to finish a work day if I was working.
When we started the movie, I was [editing] Orphan: First Kill, that’s how long ago it was and I would leave work, come over, lay in the hallway, and like, flicker a light switch because they needed a lighting effect and they had to wait for me to get there to get the lighting effect. So [there were] so few people.
MM: Yeah, with five or six people and some of the complicated lighting setups or visual effects […] I would be flicking a light and slapping Joe with an alien arm at the same time, stuff like that. So it was really all hands on deck and sometimes we wouldn’t shoot a shot at all in a day. We would just [do] set-up and rehearsal and we’d know it would work, and the next day we’d go in and just shoot it.
And then the reason it didn’t finish in that nine weeks, this is the last thing I promise, is because Joe and Josh, uh, got Christmas Bloody Christmas greenlit. So, they went off to do that and I went and produced a movie called The Dead Thing for Elric Kane. We reconvened to finish shooting what we hadn’t but at that point Josh and Joe had edited enough of the movie to see that some things could maybe be cooler or improved or even more expansive and epic! You know, there were adjustments that we could make as well as shooting the additional effects, so that then started the remainder of the nights and weekends of the last three years of the movie.
JE: Yeah, so Joe having gone and shot Christmas Bloody Christmas which was our biggest film yet, he came back to our, you know, second smallest film ever, which is basically just an art project between friends. The only movie smaller than this that we’ve made was Almost Human, our first movie, which was like famously $50,000. So he came back from the biggest movie yet and was like, ‘we really gotta amp up Jimmy and Stiggs”. And we were like, ‘But we had two and a half million dollars on that one!’. That’s why we we took over a small town, we has an ambulance chase down Main Street, we had stunts and explosions; and then Joe comes back to Jimmy & Stiggs like, ‘we gotta do that. We GOTTA do that’. We’re like, ‘….okay’.
So came back just invigorated to make it as big as he possibly could. He had been living with cuts a certain way and the movie a certain way, and he was watching it now like, ‘I feel like this is not as exciting as I hoped it would be. I think we can do it better, and I think I can come up with some better scenarios for Matt and I to act in, and I think I can come up with some cooler camera work,’
Because it was a movie where there’s no benefactors like a production company or a bond company or investors or anything that are hanging over our heads- it was really pieced together with friends and with cohorts that we’ve all been for years- we were like, ‘okay, cool’ we have the option on this movie and this movie alone to re-dream up some stuff. We tried to support Joe in that as much as we could and I think he just took the ball and ran with it and enjoyed the fact that this is the one time a director really gets to do that.
“I would basically wrap my day at 7:00 and then shoot from 7:30 to 2:00 AM, take a shower, try to get the goo off, eat something, go to bed, wake up at nine[…]“
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