Talking Gut Instinct, with director Doug Dillaman

What's Gut Instinct about?

It's about a race of alien microbes that crash-land on Earth, invade our guts, discover a love of dopamine, and use the gut-brain axis to puppeteer us into apocalypse. Which is bad.

But wait! Thanks to your friends at Interself, the Gut Instinct audiovisual purification programme can free your mind - and your guts - forever!

Where did the idea come from?

A two-part answer. The aesthetic impulse was to make something on my own that used techniques I'd loved since the first time I saw a hand-painted avant-garde film - eye-popping visuals by the likes of Stan Brakhage, Len Lye, and Jodie Mack had always entranced me, and I was ready to give it a go. Found footage was an easy way to make sure I didn't have to spend twenty-five years painting index cards, and there's a lot of it in the public domain. 

The story came out of an epic case of food poisoning. It happened at a time in life I was feeling bloated and unhappy and sleeping a lot, and once I recovered from this inadvisable rapid weight loss technique, I felt fantastic. I wondered if something had been living in my gut making myself miserable, came up with an absurd sci-fi scenario, and decided I'd do a little bit of research to make it sound science-y. Instead, my research led me to the realisation that every single step of my invented plot was disturbingly plausible.

It's been quite a long time coming together - can you talk us through the process and how you got to the final product?

Not quickly - but the short version is that I've been editing TV, mostly documentary and reality, for twenty years now, and so I'm very comfortable with working without a script, experimenting, revising, and continuing until I have a final product. It's a very different methodology from traditional feature filmmaking, where you spend years perfecting a script, then shoot it for very little money under intense pressure in too little time, and make the best with what you've got. 

So this has been a very iterative process, starting with little "jams" (audiovisual proofs of concept), Pinterest boards, outlines, research, repeat, and so on. I didn't know if it would sustain feature length at the beginning, and that was fine - if it had been better at 53 minutes, that's what it would have been.

Because for a long time I was doing it all myself while working, there'd be long periods where I wasn't making much headway because of the day job. But I do a lot of my best creative "work" in the shower and while I'm driving, so ideas would present themselves, and my life as a freelance editor meant that I could take time between jobs. Also, between hand painting index cards for animation, building my own light box, reading the diaries of frontier doctors, learning analogue synths and making goofy sounds, researching the gut-brain axis, and so forth, there was lots that I could do that wasn't just sitting in front of editing software (DaVinci Resolve, by the way) plugging away. 

What was the best part of making this film?

The irony is that I set out to make this on my own, and yet it's probably the collaboration that was the best part. Three examples:

As I was casting about for music, I found myself at a dinner with Jason Wach, who I knew vaguely as a lawyer who played guitar in my friend's band. Turns out he was besotted with analogue synths and would chill out every night by coming up with a new tune. I asked him to start sending them to me, and he'd accidentally perfectly captured the tone - a broken future, optimism for something that you know will never be. His work, combined with the more menacing work of American composer Kyle Bruckmann (a friend from university days), comprises the bulk of the wall-to-wall electronic soundtrack, augmented by my noodlings and a couple tracks by my bandmate in The Sea Plus, Hamish Scott.

A couple years into the process, I realised that my methods - combining found footage, my abstract animation, travel footage from my personal archive, and so on - weren't sufficient to ground the viewer in the space of the film and provide a continuous visual identity for our nemesis (the "badcrobes"). So I approached Liam Maguren, who readers might know from the 48Hours winner of 2022, Big Questions, and asked if he'd draw the "badcrobes". That one-off request grew and grew over years into a couple dozen animations. Working with Liam was so much fun - it basically became an exercise in making each other laugh, and one he nailed. 

And, of course, working with my wife, Sarah Watt, who's the voice of Gut Instinct. It wasn't a case of "oh, she's here, so I'll use her", but that she was perfect for the role of our helpful narrator/purification supervisor. Apart from her creative contribution, her support on every other level was integral to getting this over the line, and in recent times, she's been very good at pushing me to stop playing and start finishing as the mind-gut connection has gone from the esoteric weird topic it was in 2017 to grist for the front cover of The Listener. I love her dearly, I'm super proud that it's her voice in my film, and I can't picture this film existing without her.  

What's been the hardest part - I know it's been over several years, periods that have included lockdowns, isolations from family - has this made it more difficult or has it been a case of sinking into your work?

Your readers aren't paid to be my therapist, and they should be very thankful for that! 

Lots of challenges in life, from a pituitary haemorrhage two months in (one massive slow-down in the production process), to having my family in America during lockdown, to losing some people in my life who were very important, to having Aotearoa's creative industry collapse under my feet this year. Maybe I'll start a LiveJournal for all that.

In terms of making the film, I didn't keep a diary or anything, but I probably froze for about a year during Covid where I just thought a film about a global pandemic wasn't funny and put the topic aside. Thankfully, Covid is over and everything's back to normal and we don't have to worry about that any more! (I am of course joking.)

Your last film Jake took about the same amount of time to make - is it just something about your processes that sees you work to those timelines?

They were very different processes, so I'm tempted to say "it's called independent filmmaking". Which is true, but I also tend to be pushing a lot of creative boulders up hills, and focus at any time on whichever one has the most traction. During the start of lockdown, I made the short You Could Have Seen The Mona Lisa, which played DocEdge 2021, and a bit later I started my latest band, The Sea Plus. Plus a podcast, some non-fiction writing, a few music videos, chipping away at revising the novel I wrote in 2014, a few short film ideas, and helping other filmmakers with their films ... there's always something to play with. 

My wife and I also made a life decision, after that aforementioned hemorrhage, to live in Europe for five months in 2019, and when I arrived and discovered that I'd brought a PC and a Mac-formatted drive, I put it aside for the duration of that trip - although plenty of footage from that trip made the film. Then of course I got home and had to work flat out for ages to pay for the trip. So there's a year where not much happened on the film. And just generally balancing life and work and wanting to be connected to friends and my Kiwi family slows things down. Which is fine. The film will always be there to work on. You never know if people will. 

But neither of my films have been externally funded by funding bodies or crowdfunding, and that's the big thing. That's unlikely to change any time soon, so unless I come up with a project that suits easy production and a quick turnaround scenario - which could happen, as I don't think my next film will have 3000 edits like this one - then expect a similarly protracted process. 

What's the moment you're proudest of and why?

The first time I screened a cut in my living room to four friends in the industry, I watched them watching, and even before their applause at the end, I *knew* it worked. People can be kind and lie to you to spare your feelings - although I deliberately try to get viewers that I know would give honest feedback because they understand how helpful it is - but one thing I've learned from being an editor is that physical engagement never lies. The film wasn't fully there - the opening changed dramatically, some other stuff moved around, some subplots got excised, and audio magician Gareth van Niekerk created a 5.1 mix that's deeply cinematic - but their response made it clear that I had something that wasn't just a weird art project to bang on Vimeo that eight weirdos would love, but something that could really connect with an audience in a novel way inside a cinema.

Conversely, what's been the moment that you held your head in your hands and thought "why am i doing this?"

Honestly, the entire process of actually making the film has been a joy. Yes, I've created stupid mental barricades for myself from time to time, but whenever I was just getting my hands dirty painting medical diagrams or rewriting dialogue, I loved it. The goal of this project was for it not just to be a good film but an enjoyable process that could be a model for sustainable creativity in my life. That it seems to connect with audiences despite being a very abnormal film is a plus. 

But I can still picture myself in the shower during COVID realising I'd invested years of my life into making a comedy about a global pandemic, and that certainly wasn't a good day...

What have you learned about yourself in this process?

Well, to bring it back to the sci-fact of the film, the fact that our guts are lined with neurons that produce neurotransmitters, and the fact that the vagus nerve sends signals from our guts to our brain, really does mean we're a lot more than our rational brain, and part of how our guts behave is literally the microbes that call our guts home. So it literally changed my concept of self, and also how I perceive others and their behaviours. 

What do you expect the audience will get out of it?

So I have some idea, because I got anonymous feedback from our friends and family screening, which was super-gratifying. I like a lot of weird films, and would happily watch 65 minutes of hand-painted images with no soundtrack or video feedback with horrible noise, but I really wanted to make GUT INSTINCT a film that an audience could hook into while enjoying some of those formal aspects of avant-garde films that I enjoy. 

The feedback was great - some people love the wide variety of found-footage (there's hundreds of clips from public hygiene and military films, mostly American mid 20th century - their archives are great for these purposes), some people love tripping out on the eye-popping imagery and the audio, some people enjoy the story - but my most pleasant surprise was from friends who would never go see a genre or experimental film who really engaged with the factual content. I don't know if there's something for EVERYbody in GUT INSTINCT, but it seems like it's a film that can connect with a surprisingly wide variety of audiences, despite how unconventional it is. 

I asked people to describe their Gut Instinct experience in 10 words or less, and one person said "informative" and another said "bat-shit insane". I've seen lots of films that earn one of those adjectives, but I struggle to think of a film that ticks both boxes, which is really gratifying. (The closest examples I can think of, both of which were huge influences, were Werner Herzog's THE WILD BLUE YONDER and Craig Baldwin's TRIBULATION 99.)

What I would really love is for young - or not so young! - filmmakers to see GUT INSTINCT and take it as a call to arms to make their own weird films, not relying on "the correct way to make films", but finding a process that works for them and suits their creativity. The tool-kit we have these days is incredible, the set of learning resources available is unparalleled, and the chance of something that plays by the rules succeeding or even getting funded is negligible. The only reward you can hope for is the satisfaction of the process, and that's what I hope a filmmaker gets out of watching GUT INSTINCT. My process isn't for everybody, but neither is the status quo. Go discover yours!

You're premiering at the Terror-Fi Film Festival. What are you looking forward to there?

Every year Terror-Fi has some great under the radar gems, and this year we're double-featured in Auckland and Wellington with Things Will Be Different, a time-travel thriller produced by Moorhead/Benson (The Endless, Something In The Dirt). I've got particularly high hopes for that and Else, which sounds like a French sci-fi body horror a friend of mine saw at TIFF and loved. In Christchurch, we play the same night as the 4K restoration of Jonathan King's Black Sheep, which is also premiering at Terror-Fi. Jonathan has been hugely supportive of my filmmaking ever since we met and provided valuable feedback on in-progress cuts of Gut Instinct, and I'm looking forward to seeing the restoration in Wellington on Halloween. 

I'm also really looking forward to doing Q&As in Wellington and Auckland, and talking to any other filmmakers out there. As you can probably tell by the length of this Q&A, I've been thinking about this film for seven years and have a lot to say. So do feel free to come up between sessions and ask any questions if you like. And if I've met you before and I look blank, gently remind me - I'm moderately faceblind, which is always an adventure!

What can we expect to see next from you - and will it be in a 6 year time period?

In a weird fluke of timing, one of my most recent major editing and writing job, a documentary about 501 returnees directed by Dean Cornish, called The 501s - An Inside Story, will be premiering on TVNZ soon - in November, I believe. It couldn't be more different than this film, but I'm super proud of my work giving a voice to this community of people who've fought against the odds to turn their lives around and are trying to help new returnees do the same. In the current media and political landscape that's fraught with dehumanisation, I feel it's an important programme that has a lot of heart and a lot to say, and I hope it gets the attention and increases people's understandings of a class of humans that are too often dismissed and disparaged as a three-digit number. 

What the "paid work editing commercial television" world I've lived in for the last twenty years holds - and what that means for my professional future - remains to be seen. But in terms of being a filmmaker, I have a few short ideas, and will try to turn one or two around relatively quickly. My next feature will almost certainly be in a mode resembling this film, but expanding the techniques and probably not relying so much on found footage. It's an apocalyptic love story between two non-human intelligences. 

But even though I've authored the DCP and sent it to Wellington for the premiere, GUT INSTINCT isn't really over yet - as a one-man band, the distribution and publicity of the film is as much part of making it as anything else, and after Terror-Fi, I'll be bringing it back to as many cinemas as are willing to take it. So at least the rest of the year is about figuring out how I get people to come to the cinema to experience the film.

The release calendar right now for the rest of the year is dire as far as original content - we've got "animated sequel originally meant for television", "live-action Disney film", "part 1 of an adaptation of a musical of a movie of a book", "sequel for movie from 24 years ago", "Spider-Man villain fulfilling contractual obligation", "other Spider-Man villain whose film has been delayed a year", "what if some Lord of the Rings was animated", and so on. I think people want something different. And GUT INSTINCT is definitely something different!

Gut Instinct plays at the Terror-Fi Film Festival from October 30 before a nationwide release in December.