Director of It's a Complex World

Q: What is the background of Complex World? Is the Heartbreak Hotel based on a real bar?

A: Experiences in [producer Rich] Lupo's Heartbreak Hotel provided some of the background for the film. He was my roommate at Brown. We had talked for a long period of time about making a film about the bar. We finally got around to it about a year before the building was torn down.

The idea was to use it [Lupo's Bar] as a basis for the movie. The whole way this premise was hatched was I was wondering what if a bomb was planted in a bar--no one would pay any attention.

Q: How long did it take to produce the film?

A: We shot it in about two-and-a-half months. It took about two years to make a film out of that. I shot it like a documentary so it was shot with a lot of possibilities.

Q: How did you find the money?

A: Rich Lupo was going to put up the money, but it ended up costing more than we thought. We brought in investors, but they were people we knew--not people who wanted to make money.

Q: Did that change the nature of the film?

A: We had complete control.

Q: Complex World is a lot different than the films that come out of Hollywood. Even when I saw the trailer, I knew it wasn't an ordinary movie.

A: It has to do with the fact that it was put together on the run. It was over two years that we worked on it--it seemed longer.

The scenes were not exactly written to be placed somewhere. We wrote some scenes that were moved 20 or 30 minutes.

Q: How did you cast the film? How did you get Captain Lou Albano?

A: NRBQ played at Lupo's a lot and they're associated with him. A lot of the actors are Trinity Square people from Providence. Stanley, the guitar player, is someone I knew for a long time. I wrote the part for him. The Black preacher was a guy in Providence who did just what he does in the movie.