Quick Snaps: Jason Eisener, Filmmaker with a Shotgun
Many people think of Sundance Film Festival as a place to watch rarefied, slow-paced indie films that may never make it to theater screens outside of Park City and maybe New York. And there may well be a few of those at the fest. But on the other hand, you have Hobo with a Shotgun, which is officially premiering at Sundance before Magnolia gives it a theatrical release later this spring. The movie is directed by Jason Eisener, shown above at Fantastic Fest 2008. He won an award for his Fantastic Fest bumper Report Card, and the award included, quite fittingly, a shotgun.
Hobo with a Shotgun may have been filmed in Eisener's hometown of Nova Scotia, but the movie has a number of Austin ties. It's based on a 2007 fake trailer that Eisener submitted to a contest sponsored by the movie Grindhouse ... and won. I saw the trailer (embedded after the jump) at its first public showing, in a SXSW 2007 panel Robert Rodriguez held on grindhouse/exploitation films. Alamo Drafthouse showed the Hobo with a Shotgun trailer before its Grindhouse screenings, as did some Canadian theaters.
Like Machete, the fake Hobo with a Shotgun trailer has been turned into a feature film -- starring Rutger Hauer as the title character, no less. And while Sundance may have hosted the movie's official premiere, it screened unofficially a month earlier here in Austin at Butt-Numb-a-Thon, under such stringent embargo restrictions that BNAT attendees were not allowed to even tell people that the movie had screened there at all. (Harry Knowles posted on Twitter about it after the Sundance premiere so I figured the embargo has finally lifted.)
Chris Eggertsen at Bloody Disgusting has a good interview with Eisener about how the fake trailer became a real movie, as well as some details about the making of the feature film (apparently there's an amazing quantity of fake blood). I know some Texas film geeks who will be pleased to hear that one of Eisener's big influences is Australian director Brian Trenchard-Smith.
I've posted one more photo of Eisener below, performing the requisite chugging of the beer in his Fantastic Fest 2008 award stein. I've also embedded the fake trailer for Hobo with a Shotgun as well as the short Report Card. Be warned that these videos are not safe for work -- they're pretty gory, and Hobo has R-rated language. No word on when we'll see the full-length Hobo with a Shotgun in Austin again, but I wouldn't be surprised if it turned up as one of the SXSW Presents: Fantastic Fest at Midnight films this March.
