AFTER THE FAILURE of our first feature film, Vince Del Rio, we had a hard time. We were still confused as to what went wrong with the film. We were now in our mid- and late twenties and the struggling-artist lifestyle was becoming less cute and more scary. All of our high school and college friends had found their footing and were experiencing varying degrees of success, all of which were astronomically greater than our own. That sucked. Even our parents, who were our strongest supporters, were beginning to plant the seeds of the “backup career” conversation.

As for us, we were still living in our crappy South Austin apartment, trying desperately to hold on to our dream before it drifted away. We spent half our days working at our editing business, which was barely enough to keep us afloat, and half our days taking walks, watching our favorite movies…searching endlessly for something that would help us “get there.”

One day, as we were sitting in our typically depressed couch posture watching Raising Arizona for the thousandth time, Mark stood up, turned off the TV, and stared at me.

MARK: We are making a movie today.

JAY: About what?

MARK: I don’t know.

(Pause.)

JAY: Uh…okay. I’m down for it, but…

MARK: But what?

JAY: We don’t have a camera.

MARK: We still have Mom and Dad’s.

(This was the camera we ultimately deemed unworthy to shoot even the behind-the-scenes footage for Vince Del Rio because it was so crappy.)

JAY: But we don’t have, like…a crew…or even a boom guy.

MARK: I don’t care. We have to do something. Gimme $3. I’m going to 7-Eleven to get a mini-DV tape, and when I come back I want you to come up with a movie idea for us.

Mark, as usual, raced out before I could protest, not letting his own nerves and worries about the process show in front of me. He needed to project confidence to get us moving. This is part of our rhythm to this day.

I, on the other hand, was left holding the bag. A simultaneously annoying and empowering thing that Mark constantly does to me. He pushes me off cliffs and runs away, and I have to figure out the next move. I openly hate it and secretly love it because it shows how much Mark deeply believes in me. So I sat down and thought about what we might make. I banged my brain for an idea that didn’t need much in terms of setting and production value. Maybe even something personal. Before long, an idea popped into my head. While in preproduction for Vince Del Rio, I had set up an answering service for the film. While recording the outgoing greeting, I kept messing up and rerecording it. It devolved into a bit of an existential crisis for me by the fiftieth try, and something about the whole process landed me in my bedroom crying that night.

Mark stormed back in with the tape and I greeted him with this concept of recording an outgoing greeting, failing, and having a semi–nervous breakdown in the process. Mark immediately lit up.

MARK: This is brilliant.

JAY: Great! Let’s write the script.

MARK: Wait. I don’t want to slow us down. We have momentum. What if I just wing it?

(Pause.)

MARK: Like, you hold the camera and I’m gonna walk into that kitchen and just…improvise it. Like we did with Brandt and the Karate Master when we were kids. I’ll try to record an answering machine greeting and fail at it. And you just film me. And you can even talk to me during the take to throw ideas and dialogue at me as we go. Like we used to do when we were little.

JAY: (smiling) Except this time you don’t have to break your shoulder holding the VTR.

MARK: (smiling bigger) Exactly.

JAY: Love it.

MARK: Love it.

I grabbed the camera bag and Mark went into our roommate Will’s closet. Will was a computer programmer and had some “grown-up” clothes (as we still call them, because we are children) for work. Mark grabbed a pair of black slacks and a green button-down. He came back into the kitchen to find me ready to go, with a few fun, readily available prop options I had grabbed. Some gas station sunglasses, a set of house keys, a cellphone, a bottle of wine, and, randomly, a small box of mints. Without saying anything more Mark positioned himself at the threshold of the kitchen….

MARK: You rolling?

JAY: Yep.

MARK: Okay. I’m just gonna…just gonna come in and…see what happens?

As usual, Mark was good at leading the charge but got cold feet toward the end. And somehow whenever Mark got cold feet I was able to step in and push us that last few feet over the cliff. This is also part of our rhythm to this day.

JAY: Let’s just have fun with it. No pressure.

MARK: Right.

JAY: Good luck. Love you.

MARK: Love you.

(Heading out, stopping…)

MARK: Wait. I need a character name.

(This is Mark stalling because he is now fully scared. I think for a second and then reach for Mark’s collar, reading the label.)

JAY: Your shirt says “John Ashford” on it.

(Pause.)

MARK: It’s perfect.

And with that, Mark went outside and came right back in. What happened next was one uninterrupted twenty-minute take of Mark trying and failing to get the answering machine greeting right. I moved around with the camera instinctually, zooming in and out as needed to get the right frame on the fly. I threw story and dialogue ideas at Mark along the way. Mark took them and ran with them. Taking sips of wine when it got difficult. Putting on the sunglasses when he got ashamed of his tenth failed attempt. Even sucking on a few of those random mints I gave him, as if he were trying to seduce the answering machine with his fresh minty breath. And then, a false emotional breakdown that suddenly became quite real for Mark due to all the stress we had been through with Vince Del Rio and the impending death of our lifelong artistic dream.

After the breakdown, while still filming, I leaned into the shot and whispered to Mark, “Now get up, and get the message right, but have it be as weird as possible.” I didn’t realize it at the time, but I was creating the dramatic structure of the film on the fly. As if all those hours spent watching HBO for the past fifteen years were paying off. I didn’t even think about it. My internal movie barometer just knew what needed to happen. So Mark gathered himself and did it right then and there, without cutting.

After we had finished filming, we just sat and stared at each other for a long while. We knew some kind of breakthrough had occurred. But we couldn’t quite pinpoint it. We quickly called over our close friends and collaborators and showed them the take. We watched them watch it, and their faces said everything we were feeling. It was electric, raw, inspired, unpredictable. Somehow the energy of us not knowing where the story was headed could be felt in the footage. It was exciting for everyone. But it was also the crappiest-looking and -sounding footage we had ever shot. There was even a dead pixel in the center of the frame.

Over the next week, we tried to edit the footage down into something more cohesive, but we struggled getting the form right. Eventually we asked our friend David Zellner to take a look and see if he had any ideas. David had already had some success as a filmmaker, and we looked up to him and his brother, Nathan, as sources of inspiration. David loved the take and offered to edit it for us to see if he could crack something shorter and more like an actual film as opposed to just an inspired piece of footage.

Within a few days he handed us a ten-minute version, using jump cuts, that captured the spirit of what we shot but also gave it a more narrative pulse. Jay Deuby, our editing business partner, then weighed in. We all collaborated, and eventually we landed on a seven-minute final cut that we thought might be watchable as an actual short film. It needed a title, so we named it after the most prevalent piece of dialogue in a film about recording John’s outgoing answering machine greeting: This Is John.

Now the film was done. But the problem was we had no idea what to do with it. Everyone who saw it really responded to it, but its extremely poor production value limited our avenues of exploitation. We thought about maybe just putting it on YouTube. Then we thought that maybe we should shelve it and try to make something similar but with better production value. Ultimately we decided to just pick one film festival and submit it to “see what happens.” We chose (because we were idiots) Sundance. The most prominent and most difficult festival to gain entry to. We submitted it and quickly forgot about it.

In the meantime, we went back and revisited Vince Del Rio, and suddenly its failure and all the reasons for it were made abundantly clear to us. Yes, it was beautifully shot. Yes, the production value was amazing. But because we had unfortunately focused all of our energy on making a “professional” film, we had forgotten to focus on the most important elements…the performances and the story. And by accidentally stripping away all of those professional elements in our little answering machine movie (a full crew, proper set etiquette, trying to make the day on time and on budget) and instead focusing only on getting Mark’s performance and the story right, we had stumbled onto something interesting. Perhaps even more important was the discovery of what kinds of topics we should be making films about. There’s a saying that no one under the age of thirty makes a good film that’s not autobiographical. And while that’s not necessarily true, it proved to be helpful advice in our case. Why had we written a movie about a South Texas runner we knew nothing about, when our own personal foibles and way of seeing the world were what we happened to be in a unique position to offer? It took us a while to truly embrace the idea that the dramas of our relatively privileged middle-class life were film-worthy, but this moment was the beginning of that discovery.

A few months later, Mark was flying home to New Orleans for Thanksgiving. My parents and I were waiting at the airport to pick him up. When Mark got off the plane, we greeted him with a homemade white poster-board sign that said “Filmmaker Registration.” Mark just gave me a blank look.

JAY: Um…I just got a call. We got into Sundance.

(Pause. Mark looks around for clues as to why I would say something like this. But he just sees more smiles from our parents.)

MARK: This is not funny.

JAY: Mark…We. Are. In.

The four of us screamed and cried and jumped up and down in the Southwest terminal of the NOLA airport. And then we kept doing it.