Trivia / Gorilla, Interrupted

• Creator Backlash: The people who worked on the film have little good to say about the experience of making the film or the final project. Bauman recounts how, after showing it to his new roommate, who had never seen any of Bauman's films before, the roommate said to him, "Please tell me that was the worst thing you've ever made." Due to its place as an artifact in RLM history, however, they did work to spruce it up enough to give it a DVD release, although not without including a self-effacing making-of documentary explaining why it's so bad.
• Creator's Apathy: In the making-of documentary, Stoklasa admits that he was so unmotivated to finish the film once principal photography had wrapped that he filmed all the remaining scenes with the aliens as quickly, cheaply and lazily as possible. He points to one scene in which the camera starts panning away from an alien because Stoklasa had grown bored of filming the take. The Stylistic Suck of the scenes, which would become a hallmark of Red Letter Media, ironically make them some of the best in the film.
• Enforced Method Acting: When Jacob is tied to a chair and falls over, he yelps, "Ow, my arm!" Actor Garrett Gilchrist had actually injured his arm when the heavy metal chair accidentally rolled over it.
• Harpo Does Something Funny: A lot of Stoklasa's script was just an outline of how scenes needed to play out, leaving the actors to improvise their lines and gags.
• He Also Did: A few years after the film was originally finished, Gilchrist would later be known for producing the acclaimed Fan Edit of The Thief and the Cobbler.
• Hostility on the Set: The film had an extremely troubled production. A lot of that was due to hostility between Garret Gilchrist and the rest of the cast. He squabbled with Mike Stoklasa by coming to the shoot with a rewritten script, filled with what Stoklasa called "pointless dialogue" that could never get filmed in the time permitted. Stoklasa ultimately confronted Gilchrist to reassert creative control of the project. The cast generally spent the week-long shoot grumpy, tired and suffering from colds. In the making-of documentary, How Not to Make a Movie, none of the other cast members had anything good to say about Gilchrist, whose absence from the doc is not addressed. Gilchrist also made disparaging comments about the others during a livestream.
• No Budget: The film was filmed in a week and funded by the pocket change of four amateur filmmakers in their early 20s.
• The Pete Best: RedLetterMedia fans watching this film for the first time will most likely find the presence of Garrett Gilchrist, who would not go on to be a part of the company and has a very different comedic energy from his co-stars, to be strange and distracting. Gilchrist would later find some success of his own independent of the group as a film restorer.
• Throw It In!: There was a lot of improvising for the film by necessity, since they didn't have enough time to write and memorize lots of specific dialogue.
• Troubled Production: Everyone involved in the filming described the experience as excessively unpleasant.
  • The team had only one week to film all of the material with the four main actors due to everyone living in three different states.
  • Stoklasa asserted directorial authority over the project and wrote a loose, 50-page outline for the film, which called for a lot of improvising to expand. Gilchrist was uncomfortable shooting without a complete script and so arrived at the shoot with a rewritten script filled with what Stoklasa called "pointless dialogue" that would be impossible to complete in the allotted time. After filming the first (heavily rewritten) scene and not understanding what the scene was about, Stoklasa became sullen and withdrawn for a while. He ultimately told Gilchrist that they would not be filming any more of his additions.
  • Gilchrist's comedic tone, which he admits was an attempt to ape Monty Python, is at complete odds with the edgier tone of the rest of the film. The actors often had difficulty getting scenes to go in the direction they needed to because Gilchrist's improv was on a different wavelength from the others.
  • In a livestream, Gilchrist claimed that Bauman had cast the actress who plays Julie because he was attracted to her, but Could Not Spit It Out, causing Stoklasa to swoop in on her and create a temporary rift between him and Bauman. However, this is similar to the actual plot of the film, and Gilchrist has apparently made other claims about Bauman that resemble the plots of Bauman's films.
  • The cast spent most of the shoot suffering from colds, which wreaked havoc on their voices and moods.
  • After the week of principal photography was over, Stoklasa still had several alien scenes to film. At this point, he was so dispirited and ashamed of what the film was turning out to be that he deliberately filmed the remaining scenes with as little effort as possible.
  • In the making-of documentary, the entire cast appears except for Gilchrist, whose absence is never acknowledged. When they do mention him, it's usually to criticize him. Given Gilchrist's own critical statements about the others, they seem to have parted ways on bad terms.
• Wag the Director: Garrett Gilchrist was uncomfortable shooting without a complete script, so he made various additions to the script with his own dialogue. Mike Stoklasa shot one of the scenes he rewrote before refusing to do any more of them.

---