TIRES: Just When You Thought It Was Safe To Step Back Onto The Sidewalk
An interview with Wade Sisson, director of TIRES, a JAWS fan film that was completed in Sept. 2019.
What was the inspiration for TIRES, your JAWS fan film?
The original idea came from a conversation I had with my nephew, Corben, this past spring. He had been watching some old movies we made in the past, and he said, “We should do a movie this summer. We should do JAWS.”
You had made other movies in the past?
Yes. In 2005, before Corben was even born, all of the kids in our family were having Star Wars fever thanks to the release of “Revenge of the Sith.” So, I decided it might be fun to let the kids act out the original movie. We boiled “A New Hope” down to a 15-minute short film. We made costumes. We gathered props. We built X-wings and TIE Fighters out of Styrofoam. And we rented the local stage for a day. And after a few hours of work, we had the pieces that were edited together to make “Short Wars.” Eight years later, we followed it with “The Empire Falls Short,” our tribute to “The Empire Strikes Back.”
So, you had some experience at this. How eager were you to take on JAWS?I have to admit, the minute Corben mentioned JAWS I was excited. It was one of my favorite movies growing up, and I thought it would be a lot of fun to do. The second thing I thought was, how in the world would we do it? We certainly wouldn’t be filming in the Atlantic from here in land-locked Kansas. I thought maybe we could film it at a lake. Or a swimming pool. Then I remembered something we used to do when Corben and his sisters were younger. We live in a small town, and sometimes there’s nothing to do on the weekend, so you end up driving around town. I had found a plastic shark fin with the University of Kansas Jayhawk on it. The idea was you drive around with the fin on your car on game days. I bought the fin and painted it gray so it looked like a shark fin. I made a mix tape with music from JAWS. And on the next rainy day, I picked up the kids in my car and we drove around town with my car disguised as “car shark” with the fin on top. We played the JAWS theme and drove around trying to scare people. It made us laugh.
What was the local reaction to car shark?
I’m not sure anyone ever noticed. But it entertained us quite a few times – especially on rainy weekend days.
And this was the inspiration for TIRES?
Yes. I realized that if we made the movie about a car shark that attacks people, we could film everything on dry land and have a lot more control over what happens. That was an ephipany. So, I sat down with the original JAWS screenplay and started trimming it down to essential scenes. I did a search and replace. “Ocean” became “street.” “Shark” became “car shark.” And we were on our way.
Did everyone get on board with the concept?
It was a gradual thing. I said we’re going to make our own JAWS fan film, and the kids in our family were on board. My love of the film had been passed down to them. We watched it during one of our family Labor Day campouts at the lake. We projected it on a big canvas stretched over a fence at the campsite, and the kids loved the movie. I remember one of the kids said, “If the shark is killing people in the water, why doesn’t everyone just get out of the water? But I guess you wouldn’t have a movie then.” She wasn’t wrong. And all the kids said “fast forward to the parts when people get attacked!”
How did you get everyone on board, so to speak?By treating this like a real production. I printed copies of the script and invited our cast to the town library. One of my nieces walked into the conference room and said, “Oh, we’re having a table read. I guess this a real movie.” Everyone sat down, picked a role and we did a script read-through front to back. I gave everyone a script in a binder along with the shooting schedule which, I should say, was out of date within a week.
Did you cast the whole movie at that table read?
No, we didn’t have enough people that night. I really didn’t want to double-up on characters if we didn’t have to. We left the table read without a Mayor Vaughn and without a Quint. It looked like we would be without an Ellen Brody at first because none of the girls wanted a speaking role. But then Roslyn spoke up and said she would take on the part. I was thrilled. It was hard to find people willing to take on the bigger roles. Corben was cast first. This was his idea, so I told him he could play any part he wanted. “I want to be Hooper, the science guy.” Hooper it is! When Corben’s cousin, Easton, arrived at my house before the table read, I asked him what part he wanted. “I’m going to be Brody,” he said confidently. And so it was. We never looked back, and he took a real shine to that part, I must say.
So, when did you start filming?
By the time of the table read, we were almost to Memorial Day weekend, and most of our actors were going to be out of town or busy with family events. So, we decided to start in June.
The first thing I shot actually didn’t have any actors in it at all. There was a car show in downtown Overbrook in early June, and I decided it might be good to get some video coverage of that event, which I did. That was the first thing I shot, and I edited it together the same day it was shot. I added the music. Very little about that scene ever changed. I added the snippet with Brody and Hooper on the phone, but otherwise that scene was locked down from the very beginning.
And that seemed like a promising start.
It did! From there we started tackling things that made sense. Sometimes we shot things based on who was available in a given day. Or by which location we could utilize. Or a combination of the two. The first scene we shot with actors was the morning scene in the Brody household when Brody says “They’re in the yurd not too fur from the cur.”
Sam Criger as Quint offers to hunt and kill the car shark during the city hall meeting in TIRES.
Your cast is predominately children. Was that challenging for you as a director?
We had our moments. Remembering dialogue was a big challenge. In the beginning I had left some of the big chunks of dialogue from the film in the movie. Very quickly I realized that would have to go. We lost the Indianapolis speech early on. It would have been difficult and I realized we didn’t need it. I was always looking for ways to trim 10 words into two. But at the same time I was facing the challenges of it, I was always amazed by the performances the kids were putting forth. They all really rose to the occasion. And it’s funny how quickly this whole concept becomes real to them. Within an hour of filming they were talking about cuts and blooper reels like they’d been doing this for 20 years.
There are a lot of moving parts in this movie, literally and figuratively. How did you manage it all?
It was definitely a one day at a time sort of thing. Once we had the script and the actors, I worked on the list of props and costumes we would need. I started frequenting our local thrift stores in search of costumes. I consider myself lucky. I found the anchor shirt for Mayor Vaughn that first day. And most of his crazy suits. About a week before we shot Quint’s scenes, I found that surplus Army jacket. It was meant to be. And the design of the car shark happened quite organically. There was so much prep work. We shot about every other weekend for four months. Most of our shoots were on a Saturday. Even though this was summer, our actors had a lot of commitments during the week. So, Friday nights became my prep times. I would stay up late doing storyboards and pulling costumes and props together.
You had some great props. That mural!
Yes – our Don’t Overlook Overbrook mural had to parody the JAWS billboard, and it needed to set up the Fourth of July celebration that was central to the movie. All year the kids in our family had been actively painting at their grandparents’ house, and they all seemed to have a natural aptitude for it. All of the kids agreed that Marrit should paint the mural. She was in Colorado for a softball tournament when it was decided. Upon her return, the painted the mural with notes I’d provided about what we wanted to see. She did it in a matter of hours, and the billboard was ready for its closeup just a few days before we shot those scenes. She created the “grafitti” pieces on a separate canvas and they were cut out and pasted onto the billboard as needed. It worked very well.
The kids appear to be having fun in this movie based on the smiles we sometimes see on their faces.
I think so, yes. On one hand, it was a lot of fun and something you don’t necessarily get to do every day. On the other hand, I think they quickly gained an appreciation for the fact that the process requires discipline and is a lot of hard work.
You mentioned a blooper reel earlier. Do you have one?
We do, indeed. It’s going to be on the DVD I’m working on for the kids now. We actually have more blooper footage than usable footage. For one scene in particular, the scene in which Brody, Hooper and Mayor Vaughn are talking in front of the billboard, we had something like 20 takes. That was at the end of a long day and everyone was getting slap-happy.
What scenes were the most difficult to complete?
The scene that worried me most all the way through was the attack on Chrissie Watkins at the beginning of the movie. I wanted that to be scary and as realistic as possible. I felt that was very important. I deliberately scheduled that scene late in the shoot because I needed time to build up my plan and my courage for that scene. I spent hours thinking about how to pull that scene off without injuring anyone. For a while I thought we’d have Chrissie running through a field of tall grass, then shoot the car shark driving through the grass towards her. I envisioned it like that scene in “Jurassic Park: The Lost World” when the people are running through tall grass and you start to see the shapes of velociraptors closing in on them through the weeds. But in the end I deciced that was too dangerous. In the summer in Kansas, you never know what you might find in the tall weeds. I didn’t want any actors to be bitten by snakes.
How much prep work went into that scene?Quite a bit. Once I decided that we’d be showing a car shark attacking Chrissie as she ran down the street, I began researching ways to make that work. There were YouTube videos that showed how you could do some clever editing to make it look like someone had been hit by a car. You lock down your camera. First you film someone moving down the street. Then you film the car coming. Then you merge the footage and edit it until all the pieces make it appear the person is hit and flung along by the moving vehicle. In theory it would work. But after we finally filmed the scene, I spent an entire weekend trying to make that special effect work, and I couldn’t do it. There were about 50 steps and I’d get lost about 30 steps into it.
What did you do to solve this challenge?
I outsourced the problem in the end. Editing that scene was one of the last things I did, and I had a week to go before our premiere, and I needed to film a few more scenes and get the whole thing done. So I put an ad online for someone to edit that effect for me and I found Jacob Desio, who graciously agreed to spend a few hours doing the effect. His fee was very reasonable. He charged $150. And it was so worth it to have the finished special effect so that I could move on to the rest of the last-minute things.
How did that $150 effect your overall budget?I would say that doubled our budget. We’d spent about $150 on props and costumes up to that point. It was all being done quite cost-effectively up to that point. That’s one of the best things about making a short film. It can all be done so cheaply. It forces you to be inventive.
So, you finished your big special effect scene with a week to spare. How long did the whole production take?
Four months. We started filming in June and didn’t wrap until the second week of September. As I said, we didn’t film every day. In fact, we usually had two weeks between each Saturday shoot, which gave me time to gather my plans, props, etc.
Easton Sisson as Chief Brody has a close encounter of the car shark kind in TIRES.
Not to mention your cast.
Yes. Casting was challenging. It was hard to find people who wanted to be commit the time. And we didn’t gain some key cast members until the last minute. Quint is a prime example. I wasn’t sure how we were going to find a Quint. I considered finding an adult for that part because it seemed to demand a gravity that would seem to demand an adult. But the Quint role became one of those things that was just meant to be for our project. My cousin Lora has two sons who were pivotal parts of our Star Wars fan films. I didn’t think either would be available for TIRES but at the very last moment, Lora and her younger son, Sam, drove to Kansas for a week-long visit from their home in California. I was thrilled to learn that Sam was eager to take on Quint. The Army jacket fit him like a glove – as did the spirit of Quint. It was written in the stars, I think. We filmed all of Quint’s scenes in one day, and I really like the way those turned out.
Did you have any surprises for your cast?
Yes. I kept the whole “Footloose” homage a secret until the day we filmed it. It wasn’t in our working script. I loved everyone’s reaction to it, and for most people, it’s a highlight of the film.
How did you celebrate the completion of the project? We booked our hometown library’s community room and had a premiere watch party for the cast and crew on Sept. 10, 2019. By that time, I had seen the final cut about 100 times. So it was great to finally be able to show it to an audience and get their reaction. At the end of the viewing, I had the cast and crew stand up and take a bow.
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