iamROGUE.com recently had a fantastic chat with DB as we spoke about music, growing with the business and of course Two Tickets to Paradise.  He is the genuine, real deal, nice guy.  He takes his work seriously and he offers a very honest viewpoint on filmmaking.  So read on, and make sure you check out his latest which finds its way onto DVD shelves today!  ‘I’ve got… Two tickets to paradise!”

Being someone that has grown in this business and now is growing older in the business, what is the most important thing you’ve learned?

You know what, it’s a long day on the set and I think that some people make more money than others and some people make less money.  Some people have bigger responsibilities and some have smaller.  Early on, I used to think that there were people who weren’t really making an effort.  And I’d be like, well that guy is lazy, somebody on the crew, an actor, whatever.  And I thought, with such a great opportunity, to be in the movie business or the TV business and we’re trying to tell a story, what a gift to have this job.  And I would really get upset when I thought people were blowing it off. 

Now I’ve sort of, not that I’ve accepted it, but I realize now that that is not their point of view of what they’re doing.  It really helped me as a director when I came to the realization that nobody comes to the set in the morning and says, I really wanna suck today at work!  [Laughing]  Maybe they’re distracted, maybe they don’t have good work habits, whatever, but the big challenge when you are the experienced person on the set or one of the more experienced people, try and maybe march people back to a productive pattern.

I just try and take the long view and I’m just here, and hopefully they’ll be here and if you have a confrontation with somebody over you perceiving that they are not pulling their weight, that’s not gonna end well.  That was kind of a growing up moment for me, where I realized that I should try and see it from their point of view.  Maybe they feel like they worked hard last week and today they don’t have to.  I don’t know, just try and see their side.

It doesn’t surprise me.  You’ve always worked hard, the work you’ve done and the roles you’ve played.  Now what was the one thing that made you want to tell this story [Two Tickets to Paradise]?

The thing that got me to direct this movie was in the aftermath of September 11^th, you know I’m a New Yorker and a lot of my buddies were from Wall Street and were firemen and cops.  So I didn’t lose any of my closest friends thank God, but I knew friends who lost their best friend, I know guys who worked on the pile, you know, a lot of people.  And then that winter, I was hanging out with a couple of these buddies of mine for yet another funeral, and they were still sitting around, drinking too much, and I said you guys should take a night off from the bar, to these firemen buddies of mine, and go to the movies or something like that.  And then they said, “Movies?  Nobody makes movies for us anymore…” and then they laughed their asses off for a half an hour.  And I thought, you know what, I’m gonna try and do one because I think what they are saying is true.

I think you’re right.  And watching the film, this is truly your baby; I could see the blood, sweat and tears that went into this.

Yeah, you know, if anybody had the right to take that credit of “film by”, it was me because I did so many jobs on this movie.  Yet I still feel that, every time I watch the movie, I think that is the most pretentious credit, “a film by”.  Yet, here are the other one hundred and ninety four people that worked on the movie but it’s “film by Steven Spielberg”.  You know what, that just seems so arrogant and self-centered.  Not just for [Spielberg] because everybody does it.   And I’ve worked with some of the best directors in the world and the better they are, it seems like the less they have to prove that they are director.  A lot of these guys who are directing for the first time and who are not very talented, I think they watch Patton at night and then they come in and think that they’re the general.  Those are the ones I keep the most distance from.

How easy was it for you to step in as a director yet still be an actor?  That is not an easy task.

That was the hardest part of it, and you know, philosophically I don’t agree with video assist where they record the take that you just did and everybody plays it back on the monitors and watches it and there is sort of an assessment of where we are.   I think that you shoot the movie, and then you edit the movie.  I didn’t want to have video assist, and that is fine and you are the director and you are watching the scene, but when you are the actor in the scene who is also the director, it’s really complicated because you are not going to have a chance to look at it before you have to decide whether you are finished filming a scene.  So I made a decision with my camera man, Claudio Rocha who was also director of photography – everybody in this movie had at least three jobs – I said to Claudio, I don’t want you to direct me but I’m gonna say to you, “Do we have it?” with my shot, if it’s my close-up or something.  You either say, “We have it” or “we should do another one” and if he said we should do another one, I’d do like three more.  We didn’t stop the production to watch the video, I hate when that happens on a set.  And I also gave that permission to John C. McGinley.  I said to him, “Look, you’re my oldest friend in the business, it you want me to say do I have it, or move on…” and maybe three times in the movie he said you should do another one.  And I would do three or four or five more.

That’s a lot of trust to place in your actors.

Well you know, I figure this story is about these three guys, if these three guys are not there for each other every moment of the filming, the movie is gonna fall apart.  So I thought, why not carry that over to the actual making of the movie. 

Paul [Hipp], the third guy who is not as well known, is an old friend of ours.  He’s a brilliant guitar player, he was the original Buddy Holly on Broadway and he was always there to help me with the guitar stuff because he really was kind of a rock star.  He was very helpful with a lot of guitar in the movie, whenever there was guitar; he was very helpful with that.  He helped me with some of the music, so everybody really pitched in.

It was fun to see you with a guitar man, you looked good.

[Laughing]  Thanks.  I was in a band back in the punk rock days when it didn’t really matter how you could play, it just mattered how good ‘a jacket you had.

I remember that. [Laughing]

Those were the good old days! [Laughing]  Then it went all electronic.

Well the funny thing is, and this movie kind of sums it all up is that, we really look back at our lives and didn’t really realize how cool some things were, like Dire Straits.  They were cool back then, but now you look back and they were amazing.

Yeah.  I think as far as Eighties music and Seventies music… I think for me, music kind of dies in the Nineties and there is very little lately that is worth listening to.  But in the Eighties!  What a wealth of music.  You had The Clash, you had Dire Straits, and you had The Ramones.  R.E.M. in the beginning was great.  You had Elvis Costello and Talking Heads.  Think about all those great bands and you have now what, I mean, Smashing Pumpkins are pretty good but they’re kind of not really making stuff all the time.   Now, you have one good song and you can be a media celebrity for two months.

Now I have to mention that you did a web series correct?

Yeah, I did.  I did this thing called Universal Dead because a friend of mine, Vernon Mortensen who served eight years in the United States Navy, wanted to be a movie director and I thought, you can support the troops in a lot of different ways and one way would be to help him get a job in a business I have some pull in.  That was really my reason for getting interested and then I read the script by Kelly Parks and he is actually a trained scientist.  So it was a zombie movie, written by a scientist, directed by a military guy, that’s a good new stint so I jumped in.  And it turns out Paramount is going to make it into a movie so maybe it will be the first web series to graduate to moviehood.

That would be fantastic.  It would be great to see you in a big ass, major studio release!

From your lips to God’s ears.

Thanks goes out to DB Sweeney for chatting with us.  And now it is your turn to answer a question, what is your favorite DB Sweeney role?