Interview with Dan Fogler: Director, Writer and Star of Don Peyote

Weedist recently got the chance to talk with Dan Fogler, who co-wrote, co-directed, and stared in the new comedy Don Peyote.

This is a really interesting movie about personal discovery. Was there some event, or something else in your personal life, that inspired you to write it?

The movie was very personal, especially at the beginning of it. I’ve never gone crazy or had a breakdown myself, but have always been interested in what that must be like. It must be really trippy if you’re always hallucinating, and I wanted to capture that in a movie. I always wanted to tell the story of a guy that bumps into a street prophet and then becomes so obsessed about it that he becomes a street prophet… so I wanted to do a modern prophet journey.

I always wanted to do a homage to the Wizard of Oz, where the first part of the movie is very mockumentary style and the second part suddenly starts to become Alice in fuckin’ Wonderland.

But to answer the “personal” part: Yes. I was getting married at the time, I was shooting a movie, I was totally stressing out…

So you were like Warren (Allman, the character).

Yeah, Warren is me in a parallel universe. Like if you turned up the dial to 11 on all of my anxieties, that would be Warren. He’s very neurotic and the magnifying glass is on a lot of those neuroses in the movie… a lot of my neuroses, I guess. I’m obviously a lot more laid back than Warren.

He’s really on edge and he gets obsessed with what is coming. He becomes obsessed with these unobtainable answers, you know, and is trying to figure out the future before it happens.

There definitely did seem to be a lot about doomsday, 2012 conspiracy theories, and the end of the world. Beyond that, were there any other philosophies that inspired the views in the movie?

There were a lot of influences from all of the wise men that we met with when collecting all of the interviews. But what every single one of them said, whether it was the survivalist guy that knows how to kill you eight different ways, or the guy who, when shit hits the fan, you want on your team… or it was Daniel Pinchbeck, who literally wrote the book on 2012… every single one of them across the board all said, “But don’t worry about it, because if you worry about it, then your life will unravel and it’ll just be total chaos.”

They all said that you just have to embrace the change, and then you can really influence the world for good. And that’s the message at the heart of the movie.

So the interviews that Warren does in the movie are with actual conspiracy theorists?

Yeah, that’s actually Daniel Pinchbeck, and even though Jay Baruchel is an actor playing a part, he’s really into all those conspiracy theories, so [he] was able to improvise a lot of it.

That’s why this movie is really on the cusp of reality and fiction at the same time, because even though we do have some actors that are playing specialists, there’s also the real specialists.

You co-wrote, co-directed, and starred in this movie, and I was curious what the process of working like that is. You’re an experienced actor with a Tony Award in musical theater, so it was great to see some musical numbers in the movie. Where in the process did you write the songs and decide to make it part of the story?

It was definitely a lot of fun as an actor. There was a big part of me that just wanted to capture this moment in time, but I also really wanted to show my full ability as an actor and be able to make people both laugh and cry, so I wanted to sing and dance and get it all in there.

I always wanted to have a big dance number where he just goes crazy and suddenly finds himself in a crazy, trippy music video.

Both Anne Hathaway and Topher Grace are billed as “special appearances” in here, and both of their roles are small but hilarious. How did you get them to appear in the movie, and was there any reason for the special mention?

Well they are special appearances. Topher is only in it for maybe a minute or two. Josh Duhamel is maybe in it for like 20 minutes at the end. He and Jay Baruchel have bigger parts, Wallace Shaw has a bigger part… but I only had Anne for like, maybe 2 hours.

She was the one who handed me my Tony Award, so she has always been this crazy connection where shes like this angel in my life, but she loved the subject matter. I gave her a chance to play around a lot and help create her character. She improvised the fuck out of it and was an absolute delight.

I would work with every single one of these people again. Everyone was a friend, everyone did a favor, and that’s how this movie got made. We didn’t have that much money or a lot to offer other than just creative control.

Finally, I’d like to ask about how this movie is being distributed. It comes out in theatres in select cities, but is also available for download right now on Itunes and On Demand. It’s amazing that movies now drop the same way that albums do, where you can just download it instantly. Especially given your experience in the entertainment industry, have you noticed a shift in how movies are released and marketed?

Absolutely, it’s a totally different playing field now. For independent movies that are made for around $1 million, the record for how it does is now on Itunes and Netflix. It doesn’t even have to come out in theaters anymore, like having a film like this come out in movie theaters is just the cherry on top. Now we’ll make our money back from VOD weeks before it even comes out, and that’s the plan that most studios have now.

Hopefully this becomes a cult classic and it catches on.

I think the wave of the future is that people are going to buy a movie, or find it on the Internet or whatever and then love it so much that they’ll make it a birthday event or something to go out to a theater with all their friends and see it on a big screen. Movie theaters are gonna have to get Lazy Boys or something.

It’s a big change because home systems are now becoming, like, better than the actual movie theater.

Don Peyote is now avaiable on Itunes and on demand. Check out our review.