Quinn:

I remember talking to Jared about doing another short since we lived together and it would be easy. We tossed around ideas for a while, we had some time on our hands because I was out of work recovering from being very ill. The beginnings of the story are hazy to me but I do recall that many years ago, before most of our films, we sat around the comic shop where Jared worked and discussed the idea of doing a "Creepshow" type horror short comprised of three different story arches. The idea was dropped eventually, but was re-used in a way seeing as how the Amy segment of Getting Off was initially intended for the other film. We intended for this film to be an extremely low budget, guerilla-type shoot; we would just be shooting it as quickly and cheaply as possible. But things rarely go as planned. By the time we began shooting, I was already back at work and we had three actors coming all the way from L.A. to work on this. So things got complicated real quick. The shoots were insane, we often worked through the nights into the mornings, and I usually had work the next day. The schedule was tight, most of the shoots were back to back. It was daunting how many locations, actors, and special effects we wrote in the script considering that this was to be on a low budget. But we managed to pull it off despite a lot of griping from the cast and crew and a few moments of extreme stress. Funny memories of this shoot: when we were shooting the scene where Neil and Lena are in the bedroom there was some really obnoxious mariachi band playing somewhere around the house. Jared ran around about five different blocks trying to locate it so he could ask them to keep it down seeing as how it would ruin our audio. He was unable to locate them, but for some reason it doesn't show up on the audio. Weird ghost band. I think the end result is our best work to date and a shining example of how well we can operate in extreme conditions. Think about it like this: if we shot this for almost no money and in sixteen days, and it still turned out looking great, then imagine what we could do with a real budget and a decent amount of time. It's almost scary.

Jared:

During my last couple months at SDSU we decided to shoot a movie before I left for Hawaii on Christmas Day. I wrote the script around Thanksgiving and we shot for sixteen days in December. The script was the longest and most complicated we'd ever attempted shooting. Quinn would direct the Neil segment, act in the other two and serve as primary crew member for the rest in between working all week. I would direct Amy and Eddie, shoot one and get sound on the other while growing a beard and going broke. So it was kind of a ludicrous endeavor at the start before things even started going wrong.

The shoot started out pretty rough. I can't even begin to describe the first night of shooting for many extremely good reasons. Suffice it to say that every night of shooting afterwards seemed blessed in comparison, even when those nights lasted well into the morning.

We had to scramble to put together the cast in time to shoot and a few people dropped out at the last minute resulting in some reluctant acting debuts. The cool thing about making this movie though was that it wound up being a sort of Mongrel reunion. We were very fortunate to have Noelle Balfour and Patrick Wenk-Wolff make the trip down from LA to work with us, especially since they both ought to know better by now. Also surprisingly still a friend is Andy Parish, who gets to help re-enact the beginning of "I'm Amazed" by the Pixies with Quinn Allan around the point of the movie where the audience gets completely lost. Shannon Rodriguez dies again, Lucky John composer Jamaal Harley appears as a priest, Lance Page does practically everything else and I show up again because somebody else did not. So it's real sentimental in hindsight.

This was the first movie we'd done with a dedicated make-up artist, Ashley Lindroth. She did a good job making a few of us look several degrees more horrifying than usual. Ashley's friend Kacie Lynn stepped in as 'Nessa when the original actress got into a car accident and needed to book an emergency modeling gig to pay the bills. Kacie saved our ass that night, which may have been the one that ended at 8:00 AM. Somewhere there's footage of her and Quinn rehearsing zombie-walking. Also new to Mongrel was Leena Lambert, Noelle's roommate at the time. Noelle drove her down from LA for all her scenes and likely had the unenviable task of convincing her we actually had half a clue what we were doing. Glad she did, my favorite scenes in this movie are the ones between Leena and Patrick, which is irritating since Quinn directed that part and I just chased mariachi-ghosts.

The entire pre-production and production of this movie is kind of a blur to me. I don't remember when I slept. We'd finish for the night and I'd work on storyboards and scheduling until the next night began. Not the smartest way to go about putting together a movie but we got it done. I'm grateful we had such a dedicated cast and crew.