Jared:

This is probably the first movie we've done that I feel pretty decent about. I can still watch it without every fiber of my being wanting to tear itself apart, and that's always a good sign. Back in the summer of '05, Quinn decided to move up to San Francisco to go to some fancy-pants art school, so we figured we ought to do one more movie before he left. When we were discussing what kind of movie we should make, he brought up a fragment of a short story he'd started in a creative writing class and the ideas started flowing from there. Basically, we knew we were going to start with drunkenness and end with cannibalism. The script came together pretty easily from there.

Quinn's girlfriend Cass's mom had this incredible house, the most creepy place you could find in Santee. It was literally a haunted house. Her and Quinn had some creepy tales about the place. Cass's mom told us that her parents had died there and that you coud tell when their spirits were in the room when you smelled cigar smoke or roses. There were a few times for me while we were shooting when the smell of roses became really strong all of a sudden, which makes this the coolest short movie shoot we've had by far. Hard to beat a haunted shoot. At the time we were shooting this movie, they had renovations planned but several rooms were a complete mess in the most aesthetically pleasing way. I'm sad that it's been fixed up since then.

This movie presented a few interesting challenges. For one, we had to get a whole bunch of extras for the party scenes. Thankfully Quinn's a hell of a lot more social than I am. That certainly helped. Another fun bit for this movie was that I'd written in a cartoon that I'd have to draw up myself. I'd never done it before, but for some reason it didn't occur to me that maybe I didn't know what the hell I was doing. Took a whole summer's worth of work to put that together and I'm sure I'd found the least efficient method of doing it.

Nice Day contributed some more songs for this movie, which is pretty damn righteous of them to do so. Andy Parish provided the original compositions, another great addition that didn't require him as naked as we usually have him in our movies. (Granted, he may have scored the entire movie in the nude, for all we know.) My cousin Troy Page also went above and beyond in digitally coloring the movie, giving our living-impaired characters a great feel.

The shoot was difficult at times and apparently Quinn remembers it as being a hell of a lot more trying than I do, but for me, this was the movie that made me feel like this was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. As hard as it was getting everything together, for some reason this was the kind of challenge that I was more than happy with enduring.

Quinn:

Hooray! The triumphant return of me! Jared and I were in full swing again when we started tossing around ideas for the return of Mongrel Pictures. I knew that I wanted to do something dark and it was purely coincidental that I happened to have the beginnings of a darker toned story which I presented to Jared to see what he could come up with. Thus the script for Leftovers was born. We got to work right away and decided that we would co-direct this one. Jared would take the reins behind the camera and I was to deal with all the actors. We held out hope that we could find someone competent enough to play the lead but we knew it would be easier on us all if I did it. So back in the spotlight I went. Noel was probably my favorite character to play, it's always fun when you get to be an asshole for an entire film! There were a lot of problems with the cast and getting people to show up which was extremely frustrating. I remember being really upset at one point about something but I don't recall what. There are a few things in the final film that are painful for me to watch: certain shots I feel are dramatically under-lit, and the conversation scene at the party is difficult because you cannot hear my line at all. It's hard to detach yourself from a project like this and try to see it from an outside view. I've never really been sure if people who weren't involved get the film. But it has some really cool elements that make it cooler than any other film, the animation stuff really makes it unique. I was happy with my performance and I think this one is of the better films that we've made.