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July 23, 2011 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

18:12

1963 Silver Circle' - The Libertarian Movie Interview!

http://www.silvercirclemovie.com Stefan Molyneux of Freedomain Radio Interviews Pasha Roberts, Director of the new libertarian animated movie 'Silver Circle'

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	Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio.
	I am here with Pasha Roberts of the film Silver Circle.
	Thank you so much for taking the time.
	Glad to be here. Okay, so first and foremost, this is a film that is libertarian.
	It is a direct attack on the funny money ass-wiping currency known as the Federal Reserve Note.
	It is exciting, it is sexy, it is dynamic, there are car chases, explosions, some good cartoon kisses, which we all was worth lingering on.
	And you are almost ready to roll, is that right?
	Yeah, I mean, we're in the end stretch of it.
	There's only a little bit of shooting left because we actually work out with actors, the motion, and then we turn that into the animation, much like Avatar.
	But we've just got a couple months more work.
	It's the Death March time, and basically in September we'll be submitting the Sundance and South by Southwest soon after that.
	And you're dropping a million five on this according to your website.
	Are you guys actually on budget?
	Because you wouldn't want to be doing a film against overspending and then overspend yourself.
	Are you close to being on budget? No, we're actually on budget.
	Megan will tell you that I'm very cheap as far as these things are concerned.
	It's basically a very small budget for a movie, especially with the size and this look.
	I guess as you, I have a lot of computer background and All that kind of thing, just putting the whole thing together.
	And we're actually really excited.
	We're doing a, for example, for the fight scene, instead of using Hollywood fight actors and Jackie Chan and that kind of thing, we actually have three mixed martial arts guys coming to the studio in a couple of weeks.
	And so we're going to redo the shoot fight with them, the fight with them.
	And it'll be kind of pretty interesting, kind of getting close ups with the wrist locks and I don't know I'm looking forward to that.
	Well, I think also it struck me, as I've produced a small movie myself, that if you're wiring up actors for this kind of live-action fight stuff, one thing that's really cool about that is that you have a scene in there where a woman tasers a man, and if you've already got them wired up with electrodes, you can actually just run a fair amount of electricity through those and get some very realistic tasering.
	I mean, this is my contribution to your creative process.
	I hope that you'll credit me in the movie now for highly illegal suggestions.
	That's very interesting.
	I hadn't thought of that.
	Well, that's because you have ethical standards, but I'm bringing this to the table, which is amoral approaches to realism in acting.
	So, first of all, give the website, if you could, and then just give our listeners a sense of what the film is and what it's about and how it's going to appeal to their sensibilities.
	Sure. It's silvercirclemovie.com.
	Silvercirclemovie.com is the website.
	And there's a very active blog called Silver Underground, where there's all kinds of News and philosophical discussions and bloopers from the movie all kinds of things kind of been coming through there as we do it.
	We've tried to be very open about our production pipeline and how as a small scrappy studio we're able to try to do this inside of our little green screen studio.
	And what the movie is about basically it's set in 2019.
	It's extreme Economic collapse.
	Prices are 20 times what they are now, so I think our bar has a sign that has $100 beer night on the wall.
	I've had to double the prices since we started the movie just because silver's gone up so much.
	In the Federal Reserve, just in that kind of economic crisis, they just had to really ramp up their Their actions, so they're more militarized and they've got a couple of monetary innovations, I'll call them, that I hope they never pick up.
	We have that Strategic Housing Reserve, which controls housing prices region by region by taking over neighborhoods and making them empty.
	Yeah, I thought that was interesting. It sort of parallels the ghost cities in China, although I guess those are built but never lived in.
	So they're buying up tracts of houses and emptying them out in order to prop up housing prices, right?
	Yeah, the movie opens with, this isn't a spoiler because it's in the comic, but the movie opens with Federal Reserve troops using basically eminent domain to push people out of houses and load them onto buses and get them, you know, fortunately take them out of their house.
	So it's not that different from paying farmers to destroy their crops.
	I mean, it's supply and demand at work.
	So it's a typical way that governments intervene.
	And there's so much stress.
	You're always trying to solve the last crisis.
	There's so much stress right now about the housing.
	And there's still a lot of pent up failure inside of the housing market, I think.
	I think it actually has a ways to go down.
	So, you know, so this would be a great thing for them to do.
	I hope they never do it. You know, and it provides jobs because it makes builders, gives builders new houses to build.
	But the main thing that the rebels do is that they make their own silver coins, silver rounds, kind of like this.
	And you saw them at Freedom Fest and at Pork Fest.
	But these are the, they are working on creating an alternate currency that is Their own and that is resistant to the inflation that people are seeing.
	And is illegal in the film, right?
	It's illegal. The Coin Act of 2016 prevents people from making their own currency of any sort out of gold or silver.
	It's currently legal to make a piece of silver.
	We've done this, thousands of them.
	It's illegal to put dollars on it and try to pass it off as US currency.
	Whether he did that intentionally or not was debatable.
	But in the movie, it's kind of like in 1932 when owning gold was illegal.
	It's basically back to those days.
	Yeah, and it's always interesting to me that the Federal Reserve, the greatest counterfeiter in the history of the planet, is very concerned about counterfeiting.
	Don't counterfeit our counterfeiting whatever you do.
	Well, it's, you know, do as I say, so not as I do.
	But basically the movie is a cat and mouse game between there's a Federal Reserve investigator chasing down the rebels.
	So if you see pictures, you see Jay, the handsome gentleman in our movie posters chasing down Zoe, the Hot female rebel in the movie and basically it's this cat and mouse between them throughout the whole movie.
	And of course it's a thriller romance so it gets very complicated between them as it goes on.
	And that's probably all I can say in terms of spoilers.
	And I also wanted to, again, not to put any spoilers in, but I think there's a very concise and well-laid-out form of economic education that you get.
	Just a couple of frames where some very powerful points are made about fiat currency and why it's illegal and how dangerous it really is.
	I really wanted to commend you for compressing that educational injection into a very fast-moving plot.
	Oh, yeah, thanks. I mean, we really try to, in a movie, you have to really show and not tell.
	And So we try to minimize the speech-making.
	You don't want the John Galt 78-page radio speech.
	Well, I enjoyed that speech, but still...
	Well, you could do that in fewer pages.
	You'd just need two-point SquintoVision text with a little magnifying glass attached.
	Right. So it's really, you know, we try to put these things inside of the context.
	But just by the context of the movie fighting the Federal Reserve, I mean, there's already a lot being said there instead of it being an evil corporation.
	Although the Fed is a private corporation.
	But in this case, it's, you know, a federalized agency.
	And there's no banks in the future.
	We have, it's all Fed banks.
	There's the Chairman for Life of the Federal Reserve because the Federal Reserve should be strong and independent.
	There's a lot of innovations.
	What else do we do? We legalize pot.
	That's actually the one positive thing we have in the future.
	Right. So you're doomed, but you feel happy while you're doomed.
	It's a way of drugging the masses when you've run out of spectacles on TV to work with, right?
	Exactly. It's not unrelated, you could say.
	Now, how long did it take?
	I mean, because making a feature-length film is a monstrous, monstrous business.
	How long did it take from concept to, I guess, here where you're within a month or two of finishing it?
	We started thinking about it when Lehman Brothers went down at the end of 2008.
	But it was a very immature concept at that point.
	And so somewhere by mid-2009, we had the basic plot down.
	And part of what we realized, at first we were thinking of making a movie set in a 2008 crisis.
	And then we realized, no, that's going to be boring.
	Nobody's going to care what a CDO or CDS is by the time we're done.
	And we're considered very fast, by the way, too, especially for Netflix.
	That is very fast, yeah. And then it took a year to get the script finalized.
	I think we finalized the script in July 2010, and that was too long.
	I mean, we had screenwriter problems that I'm doing differently now for the sequels.
	Things have come together pretty rapidly since then.
	We shot in October 2010, and we've just been in massive post-production now.
	Now, shot means that you did the live-action work with the censorists to help you with the animation, because it's fully animated, start to end, if I understand it correctly.
	Yeah, it's fully animated. You won't see the actors.
	In fact, some actors play multiple characters.
	We have one guy who kills himself as two different characters, or his character kills his other character.
	If that makes sense. But in order to get natural human motion with the way that their faces go and just kind of get the genius of their faces and their fingers and everything, we actually captured everything they did in our little studio and then are transcribing that over into the 3D characters.
	And also, although I don't think I saw in the comic the actual head of the Federal Reserve, my dream casting has always been if you could get Gollum to play the head of the Federal Reserve, I think that would be fantastic, you know, sitting in a cave with a pile of fiat currency, perhaps even underwear made out of fiat currency, doing some sort of dance, my precious, my precious.
	I think that would be a really genius casting.
	And I think he's available now because, of course, after you've done Lord of the Rings as Gollum, What else are you going to do?
	I guess you could play the villain in a toothpaste commercial, but it's really hard to come up with new roles for that.
	Head of the Federal Reserve, I think that's perfect casting.
	Maybe, yeah, maybe in a sequel we'll actually have...
	Oh, yeah, he peels off his head and out comes Gollum or something like that.
	He's really a Gollum inside of there, you know.
	I'm just looking at the webcam.
	I'm noticing that I don't see you writing any of my suggestions down.
	I can only assume that that's because you have a really good memory and you don't need to.
	Right, right. Gollum, get Gollum.
	Gollum, get Gollum. Now, listen, how did you raise the money for this?
	I mean, 1.5 is quite a serious amount of even fiat currency.
	So, what was your process for fundraising?
	Well, it's just paper money, so who cares, right?
	Just print it in the basement.
	Just kidding, Mr.
	Federal Reserve Chairman. No, I usually consider my emails to be read when we're talking about how to do these things.
	Basically, we have some nice donations from some people in the community, and then I funded a bunch of it myself, too, as sort of a A mixture of those two, just to get it done.
	At this stage, because we want to release it during the presidential election cycle, because all the hype will be up at that point, we're just pushing hard to, you know, it's easier to actually fund it than to, you know, to pay for it than to, you know, do the fundraising.
	There's a lot of money out there, I think.
	At this point, we're just, you know, We're planning on earning the money back in the market.
	Right. Spend it now before it turns into vaporware.
	That could be your slogan. Right.
	And you are still taking...
	Sorry, go ahead. Oh, I'm so sorry, sir.
	No, no, go ahead. I'm just saying, we're also part of this is building up the pipeline and learning how to do this for next time.
	We've done a lot of smaller videos.
	We haven't done, you know, a full two-hour feature-length movie.
	So this is good to actually...
	Work through everything you have to do on a large scale so that we can get the sequels down quickly and, you know, we're looking at other storytelling for our future too.
	Well, I think that's fantastic.
	And you're still taking donations if people want to help you.
	Of course, every dollar you get is going to make the production that much more polished.
	And one of the challenges with, I guess, niche market movies is to try and make them look as professional as possible.
	From what I've seen, you guys are doing a fantastic job.
	But if people do want to help out, you do take donations on the website, right?
	Exactly. It's all right there, and it's tax-deductible.
	We're working with a physical sponsor.
	And the other thing that it really does is that it...
	It not only lets the movie be better, but lets us reach out farther.
	A big part of our concept in this is to get way outside of the choir.
	I mean, I think all your listeners are not going to be surprised by what's in the movie.
	They may have some nitpicky thing here or there, but they're basically going to agree with what we have to say and not be informed by it.
	They'll be entertained by it.
	They're our niche audience, but we have another niche audience inside the comics and animation world, and we go to those conferences, which are much bigger, like 90,000 people at a conference, and people are really excited about the characters and the look of the movie.
	We just say it's some sort of badass fighting against the man kind of story about the Federal Reserve, fighting the Federal Reserve, and people say, oh great, this is cool, I love badass fighting the man stories, because everybody wants to fight the man.
	Right, right. And I think it's also important if you have a high quality production.
	So if you're some libertarian who knows something about the Fed, yeah, the film may not illuminate.
	It will entertain, but it may not illuminate.
	But what's useful is, you know, sit down the family, sit down the friends and say, you know, without, ah, here's a piece of propaganda to program you about how bad the Fed is.
	You can say, you know, here's an entertaining film.
	And afterwards you can say, well, what did you think about that stuff?
	It's a good conversation entree for helping people to be exposed to the ideas.
	And if you have somebody in the room who knows more about it, Who's enthusiastic about it, so much the better.
	That's the goal, is this, you know, by the way, the bad guy is real.
	Right, right. Right, right.
	It's almost who could have dreamed it up.
	You know, it's like the comic book bad guy of some evil corporation that controls the world's money supply in complete secrecy.
	So... Okay, so how is it that people can follow on your website or on the website for the movie?
	They can sign up for updates.
	How long do you think it's going to be before people can see it and how are you planning on distributing it within the US and other places?
	Well, they can actually follow it right away based on our blogs and everything and also there's a comic book.
	We put out comic books two pages a week every Tuesday and Thursday.
	So there's a lot of people that are just following along the story there.
	And I think we're at a pretty interesting chase scene right now in the movies.
	So that's why you kind of get down with the story and we drew that separately.
	For the actual release, we're submitting it to Sundance in September, soon after we're submitting to South by Southwest, which is our two of the top 10 movie festivals.
	We hope to do well in those and depending on the success in those, we'll be releasing We'll determine the release date, but we're looking to release into 15 US cities and, you know, and basically, you know, that's our splash into the market.
	I'm just kind of working on distributor stuff right now.
	And then it'll be a similar kind of release pattern to what Atlas Shrugged did.
	We may even use the same releasing company.
	And then after that, then there's the video on demand and cable and, you know, International and online and DVD and all that kind of thing.
	Subtitles in Klingon for the niche market, that's obviously very, very important.
	I'm curious about international just because animation is a much bigger genre overseas, like France especially.
	And they may love seeing a movie about...
	Well, I think if you ever want to talk to a culture that suffered under fiat currency, the Japanese currently mired in their 20th year of recession as a result of stimulus spending by fiat currency monsters, I think they would really get the film in a more tangible way because they're a little further down the road and I think it's much more intense for them.
	I'll have to do Greek subtitles then for it also.
	Oh yeah, absolutely. If there's anything left in the Euro that can be used to purchase it, I'm sure they will.
	Listen, I want to make sure that you have enough time to continue distributing the film.
	Thank you so much. I'll put the website on this.
	I'm really, really thrilled to see how it comes out.
	And congratulations on making, I think, a very powerful, compelling and instructional tale.
	I certainly wish you the best with it in this fall.
	Okay, thank you, Stefan. I appreciate it, and I appreciate your support over time, and also your philosophical guidance along the way.
	It's exciting to have ideas behind the movie and to have such a clear voice for those ideas.
	Well, thank you, and I just wanted to point out to my listeners that, once more, he did not talk about my valuable movie-making ideas.
	But what I'll do is I'll cut off now, and then I'll just cry in a corner, and then I'll fill your junk box.
	Gollum. Gollum.
	All right, well, thanks, man. I really appreciate it.
	Have a great day. All right, thank you.

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