25, 2008 - went truly viral to date, it has amassed over 34 million views.Īt that point, Gillett and Bettinelli-Olpin knew each other only peripherally through their jobs at New Line Cinema, but he was already envious of what Chad, Matt & Rob were producing. Several of their videos cleared over a million videos, and one - “Roommate Alien Prank Goes Bad,” posted Feb. With Rob Polonsky, Bettinelli-Olpin and Villella formed the group Chad, Matt & Rob, and joined the first wave of young and hungry filmmakers to discover the wide-open creative freedom afforded by YouTube’s platform. Gillett starts giggling: “‘New thing called YouTube!’ It was a long time ago.” “So we sort of decided, hey, there’s this new thing called YouTube, let’s go start just making short films for YouTube.” “The typical acting thing wasn’t really for us,” Bettinelli-Olpin says. They became fast friends and creative collaborators. “This New Thing Called YouTube”īettinelli-Olpin and Villella met first in the mid-2000s, in the back row of an acting class the day Villella had signed the lease on his first apartment in Los Angeles. In an industry that has always heavily favored the individual auteur - like, for instance, the late Wes Craven - Villella, Gillett and Bettinelli-Olpin understand just how remarkable it is to remain a semi-anonymous filmmaking troika and find success while doing it. That spirit of brotherly camaraderie and cooperation has allowed this “Voltron of anti-style” to navigate their filmmaking path on their own creative (and quite stylish) terms - going from YouTube pioneers to the indie horror vanguard to becoming the new stewards of “Scream,” one of the most beloved horror franchises of the last 30 years. “We could ask for permission or we can just ask each other for help.” “For us, it was like fuck it,” Gillett says.
Radio silence director movie#
Within that joke, however, is a deeper truth about what’s kept these guys together for so long in an industry as devoted to gatekeeping as the movie business. “We put a grand total of five minutes of thought into it.” When Miska asked them for a name, their inside joke about the sorry state of their careers leapt to mind. “And we’re like, ‘Well, it’s all of us,'” Bettinelli-Olpin says. After they turned in their segment, “10/31/98” - about a group of friends (played by Villella, Bettinelli-Olpin, and Gillett) who accidentally stumble into an actual haunted house on Halloween - Miska asked the group who should be credited as the director. Then in 2011, Brad Miska, founder of the genre website Bloody Disgusting, invited them on the strength of their YouTube shorts to contribute a segment to “V/H/S,” the found footage horror anthology film he was producing. Radio silence.’ It was such a joke among us that, basically, nobody wanted to work with us.” The way that we dealt with that kind of like rejection was to just be like, ‘Hey, have you heard from so and so?’ ‘Radio silence. “When you’re trying to get started, it’s nothing but obstacles. “We used to always say it to each other,” says Bettinelli-Olpin. Even their group’s name is a kind of prank on themselves. It’s the first hint of the shared comedic sensibility - and humility - that has sustained the trio throughout their career.
“A Voltron of anti-style,” says Villella, 44, which only makes the three laugh harder.
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