Going Deep with the Creators of Reveries: The Mind Prison

Chatting with Graham Mason, Matt Barats and Anthony Oberbeck about the latest entry in the Reveries comedy art series

On August 22. Reveries: The Mind Prison will have its Toronto premiere as part of BE Fest 2 at the Paradise Theatre. Tickets available here!

On August 12, Bleeding Edge is screening Reveries and Reveries: Going Deeper at 7pm in collaboration with H.E.A.D., a new DIY space located at 932 College St. (accessible from the rear). PWYC.

In 2018, comedians Anthony Oberbeck (Dad & Step-Dad) and Matt Barats (Cash Cow) teamed up with filmmaker Graham Mason (Inspector Ike) to make a 46-minute “comedy art film” called Reveries. Inspired by the surreal cult comedy of Chris Morris and the monologues of Joe Frank, Reveries largely consisted of the two comedians delivering loose, joke-heavy riffs over an ambient soundscape and deceptively amateurish camcorder video montages (shot by Barats and edited by Oberbeck). Mason’s role was to establish the two main “characters” (always wearing sunglasses, often smoking cigarettes, around 40-years-old) in a handful of interstitial scenes.

In 2020, the team returned with Reveries: Going Deeper, slightly more ambitious at 60 minutes, with a wraparound story about the two protagonists living in an underground, post-apocalyptic bunker (fitting, for a movie made during the COVID pandemic), but still leaning heavily on riffs and abstract visual montage.

The team has returned once again with Reveries: The Mind Prison, the most ambitious entry in the series, which brings the characters to a desert setting, but still leaves room for the surreal, abstract “tone poem” qualities of the earlier films.

Bleeding Edge is excited to bring Reveries: The Mind Palace to Toronto for the first time. We chatted with the filmmakers about the evolution of the Reveries series and how best to describe the films to the uninitiated.

Bleeding Edge: I've struggled to find ways to describe these movies to people when they ask what it is. When you read descriptions on festival websites, there's a lot of, “It's an ayahuasca trip narrated by Stephen Wright!” That kind of thing. So I'm wondering, do you guys have an elevator pitch or a short way that you would describe the movie to other people?

Anthony Oberbeck: We landed on “comedy art film.”

Matt Barats: We never really found a clear way, because they're all a little different. We jokingly referred to it as a tone poem, because after we made the first one, someone was like, “Hey, nice tone poem,” and we ran with that for a long time.

GM: When we made the first one, a lot of things were being described as tone poems, Spring Breakers was like, “Harmony Korine’s latest tone poem is out.”

BE: I have been saying it's just two guys and sunglasses vibing and I feel that it gets the feel of it across a bit more. Have you seen any more of these “it's X meets X!” descriptions out there?

AO: Yeah, there's a Letterboxd one that I think is Guy Maddin and… Stephen Wright, maybe? I think that would hit especially hard in Canada.

MB: It's like a Atom Egoyan meets Geddy Lee.

AO: It's like Mike Myers…

MB: No, maybe Norm, maybe Norm.

AO: It’s very Kids in the Hall-esque, to be honest.

GM: We could talk about the actual art influences too, like Chris Morris, Blue Jam radio and the early Aki Kaurismäki movies like Leningrad Cowboys, that kind of deadpan art movie.

AO: Matt was really into Joe Frank and Ken Nordine and I was really into Chris Morris, the UK comedian, and his late night radio show Blue Jam. Me and Matt were coincidentally walking home from a show one night and, independently, each had been wanting to do something in that vein. So we're like, let's do it together. We had our friend Tim Joyce make us some music, and we did a 3 minute track of going back and forth on weird lines.

We didn't know how to put it out. Matt had sent me some Joe Frank YouTube videos where it was random video art looking footage, basically as a way to have it on YouTube. So we were like we should shoot some random footage of us looking cool and artistic, and make it screen saver-y, just as a way that we can put this audio track on YouTube.

BE: I noticed there was an audio version of the first Reveries available on one of your websites, so I guess making it more cinematic was something that developed over time.

MB: Yeah, that really started it. We were like, “Oh, it's gonna be this audio thing.” And then maybe we'll have this visual element.” I think the first document of ideas I had for it was labeled “word jazz ideas” and it was from 2015. “Word jazz” was Ken Nordine’s thing.

We were both writing things that we didn't really know where it would go as early as a full decade ago, basically. When we started shooting I had this little camcorder that I still use. I got it probably in 2013 or 2014. I went to film school, but then I did comedy, and it felt like a fun reemergence of what it feels like when people that are at the quality-level of really self-serious film school students who really want to make something. We were trying to get what looks badass to us like: They're at a diner! There's an hourglass! There's a clock in the gutter!

AO: All the video montages I edit and I think it's been important to the aesthetic that it's me that does it because I don't know how to use Premiere very well. I need to capture the essence of a 40-year-old man who thinks he's very artistic, but barely understands the technology he's using.

BE: I wanted to ask about the the division of labour, because I saw that Matt, you shoot the stuff with the camcorder. Anthony, you edit it. So what is the role of director on a movie like this? And what are your roles as the writers and performers?

GM: Well, I do the interstitial, more cinematic stuff. And then I also have a role in overall pacing or structure. More so in the later ones. That's directed by me and edited by me, and then the camcorder jam stuff is edited by Anthony and shot by both Matt and Anthony, but I'd say mostly Matt.

AO: Matt has the patience to always be taking a camcorder everywhere and constantly be getting shots. As soon as we finish every Reveries movie, I don't want to think about Reveries again. It takes a year to be like, maybe we'll do another. And I feel like Matt, the second it's done, he’s gotta start getting footage for the next one.

MB: I'm not necessarily getting footage of me in the outfit in the world, but it is like, hey, if I'm going somewhere interesting, I might as well shoot some stuff. As far as the division of labour goes, Anthony and I write all the jokes for those montage sections, basically. When we originally came to Graham, we had this idea for these interstitials and other things, and then it got carried away and became this elevated thing where we discovered that it's like we have these two separate things going on where our camcorder stuff looks like a choice because of it.

AO: The first one, I had worked with Graham, and we wanted to bring him on. And we had the idea that instead of presenting it as Matt and Anthony doing jokes over music, what if there were characters that are saying this? And we made this thing where it introduces you to these particular guys who are having these thoughts. Then Graham came in, and it was all Graham that had the idea to shoot it in his studio, like all rear projection. We bonded over Aki Kaurismäki a lot. I think we we all share a similar aesthetic. But the idea of very simply painting a scene, like me at my desk, and then lighting it and holding Venetian blinds in front of the light to make it seem like I'm in an office. That's a very Graham aesthetic, to be like, what are two or three little elements that give you the whole story?

GM: I used to have this office studio space that I shared with ten people in a really big room and you could take over the whole room for a weekend. I shot so much stuff there, and it was really rare to be able to do that in New York. I think it's more normal in other cities, even LA, to have that amount of space. But it actually created a whole creative era for me of being able to have more designed spaces to film in. I don't have it anymore, which is kind of sad.

The first one was shot in my studio space basically with colored backdrops and projected backdrops. And then the second one we shot in a single car garage. For the third one we flipped it and shot in these ultra expansive desert locations, which couldn't be more different. It forced us out of our comfort zone

AO: It's a funny arc, I just realized, for Graham to go from shooting in his own studio space in the most controlled environment possible to being like “We're gonna take you out to the middle of the desert and see what happens!”

BE: You touched on using Premiere and the abstract visual stuff and you also mentioned that it was supposed to be the kind of thing you might see from a guy who doesn't really know what he's doing, and that that might be reflective of your skill level. But I'm curious how you come up with those patterns.

AO: Whatever the most simple tools are, if you go to the effects dropdown, and you just go for the most simple ones, but use them more than anyone has ever used them, to a degree where it feels like I must be an idiot for just dragging the same effect onto the same clip 90 times. It's the kind of stuff you would be taught out of if you were trained to be a editor.

MB: I feel like in the second one it reaches critical mass or something. We had a little more time to work on those because of COVID.

AO: I used to smoke a lot of weed when I did it. The third one, I quit smoking weed. So I think Going Deeper was the peak of that.

BE: It makes me think of when you're a teenager and you're playing around with iMovie, and you're just using whatever effects that they have out of the box as much as possible.

GM: Yeah, trying to channel that energy in every way on this project.

MB: I always think of it as, like, hey, we may not have other resources at our disposal, but we do have our own time to fully dig into something to a degree that no one has done. “How did you do that?” Well, we just spent way too much time on this thing.

AO: The way that I crossfade from one clip to another one is I line them up, and then on the one clip on the opacity, I do a marker where it's like, okay, this is a hundred percent. And then at the end of the clip, I manually change it to 0%, and then on the other clip, I manually change it from 0% to 100%. And I have to take time lining up the changes. And then a year into doing that, I realize there's a crossfade thing that you can drag onto the timeline.

BE: I had never heard of these movies until the most recent one was recommended to us, and I loved it. I'm wondering how the first two movies were released and what was the reception to them at the time.

MB: Beloved!

AO: The first one is a 45 minute, very abstract comedy art film. I think we submitted to Sundance and got rejected, then gave up.

GM: Did we really submit it to Sundance?

MB: We didn't, really. We just put it on the Internet the day it was done.

BE: Festivals are not really clamoring for those 46 minute comedy art movies, unfortunately.

MB: We came up in the comedy scene, and that wasn't really the culture at the time. Everyone was making videos and short videos were the thing. So part of what was interesting to us was that a 46 minute visual album or comedy thing seemed so shocking. No one was doing this at the time in our community. I feel like, retroactively, we've embraced it more as a film. But it wasn't like, “Oh, we got this thing! Of course we're gonna do all these screenings with it.” It was like, no, we’re gonna put it on the Internet and then we just decided to make another one later. And that one was during COVID, so we did virtual screenings with Spectacle and some other places. It was just like the Internet was the only place at the time. So I feel like with this new one, we're like, okay, we have to do ourselves a favor. And it's at a length that makes sense to show it.

BE: You already touched on this with regard to the more ambitious filming locations in the third film, but how would you say that the movies have evolved since the first one?

AO: The first one we really did not know what we were making at all, other than that there's gonna be these video segments where it's me and Matt's voiceover. We knew there'd be an intro part, and then the way I remember piecing it together is we would think of other stuff we could do in Graham's studio. And kinda on the fly, I remember, in the middle of the process, realizing it could be pieced together in a coherent arc.

MB: I think Graham took a crucial thing that we thought was gonna come later and he's like, “well, what if we put the intro thing here?” And then what we thought was gonna be the intro a little later, and then and we're like, “Oh, this has a narrative, right?”

AO: But yeah, the first one, we were making it as we go. Also, we thought it would be 20 to 30 minutes. We were kind of shocked to realize we've got this 45 minute mid-length movie. It had turned into something way cooler and more complex than we thought.

All of them in general, but especially the first one, are very three-headed collaborations. We definitely each bring something to the table and have specific roles. Like, the three of us are the creative heads, and we're making something that couldn't come from any of us individually. It's the only thing I've made where I'm like, this couldn't have came from somewhere else. It's a weird ritual of the 3 of us circling up and conjuring something in the middle of us. Each of them we've finished and been like “How did we make this? How did it turn into this? What is it even?”

MB: After we made the first one, it's like, okay, how can we recapture this? We still want to feel like we can get lost. We don't know exactly what we're making, but we do have the first one now as a roadmap. In the second one we wanted to introduce a little more of a narrative, but didn't want to tip the scale too hard. And then in the third one, we were like, okay, what are the elements of the first two that we liked? And how can we make it feel like it's a true trilogy? We can pay homage back to elements of the first two. I do think we did that well, in a way where I think the second one is a little more tight, narratively, and the third one has stuff like that, but also feels like it goes back to this art installation, anything-can-happen vibe.

The other difference is that it was less of a bit to us. The characters we were playing, we matured into them or something. We became more of the people that we were trying to satirize.

AO: We gave ourselves permission to be like, what if we just get in the headspace of these guys. The first one is cool and weird, but I feel like it leans toward extended sketch comedy about weird artist guys… that undersells it, but it’s maybe leaning more in that direction. And the third one felt more like, what if we just were these guys making a movie? Maybe.

BE: So The Mind Prison has played at a few festivals, and it's premiered at a few places. But I'm curious how the rollout has been so far, and what the future plans are for it.

GM: Yeah, it's been good. It's such a weird ask, even to write a little capsule description at a film festival, but I feel like it's worked in our favor and people have come out for it. We're touring it around and we'll put it out digitally. And then… have we announced that it's gonna be a Blu-ray yet? Or is that is that a secret?

AO: I think we can say, but not the date.

GM: It will eventually come out on. There's gonna be a Blu-ray of the whole trilogy.

AO: Later this year.

MB: Earlier this year this organization, Hollywood Entertainment in Los Angeles, knew that we were coming out with the new one and asked if they could show the first two so in 2025 of February we got to do a premiere of the first two Reveries, which had never been shown like that before, and the reception was so great for that.

AO: An exciting thing for me about how it's being received is that, in this one, we're like, what if it veers away from comedy? The first two were going for laughs front to back. And this one we were like, what if it evolves into a more thoughtful thing? And there's been a lot of comments from people that are like “It gets weirdly moving at the end.”

AO: It starts out as just back to back laughs, and then catches you by surprise that it's a little something else.

BE: Cool. That's all the questions I have. Was there anything else that you wanted to mention or or plug before I let you guys go?

MB: Just want to mention that Reveries: The Mind Prison will be at the Music Box in Chicago on September 12th!