I was definitely trying to challenge myself as well as the audience. I wanted to be cryptic enough that people could interpret it for themselves. I didn’t want to lay all the information out very clearly. Here I wanted to make something that was more of a puzzle, that could put together themselves-hopefully, in different ways-and talk about it. There’s no traditional hero's journey, there’s not even a traditional hero or protagonist/antagonist.īuzzard and Ape were borderline traditional narratives. These are the type of characters I end up writing. I’m interested in what I’m interested in. Those are things I think are subconsciously never going to change. And as much as I tried to make something different, as I was writing and shooting it, I could spot the similarities myself. People come up and spot similarities in the way the character reacts to other people and is still lashing out and feeling paranoia. Every time someone calls it a slacker movie, it feels like an indirect diss to me, calling me a slacker! I never consciously think about those kinds of things. I just make movies about what I’m going through or feeling at the time. I’m the last person to ever try to classify what I try to do, so as far as this slacker thing…it’s kind of a little bit weird. So I wanted to take it out of the city, take the white people out of the movie. I started to feel like people were expecting me to make another angry-white-boy-in-the-city movie - a slacker, lashing out. Joel Potrykus: The original intention with The Alchemist Cookbook was to try to make something different than everything else I’ve done. Does The Alchemist Cookbook fit into this category? NFS: Joel, your last film, Buzzard was considered sort of a new addition to the slacker genre, where the main characters are not doing much, or are certainly not going on a conventional hero's journey. Their latest film, The Alchemist Cookbook, a devilishly delightful dark comedy, comes out today in a pay-what-you-want experiment on BitTorrent Now and in theaters, so you can see for yourself whether their theories hold up. No Film School sat down with Potrykus and Minnick to talk about making The Alchemist Cookbook, from shooting unbroken masters, to pharmaceutical disasters on set, to how the most important thing you can do for yourself as a director is to write, write, write. Or as Adam words it, the best cinema can come from 'a single and communicative shot.'

Minnick, Joel's long-time collaborator, applies the 14th-century philosophy of Occam's Razor to their films: when multiple explanations for something exist, the simpler one is usually better.

“That seems like a musician who is writing a song, but in five different keys just in case one sounds better,” says director Joel Potrykus about coming up with a long shotlist for a scene.

Minnick are throwing out the rules for everything from shot coverage to film distribution.

The alchemist cookbook film