Guns and Weed: The Interview (Part II)

This is the second of a three-part interview with Michael W. Dean and Neema Vedadi, the creators of the new film “Guns and Weed: The Road to Freedom.”

Part I is here.

CLAIRE WOLFE: How did you two work together on this project?

MICHAEL DEAN: It was a great working relationship for many reasons, but mainly because our skill sets overlapped a lot, and also, each guy had the needed skills the other guy didn’t have. Even philosophically: Neema is a lot more well-read than I with libertarian theory, but I taught him the basic truth that if you don’t carry a gun 100 percent of the time, and you don’t own a rifle and know how to use it, you’re a mere theorist. Neema groked that incredibly quickly, and he was a quick study too – the movie basically opens with him shooting a dinner plate at 380 yards with iron sights on a 67-year-old battle rifle, and he did the shot in two takes, after shooting rifles only eight different times. I can’t even do that shot in two takes. At 100 yards, yeah absolutely, one shot one hit, over and over. But I taught him to do it. I taught him gun safety, taught him to shoot a rifle and pistol, and gave him a very good deal on one of my old semi-auto 9mms. He started open carrying it non-stop. It was a beautiful thing to see.

And with technical aspects: He’d never made a feature film, but he interviews people all day every day as a newscaster, and produces a short featurette for the news every night. I’d made feature films, but I’d never worked in hi-def. His news station was hi-def, so he taught me the technical differences between MiniDV and hi-def. I’m good at writing fake news, but I can’t pull it off as an actor. Neema does real news every day, so playing a fake news anchor was a snap for him. And I even got to learn to operate a teleprompter! We’re both musicians, but I’m from a punk rock background and Neema’s from a hip-hop/rap background. I’d never liked much hip-hop, but we combined both styles of music quite seamlessly and effortlessly. Notes is notes, ya know?

CLAIRE WOLFE: Thanks for the link to the lyrics for the songs from the movie. I LOVE the lyrics (even though I’m no fan of that particular genre of music). Great spirit. Great total annihilation of authority.

MICHAEL DEAN: Punk rock and rap have always been about annihilation of authority. But a lot of rappers stumped for Obama, and most punk rockers I know are far far left. I’m kind of speaking directly to those punk rockers when J-Tizzle delivers our lines “I never understood why some people hate cops and hate guns, but demand the government enforce “peaceful” “utopian” agendas … when the government enforces those agendas with cops! Who have guns!” and “You hate authority but you love government? You hate cops but love government???!!! WTF??!!!”

My first real exposure to punk rock was July 4th, 1984, seeing the bands Dead Kennedys, MDC (Millions of Dead Cops) and Reagan Youth play an illegal show without a permit to about 5000 people in front of the Lincoln Memorial in D.C. The lyrics of those bands taught me to distrust the government. And at that show, mounted federal park police were aggressively menacing the crowd with their horses. During MDC’s set the cops tried to shut down the show. MDC’s singer barked over the microphone “Surround the generators!” and about 100 angry punks kept the US government at bay, with no weapons at all. It was a galvanizing experience for me.

Unfortunately, the singers in those bands now think Al Gore and Ralph Nader can save the world. (Well, two of those singers do. One of them killed himself.) And most of their fans voted for Obama. That show in 1984 was called “Rock Against Reagan.” Reagan was the overarching common enemy in early 80s punk rock, representative of all that is evil. We actually quote Reagan as a running joke in our film. He once said “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.'” We use the line “We’re from the government and we’re here to help you” seven times in the movie. Right before Dan Banning is eaten by bears, he even tells the bears “Nice bears … calm down, we’re from the government and we’re here to help you!”

I still don’t like Reagan, mainly because of his love of the War on Drugs (and war in general), but I love that quote. And he certainly understood sixth-grade math better than Obama or Bush.

Many punk rockers think “anarchy” means having a “circle A” on the back of your leather jacket as you pick up your food stamps. Most punkers hate the government but want the government to fix the world. And many punk rockers don’t think anyone should have guns. Some of my longtime punk rock “friends” hate my guts now that I’m a loudmouthed gun nut and don’t love the People’s Benevolent Redistributionista Agenda.

Punk rock always pretended to be dangerous, but it never really was. I believe the music Neema and I made for this film, and the film itself, could actually get a knock at our doors from the goons. THAT is dangerous.

NEEMA VEDADI: A lot of the best rap lyrics out there have an almost libertarian feel to them. Very common rap themes include: smoking weed, ignoring stupid laws, never talking to police, engaging in commerce for the sake of money, and always having your gun with you are. We just wanted to infuse that with the commonsense morality derived from the non-aggression principle … a concept that is often lacking in rap. With our lyrics we used the language of rap to explain the philosophy of freedom. And Michael helped musically and lyrically to make it more accessible to non-rap fans.

CLAIRE WOLFE: How did you find the other people who took part, and was it difficult to persuade any of them to go in front of your cameras?

MICHAEL DEAN: That’s another place Neema and I used our strengths. He knew some of the interviewees and actors, I knew or contacted the rest of them (and the two cartoonists who did original work for us). Also, I’d had more experience directing actors, which was useful in the vignette parts, and with the “Greek chorus” woman, J-Tizzle, who pops up a lot in the film delivering pithy libertarian truths. I think we did really well with her, and she was really good to begin with. A lot of people think she’s improvising her lines, but they were actually written by myself, Neema and Debra Jean. In the “making of” on the DVD, you can see us directing her and I think there’s one place where you can see my hand in the corner of the frame holding up a cue card.

It wasn’t hard to get anyone to be in the movie, but I’m surprised a few of the people agreed. Some of the folks in the movie are reclusive privacy lovers. Not quite Claire Wolfe, but close. I guess they believed in the project enough to climb out of the bunker and let me steal their souls with my camera. lol….

Debra Jean was the narrator. It’s an honor to live with a woman with such a dulcet voice, but also an amazing resource to be able to say, “Hey baby, I wrote a new line of narration, will you come downstairs to the studio and record it for me?” My last film was narrated by Robert Downey Jr. He was astonishingly good, but I only had two hours on one day to record him, so I didn’t have a chance to add any more narration later. Having a stellar live-in narrator as your wife makes it a lot easier for a movie to grow organically as you produce it.

Debra Jean also did a bit of story editing and fluffing and folding with the overall flow. She wrote a few of the jokes too. “Carpe Ursa” comes to mind …

Generally when making long-form collaborative art, people are the biggest problem. Technical issues and money issues are just math. (I sold some guns to finance this movie, and I’ll buy a few more from the royalties.) Those who make good art are usually folks who are good at herding cats — good with solving people problems. We did have one lady, a Playboy model (yes, there is one living in Casper) who agreed to come out to the range and let us film her shooting my TV with the Armalite AR-50. Unlike the other weapons in the film that rifle was rented, and we only had use of it for one day. But the morning of the shoot, she went all prima donna on us, demanded that we never show the movie on the internet, so I fired her and just filmed Neema shooting the TV with the .50 cal. Worked out fine. He’s not a Playboy bunny, but he is cute and spunky …

(We’ll pick up tomorrow with the continuation of Michael and Neema’s answers to this question.)

Part III.