An Interview With ‘Scooter’ Writer/Director Matt Wohl

I recently had the opportunity to review Matt Wohl’s new film, Scooter (read our review here). It’s a very well thought out take on the fertile ground that naive YouTubers can provide for the found footage subgenre. It’s also his feature film debut. In the film, three famous YouTubers attempt to ride 866 miles from Florida to New Orleans on really cheap scooters. Each have $1000 for the scooter, fuel, food, and shelter. The usual jackassery ensues, until they witness a murder. I knew talking to him would be interesting, but I learned a lot more than I bargained for.

PopHorror: How are you, Matt?

Matt Wohl: Good!

PopHorror: I’ll start off with a fun fact about you. You were a child actor.

Matt Wohl: (laughs) Yeah! That’s true. It actually began where I grew up in Burlington, Vermont. We didn’t have a lot of money. When I was 10 years-old, my mom had a friend that worked at the local Shakespeare festival. She basically asked her friend to keep me off the street. I started building sets and working on lighting. I then started acting in a professional Shakespeare festival at ten years-old. When I say acting, every play has that young prince. That was me. I got to be the young prince that Richard III kills on the tower. That was me. It was an introduction to acting and theater that was amazing. By the time I reached high school, I was too cool for everything. I almost gave up on acting. The movie, Sweet Heart’s Dance, was being shot in Vermont. It had Don Johnson, Susan Sarandon, Jeff Daniels, and Elizabeth Perkins in it. They were doing casting, and I wasn’t really interested at that point. Two months went by, and I was sitting in class in high school. Ten names were called over the loud speaker, and my name was one of them. I thought I was in trouble.

I got to the office, and the film was still casting. My drama teacher recommended me. So, the short story is that I got to be in a major movie with some high profile stars.

PopHorror: They’re still stars now, but they were huge then. What was that like?

Matt Wohl: Don Johnson flew up from Miami. This was Miami Vice era Don Johnson.

PopHorror: Did you appreciate it at the time?

Matt Wohl: I did. It was a really amazing experience. I was on set for sixteen days, and I shot for eleven days. If you watch the film, there’s not a lot of me in it. The producer and the director ended up disagreeing. The director wanted it to be a family film. When it was a family film, I had a bigger role. The producer wanted it to be a film about adult relationships, and since he was the money guy, he won out.

The experience was incredible, nonetheless. It gave me a love for film. At that point, I was sure that film was what I wanted to do. I was asking everyone for advice, like, “Where should I go to film school?” Everybody, including the director, who’s now very well known for doing the Wal-Mart documentary, The High Cost of Low Price, said the same thing. “Don’t go to film school, get a real degree, and you will always have that to fall back on.” It sounds counteractive, but it has served me well. I’ve had a whole life and career, and had the luxury of doing film stuff along the way. Some of the best advice I got – and I really should attribute it to someone, if I could remember who said it – was: “Don’t try to be interesting, try to be interested.”

PopHorror: Bernie Sanders also had a cameo.

Matt Wohl: (laughs) Yep! I’ve known Bernie since I was four. His son and I were in school together, and my mom worked for him for a little while. My stepfather was also mayor of Burlington after Bernie. Another cool factiod was that in a cut town fair scene, there was an ice cream stand that was Ben and Jerry’s before Ben and Jerry’s were huge. They gave us all free ice cream.

PopHorror: What were some of your other experiences?

Matt Wohl: One thing that you didn’t uncover was that I worked for a circus for a while.

PopHorror: Wow! What did you do there?

Matt Wohl: I had lived in Orlando, and I came back north to figure out what I was gonna do. I was living with my uncle that was a documentary filmmaker. He’s had films at Sundance. He’s probably far more talented than I am. The circus was looking for roustabouts, just general help. I helped set up tents and was the fire safety guy. I was the guy over to the side of the fire eater just in case someone caught fire. I went with them to DC, too. One interesting thing I learned was that all the clowns were Russian. When we were in Virginia, on days off, some of them would seek out Confederate and Nazi memorabilia because they were all white supremacists. They knew all the history behind white supremacy. It was so weird and unsettling. So there’s this whole subculture of white supremacists, racist, Russian clowns. There’s a film in there somewhere. To counteract that, I had an opportunity to be at The Million Man March in DC. So that was good.

PopHorror: Woah… How did that shape characters that you have written?

Matt Wohl: I think that I’ve given some duality to characters. Clowns are supposed to bring happiness and joy. Clowns shouldn’t be judging anyone from behind that facade. I’ve written one character in Scooter that has a frightening duality.  They’re supposed to be there to help anyone, but that’s not how they really feel or how they act. That alone, not being able to know what is really behind a symbol of something that is supposed to be good, and especially finding something to the contrary, is terrifying.

PopHorror: You’ve had your first screening of the film. I would be interested to know what audience reactions were. I think you’ve hit a nerve here. YouTubers are as famous as actors now. This will seem very real and possible to a generation, and definitely could impact them as a cautionary tale, much in the same way as films like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre or Hostel.

Matt Wohl: When I first started teaching film, I was amazed at how many of my students wanted to be YouTubers. Their heroes weren’t filmmakers in the sense of what an older generation might consider. Their heroes were basically jackasses. That got me thinking. Everything is so instantaneous. It’s hard for kids today to consider consequences, and there definitely are consequences. Whether you are trying to ride a scooter 866 miles or just navigating your life, there’s a consequence.

In Scooter, I really wanted to convey that anything that happens to these characters, they brought it upon themselves. A lot of times, more often than not, consequences are of our own actions. A few terrible things like cancer or the death of a loved one aren’t in our control, but the majority of what happens to us is.

PopHorror: In most cases, Scooter is going to be perceived as a horror film. How would you describe it?

Matt Wohl: Good question! Usually when I write, I do have a clear sense of genre just because of potential marketability. It’s easier to sell a film when it fits into a nice little box. However, a film can still be many things inside that genre. It doesn’t have to be limiting. The first half of Scooter has comedic elements, which can get the audience comfortable, and when that comfort zone isn’t there anymore, the thriller side of it can a stab in the gut.

PopHorror: When the film turned, it turned hard. It happened before I realized it.

Matt Wohl: You asked about the premiere. One thing that I loved about the audience reaction was that they were laughing and really into it at first. When one character calls another character a racial slur, the audience was still laughing. They hadn’t yet realized that the tone had shifted, and they still wanted to laugh. They suddenly realized they were laughing at something terrible that shouldn’t be laughed at all. I loved to see that transition, because it made them all self aware.

PopHorror: It’s beautifully filmed. Road films can be challenging. I know with GoPros and drones, it’s easier now than before, but shots still have to be carefully planned and elaborately set up.  There’s several fantastic tracking and POV shots of the scooters in motion. How did you accomplish that?

Matt Wohl: Before we started shooting, I gave careful consideration to being able to get all of the shots I had envisioned. I actually went and got some of the cameras ahead of time. One of the keys, and it’s very subtle, is that we did use GoPros, but we also used one called the Firefly. The Firefly fits in a GoPro mount. The big difference is that it had the functionality of the GoPro, but also comes in a wide angle and normal to wide model. By using the Firefly, it wasn’t always filmed with the super wide angle, fish eye view of the GoPros. It looked more like a film. My DP was Pezhman Jatala, who is the chair of the Broward College Film Program. We looked at handy cams and both agreed on a Panasonic handy cam that really delivered well. That’s the one that Juan is holding all the time. The set shots were a Sony FS700 with a sigma 18-35 art lens on it. All the cameras shot 4K, so the whole film is 4K.

PopHorror: It’s very easily watchable. I struggle to watch found footage films sometimes. The best ones, in my opinion, are the hybrids. The ones that are professionally shot, but still integrate found footage in with it. You did a great job with accomplishing that.

Matt Wohl: It was a challenge. The challenge was to make sure we had the coverage for everything. We were always very in tune to what cameras would be rolling. We even considered surveillance camera footage at police stations and gas stations that would normally be filming.

PopHorror: Was editing all the footage a challenge, and when the final edit was complete, was it the film you envisioned? Every one always says the movie is made in the editing room. Was that true for this one?

Matt Wohl: We had a pretty good plan. My editor was Andrew Austin. He did a film called The Power of Glove about the Nintendo Power Glove. Andrew was living in Louisiana, and for some reason was hanging out in Atlanta where I was staying. When I was considering an editor, I had always thought that, in the digital age, how come the editor isn’t on set when the movie is filming? I went to see Baby Driver, and I read that the editor was on set the whole time. I thought, “Finally!” Because everyone thought I was crazy for thinking that. Andrew was one of the few people that worked on the film that wasn’t from Florida. I flew him down to be on set. He was seeing what was shot, and we were talking at night about dailies, and he was already starting to put this together. The final film was true to the original vision I had, and I think that was a huge part of it. Andrew also got a nickname out it, too. We started calling him Big Tex. If you mention the editing, you have to mention the nickname.

We were shooting one year ago. We shot in September over ten days. I had a rough cut to take to AFM in November. We had six distributors interested, and we picked one by January. We then finished our post production work and delivery. We’re in theaters now. We didn’t do a lot of things that went against the grain of how things are usually done. I was talking with the DP, and he mentioned the day we shot 32 pages of script. That’s crazy! I’m proud of everyone, and how efficiently and professionally they worked. It made it all the more satisfying that we did it in an unorthodox manner.

PopHorror: What’s next?

Matt Wohl: A short film of mine called Mom is a finalist at a festival at Apex International Film Festival in North Carolina very close to you. I plan on turning Mom into a feature film. It’s more of a sci-fi film, and a drastic departure from Scooter. The other thing is a feature script I wrote that I entered into the Orlando Film Festival. It’s a finalist. I’ll find out in October if I win. The winner comes with a first look deal worth up to $500,000 dollars. That script is a comedy. The idea is, “What if Steve Martin never made it but is still trying?” So you have this seventy year-old comic, whose material is completely stale, but he’s just good enough to still be kicking around. His daughter-in-law leaves his grandson with him, and he has to take him with him on the road.

I also have a film that was optioned called Zombie Con. It’s about this famous zombie writer that has horrible nightmares about monsters, and all he does it write about them. He just happens to be at a horror con when a real zombie apocalypse breaks out. It was fun writing. I even included a zombie porn booth at the con with titles like 28 Holes Later! I’m really trying to accomplish a lot of things, and I’m very happy with how things are going.

PopHorror: Love them all! Can’t wait! I can’t begin to express my gratitude for your time. It was fantastic talking to you.

Matt Wohl: My pleasure.

We want to send a great big THANK YOU to Matt Wohl for taking the time to chat with us. As always, keep it tuned to PopHorror for all of your horror news, reviews and interviews!