Photo courtesy of Mike Hedge, mikehedge.com.
The first thing people will tell you when they tell you about this movie Moonshine – after urging you to watch it, it’s awesome – is that it was directed by a nineteen-year-old. Roger Ingraham was “The youngest director ever officially selected for Sundance,” as I put it in one of the blurbs I sent out about it.
I bet that gets old. I mean, “Moonshine is awesome” does not require “ – for a movie made by a nineteen-year-old” to be true. “Moonshine is awesome” is all you need.
Unfortunately, brain spasm, I forgot to ask Roger – now 24 – if that ever gets old when I interviewed him the other day. (Still, I bet it does.)
Here’s what I did ask him (fair warning: much of the following discussion revolves around the film’s ending, and what it meant for me, as a viewer, and for Roger, as the filmmaker. If you want the ending to be a surprise, you should watch the movie first. It’s awesome.)
I figured I’d begin chronologically, so I asked Roger if film had always been his medium, or if, like so many other filmmakers, he’d begun with painting or music.
“I started out drawing at seven, drawing dragons, knights, and pirates.”
“You say you started ‘at seven,’” I said. “Do you remember it that specifically?”
“Well, I am approximating. But at around that age, I became more serious. They say every kid draws, but some don’t stop.” [Here's a drawing Roger did in his early teens.]
“So you continued to draw? How did that become filmmaking?”
“I got into creative writing in school, and telling stories satisfied my philosophical creativity. I wrote a poem/story in eighth grade that blew my teachers away. It was about a young boy who journeyed up a vast mountain, pursued by a shadow, a dark spirit. Most of my notions from a young age involved notions of spirits, dark forces contending with humanity. I think it came from growing up in such a troubling world; picking up on the residues of our subconscious experience.”
I asked him to elaborate. “Well, my parents were mild, affectionate, and quite accepting. My sister [Sarah Ingraham, co-lead in Moonshine] and I grew up closely, sharing and so on. But I nevertheless was extremely stricken by things. When I first saw a homeless person in New York City, when I was seven or eight, I broke out into a crying fit, devastated. I couldn’t understand it.”
He continued, “I feel like, while growing up, everyone goes through this process in their own way – suppressing their natural instinct to care, because there’s seemingly too much to change – and so then we carry this deep pain buried within us.”
After a digression in which I shared my memories of a similar experience, Roger said, “I feel like artists are people who refuse to give up that part of their soul.”
“Did you feel that struggle?” I asked. “Or were you able to continue to develop yourself as an artist?”
“End of sophomore year, I refused to go back to high school,” he said. “I convinced my parents to let me home school myself.”
“Wow, I wish I’d thought of that.”
“The first thing I had to do was unlearn the need for an authority – to release the stagnancy of an obedient mind.” Roger continued. “The first year was spent trying to find my love for learning, and letting that direct me.”
“I always thought – ” (At this point, I became pretty excited about the things we were talking about; this is my favorite kind of conversation. So I admit I kind of forgot I was conducting an interview, and sort of injected myself into the conversation more than is standard in these situations. Roger’s responses continued to be just as interesting, though, so while I’d normally spare you this part, I decided to leave it in.)
“I always thought,” I said, “that the best approach to learning is taking more joy in the question than in the answer.”
“That’s a great way of putting it,” Roger said.
“See, my favorite kind of movie ending is the non ending; the ending should be different for everyone.”
(And here’s where we get into serious SPOILER territory. So if that’s an issue for you, bookmark this until you’ve seen the film.)
“No wonder you love Moonshine.”
“The best art,” I blathered on, “is more about the question than the answer.”
“I feel like art stays in the question arena when it’s truly authentic,” Roger agreed. “When it comes from a person’s real self.”
“So when did you discover film?”
“Films, oh I love films: Harvey, Metropolis, Inland Empire, Sacred Heart, Groundhog Day – ” We shared a moment of mutual appreciation of Groundhog Day. “It’s nice to see heart and soul in comedy,” Roger said. “That’s Harvey, too. Harvey is sooo cool. And don’t let me forget the All-American Taoist film: Forrest Gump!”
Though I don’t share Roger’s love for Forrest Gump, I saw the parallel with Harvey: “The innocent soul in a troubled world.”
“Yeah,” Roger said, “certainly. And both show how the ability to float without focusing on the negatives is the power of great happiness.”
“Had you already decided you wanted to make a feature film before you began writing Moonshine?”
“Yes, definitely. But I had very little knowledge of filmmaking.”
“Do you remember what made you want to make movies, as opposed to just writing?
“I felt like it was a combination of my writing and my drawing. And certainly it is the most influential art form.”
“Were there any movies that really made you conscious of film as an art form, as something you could do?”
“I really loved Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark. It sparked a lot of inspiration in me at the time I was writing Moonshine, and I knew it was filmed on lower-res cameras .” [As is Moonshine.]
“Was there anything besides the technical aspect of Dancer in the Dark that inspired you? I can see the innocent-in-a-troubling-world thing there too.”
“The fantasy aspect of it, the silence of the storyline – and, I connected with the small-town mundane truth of the characters.
“What do you mean by the silence of the storyline?”
“For me, when I watched Dancer in the Dark, the storyline wasn’t driving it really. It was quieter than that; an indie foreign film quietness.”
“So,” I said. “Vampires. Did the vampires come first, when you were writing Moonshine? What was the evolution of the story?”
“At first – you’re right, the film didn’t have a vampire context. When I was writing the story, the world was looming over me: dark shadows. I was beginning to feel like my decision to drop out of high school was a failure instead of a strength. And my mother was pressuring me to consider a full-time, 9-to-5 job. My dreams of filmmaking were looking unlikely. Very unlikely.
“I was 19 at the time,” he went on, “surrounded by artists in New Haven [Connecticut] who drowned their sense of failure in alcohol. It was the biggest period of depression in my life – so much time alone in the apartment writing. I was feeling very disconnected from my friends and family, and rarely saw them.”
“Did you have to make an effort to keep writing? Or was it something of a solace?”
“It was my last hope.”
“So you were writing your way through it.”
“Yeah, and the vampires just crept in.”
“What do the vampires represent for you, in the context of the film’s story?”
“They were an answer, actually. An empowering answer cloaked in the veil of destruction.”
“I thought the ending of Moonshine was very powerful,” I said. “It didn’t suggest that Peter embraced this – becoming a vampire – out of some kind of perversity, or something. It was suddenly a truth for him. Does that make sense?”
“Yes, definitely.”
“Was the ending hard for you to arrive at?”
“Yes. I spent much time with other endings, mostly involving failure and death. I couldn’t quite understand why this ending worked. So much of the film’s deeper currents only occurred to me after making it. Because I was making it at the edge of my mind. It was my life. And so in the years following it, the film basically was a prediction for massive shifts in my own life.
“The film was a call for help in a way,” he continued. “Asking for some fantastical empowerment to release me from the binds of my small-town hopelessness. And the darkness of suppression – all these people around me drinking their pains away for the day. I wanted out, big-time. And while editing the film, I had a near-death experience.”
I asked for details, of course.
“For months, working on the film, overworking. In one case a 110 hour day. Caffeine and cigarettes. And after meeting a deadline, I just dropped. I didn’t really wake up for three days. Hallucinating. After that, I quit filmmaking and dropped Moonshine.
“One night, after dropping Moonshine, I had an internal crisis. I decided to walk down the railroad tracks without turning back until I got the answer to a question that had been gnawing at me: ‘Does God exist?’ That was the question. I was waiting for a sign. I walked for hours, past sunrise. And finally it came to me, within.
“That point, and in the months that followed, I experienced a miraculous shift. That moment, I quit all substances and all intentional lying, without returning to them. And my life took a deep turn. I read books on Martin Luther King, Gandhi, Mother Theresa, all my heart heroes – and tried to learn their truth.”
Roger continues: “I was then visited by spirits. I had never believed in them – but my sister and I, one night, were visited by an entity that pumped our bodies with light, filling up our inner love feeling like a deflated inner tube.”
“Wow. Was this while you’d put Moonshine aside?”
“Yes, and I had dedicated myself to learning more about this new reality of God. Not hearsay, but for myself.”
“How did you set about this?”
“Well, I started praying fervently. Trying to get a connection, not talking to myself. But wanting real proof and evidence, so I’d know I wasn’t mad. And I got connections.”
“You felt you were being heard? Or was it more concrete?”
“Through my body, I could feel, or sense, responses. And they oftentimes would predict things or describe new things.”
“Wow. Was Moonshine a different project for you after your epiphanies?”
“Very much!”
Roger jumped ahead in the story. “The next time I heard of Moonshine, it was being submitted to Sundance. Through this internal journey, I was moved to Montana, where I lived on a river in a tent. At the public library in this small Montana town, I got the urge to go online, and my sister was there. She told me an agent from William Morris became obsessed with the film, hunted down a rough cut, and submitted it to Sundance. I saw it as a calling to come back home.”
“How long had you been away?”
“One of the longest months of my life.”
He goes on, “In my mind, this story of my life mimics the story of Moonshine. In a brighter way, that I could’ve never predicted. When the film went to Sundance, I was forever freed from the confined existence. No more belief in ‘failure’ – or needing to compromise my dreams.”
“Sundance was your vampire. I’m being facetious of course, but – ”
“No, it’s true. Personal validation of a loving and powerful universe was actually the greatest freedom. I could no longer ever feel that same level of aloneness.”
At this point, our agreed-upon thirty- to forty-minute interview had gone over two and a half hours, and the IndieFlix offices were slamming shut around me. So I had to bring the interview to kind of an abrupt halt. “Sundance Is My Vampire,” I thought, would make an excellent title for this piece. But since Roger didn’t actually say that, I had to sacrifice it for another title.
Which, I’m glad I did, because for me Roger’s concept of “the silence of the storyline” is one of Moonshine‘s strongest qualities. Beyond the beauty of the images that he manages to capture – images that raise Moonshine to a level well above what you’d expect from a first time filmmaker on a shoestring budget working with a crew of friends and neighbors – beyond the simple craft of filmmaking that he seems to have been born to – Roger knows instinctively what most filmmakers never learn: he lets the story tell itself. When Peter is mystified, we’re mystified; we learn what’s going on when he does. In the hands of most filmmakers, this can be frustrating. OK, boring. But Roger Ingraham has a storyteller’s gift.
Thanks to Mike Hedge for the photographs of Roger.
WIRED article about Moonshine and the DV revolution.
has produced or directed over 400 films, including the original 
In order to maintain this breakneck production pace, Corman often gave young aspiring filmmakers a chance to direct a movie. If you could convince him the script had commercial appeal, and – more importantly – that you could make it for little or no money, he’d let you give it a try. 
Penelope Spheeris
Kudos once again to 
