Dillon Brown is the co-director of two sasquatch movies: Tahoe Joe, and Tahoe Joe 2, so naturally to start my interview with him I had to ask: Is sasquatch real, and if so, where do we find him? “You know,” Dillon said, “it’s so funny — I love making the bigfoot movies, but I can’t say I’m a bigfoot believer because I spent so much time in the woods growing up, hunting and fishing, and I’ve never had an encounter. And I’ve always got a camera with me. But in today’s day and age, I figure someone would have seen him by now. He’s always conveniently blurry. So either he’s blurry by nature, or people are just faking us out all over the place. So I might disappoint a lot of people, but I’m not really a believer. I just love making movies with him, though, because it is a fun character.”

The director of eight feature and short films, Dillon, who has a full-time position with the Department of Defense, shoots his films on weekends and whenever else he can grab some time. I wondered if this is a difficult way to make a movie. “I mean, yeah,” he said, “it’s not ideal. But it’s kind of the only opportunity I have, being a dad and working full time for the Department of Defense, I have to take whatever time I have, so it’s definitely taxing. You can put in twelve, fourteen hour days. Because you might be shooting a movie and say, ‘Hey guys, we have scenes X, Y, and Z to film,’ and if the weather’s bad for one of them, well now it’s a few weeks before we can get together. And, so, I wouldn’t suggest doing it that way, but I also tell people, ‘If you really want to make a movie, then just take whatever time you have, find a location close to home, take your kids on set.’ Some of my kids have been on set with me. It’s a little rough, but there’s usually some actor there who’s willing to hang out with them while I’m shooting, though.”

One of the cool things about Dillon’s films is that he employs veterans and first responders in all his films. Inspired by frequent collaborator Michael Rock, Dillon said, “Mike was sharing with me that when he was acting and on set, it was putting him in such a good mood because he sees awful things in his job now. So he’s a former Green Beret, and now he works with an organization that tries to prevent child sex crimes. So Mike has to, unfortunately, be around a lot of bad stuff. So he’s like, ‘You know, getting to run around in the woods and pretend to fight bigfoot or go do some of these other projects we’ve done, it’s really kind of helping my mental state.’ So we figured there’s probably other people in the same boat.”

I asked whether Dillon and Michael helped the first responders and veterans with their acting. “As far as the acting side,” he said, “we try to aid them a little bit, but a lot of times what I’ll do — this is kind of a dirty trick — when they’re really nervous I tell them that the camera’s not rolling and we’re just going to test it out. But I’ll actually be shooting. Because when they’re not thinking they’re under pressure, they deliver these really good performances. But, it seems like all of them have just naturally taken to it.” 

While Tahoe Joe and Tahoe Joe 2 are found footage films, Dillon’s newest movie, The Summer We Died, a teen slasher, is a more traditional movie. But it’s shot in a frenetic, documentary-style. I asked Dillon if he shot the movie this way because it was similar to found footage. “It was, absolutely,” he said. “And what kind of pushed me to do it that way was I had seen some of Harmony Korine’s early films, and the way he shot Spring Breakers, and Larry Clark, when he did Kids and Bully, they all had this raw feeling to them. SLC Punk, with Matthew Lillard, that one also had this handheld feel. You knew it was a movie, you knew that you weren’t in-world camera with it, but it also felt very raw. And so I thought, ‘Those guys did it. They had bigger budgets and probably some better equipment, but I still think I can figure out a way to pull that off.’ And I was pretty happy with it. I think it fits the whole skater-punk rebellious vibe to just do it that way. Kinda say F– the rules.”

And what inspired him to make a teen slasher? “So there are two definitive reasons,” he said. “I love slasher movies. Scream was probably one of the first ones I ever saw, and I just remember it scaring me, and thrilling me and I got to thinking, where do I find more of this stuff? So then I started going through the back catalog and watching all the 80’s ones. I found all the famous teen slashers and then I started looking for the obscure stuff like Just Before Dawn and some of these other harder to find ones. And so throughout my whole filmmaking career, I wanted to do a slasher movie. I just have to figure out the right story, how I want to do it. And then my wife’s favorite movie, ever, is Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof. She loved the girls and how strong the girls are. Especially when they whip Kurt Russell’s ass at the end. So I was super inspired by that second half of that movie with the whole girl power subgenre and the revenge thing. So that’s why I kind of meshed those things together. And then eventually that story came about.”

The Summer We Died strikes a nice balance between teen drama and horror. Dillon explained, “I kind of knew that if I tried to go all horror with this movie, it was going to play too fast. And we just didn’t have the budget to have a super high body count or a ton of big action set pieces. And so my thought was: I have to have characters that are interesting. We have to care about them. And I sort of wanted to tell the story where you’re not just watching it in a three day span of events. You’re sort of watching the lives of these girls over multiple months. So I wanted to give fragments, like what do teenage girls go through? Maybe on a daily basis. It’s not even necessarily the most exciting thing that’s happening to them in this story. But it’s just a day in the life of…and I wanted the girls to have reasons for sort of being the way they were. Being rebellious and stuff.” 

There’s lots of cool punk rock and metal music in The Summer We Died. So much so that it very much informs the tone of the film. “So the main band in the film,” Dillon said, “actually was playing a live show in town. And I reached out to them, and sort of brought up the idea of, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if we bought tickets to your show, but we filmed a scene of our movie at your actual live show?’ And they were floored. They were like, ‘We never get asked anything cool like that. Absolutely.’ So we found this band Acid Box, and they supplied some of the music. They were in the film obviously, just kind of playing themselves, which was really fun. And the rest of it was punk music that I sort of just found all over the Internet. I was scouring free licensing sites. Where could I find some stock music? And I found a couple of sites and they happened to have some tracks that I loved, and we slipped them into the movie. Those songs might show up in other indie films because they are floating around out there, free to use. But it also felt like the whole punk rock attitude to go find some obscure or unknown stuff that was out there, rather than pay for famous music.”

If there’s one thing the film captures it’s the bonds of teenage friendship, and how there’s something very special about that time period. I wondered if he looks back on this time of his life with nostalgia. “Oh, absolutely. You know, my favorite time of my life is right now, because I’m a dad and I’m married, and it’s wonderful. But I do like looking back on that because there’s something that you can’t recreate that happens during those years. And I think one of the scariest times for anyone is that time from about age fourteen to eighteen, where you’re trying to figure out, ‘Where the heck am I going in life?’ I always felt like my parents had it all figured out, and how was I ever going to get there. Now that I’m their age, I’m like, ‘Okay they didn’t have it figured out, they were just faking it.’ But it is just one of those times I look back on and I think it was a time before social media, for me. It was a time before cell phones. I don’t know, it was such an important part of who I am now. But aside from one person that I consistently talk to from high school, all my friends now are not people from that time. It made me think, if we were to do a story past The Summer We Died, where would those girls go, and where would they be at? Obviously that’s such a fictional setting, to have a serial killer that you’re all dealing with. Maybe that would make you closer, I don’t know. I wanted the audience to see that captured moment in time where you’re really living in the moment and you don’t really care about the consequences of doing things. And that was really my whole sort of goal, was to say, ‘Don’t fault these girls for making bad decisions. These are teenagers and we all did things that were dangerous and stupid because it was fun and it was in the moment and we were with people we trusted.’ So we just rolled with it.”

The Summer We Died is out nowon . You can watch Tahoe Joe and Tahoe Joe 2 on Tubi.