Interview: Theory of Everything's David DeVos -  1008 days ago

 

I spoke with David DeVos, the writer and director of Theory of Everything, which I previously reviewed on my site here. He’s a nice guy, and obviously had a passion for both the Lord and for filmmaking I’ll be publishing this interview in bits and pieces over the next week. If you haven’t seen it yet, I’d encourage you to get a copy of Theory of Everything to watch – that’ll make the interview more meaningful.

IC:Tell me about the financing of the film. How did you raise money?
David: We basically financed the film ourselves. I do a lot of commercial work, so we’d been saving for some time. The first film I produced (and self-financed) isn’t even worth mentioning. Since producing it, I did commercial work and was learning and stuffing money away, and had an idea for another film percolating around in my head. Once we committed to making it, there went our life savings! We even sold our house so that we could finish the film (along with other reasons). It was really a consuming process.

We haven’t made our investment back yet. You’ve got to be patient with the faith based film industry. There’s not a lot of money in this genre because there’s not a huge audience. The money from the film just trickles in a little bit at a time, so I know it will be a while. I certainly hope we get our investment back. But I wouldn’t trade the experience. I feel very fortunate to have gotten to do the film.

IC: You have a wide variety of locations in the film. How did you go about securing places?


David: Getting locations involved a lot of begging and borrowing, and a lot of gracious lending from others. Momentum gets going and you are ALWAYS asking. The hospital was actually where my wife had our daughter (who was born during the making of the film). When we were hunting for a place for those scenes, we talked to her OB who was on staff there. He pointed us to the right people to talk to. As far as Gene’s house goes, it actually belonged to a friend of mine and was scheduled for demolition. Since the house is supposed to be filled with junk, we did a lot of dumpster diving to get newspapers and odds and ends. We had to dress the whole thing. When it came time to knock the house down for the movie, we ran into legal issues over the property, so had to find another, similar location.

IC: You chose to act in your own film. Why?
David: I wrote the script in my own voice – I knew the character. I knew his ups and downs, his questions. Also, the father-son relationship is something very important to me in my life. And I’m a pilot so that fit the character as well. Really, the script took my loves and put them into the lead character. I could connect easily with him. Some warned me that I wore too many hats on this film, but overall, acting was a choice I felt comfortable with.

To be honest, the acting and directing was easy. I love getting the performance – that’s the sweet spot. It was the producing that was challenging. The logistics of pulling everything together for a film was the hard part for me. My wife came in and helped alot.

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That’s all I have time to publish now. I’ll put part two up on Friday or Saturday (hopefully).

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