In the new supernatural dark-comedy film JETHICA, death is only the beginning for a very particular group of ghosts out in the middle of the New Mexico desert. Mumblegore through and through, the film’s small but mighty cast explores bittersweet feelings of loneliness, friendship, and necromancy gone awry. Darkly humorous and idiosyncratically somber in tone, it is a stripped-down, cinematic campfire tale executed with uncanny efficacy and potency.
Recently making its world premiere at this year’s SXSW Film Festival, JETHICA is the latest project from director Pete Ohs. Known for his unconventional approach to filmmaking, Ohs produced, edited, and co-wrote the script with cast members Callie Hernandez (Under the Silver Lake), Andy Faulkner, Will Madden, and Ashley Denise Robinson. He also edited the film live on his Twitch channel, EditBay4.
Joining Ohs in this live-edit adventure was the film’s composer, John Bowers. A frequent collaborator of Ohs, Bowers created a live score to Ohs’ live edit and created a beautifully intimate and effective sonic experience in the process. In celebration of the film’s recent debut, Rue Morgue sat down (virtually) with Ohs and Bowers to learn a bit more about this unique filmmaking experience. You can also find Rue Morgue’s full SXSW review of the film, here.
Tell us a little bit about the genesis of JETHICA.
Pete Ohs: The genesis very much came from the location. I found that trailer on Airbnb and the pictures already looked cinematic. It’s just that trailer in that field. It just felt like there’s a movie to be made there. I started asking the questions, “Who lives there? Why? What’s going on?” So that’s where the seeds of this idea about a woman who’s hiding out because of something that she did, something bad that she needs to hide out for.
And then for me, I like when a movie has a movie idea within it. I’m not necessarily interested in making stuff that’s just fully about normal life. So like the last movie [Youngstown], a witness protection program was the movie thing within it. And with this one, it was like, it’s gonna be in New Mexico. But aliens are too on the nose. So let’s do ghosts. And then, just through conversations with these friends who are actors that I wanted to make the movie with, we just tried to find things that were interesting. And then eventually, we found things that made us laugh and we built it all very much together.
It sounds like it was a very organic, very collaborative writing process.
PO: Yeah, it was. I had the first half of the movie outlined, but we didn’t write a script. We would write the dialogue together for scenes the day before we would shoot. And, we all stayed in that trailer together. We shot the movie chronologically, so halfway through, we had shot all of what existed in the outline and then sat down and were like, “Okay. What is the second half of this movie?” (Laughs) I think that’s why the movie has the kind of weird shape that it does. Which to me is very interesting and exciting because I haven’t really seen movies that do this. But it was very much a product of the process.
So John, how did you first get involved with Pete and this project?
John Bowers: Pete and I have been friends for many years, and I knew about the project because we had just been talking about movies over a long period of time. We went on a walk one day, and he was like, “I have a movie idea.” He started telling me about the ghosts and the rules of being a ghost. And then, he went off and filmed it!
So basically, when he started editing it live on Twitch, I was just watching it and I was at my home studio and was like, “I’m making music to this right now. Can I send you music? Can I score your live edit?” So it kind of just turned into a week and a half where I’d get up and be like, “When are you starting? I’m going to start with you.” I hadn’t seen the whole thing yet. I mean, he was editing it so there was no movie to watch yet. He’d stick on a one-minute piece of the movie for hours, and so I would have the chance to just set a vibe and refine it over such a long period of time.
Then he would be like, “Hey, let’s try something a little more upbeat.” Or, “We’re moving into the next scene now. Let’s try for a fun transition.” Or like, “Darken the mood and start pulse.” So he would be directing me as I was creating things just to have fun, really. I mean, that was the whole thing. It was like, let’s see what this feels like if you add another layer. The process was very much me watching him edit and being like, “I want to be involved with this. This is fun.”
That is wild. We definitely need to talk about this Twitch livestream. Pete, what inspired you to edit your entire film live?
PO: The editing process is very solitary, but it’s really this period of time in the process of filmmaking where you kind of just disappear. There are no pictures from the set. There’s nothing to engage the world with at all. And it just seemed like a missed opportunity for something. At the same time, I do freelance editing as a job. And during the pandemic, I had been doing all these remote editing things where I’m sharing my screen with the director or producer, and they’re just watching me edit. So I’m aware of the fact that it’s technologically simple and possible.
Then I just had the idea of like, “What if I livestreamed the edit of the whole movie?” I thought, “You probably shouldn’t do that.” If some potential buyer of whatever is going to find out that the whole movie is already on the internet, and it was there the whole time, I could see that being scary for an investor or something. But this movie is made so small with the intention just being for the pure joy of making films that I was like, “I don’t need to worry about that because those factors do not apply to this project.”
I also thought about 17-year old Pete. If he could have – or even me now – watched Paul Thomas Anderson editing Boogie Nights, I would watch that every day for however many days it takes. That’s just what would always be playing. I would eat that up. So I just thought, maybe there’s a 17-year old out there, the 17-year old version of me now. If they happen to stumble upon this, this would be a fun thing to give them access to.
I grew up in Ohio without any industry connections or even awareness, really, that this is a career path or whatever. And just the idea of an edit bay and what it even looks like to put a movie together (which is not that interesting), when it’s an unknown, it is kind of daunting. So just to be able to see it, I like that it can inform and kind of demystify the process. And also, just show that it is just me on a laptop doing this. The same thing anyone else could be doing too.
Director Pete Ohs
I find it interesting that you did this on Twitch as there is a conversation component happening between you and the people that were watching. Did you find that the livestream process of that interaction benefited or affected what each of you were doing at all?
JB: Oh, it certainly affected what I was doing because I was able to see decisions he was making and react to them in real-time. As he was telling the story through the edit, every few new frames that would be added, I would add music to it. It was as if we were in a jam band. We were just hanging out making something together with two different mediums, but we were doing it at the same time. I’ve certainly played music on Twitch, but I’ve never collaborated with a filmmaker live as though we’re like riffing off of each other as we go.
PO: The creative collaborative process of that with John was a really special feeling. It did feel like jamming. Like being in a band, sitting in the garage, and trying to write a song together. And then having the Twitch chat there watching, which, you know, it wasn’t a lot of people. I averaged like six viewers a day. Six very engaged viewers though. And because I’ve edited with clients in the room or directors and producers sitting right next to me, having somebody watch me edit doesn’t feel weird or new. But having these people engage and watch for weeks, at a certain point, I sort of started to trust them. I could feel they were on my side, that they were interested, and they wanted it to be good.
Every so often they would ask questions. Like, clearly these were aspiring filmmakers who were interested and would maybe wonder how I did a thing. But then they also had opinions about my decisions. So sometimes they would question things like, “Why am I cutting to that shot then?” Or, “This moment feels a little long.” And sometimes, I would defend it and explain why I made those decisions. But then sometimes, I would say, “Yeah, you’re right.” So they actually had a positive influence. These people did help this movie be better, which I think is really cool. I included their Twitch handles in the special thanks credits.
John, I wanted to ask you about the musical tone you set in the film. JETHICA cleverly plays with a lot of genre tropes, and your music navigates that delicate balance of horror and humor really well. Was it all difficult for you to find the right tone and not tip it too far in either direction?
JB: I think part of the reason it doesn’t go overboard and sits in a tone is that it’s like five hours of developing a moment that we were literally sitting in during the edit. So that feeling we had cultivated for an entire day or two days. It wasn’t like, “Okay. Here’s a one-minute thing and we need there to be action.” That was the vibe that we set over many hours together developing a very specific and sometimes extremely subtle cue.
There was no effort to overstate anything. I also think a lot of the beautiful cinematography really just made it easy to be like, “Let’s just accent a feeling here for a second.” Or, “Let’s take away everything except for the piano that only plays five notes every six seconds.” I really do think it was just hanging out in the process with people for so long that made it easy to say, “This is a vibe, and we are going to leave it as it is.” It just organically happened over hours and hours of sitting in it.
I have to imagine you had a lot of recorded material after this live edit and scoring process. Did you then just go back and cherry-pick your favorite musical moments for the final score?
JB: Kind of, yeah. There were definitely golden moments. Pete sent me a little clip the other day where Kevin is truly revealed in the ruins, and that was a really great moment of being perfectly done in the moment to the second. We then just went back and said, “Between this period of time and this period of time, we nailed it. Now let’s just mix it a little better.” So I would say almost all of it was written that way, and then we did go back and find our favorites.
PO: The way I remember it is, you had whatever 50 hours of music, and I was like, “Just send me some different vibes.” And so you just sent me all these files that would be 20-ish minute files where it’s like, “Here’s when we’re doing this darker thing. Here’s where we’re doing this other thing. Here’s this one kind of pulse. Here’s this other kind of pulse.” Just the stuff that we did on those days. But they almost always would correspond with the thing we edited [that day] and that vibe we then used for that scene in the movie.
Probably towards the end of the day of music, because you really had honed in and found exactly the right layers and balance of everything, there are scenes in the movie the way that they just happened to have happened in the moment. When we were editing the scene and just watching the scene back, the way the weird shape of the pulse and the way the other weird sounds came in just serendipitously aligned. I went back to the Twitch stream and then recreated that because it had been perfect in that moment.
That intimate process that you both went through together really does pay off. There’s an incredibly organic and intuitive feeling surrounding this whole film.
PO: I also think, and this probably applies to more than just music, but clearly, we are a product of our influences. I don’t like to just straight-up reference things when making things. I’m not actively trying to make something like something. In fact, when something feels like something I’ve seen before, I usually try to go in a different direction. But it doesn’t mean my influences aren’t still my influences, right? So, I’m not going to actively make a movie like The Shining, but it’s gonna have some stuff in there that’s going to remind you of it because I love that movie. And there are elements of the score that are going to feel like things John Carpenter might do. But hopefully, we’re using them in different ways, or we’re combining it with some other element that you haven’t seen before that makes it worth creating now.
You’ve both mentioned the stunning landscape of New Mexico which plays a huge role in this film. How did it ultimately impact and influence your individual work?
PO: I mean, certainly just seeing the pictures of that area on the Airbnb post. The moment I started to imagine the story, it was in that setting. The ideas were coming from it. Imagine being alone, being surrounded by a very beautiful emptiness. The fact that I ended up making a movie about ghosts and death and those themes, it makes perfect sense.
Then, when filming it, it just felt like the gift that kept on giving. I feel like anyone could take a good picture there because it is just that beautiful. And then in the edit, too. Feeling the reflective nature of nature when you see a beautiful landscape, some beautiful skies, a beautiful mountain; You stop and take a second. And then your mind starts to wander and starts to think about different things. Like, a movie about life and death. Those are places that the mind wanders to.
JB: When you see beautiful landscape shots in movies, that’s kind of the ideal – or at least for me. I make a lot of ambient music, and it’s just an invitation to make minimal additions, to add one extra color to it. That was fun for me. To try and find the emotion of the open spaces for Pete.
JETHICA is not the first creative collaboration between the two of you. What is it that you both enjoy about working together?
PO: A big part of working together is just that I love John, and I enjoy spending time with John. And so, I’m happy to just get to hang out with John. (Laughs) There’s a big amount of trust that’s involved with creating because you want to feel safe – safe to make mistakes, safe to be weird. So having somebody that you trust makes that possible. And then another thing I like personally about John is, similar to how I will wear a lot of hats in film production, John wears a lot of hats in sound. Not just as a composer, but also doing production sound and all the stages of post-production. He’s aware of it all and can do it all well. I like that his awareness of the process is part of his creative exercise as well.
JB: I also just kind of kicked down the door and told him I was gonna start making music. And so, I made the temp music, and he had to get married to it. It was very, very tactical. (Laughs) Hanging out with Pete is fun, and I like what he makes. When those two things exist and you like when you work together, it’s just a very natural back and forth of trying things out. And because I like what he makes, I can spend hours and hours and hours with it and still find subtle inside jokes that are probably just from Pete to Pete within his own movie and appreciate it.
When you like somebody’s work, it’s really easy to work with them. And Pete is extremely talented but not an ego-maniac. He wants to share the process. That’s part of what I think is fun for Pete is collaborating and sharing the process. I keep saying it, but it really was just fun to do. That’s the gist of how I felt the whole time. I was just like, “I’m having a great time and this is a great movie.”
JETHICA made its World Premiere at this year’s SXSW Film Festival. It will also be playing March 24-26, 2022 during the Filmfort portion of the Treefort Music Festival.
