Posted in: Exclusive, Interview, Movies | Tagged: Cancelled Films, Cheri Oteri, Cheston Mizel, exclusive, interview, L.E. Staiman, Paul F. Thompkins, Stephen Tobolowsky

Love Virtually Director & Writer on Ambitious Social Media Rom-Com

Director L.E. Staiman and co-writer Cheston Mizel talk to Bleeding Cool about their ambitious digital sci-fi rom-com Love Virtually.

Sometimes, all it takes as a filmmaker and writer is a big dream and serious ambition. It's something director L.E. Staiman and co-writer Cheston Mizel did in their feature debut, Love Virtually for Cancelled Films. The film follows four couples who go to ridiculous lengths to find true love in a virtual world. A retro-future satirical rom-com for the Metaverse era, the film blends live action and 3D animation as It explores and exposes the absurd reality of our world and where we are heading while probing life's deepest questions such as: How does a celebrity find someone who loves them for their true selves? Is it cheating if it's in VR? And, is it cheating if it's with an AI? Staiman and Mizel spoke to Bleeding Cool about the inspiration behind the film, how the two blend digital and live-action on an indie budget, and what veteran comedic actors like Cheri Oteri, Stephen Tobolowsky, and Paul F. Tompkins bring to the ensemble cast.

How Staiman & Mizel's Determination Made' Love Virtually' a Reality

Bleeding Cool: What's the inspiration behind 'Love Virtually?'
Staiman: 'Love Virtually' was heavily inspired at the beginning of the pandemic by the move from people interacting in-person to everything moving online over Zoom and FaceTime and people being unable to be together. This was a satire on what the world would look like a few years from now if a pandemic hit when virtual reality was much more widely integrated.

There are a lot of different digital and live-action hybrid projects, like 'Ready Player One, Free Guy,' and the live-action 'Scott Pilgrim' to a certain extent come to mind. Did any of those other works inspire the execution of this, or did you want to go in fresh?
Staiman: I loved 'Ready Player One.' I read the book a little bit after it came out. I loved the movie. This was fun, but not I wouldn't say a "parody," but it's a fun, ridiculous take on the darker, funnier side of what could happen in the Metaverse.
Mizel: This was a completely independent. You mentioned 'Free Guy.' That came out after we were well into the process. 'Ready Player One' was a massive Steven Spielberg, big Hollywood budget film. We're like, "Okay, you know what? What can mere mortals do in the genre to make it fun, funny, and interesting? That other story takes place in 2040. We wanted something more contemporary, like the standard: "We were looking for something a step beyond where VR was at the time." We considered shooting it in VR chat at one point, but we shot for what's a little bit more than the Metaverse. Meta wasn't called Meta at the time. We were forward on this idea before it was as popularly discussed as it is today.

Can you break down the casting and how everything fell into place?
Staiman: Since we had a shoestring budget, and neither of us had much experience in feature filmmaking, we reached out to different casting directors for this movie and got nowhere with that [laughs]. No one would take our phone calls. My manager at the time ended up hiring him as a producer and as the casting director. He pounded the pavement, and I made lists of people I thought would be great in the movie, the up-and-coming comedians, and those who have been around forever. He got in touch with the agents. It was a long and tedious process. I'm so happy with the cast that we were able to get. To get Cheri Oteri, Stephen Tobolowsky, and Paul F. Tompkins. It was a dream come true. They're legendary comedians, and it's amazing to work with them.

What did they bring to leading this ensemble cast to expand on that?
Staiman: It was funny because we did a lot of auditions early before we had Cheri and Stephen. We saw a lot of people for both of those roles, and it was disheartening. We could not find people to embody those characters (of Doctors Evelyn and Divine). When Cheri and Stephen came on, it was so instant. They brought their spin to the character but a sense of authenticity. They made them feel like developed people. It was wild to see these characters come off the page.

How did you develop the characters and archetypes? Were there any parts you begrudgingly cut out?
Staiman: There was a lot of exploration and a lot of "Letting the story dictate characters and who we needed. They were characters that were born out of utility. We're like, "We need something for this or someone for this person to interact with," then characters were born, but there are a lot of parallels. We try to make sure that we match people up in a certain way. Every character kind of has a utility throughout the process. Ksenia [Valenti], who plays Angela, I had her in mind from the beginning. She was funny, and I had worked with her before. Everybody else, in terms of casting, was going out and trying to find the right fit for each character.

Since this is your feature debut, what were the biggest creative hurdles you had to overcome?
Mizel: The hurdles weren't creative or practical; one of the realities of filmmaking and getting it done right and then distributing. Creatively, the biggest hurdle between us is that L.E. is more of a perfectionist. I'm more of a pragmatist. Whenever we would do something, or I'd be doing the animation, I'd show them something; he'd say, "No, it's not good enough." It was sometimes hard because I knew nothing about animation when we started this. I ended up animating the original 32 scenes when we were doing mocap in my basement.

Fortunately, we found some people to make it look much better by doing the cinematography, lighting, and some animation cleanup. That process got frustrating because I had a director, my partner, on this project, who wanted it to look a certain way and wanted it to get it placed. While it made me much better at what I did and forced everyone to rise to the occasion creatively, it can be frustrating when you know you have pragmatism versus perfectionism playing off one another.

Was there any sequence or aspect to expand in your response here that was difficult to get through?
Staiman: One of the main challenges of the film is that the actors were primarily acting from blank screens. I would either read with them or the script supervisor was reading with them. It was matching up performances, adlibs, and stuff to make sense in the edit. That was challenging, and some of the crowd sequences in VR.
Mizel: Some of the animated sequences were rough; we did the same scene repeatedly, and I had several all-nighters. I was trying to get this animation software, and then you got the mocap and keyframe things together. The technology we use in terms of mocap had all sorts of drift and things they now have solutions for. We said, "Hey, even you can use mocap as someone who's not a big animation studio." Many of the stuff we were using was not ready for prime time, and I didn't know how to use it. I was learning on the job.
There were a lot of scenes in the animation where I spent a ton of time technically trying to get even the performances to line up and deal with weird things that were happening with the avatars. Things were moving around, and I was figuring out how to work around and hack my way around, like getting all these things to work, and it's an uphill battle for quality. There was a lot of learning on the job with the technical side of things that made it particularly challenging.

Love Virtually, which also stars Peter Gilroy, Ryan O'Flanagan, Adam Ray, Nikki Howard, Tom Virtue, and Paige Mobley, is available on digital and on-demand on November 7th.

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