The Big Picture

Arnold and Wong self-funded their directorial debut, We’re All Gonna Die, using their VFX knowledge from previous projects to create a unique sci-fi rom-com.
Jordan Rodrigues and Ashly Burch discuss their experiences on set, including cold shoots in Utah and embracing guerilla filmmaking.
The success of their Dungeons and Dragons podcast helped fund the indie film, showcasing their DIY approach to filmmaking.

After the successful run of Video Game High School, the creators behind the web-series are ready to add “filmmaker” to their stacked resume. Matthew Arnold and Freddie Wong have continued to join forces through their Youtube Channel, RocketJump, and their hit podcast Dungeons and Daddies. Years after experimenting with VFX and delivering content through various mediums, Arnold and Wong are now promoting their directorial debut, We’re All Gonna Die. The indie film, which stars Jordan Rodrigues and Ashly Burch, follows a beekeeper overcoming grief and an emotionally distraught EMT as they go on a road trip together to retrieve their belongings, which are being transported across the country by an alien “spike” that the world has gotten used to.

Ahead of its world premiere at the 2024 SXSW, the cast and filmmakers stopped by the Collider media studio to chat with our own Steve Weintraub. Arnold and Wong went into detail about funding their first feature out of pocket, how their previous projects equipped them to use VFX in their favor, and making a rom-com out of an alien invasion. Rodrigues and Burch also spoke about the cold shoots in Utah, having calves on full display, and their motivation to say “yes” to a project that incorporates guerilla filmmaking.

You can either watch the interview above, or read the conversation below.

COLLIDER: First of all, congrats on being part of SXSW. What I’m excited to talk to you about is the fact that you guys are like a real indie. There are a lot of films that are here that have a higher budget, and you guys are, I don’t want to say guerilla filmmaking, but I’m always enthusiastic about supporting films that are made with just $5 and a roll of duct tape. Listen, no one will have seen the movie yet, so who wants to bite the bullet on explaining what it’s about?

FREDDIE WONG: From the jump, this is a sci-fi road trip, rom-com. It’s a road trip movie with sci-fi elements. Done! The premise is, at some point in the near future, an alien artifact shows up in earth’s upper atmosphere. It wreaks havoc. Wars are fought, nations trying to throw missiles at 100 million people as it jumps around the earth doing all kinds of weird things, and then the movie takes place like a decade later. It’s just still there. We haven’t been able to do anything about it, and now we all just have to live with it. It’s just a road trip movie with this as a sort of thing looming over humanity, just sort of jumping around.

MATTHEW ARNOLD: You know scenes in Godzilla when they shoot like 1000 nuclear missiles at Godzilla and then the smoke clears and Godzilla’s there. We just figured we’d do a rom-com set 10 years later, where Godzilla’s just still there, and sometimes he naps, sometimes he chills, sometimes he pisses. He’s just there and if he starts moving, you’re all going to die. If not, then you just go about your daily life. We just thought it would be fun to do a road trip movie kind of in that setting.

WONG: Within that movie, it is about a struggling beekeeper and an emotionally raw EMT, who Jordan plays, and they sort of get almost into a car accident. Their stuff gets teleported away by the spike, and now they have to do a road trip across the country to get their stuff back.

Matthew Arnold and Freddie Wong on How ‘Video Game High School’ Led Them to Experiment With VFX
Image via IMDb

See what’s amazing is, like I said a second ago, you guys had $5 and a roll of duct tape, but what’s amazing about VFX now is that you can incorporate this kind of big idea into a real indie movie, which is fantastic. You know what I mean? Because let’s be honest, that sci-fi element attracts a lot of people.

WONG: It speaks a little bit to where our origins are and our background, because we started doing our own visual effects on YouTube videos and on our web series, shows like Video Game High School. Having done that, when it came time for us to come up with a movie, we wanted to just write a movie and direct a movie that we could just do ourselves and finance ourselves. It was very helpful because we can be like we know which effects in the sci-fi world are expensive effects, and then which ones are like we can do that and put that on a bunch of shots, and it won’t cost us that much. So, having that sort of knowledge is helpful in making that and that comes from just doing it ourselves for so long.

I’m curious and this is for all three of you. This is a little bit of a curveball. If someone has never seen anything that you guys have done, nothing, what is the first thing you’d like them to watch and why?

JORDAN RODRIGUES: I was one of those people that, when I was presented the script, I actually didn’t know who RocketJump was, but once I did a little bit of digging, I realized how massive RocketJump was. In the first video I ever saw of you guys was episode 1 of the short film, and it was these guys trying to get horses to drift in Rocket Jump: The Show. Once I was like, “oh, they’re trying to do a western”, but the whole concept is trying to get horses to drift. I’m like, that’s it. I got to work with these guys. These guys are amazing, and I love their creativity, so that was my experience.

ARNOLD: Obviously, since we’re promoting We’re All Gonna Die, I would love everybody to watch We’re All Gonna Die first. But I mean, we’re still in the same way of just bootstraps and doing it ourselves and true indie. I’m still immensely proud of Video Game High School, which is a web series we did back on YouTube that we crowd funded all three years, and it always surprises me how much that seems to have resonated with people. We still get people coming and being like, “oh, I got into filmmaking because of Video Game High School and watching the behind-the-scenes.” To us, that’s as important to us as actually making movies is just sharing, because we all grew up on Peter Jackson’s behind-the-scenes on Lord of the Rings. We just want to make movies and get other people excited.

WONG: We all grew up loving the behind-the-scenes stuff on DVDs and then there’s not that anymore, but we’re all still like wanting to know, “hey, how did they do this”? Now you’re digging around on it, and you barely get anything from that, so we always had that as part of it. I would say if you were to pick one, I’ll say this. If you have five minutes probably, we did a sketch with Key & Peele called Mexican Standoff. That’s just like an escalating Mexican standoff. That’s a good one to start with. If you have more than that, then I would probably say the Tip Jar episode. There’s a short that’s called Tip Jar on our YouTube channel. Also, there’s the episode on Rocket Jump: The Show.

ARNOLD: It is like a classic Charlie Chaplin silent film for 10 minutes. It’s fun!

The Filmmakers’ Dungeons and Dragons Podcast Helped to Fund Their Directorial Debut, ‘We’re All Gonne Die’

I read, could be wrong, that it was the success of the Dungeons and Dragons podcast that actually basically enabled you to make this movie.

WONG: We’ve been pitching low budget movies to try and get someone to pay for the last decade. All kinds of projects, and it’s tough, and it’s a very difficult industry. It’s kind of well known for that.

We’re probably not the best pitchers in the world either. You know, let’s be honest, we haven’t made anything, probably like, not the best, right? Peter Jackson got Lord of the Rings, and he just didn’t want me to be there [LAUGHS] but over the course of doing that, we were like, “well, let’s just make something that we can do ourselves”. Then, in the meantime, we still need to pay our bills because, you know, we’re still living in Los Angeles and trying to make things, and get things to work. We decided to start a Dungeons and Dragons podcast with a group of us, and we started that a couple of years before the pandemic, and it just took off. It’s called Dungeons and Daddies, not a BDSM Podcast. It’s about four dads who get flung into the fantasy world of Dungeons and Dragons, and they lose their kids on the way, and then they have to get their kids back. It’s like a minivan, but in Lord of the Rings. It’s that kind of setting.

ARNOLD: Just so much of what we like to do in our behind the scenes is be as transparent as possible. Yes, in relative terms, it’s $5 and duct tape, but we always joke that if you want to make an indie film, either you need to get somebody else to pay you a lot of money. You need to have a lot of money, which means either you probably are a kid of somebody in the industry who has a lot of money or your parents have, or you somehow make a super successful podcast. I mean, that’s honestly the only reason we can make this movie is we did not think the podcast would be a hit, but once we saw that it was doing well, Freddie and I just were like, well, we want to make a movie, let’s just save up for three years and make the movie ourselves then. It’s an expensive industry, but you never know the way that you’re going to get there.

How long did you actually have to shoot this thing?

WONG: The way we do it is that we have our core sort of shooting time, which was about a month at the end of 2021.

ARNOLD: 21 days, two weeks in Utah and then like a week and a half in L A and then everybody else can go home and live their lives. Then Freddie and I spend like a year and a half editing slash driving to Utah again to get more shots. That’s how you kind of stretch your budget, do it as much as yourself as possible. There are a lot of times on set we’re like, isn’t there a big spike sequence here? We’re like, we’ll do that a year later, like when we don’t have 20 people on pay, right now, we’ll do it later ourselves.

WONG: Yeah, we took like a few months. About a year later, we took another road trip out. Just a small, small group of people just let’s go out on the road all day. We’re just looking for driving shots, the kind of thing that when you’re doing with a big crew can be very expensive because you have a big crew kind of waiting on you to do stuff. But if you’re just, yeah, you got a camera, I mean, you guys are running the C-70. This is the camera that we used. Yeah, and because I love the Canon cameras, and I was, “oh yeah, let’s just grab it”. We have it, and we’ll just go and shoot it.

Jordan Rodrigues on Wearing a T-Shirt and Shorts While Shooting ‘We’re All Gonna Die’ in the Winter
Image via SXSW

When you saw the shooting schedule and saw what you were going to be doing, what day did you have circled in terms of, I can’t wait to film this, and what day was circled in terms of how exactly are we filming this?

RODRIGUES: Right. Well, I think once I had got the job, once you guys emailed me, I was absolutely stoked because, like I said, I really wanted to work with you guys and I love the script. Then there was a moment when my manager called me. He’s like,”just so you know, this is really ultra low budget. They’re funding it themselves and there’s not going to be a dressing room. You’re going to have to ask to go to the gas station toilet.” I’m like, this is exactly what I need. Please give it to me! I just need this so badly. So I’ve been on board since I was approached by Ashley and I just needed something this raw to do in my creative life. I’ve been on board since day one.

ARNOLD: You’re probably worried about…we put you in cold water.

RODRIGUES: Well, yeah, I showed up to day one, and they were like, this is your outfit, and it was just shorts and a t-shirt in the middle of winter in Utah. I’m like “got you, I’m in this costume, the whole movie.”

ARNOLD: I know when we were shooting it and when we wrote it, it was like Arizona to Idaho and in our heads we were doing it in spring or whatever and like, yeah, you had to be in the shorts. We couldn’t pivot it because she had to see your calves a lot. So once we were shooting on Thursday, and we literally missed the blizzard that hit Sundance, by like four days after we left our shoot in Utah, it was a blizzard. So you were in shorts and an EMT t-shirt or her t-shirt for like two weeks in freezing cold in a river.

WONG: It was the coldest shoot that I remember.

When you see the script and one of the plot points of the movie, you brought it up, is your calves. You’re being objectified. Did you enjoy being objectified or is it one of those things where the tide has turned?

RODRIGUES: I’m pretty proud of my calves.

WONG: Those are great.

RODRIGUES: I don’t know where they came from. I’ve just had like some calves on me since I was a kid. I think I just walked around on my tippy toes all day

WONG: You trained for this role your whole life pretty much.

In between takes, were you doing special calf exercises?

RODRIGUES: No, no. Maybe? I don’t know, was I? I can’t remember. I think I was just so tense from the coldness that they would just flex the whole time.

WONG: We were like, “no water”!

ARNOLD: We definitely had to put it up because there were like three sequences where your calves are in the movie. The main one, the first one where she first sees your calves, we forgot to shoot on the day, and it’s like a year later when we were editing it. We spent like three days being like, “there’s no freaking way we forgot she was the shot”. It’s been in the script since day one! So he had to come over to my house and like just stand next to some dirt and then do the calves again. Which mind you, for a year where there was a placeholder in the movie on Freddy’s calves, lying on his living room floor and then his calves flexing. Every time we screened the movie for test screenings or getting feedback notes, it just never worked because it was so out of place. It’d be like her looking down, and just saw these like pasty…

WONG: Pasty Matthew? Careful Icarus. [LAUGHS]

ARNOLD: Well, it’s also because we filled it right after you were sitting down in the edit room.

WONG: Oh, I got all my clothing marks.

ARNOLD: Yes, clothing marks on his calves. It was a hideous shot. It was much better when we got your [Jordan] calves in there.

Speaking of showing it to people, so you put together a rough cut, or a cut you’re happy with. You start showing it to people who gave you the best feedback in terms of, you know, they tell you something, and you’re like, “oh, yeah, maybe we do need to adjust this thing”.

WONG: We have a sort of interesting kind of impromptu system that we’ve come up with over the years, where there are different groups of friends and producers and writers and directors that are in different tiers in our internal tracking, because there’s some people who can see it like a rough cut, and they can give you notes for a rough cut and there’s other people who they’re better at giving notes when it’s a little bit more final and a little more further along in the process. So I would say, probably one of the things for us…Do you have anything in mind?

ARNOLD: I was going to say there are two of our friends. Will Campos is a brilliant writer that I’ve run like tons of stuff with. He just didn’t happen to write on this one because it was during the pandemic, but he was one of our most trusted people, and we gave him both the script and the early cuts. Same thing with Beth May, who’s another brilliant writer, poet, who’s on the podcast. Then, we showed to families at a certain point. You brought it up to like a friend, like you have a friend, but she had a group of friends that didn’t know you, so you do like little screenings here and there and notes are good. I mean, what’s almost as important is like watching it with an audience and watching their reactions.

WONG: You can kind of set the room of like, “oh, this part’s dragging” and “oh, this part’s going a little fast”. One thing that I think we went back and forth on a lot was just the details of how much in the meet cute because the meat cute, when the two leads meet each other for the first time, is going to set your foundation for the rest of the movie. So how much of that do you like? Do you string it out? Does it get too boring at a certain point? That section I think, saw a lot of sort of light, tiny tweaks that had disproportionate effects.

ARNOLD: The biggest change was probably just that we always wanted to do a thing where the sci-fi element was in the background. It’s very much supposed to just be part of the normal life. We spent a lot of time making sure the spike is kind of in the background. It’s kind of there, but it’s not part of it…Ashly!

We have another person who’s joining us. [Actress Ashly Burch walks into the studio and sits with the cast and crew]

WONG: Hey Ashly!

ARNOLD: We got the intro montage. That’s all important, we figure that out later.

Welcome to the party.

ASHLY BURCH: Happy to be here.

WONG: Oh yeah, get the microphone in there. Ashly, we were just saying that probably the part that we went back and forth on the edit the most was we have this intro news montage in terms of setting up the world. Originally, we didn’t have that at all. We want to just throw people right into it and then once you sort of put everything together, we’re like, “oh you need a little bit more context, a little bit more understanding of it.” I think it’s a very important piece.

Well, I was going to say at the beginning of the movie when I was watching it, I was “ok, this is pretty ambitious for an indie to have this whole setup of newscasters and the whole thing”. But this goes back to what I was saying, which is the advent of VFX for everyone, which allows Indie movies to bring in elements that used to just be reserved for big budget Hollywood movies.

ARNOLD: Hi, Ashly. We have to ask you some questions.

BURCH: No, I can just be here, man.

Ashly Burch Was Cast in the Indie Film, Shortly After Reading the Unfinished Script for ‘We’re All Gonna Die’
Image via SXSW

I’ll bring you into this by saying what was it about this project and this script that said, “oh, I need to do this.”

BURCH: So I’ve worked with Matt and Freddie. When did we meet? I was trying to figure that out. Ages ago.

ARNOLD: I can probably find out Freddie was a reward for Sundance, and then you got to do a Nintendo branded video with him.

BURCH: We’ve known each other for a long time, but they sent me the script just to get I think, my feedback on it because I write as well.

WONG: 2013.

BURCH: 2013, that’s almost 10 years!

WONG: Ashly shared an item with me. Donkey Kong on Google Drive. This is December 19, 2013.

BURCH: Wow!

That is crazy that you can pull that out in like 10 seconds.

BURCH: You really have a deep log on your Gmail.

WONG: Oh, you don’t leave my phone. I got you! Want to know what that red dot is on the email?How many unread? Guess what that red dot is.

BURCH: 10,000

WONG: 10,080 and my mind is clean like a pristine Zen pool. I am completely calm and beautiful. Yes. Not even a ripple upon the glassy lake of my mind.

BURCH: Well, they sent me the script and I loved it. I mean, I’ve loved everything that Matt and Freddie have done, but what I loved so much about it was how it handled grief. In particular, I think it captured the feeling that a lot of us had during the pandemic, which is, it feels like everything’s falling apart and we kind of just have to live with it. That’s sort of what the spike represents to me. Is just anything that’s sort of Damocles hanging over everyone. You just have to continue your life.

I thought they captured that in such a beautiful, funny, and heart-wrenching way. Yeah, I just knew that I wanted to be a part of it.

ARNOLD: I don’t know if we would have done it without Ashly, because I think you were one of the first people we sent the notes to, and she literally responds with “no notes, its got to be made.” Then I was like, “well, I asked you for notes” but then you respond with like, “I really want to be a part of this.” So I was like, “ok, ok, no notes, but we got an actress.” That’s good. That’s a good trade off.

You were just so supportive from the very beginning.

We were talking earlier about the fact that this was like a no-frills shoot, so talk a little bit about, for the two of you, what was it like because you are literally in all the scenes. Like the two of you together. So what was the shoot like? Especially when it’s guerilla and you’re doing everything.

BURCH: I drank a lot of cold brew I remember.

RODRIGUES: Zoa. Shout out to The Rock.

BURCH: I mean, it was a lot. There were a lot of night shoots and it was cold. It was harder for Jordan based on his costume. He’s wearing shorts and a T-shirt the entire movie, but honestly, I think we both just felt like it was so much fun.

RODRIGUES: Absolutely. I was just saying before that I just needed something like gorilla style. Something just really fun, and we could just be a part of it. We were in it, there was no pretentiousness on that set. We were, we all got an Airbnb together, we all stayed together, and we just had this summer camp sort of filming party. It was awesome.

BURCH: We were part of the crew, which sometimes, when you’re an actor on a show or on a movie, you don’t feel that way.

WONG: You kind of feel like you’re a baby that someone’s taking care of.

BURCH: You know, but we were all in it together, and I think it’s a testament to Matt and Freddie as well. This is their first feature, and we all really wanted them to succeed. We were all really excited for them and proud of them, and we’re there to make it happen and to make their vision come to life. It was just honestly a blast. I had a great time.

If They Could Only Watch One TV Show For the Rest of Their Lives What Would It Be?
Image via NBC

If you could only watch one TV show for the rest of your life, what TV show would it be and why? Or just what TV show?

ARNOLD: I’m already doing it. I watch it every single night as I go to bed as my white noise. Frasier always Frasier. I don’t know if I picked the right cameras. I’m going to do it for each one. So you got Frasier. Frasier. Frasier. Not the new one. The new one’s OK. It’s not bad. The original is one of the best shows of all time. Watch it every day.

WONG: Masaaki Yuasa’s Ping Pong, the single greatest sports, anything ever made. Fuck your other movies. Fuck western movies. Masaaki’s Ping Pong is my series. I’ll watch it until the day I die.

I pull on episode eight, and I cry alone in my room. It’s the greatest sports. Anything, anything. Watch it.

BURCH: It’s just this all the time. This is this every day. Damn, do you have yours?

RODRIGUES: That’s crazy. No.

BURCH: I think, I guess mine was Parks and Rec by a country mile for a while, but I think I watched it so much I ran it into the ground. So now…

ARNOLD: It never happens with Frasier. You never run on the ground.

WONG: That stays a lot for days, years, for decades.

BURCH: So now it’s New Girl for me, I think.

RODRIGUES: I love New Girl. Shitt’s Creek. I love Schitt’s Creek. That’s like a new thing for me.

BURCH: It’s very comfy.

Listen, I really want to say congrats on being part of SXSW. I really love supporting indie cinema and I really hope you have a fantastic fest. Thank you.

ARNOLD: Thank you for having us.

We’re All Gonna Die will have a limited theatrical release, with a few opportunities to watch the indie on the big screen in a few cities throughout the U.S. Click the link below for screening dates and information:

Screenings and Tickets

We’re All Gonna Die (2024) In near future, everyone’s gotten used to the 10, 000-mile alien tentacle that materialized in the sky, and a struggling beekeeper and a grieving wanderer must join together and take a dangerous roadtrip to get their teleported stuff back.Release Date March 10, 2024 Director Matthew Arnold , Freddie Wong Cast Ashly Burch , Jordan Rodrigues , Willow Hale , Chase Mangum , Vin Vescio , Indiana Arnold , Serenity Grace Russell , Nevada Arnold Runtime 110 Minutes Main Genre Sci-Fi Writers Matthew Arnold , Will Campos , Beth May