I just finished American Movie and I was wondering if this was a real documentary made during the filming of Coven or was it made after Coven was finished? Because I figured if Borchardt was having a documentary made about him he must have been getting/gotten paid for that.
shareYes, it's real.
shareAll through this movie I kept going back and forth, thinking it was a mockumentary, and then not being sure. It sure did remind me of FUBAR!
sharei personally think it's a mockumentary. the characters are just seem too much like caricatures.
I love the community of movies - how we all bond in the dark when we recognize ourselves up there
I've heard people say that AMERICAN MOVIE is "not real" many times since I moved to Los Angeles. Having grown up in Wisconsin, where half of the people you go to high school with are just like the guys in the film, there was never any doubt of the authenticity for me.
The thing I always ask people is if those guys WERE actors, wouldn't they need to be Sean Penn or somebody to do it so convincingly? Sure, SPINAL TAP pulls it off, but look how much established, recognizable talent was involved there. BLAIR WITCH certainly never convinced anybody who knew anything about how movies are made (even if the fact that it was about... um... witches wasn't a dead giveaway.) When I saw the CLOVERFIELD trailer, they got the auto-focus right, but everyone in the room looked like a model.
Remember when Garth Brooks did the fake BEHIND THE MUSIC where he played the Chris Gaines character? I turned on the t.v. and saw his "mother" talking and I knew immediately that this was not an actual episode, because most actors bring too much to it, they try to inflect everything they say, and that's just not how people talk and behave.
AMERICAN MOVIE is how people talk and behave, or people in the Midwest anyway. Eventually I met Mark, drank with him, met his dad -- and the experience was exactly like walking into that movie. He just did a role in my new movie, too.
He's a very genuine guy, and AMERICAN MOVIE is a genuine movie, and a genuinely good one at that.
By the way, the moon landing was real, too.
"You're going to need more than one lesson. And you're going to get more than one lesson."
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I agree with you! When watching this I thought so many times about how realistic the guys were and could no way be actors. I have relatives who live in Wisconsin and I've never once heard non-natives get the accent right (in productions).
I know so many people who act like the guys in the documentary and it was a little unnerving to see them in this light.
One of my friends actually bumped into Mark one time and he said the guy is exactly like he is in this movie. It's a complete documentary, not mock. These guys are legit.
Mark is an extremely creative writer, you can tell by the way he talks. He's just falling under in the popularity race, so less people take him for what he is, a genius.