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 Jonathan Penner Interview with FatFreeFilm -
Independent Film Podcast hosted by Joel Marshall and Kamala
Lopez-Dawson. Podcast directly from Hollywood, California in an
all audio format (Transcript by SurvivorFever.net)
Podcast
Audio >>
Jonathan Penner, actor/producer and current Survivor
cast member, joins Kamala and Joel for a lively discussion of
reality television and what it is like to be a participant, and
also how we measure success and happiness in our creative lives.
FatFreeFilm is the Independent Film Podcast featuring weekly
discussions with filmmakers about filmmaking for filmmakers.
Joel: Hello and welcome again to FatFreeFilm. I'm
Joel Marshall.
Kamala: And I'm Kamala Lopez-Dawson and we have with us
today Jonathan Penner, an actor, writer, director and Survivor.
Jonathan: Hi.
Joel: Hi, thanks for having us here at your home.
Kamala: Your beautiful home. We're very
interested...first of all we might as well get this out of the
way...you just came back from doing Survivor for 45 days and we
know you're not really allowed to talk about the outcome but
talk a little bit about the experience.
Jonathan: Well, the experience was incredible.
I'm 44 years old. I was on the Cook Islands. There
were 20 of us. Really, it was one of the great times of my
life because there was no phones and there was no contact with
anyone from my life. There was no mail. There was
nothing to read. No watches, clocks. It was a very
pure experience and I got to live even though there were cameras
all over the place all the time we sort of quickly forgot about
them and we were able to live in a much more real and I'm making
quotation marks with my fingers as I say "real
way". And that is how the human body was evolved to operate.
To sleep outside in a bare kind of shelter, to eat foods that
you find right there and nothing else essentially. The
food that you're eating was grown in the environment that you're
living in. It's not like you're living in the arctic and
eating coconuts. You're living in the place where the
coconuts grow and eating coconuts and fish. It was
fascinating. Fabulous experience. Really. Very
cool.
Kamala: Did it feel longer than
45 days or faster?
Jonathan: It was long. 45
days doing anything is long. But it's like with anything
else. At first you're saying, oh my God, I can't believe
I've got another 40 days of this and I'll never get home and I
really miss my life and my wife and whatever. And then you
say, oh God, I can't believe I only have five days of this,
forty days are gone already. How the hell did that
happen. It's like with anything, I think. If you are
really fully in the moment, as fully as you can be in whatever
you're doing, even sitting here talking to you. If you're
really here then time itself expands and contracts in funny
ways. It was...we slept 12 hours a night, basically from
sundown to sunrise. And you sort of never sleep like that
here. Even though you're sleeping on the ground literally,
or with a tarp on the dirt. I slept better than I ever
slept here. It was only when I got back and got into bed
that I said to my wife, "Did you get new sheets and pillow
cases?" Because it felt so soft. It's like the
thread count of my sheets had gone up miraculously. She's
like, "No, that's the same sheets and pillow cases you
always had." You get to appreciate things. Did
it feel long? It's a long time to do anything. You
don't do anything in your life nonstop for...it was 39 days that
the game lasted. You don't take a vacation for 39
days. You don't work for 39 days or if you do you're a
basket case. I think actually by the end of it, it was
stressful. It was stressful, yeah.
Joel: What was it like coming
back to society after that? I know that I spent a few
months up in Alaska and when I came back just to Seattle which
is not like NYC, I had to hold on when I was in a car. It
was kind of crazy.
Jonathan: Yeah it was culture
shock for sure. But it's like with anything. You
fall right back into it. When you're on an island eating
fish and hunting for yourself and crapping in the woods and
that's sort of where you're at and what you have to do.
When you're in L.A. talking on the cell phone driving in the
traffic, listening to the radio, that's what you do, too.
It did...I don't know...it's not that it helped me. It
re-encouraged to think about being as present as I can be here
as much as I try to be present there. The game is designed
for you to realize that every day somebody is going to get
eliminated. Or every other day somebody is going to stop
playing the game. I've tried to bring that, successfully
or not, out here. It's not so much that I'm going to be
out of the game of making movies or show business or the game of
my life. But it really is true that this is where you are
right now, right here. Be here now because you don't know
where you're going to be tomorrow. Even though you think
you know. You can take it for granted. I'll probably
be sitting here on my couch talking to someone else tomorrow.
Who the hell knows or who knows who that is going to be.
Life changes so fast. When it changes and the rest of the
time you're sort of doing stuff and you realize, oh I didn't
even know what I had til it was gone when that weird thing
happened that changed everything. The game of
Survivor is strange because the show Survivor, I don't know who
watches it or not, over the course of an hour they usually have
camp life and then there's this challenge, this athletic event
and then there's the aftermath of that and then there's another
athletic event and the losing team or the losing people,
somebody goes home. Well, the way it's edited together,
those athletic events seem to be the be all and the end all of
life on Survivor. The truth is that you could go two or
three days just hunting and fishing and sleeping and hanging out
and being social and then you get one of these challenges and
the challenge might last ten minutes. Which of course in
screen time is 10 or 15 minutes but in lifetime is this tiny
little piece of it.
Joel: Do the people who do the
filming, do they...is there a director?
Kamala (?): He isn't allowed to
talk about any of the production stuff. So I would be
careful not to talk about that...
Joel: Okay, we will. Do
they ever intercede into what's going on to try to make it more
lively or make people fight or things like that?
Jonathan: No. The question
is, 'do they ever intercede, the producers', they
don't. They are extremely vigilant about that. For
legal reasons as well as just the veracity of the game. I
think if the audience ever felt that somehow the producers
were tampering in the outcome of the game, then any chance
of the show succeeding would fly out the window. I really
believe that they go out of their way to not do that. To
not ask any leading questions that would even influence what you
think because they know stuff that you don't know. So,
they are extremely objective and in fact, aren't allowed to talk
to you outside of asking you questions on camera.
Joel: What do you think about
reality television and the effect it's had on entertainment?
Jonathan: Well, I don't think,
what reality television, how reality television has affected
entertainment, I don't think it has as important a question as
'how has digital technology and where people are really at
affected entertainment.' And reality tv is a
manifestation of those things. Just like this show is a
way for people who might not otherwise be able to get a show to
an audience. You guys have been able to figure out a way
to do that using new kinds of technology. The filming of a
show like Survivor, or any reality show, is predicated on people
have super easy handheld digital style cameras that they can
film anywhere and on almost any number of conditions. They
don't have to change the film every 10 minutes. Even
though they shot on beta and were changing every 30
minutes. The fact is they shot thousands and thousands of
hours which they couldn't have done 10 or 15 years ago.
Kamala: I think the thing that is
going to really affect change in the future is people are going
to be making full on theatrical movies in their homes. And
that is going to change the market because there is going to be
a way to create effects and a way to create a studio because
lighting is going to go a hundred times better. In the way
that computers are just better, faster, stronger, film
technology is going to mimic that. It's going to be a real
leveling of the marketplace.
Jonathan: Stacey's right, I
think. How those movies get distributed and what people
will need to feel successful, the financial landscape is going
to change. People can be creative. Can be creative
now in their house and make short films, feature length films,
whatever. They may not make Steven Spielberg size
money. Robert Rodriguez and some of those guys have been
able to parlay homegrown filmmaking into studio
finance. The economic landscape will change, I
think. But the other point I was going to make about
reality TV and why it's so popular, to my mind, is because of
what people want to watch when they watch drama and not special
effects or, or, what's the word I want, spectacle. There's
a difference between spectacle which is essentially like a
fireworks show or a roller coaster like in the movies.
Something you 200 million dollars worth of CGI
beauty. But drama. One of the things that people
really want is genuine human behavior, genuine human
emotion. That's why reality TV is so successful, I
think. Because the stakes are real and you're seeing
somebody try to achieve their agenda and their reaction when
they achieve it or don't or they're stabbed in the back or they
make a million dollars or whatever as opposed to some actor's
choice and some editor's choice of how the character would
react. You're actually seeing a real person that you
may or may not have invested your time and energy into.
Having something happen to them and that's why we watch, hoping
that Taylor is going to win American Idol or you're disappointed
when Katherine doesn't win American Idol. Those are the
moments that we have always wanted to see in a drama. And
that's why reality TV is so successful. I think it's
because it's real human drama.
Listen
to More of the interview at fatfreefilm.com >>
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