JESS PEARSON: It's nice to see some familiar faces,
for those of you-- hi, hi Paul.
How was lunch?
FEMALE SPEAKER: Shout out.
MALE SPEAKER: Oh, it's so good, Trish.
JESS PEARSON: Trish is very hungry.
For those that don't know me, my name is Jess [? Pearson. ?]
I'm on the sales side.
I work on the automotive account.
Jeffrey and I actually met at a volunteer
at Westminster Avenue elementary school.
We were both on a career day panel.
And he and I have been in touch the last couple months.
And obviously he is a fan of Google.
And the second he walked in, I gave him a tour.
He saw the screening room and said, oh my gosh.
Can I bring my film in?
And so he gave me the short.
It was very humble.
It's actually an Oscar-nominated short from this past Oscar
award season.
So we're pretty excited to have you here, Jeffrey.
And Nora is his wife, next to him.
Nora's very involved in the Community Garden
Project at Westminster Avenue School.
So thank you both for having us-- or bring-- or coming here.
Having you.
JEFFREY KAROFF: Hi.
They want to put you on camera.
AUDIENCE: I guess for posterity, my first question
is where did you find this guy?
I also really liked the shot at the end, where
you have him start digging his second magnum opus,
and you just zoom out.
And how far was the camera from that,
and did you have to do a couple tries to get that right?
JEFFREY KAROFF: The first question
about where did I find him, we have a house in New Mexico.
And I met in a small town called Dixon.
And I met Ra when we first started going to this house.
And I met him.
I met Shel and Liz first.
Nora and I were at the pancake breakfast,
which was a fundraiser for the volunteer fire
department, that kind of town.
And met Shel and Liz, and they said
we're having a cave dug on our property.
Are you interested in seeing it?
So that's an invitation you don't turn down.
And it took me, after seeing that cave--
that shot in the movie where they come around the corner
is the experience that we had first seeing that cave, which
was that, oh my God, what is this?
Never seen anything like it.
I knew it was something that was film-worthy,
but it took me many years to figure out
a way into the story of it.
So I actually didn't start the film till almost 10 years
after I met him.
So all of the creation of Liz and Shel's caves
that you see in this is actually he's working on another cave,
but we used the footage for it.
As for the last shot, I had had that shot
in mind for a very long time, not knowing
that I was going in the film with it.
But I liked the idea of man in landscape,
and it really worked well for the theme of the film.
And I tried to shoot it with a balloon, a GoPro on a balloon.
That was a total disaster.
I tried to shoot it with a mini helicopter from a crew
that I found locally.
And the crew members were all stoned,
and we did a day of shooting and we got not a single shot
in the entire day.
So I had the one shot of him starting.
I was so thrilled to be there on the day
that he was actually starting a cave,
because all those years had passed,
and I was never in New Mexico when he started a project.
And I was there on the day.
And I have a shot.
It was on a tripod.
And he started the cave.
And originally, my first cut, I ended the film with that shot.
And then I was looking at it one day
and I thought, oh, wait a second.
Everything around him is not moving.
And I sent a cameraman back to that spot.
It was exactly two years later to the month.
And I said, at 3:30, can I have the metadata from the shot?
So I said at 3:30 in the afternoon,
stand on the hill opposite where we were.
Point the camera, your still camera, at the cave opening.
And do 10 shots of different sizes,
zooming backwards without changing the pan or the tilt.
And a compositor put the motion frame inside
of the still frames and pulled back.
So it's all done in post.
AUDIENCE: Thanks.
JESS PEARSON: Can I use your mic?
JEFFREY KAROFF: OK.
JESS PEARSON: So I know when we met,
you and I were on the panel.
And you had mentioned that you direct commercials.
And I think you work with a lot of automotive clients.
Is this your first film that you directed?
And it almost seems like this became your passion project
as well.
So not a question, but just more of a comment.
JEFFREY KAROFF: Yes.
[LAUGHTER]
This is my first film, yes.
Although I've done a lot of documentaries
in the context of fundraising films
for philanthropic organizations and nonprofits,
so I was pretty familiar with the form of it.
No more questions?
Oh.
AUDIENCE: What are you working on now?
JEFFREY KAROFF: I'm actually gone back
to my day job of making money, the one
that-- so I'm shooting commercials.
The one thing though that I discovered
about making documentaries is that it
is the opposite of income producing.
So especially for something like this.
I mean, I didn't have any backers or anything.
I just financed the whole thing myself.
And that was really one of the reasons
that it took me so long to get started on it, because I knew
that it was something I was going to just have
to do on my own, because I didn't even
know what film I was making while I was making it.
And when the digital revolution caught up to a place
where I was actually the owner of the Canon 5D
that this film was shot with, then it was like, OK.
The bar to entry is so low that I can do this thing.
And even if it comes to nothing, I
was, oh, let's spend a few thousand dollars.
It won't be that bad.
But now I'm back to making a little money,
and entertaining a couple of documentary projects.
Julie?
Yes.
JULIE: Do the people that own the caves spend
a lot of time staying in the caves,
or do they rent them out on Airbnb or anything like that?
JEFFREY KAROFF: You know, I feel like any of them could.
And I think they'd do really well.
But part of what drew me to the subject matter,
besides Ra and his art, was the peculiar nature
of the people in this part of the world.
I think it's like-- you know "Treme," that HBO series?
You could only find those people in New Orleans.
Well, I think you could only find these people here
in northern New Mexico.
They're all a peculiar kind of oddity.
The only difference being that they're all transplants.
None of them were born there.
So the people were drawn to this place.
But it does draw a certain like mind.
And that like mind has a kind of disdain for-- not disdain,
but they're private.
So none of them really want to invite the public
through any means at all.
It's actually really hard to see any
of his caves because of that.
Shel and Liz use their cave as a guest house.
And they're very generous about it, so like friends of friends
stay there.
The last time I was there two weeks ago-- we
were there two or three weeks ago--
and we walked into the cave and there
was like a family there and a Buddhist monk
in full robes sitting on one of the stoops there.
And I was like, wow.
That looks perfect.
This is a made for you.
And the other people use them as places to meditate.
And some people have like music parties in them.
So nobody lives in any of them as far as I know.
Shel and Liz's cave, by the way, it
has plumbing and electricity.
AUDIENCE: Hi there.
JEFFREY KAROFF: Hi.
AUDIENCE: It seems from the documentary that for the people
closest to Ra that it was really difficult over the course
of the years to like emotionally support him, especially
his wife.
In the time that you worked with Ra to make this film,
what was your overall impression of him as a person?
JEFFREY KAROFF: He's very open.
And that was really helpful, of course, as a filmmaker
that he was so willing to talk about himself
and not necessarily in positive--
paint himself in a positive light all the time.
Definitely what you see is what you get.
There is no subterfuge there.
He is that guy.
And he's incredibly kind, incredibly generous person
and was really generous to us.
I mean, down to the smallest thing
where we had to haul lots of equipment
up mountainsides many times.
And he's the strongest guy amongst us by
far even though he was the oldest.
And he would just pick up the heaviest thing
and haul it up the hill every time.
The business with his wife, it's complicated.
It was complicated, I thought.
Somebody else's relationship, it's like-- eh, you know?
You know that what.
You kind of wonder.
Sometimes when I watch the film, I think, well,
why did you get involved with this guy at all?
But because there's more to it, there's more to it.
And actually right after the film
was finished and was showing and was getting popular,
they separated and they were talking
about getting a divorce.
And Ra called me and said this is not your fault.
This really was coming before this.
And she's gotten a lawyer and we're getting divorced.
And then two weeks later, they were back together.
So that's how that's going.
Right.
AUDIENCE: So you mentioned the plumbing and the electricity.
And I noticed other things like nice wood floors and windows
in some of those caves.
Does Ra do all that, or does that get contracted out?
Or how does that happen?
JEFFREY KAROFF: He prepared the walls
for the plumbing and the electricity
to be put in by grooving out the pathway.
And there were natural grains in the sandstone
that he could follow.
But other people did all of the woodwork
and the electrical and the plumbing.
And there's a beautiful door on that cave,
which is just stunning.
But somebody else created that.
And so a lot of really talented artisans
in that part of the world, there's
a concentration of them around Dixon.
Nora?
NORA DVOSIN: I just think it's worth mentioning the Jeff Bezos
connection because that one had something
to do with the authorities.
[INAUDIBLE]
JEFFREY KAROFF: Yeah, what Nora's talking about
is that Jeff Bezos runs this conference every year
called Campfire.
And it is so under the radar that you can hardly
find it on the internet at all, which
I didn't think there was anything
that you couldn't find through Google.
But it's that kind of a Ted conference for culture.
And they invite painters, writers, artists, filmmakers.
And the organizer saw this film and contacted Ra
and invited him.
And he was really well-received there.
He did a presentation.
They showed 15 minutes of film.
And Jeff Bezos was there, and he kind of
made a personal connection with Bezos, so--
and with a lot of other powerful people, so at some point,
who knows?
That may be a force that he draws
upon when he is making his case.
Is that what you meant?
OK.
Thank you guys for coming.
Do you have a question?
Oh, wow.
AUDIENCE: We saw about the visual images
you talked about, various helicopter tries or whatever.
But could you describe your audio process
throughout and what you had in your mind
for the overall audio feeling of the project, or--?
JEFFREY KAROFF: Absolutely haphazard.
I mean, I had-- I was running sound.
And I've never run sound, so that should give you
an idea of how well that was planned.
But I had-- there are these little audio,
digital audio recorders now that I
borrowed from my brother-in-law.
And then I borrowed microphones from friends and stuff
because I don't actually own any audio gear.
And then sometimes we used a shotgun on the camera itself.
Sometimes we would do both.
Sometimes we would end up with no sound
because I forgot to turn the microphone on.
I have a couple of scene like that.
Actually, the very first interview
that I did on the very first day,
I forgot to start the audio recorder.
So we had to start over.
I was shocked that the sound came out so well.
I couldn't figure out why.
AUDIENCE: It all sounds very good.
JEFFREY KAROFF: Yeah, it sounds really good.
And I violated every single rule.
I didn't know how to set levels or anything, so I don't know.
It scares me to think like that's probably--
I shouldn't get any confidence from that at all,
because it'll never happen that way again.
So yeah, but the guy who did the music I thought
did a really nice job.
And I was very much hoping that he would create a soundtrack
that you could listen to in your car
if you were watching the movie.
And I think he did something very close to that, so.
All right.
I think we're done.
Thanks, thanks a lot, guys.
Thanks for coming in.
[APPLAUSE]