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Nearly two decades ago—when a jam-packed screening room beneath the Portland Art Museum rang with applause—the hometown premiere seemed to all involved the dawn of a soon-to-be-formidable filmography for brothers Arnold and Jacob Pander. Then, life happened.
Scions of Dutch artist Henk Pander and indie comic legends in their own right, the brothers Pander had been developing their filmmaking chops ever since early work on Drugstore Cowboy storyboarding and building props for de facto mentor Gus Van Sant led to a string of high-profile commercials, shorts and music videos for acts like the Dandy Warhols and DJ Howie B. Then-titled Selfless, their long-awaited feature debut brought together Hollywood heavies like Mo Gallini (2 Fast 2 Furious, Mulholland Drive) and local up-and-comers like October Moore (Pig) into an absorbing, hyper-Hitchcockian identity heist among Pearl District architects showing us fear in a handful of venetian blinds.
Though far from the groundbreaking dynamics of their graphic storytelling, Selfless began winning awards and amassing buzz along an extended festival tour as the Panders rode a spiraling momentum into a triumphant screening at San Diego’s 2009 Comic-Con and a subsequent distribution deal. And then their passion project vanished to the depths of contractual limbo for 15 long years.
Finally freed from the distributors’ dungeons with a newly retitled Altered Ego, the Panders have at last released the film on Amazon and begun screenwriting their sophomore effort. From their late father’s art studio, while busily spearheading a DIY social media campaign, Arnold and Jacob Pander spoke with WW about every filmmaker’s worst nightmare.
WW: So, 2008, your debut premieres at the Portland International Film Festival with what seems a limitless future awaiting…
Jacob Pander: It was still the era where the idea was getting into Sundance, Tribeca, the big festivals, would shine some light on your abilities and open up the industry. Simultaneously, right at that time—2009, 2010—all of the Hollywood film divisions had been shut down one by one, and then the global economy crashed. So, there was already a glut of really high-quality material when everything just went into this tailspin standstill.
Arnold Pander: There weren’t a lot of commercial options for a movie that didn’t have big celebrity names attached, didn’t have a conventional theme—not horror, not super art house—but it wasn’t your traditional indie either. And, unfortunately, we were really poorly represented.
JP: We had, essentially, a lower-level sales agent—somebody who dealt mostly with horror, B-movies, that kind of scale.
AP: That straight-to-video model was still the standard, but the Hollywood shift to big studio pictures and tentpole superhero movies was on the horizon. And, because we come from graphic novels, we were able to leverage a lucky window.
AP: Since the folks at Comic-Con knew the Panders, they gave us a slot to screen our movie. And, with that information, our sales agent was able to get a bigger distributor on board.
JP: Actually, at the time, our sales agent used that news to flip the film to a more dialed sales agent who dealt with bigger movies, and a bona fide distributor picked it up sight unseen just because it was at Comic-Con.
AP: So, we pulled all the strings we could to get a deal with the big company looking for movies with Meg Ryan and Brad Pitt and, I guess, their expectations were underwhelmed.
JP: This is just my surmising, but landing in such a high-profile environment probably elevated the film out of scale. I mean, literally, George Lucas was there. James Cameron was showing a sneak peek of the first Avatar that same day. I think [the distributors] signed the deal, looked at the movie, and saw an arty little indie without any movie stars.
Was there a point where you suddenly realized this actually wasn’t going to happen or just a slow realization?
AP: Oh, it was pretty immediate [wry laughter].
JP: One phone call.
AP: We were super enthusiastic about doing everything we could. After DIY marketing for the film festivals, we just wanted to know how to keep helping push the thing forward and, landing this big distribution deal that the rep talked up as very significant, we’d already started conceptualizing the idea of a digital comic sequel to go alongside.
JP: We get a call set up with the distributors to talk about marketing and how we were on board to support when the guy on the other end of the phone says: “I’m going to be honest with you guys. There’s no world where we’re releasing this movie.”
JP: There was no negotiation. We had nothing to negotiate with. They had the movie.
AP: They paid the money for the license. Not a lot of money.
JP: I mean, it was a chunk of change, enough to deliver the film, but not money in our bank accounts.
AP: We didn’t have the language in our paperwork to fully protect ourselves. So then we basically had to sit and wait out the licensing. I’ve talked with other filmmakers who were, like, “Fifteen years, right?” It was a fairly standard “you get screwed” bad deal.
JP: It was hard. Tough to get financing for another feature after a film vanishes off the radar. But, we thought, let’s not make this our narrative. Let’s not make this our focus. So we pivoted back to graphic novels, did Girlfiend, and moved on to other things like Subtext.
And now?
AP: We’re writing a new script and just looking to get as many eyes on Altered Ego as possible.
JP: Momentum slowed, no doubt, but we’re looking at it all from the vantage point of a new day where we can suddenly show people Altered Ego and, hopefully, get them interested in our movie so that we can make more of them.
AP: Though things could change tomorrow, only movies done at a really low budget can realistically start to see a return in this current climate. It’s a volatile economy, period, and so much has to do with creating work that’s attainable. Instead of pitching a $20 million movie to Hollywood, let’s go try to make one for $200K. You have to build your way back up, and this film finally being out in the world feels almost like a reset.
