INDIE SPOTLIGHT: An Interview with SXSW ‘Dead Mail’ Filmmakers Joe DeBoer and Kyle McConaghy

On a desolate, Midwestern county road, a bound man crawls towards a remote postal box, managing to slide a blood-stained plea-for-help message into the slot before a panicking figure closes in behind him. The note makes its way to the county post office and onto the desk of Jasper, a seasoned and skilled "dead letter" investigator, responsible for investigating lost mail and returning it to its sender. As he investigates further, Jasper meets Trent, a strange yet unassuming man who has taken up residence at the men’s home where Jasper lives. When Trent unexpectedly shows up at Jasper’s office, it becomes clear he has a vested interest in the note, and will stop at nothing to retrieve it...

Buckle up for a time warp comedy-horror that tickles your auditory and visual senses. The latest indie feature, Dead Mail, hails from the writing-directing mastermind team that is Joe DeBoer and Kyle McConaghy. The film premieres at SXSW on March 9 at 3:00 pm at the Violet Crown 2 .

The two filmmakers recently spoke with Script about how they landed on this incredibly unique and unusual concept, to their character work, their creative collaboration, and how they interweaved visual and audio elements to enhance their film.

This interview has been edited for content and clarity.

Sadie Dean: This is a very interesting and unique world. What was the seed for the story idea, and what was the process of you two coming together to execute that?

Kyle McConaghy: Well, I think in terms of the world, one thing that Joe and I have always kind of bonded over is just our kind of smaller town highway, [and] relatives, and we kind of joked around how like you’d see a picture of Uncle Doug in 1978 or 1991, and he kind of looks exactly the same and same styling. So, kind of this ambiguous time period is something that's always been something we wanted to do to hopefully capture one day - so that was kind of a seed of it.

But when Joe and I were writing our first script, I think we were kind of in the final stages of it, Joe came in one day, and he's like, 'Hey, I just read about this thing called the dead letter office. It's this branch at the Postal Service, where they investigate undeliverable mail.' And I was like, 'Oh, my gosh, that's cool.' He's like, 'Yeah, let's have our next project on that.' I'm like, 'Oh, I love that. Let's do it.' And we're just starting to kind of think of like ideas of how to make a film out of this real-life organization.

I was thinking of what became the opening scene, like a middle-aged Midwestern woman bound coming out of the house with the letter, army crawling across the ground. And I told Joe about this opening scene idea, and he's like, 'I really love it. But instead of Midwestern woman, could it be Josh Brolin?' And I was like, ‘Oh, yes. Let's do it.' [laughs] So then we just kind of tried to figure out how to incorporate Josh Brolin - we made him a synthesizer engineer, and just kind of went from there.

Sadie: In terms of your creative collaboration, from writing the script to putting the picture up as both writers and directors, how do you two divvy up responsibilities?

Joe DeBoer: We started writing together a while back, and we would come up with an idea. And then one of us would start writing. And then the other one would come in and basically be like, 'Hey, man, you kind of took that a different direction. That's not what we talked about.' So, we kind of decided at that point, we're just gonna do it all together. So, every single scene, we kind of outline, then we write, we'll fill in dialogue here and there, but pretty much every time it's just better if we take time to do it together.

And then on set, Kyle is visually so talented. I mean, he really leads on the coverage. And I'm kind of more if I were to describe myself, as more of an actor's director, working with cadence and tone and things like that. So, it's really been a good partnership. Kyle's also great at those things as well.

Sadie: There’s a very specific tone carried throughout this film. And I think that’s also executed very well through shot selection and camera angle. Was that written in the script, or something thought of on the day? I keep thinking of the scene with Trent in his garage in his car and that specific coverage.

Kyle: I mean, kind of both, because we love the visual elements of filmmaking, of course, like we write in a lot of the shots in the script and talk through them as we're writing. This film, though, I mean, we kind of just by design, being a low-budget film, we knew we had limited time. So, we shot-listed and storyboarded a lot of it. But I mean, really, we didn’t have too much time to kind of look at the locations and stuff. 

So, this film, we decided we're gonna shoot almost all handheld mostly, we're not going to have any lights other than what's practically there, just to kind of stay nimble. We would like to get a lot of coverage and a lot of different angles. So, to your question, I think like in the car, that's just kind of like, 'Oh quick! We have 10 minutes to get this scene. I'm going to jump in the front seat,' and Joe is going to shake the car or maybe hold the one light or something. We wanted to make sure we had good sets, and our production designer was amazing. And the actors, of course, were amazing. Costumes are amazing. But like, alright, if we have cool, interesting stuff to film, the angles don't really matter so much. Let's just pick off what we instinctually can.

Joe: We kind of made a rule too. We shot as much as we could on an 18 mm Zeiss B speed, which is what they used in Taxi Driver. And we both loved wide-lens close-ups. And we had very confined spaces. So, it just kind of lent itself to the look.

Sadie: Did you guys shoot all this on film? Or is it just those specific shots that you're working on? Or was it all done in post?

Kyle: Joe owns a Red Komodo, which is I guess, kind of one of the lesser expensive Reds. But for whatever reason, we kind of gravitated to the look, I've used it on a previous film. I think what Joe said, the lenses probably gave it most of the look and we kind of wanted to try to at least go big in terms of the color grade and wanted it to feel hopefully not too contemporary.

Sadie: On top of the visual tone of this film, there’s some really fun character work at play, especially through dialogue. For instance when Jasper calls Renée and Renée responds with, “Context, please.” I just thought that was a really clever device to deliver information. Additionally, you guys do a really great job at building intrigue and tension. What was your process or plan of attack on how to build from scene to scene along with character intention and motivation?

Joe: We really start I think with characters. So, the character of Trent was kind of the first one that we had in our minds. And then as we sort of outlined, I think we had the evolution of Josh, and obviously Jasper was kind of the first character besides Trent that we had to formulate, just the idea of sensationalizing this dead letter investigator. And he's just this craftsman. I think it just starts with knowing the characters and then trying to go scene by scene within the outline and make sure it's not boring and that the dialogue is moving the plot forward. But we really don't like explanatory dialogue, to your point, not that anybody does. So trying to make sure we have enough for the viewer while staying true to the character and keeping the plot on point.

Kyle: For this film, at some point, we're trying to kind of just figure out how to process this opening act, and then kind of our mantra is like, alright, we're gonna stay with the letter. The letter is the main focal point of this first act, so let's just follow where this letter would naturally go. And of course, it goes to Jasper, and he becomes kind of a primary character. And I don't think we really, this is a little while ago, Joe, correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think we really knew that we were going to go…like the back story of the letter so quickly in the film, I think it just kind of naturally, at the end of the first act was like, ‘Oh, yeah, it feels like Jasper would meet the end of the run of the letter here.’ And now we got 70 pages we need to write still, ‘Hey, let's now go back and figure out where that letter came from. And how Josh ended up where he was.’

Joe: Yeah, definitely the first act, I feel like that was the first thing we had. And then we kind of had to reverse engineer it.

Sadie: And it works. Another element that was enjoyable was how you utilized synths into your sound design, alongside your score. Was that intentional on the page or did it kind of reveal itself during the creative process?

Kyle: Yeah, I think it was probably during filming. We kind of realized things when we started to talk about what are we going to do for music. And of course, Josh is always noodling on the synth and trying to create new sounds, so maybe we just almost need to just kind of base it off the diegetic sounds that he would be toying with while engineering the synth. And then I think that led us to kind of wanting to just kind of see what was out there.

We love Wendy Carlos, and she's been a huge inspiration to us, musically, and filmmaking-wise, too. But we're just trying to figure out like, ‘Alright, other than her, what other composers, similar early analog synthesizer composers are there?’ We found this composer Janet Beat, who did all this cool stuff and I think it was like mostly the late 70s…it was fun kind of discovering these, unfortunately, pretty unknown non-male synthesizer composers that we really gravitated to, we ended up using a lot. A lot of the score are from these two composers.

Joe: And then we own two analog synths that helped fill a lot of the gaps. So, we've got an SK20, from probably early 70s. In like 2000…early 2000s, Kyle bought this vintage Reverbojet amp that any of your guitars would sound amazing through. So, we used that a lot as well. But we kind of have the gear so it was a little bit of a cheap layup after sourcing some of those awesome composers that Kyle did all the legwork on and Janet Beat especially was such a cool find. She does that tinkering, noisy dissonant stuff that's throughout the film.

Sadie: Yeah, that's awesome. What was the biggest learning curve for you from this second feature that you’ll take with you onto your next film?

Joe: I think for me, our first film that we did together, Bab, I thought was a really original concept. But we hadn't honed the craft of screenwriting, I think yet. I think we had a lot of original ideas. But yeah, for me, it was just taking the time to really refine the script. And make sure the beats are right. And obviously, be as original as possible, but sort of within the constraints of knowing you can lose an audience in three minutes really quickly if there's a boring scene in the first act, things like that.

Kyle: Yeah, I agree. I think we kind of at some point as you're writing it - I don't want to throw specific examples because we know it's nothing close - but we're like, ‘Alright, maybe this is kind of more of like a straightforward Hitchcock type mystery film’ or our mediocre version of it. But then I think kind of within the context of what we felt like we were maybe just trying to follow a little more of a traditional story path was like, ‘Alright, what's the most unique choice we can make?’ At least within our maybe not always the most creative minds - let's just try to go big with everything visually, sonically audio-wise…We just always wanted to try to make the most strange one, I guess. 

Dead Mail 2024 SXSW World Premiere & Screening Times:

Violet Crown 2, Saturday, March 9 at 3:00 pm

Violet Crown 4, Saturday, March 9 at 3:30 pm

Alamo Lamar 8, Monday, March 11 at 8:45 pm

Alamo Lamar 7, Monday, March 11 at 9:15 pm

Alamo Lamar 8, Wednesday, March 13 at 2:00 pm

Alamo Lamar 7, Wednesday, March 13 at 2:30 pm