Director's Commentary

Rod used to rave on and on to us about David Lynch's Lost Highway… so one night Dave and I decided to rent it and watch it once and for all. It totally blew us away. Never have I walked away from a film so confused… and I've seen Eyes Wide Shut! I couldn't figure it out at all, and I was shocked by the total lack of sense. That night, Dave and I decided that we're going to make our own version of Lost Highway.

To do so, we sat down and just scribbled down 15 or so abstract scenes and ideas that we liked… and then we arranged them into some semblance of a narrative plot involving a single character walking around having weird shit happen to him. It's like that surrealist film that Salvador Dali made with that other guy when they wrote down their nightmares and filmed it.

And the very next day Simon came over and we shot it. Simple as that. I think it was a pretty impulsive experience, and I really like it for that reason. We wrote, we shot, we edited and we laughed. The total production time from start to finish was just four days. I don't think we've ever made anything so quickly before, without much hesitation or procrastination.

The Fourth Place then also became one of my more popular videos. It could be because it's shorter and more accessible to people, without the icky subtitled nature of PMS or the in-joke concept of UGR. It was also the first of my works to be screened to the public at a uni screening (along with Ass Wide Shut, a short video I made), where it became one of the big crowd pleasers. Up until this point, I hadn't gotten much praise from strangers before, so I was majorly stoked by that.