Co-directors Jason Sikorsky and Tad Sallee discuss their five-year journey creating Going Postal: The Legacy Foretold, a documentary on the game Postal and its creators, Running With Scissors. They explore filmmaking challenges, the gaming industry's volatility, and aim to inspire future creators. The film is set for release in Spring 2025 and is available for pre-order now! | In The Keep | Support In The Keep |
Transcripts
Music:
[0:00] Music
Jason:
[0:33] Lived in uh tucson uh together and we had both gone to the university of arizona um neither of us actually met each other during our tenure at the university but um we both were in film school and i guess we never had the same class because i never saw tad and tad never saw me granted we were like in different programs but i feel like our paths should have still crossed at some point,
Jason:
after we graduate i graduated:
Tad:
]:
Jason:
[1:08] One of those years i graduated college yeah yeah well it was around probably 15 or 16 that we met right.
Tad:
[1:17] Yeah yeah it would have been around then because i remember i was i mean we were both kind of looking for work and that's really how we met was at a clinique gig so basically we were handing out bottles of clinique and it was kind of a marketing position where you had to be boots on the ground like talking to people handing out this product and we weren't getting paid much but it was like enough for us to want to do this because like it's Clinique like how uh how how are you gonna take the bottle from us like we're guys like what do we know about Clinique and um so we ended up talking and we met each other that way and we're like kind of shocked that we had never met each other before up until that point um yeah we were in the film program and we both had a love for movies for film for television just kind of clicked and then from there the magic just transpired we uh we started working together um we ended up living together at one point for quite a while too like jason was saying and that's kind of where the idea for a film or something related because we were doing films and we were doing stuff but we hadn't done our own project so it was
Tad:
[2:25] When jason was directing the show um and i was assistant director on it that he brought me on for and i approached jason i was like hey i want to do something with video games because we both have a love for video games and um we kind of had an idea for like a youtube channel just basically like kind of a deep dive into like an mtv version of going into development offices
Tad:
in:
Tad:
[2:55] And it's funny I was just talking to a friend of mine yesterday about that last E3 because that was the last E3 that has ever happened might ever happen again right oh sorry And we were kind of going around to meeting developers, meeting people to kind
Tad:
[3:09] of just get general ideas. And we kind of left that with some ideas, but nothing firm. And then it wasn't until Jason, you knew somebody that knew Mike J, right?
Jason:
[3:21] Yeah, this girl that I was kind of seeing at the time, she was hanging out at my house.
Jason:
[3:27] And I told her, oh, I'm trying to make this YouTube channel with my friend. It's going to be about video games or films yada yada and she was like oh that's a really cool idea i actually know someone that works on video games and um i looked at her and i was like sure tucson really i'm like what what game and she's like um it's like some game called postal and um i i was just in shock i was like wait postal i'm like uh i remember watching that movie as a kid and i remember looking into the video game series at that time too so i was familiar with it i i hadn't played the game i just seen the movie that uva bold directed um and sure enough uh she pulls up the game and verifies with me that it's the postal and um she puts me in touch with mike jay and me and tad go and sit down for ramen and um two hours later he kind of just deep dives into the whole history of Postal and we're sitting there just like,
Jason:
[4:28] wow, this is insane.
Jason:
[4:31] First of all, super cool to meet you and super cool that you're here in Tucson. And can we please make a feature documentary about you and running with scissors and it kind of just blossomed from there.
Tad:
[4:42] Yeah. Well, we were originally, I think when we heard his story,
Tad:
[4:45] we're like, okay, I don't know if this is a YouTube series anymore. I think this has to be something bigger because you can't entail 25 years of
Tad:
ally we wanted to come out in:
Jason:
ers we printed it says coming:
Jason:
[5:59] to think about now looking back three years.
Ty:
duke nukem forever coming in:
Jason:
[6:57] Yeah i mean it's uh we appreciate that um we we definitely felt that we needed to take those extra couple years uh to really polish this into a uh well-produced documentary it was it was initially um actually you know i'd say we didn't really know what we were getting into we had never made a movie before we we knew what we wanted to come out on top with um but i think the main thing is we just didn't realize how much time and energy it takes to make a two-hour documentary on top of having full-time jobs.
Ty:
[7:32] Yeah, it was going to be actually another question I had, but basically,
Ty:
[7:35] this is your first ever real movie. Both of you, yeah?
Jason:
[7:40] Yeah, it's our first feature, our first feature, for sure.
Ty:
[7:45] Did you have friends or mentors to walk you through that process, or did you just jump in both feet and go for it? what was that like
Jason:
[7:55] Do you want to start sure um.
Tad:
[7:59] Yeah, I mean, both me and Jason have had experiences working in film and TV
Tad:
[8:04] before we started this project. So we had experiences. We knew what we wanted to get into. We had a crew that we had been working with that was already fantastic. So we already had pretty much all of our T's crossed, which was great. And we had had experiences working in well-produced stuff, which was nice. So we had the connections there. um it wasn't really until like post-production where we were like uh we had the opportunity to meet somebody that was a high-ranking producer in hollywood and we sat down and had lunch with with him and um uh we kind of just generally was talking about the film and and he he gave us some ideas and one of them actually transpired to uh what we included in the film which is a little more of a controversial take into the film.
Tad:
[8:53] And so we kind of took what he said and really integrated that into the movie, which is something that it needed. And so it was nice to hear from somebody who's actually producing stuff for film and television right now, what their thoughts were. And so we really took that and ran with it. So it was nice to have that. For the most part, on our day-to-day when we're editing, I mean, we're watching it, we're sending it out to people, we're getting feedback. We had rough cut screenings like we had a lot of um people and running with scissors of course too uh that would give us feedback um so we had a lot of people there that were giving us feedback as we were actually producing the film so that really helped and then it's nice to have a full team because you really this took this took a village we had four or five editors throughout the whole project um that would do uh assistant editing while i was doing the main project so it's nice because you have everybody that's kind of coming together and giving each other feedback and so that helps because you're essentially screening it to other people while you're making it, making the film. Um, but there was nobody who was really like, this is how you do it. Like we were pretty much from, from the get go kind of making it up as we go along.
