This film was processed by hand.  Josh took the super-8 cartridges apart and dunked the film manually in slide-developer.  That's why it's so rough-looking.  That's also why the digital compression is so bad: I apologize.  There's just too much information here to fit into 10 megabytes.

This is one of those experiential film projects that I love so much.  Not "experimental", "experiential".  According to the story I heard from Josh, when he and his actor friend went up into the mountains to shoot, it started to rain, they got lost and wandered around the woods all day, and then stumbled upon this demolished house.   So, in a sense, the desperation of the character is very real.

I find this style of filmmaking so much more interesting than a carefully scheduled and storyboarded shoot. Apocalypse Now, for instance, is a good movie, but knowing that Francis Ford Coppola was out in the jungle for like 250 days shooting it, and driving himself mad in the process, elevates it for me to a level of high art.

A lot of filmmakers rely on their actors to have this kind of reality in reserve, hiding out in their imagination or sense memory somewhere.  But I think really good directors create this world for their actors, and the actors get to just live in it.

"Empty" is pervaded by a powerful feeling of hopelessness and despair.  You don't even need to know, in the end, that it's supposed to be a film about the end of human civilization: it's the intensity that matters.