Five Questions with Chris Ingvordsen

Grab your IMDb login and a notebook because film school is in session. In his latest interview, Michael Melamedoff goes deep into the New York City indie film scene of the 80s and 90s with none other than the legendary cult filmmaker Chris Ingvordsen. From VHS to verticals, to Sandra Bullock and WWII submarines, find out how Chris is continually adapting to the times and never taking his eye off the economics of storytelling.

This interview has been condensed for length and clarity.

MICHAEL MELAMEDOFF: I am very excited to be here today with Chris Ingvordsen, one of my favorite honorary Cowboys Bears and Ninjas. Chris and I first met working together on our television special, In With the Old: The Andes Hotel, for the Magnolia Network. And Chris, when you and I were first introduced, my business partner, Matt Semel, told me “You're going to love Chris. He is one of us and he is truly somebody who can do everything.” And on that special, you did. You were a producer and production manager and a cinematographer at times and key grip and location sound recordist and AD. As I dug into how it was that you were able to do all of these jobs, I realized we knew a lot of the same people from the indie film world. You are an incredibly accomplished filmmaker with a career spanning now over 40 years. 

‍You have a number of incredible credits, including the beloved cult classic Blue Vengeance, the Frank White trilogy – which anybody who grew up with late night cable in the 80s and 90s probably came across at some point – and more recently, the Air Boss series. I need to ask you about all of this, but what I'll start with is: As somebody who has been a director, a producer, a writer, and a star across your movies, what opportunity did you see when you started out in the early 1980s that made you believe that you could build a career outside of the traditional Hollywood system? Was there a business model that you were trying to create?

CHRIS INGVORDSEN: No, but I guess I had always wanted to be a filmmaker. I didn't go to a traditional film school. I went to Duke University, which had no film program. Now it has a very, very accomplished one. I grew up in New York City, so I came back after I graduated and I ran into a high school classmate whose uncle was John G. Avildsen, who had just done Rocky. So I kind of stumbled into the business kind of PA-ing for John G. Avildsen. It was very fortuitous that that happened. The early 80s to the mid 80s was an interesting time for indie films because of the mom and pop VHS phenomena. There was just this incredible need for what's described today as content, but then it was films. And I, even though I hadn't had a traditional film school background, was kind of street-taught. I just met people that were also trying to do this, and we seized the opportunity. So I just started making independent films. And that was kind of my start. 

MICHAEL: Was there a business model that you were trying to create? How were you thinking about budgets and genre, recognizable actors, financing, and how you would sell these movies? 

CHRIS: Well, that's interesting because shooting on film, you actually had to have some amount of money to do it. Now things are much more democratic with technology. But back then you really had to raise a little money. Luckily, a lot of my friends from school were getting their first jobs on Wall Street. And I was absolutely a pauper, but they had a little money. So I just sort of put together limited partnerships. And I started making genre films not as some kind of a strategy – it was the kind of the films that I grew up with, you know, cop movies and action movies – and that's kind of where my sensibility was. And that actually worked very well for the marketplace because it was exactly what the mom and pop video stores needed. So I made a silly comedy, Firehouse. Then I made a movie called Hangman, which was kind of an action film, and we were off to the races. 

MICHAEL: And that was Sandra Bullock’s feature film debut, right? 

CHRIS: It certainly was. You know, it's so funny. Everybody remarks, how did you find Sandra Bullock? It’s just that casting is so essential to making a film. I was just doing my job, seeing tons and tons of actors and actresses. And this person was just fantastic. Of course I'm going to hire her.

MICHAEL: So let's talk about casting for a second because you mentioned earlier John G. Avildsen and Rocky – which funnily enough, I just watched with my son about two weeks ago. It's stunning watching that movie now realizing that it's a studio film, albeit a small studio film. But in so many ways so rough around the edges. Don't get me wrong, it's beautifully directed. It's so thoughtfully shot. We can thank that movie for things like the steadicam, right? So it's not like it's without technical merit. But there is a lived-in quality to that movie, and so much of that comes not just from Philadelphia circa the late 1970s, but Sylvester Stallone and his performance and that decision to center himself in that movie. You, too, have frequently starred in or co-starred in your movies. Why did you choose to make yourself so central to the entire production as a writer, as a director, as the star – was starring in the movies primarily a creative decision, a practical one, an economic one? 

CHRIS: It was very much practical. I never wanted to be an actor. I had no delusions about that, no ego. But it was just one less actor to cast [laughs] and I could handle the action stunt character, you know, running around being the good guy, bad guy. It was hard to cast [that character]. New York back in the 80s had a lot of character types. So if you needed the older police captain, you had it. But I just didn't know any sort of action figure guys. So that's why I ended up doing it. And the people that I came up with in the industry – most of whom started [indie production company and distribhtor] The Shooting Gallery – just figured we had to do everything. So we would put ourselves in the films. We would switch off doing sound or shooting it or whatever. We thought we had to do that, so that's how it happened.

MICHAEL: I've only co-starred in one of the movies that I've produced, and maybe I should be doing it more. 

[They laugh.] 

I will say early in your career, part of your model involved putting recognizable actors like Lance Henriksen, Martin Kove, Sandra Bullock into your films. But in more recent work over the past decade, you've gravitated towards working with actors and filmmakers from your own community. You're based in Upstate New York, and you've been making a series of works that feature performers drawn from where you live now. What's the basis for that choice? Is that a response to how the economics have changed? Or do you find it more rewarding? 

CHRIS: When we started out, we didn't have any sort of recognizable names. But we hooked up with a distributor in LA, Shapiro Glickenhaus – Leonard Shapiro and James Glickenhaus, who were mini majors at the time. And they were like, You're going to have to put someone recognizable in your films. That added a whole level of complexity. Not just in money, but what sort of set are they expecting? What sort of perks? What sort of attitude? So we started out with Jake LaMotta – a recognizable name after Raging Bull. And then we met Lance Henriksen, who was in a couple of my films and just an amazing, amazing person and actor. So creative. Such a team player. He became like the head of the acting department, all the young actors loved him. Billy Drago, another guy who was like that. So we kind of worked around the edges. And then as time went on into the aughts and the 2010s, it became less important. So now I'm sort of a curmudgeon in Upstate New York where there are a lot of people with skill sets: cinematographers, actors, et cetera. So I'm just going for people who are great actors and the chips fall where they may. I probably can't afford a star anymore. So that's the economic progression.

MICHAEL: Speaking of economic progressions, you've managed to keep making independent movies and – as you said before – what we now call content, through several completely different distribution economies. Pay cable, VHS and direct to video, the DVD boom...more recently, streaming. Throughout all of those transitions, what has actually stayed the same? And when one marketplace disappears and another emerges, what do you think you understood about making films economically and finding an audience that allowed you to keep going? 

CHRIS: For filmmakers out there – you have to pay attention to the economics. Yes, it’s about passion, it's about creativity. But at the end of the day, if you're going to make a film and you have investors, if you want it to be scalable – and by that, I mean, do you want to make another one? – you better pay attention to maybe getting their money back. That was something I always understood because my friends bankrolled my first films, and I knew that if I were to keep going I had to pay attention to getting their money back. 

How we do that has changed so many times – we started out with the mom and pop thing when it was never really about getting into movie theaters. Except in foreign markets, they would always need prints. So we had VHS or DVD domestically, but overseas it was about theatrical and all of their ancillary markets. Now it’s pure streaming. Some you pay for, some you don't. But that is the new marketplace. 

Now it's so much easier to make a film – you need so much less money. You really just need the skillset. As you well know, you can actually shoot the film on your phone. I don't recommend it because of the sound, but even pro cinema cameras are very, very affordable now. So what really counts is your creativity and your skillset. And once again, you better learn how to do everything. I highly recommend that to everyone. Learn every department.

MICHAEL: Speaking of these transitions, you're now moving into new spaces. Specifically your latest project is one in a long line of really unique and interesting thrillers and horror films that you've been working on for the past few decades: Crush Depth is actually a vertical series designed explicitly for TikTok and Instagram. It's a really, really cool series set on a submarine. You somehow pulled it off with a very little budget and a lot of local talent. And of course, with the support of Corey Tatarczuk, who is a beloved colleague here at Cowboy Bear Ninja.

Verticals is a format associated more with phones and social platforms. After more than 40 years adapting to new ways audiences are consuming movies, what do you see in vertical storytelling that reminds you of the opportunities that you saw in cable or home video decades ago? 

CHRIS: So about a year and a half ago, verticals came on my radar. It's amazing how it's just now on the industry's radar because it has been a phenomenon overseas, particularly in China, and also a big producer is Ukraine and Eastern Europe. You know, it's just another way of telling stories. I don't need to be a purist about it, I'm not making Lawrence of Arabia or The Searchers with a beautiful horizontal image. You know what? I just wanted to try it because I didn't see it as any different than telling a traditional feature story. In a way, it's like you were writing a novel but now you're writing a haiku. It's okay. There's still an art to it. 

And in my traditional overachieving ambition, I decided to turn a WWII submarine horror feature script that I’ve been wanting to do for years into a vertical series. It was a real learning curve and not in a bad way, in an interesting and fun way. It's not just that your framing is vertical. It was actually in the writing. It's very formulaic: you come in on the hook, the action escalates, and you go out on the cliffhanger. That wasn’t necessarily easy to adapt from a feature script with a slow burn act one, but the format was fun. 

MICHAEL: As somebody who had big hopes and dreams for Quibi (rest in peace) one of the big mistakes that I thought they made as a platform was trying to carve down traditional TV and feature storytelling into seven minute chunks, rather than thinking about how differently audiences were receiving content on social and how differently the pace of story had to move. Is this a space that you're going to do more now having one under your belt?

CHRIS: I think so. I realized mostly what is out there in the microdrama space right now is romance and romantasy. It's like, “I met a billionaire werewolf.” And that’s okay – that's also what is mostly selling in books. But I wanted to try horror, which is something that I'm pretty steeped in as a producer and director. And it was, like I said, a learning curve, but it was really rewarding. And I really enjoyed doing it. 

MICHAEL: I am very eager personally – and this is a call to action for you, for anybody – but I think what would immediately jump out in this space is a return to the sort of the titillating 80s slasher horror movies. Jump scares, immediate shock, visuals that grab you right away, pretty faces in the woods… It's both a genre that I love and a challenge that I’d be eager to take on. So something to think about for us, Chris, if anything is striking your fancy in that space…

CHRIS: You're so right on – your intuition is right. I heard someone describe doing a microdrama as a negotiation with the audience. Are they going to swipe to the next episode, or are they going to swipe to the next thing? It's nothing different than everybody else in media. You're trying to hold an audience. You just don't have the slow burn. You don't have time for character development. It’s more visual and it's more emotional. That doesn't mean it has to be cheesy. It just means that you're instantly grabbing people. That was a learning curve for me.

I'm going to shout out to Corey [Tatarczuk] – who did our entire post-production. She is such an incredibly talented, intuitive editor. I've worked with 50 editors and she is just the top tier. She is a huge part in making Crush Depth work. Together, we're learning how to grab the audience and tell a story within that minute or minute and a half time frame. So it was fun. It was a little bit hard, but it was a lot of fun 

MICHAEL: To quote our poet laureate Olivia Rodrigo: Past mistakes are just new information.

CHRIS: [laughs] There ya go. I love it.

MICHAEL: Where can people watch h Depth, Chris? 

CHRIS: Right now Crush Depth is on my socials: Instagram and YouTube. We're ending our season one this week with 18 episodes, and then trying to find one of the new upstart horror streaming services that are experimenting with verticals. I really had a blast doing this with very, very talented, hardworking team player actors who have been in my repertory company for a while. We started shooting in mid-February in an old World War II warship with no heat, no electricity. So talk about actors who are team players. Shout out to them. 

MICHAEL: They're lucky to work with you, as we all are. And thank you so much for taking the time to chat with me today.

CHRIS: My pleasure. Thank you, Michael.

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