EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW WITH DIRECTOR AND ACTOR JOHN CHARLES GERALD ~ JOHNNY

Thank you John Charles for taking the time to do this interview with NVRI. 

Kindly introduce yourself to our audience.

My name is John Charles Gerald; a film director in Los Angeles California. I’m open to all genres of filmmaking but I find myself specializing in the dark psychological subjects with subtext and subliminal content bordering the horror genre. I’m a self taught filmmaker with an audio engineering degree. My degree and over twenty years of experience in audio, has helped me tremendously in my career. I was born in Florida and migrated to California where I made my feature film Johnny.

2. Tell us about your most recent project Johnny, what is the premise of the film and what do you hope that the audience learns?

Johnny is a wonderful film! It took six years to complete due to financial challenges. It is a dark psychological film considered extremely disturbing by many viewers about an individual suffering from an abuse trauma who later finds a creepy puppet as a way of coping with that trauma and digging for answers. The purpose of this film is both to entertain and to inform or raise awareness of how serious an abuse trauma can be in an adult, specially if this trauma happened in the adults childhood. This is more common than we all think; I have found through research, that about eight out of ten people have suffered some sort of abuse either in their childhood or in their adulthood. It’s a worldwide disgusting Eepidemic in which I was a victim of myself, so I have dedicated this film to all the victims of abuse in the world.

3. How did you come up with the idea for your film Johnny?

I was making a music video for one of my songs because I used to be in music for years and in this song, there’s a quick dialogue in the beginning that for some reason ended up sounding like a puppet voice, so I decided to build a puppet for this music video. It took me about three months full-time of building this thing! The music video was extremely complicated to make, so while the music video was failing, a film idea was being born. As I was looking at this completed puppet, I couldn’t stop to think how great a film would be with a puppet like this done in a very different way to the traditional possessed evil doll. I needed a story to tell and couldn’t find one with a puppet involved in it, so I decided to tell my own. At first, I didn’t know how or where to put the puppet in the loop, so I just started shooting in an improvised way at first and then the story started to call me and it started to put the pieces together itself and so there Johnny was born with a perfect place for the puppet in the story.

4. Tell us about your character Floyd Norm... What do you love about him and what do you hate about him?

Floyd is a very interesting character. He’s a victim of abuse and his mind has a damaged cluster or section caused by trauma so he’s a very peculiar character trying to be a survivor of this trauma. He’s not a bad guy but he’s not a hero either; he’s just a damaged product stacked in a shelf in the returns/clearance aislef of life and he’s fed up with it so all he’s doing is just trying to look for answers. He wants to know why he is this  way and what the heck is going on. I like Floyd a lot and there’s nothing I don’t like about the character other than it is based on my own life. I wish it wasn’t, but it is.

5. Wow, not only were you the lead character, but you also wrote, produced, directed and did the cinematography. Did you find it to be difficult or easy wearing so many hats in creating Johnny?

 

I believe it was a terrible but necessary situation and it is more common than I thought because most filmmakers have gone through this before in their first films, so yes, it is terrible because you’re doing all of these things with limited help which becomes time consuming and very stressful but you’re also learning about each department in a movie and you’re getting hands-on experience with everything that happens in the films ecosystem so that later on in one’s career, you can better manage the entire crew because you know about everything and it makes you a much better problem solver because you have the knowledge and experience to solve the multiple problems that can be thrown at you without warning.

6. Who inspired you the most in the film industry and why?

I have many favorite filmakers that I respect and admire and that I have stolen little things from as we all do from each other in the film industry, and sometimes it is difficult for me to pick one over the other because they have all contributed to who I am now, but I would say somebody that has inspired me as far as having a laser focused vision and perseverance to the point of having a stroke, is master George Lucas. As far as artistically and technically, I have a bit of a long list but the one that gets closest to who I am as far as how to craft a film, would be Stanley Kubrick. 

7. If you could put one major celebrity in one of your films, who would it be and what would the film be about?

I would put Nicolas Cage in one or more of my films because I feel that he has done so many films that he can play virtually any character. I love his versatility and wide range as an actor. 

8. What are some of the things you enjoy doing when you are not filmmaking?

I would say operating the camera and seeing how my vision gets executed in front of my eyes in a tangible format as I polish the character’s performances according to my vision and purpose for the film. I enjoy most of the technical aspects of crafting a film but when I do too much it does wear me out.

9. What is next for John Charles, do you have any projects in development?

I am making a new film right now about another mentally ill character or maybe I should start calling my characters “patients” of the John Charles Geerald mental institution of Film. This mentally ill character gets obsessed with a woman half his age and… I’m not telling you anymore. I cant wait to delight my audience with this one. Specially when my main character goes on a bloody killing spree!

 

10. How can your fans get updates about you and your films? Your website or social media links ?

The best place to find me is on my website at urbantunnelfilms.com I am on Instagram as @urbantunnelfilms or type my name and you’ll find me. I use the same name everywhere else on socia mmedia but my website or IMDB is the best place to find more about me.

All available streaming platforms and view trailer here

https://midnightreleasing.com/filmcatalog/johnny/