The Last Passion of Samurai Jesus

Some people just don’t know when to die…

The year was 2005. It was the heart of the Bush era and my junior year of college. My friend and I had devised a plan before summer break to make a feature-length film that would put the epic win back in our lives at a time when America was a dissapointing failure of Christian War-hawks and wasted lives. It was Monty Python meets Kurosawa. This project was the groundbreaking cornerstone of my college years. The film represented everything that meant most in my life:

The Last Passion of Samurai Jesus – final showdown

Samurai Jesus took a semester to write and a semester to shoot, cut and produce. Prior to the premier, we stayed up for 50 continuous hours working to finish editing, export and burn. Without Facebook, YouTube, Kickstarter, a car or a cellphone, we made this happen. My laptop’s internal hard-drive was only 20gb and its 256mb of RAM made rendering a bit glitchy. Most of the roles were played by our friends, very few of them actors or filmmakers, with a total cast and crew of almost 75 people. I directed and starred without ever learning any of my lines. We made all of our own props and scouted all the locations ourselves. No one was paid. Our budget was under $500, and after selling dvds we actually turned a small profit. Over 300 students and faculty came to the first screening at a 1,100 student school.

When the credits rolled, it was the happiest I’d ever been— there surrounded by my friends and coconspirators.
It was truly one of the greatest shared experiences of my life.

• • •

Oh, and I met my partner as an extra bonus 😀 The moment is captured in the clip above. I actually stabbed her before I knew her name, all while wearing Zombie Samurai Jesus make-up.

Auspicious beginnings indeed.

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