Hello, I'm John McGrath.

I'm a producer for Kansas City PBS and today on A.. we bring you the Kansas-lensed feature film Head Count.

Head count was written and directed by Ben and Jacob Burghart.

We sat in the studios to talk to the brothers about their debut feature, an amazing short film that got them noticed, and their passion for telling stories set in and about their home state of Kansas.

What's in the gun?

Okay.

How many bullets are left?

Think.

So Head Count is a.. pointed at the back of his head and he's trying to remember what happened to each bullet as the trigger gets pulled and each bullet is sort of a different memory, almost a different short story.

And through all these short stories, we see this larger picture of how he got in this situation and how he's going to escape.

And if he escapes, if he escapes, yeah.

Let's have some fun.

Here, kitty, kitty.

So tell me the inspiration of it, yeah, Ben, what was the inspiration because it came from a short?

Right.

Like, tell me how it came about.

So we're big fans of, I think we're trying to describe as like kind of a high concept idea, and so for us, it was a combination of the Coen brothers’ “Blood Simple”, their earliest film, and then also Christopher Nolan's “Memento.” So it's kind of this western, kind of neo noir that also has these elements of kind of detective trying to piece together a memory, and we kind of just fused those together and that became Head Count.

Yeah, originally it was a short film that we did for a 48 hour film festival that we did for about a decade in Lawrence, Kansas.

And, we saw the short, we saw the potential, and we were like, hey, let's take this and expand it into a feature.

Is Joe okay?

Who?

No man, no one is okay.

And then kind of working together as brothers, we do so much in tandem.

When it comes to concepting the film, you know, we usually have some kind of high concept we start with, and then we start fleshing out scenes.

We have so much reference material that we show to the cast and crew from, you know, imagery to other films.

We make our own trailers and look books and all these things kind of really help inspire the crew and the actors and gets them excited because that's all you have to really show them.

You can describe all day you want, but once you have these kind of visual representations, that really gets them excited and then we storyboard every shot.

We storyboard every edit practically.

We do animatics for trickier scenes.

The opening scene on the “Chain Gang” becomes more complicated.

We had a storyboard that and showing all those to the actors and producers and people gives people confidence and lets people see the movie in their heads.

And it's just such a so, so helpful for us.

Yeah, because you guys are graphic designers and what I noticed when I researched you, you're very visual.

Tell that to young filmmakers how they're missing that.

Here's here here's my piece of paper I want you to read and give me money and be inspired by that.

Tell me - it's so amazing what you guys do.

I think about this all the time.

This is what I want to tell all starting filmmakers is that it's a visual medium and that, you know, the greatest, I think the greatest filmmaker of..

He was the greatest of all the grounds.

Buster Keaton and his films are pure, purely visual.

It is “Looney Tunes” style set up, you know, set up expectations, do a reversal.

Everything comes through in facial expressions and just lean into what is your film without any dialog.

I think what really kind of sparked that idea of making it very visual is that when we were younger, you know, eight, ten, we were making films out.

We're out from the middle of nowhere town called Offerle by Dodge City.

200 people.

And so there were no film schools there.

There was no, like, mystic filmmaker living out that we went to.

Like, we just had to figure it out ourselves and I think when we started doing the 40 hour film festival in Lawrence, we said, okay, we're not the best actors, we don't have the best cameras.

Like the, you know, the only thing we can do is tell the best story visually.

“Suspense” is about a paratrooper who gets jettisoned out of a plane that's exploding and then his parachute gets stuck in a tree canopy and he's too high off the ground to where he can't just drop down or he'll be severely injured.

Hello?

Hello?

And he's basically stuck there in the night, in the dark and then basically a creature shows up in the night.

and so he has to figure out how to get out of the situation.

Shorts or comedy shorts.

Horror shorts.

This puts somebody in a situation and then i.. which I thought was great.

Am I making sense here?

Yeah, I think that's Stephen King's wh..

I think that, you know, I wish he could see it some day because .. almost like a short story of his, like “Gerald's Game” or something, where it's just stuck in a unique situation that's especially awful.

And that was a big inspiration also.

Okay, so it holds six bullets.

What perspective do you guys bring to your film?

I think the perspective we bring for this film especially is like Ben said, we grew up in a really small town by Dodge City, middle of nowhere.

But we've lived in Kansas our entire lives, and when we were looking at this film, we said, you know, there's a lot of films set in Kansas.

I feel like there's not a lot of fi.. And that was important to us, is that we really get the Kansas attitude, the Kansas kind of perspective, the sense of humor, the Catholicism is important in this movie, the characters, the chain gang.

I don't know if Kansas has chain gangs anymore but a lot of, you know, a lot of the kind of the characters that show up in the film are based off of people that we knew growing up.

So we love bringing that.

And then, you know, I think he, at one point, our main character, v.. like an abandoned house that a grandmother used to have and left to the grandkids.

It's like we used to go to those all the time when we were younger and our, you know, our main character talks about working in a grain silo and like, we.. and that was really intense and so all of these kind of personal touches we w.. you know, someone around Kansas and be like, oh, yeah, I recognize it, but to someone, you know, across the world or across the US, they would be like, oh, well, this is really interesting.

It's like when they watch “Fargo” or something like, oh, I didn't know.

Like the specificity makes it more .. you know, play a really broad audience or a really broad stroke.

Yeah, that makes it more universal.

The more specific it is and the more specific your opinion is.

And yeah, the more personal, the more creative.

I think that's what it scores, as he said.

So that's what we're trying to do.

That's what we like to do.

And yeah, it's just fun.

We just want to make.. and that's what we've been doing since we were kids, so that's the goal.

Kansas City.

How great is Kansas City?

Kansas City is amazing.

You could not make this film anywhere else.

You know, there are so many talented people here.

There are so many amazing locations, so many passionate people, so much so much potential here to make amazing stuff and I don't want it to go to Oklahoma, I don't want it to go to, you know, Georgia and Illinois.

You know, let's let's pass some awesome tax cuts.

Let's do it.

Let's do.. and not, you know, creative brain drain out to L.A. or to Georgia.

You know, there's so much.. You know what else do you have to say?

You said it all.

Yeah.

That's it.

Yeah.

It's great, it's great.

And like I said, there's so many films, you .. about Kansas.

You know, there's so much more potential here.

You know, I've seen it.

There's I've seen it.

There's nothing el..

I know everything about LA and New York.

I don't care anymore.

You know what's going on here?

Well, I'm gonna die.

I'm willing to take that chance.