We weren't.

You know, we're sort of film geeks guys that like to watch a lot of movies and talk about a lot of movies.

And I remember the day that we told our father that he was gonna drop out of law school to make a movie blow.

Where the Russo Brothers I'm Anthony and I'm gel.

And this is the timeline of our careers l a x 2194.

Yes, you.

If you pull us up on I am Devi, you'll find this interesting title there.

Yeah, it's called L a x 2194.

We have nothing to do with that project.

So we don't know why it's on our We've actually tried for years to get it off, or I am Devi Page unsuccessfully.

You've never heard of it?

Were Cleveland at the time going to school?

I have no idea What So I am Devi, if you're listening, please, Can you take that off?

You've never heard of it?

Are very very first movie was called pieces Joe and I made it.

We shot it between like 94 97 because about which is why we weren't working at l.

A x 21 exactly took three years to shoot this movie in our hometown of Cleveland.

I'll using friends and family is cast and crew.

Yeah, we were inspired by Robert Rodriguez, who had recently made El Mariachi and wrote a book about how he made a movie for $7000.

We, unfortunately, did not get this movie done for $7000.

Cost us a little bit more than that.

We ran out of money here.

We did remember we shot this shot on 16 millimeter.

We ran out of money and we had a key negative in the fridge there six months Saturday.

If there had been a black the entire film, we would have lost the whole movie.

We're sort of film geeks, guys that like to watch a lot of movies and talk about a lot of movies.

And we weren't necessarily Spielberg in the backyard with the camera shooting films.

We really didn't know how to make a movie.

We had to buy some books to teach yourself how to do it from one guy in Cleveland.

That could be a GP, and I remember the day that we told our father that he was gonna drop out of law school to make a movie.

It was a rough day.

Didn't speak to him for six months.

But a lot of awkward meals at the dinner, too.

Yeah, it was awkward for a period there, but he eventually came around and became one of our biggest champion.

So he he became very happy at some point.

Choices were not here sitting here, not her father.

So, yeah, it was a very experimental genre film, the kind of movie that only a guy like Steven Soderbergh would, uh would enjoy.

And thank goodness he was actually sitting in the theater for that screening.

Said he really liked the movie and it was the start of our careers.

We never released it because we have a lot of meat music in that movie that we actually cut the film to.

We don't know anything about the film business and how much music costs.

So when we went to clear Led Zeppelin and Funkadelic and all these other awesome bands were used in the movie, I couldn't afford, you were sort of like what we need to pay for this stuff.

Really.

It was a film.

It's a disaster.

It's a documentary.

It's supposed to look like that good news is save his crack.

I received a phone call while I was living, you see, like student housing, and I picked it up and the voice on the other end said, I this is Steven Soderbergh.

Joe there was getting an M f A degree in film at the time.

You see a way, and I thought it was one of my fellow classmates messing with me.

Unfortunately for us, it was actually Steven Soderbergh.

We want Thio eat with him at a Riverside Cuban restaurant on Venice Boulevard in Los Angeles.

Had a really interesting conversation with him.

He said he wanted to produce her next film and help us get into the business.

He really liked some of the stylized elements of pieces, and I thought we had potential.

I was gonna become our godfather, said Speak, at which point we, Joe and I went into about a three year cycle where we wrote three screenplays.

Eventually, Stephen formed a partnership with George Clooney when they were making Ocean's 11 so they had a production company based at Warner Brothers and we got a call one day from the head of their production company and he said, Basically, Stephen wants to produce the mother movies through this company, and you guys were the first name he brought up.

So we sort of showed up with our three scripts that we had written, and Steven said that one and we made welcome to Collinwood took us about a year to cast the movie were relatively unknown filmmakers with movie that only Steven Soderbergh liked.

So you know, not necessarily a calling card phone, and we sat on the couch in Jordan.

Stephens office used to call it the Russo Brothers Corner on.

We had a phone and a side table, and we make calls all day just trying to get actors interested talking to agents.

This was in the very like a right around 2000.

I think that we're doing this so is right after that sort of the epic nineties, the indie films of the nineties.

So we were able to target like some of our favorites from those movies.

Sam Rockwell, William H.

Macy, Patricia Clarkson, Michael Jeter, Washington.

George Clooney played a role in the film George actually jump start the movie.

We couldn't.

I could get the budget we needed until George actually took a roll.

A small role in the film.

Uh, but, uh, he steals every scene he's playing.

A safecracker teaches, um, teaches our group of criminals how to crack a safe, which is the way we were able to go back home in Cleveland, where we had made pieces originally.

And, you know, the prior film we had made was basically a do it yourself movie where where the crew is, like, you can count them on one hand.

So we go to our first day of shooting.

I'm welcome to Collinwood in Cleveland.

We're shooting in this warehouse area and we start to pull up to set the two of us on the first day.

And all of a sudden there's all these trucks all over the place, all these police all over the place, and I start to get really anxious.

And Joe and I are looking at each other.

What the heck's going on?

We're supposed to shoot here today.

Everything is in the way.

It's cops and trucks all over the place.

He had no idea that this was our crew and the police were there for our production.

We literally like we had no frame of reference from that scale from a budget like that to a budget like that.

Get cops and trucks by slightly.

You mean 200 times the budget?

That's right.

But it was still minuscule compared to a cat America water soldier.

So we had to shoot some complicated stunts on on this movie, one of which involved hanging Michael Jeter and Sam Rockwell from a pipe about 30 feet.

Uh, well, the ground for sequence in which they're trying to sneak across the pipe in order to get into this apartment to break into a safe.

The learning curve was steep again for guys who had played just about every roll on their first movie behind the scenes.

Now we had to start understanding how of the departments worked.

That movie was a film school.

It's very much was this was right after the rise of The Sopranos, and I think the Shield had just premiered on FX.

FX was striving to be like free cable HBO run by a guy named Kevin Reilly.

Yeah, Kevin Ryan, who is a real maverick.

Very, very smart executive.

The time when they were trying to make television more cinematic, they couldn't afford.

Like the big feature director, they began looking at indie directors for t Bring to television for the first time.

So somebody had somehow mentioned us to.

Kevin liked what we were doing, and he offered us this pilot called Lucky, which was a very strange comedy about a degenerate gambler.

And we shot it hand held and really aggressive and different, and it caught a lot of people's attention in the industry.

I think the show lasted one season.

It was one of our favorite for you that you have worked.

A pilot became kind of an industry favorite, and I can't tell you how many meetings we got as a result of that pilot people really loved it.

Luckily, that pilot in the hands of David Nevins on dhe, they had a pilot script for a show that they were really excited about called Arrested Development.

Michael, look what happened to my fox.

Someone cut off his little foot.

Is it?

Is it noticeable?

Well, remember, you're gonna be all splattered in red paint.

That's gonna distract the eye Ron Howard said.

A very interesting thing to us at the time.

He's like he felt like it was really important to try to reinvent what television comedy could be.

That was the aspiration of that show, which is which is reality.

Television was coming in and was taking up all the time side because it was really cheap.

And, you know, he felt like sitcoms were stale and single camera comedies were becoming with a thing of the moment.

The problem with them is that they were expensive.

So they went to indie filmmakers like us to try to figure out a way to accomplish everything that they wanted on a budget.

So Dogma was big at the time of the film, movement is very stripped down film movement, and Anthony, I thought, All right, well, let's just dogma arrested development And we wrote a cover letter to cast saying Everyone gets the same trailer.

Be prepared to hear on hair and makeup.

We're gonna move quickly.

Natural way.

The 1st 2 things never happened, by the way, but they were part of our initial, the spirit of them.

But, you know, way we're pushing everybody to work in a certain pace.

And we came up with this idea tease digital cameras.

And these were the first is the first time I think in a network history that someone had shot asked to shoot a narrative show with digital cameras.

Of course, the network thought were insane.

Remember, this is like 2002.

Yeah, I wanted to make it feel like a market.

Mentally.

We were also being very referential to reality television, which was was taking over programming at the Times.

They feel like people understood the aesthetic behind it.

Yeah, so they're big concern was like, Oh, you guys can't shoot this on digital video cameras.

It's gonna look like crap.

And we're like, we want it to look like crap.

That's the point.

That's the whole aesthetic we're going.

Also, the point is that with digital camera, move much faster and keep the camera rolling so you could just shout out ad Libs to the actors and I can just keep going.

It was a tool for us to really try to reinvent how things were being made, what budget level they were being made at, and that Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of other to the narrative of rusted vote.

We convince them that, you know, that was the way to go.

And then we had to get script down from 60 Suitable.

I think we ended up shooting a 36 page script.

The other thing about rest development and this was an innovation that we came up with while we're trying to figure out how to shoot this enormously long pilot is the element of the narrator, which was performed by Ron Howard.

You know, that narration and arrested development allowed us in the editing process or even in the script process to pull out chunks of the story so that we could just get to the funny parts, you know?

So anything any sort of plot that we needed to summarize Ron Howard could do it very quick.

As a narrator thing came up with this two weeks before we shot you were sitting in a room with Mitch going How we get all this, you know?

How do we get all this?

We tried to get stripped all the ways that we couldn't do it.

There were other techniques techniques we came up with, which included flash back so that we could get really quick story bites out.

The narrator was the key to all that because it allowed us to go anywhere at any time.

So with a show like peer pressure, I think, which was episode night of Season one, where Believes Bluster wants George Michael to get weed for Lucille because she's having dizzy Vertigo attacks.

It's sort of crazy.

Episode unfolds.

I think ultimately that might have been like a pen up ultimate episode in terms of all the stylistic techniques we used on that show, plus the level of insanity that reaches at the end to shoot out on the docks with the hot cops and a bunch of fake drug dealers.

If you look at your pressure as sort of away to encapsulate what arrested development is, I think it really touches on.

You know, the dramatics of the show you have to do with parents and Children and in the town, the insane tone of the show Way just won an Emmy and arrested development for the pilot and given us a lot of political capital in the television space on, we're able to pick and choose projects with Ford.

One script that came across my desk that we really fell in love with was written by Dan Harmon on It was called Community, and it was about a collection misfits at a community college.

And we just thought it was a genius idea and that the execution of script was really for our taste.

It was layered.

It was clever.

It had really any characters in it, Uh, callbacks.

Call Fords.

It really reminded us of arrested development.

A lot of ways I should say, our approach, the television was exactly what our approach to indie filmmaking was.

Prior to that which is, you know, we would approach a project from the very beginning, just with a script, basically.

And then we would build the show out from there like a future director.

Woods.

What excited it's about working on those shows you could come in and create a world on.

That's what people came forward to create world.

And they asked us to come in and executive produce the show and sort of godfather it.