by Mike Hull (co-star, co-writer, co-producer)

The Dirty Sanchez is my favorite movie of all time, bar none. I don’t really like watching movies, and there are lots of ‘classics’ I haven’t seen, but I’ve never experienced anything that touches the heartfelt hatred present in every minute of this movie. The Futurists did it with their plays, but most art, in one way or another, sets out to please someone. This movie tries, from the first scene, to kick it’s viewers straight in the balls and keeps kicking up the body until, in the end, we’re aiming for the head, begging you to turn it off and pretend the characters give a fuck.

Who do we show disdain for in The Dirty Sanchez? Well, there’s the viewer, already mentioned, who gets no breaks visually or in the dialogue. There’s women, who’re portrayed as toys. There’s men, who, in this movie, are as heartless as we get without re-writing a Marquis de Sade novel. There’s filmmakers, who watch a hundred years of development go ignored. Critics, Christians, any one interested in the fraud of decency and political correctness. The characters in this film hate everyone, including each other and quite possibly themselves, but they eat and drink their hatred like a 10 course meal with vintage wine. I like to think there’s someone under the table sucking them off while they eat, just another stinging shot in the eye of what the human race has supposedly been trying to acheive.

I may be biased, but that doesn’t matter either. We set out to make the absolute antithesis of what we had been making, which was much more in line with social blahblah norms or whatever, and I think we succeeded swimmingly. More honest than anything that ever came out of Hollywood but more fun than a Dogma 95 film, Sanchez reminds us that, in many ways, 5,000 years of religion and philosophy haven’t accomplished a god damned thing.

The original idea was to write a movie about how guys really talk when girls aren’t around. Jason had the opening monologue bubbling in his head, about a guy telling a girl straight-out that he’s trying to fuck her and daring her to say she doesn’t want the same thing. Of course, she does want it, don’t we all, and the film opens like a bad porno. Perfect.

After two years of telling him I couldn’t write for film, Jason had finally come to me with an idea I couldn’t resist. Most of what takes place is guys telling stories, and the stories all come from us and our friends. Not all of the guys we know act like the characters, but the ones who do are filthy enough that we could fill 90 minutes with their exploits and have plenty of tales to spare. We talked through the story line and I wrote as many scenes as I could wrap my head around, passing them to Jason in longhand on the back of fliers, notebook paper written into the margins and the occasional drunken bar scribbles on napkins. He organized my random thoughts and his scripted scenes into a coherent form, and our first collaborative writing project was done.

We decided on mostly handheld shots and some improvisation to help give it a documentary feel, hoping to make the story seem more realistic. Rehersal and shooting took about six weeks, during which time we drank a lot (everyone except Jason), smoked way too much and spent every extra minute trying to live out new moments that were worthy of the degeneracy we were filming. A few of them were written in at the last minute. It was summer and we were all hot, hard and brimming with attitude. God it was fun.

Once shooting was done, we realized we didn’t have anywhere to edit our masterpiece. J ended up using ancient 3/4” reels that made the movie seem lower budget than it actually was. Coincidence worked though, and the editing limitations helped the movie come out looking as foul as it sounds. We got a lot of flack for the look of the Sanchez, but no one seemed to take into consideration that to shoot a script as dirty as this one in a stylized, polished manner would have run contradictory to everything that was taking place on screen. As it is, we were able to create a world where no one questions whether or not someone would give a friend herpes to win a $200 bet, and the bottom-of-the-astray look of the film does a lot to encourage the audience’s accepting of an anything’s possible aesthetic.

“I know an approach like mine doesn’t work on 90 percent of girls. Well, 75, 80 percent. And that’s fine. I wish those bitches well.” This line from Paul’s opening monologue wasn’t intended as a metaphor for the film itself, but I think it’s appropriate. Most people didn’t connect to the Sanchez, and we wish them well. But frankly, that’s not our concern. We set out to make a movie that was unflinching in it’s realism, no matter how ugly the picture got as it developed. Mission accomplished.

The Dirty Sanchez is dedicated to every girl I’ve ever slept with and every girl who’s ever lied to me, which, oddly enough, are the same list.