[upbeat music]
- I was a trader in Chicago, right?
Traded in the Soybean Meal pit.
I turned myself into a thousandaire.
I made thousands of dollars, right?
I saved it and I asked myself, "Now that I have this money,
what do I really want to do?"
'Cause I didn't need all the things
that I saw everybody else needed,
$500 pairs of shoes,
the other traders are spending around me,
like, expensive steak dinners, like...
I didn't need any of that, you know?
I just asked myself that simple question,
when I'd made this certain amount of money, is:
"What is it that I really want more than anything else?
What do I want out of life?"
- Hi, welcome to Director's Cut .
I'm Pete Schwaba, and we just saw a clip from Chasing Bubbles ,
a film that looks at the life of free spirit Alex Rust,
who gave up his life as a big-city trader in Chicago
to sail the world.
Despite having almost no sailing experience,
his exuberance and thirst for adventure
led him to have soul-enhancing exploits
with complete strangers.
I'm joined today by the film's director, Topher Cochrane.
Topher, welcome to Director's Cut .
- Thank you. Very glad to be here.
- Okay, so we got a little taste of Alex in the open there,
but tell us more about your leading man.
How did you find him
and what made you decide to tell his story?
- I met Alex in Chicago in 2008 or '09.
He was--
We were both young Chicago professionals, I guess.
Sort of--
We kind of ran in the same circle
of party kids and young professionals
that were hanging around the Wrigleyville area at the time.
Except I was maybe on more of a traditional path.
I was working for an advertising agency
and had a car payment and two dogs,
and Alex was working at the Chicago Board of Trade,
but he was living in a van
and saving all of his money for adventures.
- That's crazy.
When I saw living in a van,
Even parking in Chicago costs you almost as much as rent.
Where was this van he lived in?
Where did he keep it?
- He parked it all over the place.
He would use it to drive wherever he was going,
whatever adventure he was on,
or he would park it near the Board of Trade,
or if he was going to be bar hopping
in Wrigleyville or in Wicker Park,
he'd park it wherever he was going to be.
- You had a ton of footage that Alex took.
Talk about, as a filmmaker,
how do you weave kind of a narrative
when you've got all this great footage of the sea?
Does the sea serve as a background
for finding that story at all?
How do you navigate that?
- Yeah, certainly we had visual themes and colors,
and since it was all shot on boats
and on the ocean, for the most part,
we used the ocean horizon as a visual theme
to come back to.
But to weave a narrative, we took all the footage
and we watched almost all of it,
and we organized it geographically,
sort of chronologically and geographically.
And then, we started shooting interviews.
I interviewed Alex extensively,
and his brothers, and his friends
and crew members, people who he had sailed with,
and people who knew him, his family,
and I pieced the story together.
When I started making the movie,
I thought I was just telling the story
of a young person sailing around the world,
so I was trying to piece that narrative together.
I had sort of written up an outline,
but if you watch the movie you'll see that
as we started making the movie,
the story really changed and evolved.
I sort of let the narrative change
as the story changed.
- Must be overwhelming, too, to see all that footage.
I mean, you... I would imagine that you'd put
the footage on and have a viewing party
to see what you have there, because the footage
is so much fun to watch too, you know.
- We did it at night.
It was overwhelming. We had hundreds of hours.
We... myself and the film's producer, Laurie Adrianopoli,
we would meet at night after work
and sit in an Avid and watch footage.
I worked for an advertising agency,
and she worked in video post,
so we had the facilities at our disposal at night.
We would sit there and go through things
and mark clips we liked--
- Yeah.
- ...and write up outlines.
We outlined the film during the interview process.
- That's great.
Let's see another clip from Chasing Bubbles.
- We lived in a harbor in Ft. Lauderdale,
because the boat was basically a third underwater.
We spent 30 days fixing that beast up.
This is where we've been sleeping for the past...
We did not have a toilet, did not have a shower.
It didn't have anything.
Here's some of the food that we got.
Show 'em all the food we got stored for you guys.
We just talked to a bunch of people
who were boat owners, and everybody was saying
how we had to take a course before
we started sailing, and he was definitely against that.
- I flew down there a couple of times
and helped him set stuff up on it, and just
tinker with it.
He had never really drove it out on the water or anything
before we went out the first day.
And they told us not to go out
because the waves were too big.
[laughs] It was a disaster.
All the ropes off the side of the boat
were flying into the water
and getting wrapped around the prop, and the boat stopped.
We're just bouncing around.
We got one buddy, he's throwing up everywhere.
Alex has got a book called Sailing for Dummies ,
and he was dead serious.
He told me to go down below and read
on how we're supposed to turn the boat.
- The thing is, I should have read it earlier on,
because we got the jib sheet caught in the prop,
and I'm reading the book later, and I'm like,
aw, man, it says you're supposed to do this
with the jib sheet, the stopper knot.
And then you don't get it caught in the prop.
And I'm like, oh, that's great.
- He gave me a call one day, and he's like,
"Hey, Gerber, I need you to come down to Florida
and we're gonna go sail."
Like, someone needs to teach me.
And I was like, I barely know how to sail, man.
I've sailed with my dad a little bit, but...
I haven't sailed that much.
He had told me he had took a captain's course,
and it turns out he took, like,
a celestial navigation booze cruise.
Which had nothing to do with...
He had no idea how to sail.
- That's great.
- Wisconsin native, Ross Gerber, right there.
- Yeah, who we'll meet in a little while.
So there's a point in the film... how much...
This is what I want to ask you.
You have all this footage you acquired.
How much of the film is the footage Alex took
compared to what you shot?
- Well, all the audio, all the story of the movie,
is the stuff that we shot.
And then all of the cutaways, all the B-roll,
all of the imagery of the sailing,
was shot by Alex and his crew.
So when he set out from the very beginning
from that first boat that he and Ross and Vanessa
were on in Florida, sailing to the Bahamas,
and then throughout the Caribbean,
he had this idea that like...
oh, there are cheap video cameras now,
we should document this.
And then I think eventually he thought
that if he kept shooting,
and if he kept getting coverage of stuff,
that maybe he could do something with it,
create a television show or make a film.
And then when he finished sailing,
he came back to Chicago
and we threw this party for him when he came back.
And he and I got talking at that party.
Why don't we make a documentary about all this footage?
So he put it all onto a drive and handed it to Laurie and I,
and we started cobbling it together.
- So many documentaries are people talking,
some photographs, maybe some video.
You've got the entire world as your backdrop.
What does that do to the value of your film?
- It makes it look really big and beautiful.
Yeah, I mean you get to see things that...
the viewer gets to see things that people
don't normally get to see.
Although there are a lot of...
Because of cheap cameras and people sailing,
a lot of sailors are shooting coverage of their circumnavs,
of their trips, of their voyages now.
So there's a lot of content
on the internet of sailors sailing.
We're kind of trying to tell a more human story.
We wanted to try to find what was there
besides the sailing across oceans.
I mean, what happens to a person
in their early 20s who decides to hike the PCT
or backpack across Europe or get a sailboat
and sail around the world?
What happens to that person afterwards?
Because it seems like there's a lot of people
taking these wild journeys now,
but I was curious as to what that does to a person.
- How do you settle back into everyday life?
- It's not so easy.
- Okay, I have a two-parter for you.
Boats are not cheap.
It seemed like it was kind of a big party.
You've got all these people on the ship, on the boat.
Talk about how did he finance this trip?
Because he was out there for three and a half years.
And then you, how did you finance your film?
- Okay, well, Alex, when he left,
he had been living in that van
in Chicago and saving all of his money
and trading, I think, agricultural pork futures
at the Chicago Board of Trade?
And he had scraped together around $100,000 that he had.
So his first boat cost about $3,000.
And then his second boat, Bubbles ,
I think he spent about $70,000 on that boat.
And then also, as he was sailing,
he'd invite these friends to come join him
in Panama or in Fiji or wherever they...
wherever people were flying to go join him on a leg,
he would have them bring whatever
replacement equipment he needed
and buy diesel fuel, buy food,
everyone kind of paid their own way.
So it was sort of like a cooperative.
- Like a cover charge for the boat.
- Yeah, kind of.
And something that's not in the movie
is that when Alex ran out of money
towards the end of his journey,
and the boat was falling apart and needed to repair it,
he sold shares in the boat to his friends.
So that when he would eventually sell the boat,
he could pay them back.
It was sort of a cooperatively-financed adventure.
And the movie was made the same way.
We collected all the footage and we shot
all the interviews, and then we cut together
a teaser trailer and some teaser clips
of the story we wanted to tell, and then we
crowdsourced the cost of editorial on Kickstarter.
We did a Kickstarter, we raised, I think, $50,000.
Most of that money went to go pay for
these really great editors in Milwaukee,
Chris James Thompson and Andrew Swant.
- Sure, I know those guys.
- Yeah, yeah, they've made a lot of great documentaries.
So we worked with them to take on
the monumental task of editing this thing.
- That's crazy.
Well, you did a great job.
When we come back, we'll be joined
by two more of the film's producers,
but let's take another look at a clip from Chasing Bubbles .
-[Man speaking foreign language]
- Yarr.
The difference between what we did on Bubbles
and what most people do is they'll leave
from one port and sail around the world,
be at sea the entire time, and come back.
I see no gain in that.
I mean, I wanted to explore the world.
I wanted to see places, I wanted to meet people,
and so the pace that we set with that
ended up being based a lot on
I wanted to see other forms of life
that were living in the world.
The humans, animals, everything.
I wanted to see different places, what was out there.
That's like exactly what I wanted to go see.
I really wanted to go explore.
Holy smokers.
We did a round-the-world going from
hemisphere to hemisphere, where the storms seasons weren't.
You can actually see the colors and the
formations of all these little tiny rocks.
And so you're always in summer, basically, right?
You're always in the good time of year.
It's just a cool place.
We're just coming into this cave right here.
- Big one, Joe!
- [Man] Oh, my God!
- Oh ####, this is gonna be wet!
- Joining me now are Laurie Adrianopoli and Ross Gerber,
two producers from Chasing Bubbles .
Welcome, you guys.
- Hi. - Glad to be here.
- All right, so Ross, I'll start with you.
You were on the boat with Alex.
How long were you on the boat, and
it's actually kind of a two-parter,
when you were out there, I saw the graphics in the film,
how long did you go without even seeing land at times?
- I was out there for a total of six months.
There are actually four different legs that I was on.
I was in the Caribbean and then across the Pacific
and then in a little bit of East Africa.
And the longest we ever went, and I think
the longest the boat total went
without seeing land, was 19 days,
almost 20 full days from the Galapagos
all the way to French Polynesia.
It actually went faster than you would have thought.
You're very tired, and so the time just kind of flies.
- Did you ever run out of food or run low on supplies?
Was there any nervousness about that kind of stuff?
- We never ran out of food or supplies.
We ran out of good food,
for sure, we were eating Vienna sausages, things like that.
But there was never really a worry.
We literally had filled the entire boat
with rice and beans and pasta, things like that.
- Laurie, when we spoke the other day,
you told me that Alex gave you a whole bunch of footage,
and I thought that was very similar
to how he kind of approached this trip and sailing.
Talk a little bit about that and what it was like
working with him, making the film.
- Just diving right in.
He handed us a whole four terabyte drive
full of footage that he had fully organized in one night,
from start to finish, where each film folder location
took place, and labeled every file,
and wanted to jump right into editorial
when he handed it to me.
It's kind of how he approached life, everything.
That's why we love him.
- He wasn't a huge planner.
You can see from the movie,
he kind of put his mind to something,
and then wanted to get it started immediately.
- That's so great, though.
You've known him the longest.
What's it like, because he seemed like
strangers like him, he's one of those people
that instantly warms up to people.
Is it harder to really get to know someone like that
when they're sort of always curious about other things?
Or is that just a gift that he has?
- It's an interesting question, and I think
it was tough to get to know Alex in some ways,
but he was such a charismatic guy.
I mean, he was the person, when he walked into a party,
people really gravitated towards him.
People wanted to meet him.
And so I think to really get to know him was difficult,
but he was such a friendly guy,
and his whole M.O. was just making sure everyone had fun.
And he did a really good job of it,
and he was so genuine,
there were very few people that didn't like him.
Everyone seemed to like Alex.
- Talk about the different roles
you two played as producers.
You were a consulting producer,
and you did a lot of post work, right?
So break those down a little bit for us,
what your contributions were.
- The post-production process was...
It was really cool. It was neat.
We have all this beautiful footage to go through,
and like Topher said, we screened
hours and hours of footage.
Picking the best selects out of that,
it was hard, because there was so much great footage.
And there was so much more that you would want to put in.
But in order to tell a story, you have
to pick the best of the best.
And we definitely had that.
- So you were kind of the guy in the boat,
doing all this stuff, what was your contribution
aside from that, Ross?
- I guess I was helping to make sure
that the story was true to how it happened
in helping with that entire process.
But I'm not a filmmaker by trade,
so I was working with Topher and Laurie
and seeing them through the process.
And then helping with some of the artistic calls.
There were questions as to does this feel right
and does this feel true to the story?
And is this how it happened?
So I was really sitting along and making those calls.
- That's so great.
You've got a movie here about a guy who didn't know how to sail,
and you're like I'm not really a filmmaker.
It's like you guys are just going with it.
And that's so fantastic, that you got everything done.
That's great.
Let's see another clip from Chasing Bubbles .
- He was just away from home that whole time.
Yeah, I missed him.
There'd be several times I'd be like, Alex isn't here.
It'd be nice to hang out with him or see him.
He's half a world away.
I mean, I followed along on Facebook a little bit,
you know, see pictures, but
it's not really the same thing, you know?
[harmonica music]
- The first time it was like this long,
extended party, and it was just party
from place to place, everywhere that we went.
Party with different people, and it was
a lot of fun, but it really was just like
a big, super-long, extended party,
and that was kind of like what everybody was into.
The second time that I came on Bubbles,
it was definitely more business Alex.
You were like really concerned,
and it was something I hadn't really seen
from you before, and obviously
over the months that I had missed of you sailing,
you had become a sailor.
And before, you were just a guy that owned a sailboat.
- I feel like he was trying to prove
to everybody how hard he worked.
Instead of everybody looking at him as being
just this crazy person that travels and does crazy things,
that he was proving something deeper than that.
- He realized that true satisfaction
isn't with just partying, you know,
the adventure, the exploring, the meeting people,
and the beauty, you know, the beauty that he's seen
around the world that's given him a new desire
or a new direction or a new perspective for
what is fun, what is a party.
- So Laurie, you're sitting there
watching all this footage you have to go through,
but you said you weren't on the boat with Alex.
Did you want to be, after watching this?
Does it make you wish you could have been part of that?
- Yes, definitely, yeah.
- I get seasick just looking at that stuff,
so I just had to ask.
Ross, you talked about some storms that happened.
There had to be times that you were in danger,
and we see some of that in the film,
but elaborate a little bit on that,
some of the experiences you guys had out there.
- Yeah, there were some dangerous times,
and in retrospect, in watching the movie,
I think they were more dangerous times than I realized.
But one in particular,
we were always fishing.
I grew up in northern Wisconsin,
on a fishing resort, my grandfather's.
So I really wanted to fish the entire time.
And of course eating chicken and rice,
canned chicken and rice, isn't great.
So anytime we'd catch a fish it was an absolute feast.
So we were fishing, and we hooked,
we were near French Polynesia, and we hooked
a big fish, and these are big shark waters,
so oftentimes the shark will take the fish
before you get it in the boat, and we boated this gigantic
mahi-mahi, I think the biggest one we ever caught.
Fantastic fish, and the wind was really strong,
so it was tough to get it in, and we eventually
got it on the boat, and we were filleting it out,
and Diego, who is from the Galapagos,
we sent him to get, we had one main mixing bowl
that we used to cook almost everything on our boat.
And he went below, so we could toss the fillets in it,
and as he was coming up, a big gust hit us,
and it blew the bowl into the water.
And that was really our only bowl.
Which sounds crazy, but the other ones had broken.
And so we all looked at each other,
and he said, should I jump in to get it?
And we were sailing pretty fast.
And we said yeah, we'll turn around.
So he dove in and grabbed the bowl,
and we went to try to turn the boat around,
and something kind of got hooked.
The man overboard drills, the rule is
that someone points at the person in the water
so you don't lose them, because there are these waves,
and someone can get hidden behind the waves.
And I had to go and reach for some ropes
to unhook some stuff, and kind of lost him for a second.
So the way it happened is he was in the water
for probably 25 minutes, floating with this bowl,
before we got him back.
And as soon as we got him back in the boat,
we're like, okay, we're never doing
anything like that again.
- You said there were sharks.
Was it shark-infested, did you see sharks?
- If you catch a fish, sometimes you'd see a shark.
Or they'd take half the shark.
But it's not-- At dusk, you don't want
to be floating in the water.
That was a big shark area too.
Not the smartest thing we've done.
- But you made it through. - Yes, we made it through.
- Talk a little bit about the influence
Alex's father had on him.
You guys talk about that in the film,
and Alex talks about it.
Did you know, you were close with Alex,
did you know his father?
- I never had met his father, but
the closer I got to Alex, the more I knew
that it was very important.
His father had passed away before I met Alex.
But his father was much older too.
I think his father was in his 80s when he passed away,
and Alex was 20, so he was quite a bit older.
His father was a very successful man,
and I think he had high expectations,
and Alex wanted to meet those.
So he was always, I think, trying to meet
these grand expectations that may or may not have been
accurate to what his father thought.
- Interesting.
The first clip we showed, we talked about...
He alludes to what do you want out of life?
So he wanted to take this trip.
So he sails the world for three and a half years,
then he comes back and tries to settle in, in Chicago again.
What did he want out of life then, after the trip?
- I think that was the million dollar question.
I think he very much wanted to put a bookend on this trip.
He tried to go back into trading, I don't think it was,
after spending so much time at sea
and having so much freedom, it didn't...
In realizing he saw a ton of happy people
on these poverty-stricken islands
that were subsistence-farming, and they were happy.
He was trying to figure out
what do I want to make myself happy?
So I think that was very much a question
that he was trying to answer,
and like many sailors try to answer when they get finished.
- Let's see another clip from Chasing Bubbles .
- I could honestly say I'm definitely the worst sailor
who ever sailed around the world, for sure, by far.
Just going out to sea and figuring it out as we went.
I mean, there can't be the less-experienced sailor
or somebody that knows as little about sailing
as I do and have done it.
Like, there can't...and make it, like I don't know.
I thought okay, yeah, it might take me a little time
to get adjusted back into America after being out here
and seeing this and running on my own schedule
for all this time, but it's been way different
and way harsher than I thought it would be.
I went and traded again for two months in Chicago, and I was
just miserable, sitting in front of the computer screen,
you know, doing the numbers thing.
After seeing almost every sunrise and sunset,
and sailing under the stars at night,
and meeting tribal chiefs, and having
Amazonian mayors come aboard, and getting greeted
by government officials, and the whole tribe'll come
and do a dance for you just 'cause you're there,
I got addicted to it.
Right now I'm going through a crazy withdrawal.
- He told me specifically, like,
Reed, I thought I had it all figured out.
I mean, it was so clear during those couple years.
But now I'm more confused than I was before I left.
- Okay, so Laurie, what's your biggest challenge?
You came onto this after, for post.
What was your biggest challenge as a post-producer in this?
- The amount of footage and filming that we had to do after,
for interviews, and Alex being "itchy feet" after
he got back from traveling, wanting to go off on
smaller adventures, and us trying to wrangle him.
- Still trying to make a film. - Yeah.
- Needing him for other stuff, yeah.
- Yeah, that. - That's good.
So this kind of reminded me,
or Alex reminds me, a little bit
of Jack Kerouac or Neal Cassidy.
Does he have influences or people he read
that made him want to do this?
Because people don't just do this.
This is a rare kind of person that does this kind of stuff.
Who were his influences or mentors?
Was it his dad, maybe?
- I think a lot of it was his father.
His father, they had businesses in South America,
and he had brothers that lived down there.
His father had done a lot of traveling,
kind of lived a full and well-traveled life
that Alex got to see.
- His father was an egg farmer in southern Indiana
and built up a really large egg farm,
and used that money to travel the world, see the world.
And Alex wanted to see the world as well.
I think he liked the idea of a sea captain or a pirate.
Also he liked the efficiency and
simplicity of traveling by sailboat.
He had been traveling by flying, and
I think he liked the sustainability and
easy way of traveling by sailboat.
- So you got this great documentary you finished,
with this really charismatic leading man,
so to speak, and you guys all seem like
you really connected with Alex.
How do you move onto another project?
What do you look for?
Do you look for something with a similar bent to it,
like someone you're close to, or do you go
in a totally different direction to pick a new project?
- I want to try to tell a different kind of story.
Just try to mix it up and do something different.
Certainly we learn that having somebody
with a lot of charisma, it shows up on the film.
It really helps the film.
In terms of who that person is as a character,
sometimes there's some conflict there.
So we'll try to find a different character,
a different kind of conflict, a different story to tell.
- So what was your biggest challenge on this,
Topher, as the director?
Laurie said what hers was, I would imagine to some degree
that was yours too, but as a director,
you've got a lot more going on too.
- I wanted to do justice to the story.
I wanted to do justice to this footage
that we inherited and tell the story
in a really interesting way.
I also wanted to make, and this is so obvious, but
I wanted to make a good film, something that was tight,
that was good to watch, that my friends who are
filmmakers would watch and enjoy
even though it's in a lot of ways a found-footage film
that we shot on a micro-budget.
We shot this on a 7D and pulled clips
that were shot on cell phones.
I wanted to take what we had
and craft something beautiful with it.
Also, something that Laurie didn't mention,
that she and I both have had to absorb
is that because Alex was such a charismatic guy,
so many people love him and were a part
of his story and a part of his journey,
and they all have really high expectations.
They all feel a sort of possessiveness of the story.
So there was a lot of pressure from a lot of people
in Alex's life on us to do justice to the film.
- We have about 30 seconds left,
so here's what I'm going to say.
Independent film, they're hard to make,
they're even harder to get seen.
How do you do that?
In 20 seconds.
- We put ours on YouTube.
- [Pete] How do you get people to YouTube, then?
- We sort of developed a marketing strategy.
We had a Facebook page, and we drove ads
towards people who were interested in sailing,
people who were interested in adventure,
people who were interested in DIY kind of experiences.
- A lot of grassroots do, sending it off to friends.
- It never ends, that's so great.
Well, you did a great job.
Thank you for being here today. Good luck with it.
- Thanks for having us. - Thanks so much.
- You bet.
Hey, and thank you for watching Director's Cut.
For more information on Chasing Bubbles ,
please go to WPT.org and click on Director's Cut .
While you're there, send us an email
or find out how to submit a film.
I'm Pete Schwaba, and I've never even been on a dinghy.
Now, sit back, because Chasing Bubbles
on Director's Cut Presents starts now.