Josh Guffey directing Tony Todd in "All Gone Wrong." Courtesy of Josh Guffey.
Filmmaker Josh Guffey has been trying to make his debut feature, All Gone Wrong, in some way, shape, or form for the past 15 years. The film stars Jake Kaufman as a veteran narcotics officer who sets off on an unauthorized investigation into a drug bust gone wrong after his rookie partner is killed. This investigation leads him to a rural town in Illinois, where he finds a staggering drug operation being run by the dangerous Lamont Hughes, played by Candyman star Tony Todd. After premiering at the St. Louis International Film Festival in 2021, All Gone Wrong is set to release on Apple TV+, iTunes, Amazon, and other streaming VOD platforms on January 27. In advance of the film’s release, we sat down with Guffey for a chat about how the film came about, his experience getting the production started, and lessons he learned along the way.
How did All Gone Wrong first come about for you?
I went to the University of Iowa, and while I was there, I studied cinema and comparative literature. While I was in school, my sister had graduated from the same school and [went on to] become a police officer. I was coming up with short film ideas to fulfill assignments for classes and I was like, Let's see if she could introduce me to some police officers and see if there are any cool, true stories that I could tell. So she introduced me to her shift captain, who also introduced me to his old partner. Both of them had done undercover narcotics work in the '80s as part of a task force with the Illinois State Police. And they just told me some amazing stuff. It was very eye-opening, just in terms of how undercover narcotics work functions in semi-rural locations. It's largely based on civil forfeiture because their units are often not funded by the general budget. So that incentivizes some, in my opinion, questionable behavior. So that is the jumping off point. There was a specific case where one of these guys had been tasked to go undercover alone into a small town that had been kind of overrun by drugs. And specifically they felt like it was a distribution hub for a larger drug operation, and drugs would come in and then get dispersed from this quiet town. That instantly got my mind racing, because at the time I was a big Sergio Leone fan, and still am. It reminded me of A Fistful of Dollars, where Clint Eastwood comes into town, he's a stranger, and he plays everybody off each other and leaves unscathed at the end of the movie. And I was like, well, maybe this is more of a grounded, kind of Michael Mann crime film version of that. And that's what initially drew me to it. From there, I got to work, and when I graduated college, I started writing the script. Around that same time, I had met Jake Kaufman, an actor in Chicago, and we just hit it off. I started working on the idea with him. That partnership, me and him, sustained throughout the life of the project.
How long has this process—from script to getting the film out to festivals locally to being available on VOD—been for you?
It was a long time. I started writing the script in 2008. And there were these milestones along the way. In 2009, Jake and I shot a short scene from the script at the time, and also in 2009, we moved to L.A. together. In 2011, we shot another proof-of-concept scene. I moved to St. Louis in 2015, and then he moved back to Chicago. We shot some more stuff there, just as a way to build a concept trailer and continue to talk to investors and people about the movie. And then in 2018, I decided, I have to get this train moving. It's not going to move with some angel investor coming in and saying, "Hey, let's do this." I need to just set a shoot date eight months out and make it happen. Miraculously, that putting the cart before the horse instigated all the conversations I needed to have. Investors instantly were like, “Okay, I see the sense of urgency. The shoot is going to happen here. Here's my answer." And whether it was a yes or no, it was a way to facilitate that directness. It was also a way to get dates with Tony Todd, who we got to sign on after he read the script. In 2019, we shot the film, and in 2021 we had the world premiere at the St. Louis International Film Festival. Now, in 2023, 15 years later, the movie is going to be available for a broad audience on streaming. So, these things take longer than you hope, but at the end of the day, I'm just thankful that we kept our eye on the ball and here we are ready to release the film.
This being your first feature, what was that experience like actually getting the production rolling, after nearly 10 years of developing it?
A lot of the conventional wisdom now is make something quick, make something cheap so that you can get those reps and learn how to make a movie. Then, hopefully, the next movie's a little bit bigger and you sort of iterate. Your career is then this iteration of movies with increasing scope, and that was that was what I wanted to do. But I was just hung up on making All Gone Wrong as my first film. I wanted to make it so bad that this other conventional wisdom of “make something that you want to see” or “make the movie that you wish you could see”—that was sort of my dominant idea. I wanted to see this movie. So there were a lot of years where I probably could have written something with a smaller cast and minimal locations, but I just didn't want to do that. I wanted to make this kind of movie. And because of that patience, I was able to develop in my career and use a commercial video career to develop the skills that a lot of people are expecting you to develop with making movies. I was able to learn how to produce, how to budget, how to gather a crew, how to direct actors. So I had a lot of those skills that I knew I would need down the road. When it came time to be on set for All Gone Wrong, it felt familiar to me. I had worked with the vast majority of the crew on commercials, and we knew each other really well. In terms of working with the actors, I knew enough to basically facilitate whatever method of acting they wanted to employ. At the end of the day, you can't be this performance whisperer. You just have to create an environment where everyone feels free to create however they want to create. And then it's my job to make sure that the movie is my responsibility. If something doesn't feel right, then we sort of tweak and we steer from there. In looking back on the whole process now, 15 years later, I realize that it is a first film, but it's also the latest project in a long line of projects that I've done over my career. And in that way, I feel very fortunate that it did take this amount of time, because I don't think it would have been the movie that I wanted to make if I would have made it sooner.
What was your experience like filming All Gone Wrong in St. Louis and the surrounding area?
We shot the vast majority of the movie—if I had to put a number on it, it's like 80 percent of the movie—in Saint Charles, where they really opened their arms to us. There was a neighborhood in Frenchtown, St. Charles, where within like a five-square-block area, we shot a ton of stuff....St. Charles was our hero city. And then we did shoot some diner stuff in South County, and then we shot a big climactic showdown scene in the retired side of the steelworks location in Granite City, Illinois. Just knowing how our budget was pretty low, we had to find locations that we could just walk into and shoot. And so one of those types of locations was the St. Charles Police Department. I knew a family friend was a detective there, and we basically were able to shoot all the police station scenes just in the Detective Bureau. So there are sequences where, let's say they're bringing in an informant and they have to put them in an interview room...that whole office is already rigged with the cameras. And so we could just use their existing systems and almost stage long stretches of action and treat it like a documentary, where our actors are just being in the office and doing their job. And then the informant waits in the interview room and things like that. We're just able to treat the movie like a documentary in those sequences because it's all there, and we don't have to set it up and we don't have to rig it or build it on a soundstage or something that's really expensive. So we were able to really be patient with finding locations.
Reflecting on this whole process now, as the film is about to be available to a wide audience, what was the most rewarding aspect for you of working on All Gone Wrong?
A lot of people talk about [pitching the movie] to a decision maker who will say yes and “greenlight the movie.” But what I learned very quickly is you were pitching the movie to everyone that ends up working on the it, because everyone can do anything else with their time. But to dedicate themselves to your idea, they have to say yes. And so that goes down to the crew, that goes down to the production assistant on set, that goes down to an investor or whoever. So to know that everybody who made contact with the movie and is in the movie and worked on the movie, that they said yes to that pitch, and then to watch everybody throw their best into it and work so hard, it's an emotional thing. You're expressing an idea. You're trying to say something about the world with the film. And then to see this collective of people say yes to that and then work alongside you to make that happen...There's a lot of auteur-driven commentary around filmmaking and how it's a director's medium, but it is a collective. It's like sports in that way. You can only succeed if everybody is playing the role and doing it well. And to be somebody who is just alone in a room writing a script and just thinking about these ideas, to then fast forward to when we were making it and you have all these people kind of rowing in the same direction for that idea—it makes me nostalgic for that collective. It's why filmmaking is my life. And I feel incredibly grateful for that part of the process. That's why I want to do this.
What have been some of the most memorable parts of making this film?
The lead in the movie, Jake Kaufman, is one of my best friends. And I remember watching him play one of these one-on-one dialog scenes with Tony Todd. And they're just sitting across the table from each other, and it's sort of a cat and mouse conversation. It was a scene I had written and rewritten and rewritten and really pored over. Then to watch horror icon Tony Todd—who played Candyman, which scared the shit out of me when I was a kid—playing the scene that I had written across from one of my best friends…at that point it became like, What are we doing here? This is crazy. So that to me is like one of the first things I think of. I had a hard time even vocalizing what I was thinking when we were shooting that to give them notes on another take, because I was just so swept up in this surreal experience.
Now that you're kind of at the end of the cycle on All Gone Wrong, is there anything that you're working on next that you can tell me about?
It's still in the script stage, but I've been obsessed over the last few years over a true crime story, if I had to be reductive about it. But it's based on a series of hijackings in the '70s that took place in and around St. Louis. Plane hijackings, a helicopter hijacking, some attempted prison breaks. And it's all part of this sort of stranger-than-fiction tapestry that happened in the mid-to-late '70s. And so I'm trying to wrestle that and make it into something concise enough to tell it as a movie. I'm working on that script now and just having a ball doing the research and finding little nuggets to include. I'm excited about it.
