[Interview] Mary Ratliff, upcoming film Good Game

DVL: Tell us a little about yourself, where'd you grow up, how/when did you get into film, and what your role is in the Good Game (GG) film.

Mary Ratliff: Well, there's a lot of history but basically I grew up in a rather small town in rural Virginia. I've been obsessed with movies most of my life, but I only started seeing it as a possible career path when I was almost done with high school. So I studied film for both an BA and an MFA, and I've been making short films of one stripe or another since the late 90's. My undergraduate thesis film actually was a fiction story about Starcraft players, incidentally.

As for Good Game, on paper I'm the executive producer and director. But what that means is that this has been my baby since October of 2010 when I first went to MLG DC and decided that I wanted to make a movie about eSports, and SC2 in particular.

DVL: You mentioned that your thesis film was a fiction story about Starcraft players - are you able to elaborate just a little on what it was about? Is it hiding in the archives of Youtube or Vimeo somewhere perhaps?

Mary Ratliff: I have contemplated uploading it just for laughs actually, but I'd have to hunt down the actresses and make sure they were okay with it first. But it was called Waiting for Warcraft, I actually wrote the script for a screenwriting class where I was mad at the professor and I didn't want to write anything for that weeks class, I just wanted to play Starcraft and talk to my friends about the latest Warcraft 3 trailer. So I wrote a script about three girls who sat around played Starcraft and talked about the latest Warcraft 3 trailer. In the end, one of them gets into the beta test and the others don't, and it causes some jealousy.

DVL: Sounds a lot like what really happens during beta phases!

Mary Ratliff: Yeah, a few months ago I got into the Hearthstone beta and my husband didn't. It was like a replay

DVL: How did you first come across video gaming, and then eSports?

Mary Ratliff: Well, I'm part of the original gaming generation, I had an Atari back in the day when I was barely old enough to walk, though I became more of a PC gamer very quickly after that.

With eSports, I can't remember how I first learned it existed but I really ended up getting sucked in through osmosis. When my husband and I first moved into the house where we live now, we had our computers set up where we were back to back. He watched Starcraft matches constantly.

So I started turning around and watching with him, and then Day 9 started his dailies, and it was just all downhill from there. MLG DC was the first event I actually attended, and I started contacting people to make the movie about a week later.


DVL: Where did the specific idea for "GG" begin? What made you want to delve into the lives of professional video game players?

Mary Ratliff: Well, it's IdrA's fault really.

But to be more complex, it was a combination of things. A few months before MLG DC, there was a world cup match between I think the U.S. and Algeria. It was the first time I'd ever gone to watch a sporting event at a bar, that usually wasn't my thing, but I really like World Cup Soccer. Anyway, there was this goal at the end of the game, this really epic last minute save by the U.S. And you could hear the entire mall I was in explode with cheers and shouting and chants.

When I went to MLG DC, there was that same kind of energy that I noticed with people watching the game. But that was also IdrA's first tournament back in the states after playing in Korea, and I had become a fan of his, he was one of the reasons I even went in the first place. And I just found myself wondering about what his life was like. And I wanted to know how the teams worked, how does the business model function? Do these guys actually make a living? What's the career expectancy? So I figured I could find out the answers by making a movie. Which is a cute way of saying I saw there was a really interesting and worthwhile story there, and I wanted to tell it.

DVL: Is this the largest project you've taken on so far?

Mary Ratliff: Yes, by far. It became a bit bigger than I think I had originally envisioned, so it's now my longest film both in run time and in production time. It blew my previous budget record out of the water. It definitely just had a lot more logistics and moving parts. The film I made just before this one was complicated, and had a much larger crew (around 20 people compared to at most 3 on GG) but was only three days of shooting total. It was shooting on location, but in one place. Rather than flying from one end of the U.S. to another every month.

DVL: You mentioned that you were a fan of Idra; did you always want to work with Evil Geniuses or were there other team considerations at any point?

Mary Ratliff: EG was always my first choice, for a lot of reasons. But when I first started I was very open to the idea of following several teams, or even going with a different team altogether. But that didn't really pan out, and I realized very early that if I wanted to talk about gaming as a business, the people to talk to were Evil Geniuses.

DVL: We’ll get back to that shortly but I wanted to ask about budget; to help raise funds to produce the movie you initiated a Kickstarter - which at the time was a very popular method for film-makers to help fund their venture - how did the Kickstarter help out, and would you change anything related to this if you were to make another film in the same vein?

Mary Ratliff: Oh man, I have so many long winded thoughts about Kickstarter.

Well, for our Kickstarter, the funds were helpful but I think not in the way that most people expect. At the time it basically was a stop-gap that helped fund one month of shooting (there were three events in one month that year I think) But what people don't realize about crowdfunding is that a significant portion of that money never gets to the filmmaker's pocket. If you look at our page, it says we raised $13k. $5k of that was in donations that were made with incorrect credit card information (one large donation and two other smaller ones) and then on top of that we lost 10% of what we took in for fees to Kickstarter and Amazon Payments.It's also considered taxable income, which a lot of people don't realize.Then you add in that I had to make all of the perks, and ship them to everyone. And I still have more perks yet to deliver, so I actually haven't done the math yet to see if we really made any real money off of it at all. All that being said, I still consider it a success because as I tell people, the point of it isn't the funding, it's the crowd. We have a group of backers who are really interested in our project, who want to see it succeed. They were talking about it and promoting the page, and tweeting about the movie, and that's invaluable.

So, next time there are things I'll change. I'll probably rearrange how I did the perks to account for the additional costs. I would rethink some of the things we offered, just because they were a bit hard to deliver. And if somebody says they'll donate $5k and then doesn't respond to my emails, I'll know to go ahead and have Kickstarter cancel their pledge.

DVL: Robert Rodriguez (From Dusk Till Dawn, Grindhouse: Planet Terror) once said, “Low budgets force you to be more creative. Sometimes, with too much money, time and equipment, you can over-think. My way, you can use your gut instinct.” Do you think that applies to this project in any way compared to prior work you've done? If you hadn’t of had the donations you received, would you have had to improvise more, or would things have simply been cut?

Mary Ratliff: Well, all the work I've done has been ultra low budget, so I'm definitely no stranger to that need to improvise and prioritize. Even the other things I've worked on as a crew member have mostly been lower budget stuff because that's just what's shot in the D.C. area. The big budget stuff is usually elsewhere. If we hadn't had the Kickstarter money, I think we probably would have gone ahead in a similar fashion, I just would have had to go into more debt to do it. Because we were already being very thrifty whenever we could be. Whatever money we decided to spend, it was always after careful consideration on if we even needed it. A few times we might have gotten a slightly smaller lighting package, maybe.

It's possible we would have skipped an event, though thinking back on it now skipping MLG Orlando would have been ridiculous, we got a lot of our footage we used from there. I guess it's easy to rationalize your budget decisions in hindsight. The one thing I would have changed, I didn't have the information back then to have made a better decision.

DVL: There were many other eSports film projects being taken up in the 2012 period - how does GG compare to some of these that have actually come to fruition; eg Starnation, Sons of Starcraft?

Mary Ratliff: Well, first I should probably be clear that I haven't actually been able to sit down and watch any of the other films yet.
I've seen the trailer for Sons of Starcraft, and a few minutes of the film but I haven't seen the whole thing. It's actually really hard for me to compare myself and my films to other people, because I try not to operate that way on a personal level, I find it's just not particularly useful. But in general, I think my film is one where I came in wanting to capture a moment more than anything else.

DVL: What about on a plot/characterisation of the film level - where SoS is going in to look at Nick and Dan, how would you describe the journey of your movie?

Mary Ratliff: Well, I think our movie has some characters that stand out, and it does become about them in a way. But for me it's really more about what this career is to these guys. What do they put themselves through for this, and how do you consider them a success or not?

One thing that made me think about our story was when NPR (National Public Radio, their audience is not really a gaming audience) did a story about the two SC2 players who got athlete's visas. The comments were full of people saying "they're not athletes, this is not a sport" etc, and I really wanted this film to be something you could show to those kind of people and just give them more information before they say stuff like that.

But I can say that part of the plot of the movie is about how the team functions as a business, and how the roster changes throughout the year, adding new players, cutting old ones, what that means for the players as people, etc.

DVL: How much contact did you have with these other producers during the creation of GG? Did you feel as though anyone was stepping on toes at all?

Mary Ratliff: It varied for each one, but we were all pretty friendly. I didn't run into Jeff Alejos too much except while I was in Korea, and he actually loaned us some equipment and showed us a great place to get dinner, taught us some of the phrases we should know, etc. Justin and the Star Nation crew we saw all the time, and I haven't talked to them in ages but we used to get food together and chat at events a lot. We all sort of realized early on that we weren't chasing the same movie. Maybe we were in the same places, and shooting the same things, but we were after different stories. And filmmakers can be competitive but we can also be very friendly with each other if we're not in direct competition.

So when it came to the three J's (Jeff, Justin, and Jonathan who was working on a film that I haven't heard about in two years that may have been abandoned) I thought we got along great, no stepping on toes at all. We would loan each other equipment, batteries, etc. I think I even loaned one of them a crew member at one point.

DVL: Earlier you were mentioning that in the end EG was one of the best choices when it came to the direction you wanted to take the film; how receptive were they to the idea when you contacted them?

Mary Ratliff: When we were filming, Scott Smith was still their COO, and he was the first person we talked to. I think it only took five minutes to get him on board.He was very receptive to what we were trying to do, and we had a conference call with Alex Garfield shortly after and we all game to an agreement pretty quickly. That part was actually quite smooth. And we all agreed very early on that this project was under my creative control, that they were the subjects and they would give us some support but it wasn't an "EG movie" actually. Which is still hard to explain to the internet sometimes. But both Scott and Alex understood my need to keep it an independent production.

DVL: Initially in my understanding you wanted to make a film that was more so about the EG team itself; however judging from the trailer, the plot and direction seems to be focusing more on Greg "Idra" Fields - is this correct? How did this change come about?

Mary Ratliff: Well, if I had to pick a main character it would be him, but he's not the only subject in the movie. We look at several topics as the movie goes on, and we focus in on a lot of the team members for at least a segment. But the biggest changes and the decisions on where to focus our time and energy mostly came about in editing. The first pass I made at the script was kind of a mess, I admit it. It was all over and there was too much in it. So then Henry Kaplan, our first editor, basically took my script and pulled it apart and put it back together, then did a rough cut based on that. He did a great job, and it really helped me get back on track to hone in on what was really interesting and what was working. Of course, it was around that time when IdrA was cut from the team, so when Pete Binswanger, our second editor, came on board, one of our tasks was to reconsider our story based on what had happened since. Peter really helped shape the movie into what it is, and helped me really focus our energies on what was interesting and what was working.

DVL: I was going to ask about the end of Idra's career - Towards the end of 2013 we saw Idra end his time with EG, was this before or after you'd finished filming? While watching the film will we get some insight into the mind of Idra and how he was feeling near the end?

Mary Ratliff: That moment came well after we had finished filming, it was even after we'd finished the first two cuts of the film if I remember correctly.
But we definitely incorporated it into our story, and I honestly couldn't tell you if we're accurate about his mindset, but I think an audience will come away thinking that they understand some of what happened.

DVL: What was it like filming in Korea? You travelled there with Idra to film his GSL Code S match - what was it like moving into one of the most in-depth eSports cultures in the world? How did it feel different to North America?

Mary Ratliff: The trip to Korea was definitely an experience. In some respects it was phenomenal. In general, Seoul was a wonderful place, and I was there with a good friend of mine, Ken Ikeda, who was filming for me. The big thing was that in America at the time a Starcraft tournament was an EVENT. There was immense staging, huge crowds, it was really a lot of spectacle. GSL wasn't like that at all.

Actually, it felt a little quiet, comparatively. The production is very well done, and it's very nice but it's focused on creating a high quality stream, the audience was almost like an afterthought. But at an MLG, the audience is a large portion of what they're trying to do. It was really fun to watch Starcraft on TV in my hotel room though.

DVL: Are there any parts that you were hoping to add into the movie that budget/time/other constraints didn't let you get in?

Mary Ratliff: A million. One big one was I wanted to go to visit LzGaMeR in his hometown and do a long, in depth interview with him at the tail end of filming. I'd even talked to him about doing it, and started to put it together but the budget just wasn't there. There was quite a bit in Korea that I wanted but we missed out on for a variety of reasons, but in the end I don't think that footage would have ended up in the film anyway so maybe it's good we didn't.

But even with all that, there's dozens of hours of footage, and entire interviews that didn't make it into the film that I wish there was space for. There were several storylines I was chasing that I found fascinating but I had to let go of.


DVL: Do you have any further plans for projects within Starcraft, or eSports at all? Perhaps GG 2; Revenge of the Gracken, including those extra stories you alluded to?

Mary Ratliff: I don't think a sequel is really in the works, no. But I've actually toyed around with taking some of that extra footage and creating a few short pieces out of it, as DVD extras or website bonus footage, that kind of thing.

As for the future in general, I don't have another Starcraft project in my pile of ideas right now, but several of them focus on other nerd interests. Not sure what's actually going to be next for me though.


DVL: Finally the most important question: Would you rather fight 100 duck sized Idra's, or 1 Idra sized duck?

Mary Ratliff: I love ducks, so I wouldn't want to fight one, so we'll go with the first choice ; )