These are two questions excerpted from a long interview between Quiet Earth (QE) and Larry Fessenden, producer and star of I Sell the Dead, which was conducted before the Toronto After Dark screening of the film: 

QE: No kidding… OK, here’s another question. Was there any issues bringing Dominic Monaghan onboard for I Sell The Dead, considering he’s coming from such a hugely-popular TV program?

LF: It was a great experience. My co-producer, Peter Phok, he really had this notion we should try for Dom, and we sent the script to Dom’s representation and they got it to Dom over the course of several months. He really gained an enthusiasm for the script, and he was just finishing up Lost… we ended up waiting for several months just to work with his schedule, and as it turns out, our first night shooting was the night that his last episode broadcast, so he was in a great sort of mood – a chapter had ended in his career, and moving on to our little film. So we were very honored to get him. They were really generous to us, and really stuck with it, and Peter and Glenn, once they realized it was possible, were very enthused.

QE: Is that really part of the challenge you face, as an indie filmmaker… how the heck do you approach and convince people? Is it all script-based?

LF: It really is. It’s very much script-based. We’re lucky that Glass Eye Pix has a bit of a rogue reputation, so I think people become aware of our previous work. In the case of Ron Perlman, of course, he and I worked together on The Last Winter, and we just had a blast, and I was able to convince him to show up for what was a three-day shoot for him. Ron was finished with Hellboy 2, and that was a grueling experience under the maestro, Guillermo Del Toro, and I think he was ready to have a little palate cleaner, and so he just popped in and did our shoot. We had been waiting for him for six more months after our original shoot with Dom, so our shoot was spread out over a year. The beauty is that Dom was dedicated enough to the project that he came back – these are very busy people. So it’s all about having good relations.