Crank Director Brian Taylor on NFT Movie Starring Christopher Meloni

Director Brian Taylor (“Crank”, “Crank: High Voltage”, “Mom and Dad”) watched NFT expanding the market from digital paintings and photography to musical projects and more, the filmmaker decided to get in on the action, creating a new experimental short film with Christopher Meloni.

“You are almost never first in anything in my business,” says Taylor Diversity, explaining why he decided to join the NFT craze. “Everything you do has been done 50,000 times before.”

“So I called Meloni and said, ‘Are you in?’ and he said, “It’s totally possible,” because he’s into anything new, “Taylor said. “So I flew to New York and we made a movie.”

Taylor and Meloni first collaborated on the Syfy series “Happy,” in which Meloni plays a wounded assassin who befriends her kidnapped daughter’s imaginary friend, a playful blue flying unicorn. All of this being said, actors and directors are pretty comfortable getting into all sorts of things no matter how fantastical or weird things are.

According to the film’s description, “Out!!!” follows M Berkoff (Meloni), a “manhattan douchebag terrier” who learns that a vesta-sized asteroid is on a collision course with Earth impending mass extinction. He only has 42 minutes to put an end to all the loose ends in his life before he – and everyone else on the planet – is “escaped from the damn thing”.

When asked to recall the most memorable moment from the test, Taylor quipped, “It’s so memorable when Chris Meloni is naked and covered in blood in front of you.”

“I think most Chris fans would dream of such a moment,” he added. “They will be jealous because I always get moments like that.”

Or maybe they’ll just pay a price on it.

Short films sold at auction on Open sea, one of the largest NFT markets, until Sunday. In addition to the entire short, Taylor is also auctioning off 24 replacement scenes, discarded or whole.

“The Crypto Opportunity of a Lifetime IS HERE,” Meloni tweeted. “Whoever wins gets the right – you can choose to watch it alone, with friends or even reveal it to the world.”

Taylor describes the sale as a “pure” version of the NFT, in which the person who bought the rights to the short films or any scenes is really the only one with access to them.

“Once you own it, I will destroy all original copies – the media, the sessions, the newspapers,” he explains. “Nobody owns it anymore except the person who bought it.”

That kind of innovation is what Taylor enjoys most in the grand experiment of making and selling a movie as an NFT.

“The main driving force, creatively, was, ‘Be the first; let’s do something that’s never been done before,” he said. “Whatever the normal obstacles to filmmaking, figure out how to overcome those obstacles.”

Filming during the pandemic, the filmmaker recruited a small team to produce the project during a break from Meloni’s filming schedule for “Law and Order: Organized Crime”. Production took place over the course of a week.

Making the film itself fulfills Taylor’s usual goal as a filmmaker, “which is to make great movies and impact the culture in some way.”

But there is also the question of financial viability; how to recover their production budget based on bid from the public calculated in speculative cryptocurrency?

“We’re not doing this to try to get rich, we’re just doing it because it’s fun,” Taylor said, noting that the auction for the rights to the film is set up so that the film doesn’t lose money.

And, with NFT, the usual metrics of success (box office and viewership) are gone.

“That’s the opposite of what’s expected for most movies, which is, I want this movie to be seen by as many people as possible,” he said.

“The mission of this project is to put something, in this case a movie, into space and see what the consequences of that are,” Taylor explains. “[To] See if others see that and get inspired to do something new. Or be inspired to innovate based on that concept. And basically, just throw an element of chaos out there, and see how it changes the game, if it happens. “

Check out the trailer and check out stills from the movie Boundaries below: