A comical short in a clinical setting with a doozy of a climax. We had to know more about that! Director Calvin Lee Reeder explains the four minutes of weirdness he presents in The Procedure.

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This film is pretty funny and bizarre. Can you tell us more about where the idea came from?
“It all sort of came to me pretty quickly. I was just lying around watching The X-Files with my girlfriend and the whole scenario just played out in my head. I paused the show and pitched her the story. She was totally disgusted by the idea but then both of us giggled about it for days. So I wrote it and it became sort of real. All my buddies agreed I had to make it, but it took a solid year and a half before I found the right people to make it with.

How did the lead actor react to the script?
“Well, the lead actor happens to be the film’s producer, Christian Palmer. He wanted to see the movie get made even more than I did so he was ready to do whatever it took. On the day we shot it, he was incredible – he only got upset with me once and yelled: ‘Dude, you owe me a beer!’ I figured if that’s all I owed him we should push it further, so we did.”

Is the film just a good joke, or is there some metaphoric meaning?
“I just wanted to execute this thing with precision. That was really the thing for me. If one detail got away it could potentially blow the whole thing. So just making it crystal clear and putting the audience in the right place was my only objective.”

You’re a director, but people might also know you as an actor. Can you tell us about the choice of practicing both professions?
“You know, I never made that choice. I don’t pursue acting, but at film festivals and other events I meet directors and I must make them laugh or something because they sometimes want to cast me. That’s really it, I haven’t even seen most of the movies I’m in.”