Sundance 2024! Dimitri Simakis And Suki-Rose Talk THE RAINBOW BRIDGE!

Introduction

In The Rainbow Bridge, Tina and her aging dog visit a mysterious clinic offering human-to-pet communication. Two sinister doctors uncover an otherworldly bond between them that transcends time and space. They might be the key to something greater…but at what cost?

Synopsis

Tina (Thu Tran) and her dog, MeeMoo (voiced by Fat Tony), visit “Rainbow Bridge Enterprises,” a mysterious clinic offering human-to-pet communication. The esoteric Dr. Bailey Picadillo (Heather Lawless) and her burnout partner, Herb (James Urbaniak ), detect a cosmically strong bond between their new patients, triggering a journey across time and space where Tina and MeeMoo can properly say goodbye in their final, fantastical forms. Chaos ensues as Tina is abruptly thrust back to reality while MeeMoo is left behind in the transcendental Rainbow Realm. Tina may feel a bittersweet sense of relief, but Dr. Bailey gets more than she bargained for when the fabric of reality might have just split wide open.

About the Filmmakers

Dimitri Simakis is a filmmaker, musician, illustrator, and co-creator of the found-footage collectives Everything Is Terrible! & the slightly more terrifying, Memory Hole. The EIT! collective has made eight feature-length found-footage films and has toured North America regularly for the past thirteen years. Simakis’ background in immersive storytelling is seen by millions at Pizza Pals Playzone, on permanent exhibition at Meow Wolf’s Convergence Station in Denver, CO. Simakis is currently the Creative Director for GIPHY, the world’s largest GIF library on the internet.

Producer Suki-Rose is a director, producer, multidisciplinary artist, and co-founder of Spooky Kind Productions alongside Dimitri Simakis. Suki-Rose is a former Disney Imagineer, former creative executive for SpectreVision, videogame designer, miniaturist & fabricator. The filmmakers tackle such tragic loss through a fantastical, silly, and thoroughly entertaining lens. The filmmaker’s world-building creates an homage to 80’s cinema that is both grounded and brilliantly bonkers all at the same time!

Interview

Glen Dower:

Dimitri Simakis and Suki-Rose, how are you, good people?

Dimitri Simakis:

Hello. We’re good. How are you?

Glen Dower:

I’m really good. Thank you for taking the time to talk to Cinema Scholars today to discuss The Rainbow Bridge, your…very quiet, reserved film! Wow. I watched it with my wife after my first viewing, and I just watched her watching it. This film is my jam all day long. As a child of the eighties, I saw this as a love letter to Joe Dante, and I don’t know if you guys are aware of the UK show The Mighty Boosh?

Suki-Rose:

Oh yes!

Dimitri Simakis:

Yeah, of course!

Glen Dower:

Great! I saw a taste of that. I just had the most fun.

Dimitri Simakis:

That’s exactly what we want.

Suki-Rose:

That’s so nice. And if you can’t tell, we’ve been at Sundance, for almost a week now. Our voices are gone from screaming at parties, so it’s been a blast here.

Dimitri Simakis:

We’re hanging on by a thread, but we’re having a blast. It’s great. But thank you so much.

Glen Dower:

Can you tell me what your experience of Sundance has been? This is the 40th year, so it must be pretty special up there.

Dimitri Simakis:

And our 40th time, right?

Suki-Rose:

It’s our first time here with a film.

Dimitri Simakis:

It’s a wonderful place. It really is this wonderful meld where everyone’s just meeting and talking and being, everyone’s so friendly.

Suki-Rose:

It’s really easy to meet people and chat here. Everyone’s kind of on the same wavelength. It’s cold. This is the talking point everyone has. It’s cold!

Dimitri Simakis:

Just talking to other filmmakers and meeting other filmmakers. So it’s just really, really inspiring. Truly. It’s awesome.

Glen Dower:

So, The Rainbow Bridge. Dimitri, you’re a quadruple threat in this film. You’re a writer, director, editor, and composer. Busy man. And Suki-Rose you are the producer. With this movie, I’m guessing it came from a fever dream or you saw one of those infomercials that the film opens with, and said, what the hell is this?

Dimitri Simakis:

I really, really love found footage. That’s one of my main passions. So I think I’m just too, almost uncreative in that way of just like, well, I have to start with something VHS.

Suki-Rose:

You definitely have VHS brain poisoning, I would say.

Dimitri Simakis:

There’s going to be an element of that in probably everything I think I do. So I started off with the wonderful David Brown in a new wave infomercial.

Suki-Rose:

And we’ve known Thu Tran, who stars in the film for about 10 years, and Dimitri just knew for more than the last decade that he wanted to make something like a fantasy film. That is kind of a love letter to all like that. You like fantasy 80s cinema, The Neverending Story, and Joe Dante.

Dimitri Simakis:

John Carpenter. There’s a lot of that.

Suki-Rose:

It’s funny. Like, we’re married, we’re a married couple. So when one of us is working on a project or developing an idea, we don’t know how to do that without involving the other person really. It’s just kind of like when you’re passionate about a concept, you’re living in it all the time. And if you’re living with one other person in the woods, we live in a mountain town in the woods, it’s like, it’s on the table, it’s what we’re doing.

So when he had the idea and was like, I want to make this film, I was like, well, hey, this is brilliant. Everything Dimitri does is brilliant. So I’m like, it’s going to be amazing. But also I was like, there’s no one else who I would trust to really understand what he’s trying to do. And we really, on all our projects, try to act as creative amplifiers and interpreters for each other. Just kind of being like, I get it. I can see it.

Dimitri Simakis:

Or that level of honesty of like, Hey, listen, man, I don’t get it.

Suki-Rose:

We’re very rough with notes with each other.

Dimitri Simakis:

Very, very harsh. We have to.

Glen Dower:

That’s what you need sometimes, right?

Dimitri Simakis:

Yeah, definitely.

Glen Dower:

Let’s talk about the characters in The Rainbow Bridge, because what I love about the three main players we have in this, we have Heather, James, and Thu, I love how they’re all in different movies, but they’re all in, and they’re ruling their own different movies. We have Heather as Dr. Picadillo and James Urbaniak as Herb who is in a Universal horror movie. Then Thu playing this absurd situation completely straight. How was your direction for each?

Dimitri Simakis:

That’s just Thu, that’s who she is. She’s just like that all the time. So I definitely wrote it as best I could in her specific voice. But for me exactly, that was really the point if I wanted her to play it straight that way, to just be in this whirlwind of kind of madness and insanity. Then you get James, who’s this seasoned character actor who’s been around since I think at least the 90s. He’s been in everything. He’s been directed by everybody. Spielberg, Christopher Nolan.

Suki-Rose:

…Dimitri…

Dimitri Simakis:

But he’s just so great that he just takes on any role and is like, huh, got it. Immediately. Just gets it. And then Heather’s someone who’s also just been, we’re such fans of her work especially on At Home with Amy Sedaris. I really loved that she had so many questions about the character, the background, and who she was, which I was more than happy to provide. Again, just kind of making compilations of videos to show her.

Suki-Rose:

Dimitri would make video playlists mostly from people from something in LA we have called the Conscious Life Expo, which is kind of just a new-age convention. He made Heather all these playlists to be like, here, this is the flavor of this character.

Dimitri Simakis:

But we’d love that too, how it felt like they’re in three different movies, and for five minutes we were like, is that going to work? And while we were on set, but it was like, no, of course. We were so happy with how it turned out in that sense.

Glen Dower:

What was the audience reaction at the premiere?

Suki-Rose:

We had our premiere last night, which is why we’re a little sleepy, and one of the things I said to Dimitri, because this is Dimitri’s first film festival film, and I’ve done this a handful of times, the one thing I say is you’re not really watching your movie. You’re watching the audience watch your movie. And it was wild last night. It played so well, that the jokes hit. That’s just the most satisfying thing. Totally.

Dimitri Simakis:

I just wish I could just look back and watch everyone.

Suki-Rose:

I know we wanted to turn around and watch our crowd, it’s been amazing.

Dimitri Simakis:

Again, just all of that and people who have seen it beforehand and all of that, it’s unreal. I’m sad to leave. I think we’re going to miss a couple of screenings in Salt Lake, and I’m like, no, I want to stay.

Glen Dower:

So what’s next for you guys? The Rainbow Bridge a short but it leaves itself open for a sequel with the walls cracking between worlds…is there an idea to make a follow-up or to expand this, if it’s a hit, into a feature?

Dimitri Simakis:

I guess going back, it was the original plan to make a feature. So in a lot of ways, this is sort of a business card in that way, in that sense.

Suki-Rose:

Just a little nibble.

Dimitri Simakis:

It does end with that shot, where as soon as it goes to black, would probably cost about 10 million dollars! We definitely want there to be that cliffhanger. But a feature is definitely in the works, at least on our end.

Suki-Rose:

We’re definitely not feeling done with these characters. We keep thinking about them, thinking about their relationships with each other. We have a feature version of this that is just kind of being teased out, getting the finishing touches on that. And we’re going to do that as co-writers.

Dimitri Simakis:

We love these characters.

Suki-Rose:

We love them so much and we think about Dr. Bailey Picadillo all the time. We’re just seeing something mostly, honestly, I’ll see something on YouTube and be like, Dr. Bailey. That’s Dr. Bailey. Yes, for sure.

Dimitri Simakis:

There’s a lot of that in L.A. There’s a lot of Herbs in LA. But while we were working, we felt 13 minutes just isn’t enough, but let’s keep cramming, cramming, cramming, cramming to make that kind of feel like it’s bursting at the seams in a way.

Glen Dower:

And was there much left on the cutting room floor?

Dimitri Simakis:

Not really. There was maybe a line or two maybe, but we knew exactly. It was very methodical in that way. I do illustrations. Probably the first job I’ve had outside of school. So kind of treating it almost as a comic book in that way of storyboarding all that. But again, meticulous, I think to the point of madness.

Suki-Rose:

No, it’s great when you’re trying to communicate what you’re trying to do, when it’s something so unusual to a lot of different people to be able to be like Dimitri’s storyboards are like, it’s so funny. My storyboards are always like, here’s a circle and a triangle, and they’re going to move through space and talk to each other. And I was just like, well, we can all see the film here on the page. It looks amazing. Let’s do it!

Dimitri Simakis:

And a big testament to the crew. Everybody from the art department, animators, compositors, puppeteers.

Suki-Rose:

Costumes.

Dimitri Simakis:

It just kept going. But it was so great to have that base of like, I’m going to tell you everything I have in mind. But then everybody went wild with it in so many different, not in so many different directions, but just kept adding and adding to make it again, to make it burst at the seams.

Suki-Rose:

We’re so lucky to work with people who are also dear, cherished friends that we’ve all been slogging through the industry with for a long time. But also just when you bring the level of passion to a project that Dimitri is laying down is the base work, everybody rises to that and brings like, oh, but what if there was this, what if there was this? And so everything just expands, it’s so cool. I mean, we feel so lucky to work with the people we work with.

Dimitri Simakis:

We said last night that you kind of bring everyone down into your madness with you, into that fever dream of just like, what’s the computer gear going to look like? Okay, what’s the headset? How’s that going to work? And how intricate can we make all that?

Suki-Rose:

And that’s why we’re here.

Dimitri Simakis:

There’s so much more to go.

Glen Dower:

Yes, it’s always surprising when you see the credits rule on a short film because people do think, oh, it’s just the director and the cast and the director’s just there by himself. But no, the credits keep rolling. Amazing puppeteers and of course the makeup, like Thu’s in the afterlife. It’s just a ride.

Suki-Rose:

You’re along for the ride!

Glen Dower:

And then…their special song starts. I need to get that song on my Spotify!

Dimitri Simakis:

I think it’ll be out soon.

Suki-Rose:

Definitely, with the song, that was part of a big process. Do you want to talk a little bit about finding the song?

Dimitri Simakis:

Yeah, I kept going back, I’m like, do I really go Neverending Story- kind of synth-pop? I love New Wave, all that kind of stuff. But I was like, no, it just feels too on the nose, too cutesy. And Thu is also in a, I believe she describes it as a scat rap band called Old Throat.

Suki-Rose:

I would call it like a noise band!

Dimitri Simakis:

But she’s a singer, but it’s a lot of guttural, just guttural tones. You would not expect it maybe from passing Thu on the street, but it is, she’s just a firecracker of energy when she lets that out. So anyway, it was like, oh, this makes perfect sense. And then, of course, Fat Tony just brought it home. He is just such an incredible artist, rapper, musician. We knew right away it had to be him. He was the only person we reached out to.

And we’ve been friends for a few years, but he was also like, ‘I can’t believe you’re saying thank you for asking. I love Thu. I’m a fan of her work. We met 20 years ago in New York. Oh my God, I haven’t seen her in forever. I would love to be reunited and just have been there.’ When you’re doing a lot of remote work or you’re recording with Tony and post of course…

Suki-Rose:

…just to have everyone together in the same room. It’s such a fun experience. It’s a delight.

Glen Dower:

So cool. So, we are the movie site by movie fans for movie fans. Obviously, you guys are movie fans as well as makers; and the world is waking up to the Oscar nominations. Have you guys had a chance to check the news?

Suki-Rose:

I did! I did just take a peek at the besties. But I don’t feel like there were any surprises. Were there any surprises?

Glen Dower:

We’re obviously in the midst of the season. We’ve had the Emmys, we’ve had the Golden Globes, we’ve had the BAFTA nominations in Britain. Again, it’s the same names coming up again and again. I was speaking to another director also in the short category, for The Shell Covered Ox. And we were just talking about how Chris Nolan, and that perhaps Oppenheimer is not his greatest movie, but is this going to be his ‘Career Oscar’?

Suki-Rose:

I was going to say, is this his Leo getting the Oscar for The Revenant? It’s like at a certain point it’s just like he’s worked so hard, let’s just…But I did really like The Holdovers. I was trying to remember if that got a nomination for Best Picture and I can’t remember. But there’s a handful we haven’t seen of the Best Picture nominations. I feel like that’s a February activity, end of January, early February. It’s like, okay…

Dimitri Simakis:

…what have we missed?

Suki-Rose:

We spent a lot of time watching our movie! When you’re making stuff you like to watch things that inform it. So we’ve been watching a lot of fantasy stuff. We saw Oppenheimer, we saw Killers of Flower Moon we saw Barbie course, May December. May December was so beautifully shot. I’m obsessed with that DP, Christopher Blauvelt. He is just like, I worked with him on one film, and every time I see his name in the credits, I’m always like, oh, oh yeah, there you go. Of course, that’s how he shot it. It’s beautiful. We’re isolated mountain folk a little bit.

Dimitri Simakis:

There’s one movie theater and they don’t always have the art house stuff.

Glen Dower:

So what’s next for you guys after enjoying the rest of Sundance? Continue on the festival circuits or have a new project in mind?

Dimitri Simakis:

Well, it’s a little bit of both. We’re trying to really take advantage of just the opportunity. So far it’s just been our submissions. But just really excited to see where we can go, see where we might not be able to all of that stuff. But just again, to be able to even think about doing this once more is like, oh my God, I don’t know if I can handle it. It’s too much. It’s too much context.

Suki-Rose:

It is. It’s overwhelming to be like, okay, you’re going to go to a festival, you’re going to talk to a lot of nice people and everyone’s going to be just really nice and compliment you. And it’s overwhelming when you kind of work in a vacuum and you slog through rejection endlessly. So it’s kind of like, well, I think we’re entering into a writing period. We have this feature that is fully outlined, but we just need to buckle down and we’ll see who else wants to invite us to their festival and who else wants us to come hang out. No complaints.

Glen Dower:

There we go. Guys, it’s been an absolute pleasure to meet you and like I said, I really enjoyed The Rainbow Bridge, and just I want more, keep them coming, and make a streaming show! But, enjoy the rest of Sundance, and a big rest, then some breakfast.

Suki-Rose:

Thank you so much. It was as much a pleasure for your time.

The Rainbow Bridge, a thirteen-minute comedy thriller was written, directed, edited, and composed by Dimitri Simakis and produced by his wife Suki-Rose. It had its world premiere at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival.

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