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Kat Candler's jumping off bridges follows what is in this digital age an almost classical form of independent film; a solid script, shot on a shoestring budget that had just enough funds to cover some gorgeous 16mm photography and a strong indie rock soundtrack (featuring the likes of Sufjan Stevens, Jeff Hanson and Bosque Brown).

Full disclosure: I've been friends with Candler for quite some time, and as such should probably abstain from offering an opinion on the film itself. I'll just stick to the facts: jumping off bridges is Candler's second feature film, and her first working in tandem with producer Stacy Schoolfield. The picture had its world premiere last March at the SXSW Film Festival, which led to substantial acclaim, further festival screenings and some tentative interest from distributors. But instead of waiting around for a deal to fall in their laps, Candler and Schoolfield took matters into their own hands and announced that they would be self-distributing the film. They've been on the road with it ever since, but they're taking a more iconoclastic route than most self-distributing indies.

The film is about the effects of suicide and different ways in which people respond to it. Although her narrative is focused on a single family and their loss, Candler underhandedly suggests that the repercussions of suicide reach far further, that they are as social as they are personal. Noticing that the film struck a chord with certain audience members, she and Schoolfield decided to openly court suicide counseling and mental health groups and almost immediately found a whole new audience opening up to them.

The film's theatrical tour will hit its peak the first week of November, with an engagement at New York's Pioneer Theater on the 3rd and the 4th and a consecutive bow in Los Angeles. This will be followed by a government-sponsored screening in Washington DC. Even though they were up to their ears in preparations for these screenings, as well as making preliminary steps towards pre-production on their next feature, Kat and Stacy found time to sit down with me at their base of operations in Austin, Texas and discuss their self-styled manner of distribution (and even as we talked, they were on the phone with one of their lead actresses, who was trying to find an art house theater in Tennessee where the film was about to screen).

So give me the rundown of an average day in the life of a self-distributing independent filmmaker.

Stacy: Well, we're living the life of the glamorous filmmakers these days, big time.

Lots of spas and massages?

Stacy: We wake up and are on email or the phone, fretting and pacing and adding things and doing a lot of math.

Kat: First, I wake up and then I go run and then I go take a shower. Then I go to my day job and I get out of my day job at one. And then from there, I go to a coffee shop and pretty much email for five or six hours. Go home, eat dinner. Maybe watch a sitcom while I do some work.

You've been on the road with the film all over the country for the past few months. What's the next stage of the tour?

Kat: We're screening in New York and LA the first two weeks in November. Those screenings are mostly geared towards distributors and critics. And then we have a huge screening in Washington DC that's sponsored by The National Institute of Health and The US Department of Health and Human Services, where they'll be bringing in a bunch of different government agencies.

Stacy: Our goal is to get people to those screenings and get the film in front of them.

Kat: And show them that we have an audience. The things that we heard early on from distributors were that it's a downer of a film, we don't know how to market it, we don't know how to sell it, we don't know who to sell it to.

Stacy: Or, "Can you make the ending happier?"

Kat: And so it's kind of about trying to prove people wrong. There are people kind of shaking their heads, and it's like, "Screw you, man, we're going to do it and do it on our terms, and we're going to make it the best we possibly can." That's why we're self-distributing it. We're proving that there are people who will come out and see it and embrace it and take it out into the world beyond us.

You've foregone the usual path of courting distributors and have taken a pretty unprecedented approach to the self-distribution model. In a way, what you're doing is more like social work than distribution. At what point did you decide to buck the usual independent film trend and take this route?

Kat: Well, we knew when we were shooting the film that our audience was different from what we thought it was going to be. We thought we were going to have this art house film that was going to play in the Landmarks or the Angelikas, but when we started to get phone calls and emails from people who had lost loved ones and counselors and support groups, that's when we realized we had something very different on our hands.

We had a friend who used to work in marketing at Morgan Creek and he sort of said, "This is what you guys are. You should really embrace it and work with who you are and what your film is telling you where it needs to go." And that's when we started talking to regional and national mental health organizations and suicide prevention coalitions and teaming up with those folks in regards to how they could use the film for their audiences and in their communities. And that's sort of how it got started.

But you didn't originally make the film for this sort of niche audience, nor is this a film whose issues are limited to suicide. Has that actually been appealing to audiences, that it's thematically a bit broader than a typical issues picture?

Stacy: I think so. What I've been hearing is that audiences like how all the kids [in the film] respond to grief differently. I think, for the mental health groups, that is the hook that gets them in the door. Those organizations are hearing about it from other organizations who've seen it and recommended it, and that's just one of the word-of-mouth directions it's going. We're trying to dig deeper with our audience as well, but that's really the bedrock that started this screening tour.

Kat: And the other thing, as far as the issue-driven aspect of the film is concerned, you think that suicide and mental health is very marginalized, but it's not at all. We're all very directly or indirectly affected by it, and I don't think we all realize that. And so it's like these little tiny legs keep sprouting in all these weird, strange directions -

Stacy: - and then some people still come see it because of the soundtrack. Or because Michael Emerson's in it.

Kat: And honestly, I think the direction that we're going and the responses that we've gotten and the people that we're working with... I would say that this is way more rewarding than getting some sort of distribution deal, because I feel like we're affecting people in ways that we had no idea we could.

Stacy: They're not just going to see the film. They're going to use the film in their work. They're going to keep giving it a chance to be seen by other people.

Kat: And it goes far beyond the movie theater. Once they leave, they start talking about it with other people.

Kat, I know you recently made some changes to the film so that it would be better suited to this roll out. From a director's point of view, do you feel like you've had to subjugate your vision for the sake of the audience?

Kat: No. Honestly, the changes that we made were changes that we all agreed on outside of anyone's responses to the film. It was basically tightening it up. The only thing - it's kind of ironic - we pulled out a lot of the language to make it suitable for a PG-13 rating. But when we were doing close-captioning, and I was transcribing what was actually on the screen, I was like, "Wait a minute, that F-word wasn't in the script! The actors did that on their own!" And that happened a lot of times! And I was like, you know, I think I was trying to get a PG-13 with this script and our actors screwed us over!

Let's stroll back a bit to the actual inception of the project. You shot this five years after your first feature, Cicadas, but and I know the script was done some years before that. Wasn't it invited to the IFP Labs at some point? When did you and Stacy decide to tackle the project on your own?

Kat: It was in 2002 that I was at IFP, and I was trying to get it off the ground in any which way I possibly could. Trying to talk to people, attach producers and whatnot. I just wasn't in a place with my career and my experience where that should have happened. And so years later, when teaming up with Stacy and Lorie [Marsh, co-producer of the film], I had that foundation and collective force that could actually do something with it.

Stacy: I guess, really, you just have a date you want to start, and you go towards it, and you just do it.

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