INTERVIEW: “Getting The Band Back Together”: Moonshine Post’s Journey to Bring ‘Idiots’ to the Big Screen
- William Glen Jones
- 18 hours ago
- 6 min read
Founder Drew Sawyer talks the ATLFF opening night premiere of Idiots
“It takes a village, and sometimes a village of lunatics to make a movie,” Moonshine Post Production founder Drew Sawyer humorously said upon taking the stage at the Atlanta Film Festival Opening Night, where he helped introduce a screening of Idiots to a sold-out crowd.
Idiots – which follows two down-on-their-luck men forced to work together to transport a rich troubled teen to rehab – had its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah in January (where it was formerly titled The Shitheads).
However, its Atlanta premiere proved especially significant. Not only was Idiots largely shot in Georgia, specifically Paulding County, but the film was completed at Atlanta’s own Moonshine Post-Production, commemorating a special kind of homecoming.
Sawyer helped introduced the screening alongside the film’s producer Alex Orr, who has been attempting to get Idiots off the ground, alongside director Macon Blair, for over a decade. Yet, Sawyer and Orr’s own creative partnership, and their roots in the Atlanta filmmaking scene, dates back even further.
In the 2000s, betting on Georgia as a viable film hub was certainly a riskier venture. The work that was emerging as a result often included very scrappy, independently-financed passion projects, either shot on analog 16mm film or utilizing early digital photography. Passion, above all else, is what fueled the creatives in this moment.
“Everyone was directing, everyone was taking turns holding the boom, everyone was editing,” Sawyer said. “We were all helping each other, and laying the groundwork for what it meant to be a professional filmmaker, or pseudo-professional filmmaker in Atlanta.”
A prime example of this filmmaking style and ethos being Orr’s 2007 directorial debut, Blood Car, a 76-min campy exploitation slasher that, in its own commemorative bit of programming, screened on the closing day of this year’s festival, creating a full-circle dialectic between these projects.
While Sawyer and Orr were circling each other’s orbits, Sawyer was attending Georgia State University, working three jobs, interning at a post-production house in Atlanta and honing his editorial skills on any project thrown his way, in addition to finding his own personal filmmaking tribe.
This tribe included the likes of David Bruckner, Dan Bush and Jacob Gentry, all of whom were coming off their 2007 independent horror production, The Signal (which also screened as part of this year’s festival on April 26). What Sawyer saw in their film was not only inspirational on a purely creative level, but also provided a pathway for what an independent financial model could feasibly look like.
The Signal, which was shot over the course of a mere 13 days with a production budget of $50,000, was able to premiere at Sundance and be acquired by Magnolia Pictures. The Signal represented a sales/distribution model that was virtually unheard of for a Georgia production during the period: the pre-tax credit period.
While initially enacted in 2005, the Georgia filmmaking tax incentive, also known as the Georgia Entertainment Investment Act, truly crystallized in 2008, with an expansion signed into action by Governor Sonny Perdue that quickly transformed Georgia into a major film and television player.
“There’s a reason why everyone from these camps all made it to higher levels professionally,” Sawyer said. “[Atlanta] was this incubator was producing an unfathomable amount of success in all facets of filmmaking, from producing to directing to production design to post-production. So when the Investment Act happened, we were ready.”
Even with big-scale productions rolling into town, from the likes of The Walking Dead to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Sawyer clarified that the models and ethos of how he made movies did not change, but rather that these models only mutated and amplified with additional resources now available to them.
“I literally was just making indies with my friends,” Sawyer said. “That never stopped.”
One of these independent films was 2012’s V/H/S, a found footage horror anthology film that was not only a smash success in its own right, but helped launch the respective careers of its directors, with names including Adam Wingard, Ti West, and David Bruckner, leveling up, so-to-speak, from the success of The Signal. V/H/S also screened as part of ATLFF on April 25.
Sawyer appears as the character “Clint” in Bruckner’s 20-min. segment, entitled “Amateur Night.” It was one pit-stop in a long string of pit-stops for Sawyer, but a vital one.
Sawyer cites 2012 as a critical inflection point in his journey – when he not only wanted to be involved in moviemaking, but help spearhead one of the most critical parts of moviemaking: post-production.
At the same time V/H/S was landing with such an enthusiastic response, a television series called Stuff You Should Know, which was adapted from a podcast of the same name and produced for the Science Channel, began producing episodes locally, where Sawyer served as a post-production supervisor.
“I had these two kind of golden opportunities,” Sawyer said. “I can cut on all the platforms, I had been freelancing at all the post-production houses in Atlanta, so I knew the ins and outs of pretty much every technological capability of the post-production landscape in Atlanta, but also what I would do differently if I was going to make a movie for myself.”
When the pilot for Stuff You Should Know was picked up, the producers not only sought out Sawyer’s talents, but inquired about keeping the production, and specifically the post-production processes, as local as possible.
Sawyer had the name Moonshine rattling around for some years – Moonshine Pictures, Inc. was a previous name for his production company established in 2007 – but in 2012 the partnership entity, Moonshine Post-Production LLC was established on the Atlanta Beltline, setting its sights on being the city’s premiere post-production facility.
“The idea was to build a brand that is bigger than me, that is just not ‘Drew the Editor,’ using all this incredible talent that I just met over the last two years making this television show and this movie,” Sawyer said. “Because this talent does exist.”
Flash-forward to nearly a decade-and-a-half later, and the gamble has paid off. Not only is Moonshine Post Atlanta’s go-to post-production house, offering specialty services for films, television and advertising. These services include editing, sound, dailies and color finishing. Their collaborators have ranged from Netflix, to Sony Pictures, to AMC, and many more.
Yet, Sawyer says that the local collaborations still feel the most special, and his collaboration with Alex Orr and Macon Blair on Idiots represents, not only its own full-circle moment between long-time peers and collaborators, but a creative apogee for Moonshine.
Idiots is the first ATLFF Opening Night film to have its post-production completely overseen by Moonshine, who also sponsored the screening. And when it came time to finally get the film off the ground, Sawyer was one of the very first people Orr called, with the hopes of completing the entire post-production process with Moonshine.
“When there’s an opportunity to get the band back together… I can’t wait,” Sawyer said about working with Orr. “He knows what he wants, and he wants to work with directors that know what they want… there’s a mutual respect and language between all of us, and he will follow through and represent the best of what Georgia can bring to a low-budget scenario.”
Sawyer cites Idiots as the fastest and smoothest post-production process on any project he has ever worked on, and the final edit – from first assembly to exporting the DCP for Sundance – came together within less than five months.
At the end of the marathon-like process, Sawyer finally found some time to breathe. He recalls sitting on his porch with his young daughter, playing for a couple of minutes with her, when he received a call from his wife, informing him that her water just broke.
“In a way, I had two world premieres in January: the birth of my son, and the movie Idiots,” Sawyer said.
The results show on-screen, and Sawyer, Orr and the entire creative team behind Idiots remain incredibly proud of the film, and thankful for the long and arduous journey it took to bring it the silver screen and, specifically, to the Atlanta Film Festival.
“We made a movie with the people we’ve been making movies with for 20 years,” Orr said. “It doesn’t get much better than that.”
“Idiots” will be released in theaters nationwide by IFC Films on Aug. 28.
In addition to presenting “Idiots,” Moonshine also sponsored the Filmmaker’s Lounge on April 25, as well as hosted a launch event for the inaugural Post Atlanta Conference, of which they are a founding partner, scheduled for Sept. 26-27, 2026. The conference will feature 50+ experts and panels focused on industry craft.
