Usually I just have a bunch of ideas for a script and I just shove them all together so I had an idea about an alchemist, and then I had this weird doppelganger thing, and then I just started kind of throwing them all together. It was supposed to be a doppelganger out in the woods story. So I started to write this doppelganger script and then just one thing led to another. And I was like, “What was THAT?” And Ashley and I thought that we had seriously seen a doppelganger and that this guy was like some creation of satan or something, out to do malicious harm and he just didn’t know who were were and didn’t know what to say. And it was him – and we rolled down the window and were like, “Hey Roland!” and he just turned and looked at us and didn’t say a thing and then just walked into a house that was right there. And we drove by him real slow and we were like, “Maybe that wasn’t him?” Then we turned around and pulled off to the side of the street and just watched him. And we thought we saw this old friend of ours, Roland, walking down the street like a zombie. Joel Potrykus: It started off when me and my girlfriend/producer were driving on a street in Grand Rapids, a city where you kind of know a lot of people. Hammer to Nail: What first attracted you to this idea? Was it the location? The genre?

Joel Potrykus may have abandoned the grit and grime of urban life in order to shack up in the woods, but he sure as shit didn’t leave behind his penchant for weird-ass punk-infused shenanigans! While I ultimately don’t know what this movie means - is going off the grid a bad idea? has the world made all of us insane? is Satan realer than Bigfoot? - the performances by Ty Hickson and Amari Cheatom and Potrykus’s assured filmmaking made this one of the more original films I saw at this year’s fest. In his SxSW wrap-up, Michael Tully wrote: The film follows an outcast (Sean) living in the woods of Michigan who makes amateurish attempts at alchemy and reckless conjurings of evil in a genre best described as “WTF?” (in the best way possible). I caught up with Joel Potrykus ( Buzzard, Ape ) after his newest film, The Alchemist Cookbook, played BAM Cinemafest in June. ( Charles Poekel caught up with Joel Potrykus at BAM Cinemafest regarding his latest film The Alchemist Cookbook. The result is the following chat which is one of the best interviews you’ll read all year! Potrykus’ film is available NOW in a pay-what-you-want format.)

The alchemist cookbook (2016) showing