Doug Spearman, writer/director of Hot Guys With Guns

With a title like Hot Guys With Guns, the gay action comedy has been getting attention on the film festival circuit and for good reason. Taking elements of film noir, buddy comedies and a dash of gay romance, writer/director Doug Spearman has crafted a layered story that follows two exes, Danny (Marc Anthony Samuel) and Pip (Brian McArdle) as they try to solve a West Hollywood crime ring. Of course, the two men are also trying to solve the matter of their hearts as lingering feelings from their past relationship are just as paramount as the clues they're searching for to solve the crime.

The film, which also deftly sends up Hollywood, gay culture and race, screens at the 31^st Annual Outfest LGBT Film Festival in Los Angeles this Friday, and brings a full circled-ness to the project since it was developed by Spearman in the Outfest Screenwriting Lab in 2009. Hot Guys With Guns also stars Alan Blumenfeld, Blake Boyd and TheBacklot Hot 100’s Darryl Stephens.

We sat down with Spearman this past weekend at Outfest to talk about making the film, casting a straight man as one of his romantic leads and how his post-Noah’s Arc career led him to making this film.

TheBacklot: You’ve been at Outfest before but I'm guessing this experience is different because this film is your baby. You wrote it, directed it…

Doug Spearman: I pushed this thing out of my body. Do you know what I mean? I did…I've been in stuff that was at Outfest but I've never walked the carpet for that. I've walked the carpet at Outfest one time and that was just one year that I was judging, but it was this time, it was like so much more important. I had my guys and the people who wanted to be there.

Hot guys Marc Anthony Samuel (l) and Brian McArdle (r)

TBL: As fun as the movie is, you’ve instilled a groundedness to in the relationship between Danny and Pip, Pip’s relationship with his mother…all real stuff.  Did that come about consciously or was it more organic?

DS: A lot of it was, really. The best way to answer that is most of it is organic. I'm really close to my ex's. I keep ex-boyfriends. Pip and Danny's relationship is based on a relationship of mine; an ex of mine. In fact, there is a line in the dialogue in the movie that actually came out of a conversation.

And like the scene in the bathroom between Pip and his mom, that's really kind of my relationship with my mother. I was one of those gay guys that grew up with the mother with no boundaries. I'm like, ‘What do you mean, your mom never called you in the bathroom to wash her back? What?’ And I wanted one creepy little element with them and that was when the door closed.

TBL: You also make more than a few comments on Hollywood and living in Los Angeles which I definitely could relate to!

DS: I'm really nervous to show this movie in L.A. I kind of feel like Billy Wilder when he screened Sunset Boulevard and Jack Warner came up to him and cursed him out, because there are a couple of people that'll be sitting in the audience who are actually characters in this movie. I wanted it to feel like L.A. I mean, L.A. is a character. If you notice at one of the sex parties, the guy has lubes, condom, and parking passes laid out in West Hollywood. Only in West Hollywood would you have valet parking at a sex party.

TBL: Talk to me about casting. The roles of Danny and Pip are the core of the film so you had to get it right with Marc and Brian.

DS: Marc and Brian worked on that relationship. We rehearsed every week, four days a week, for three, almost four months and for free. Because that relationship is old. It has history. And the other thing is that Brian is straight. Brian had never kissed a man. Brian had never hugged a man and had never made out with a man. Everybody thinks Brian is the gay one, but no. Brian is completely straight. We had to teach Brian how to hold a Martini glass like a gay man because gay men hold them in a certain way. Do you know what I mean?

Brian actually videotaped himself kissing so he would know what it would look like with his girlfriend…we had intimacy rehearsals where they started just by touching each other and just by looking at each other and touching each other's faces. Brian and Marc, I made them walk around the block holding hands. We had to improvise their first date and we had to improvise the phone calls.

TBL: Those are good acting lessons for anyone playing a couple in film or TV.

DS: Well, because I'm an actor. I'm a trained actor and I was trained by really good directors. So we spent a lot of time creating them and, no matter what was on the set or what was going on, if anything got too loud, I said, "You guys go to each other and put your heads together. This whole movie hangs on your relationship."

Marc and I worked really hard at first because Danny can come off as the angry black guy, because being black and gay in both Hollywood and West Hollywood can be difficult, and can make you really mad. You notice Danny a lot of times is the only black character in the white world…the black gay character…so we had to strip off layers because [Marc’s] natural instinct is to shield and be funny or you can just play Danny as the angry guy. I said, ‘No. You are the audience's way in and then once you're in, Brian tickles them.’ Marc is the heart of the movie and Brian's basically the libido.

Darryl Stephens (Spearman's co-star during their Noah's Arc days)

TBL: It must be a testament to his acting but Brian does not come off like a straight guy playing a gay guy.

DS: Well I told everybody, because we had a reading and Sam Riley asked me, ‘So how gay is he?’ And I was like, ‘You pull it back. I don't want any of that.’…I wanted them to be just people and I told Brian, I said, ‘You're rich. You come from a trust fund family.’ We watched Shampoo and I said ‘you're Carrie Fisher in Shampoo. You're over-privileged and you have no boundaries with your parents. At one point, you and your mother had the same boyfriend. Like you slept with one of your stepfathers.’ I come up with these really deep back stories.

And this is the first gay movie that I've seen in a long…there are no drag queens in this movie. There's not one drag queen. I was actually going to put in the credits, "No drag queens were hurt in the making of this movie."

TBL: And you said a lot of this with Hot Guys With Guns was because of a story that ran on this site (when it was AfterElton), right?

DS: That article was a tool for me because I kept showing it to people, to investors. Because see, there's a need for these guys.  There really is. I posted the article and I think I put it on my Indiegogo page, but I wrote [the journalist] and asked permission and I let him know that I was doing Hot Guys With Guns.

TBL: What's your hope for yourself career wise? Do you want this to kind of be a calling card for you as a director and/or screenwriter? I’ve talked to Darryl about having Noah's Arc attached to your name and getting known for other things.

DS: It was the thing that gave us, certainly, prominence, but I was lucky enough to have a career on the other side of the camera for 20 years, literally. I was 41 when I auditioned for Noah's Arc. I was 43 when we went on the air. I started working in television when I was 18 and I came into this kind of grounded.  But I knew if you spend enough time watching television series, if you get a series, you maybe get one shot and then you could be called Gilligan the rest of your life. I was willing to accept that and actually I worked more before Noah's Arc than I ever did after. Noah's Arc brought a full-tilt stop to my acting career.

TBL: Was that because people said, ‘Oh, this is a gay actor from a gay show?

DS: Yeah. But after Noah's Arc, I think I did two movies and that was it. I mean full-tilt stop. And I thought, ‘You know what? I've got other stuff.’ I love to write and I love to tell stories and there are a bunch going on in here. I've got a love story that I want to tell. I want to do the sequel to this. I would love to sell [Hot Guys With Guns] as a TV series, because I think it's built to be a series. I would love it to be a gay franchise.

Outfest continues in Los Angeles through July 21^st. To find out when Hot Guys With Guns might be in your area, check out the Facebook page and follow the film on Twitter.