Editor’s note: B. E. Grey interviewed Jodi Cash and Ethan Payne prior to “The Green Flash” viewing at the Eastern Oregon Film Festival. Grey’s question are in bold, Payne’s responses are in italics, and Cash’s answers are in plain text.

How long have you been touring with the green flash?

We began festivals in April, so I guess a little more than six months.

And how many festivals have you both attended? Have you attended any together? Are they all separate? Because I know that you’re based in Paris, Jodi. And, Ethan, are you stateside?

I am: Atlanta. We’ve attended three together, yeah?

Yes. We attended Sunscreen, Queens World Film Fest, and Ouray, together, which was really, really fun. And then I just attended the Not Film Festival in Santa Candelo de Romagna, Italy, and Ethan will be representing the team in Oregon.

So, the Eastern Oregon Film Festival will be number five for you guys, and have any other members of the production attended in person for these, or has it just been you two?

There are two other members of our team. Our other two are our co-producer/composer Gresham Cash, who is also my husband, living here with me in Paris. So he’s been to the same four that I have. And then Jake G., our co-editor and co-DP attended Queens World and Ouray.

And my compliments on the compositions for the film. They’re really quite lovely.

I will relay that.

Obviously, we can send off a film and let it speak for itself. What do you guys hope to bring to a festival by your attendance?

Ethan, you wanna go ahead since you’ll be at this one?

Yeah. Absolutely. I think, a curiosity and a desire to connect with other filmmakers. I think, especially in our case because we’re such a small crew, we’re all best friends, but filmmaking can be a really isolating task, especially in the edit room. And so these festivals are an incredible time to just connect with people who do the same thing that you do and have experienced the same things that you do and sometimes experience the same isolation. So in our experience, being around other filmmakers just has just been so enriching and creatively and emotionally nurturing just to be around other people.

Y’all are co-directors, so, I’d like to ask: have you worked together on projects before? Is this the first project you worked on together? How did that come to be?

Well, that’s a good question. This is not the only project that we’ve worked on together, but in a funny way, it was the first. This documentary grew out of a story that I wrote and Ethan photographed in 2016 for a publication in the South called The Bitter Southerner. And the story featured Steve Lamb and a couple of other people who do appear in the documentary, some who don’t. And when we went and wrote and shot that story, we thought, “this feels like there’s something so much bigger there. We should go back and do a film.” And in the meantime, we did a couple of other print stories and publications together. But working together was always so natural, so fun. I’ve learned so much from Ethan, and he’s also just, like, a joy to spend time with. So it was very, very easy and natural working together on something that required one shoot and just a little bit of collaboration growing into something much bigger.

So y’all started out working together not in the documentary medium. You were working in print and photography respectively. And so do you guys have backgrounds in documentary, or is your background in photography and journalism?

My background was in print journalism, and online journalism. So this is actually my first film, and Ethan and I have begun a couple of other projects that we’re excited about, but Ethan has a vast film background. He can tell you more.

Oh, yeah. I was, I actually do mostly documentary work, short docs for nonprofits, and things like that. Shooting stills is probably the least of my professional work. I was more of, yeah, more of a doc filmmaker at the time, but was super glad when my friend asked me to shoot some photos and go down to Florida and hang out.

And so I guess with your respective backgrounds, how does that translate into your division of labor when working on a project together? Is it as simple as, Jodi does the talking and you do the filming, or is there a lot more collaboration and haggling over the same stuff, or do you guys have your respective tasks?

Great question: Jodi?

Yeah. I think that is a great question. To me, I think it’s pretty easy and natural for us to stay in each of our lanes. All of the shooting, aside from shoots when Jake, our co DP, was present, everything visually was Ethan’s work. And I think that I brought a focus on the story and to, you know, being the person asking questions. But at the same time, we would always talk about those things before and afterwards and what worked and what didn’t or what we were excited about, especially when it came to interviews. We were very much in conversation about what the story was, what we thought it was, how it was developing. So it’s very collaborative, but at the same time, I don’t ever feel like my toes were ever stepped on.

You know, there are things that I like doing probably more than Ethan does. A lot of the, like, communications and real production work, of just kind of getting everything in line, is a lot of fun to me. It feels like an easy transition from journalism, you know, things that I was very comfortable with arranging, and that Ethan had done for himself on other films, but I hope it’s nice at least to offload some of that while he’s also gotta create, you know, the perfect image and and make sure that everything looks as good as it does. Anything to add, Ethan?

Oh, sure. It’s just been such an easy and incredible collaboration. As someone who’s used to shooting a lot by myself, it’s incredible to be able to focus on making an image look the way I want to knowing that, Jodi is the one that’s gonna be mostly in the chair, chatting with the interviewees, and it was just an incredible division of skills and labor that way. And I would, you know, I would chip in every now and then during the interviews, but it was nice to have someone lead the room. And Jodi was definitely the leader in the room during the interviews.

I think it was a lot of fun too once we got into the edit, then things about the stories spoke to both of us differently and struck each of us differently. And I think because there were two minds about post-production, we got to a point that the story is what it is, and I feel so satisfied with it.

Getting to postproduction, that is one of my major questions about the film: your film has a fascinating structure that is not remotely straightforward. And I really found myself swept up by it, and the roundabout ways that you came to tell your narrative, because there was this very straightforward way to tell this. It’s like, “in the beginning, there was an economic situation in Florida that led a young generation of fishermen to become pot smugglers.” And you go through all of the stuff until and gradually build up this character of Steve Lamb. But you started in a completely different spot and, like, we don’t even know he has a family until two-thirds of the way through the film. How did that structure come to be? Is that something that’s present in “The Smuggler’s Ghost,” or is that something that you found on your own? And how did you find it?

That’s a great question too, and that was something that we really had to kind of work through in another great moment that it was so great to work through together. Because by the time we reached post-production, we’d been shooting for, like, four years, five years. And so we had just a ton of material. I think the documentary that we thought we were making at first would have been that straightforward narrative of here’s, you know, the story of these young men. They had this skill. They started to do this thing. They made a ton of money and then, whatever.

But that just wouldn’t have represented at all what Steve is really like, what the community is really like, and what we thought was more interesting was basically trying to represent our experience as filmmakers — just kind of diving into this rabbit hole of story that is so on a meta level, we’re telling the story of Steve trying to pedal his own story and get his memoir out there. And then through that memoir, we look into what is this major event in his life that he’s always talking about, this aspect of his life.

And so it mirrors our experience of being with Steve and him kind of revealing the story to us, being in the van with him when he’d be like, “oh, pull pull over here. You know? I’ve got a hundred grand buried over here,” and then all of a sudden, we’re in his mom’s yard or, you know, like, “let’s go by here. I’ve gotta drop some books off,” and then we’re meeting people who mentioned the Steinhatchee bust. So we wanted to do that, and then we also had the idea that we would structure it in chapters, basically mirroring a book. It’s not at all like “The Smuggler’s Ghost.” “The Smuggler’s Ghost” is a very straightforward recount of, you know, Steve’s first trip smuggling.

A completely unhinged accounting of.

I think that’s an accurate summary. So we were just starting to kind of pull apart the representing our own experience in this kind of ride along with Steve. Because Steve is such an anomalous person and so different from who you think of when we start telling people that we’ve made a film about a pot smuggler. I don’t think the average person starts to picture this, like, wacky, endearing, and sometimes challenging grandfather.

And so we wanted to get all of Steve. And in order to get all of Steve, we had to kind of represent what it’s like to be with Steve and to receive his life story from him.

And then just in the editing booth, amidst the isolation of sitting amongst hundreds of hours of footage, what was that process like? Ethan, if you can speak to decisions to omit or include specific stuff. What is it like trying to recreate that rabbit hole experience in the editing room?

Well, Jodi had put together, from all of the countless interviews and transcribing that she did, she put together a script for an editor to follow. And so once she and I had gotten to the point where we were too overwhelmed to edit it ourselves, we pulled in Jake, our co-DP, to basically put an assembly cut together.

And he was the objective eye, so to speak, that could look at the script and put his own creative lens on it. And so then once we had that, once we had the puzzle pieces or the paint on the wall, so to speak, we could then see, okay, we don’t need as much of this. We don’t need this. We probably want a little bit more of this, but it was incredible, it was so invaluable having Jake there to put an assembly cut together, a huge sprawling cut so that we could see what we had and then pare down from there. And that was still a huge challenge figure because you get to know people, especially with Jodi and I being there for all of the shoots, you’ve really fallen in love with characters and you don’t want them to leave and you fall in love with the sentimentality of a person and what they bring to the story when sometimes maybe we need a little bit less or maybe we need a little bit more of someone that you had underestimated earlier in the process.

But it was very, very difficult to pare down and to say, “okay, what do we need to know about Steve? How do we want the audience to feel about Steve? And when can we reveal the family?

Any babies that got killed, highlights that hit the cutting room floor?

Definitely. I mean, honestly, all of the people we encountered, at least to us, were so funny that a lot of a lot of things that we had to trim were just either things that were very sentimental. And like Ethan said, we came to love this family and this community so much that having to cut any of their words of affection felt really difficult, and then having to just cut jokes and silly moments of Steve being Steve that we treasure because that experience was so meaningful to us, I think, was really hard.

Yeah. Well, I can personally say that I’m very thankful that you kept “young, dumb, and full of cum.”

It seemed responsible.

You did your civic duty in keeping that in. I had trouble keeping that out of my review for the film, because it’s not quite what our publication is looking for in terms of language. But getting back to what Ethan mentioned about what you’re wanting the audience to feel: your tone is the other thing that has really stuck with me, because we’re dealing with a lot of heavy subject matter and yet a central figure who is very, you know, on the surface, very light and and and boisterous and optimistic. And yet there’s drugs and death and unjust incarceration at the heart of this film. And so what was it like trying to balance that? Because it literally feels at moments that on the edge of the frame, there is all of this pain just sitting off there. I’m thinking of the moment of interviewing Troy and, just off the frame, Steve starts breaking down, and it’s this kind of shattering of the facade of the film’s, you know, light, witty optimism.

Thank you for that. I’d never actually thought about that before, because what Troy was trying to say was just, “we had a great time in prison, and I love Steve Lamb.” And Steve had a different idea. I think Steve’s motive in pointing us to Troy was to try to get his friend on camera, who was dying, who he loved, and it was just about getting these people’s stories out there before they pass away. So and that, yeah, that moment caught us completely off guard. Thanks for noticing that.

Yeah. And what was it like balancing the tone in the editing room? Were there temptations to lean more into that? Because this is serious. This was painful. Like, there’s only a couple moments that that tears flow, and yet there is a lot of cause for tears.

I think that balance is representative of how Steve was as a person and also how his family operates. I think that they’re all very averse to anything like that. And even though their pain is very real and they can talk about it, honestly, they were very quick to always lean back into what they felt grateful for, what they were happy for, what cheered them up and what they still love about their life together. And so that was another case of just basically wanting to mirror the nature of our subjects.

And I think even though, you know, Steve’s incarceration or struggles with addiction or losing friends, all of those things were sources of very real heartbreak to him. If it would have been a total injustice to his nature and resilience and optimism and incredible humor if we had just let ourselves tip entirely into melancholy about what he’d suffered. And so instead, we did just try to strike that tone of, “this is what it’s like to be with Steve,” where he’s telling you something brutal about what happened to his mom who was the subject of so much abuse of his, you know, mostly absent father. But then in the same twenty minutes, he’s sitting, calling his daughter, and they’re making jokes about him being a smuggler and her being a cop. And so the balance was very easy because it was just present in the material because it is what it was like to be with Steve. You never got all one thing.

And this film’s relationship with law enforcement is very interesting. Your film ends with chyrons that give the political context of the film. It ends with that. And there’s the section about maybe halfway through the film that talks about the war on drugs and stuff like that. It was just fascinating to me, when you were interviewing these figures from the DEA and various law enforcement agencies, that they’re pretty much all smiles. And what was it like, you know, with the political attitude of the film, that this is unjust, that the Nixon and Reagan administrations were doing incredible harm, what was it like interviewing these figures? Were they at all remorseful? Were they at all, regretting the systemic injustice that they participated in or contributed to?

I don’t know that anyone was remorseful about, you know, the work that they’d done, but I do think there was a sense that men like Steve were not the criminals they were ever really concerned with in their work. I think their work, for most of them, focused on much more violent drug related crimes and more complex criminal systems than young men who had nautical skills and were getting marijuana nonviolently, you know, paying for it in one place and selling it in another. I think they could all recognize that it was an obvious economic opportunity, and they could understand why people got caught up in it.

And it was striking to us, and one of the things that made us want to make this a film from the original story that Ethan and I published. We thought it was remarkable that these people live in harmony together as part of the same community. I mean, Charlie Fuss, who has also passed away, he was the person who originally helped us get in touch with Steve when I couldn’t find an accurate number for him. And they all just opened doors to us and were happy to tell this story and happy to promote Steve telling his own story, because they understood why he did what he did. They understood that there was not a better option for him.

And I think in the same way that they really cast no judgment about the lifestyle that Steve had, he cast no judgment about theirs. They just kind of all understood that they were on opposite sides of a fight that wasn’t really theirs. And so we were just impressed that these members of law enforcement didn’t treat Steve with any kind of disdain or judgment or, you know, criticism even really.

Was there any temptation to press them, you know, harder and try and get them to reckon with the system that they were a part of?

No. I mean, I don’t think that was ever the nature of our inquiry.

And I think I remember I mean, I think Jodi had the question for everyone: as you look back now with marijuana becoming increasingly legal, are there any thoughts, like, what are your thoughts now and all of these things? And I think I would say, like, and I don’t wanna put words in their mouths, but I would imagine that the majority of those guys lived with two truths. They loved Steve Lamb, and they probably died still believing that marijuana was a gateway drug and should be illegal. But no. No. No. I mean, those questions were asked, but we didn’t find that there was too much reflection on their end.

I guess this is less of a question, but I’m wondering how much of the magnanimous-ness with Steve and his buddies was, was because these were White folks that were doing these actions instead of, you know, non-White folks who they might not have been so forgiving or understanding with.

Oh, certainly.

Yeah. I think that surely played a role in the, what’s the word? In how long they wound up in prison. The consequences would have been, and were so much harsher, obviously, for people of color. And I think that that was something challenging as we were filming this, was considering that.

And they certainly had their White privilege. And because they had, even though they all came from very poor White backgrounds, they had already made a lot of money smuggling weed, and so they could afford hotshot lawyers. So they had their white privilege, but they also had a lot of money to spend on really great lawyers that got them, you know, a slap on the wrist as they say.

I just wanna congratulate you both, especially Jodi for a first feature. This is really a tight piece of work that I found endlessly fascinating, in its structure, in its tone, that was not at all your conventional way of telling a story, and I really found it fascinating. I guess one last question. What was it like working with an amazing wealth of assets, of photos and video from the time? What was it like going through that? Did most of it end up on screen? Was there a lot that ended up off screen?

Steve, thank God, loved to document his own life, and that made for a really, really fun bank of material to go through. And, obviously, it did a lot to color the film. It’s wild because, when we were first handed at all of it, it seemed impossible that we would use all of it. I think we did use a lot of the still photos that we got from him. There’s definitely a lot of video footage that had to hit the floor or just didn’t get used. But all of that had been digitized, and I was going through that during full lockdown. At that point, I was living in Barcelona, Spain, so it was a great activity to kill some time while I wasn’t allowed to go outside.

And I guess my last question, and the most important question for the interview is: was Steve naked and taking a dump in that one photo?

The world may never know.