Q&A with the NIX BROS

Haven’t heard of the Nix Brothers? You’ve been missing out. We here at Festivus have been singing their praises for years, and basically love everything they do.
Evan and Adam Nix are Denver-based filmmakers from Las Vegas. They specialize in stylized comedic web videos, short films and music vids. Their work has been described as “dumb movies for smart people”, although they personally don’t understand what that means. Their short films have been featured or won awards in numerous film festivals, including CineVegas, Breckenridge Festival of Film, and Festivus.

We did a bit of Q&A with Evan Nix recently. Below is an excerpt. The complete Q&A will be featured in our next newsletter.

How long have you and Adam been making films?
I got a camcorder for Christmas one year when I was 14 or 15. We made a lot of little videos and movies that we edited in-camera.  We never had scripts, we just shot as we went along. It made for projects that were incredibly fun to make, but really hard to watch.

What was the first project you worked on, and what drove you to give this whole “film” thing a shot?
Our first film was a 30 minute short called “Fortune Cookie” that we made for the first year of Dam Short Film Festival in 2004, in Boulder City, NV, where we grew up. The screening was attended by a bunch of our hometown friends and relatives, and it won the Audience Award as a result. I hated it, though, so afterwards we destroyed it and all evidence of it. But the encouragement and feedback we received certainly inspired us to keep making films. 

Where do you come up with the concepts for your films?
As far as the other Nix Bros shorts and other projects, the ideas generally just come from our normal conversations, when Adam and I are hanging out. We are goofy people, and we are sort of competitive in who can out-dumb the other one. For instance, when we moved to Denver we went to get our CO driver’s licenses together. We had a contest to see who could pull the dumbest face in our pictures. I won. But a month later Adam lost his license and had to get a new one. So now I have a license where I look like an idiot, and he has a normal picture. So really, he won that one because now every time I go to a bar I get a comment on my picture. He tends to win more at being dumb, because he is smarter than me.   

What are you working on now? Any interesting new projects?
Total Ghost is our newest project. Total Ghost is an electrodiscopop super group from Europe. They have a 6 song EP available in the iTunes store, and a few music videos in the works as well. Check out http://totalghost.com for more. 

For more with the Nix Bros, check out Nixbros.com, and be sure to stay posted for the upcoming Festivus FF newsletter that will include this Q&A in it’s entirety.