By Ryan Michael Painter

rpainter@inthisweek.com

While the U.S. Department of Agriculture repeatedly denied the filmmakers of "Killer at Large" requests for an interview before leaving a voice mail stating, "We have no one here qualified to talk to you about agriculture," the filmmakers themselves were much more amicable when it came to granting me an interview. Perhaps, as filmmakers, they felt qualified to talk about their film; clearly the USDA has a thing or two to consider implementing in their hiring process.

Sitting down with local filmmakers Bryan Young and Elias Pate, who, along with director Steven Greenstreet, were responsible for the writing, cinematography and editing of "Killer at Large," was like shooting ducks in a proverbial barrel. All I needed to do was point them in a direction and the stories would quickly follow.

Following the success of "This Divided State," the trio of filmmakers were approached by Shawn M. Talbott, a Nutritional Biochemist, who wanted them to produce a short film about the connection between stress and the obesity epidemic.

While obesity wasn't a "sexy" subject Young would have picked out himself, Pate, who always wanted to become a chef, was drawn to the idea. Following Pate's lead, Young and Greenstreet started in on their own research. As the information piled up, they realized the subject was too dense to be covered in a short, and set out to produce a feature-length documentary.

Armed with their research, and the occasional point in the right direction from Talbott, the trio set out to find their story. "In an informational sort of journalistic documentary like this when you cast that wide net, you do more interviews than you think you might need," Young explains.

Their net proved to be vast, as over the course of two years the filmmakers recorded over 300 hours of interview footage, including conversations with Ralph Nader, author Michael Pollan, playwright and film director Neil LaBute, Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, Senator Sam Brownback amongst dozens of others.

Paired with a seemingly endless amount of archival footage, including television advertisements and interviews from the likes of Arnold Schwarzenegger to the former U.S. Surgeon General Richard Carmona (with a brief and rather embarrassing appearance by Michael Leavitt and an overweight ogre), the team began to shape their film by narrowing their focus.

"The fear was having a balloon of information that just confused [the audience] even more. Part of the process was binging on the information and then purging out the fat," Pate interjects.

Young laments having to cut his favorite story about how the temperance movement and ultimately prohibition rose from the health crisis caused by the cost-effective way corn was shipped (as whiskey).

Pate takes a more objective perspective and says, "You have to take a hatchet to it at some point. Which is something we did repeatedly.

Young explains that ultimately the film dictated its own shape, "In every interview we did, no matter who we talked to, they said that this is the first generation of children that will have a shorter life expectancy than their parents. The goal of the film became to find out why."

Pate suggests that it was important that they find the answer for themselves and not rely on experts that tend to be self-promoting and push all the attention towards their area of interest. He hopes that through the film an audience might come to their own conclusions.