SLIFF 2020 Interview: Joe Saunders – Director of THE PENNY BLACK

By Tom Stockman | November 17, 2020

THE PENNY BLACK screens as part of this year’s St. Louis International Film Festival November 5th – 22nd.Ticket information for the virtual screening can be found HERE The feature is followed by a Q&A with director Joe Saunders, producer Alexander Greer, and subject Will Cassayd-Smith.

The twisty, head-spinning investigative thriller “The Penny Black” begins when Will, the estranged son of a conman, receives a stamp collection putatively worth between $1 and $2 million from his enigmatic Russian neighbor, Roman, who asks him to hold the stamps while he’s on a two-week trip. Far from a close friend, Will knows nothing of Roman beyond his first name. In fact, the sole basis of their relationship is a conversation that the two had while smoking outside their mutual LA apartment building while a drunken Roman downed canned liquor. The filmmakers hear this outlandish tale from Will at a dinner with mutual friends shortly after he receives the stamps, and they ask to start filming to see what occurs. As it happens, Roman is absent for far longer than two weeks, and after several months pass, Will leaves the apartment building to move in with his girlfriend, taking the stamps with him. Questions abound: Given that Will has no contact information for Roman — not even a last name — what will he do with the stamps, which are in fact quite valuable? Is he potentially in any danger? The film then takes another whiplash turn when a significant piece of the stamp collection goes missing, forcing the filmmakers to re-examine Will — a slippery, elusive character throughout — and his capacity for honesty. Los Angeles magazine writes: “‘The Penny Black’ tells an impossible-to-look-away-from story.”

Director Joe Saunders took the time to talk to We Are Movie Geeks about PENNY BLACK

Interview conducted by Tom Stockman November 12th 2020

Tom Stockman: First explain what the Penny Black of your film’s title is. 

Joe Saunders: The Penny Black is referring to the first adhesive postage stamp in the world. It came out in 1840 in Great Britain. 

TS: But that’s not what your movie is really about.

JS: No. 

TS: Did you have an interest in stamps before you made the film? 

JS: I did not. I collected baseball cards and other things when I was a kid so I was familiar with the collecting process but no, I never got into stamps. 

TS: I think a lot of stamp collectors are dying off.

JS: They are and it’s kind of interesting because when we were shooting this, we went to a lot of  stamp collector shows and conventions  and there were a few people there that were very suspicious of us. They wanted to make sure that we were promoting stamp collecting as an appealing  hobby.  There was one guy in particular we interviewed separately, but none of that made it in to the final film because he got a bit hostile and paranoid about making sure that we put stamps in the best light. 

TS: Let’s talk about Will, who is at the center of your film. How did you meet Will and how did you come to make a film about him? 

JS: I met with him through Alex, my producing partner, for this documentary.  He knew Will from a roommate in college, so there was no direct relationship.  I had just moved to LA and was having brunch with Alex and a group he knew and Will was one of those people and he told the table this rather outlandish story about his neighbor who came over and gave him this million dollar stamp collection. I did not know him well and I tend to trust people I don’t know. I didn’t know of any reason why he would lie. The way he told his story was kind of sensational and I questioned it.  So I asked him if I could come over with my camera the next day and film this is as small LA weird type of story.  It obviously blew up into the much bigger thing. 

TS: I was going to ask you how well you knew Will before the filming began.  Frankly, he comes off as very unforthcoming and I think untrustworthy.  Why do you think Will gave you such intimate access at first? 

JS: At first I think it was just the novelty of being asked to be filmed on camera. Personally, I would just freeze up if someone put a camera on me because I am just too aware of myself to behave naturally.  I think Will is the opposite.  He revels in attention, so when I put the camera on him, he wasn’t exactly acting like he would off-camera. There was more performance involved and I think he really liked the idea  that somebody wanted to make a documentary about him. That novelty wore off though over the years that we spent shooting this. And that may be because he simply got tired of us filming him all the time and it became a burden or there was a specific reason he wanted us to stop filming. That could be that he did something with these stamps or he really did not want to find his neighbor that we were trying to find.

TS: At what point during the making of this film did red flags go off where you thought maybe Will was not on the up and up? 

JS: It was the moment when we noticed that there was a stamp book missing.  He was always a little flippant with everything so it was actually a challenge editing him into a cohesive character because every time we would film him, he would give us so many different sides of himself. It would have been really easy to go to extremes and show him as either a Saint or a complete devil. Trying to get that balance of representing him as we saw him was pretty difficult.  When the stamp book went missing, all of our fears were confirmed in a way because we always thought he would do something with the stamps so when we realized that that book was gone, we immediately assumed that he had. We started looking back at all of our interviews with him and everything he had said and how he had turned into not being wanting to be filmed anymore. It made that look a lot more suspicious. 

TS: Was the Penny Black stamp in the book that went missing? 

JS: There was a Penny Black stamp still in the collection but it was impossible to know if that Penny Black was the previous Penny Black. 

TS: Who was Will’s father and how does that relationship fit into your film? 

JS: Will’s father was a con artist who ripped off several people by selling them counterfeit art. That was one of the things told to us by Will in one interview. But when the stamp book went missing, we started wondering if anything he had told us was true. He never found his neighbor so we still didn’t know exactly how he got the stamp collection and then the story of his dad came into question. We did some research on that and we were able to find some documents from the Getty Museum that had him listed as an art dealer that they should not deal with.  Christie’s Auction House had him blackballed. We also found document of a court case involving him and two other people concerning counterfeit art.  And I found a letter Will’s father wrote in a Christian magazine in England about serving jail time and repenting. It was really weird. 

TS: Did you make any attempts to try to contact him for an interview? 

JS: We wanted to and we asked Will several times if we could and he always told us no. It was a situation where he was the subject of this documentary and we needed his cooperation so there were certain barriers that he put up that we couldn’t cross. We thought that though we couldn’t cross them at that time, once we got what we needed from Will, maybe we could go back and interview his dad and talk to his mom more and try to confirm some of his stories. We shot this film over a period of five years on and off and eventually we just stopped filming and needed to do something with our project.  So we edited it together and had our film. 

TS: It’s an interesting film. At one point you asked him point-blank if he has been honest with you. What did you think of his answer? 

JS: I think he is someone who enjoys being kind of mysterious and he enjoys keeping people questioning him. It gives him this little sense of control and power. So I don’t think he was always honest with us but it’s really impossible to tell. 

TS: At one point in your film you note that Will was becoming less and less available. Then you went and look for this Roman guy yourselves. How much time did you spend looking for him?  

JS: Once we knew that he was in a certain neighborhood in Los Angeles, we probably spent close to a year looking for him. Alex and I have jobs so it was hardly anything we could do 24/7.  The private investigator was getting kind of sick of us. She wasn’t getting paid. 

TS: The gal on the moped?  

JS: Yes. But she wasn’t doing a lot of that work so Alex and I would have to go out looking for him. We tried to do it intelligently. We figured he had a job and he would come home during certain hours so if we could we would go there very early in the morning and look around but it was kind of like a needle in a haystack because we didn’t know what he looked like. So we would look for someone smoking and if we didn’t see anything we might leave and come back later in the week or maybe during the hours coming home from work.  When we did finally find him, it was a rush. 

TS: Do you think that was really Roman?  The guy in the diner at the end of the film?  Do you think that was the guy who gave me Will the stamps?  

JS: I do yes. It’s interesting that you would ask that question though, did you have suspicions? 

TS: I did. It just seemed a little too neatly tied together, especially the scene at the diner where he and Will are so friendly with each other and Will gives him back the stamp collection and Roman doesn’t even ask about any missing stamps. Do you think that the stamp collection was the one stolen from Edmund Cherry, who had his collection stolen in Arizona? 

JS: It was impossible to determine that. Edmund Cherry’s niece Bonnie didn’t have any direct evidence and was unable to pinpoint any stamps that were in the collection that were his. Her stepsister, who we also interviewed but did not want to be on film, is certain that it was Edmund Cherry’s collection and on our Facebook page, she keeps messaging us saying “You know these are ours, Joe. You know those are ours“. 

TS: The niece said that the FBI has been investigating the theft of Edmund Cherry’s collection.  Do you know if the FBI ever contacted Will or Roman? 

JS: I doubt it. We actually contacted the police department in Arizona who were investigating the missing stamp collection. We went down there with Will and Sherrill the private detective. They gave us the entire case file on that theft, though part of it was redacted.  There really wasn’t much in there. We talked to a woman who owns a motel who had recovered one of the binders from that stolen collection and she was kind of shady too.  That didn’t lead anywhere either. We did try to talk to the FBI because we thought that since the case was so old, the case file had become public. But with the specific case that we were dealing with, they either weren’t allowed to share files with us, or they didn’t have them. 

TS: Do you think the missing book of stamps and the boat at the end of your film are related? 

JS: I don’t know. It seems so strange to me that he would just suddenly have a boat. He claims it belongs to his mom, but she doesn’t use it. 

TS: It was a great way to end the film. It was almost comical. 

JS: Yes, my brother watched the film and commented that the ending reminded him of OCEAN’S 11 with the guys on walking off smiling at each other for having pulled off the con.  I remember the moment when Alex told me Will had just bought this boat. It was crazy. Just unbelievable.

TS: Yes it was. Have you shown THE PENNY BLACK at other film festivals?

JS: Yes it premiered at Slamdance just before Covid canceled all of the other festivals. I got to go and watch it with an audience which was great. That’s why you do these things. It’s been unfortunate to have a festival run in 2020.

TS: What’s your next project? 

JS: I’ve been working on a documentary about warm-up comedians which again has been affected by Covid, but we’ll see. Other than that, I do a lot of animated projects. Alex and I have been working on this comedy talk show series that takes place in stranger’s cars during rush hour traffic which again has been affected by Covid, but hopefully  we can come back to that. 

TS: Thanks a lot for talking to me about your film

JS: My pleasure.