Francesco Rulli: The Hold Up... So this is a year later, 1972.

Abel Ferrara: Yeah, in this movie, we learned a little bit more.

Francesco Rulli: I think it is about 15 minutes.

Abel Ferrara: It’s shot at the same location.

Francesco Rulli: [laughing, pointing at the corn flakes box on the screen] How much money did you get from Kellogg’s for this?

Abel Ferrara: [laughing] A million […] Once again, we are locked in a blue collar working class mentality, and Nicky was a communist then. That actually meant something back in the day. It’s funny, because we were blue-collar kids, and we were trying to get out of being blue collar. We wanted to be Hollywood jerks, but we would always make films about blue-collar kids […] Here’s the factory that we used to work at in Poughkeepsie. Look at this place.

Francesco Rulli: Talking about prisons…

Abel Ferrara: This was a standard; they made everything there, from butter to peanut butter and whiskey, and all of us worked there when we didn’t want to work for our father. We worked inside this factory and we were happy, because we actually got paid […] The premise of this movie is that these three guys are friends; two of them lose their jobs, and the other keeps his job because his wife is the daughter of the owner of the factory. So he tries to help the other guys get their jobs back. These are hooligans in real life… They are bikers from New Jersey. The point is they get fired and go to a gas station to rob it. So the friend goes along with them out of friendship. Then, in the end when they all get busted, he doesn’t go to jail. We were learning how to shoot back then. Again, we didn’t have the sound quite figured out. But you know we were shooting all the time with small super 8 cameras, and the point of not having the sound, I think, maybe gives you more of a visual take.

Francesco Rulli: But this actually has sound.

Abel Ferrara: Yeah, this actually has horrible sound. We shot this in a magnetic stripe film that people used to shoot news with so that we could post-sync it. And we are post-syncing it on an original negative while running it in the projector. It sound almost ridiculous talking about it. Gas was 37 cents a gallon.

Francesco Rulli: Fantastic.

Abel Ferrara: Now we actually have moving shots here. We did this at the back of a car. [Music playing] This is an Elvis Presley song that would cost us a quarter million dollars if we wanted to use it now. This poor kid was working at the gas station. That was perfect.

Francesco Rulli: That’s how you get into the film industry [laughing].

Abel Ferrara: Let’s see what we got. This is the car we used to drive. This is my father’s Pontiac. This kid is a good-looking kid…

Francesco Rulli: It looks like he’s going into the prison.

Abel Ferrara: Yeah, he needs to visit his friends, but he’s not going there. He’s going to the factory.