Behind the Scenes

The origins of Confessions of an Inglorious Bastard are far less intentional than the finished piece suggests.

The project began as a straightforward behind-the-scenes featurette for the long-forgotten Untitled Ray Revello Project, likely connected in some early form to The Death Epic or When the Levee Breaks. The stated goal was simple. Document Ray Revello’s directorial debut. Capture some footage. Assemble something presentable. That version of the film lasted approximately five minutes.

As recalled in later commentary, the turning point came almost immediately after the first day of shooting. “We were going to make a documentary at the same time,” Revello explains, before trailing off into the realization that it had already gone somewhere else. “As we were walking home that night… it changed from making a documentary to just random comedy. Just fuck with people.” That instinct stuck.

From there, the project went off the rails in the best possible way. During the initial edits, Daryl Della began inserting sarcastic cuts, quietly undercutting Revello’s natural tendency toward self-mythologizing. Rather than resist, Revello adapted. Interviews became performances. Statements became setups. The more the edit pushed him toward absurdity, the more he leaned in, exaggerating his own persona and actively trying to break the tone. The documentary stopped being a documentary. It became a character piece, assembled almost entirely in post. Or, as the group would later describe it more bluntly, “pretty fucking random.” The footage itself was less important than what could be made from it.

New scenes were created to support the shift, often with no clear boundary between improvisation and intent, including a staged moment in which Ray burns Daryl’s younger brother with a fake cigarette for the crime of “writing like a nine-year-old.” Revello’s on-screen persona took shape as a volatile, self-aggrandizing figure. Part action hero, part domestic disaster, part something else entirely. The commentary struggles to pin it down, eventually landing on a comparison that says more than it intends: “He’s like Howard Hughes… without the smarts, without the charm… just the madness.”

An abandoned side project was folded into the film as well, expanding its already fractured structure. At the time, Wizard Magazine was running a fan film contest centered around the Batman villain Hush. Brandon J. Snyder proposed an interview-style parody, with Revello wrapped in bandages as the character. The whole thing unraveled magnificently. Filmed in the newly built back cottage at the Della house, the production was fueled by homemade chicken wings courtesy of Daryl’s mother. At some point, Ray managed to get wing sauce all over the bandages, immediately destroying any remaining illusion of menace. Snyder, as was occasionally his habit when an idea began to reveal its inherent stupidity, quit halfway through in frustration.

Daryl did not. He kept rolling. That footage, too, found its way into the final “documentary,” further enriching its sense of chaotic found-object storytelling. The footage was salvaged, repurposed, and ultimately integrated into Confessions, where it plays less like a failed sketch and more like a found fragment from a parallel production that no longer exists.

The film continued to expand in this way, absorbing material rather than generating it. Footage shot months apart was presented as contiguous. Real locations were used without context. Scenes were staged, abandoned, and then reinterpreted in the edit. At times, even the participants seemed unsure what they were watching. “This doesn’t look like an actual… anything,” one of them notes during the commentary, trying to make sense of a sequence that appears to document Revello’s daily life. The conclusion arrives quickly. “Well, that’s what it is. Pretty much.” The lack of structure became the structure.

Technically, the film was assembled on Daryl’s green iMac, one of the earliest major editing efforts of the group’s formative period. Then, as often happened during this era, the footage was lost. Or thought to be. A final cut had been transferred to VHS as a precaution. Years later, around 2008, the tape resurfaced. What might have been a minor inconvenience instead took on the weight of rediscovery. The image had degraded. Colors had shifted. Detail had softened. Rather than restore it cleanly, Daryl rebuilt the film from that degraded source, effectively editing a second-generation version from its own ghost.

The result gave Confessions an unintended texture. Washed out, slightly damaged, and removed from its origin point just enough to feel like something recovered rather than created.

By the time the group recorded commentary for the film several years later, even they seemed to be encountering it for the first time. “This is the first time I’m seeing this,” Nate admits early on. Ray adds: “Back when I was still funny.” The line lands somewhere between joke and confession. Which is appropriate.

Confessions of an Inglorious Bastard is less a film than an artifact of a very specific moment. A time when the boundaries between documentary and parody, planning and improvisation, performance and personality had not yet been defined, and likely never would be. It does not present a version of Ray Revello. It presents every version at once, assembled from whatever happened to be captured and whatever survived long enough to be edited together. Which, for a film about Ray Revello, feels exactly right.