The LXD: Season 1 and 2 is available on DVD today! Make sure to get a copy, you can order from Amazon.com for $14.99

THE DEADBOLT: Since LXD didn’t rely on dialogue to tell the story, was that a comfort or a challenge as a director?
JON CHU: It was both. It was a give and take. We wanted to push the idea that dance was our main mode of communication in these shorts. In these pieces, when you put them together, when you have a complicated origin story of a super hero, it’s a little more difficult to get some of the plot things out. So you need a little bit of dialogue here and there. Each episode kind of changed it up to how much dance and how much dialogue you use. Some we don’t use any dialogue and some we use a lot. Sometimes you have to read.

We actually play with the idea, because to me the whole thing is an experiment to see how far we can push dance and see where we’ll make mistakes. Sometimes it won’t work and we’ll pull back a little bit. Sometimes it’ll be too long or too short and this is a whole process to find a new voice of how dance and story telling can be together in a more organic way. So it’s like a freeing opportunity to play in different ways and we haven’t dedicated ourselves to one way of doing it.

THE DEADBOLT: The Robot Love Story was just amazing. That was unlike anything I’ve ever seen. What were the keys to making that work so effectively?
CHU: Thank you. Well, that was a process. At first I really wanted to do a film noir. I wanted to do it in a sort of silent movie style but in a modern way. We’d do a silent movie and Mad Chad, our Robot guy, and Pandora who plays Autumn in it, their style is so intricate that you can’t have a lot of movement with their dance. The camera really just has to sit there and let them paint the poetry for you.

Their style really dictated how we were going to tell the story. The fact it was a love story between these two, or sort of a past love story, was something that we saw as kind of balletic in a way. Their style really dictated how we were going to tell the story, which almost every episode it’s the dancer and their style and how they express. A lot of time we’ll put them in the dance room and say, “Okay, we want to tell a story of a husband and wife who don’t remember each other but had a past relationship. How would you guys communicate that?” We turn on music and just let them communicate it and freestyle. From that we’ll write down the things that really move us. That’s how we sort of get into each of those episodes. So that episode actually came from a lot of that

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