Close out 2025 with a future-classic movie

An interview with my favorite director. In other words, nepotism rules!

Dec 31, 2025

Welcome to the final 2025 issue of Flashlight & A Biscuit! I’m closing out this year with an interview I’ve been looking forward to for years. Logan Busbee1 is the director, writer and lead actor of “Take A Friend,” a feature film released earlier this month and now available on YouTube. A recent graduate of the University of Alabama, Logan has spent the last two years working on this project, and now it’s ready for the world. (Yeah, he’s my kid, but he’s definitely transcended that burden.) Here, my interview with a visionary director … conducted while we were watching the Miami-Texas A&M game. Enjoy, and Happy New Year!

So it’s time for the interview for Flashlight & A Biscuit. Chill, don’t worry.

Oh God. Oh God. I’m so scared.

Give me the elevator pitch for “Take a Friend.”

I never … I never had to pitch it. So I’ve got to come up with it here.

There have not been enough modern coming-of-age movies like Dazed & Confused or Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Also, one of the most underused forms is found footage — it’s almost only ever horror. Why not combine the two? Follow a group of college seniors on their last night before graduation, they’re recording the whole time and get that real-life experience In a real college town with real college students as actors.

Walk me through the genesis of this idea — how you came up with it, how you wrote it, everything that happened before you started filming.

Not to sound pretentious, but I started writing it in Cannes, France. I was studying abroad, and I knew I wanted to make a movie my senior year no matter what, and I figured, hey, this is the perfect time to write it.

Cannes is such a great movie place that gets the vibes going. But I was also limited by my money, and my location and my actors — which was Tuscaloosa, Alabama and me and all my friends. It started off as this much larger, almost Magnolia-esque type of movie, with all these different characters and plot lines that would slowly intersect. But that was going to just not at all be feasible. And so I rewrote the script multiple times. It was just too much.

So that’s when I came to the aspect of the interconnection of phones. There’s a lot of writers and directors who say phones are terrible for movies – they kill horror movies, they kill action movies because of that instant communication. But if you use them as part of the story, they can be very interesting. You have to confront that — there’s no modern college story without phones anymore.

I wanted to have the phone be a major aspect, and I wanted a rejection of that, as well. That’s how I came up with using the old family video camera from 2008, or whatever. [Editor’s note: 2008. So old.] So that became, Let’s film this whole night. Let’s make it like a family movie. Because, again, with phones, you get snippets. It’s 10 to 15 seconds. It’s all vertical —

Fumble! Fumble!

Oh man! [recomposing himself] I also had these vignettes come into play – these highly cinematic moments interspersed throughout. They all cut off from the main story in some way or another, but they’re not the main story, so they’re a very different visual style.

You cut between the found footage of the old camera and then the contemporary high-end camera. What was the thinking behind trying to combine those two?

Found footage is hard to do for a whole movie. Blair Witch Project got it done because it was a horror movie, and because it was the first to ever do that. But it’s tough to watch a highly improvised movie that’s just found footage. That can feel like, you know, a crappy YouTube vlog. So I wanted to highlight other aspects of that college graduation experience that weren’t going to be able to make it in through that main storyline.

There’s a (spotlight on a) business dinner, where someone is networking and asking, ‘Am I valuing my friendship and my final time here? Am I going to put in the effort to get a good job right out of college?’ And then there’s a college band, which is, ‘We play bars, we play parties, but do we really have any talent to keep going afterwards?’

These are not things that I’d be able to tackle inside of the found-footage narrative, and so I wanted to highlight them with a more cinematic style.

Tell me a good story from the filming — something funny, something ridiculous, something weird that happened.

The whole ending is a Beer Mile. It’s all of us chugging beer and running, celebrating graduation. The thing is, we weren’t acting! We did an actual Beer Mile! Which, if you’ve ever done one of those … man, are those rough! You are sprinting. It was the 90-degree Alabama heat, we’re in button-ups and long pants, and we’re just chugging beers and having to sprint across these hills. After we filmed, we had to sit on the grass to catch our breath.

The scene where we all ate Cook Out on the back of a car, we had to film that twice, because the first time some frats started blasting music that echoed so heavily it was literally melting the audio. You couldn’t hear us with that in the background.

And then the Waterfall scene [Editor’s note: For the more seasoned members of our readership, “Waterfall” is a drinking game] — we’re all method actors, so we were drinking for all those scenes. But it just made that much more fun and that much more realistic. It also helped some of the actors who were not as inclined to be themselves on camera.

So you got your actors drunk.

You do what you have to do.

I understand that there was a bit of a difficulty from a technical perspective once you finished most of your filming.

Yeah. All but one or two scenes had been finished filming when my hard drive just broke. Luckily it was a hardware error, which meant that I was able to get it repaired and get virtually all of the footage back. I thank God for that because, Jesus, if that did not happen, the movie would not exist. All of it was on the hard drive. It was directly after the longest filming day, a sunup-to-sundown type of day, and after that it was just gone.

Months later, and $2,500 lighter in the wallet, it got repaired. I had become a better editor by that point, working on other projects, and I was able to get a couple reshoots. It was a very annoying and terrible situation, but now that I was able to get the footage back, and become a better editor, it all worked out well in the end.

What role in the film — hey, there’s Alabama’s campus on TV —

Roll Tide.

What role did the University of Alabama play in this?

The campus, the buildings, the environment played a major role. There is a lot of Alabama that is kind of the quintessential college campus. And I’m not just saying that because I’m biased. It has a lot of very cinematic aspects — there’s frats, there’s bars, there are these giant Southern buildings that scream education. It’s all very walkable, which made filming very easy.

What did you learn about yourself from making this movie?

It was interesting because I am the main character in the film. The character of Logan in the film is very similar to me, but also has some noticeable differences. Which was weird because I have to play myself, but not wholly myself — wow, Carson Beck just fumbled!

Whoa! Miami got it back.

The whole “filming the last night of college and trying to immortalize it” stuff is what happens in the story, but it also literally is what I was doing in real life. This was filmed in the last few months of my last semester. It’s all my friends who are playing mostly themselves.

And I had to think about, was I stepping too far and becoming the film character of Logan, who is kind of throwing away his last night? With the hard drive thing, I almost got pulled into that, because it broke with a few weeks left in the semester, and I was horribly depressed and so annoyed. It was such a sinking feeling, but luckily it was not my final night before graduation.

So I was like, screw it, and I decided I was not going to think about it until after I’m out of college. Just had a great time those last few weeks, hanging with my friends, seeing people every night, making sure I got those big last lunches, last dinners with people I wouldn’t see as much. In the movie, I had written some of my worst instincts and worst possibilities, so I steered away from that and became a different Logan than the one in the film.

You got to show this film in a premiere at a classic movie theater with a marquee. What are you feeling when you’re having your debut film premiere on a real movie screen?

It was surreal. Such a culmination of everything I had worked on for so long. I started it on another continent. And seeing it all come to fruition — I could see the bits from my first draft, I could see the things that I added on the fly, I could see the things that were added in editing. It was one of those things where I had been watching it in the little Adobe Premiere editing screen, and I was like, Is this even any good?

And then you’re in a movie theater seat, having popcorn and soda, watching it on the big screen, everybody’s in the audience reacting to it, and you’re like, Yeah, I did it.

Last question. You have the ability to add one character from the Marvel Cinematic Universe to “Take A Friend.” Who do you select and how do they change the arc of the movie?

Thanos would be interesting. If he snapped, how does that affect the last night of college, but also half my friends disappearing? Thor would be great to hang out with at all the parties. There’s not a lot of X-Men I’d really want to invite.

Spider-Man, one of my friends could reveal to us that he’s Spider-Man. Or I could catch him on camera changing into a costume to go save the day. “I’m about to graduate, and also — my friend is Spider-Man!”

You should have put that in a post-credits scene.

Yes. Legally distinct Spider-Man. Arachno-Boy!

Watch “Take A Friend” right here:

That’ll do it for 2025! Thanks so much for reading. If you filled out our survey earlier this month, you’ll start seeing some of the results of that early in 2026. Good days ahead!

The best to you and yours in the New Year, and we’ll catch you back here soon!

—Jay
Land Cat, Georgia