RJ Cooper — Osmosis, Oners, and Editing Three Movies at Once

James's longtime editing partner and secret weapon RJ Cooper finally sits down in front of a camera. A USC film school grad who started out designing posters for Batman Begins and Spider-Man, RJ has cut the bulk of James's directing filmography — Survive the Game, Hot Seat, Fortress, Darkness of Man, The Workout, Boris is Dead, and I Have Proof — and the two have developed a creative shorthand that borders on telepathy. This one gets into the real craft: how editors read footage, fight for the film alongside the director, and keep the heart of a movie alive when producers start circling.

Key topics & highlights:

• How RJ and James developed their editing language across seven-plus films — and why the first cut keeps getting closer to what James actually wanted
• The frame-blending trick born on The Workout and the Star Wars–style wipe transitions RJ snuck into Boris is Dead over James's objections (and won)
• Hot Seat's unique challenge: building fake computer screens for Kevin Dillon to react to and fighting for every stock helicopter shot
• Why The Workout's extreme multi-camera chaos (15 cameras, cell phones, angles James didn't know he had) ended up changing the way both of them shoot and cut forever
• Editing three feature films simultaneously — and how he keeps the worlds straight
• Reading a director's signature: James = performance + action + dark humor; Matt Eskandari = relationships; John Keyes = women against impossible odds
• Actors who gave him gold he had to leave on the cutting room floor: Antonio Banderas and Alice Eve
• RJ's most panic-inducing job: Hot Seat, with its blank monitor problem
• His first feature: Game of Assassins shot in China with Bai Ling
• Three Bruce Willis films with Matt Eskandari
• Pre-production involvement on Boris is Dead — hired before cameras rolled, suggesting shots and knowing the film needed heavy needle drops from day one
• Music as craft: temp tracks (Dark Knight, Interstellar, always Sicario), playing the edit like an instrument, and using his wife as a fresh-eyes test audience
• AI in post: Night Driver as a real-world test case, AI ADR via ElevenLabs, the color-space limitations of AI-generated visuals right now, and why storytelling with a point of view is the only real moat
• RJ's directorial ambitions: sci-fi (loves Denis Villeneuve), Westerns (already collecting sound effects just in case), and James's on-the-record promise to produce his first feature
• James's $7,000 first-film program and the indie model (No Stars, $200K budget, $4.5M at AMC with no P&A)
• UFOs, Tesla life, Gerald the Dolphin, and alien cinema (Blurp 3 is apparently the masterpiece)

Find RJ: rjcooperfilms.com | @rjcooperfilms on Instagram

James brings his big sister Samantha Sellars onto the podcast — curriculum manager by day, BookTok evangelist by night — and the result is an hour of family chaos: the graduation purse cigarette ambush, a toddler-James getting tricked by Toy Story walkie talkies, how Sam accidentally introduced her boyfriend to extreme M/M torture fiction, and whether 300 years of alien luxury living is worth getting eaten at the end.

Watch on Youtube: Click here to watch a video of this episode.

Creators & Guests

• BJ Hendricks - Host
• James Cullen Bressack - Host

Kelly Lynn Ryder - (actress/producer, Deadlock, Complex Texas, The Leader) sits down with James and BJ for a wide-ranging conversation about building a career entirely on her own terms — no reps, no fallback plan, no safety net, and apparently no Die Hard. Kelly and James have worked elbow-to-elbow producing Complex Texas and The Leader (a Heaven's Gate biopic that just got into Tribeca), and this episode is part industry masterclass, part warm roast of someone who sprinted to South Georgia at 5:36 p.m. for a last-minute Bruce Willis recast.

Key Topics

• From quantity to quality: why Kelly went from saying yes to 95% of jobs to producing her own projects — and how cultivating financing relationships became her leverage
• The Deadlock call: getting phoned by director Jared Cohon at 5:36 p.m. and driving to South Georgia overnight for a three-and-a-half-week lead role opposite Bruce Willis — while her mom read the script to her on Bluetooth
• Bruce Willis from Friends: Kelly's now-legendary confession that she knew Willis primarily as a recurring guest on Friends, not from Die Hard
• Slotherhouse: the killer-sloth Tubi movie where an American sorority house doubled for the Serbian royal palace
• The first Deadline mention: sitting at Grumpy Grizzly coffee shop in upstate New York with her grandmother when the notification hit — and sobbing into her cup
• Producing Complex Texas: first full producing credit alongside James, including James knocking himself out cold taking a baseball bat to the head (one take, one piece of sugar glass, one dented car)
• Kevin Dillon on set: powering through illness for every take, running lines with the full cast, staying for everyone's coverage — and Kelly not knowing who Johnny Drama was until halfway through filming
• The crab bucket theory: why success creates enemies and why you have to build your own table
• The Leader at Tribeca: the Heaven's Gate biopic Kelly co-financed and acts in, with Joel David Moore's Balcony Nine and director Michael Gallagher
• Wes Craven's advice: the people who make it aren't the most talented — they're the ones who don't quit
• James's knuckle tattoo: deliberately making himself unemployable in restaurants to remove every possible exit from filmmaking
• The go bag: always packed by the door since Deadlock, ready to drive to Georgia at any moment
• Advice for aspiring actors: outlast everyone, say yes to the rooms the universe opens, and remove every escape route

David Lawrence — Cancer, Cannes, and a Fake Australian Accent

David Josh Lawrence (actor, writer, producer, acquisitions at Studio Dome / Bloodstream TV) pulls up a chair in the most eventful tracksuit session yet. What starts as a conversation about his self-produced passion project *Lincoln Must Die* quickly spirals into a deeply honest — and deeply funny — account of how he actually got here: surviving non-Hodgkin's lymphoma at 16, becoming a firefighter in San Bernardino, finding acting through exposure therapy, and learning to write scripts because the 2007 WGA strike shut everything else down.

Topics & highlights:

• Lincoln Must Die — how David pitched the story from nothing at Cannes, waited five years, and finally got it made in a month with indie collaborators Leanne Bauer, David Mitchell Park, and Mario Garcia Duenas
• Cancer at 16 — non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, the Make-A-Wish negotiation (Jackie Chan was busy, Jet Li was busy, Britney Spears was apparently doable), and why surviving it made everyone else's excuses hard to tolerate
• Firefighting & exposure therapy — how anxiety attacks on medical calls in San Bernardino led him to a therapist who told him he was actually just an actor
• The Australian accent arc — faking a full Aussie identity to book a role, accidentally getting signed by an agent, booking Bundaberg rum and Outback Steakhouse commercials, and the moment it all unraveled at a client mixer
• Breaking into distribution — filling in for a no-show at the American Film Market and getting offered an acquisitions job by the end of the day; working with mentor Tom Malloy
• Why you shouldn't put your indie film on IMDb too early — a genuinely useful breakdown of how festival dating kills your international sales window
• Complex Texas, I Have Proof, and the buddy-cop-with-a-monkey movie — the ongoing collaborations between David, James, and BJ
• Weed brownies, alien theories, and the case for just going out and making your movie already

Jessica Russo — Sales Agent, Producer, Hat Assassin Jessica Russo (VMI Worldwide / Vantage Media) joins the tracksuit table for a genuinely rare perspective: the sales and distribution side of indie filmmaking.

She and James have collaborated on a string of films — including Darkness of Man (starring Jean-Claude Van Damme, currently on Hulu) — and BJ just wrapped The Night Driver with her. So the war stories are real, the industry takes are sharp, and yes, the dolphin kidnapping story is discussed at length.

### Key Topics

• How the indie market has shifted — quality over quantity, the death of easy pre-sales, and why the financial model for indie films has fundamentally changed post-strikes
• The Van Damme hat story — how Jess saved the *Darkness of Man* poster on day one of filming by killing James's fedora
• Library acquisitions & consolidation — Netflix/Paramount, Gravitas/Shout, Chicken Soup for the Soul/Redbox/Screen Media, and what it all means for indie filmmakers
• AVOD vs. SVOD — why ads came full circle and what Tubi's rise means for the market
• What actually gets greenlit — script, team, name, and financials that make sense in today's landscape
• Delivery schedules — the unglamorous paperwork mountain that filmmakers are never taught about in film school
• Film school vs. real-world training — why internships and networking beat most curricula
• The Sex Pistols documentary — Billy Idol cameos, Glenn Matlock, and a Netflix sale
• Jess's first producing credit — Awake (Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Francesca Eastwood), shot in Oklahoma during tornado season
• Crystals, tarot, D&D, and Harry Potter — the full nerd profile of the most organized person at VMI
• Aliens, Mayan temples, elongated heads, and one architect allegedly kidnapped by dolphins (James later discovers it was an April Fools story — BJ chooses to believe it anyway)
• Advice for aspiring filmmakers — read a delivery schedule, do an internship, go to networking events, be a good person

> Want a delivery schedule? Reach out to Jess and tell her you're coming from the Tracksuit Pod.

Today’s guest is our good friend, the incredibly talented actor, singer, and artist, Justin Cornwell! If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to hit that SUBSCRIBE button and leave a comment below! Justin sits down to share wild stories from his decade-long run working consecutively in network and studio television. He talks about his nerve-wracking audition process for Spike Lee's Chi-Raq, improvising a scene with Dave Chappelle and Wesley Snipes, and acting alongside Tom Hardy in the upcoming Netflix film Havoc. He also reflects on starring in Training Day with the late Bill Paxton and surviving intense 16-hour days on set. Plus, we dive into Justin's hidden talents—from his killer karaoke skills and spot-on impressions to his jaw-dropping portrait art. We also discuss his new indie film Million Dollar Bet (releasing on April 30th), the crazy world of prediction gambling apps like Polymarket and Kalshi, and his dream of starring in a triumphant biopic.

Welcome to the Tracksuit Podcast!

Hosts James Cullen Bressack and BJ Hendricks kick off episode one with actor Jesse Kove - son of Karate Kid legend Martin Kove - who showed up late, sans tracksuit, and immediately made himself at home. They cover Jesse's career in action films, working alongside Jon Voight and Kelsey Grammer in The Last Firefighter, his playable character in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, the upcoming Boris Is Dead, peptide therapy, men's health, ditching his smartphone for a flip phone, and his work with Wings of Rescue - flying hundreds of dogs to no-kill shelters across the country.

Click here to view the episode transcript.
Creators & Guests

• James Cullen Bressack - Host
• BJ Hendricks - Host
• James Rundquist - Producer

🐾 Support Wings of Rescue: wingsofrescue.org
📸 Follow Jesse Kove: @jessekove
📲 Follow us: @thetracksuitpodcast