It’s been a big year for Des Moines-based filmmaker Kristian Day. After years of work, his name has been attached to releases on nearly every major streamer in 2024.
The Last American Gay Bar, which tells the story of Des Moines’ famous Blazing Saddle bar, came out on OUTtv this summer. A three-part documentary about an Iowa cold case, Taken Together: Who Killed Lyric and Elizabeth?, spent several weeks on Max’s Top 10 series list after it was released in August.
The latest project — another with collaborator Dylan Sires — tells the story of Xaviar Babudar, the Kansas City Chiefs superfan who was sentenced in September to more than 17 years in prison for a string of bank robberies. ChiefsAholic: A Wolf in Chief’s Clothing premiered on Prime Video Dec. 24.
Ahead of his latest release, I chatted with Day to ask him about telling these regional stories for a national audience, what it’s like to film as a headline unfolds in front of him, the funding realities of passion projects, what’s next on his agenda and what sort of (likely horrible) sleep schedule allows for this level of output.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Madeleine King: Kristian, to put it mildly, you’ve had a busy year. You were a showrunner and director on The Last American Gay Bar docuseries on OUTtv, worked as a producer on the HBO series Taken Together about the abduction of two young Iowa girls and you just produced ChiefsAholic. In a year when you seemingly never stopped making announcements about new projects, what stood out? What were you most excited to share?
Kristian Day: I don’t think I will have a year like this again for a while.
Taken Together was actually filmed over a period of seven years and then wrapped back in September of 2022. It just didn’t get released until August of 2024. It was coincidental that everything lined up this way. I do feel like the span of projects that have been released this year hit on every level.
The Last American Gay Bar was 100% a local story, but it connected with a generation of gay men that are starting to fade away. ChiefsAholic has been two years in the making. It was ripped from the headlines and we were there for it all the way to the end. We had a lot of ups and downs with it, including falling into debt when we ran out of development money, and I had to start putting things on personal credit cards. But I did that because I believed in the story and I knew a bigger studio would eventually come along.
When ChiefsAholic was announced, I felt that I needed to mention that this would be the last movie for a while since this was the third one this year.
King: Do you… ever sleep?
Day: Well, yes is the short answer. What makes it work is having some sort of schedule. I’m in bed by 10:30 p.m. and up by 6:30 a.m. I fill my time wisely.
King: Last movie for “a while…” What does that really mean for you? Do you have an ideal plan for this time away from production?
Day: Oh, there are things being made.
I have one documentary that needs to be delivered in June. One feature documentary and one short that are both passion projects. I am in production all the time.
Technically I didn’t have a movie or show released in 2023, but Dylan Sires and I were chasing Xaviar Babudar after he went on the lam. I also sold and shot The Last American Gay Bar during the last half of that year. It was a weird time because we hadn’t sold ChiefsAholic to Amazon yet. We were in limbo as we were looking for a buyer and the industry strikes happened. I had the idea of The Last American Gay Bar on paper, but nothing was shot. OUTtv bought [the series] based on the idea alone and then all of a sudden, Amazon made their offer on ChiefsAholic. Then there were two very different productions happening simultaneously.
Outside of the movie world, I have been focusing on writing because that only costs me time. I started a manuscript back in the spring of 2023 called F*ck This Show, which I just finished this past November. It’s a memoir of a self-destructive reality TV producer desperately clawing his way out of making the world’s worst television. I worked with an editor who, at times, would probably like to see my legs broken. But it was one of the best creative experiences I have had in a long time. It’s the final words on my years making the trash television you see in the waiting room while your car is getting an oil change.
King: Can’t wait to read it! I’m a not-so-secret fan of “unscripted” television, so I’m sure it’ll be devastating to see it all through your lens.
Going back to your latest projects… In one documentary, your team searches for answers in a more than a decade-old case. In the other, you’re getting answers from the perpetrator of a crime in almost real-time. One a cold case, one very hot — Babudar was just sentenced in September. On Taken, you told IPR that you hoped the documentary would help bring more attention to the case and make sure it’s not forgotten. What are you hoping people get out of watching this latest project?
Day: When Dylan [Sires] told me he thought Babudar might be a serial bank robber, I didn’t believe him. Who even does that in the modern world?
I am a big fan of the Safdie brothers’ movie Good Time, but that is pure fiction. The Jesse James of the world are few and far between. If he was right, then this guy in his late twenties had been robbing banks all over the country. When we were still originally spending time with him, it felt like he just hit a really bad patch and maybe didn’t know what else he could do. He robbed a bank, got caught, end of story.
Then I got the call at 9 p.m. on March 25, 2023: He cut his ankle monitor and ran. That’s when I knew Dylan was right.
It’s not often that you are in a position to capture a story as it unfolds in real time. We went after it. The caveat to this was there was no more development money. So if we proceeded, it was on our own dime. For two weeks, we traveled with the bail bondsman, Michael Lloyd, looking for Babudar and following his mother and brother. They all three lived a nomadic lifestyle that slowly revealed itself the longer we stayed on their trail. An outlaw family with no physical home, but multiple cars which they lived out of that they parked in various Target parking lots in the Kansas City metropolitan area. It was this family of rebels with no jobs, just living off the land. It nearly bled us dry, but the story kept us in the field.
King: It’s a compelling story, and it feels rare to get such an inside look as a headline unfolds in real time. How did Dylan/you start this project? What was the story you were hoping to tell before you found out the magnitude of what you were documenting?
Day: A few days before Christmas, back in 2022, I was doing my annual cider delivery to friends when Dylan called me. A friend of his from Kansas City told him about a Chiefs superfan who was just arrested for robbing a bank and he asked me what I thought. We had just wrapped Taken Together a few months earlier, and to be honest, we were pretty numb from it.
This story [ChiefsAholic] didn’t have murder. No one was kidnapped. It had this element of Don’t F*ck With Cats with the internet sleuths that I loved, but also I am obsessed with stories about countercultures and subcultures, whether it be the men from The Last American Gay Bar or my love of punk rock and noise music. The superfans were a subculture of their own.
I always knew that a bigger story would reveal itself as we moved forward. We spent a good chunk of 2023 in Tulsa and Kansas City with all of us piled in a house together for weeks at a time. I knew there was something deeper the night we watched the NFL Honors show when he won the bet that Mahomes would win the MVP award. This was the first moment I was able to interact with him as I flew in from a commercial shoot in Vegas that day. Dylan and our DP Bruce had already spent a day with him. But I will tell you, the moment he won that first bet after being out, he started opening up about choosing to be homeless. It was honestly pretty interesting.
“You throw away a minimum of $12,000 a year when you rent an apartment. Get a nice car, live in it for a year or two and you can save that money for a down payment on a house,” Babudar told us.
He wasn’t wrong. You could do that.
King: Speaking of Christmas, is there any story behind the Christmas Eve release date? Did you want to give us something to talk about at awkward family gatherings?
Day: That was an Amazon move. They have a lot of faith in this movie, so they are releasing it right before everyone takes their winter break. That way you can ask your weird uncle if ChiefsAholic has any weight on the Chiefs three-peat?
King: I hope Taylor Swift watches! Any final thoughts you want to share?
Day: Movies are hard to make. You spend anywhere from six months to two years or more working on one just so someone at home can devour it in two hours. Watch them with your friends and talk about it afterward. Ask grandma or your stepdad from two marriages back (the one you actually like) what they thought. Don’t just burn through it. Enjoy it.
This post was originally published on here
