Read This: Making the fake punk band in Green Room look as real as possible

Jeremy Saulnier’s Green Room, a well-reviewed survival/horror film that pits a punk-rock band against a group of violent racists, is entirely fictional. Patrick Stewart is not a white supremacist in reality, and the movie’s heroes, The Ain’t Rights, are not a real band. But Saulnier didn’t want them to look blatantly fake, the way ersatz bands usually do in movies. So he brought in a professional: singer-guitarist Hutch Harris of The Thermals. In an article for The Talkhouse, Harris talks about the strange but rewarding time he spent working on the movie, trying to make the fictional band seem as nonfictional as he could. Movies rarely get rock bands right, Harris says. He points out how odd it is that actors will gladly gain or lose weight for a role, yet learning a few simple chords seems beyond their grasp. “When I see an actor strum one sad, poorly fingered G chord for an entire song on screen,” Harris writes, “I’m not so much disappointed as I am surprised.” Luckily, Saulnier was willing to spend time and money to make The Ain’t Rights authentic.