Back from Austin

The following post was written at the airport while waiting for a flight...

Here I sit, at Metro Airport, an hour and 20 minutes before my flight is scheduled to leave, listening to the track Danny Zott wrote to supplant the Tom Waits song in “The Killers” through ipod ear buds with a missing left ear piece cover causing major distortion in that ear. But it’s better than mono. Which I guess kind of sums up things for me lately, listening to a beautiful song but in a less than satisfactory way due to conditions beyond my control (cheap ass earbuds!) while I wait.

We’ve got a sneak preview screening on the 26th at Quay St. Brewery. I feel it’s ready for a public audience, although I would like the audio to be mastered a little bit more. We’ll make comment cards and hand them out and hopefully get some positive feedback and can use it to tighten the film, if it needs tightening. I have no idea what the turn out will be, how it will be received and all that jazz. I know that a lot of people are going to be in town, so there’s potential for a huge turnout, It’s also the day after Xmas so who knows. Sooner or later you’ve got to have your first film premiere, a real premiere, so why not now, right smack-fuckin’-dab in the middle of some serious life changes. It’ll be interesting to see how those who know my work through Suck the Cool Right Out and Almost Evil respond to this piece. “The Killers” is as serious as a heart attack, but there are some funny moments. There’s some stuff in there that I found downright hilarious, hopefully audiences will too. An audience seeing my film. I think that’s the first time I’ve put it together, in written text, that ultimately this thing, whatever it turns out to be, is for more than just those of us involved. This needs to be seen by as many people as possible, and we’ve put in all this hard work, all the hours planning things out, all the brainstorming, all the late hours editing, to make sure that when it does, its hopefully well received, as ultimately the goal is to use this film to show what I can do with no budget and use it to finagle my way into getting someone to put up some money to make another one, a longer one, something on a larger scale. We’ll see what happens.

A week ago I was unsure about the music, I was pretty sure it would come together and I put my complete and total faith in Danny that he would make it happen. I guess really, I’ve had to put my faith in a lot of different peple through this project and hope that they came through. Actors who had little to no experience. The generosity of strangers to let us use their buildings to film in. A lighting director who had absolutely no experience working on a film. And I guess, ultimately, I had to put a lot of faith in myself that I could make it all happen. In hindsight, there was one major mistake I made, and that was to put my faith in someone who, lets be perfectly honest, had a lot going on in his life and probably should’ve just been focusing on getting well and I should’ve found another sound man. Live and learn.

But back to the music. I sat down the other night and went through and made some executive decisions about what music should go in the diner scene, what songs should be playing in the background, so that Danny could work on them and do what we were planning on, which was to create a hybrid sound of today and the 20s. I had already narrowed down what I was thinking about to about 60 songs. Surprisingly, weeding through those songs took a lot less time than I thought to find what I wanted, about 3 and a half hours total. It might’ve taken longer, had I not struck iron a few times and found, what I deem to be, the perfect tracks on the first try. Louis Armstrong’s “Go Down Moses” was the 3rd track I tried in the place that it ultimately is in, and like “Lazy River” I knew the insant that I watched the film with the music playing in the background that it belonged. I kind of wish I could’ve just done a complete Louis Armstrong soundtrack but I think that would’ve been a tad excessive, and I’m glad to get in some other artists from the 20s. So after I bounced the wave file of the songs playing in the diner, I sent them to Danny and within 48 hours he had some amazing work done to them. Todd, Ryan and I watched the film first with just the plain songs in the background on Tuesday. They both were pretty happy with the choices I made, and were absolutely in love with Go Down Moses. 48 hours later, I had a the scored version from Danny and we watched it and everyone agreed that the change and the improvement was significant. Actually, that’s a bit of an understatement. I have written about how Danny presented me with a challenge thus far: providing amazing music that I loved and wanted to use, but music that was quite different from what I had in mind from the start and it had started to change the mood of the piece, not in a bad way, just in a matter of fact way, from what I had originally envisioned. But what he did with the diner scene…goddamn that motherfucker brought it all together. What I now have in the diner scene is exactly what I had in min when we started: dirty guitar providing an unnerving-tension-building-background to what’s already a pretty tense situation. And the way in which he did it, using the same notes, chord progressions, and sounds, ties in with everything else that had already done. I cannot write enough about how pleased I am with what he’s done and am grateful that I was able to meet him through Chad and our paths were able to cross we could work together. I hesitate to say this, because this little film is nowhere on the scale of “Good Will Hunting” and won’t be seen by nearly as many people, doesn’t have an Oscar-worthy performance (sorry Cliff) or a comedy legend, but if the right people see this film, Danny could very well find himself in the position Elliott Smith was. Which would be fitting because he has a lot of Elliott Smith’s style in him, just not the whole heroin and heart break, depressing as hell, way.

I’ve made a lot of new friends through this process and I feel I’ve grown exponentially as a filmmaker and probably as a person. After the creative outburst sessions, those nights where I’d have an idea and we’d spend the next few hours figuring out how we make that idea happen, I think that the whole camaraderie and overall sense of teamwork, was my favorite part about the whole thing. It’s hard to deny that there wasn’t a real sense of excitement surrounding us these last 3 months, justified or not. We, as a team, were creating something out of nothing. An idea, a dream, a pretty straightforward adaptation of a Hemingway story and ambition, add in a lot of hard work and all the technical fun stuff, and we’ve got a 40 minute film that is being sent (and hopefully accepted) into film festivals. I lead the team, it was my vision that we started with and I was the one responsible for it in the end, it all came down to me. Because of that, right now, I’ve got a lot more confidence in my ability as a filmmaker and just in general. I put something together, a 40 minute film, and no matter how it turns out, that’s a pretty significant accomplishment in itself. Although, I don’t really feel that way. To be perfectly honest, what I did with “The Killers” and how its turning out…it just feels like that’s what I’m supposed to do. It’s what its expected and that the bare minimum I should be doing is putting together a little no-budget film that will be seen by some people and then who knows what. There’s not a lot of sense of accomplishment, not yet, and that’s not a self deprecating thing, its just that I don’t really don’t have a sense of what we’ve made yet. It’s yet to be seen by strangers or people who didn’t have some involvement in it, be it acting in it, working on it, or just being around us while we were making it. The 26th will be judgment day for this film, for what I’ve done on it, thus far.