Countdown to the first screening...

Well, I see it's been a long time since I've updated this.

The film is nearly done. Danny Zott is putting the finishing touches on the score. I'm satisfied with 99.9% of the cuts. There's one that I still want to tweak. Rich Cox and I will have to sit down and do a final sound mix, compress some stuff, etc. I've got to touch up the credits and pick a final font for the title. And that's it.

If all goes as planned, it will premier Dec. 19 at the SC4 Theater. Then, if Dutch from GKC comes through, we will hopefully screen it at the GKC movie theater at the Birchwood Mall. The same movie theater that I've watched so many movies at, including the rereleases of Star Wars. That'd be surreal as hell.

In the last month I've grown entirely sick of "The Killers" at one point. After spending almost every day working on it, thinking about it, for 3 straight months, I had to get away from it. Todd and I went to Chicago, which was an adventure in itself. And even then, I couldn't get away from it, as Zarlo, whom we went to visit, wanted to watch it.

Some random thoughts on various aspects of the film:

The score - This has been the most difficult part of the entire thing for me. When I wrote it, I didn't have anything in mind, I tried to keep it a blank slate. At the time of writing the screenplay I was listening to a lot of Radiohead. Actually, when I wrote it last December, I was only listening to Radiohead. As we started filming it, Radiohead was still heavily in the playlist but Tom Waits started to infiltrate. Wilco found its way in my playlist as well. During editing, those 3 were heavily influencing me as well. I watched a lot of Jim Jarmusch's films at the start of editing. In fact, at one point, when I was really unsure about how to proceed with the opening sequence and what to do (before I even came up with and wrote what is now the first scene) I sat down and watched Down by Law twice. That had such a huge influence on me. I don't know if it shows (it probably does, although I think it shows more subconsciously in the running sequence, it's almost a reverse of the opening tracking shots) but when it came time to put temporary music in, I put in "Jockey full of Bourbon" during the walking/introduction to Nick Adams sequence, knowing full well that it would be replaced. I added "Goin' Out West" from "Bone Machine" to the running sequence, and of course "Come on up to the house" to the final scene. In hindsight, this was probably a bad idea. While it was the closest to what I had in my mind, it was also improbable to repeat or imitate and presented an extremely unfair challenge for anyone who would score the film. So when Danny gave me a rough cut of music it, even though I liked the music on its own, it didn't have the same feel as the Tom Waits did. Of course it wouldn't, Danny and Tom Waits are so far apart, but in a good way. It took me a while to grow accustomed to what Danny was doing for the movie, and after we talked about it, he actually tried to incorporate a little bit of Tom Waits' "dirtiness" into some it, while still keeping it distinctly a Daniel Zott piece of music. I think what he's got thus far is great, and I really think the only way I could find something that I would like more would be if Tom Waits himself would somehow take an interest in a film that was shot on a budget of about $100 and score the entire thing for me, something that's not bloody likely.

The other interesting thing in terms of the music that happened occured when I put in "temporary" music to submit the film to the Ann Arbor Film Festival. Todd and I searched for some interesting open source songs from archive.org, a place for all things public domain. We came upon a Louis Armstrong song, "Lazy River" that I just threw on top of the walking/introduction to Nick Adams scene to have music there. It was only when we watched the film afterwards, that we realized just how perfect the music fit. The way things happened on cuts, how it tied in thematically, etc. Just pure happenstance. And from reading all sorts of interviews with Jean Renoir, Fritz Lang, Orson Welles, Charlie Chaplin, etc. I came to realize that this sort of thing does happen and its the good filmmakers who take notice of it and accept that sometimes chance is more perfect than anything they could come up with and to run with it.



Pacing/Cuts - I ended up cutting 3 scenes from the film: Ed's scene as Cab Driver in the diner, Nick Adams leaving Ole Andersson's apartment and Nick Adams hailing and driving around in a cab after he leaves the apartment.

Cutting Ed's scene was the most difficult, as it was short and Ed was hands down the best of the walk-on roles. The reason I cut that season was 2-fold. First, pacing. The diner scene was already running a bit long. I could have cut the Angry Man scene or Rich Cox's scene. Cutting Angry Man scene would've left no comedic relief from the tension of the entire hostage situation in the diner, and as Hitchcock has taught me through his work, you have to give the audience a little breather or else you'll suffocate them and they won't be willing to go along with you for the rest of the film. Cutting Rich's scene would've been problematic in transitioning and cutting from the previous scene, so that option was out as well. The second reason I cut Ed's scene was that it allowed me to get rid of a problematic close-up shot of a clock and to cut out some extra lines between Max and George that didn't really do anything to move the plot along. If anything, they caused confusion ("you're friend Andersson's not coming" says George. "We'll give him another 10 minutes" says Max...to which they give him either 5 more minutes or 15 more minutes, depending on how I cut it). I tried to avoid any and all close-ups in the entire film. The closest thing to close-ups are some tight shots of Nick Adams during the running scene and the close-ups of objects that open the film. Other than that, there are none. There were a few reasons why I decided not to shoot in close-ups. The first, is that it exposes your actors, and with amateur actors I felt that would've been unfair to the actors and the characters they're portraying. The second is the message that a close-up sends to the viewer. It says "THIS is more important than whatever else you've seen" - and there's not one single thing that I felt should've delivered that message once we got the film rolling, except for the exhaustion on Nick Adam's face when running.

Cutting the scene with Nick Adam's leaving the apartment and the cab scene were much easier. For starters, they were rushed when we shot them. I found a way around some continuity problems, (which will make it on the eventual dvd and probably on this blog when I have a chance to encode the scene) but it just didn't do anything for the narrative. Even if we had spent an entire day shooting these 2 scenes I still think I would've cut them. The only thing the scenes did was to move Nick Adams forward in time and space, and through the miracle of montage and edit you don't have to worry about that, a fade can do the same thing in less time.

Some of the other cuts that I made were minor in nature. I cut off about 15-20 seconds of Emily (Church Mom) trying to make small talk while Jim (Max) smoked his cigarette ignoring her. Again, the diner scene needed to have the pace picked up a bit, and while she had some great nervous improv lines I had to cut them for the greater good of the film. The question then became where to cut. It came down to 2 choices. We cut back from George cutting ham in the kitchen to her telling Max "Boy...I'm really running late for Church...Do you go to church?" or straight to her asking him "Do you go to church?" At first thought, I wanted to cut straight to the "Do you go to church?" line for pure comedic value. When she enters the diner one of the first things she says is that she's running late for Church, and I thought it'd be funny to drive home the idea that she's this church mom, by her just asking this complete and total stranger if he went to church. Had the inflection in her voice been different, I might've gone with that, but as it stood, it felt odd and awkward. So I started with the previous line. As it stands, just about every one of her lines is about church, so she's still the super-crazy church lady, she's just not a total creeper about it.

The walking/introduction to Nick Adams scene has undergone a lot of minor cutting that amounts to a major facelift. As it stands now, the scene is 3:33 long, and that's how it'll be in the final film. The first cut of that scene was about 6:45 long. The scene has the same exact meaning and everything, the only thing that's different is that every shot is shorter and a few shots have been removed entirely (ones that I either didn't like, there were issues with the camera being shaken by the crazy fierce wind blowing off of the river, etc.). It's funny, cause when I first emailed the scene to Jim and Cliff they both suggested I try and get it under 5 minutes and I thought "how the fuck am I going to do that without butchering it?" but I've learned a very valuable lesson: if something needs to be cut down for time considerations, you can always find a way, if you're careful, to do so without butchering the essence of the scene.

Many more thoughts on the film, life in general, changes, etc. but for now I need sleep