5Q: Dustin Grella / PRAYERS FOR PEACE
Posted by CQ Central
Dustin Grella
1Q: Tell us a little about the origins of PRAYERS FOR PEACE, from concept to financing.
I don’t know that it was ever a conscious decision. The film is entirely non-fiction, and I tried to keep as close to the facts as possible, so the story unfolded relatively naturally. I write every day, so after I walked past the ribbons, I went home and wrote about it, and while I was writing it I knew I was going to make a sound piece out of it. I was trying to make it feel a little like an Ira Glass narrative, very Americana. When I started looking for a topic to do the animation on I realized that I already had this sound piece finished and could simply animate on top of it. I don’t know that I ever sat down and said that I was going to make a film about my brother. I think this goes back to the question of what motivates me, when I said that the creative process is exciting, that I never really know what is going to happen next. I could be writing a letter one day that becomes a sound piece another day that becomes an animation the next, I don’t ever really know.
I think I might have just done that. The film’s creation was very organic. I just had to sit in the studio and do the work. As I mentioned before, the whole thing is a narrative of what actually transpired. I was walking home, I saw the ribbons and went home to write about my thoughts. After making the sound piece and deciding to turn it into an animation I decided that the shots should be long and slow so that the viewer has the opportunity to digest the story and not get hung up that it is entirely drawn with pastels on a sheet of slate. I storyboarded what I could, and pulled a lot of the sound and imagery off of Devin’s laptop, although the images for the end didn’t arrive until months later. I had some ideas of what I wanted to use, but this film’s creation was very organic. I just had to sit in the studio and do the work. I found the reference footage for the very last shot a few days before I used it. My Uncle Art gave me hours and hours of family VHS tapes to go through and I was getting sort of tired and drifting out and would have missed it entirely, but my girlfriend leaned over my shoulder and said, “Whoa!” Even though I did a lot of the work on the film, the film itself kept shifting forms and I really didn’t know what it was going to be about. It wasn’t until it was all over that I realized it wasn’t really my film at all, I was just there to put it together. Read more
Tags: 5Q, animation, Dustin Grella, non-fiction, Prayers for Peace, SHORTS, war.
5Q: DANIEL KRAUS / PROFESSOR
Posted by CQ Central
Daniel Kraus
1Q: Tell us a little about the origins of PROFESSOR, from concept to financing.
PROFESSOR is the third film in the Work Series (www.workseries.com), a cycle of cinema verite documentaries about working in America. After making SHERIFF and MUSICIAN, I wanted to do a movie about the labor of the mind, so I tracked down the University of Iowa’s Rabbi Jay Holstein. I remembered him from my undergrad days as angry, hilarious, foul-mouthed, and brilliant. I was pleased to find that not only was he still teaching at age 69, but he had lost none of the fire.
2Q: This is the first festival for your film, and your first audience; how has it been received? Are you looking forward to any other festivals?
I was caught off-guard by the response. Three packed houses (including one that had a lengthy unplanned intermission when a popcorn machine in the lobby caught on fire) and an added Audience Award screening. My documentaries are typically patient, studious affairs that are not everyone’s cup of tea, so it was a lot of fun to see how Holstein’s personality transcended that and exploded the appeal factor. Read more
5Q: CAMPBELL GRAHAM / ANYONE YOU WANT
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CAMPBELL GRAHAM
1Q: Tell us a little about the origins of ANYONE YOU WANT, from concept to financing.
ANYONE YOU WANT is a romance about a young businessman in Sydney who befriends a troubled homeless girl and is drawn into her secret fantasy world. I wrote it in a month and it was financed by me, my two brothers and my ex-girlfriend!
2Q: ANYONE YOU WANT is having its World Premiere at Cinequest on March 3rd. How have you been enjoying the festival so far, and do you plan to bring the film to any other festivals?
3Q: What was your best and/or worst experience while making ANYONE YOU WANT?
Tags: 5Q, ANYONE YOU WANT, GRAHAM CAMPBELL, world premiere.
5Q: ALEJANDRO ADAMS / BABNIK
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ALEJANDRO ADAMS
1Q: Tell us a little about the origins of BABNIK, from writing to financing.
I bite off more than I can chew. It’s pathological. This film was made in a language I don’t speak. It stares down one of the hot-button issues of the day—sex-trafficking. I’m in over my head. I’m drowning. I can’t look at my work from the outside but I imagine it’s quite a spectacle. I don’t remember making this film and can’t imagine why I did. Read more
Tags: 5Q, Alejandro Adams, Babnik, DRAMA, world premiere.
5Q: LAWRENCE MICHAEL LEVINE & SOPHIA TAKAL / GABI ON THE ROOF IN JULY
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Sophia Takal & Lawrence Michael Levine
1Q: Tell us a little about the origins of GABI ON THE ROOF IN JULY, from concept to financing.
Lawrence (writer/director/actor): I shot and edited my first feature, TERRITORY, over the course of my first year at film school, so when the film premiered in Cinequest in 2005 I was still really a student. While at film school the teachers pushed me to write very conventional screenplays, which I was resistant to, but I wrote them anyway. When I graduated, I realized the films I’d written at school would be hard to get off the ground because they had relatively large budgets. It was depressing to think I might have to wait years to get back on set and work with actors, which is my favorite part of filmmaking. At the same time, I’d been revisiting a lot of Cassavetes, Mike Leigh & Rob Nilsson films and reading about their methods. They really inspired me to break away from the more conventional approach that I’d adopted at school. I was especially interested in how they collaborated with actors to create their films and decided that the next film I shot would draw on their techniques. Read more
Tags: 5Q, COMEDY, DRAMA, Gabi on the Roof in July, Lawrence Michael Levine, Sophia Takal, world premiere.
5Q: JOHN SHEEDY / THE TIJUANA PROJECT
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John Sheedy
1Q: Tell us a little about the origins of THE TIJUANA PROJECT, from concept to financing.
The concept for the Tijuana Project was shared with me by Victor Villaseñor, author of Rain of Gold. I was looking for a story of hope about kids living and surviving in an inhospitable place and he told me about the kids in the Tijuana garbage dump and a school that was built for them right next to the dump. I only had $1,000 to start with, but after seeing the apocalyptic environment where these kids and their families lived and worked I knew I had to do the film. Read more
Tags: 5Q, CQ20, DOCUMENTARY, John Sheedy, Tijuana Project.
5Q: ERIC D. HOWELL / ANA’S PLAYGROUND
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Eric D. Howell
1Q: Tell us a little about the origins of ANA’S PLAYGROUND, from concept to financing.
It started as a writing experiment. I didn’t want to use any dialogue in the film and was trying to play with the empathy of the audience. Soon I discovered that the story was a provocative piece that could be an effective tool. At that point I made a very clear mission statement: I set out to make a film that would reach the broadest audience possible, to raise the most amount of awareness about children affected by war & violence, and the organizations working to improve their lives. The entire production was made possible through charitable cash and in-kind donations made to our fiscal sponsor IFP Minnesota. Screening rights of the film are being offered to non-profit organizations working to help children living in violent conditions.
Tags: 5Q, Ana's Playground, CQ20, DRAMA, Eric D. Howell, short.
5Q: MATTHEW BISSONNETTE / PASSENGER SIDE
Posted by CQ Central
Matt Bissonnette
1Q: Tell us a little about the origins of PASSENGER SIDE, from concept to financing.
Well, I had always wanted to make a road movie, so I lifted the idea from the Wilco song “Passenger Side”, and then situated it in Los Angeles, as I live there, and it’s a big car town, and it’s sort of near to Modesto (relative to say Montreal, my home town), which is, of course, the location of American Grafitti, a movie I really like, and one I was thinking about while making Passenger Side.
Corey Marr, my trusty producer, raised the money through television pre-sales from our favorite people, Movie Central and The Movie Network, and then later Telefilm Canada stepped in with some finishing funds, so it was half capitalism, half socialism, like Vermont. Read more
Tags: 5Q, COMEDY, Corey Marr, CQ20, Matthew Bissonnette, Passenger Side.
5Q: Zach Weintraub / BUMMER SUMMER
Posted by CQ Central
Zach Weintraub
1Q: Tell us a little about the origins of BUMMER SUMMER, from writing to financing.
My writing process spanned a couple of years, and saw the film take on various incarnations. I started writing it as a very traditional screenplay about halfway through film school in New York because I had been warned that graduating without a feature script was the worst error that an aspiring director could commit. Just before my senior year I was getting exposed to a lot of the great new no-budget work that was coming out and was inspired to try my hand at it. So the screenplay changed a lot as I started writing it realistically according to my means. But I never even finished a complete draft. The dialogue was all so long-winded and mouthpiece-y, and all of the characters just sounded like me, so I scrapped it and wrote a detailed outline instead. That was what we shot from. I recruited friend/classmate Nandan Rao to move to Olympia, WA (my hometown) with me to shoot/co-produce the film. Because we were first-timers, we gave ourselves about six months to feel everything out before shooting anything. This time was also spent fundraising, which was a dismal failure. We threw events like a roller-disco, a garden pizza party, and an art show/raucous dance party (a bad combo for fragile ceramic pieces). Altogether, we milked less than a grand out of it all. Because the film coincided with my college graduation, I was able to finance it using gift money and some excess student loan money that I sneakily neglected to return to the loan company. It was an absurdly cheap movie, but I don’t think that’s apparent at all.
Tags: 5Q, Bummer Summer, CQ20, DRAMA, Nandan Rao, world premiere, Zach Weintraub.
5Q: CULLEN HOBACK / FrICTION
Posted by CQ Central
Cullen Hoback
1Q: Tell us a little about the origins of FrICTION, from concept to financing.
In the summer of 07′, I made an agreement with a private high school wherein I would teach film a couple hours a day (paycheck…) if they would let me spend the rest of the time working on my own projects with my writing partner Jerome Schwartz. So while driving in a short bus to pick up my co-writer Jerome from the airport, I was struck with a crazy idea. There were all of these resources available– food, lodging, transport, and a well of filmmaking equipment. Additionally, the arts program was struggling from a small number of students and a lack of structure (explained in the film)–I realized the creation of a film would give the program a purpose. I had also noticed that the couple ‘running’ the program had a seemingly tenuous relationship; and both hadn’t grown out of the fame-craving phase. So I had a setting, I had a subject, but I didn’t have a plot. Read more
Tags: 5Q, COMEDY, CQ20, Cullen Hoback, DRAMA, FrICTION, Jerome Schwartz, Monster Camp, world premiere.