By now, if you’ve been following the story, you’re starting to see quite a bit of the town. All things considered, this was a relatively easy section to put together. The relationship between Kyle and Gordy is growing, the story is moving forward, and there are relatively few effects and stunts.

The most interesting part of this shoot was the exploration of Kendall Brown’s house and the introduction of Dave Chattam. I met Dave on a music video I produced and liked him right away. He has a charisma that is instantly recognizable. When it came time to shoot this film, I wrote the part just for him. In hindsight, I wish I would’ve given him a bigger role! He was awesome to work with, and brought a lot to the project.

The house that we shot in was a last minute location change. We had a place fall through the night before, and in the nick of time we found this spot. A bunch of young bachelors lived there, and when we arrived at 5am on a Sunday morning, the occupants were still up partying from the night before. As soon as we started shooting they all went to bed. I never saw any of them again.

The house was also completely trashed. That made the art department job a piece of cake. We just threw a bit more trash on the floor and we were ready to go.

The best part of the day was letting Dave and Jeff crash through a phony bookshelf.
We took some flimsy shelves, cut them down so they’d break apart easily, and filled them with plastic dishes. When we did the shot, right before I called action, Dave started screaming to get in character. Jeff later told me that it really freaked him out. Dave launched himself backwards through the shelf and absolutely crushed Jeff underneath of him. He slammed him against the wall so hard that it knocked him senseless for several minutes. Jeff really didn’t have to do much acting in that scene. What you see is what you get.

In the previous blog I mentioned the back breaking effort it took to create the scene in the Joe Johnson house. If you haven’t read it, I would highly recommend it. Especially if you’re an aspiring film maker and would like to know what it takes to make a movie.

I wanted to add this extra blog here because I have to mention the foot chase that happens after the Joe Johnson house. Believe it or not, this didn’t come together as smoothly as I had hoped. I shot several pieces of Kyle and Sykes running around in the dark, but something was missing.

After we wrapped the shoot in the winter I had to re-watch several movies with action scenes I loved. I realized that what makes a foot chase exciting is to be right behind the character. I had shot several pieces of the actors rushing past the camera, but it didn’t give me the intensity that I was trying to convey. I went back to the drawing board, and in the summer reshoot, we spend a night with the camera right on the tail of the actors.

The thing to keep in mind here is that everything the stunt guys are leaping over or dodging, I am dodging too – as I am carrying the camera and trying to keep it all in focus. I had the biggest close call of my life while trying to do this. At one point we ran through a big shadow and I tripped on a root.
Yes, what you see in this shot is the ground rushing up towards me. I nearly face planted onto the pavement with only a very expensive camera and film lenses to break my fall.

The other difficult thing about this sequence was since we were using lights that were made before the Bible was written, then didn’t like the humidity very much. We were shooting in August in the thick Tennessee humidity and the lights would only stay on for a few minutes. They would shut down and stay that way until they cooled off. We had to rehearse all of the chase scenes in total darkness, flip the lights on, and quickly do the shot before the light died.

After we shot those scenes I could tell that the action was moving along much better, but we still had to devise a way for our hero to get away. So, since we had no money I came up with the brilliant idea of hitting the bad guy with a car. It wasn’t until we were a few days away from production that Jerry told me a complex stunt like hitting someone with a car usually costs about $25,000. Since the budget of the entire film was only $12,000, I knew we had to come up with something different. Jerry, in all his brilliance came up with the solution. First, we shot the stunt guy getting tagged by the car.
However, this shot was filmed in reverse.
We started with him on the car, the car backed up, and the stunt guy hopped off the hood. Once you ramp it backwards it appears he rolls onto the hood.

The next shot was filmed from inside the car. All we did was put a back pad on the stunt guy, I shot really low so you wouldn’t see the street, we stopped the car, and he dove onto the hood and shattered the window.  Finally, we shot the last piece of him rolling off the hood. . .  And viola! We just hit a guy with a car!

Finally, we put our hero in a pond. This was an underwater piece that we filmed in April. I figured that it would be warm enough to do this, but nay, it was frigid enough to freeze thy nether-regions.  What kills me about this is that this isn’t Josh Sumner, it’s Ben Juhl! It just so happened that Ben wanted to do a little acting, Josh was back in school, and Ben was a dead ringer for Josh so I could use him and even show his face! You’d be surprised at how often throughout the film I did that.

I realize that one of the weaknesses of the film is that it is a little slow in the beginning. As I’ve mentioned before, this wasn’t something I saw coming. It wasn’t until everything was shot and edited that I realized the beginning of this film had a slower pace. One potential distributor commented, “If you were Stanley Kubrick, you could get away with that. But you’re not Stanley Kubrick.”

I’m not?
That said, once people get to this part of the film, they are usually hooked. I say this because I’ve heard multiple comments that once this scene started they had to see how the film ended. That makes me feel really good because this scene was one of the most difficult ones to shoot in the entire film. Every day we worked on it, we were faced with some sort of back breaking issue.

To understand why, you first need to understand that the Joe Johnson house is actually four separate locations.

#1 The front and back yard.

#2 The downstairs living room

#3 The upstairs hall

#4 The attic

And this doesn’t include the multiple locations we used for the foot chase

Or the underwater location we used for the pond.

That might help gain perspective on what it took to shoot this sequence. It was spread out over a nine month period and was a real mental juggling act to keep all the action straight in my head.

So, the first day was the front and back yard. And you can tell from the film that we had what every film maker dreads. . . RAIN. No folks, that ain’t movie rain, that’s real Tennessee thunderstorm rain, and it didn’t let up. We were completely drenched by the time that night was through.

Steve-o and I were the only ones who were there from beginning to end that day. We started the morning shooting all of Jaimee’s scenes.

Then we moved on to the night scenes with Josh entering the house. I believe that when it was all said and done we worked a 20 hour day. It was even more difficult the next day because we moved on to location #3, the upstairs hall. That was the day Steve and I broke the marble table top.
(I’d like to give more details, but I don’t really want to talk about it.)

It didn’t get any easier once we moved inside. The attic scene was the first thing we shot of the entire movie. That was before Jerry and Amanda arrived, so we were using some sort of smoke machine that Moses used in ancient history. It wheezed out some sort of weak toxic gas, and never really had much of an effect. Not only that, it was really dangerous. It was basically a hot plate with some sort of smoke hockey puck that burned. We were working at RSVP in a set constructed of indoor paneling, and filled with boxes and other debris.
Translation: a highly flammable area.

What’s funny to notice is Josh is carrying his trusty light as he crawls through the attic. However, this being the first day, we had scripted that he was carrying a headlamp. During the attic scene he broke the light, and from that point forward we switched to a standard mag light.

The last piece was shooting the entrance into the living room. This was very involved. We only had one day to shoot in this location because the owners were leaving on vacation. We also had to completely trash the place to make it look like something violent had occurred. To top it all off, we had to shoot some long crime scene searches, lots of dialogue, and a big stunt. . . A high fall onto the living room floor.

Now, at this point in my career I had never shot a stunt before with a real stunt man.
Everything I had done up to this point was just crazy stuff my friends would do. So, using my best guess, I set the schedule thinking I had plenty of time to execute this and move on. I figured it’d take us two hours TOPS to shoot this. Four hours later we were still getting ready. Everything was against us. We had to dark the house and make it look like night, we had to fill it with smoke, we had rain running down the windows, one of the interns knocked over an HMI light and broke it just before the stunt, and on and on the story goes.

Needless to say we went way over time. I believe it turned out to be a 15+ hour day. Everyone was feeling really punchy, actors were frustrated, the owners were irritated with me for taking too long.
Yes, it was very stressful, and I believe that the movie nearly fell apart that day. If it wasn’t for the calming influence and the relentless optimism of the great Jerry Buxbaum, I think I would’ve lost several vital members of the team. I don’t think I could’ve continued on.
Thanks, Jerry.

And thanks for not breaking your neck when you fell into the box pad. : )