Did you really have just a $7,000 budget?
That’s true, yeah.
That’s pretty amazing.
See, but that’s the thing. It’s such a great little hook or whatever… I ended up paying for that. I feel like a moron for sticking to that budget. I really should have found more money and it would have saved me like a year of my life.
The shooting ratio was so tight – it was 2:1. We only shot one take and not only that, we only shot the lines from any given shot that I knew I would need, with very little overlap. So, you know, there’s nothing left. For the most part it works well. It’s kind of pre-edited and you just edited it together the way I had planned. But when there’s some kind of problem, like if I lose a shot because a mag is accidentally opened and exposed to light. Or if there’s some kind of continuity error – if a water bottle is on the table in one shot but not in the next – it’s this problem that takes days if not weeks to figure out and I’m scrambling around for, “Was the camera accidentally on for a second? Is there extra footage somewhere? This actor’s back is turned, maybe I can get him to dub the line a little bit faster.” It becomes this weird puzzle and it takes forever to fix.
That sounds like a nightmare.
It is a nightmare.
Were you ever tempted to give up on the film?
I did give up. I gave up at least three times during the two years. It took two years to edit and compose and loop and foley and all that. There’s at least three times… It really got to me when someone asks what I did for a living and I realized I didn’t have a good answer. And it was just, I don’t know, it was like I’m in my apartment alone all day editing this thing that I’m calling a film but it wasn’t actually a film yet. So yeah, there’s a couple of times where I just gave up and decided I was going to go back and get a job and actually have a good answer to what I did for a living. That was going to be that.
With the very limited amount of money that you had to spend, why didn’t you go digital?
I did the math and I figured I could get away with film. It was really important to me that the medium be film. In the story, the music starts off acoustic. As the story gets more fantastical, the music gets more ethereal and atmospheric. And the same thing happens with the editing. It starts very conventional and then more jump cuts are introduced and it’s more stylized as the story gets fantastical. So when it came to the medium, I wanted to start in a place that people are used to seeing so that I kind of had the latitude to overexposure later on, or to color time extremely. That’s something that I couldn’t get shooting [digital video] or anything else I had at my disposal. I needed to shoot film.
What’s next for you? Are you writing?
I get to go back soon. I’ve got one more trip to Los Angeles to do some Q&As and a few more interviews, and then I don’t know if there’s anything planned so I get to go back to writing.
Do you have a story in your head?
Yeah, yeah. I can’t wait. I’m part of the way through the script now but it’s a romance.
A romance?
Yeah.
Is there a sci-fi angle or is it strictly romance?
The only thing in it is that the lead character is an oceanography prodigy but it’s not like heavy on the science. So, no.
If someone would have told me the guy behind “Primer” is doing a romance next, I wouldn’t have believed them. Is this a story you just need to tell?
It’s just it’s always about the themes. The story just builds up from that and so that’s what happened with this also.
