Pre Production:
The Rat Thing began as a two-character thirty page one-act play that I wrote for Michael McGee and myself. After unsuccessfully trying to raise the money to produce the play I decided to turn it into a screenplay and try to raise the money to produce a feature length film. Go figure. I initially believed that since I had such a large role in the film that it would be wise to find some one else to direct it.
I went through three different directors before I realized that the only way I was going to get my vision on screen was to direct it myself. Over a period of three months we did three staged readings at the HBO workspace. All three readings had a huge audience reaction and as a result I received multiple offers from agents and producers to sell the screenplay to a major studio. I also had an offer from a producer to make the movie with a three to five million-dollar budget. I would be able to star in the film but I would have to drop my cast so they could surround me with “names” and I would not be able to direct. I rejected these offers. I then began trying to raise the money independently.
The Rat Thing screenplay was a semi finalist in the Nicholls Fellowship Screenwriting Contest. Once again I had a bunch of offers from producers that wanted to take it to a studio and have name actors play the parts. I must have heard a hundred times, “Sell this screenplay. You can put your “friends” in your next movie…” Well my “friends” were cast because they were excellent actors that were right for the movie, not because they were my “friends”. Another thing I heard over and over again was, “Do you know how hard it’s going to be as a first time director to act and direct at the same time? Don’t you realize how hard it is to do a comedy!?!” I set about trying to find a producer to help me. Once again the producers I worked with seemed to want to go in a direction that was different than what I felt was best for the movie. I was often told that I wasn’t being realistic, that I was going to have to make compromises, that I wasn’t going to be able to do it, and so on. So now I had to become the producer as well.
Besides encountering a ton of naysayers along the way I also ran into my share of the unscrupulous underbelly of the film world. I won’t even bother to go into that. Let’s just say I learned some very harsh lessons and was taken for a substantial amount of money. After trying to raise money and a couple of false starts, we finally secured the budget to shoot the movie. Three weeks before shooting I lost the lead female actress because she was sentenced to jail after her thirteenth arrest for civil disobedience while protesting the war in Iraq. I quickly searched for and found a replacement. We were all crewed up and ready to go.
Production:
We shot for four weeks in July. Day one was a 6pm to 6am night shoot with 52 set-ups in and around a Supermarket that we were paying 12K for two nights. We were shooting on Hi-def using a Sony F900. On the very first set up the camera broke down so right away we were two hours behind schedule. By 2am the keys to the car we were using for an exterior shot had been lost. By 4am my line producer was telling me that we were never going to finish the movie. His favorite line which he used almost everyday of the entire shoot was, “When the money runs out, the party’s over”. Twice before I had been the lead actor in independent movies that had made it through seventy five percent of the shooting schedule and then shut down because they ran out of money. Neither of those movies ever resumed production so I knew what could happen. Night one was a combination of sublime exhilaration and terrorizing anxiety. I learned very quickly to stay in the moment and do my best to get the scene we were working on in the can before worrying about the next one.
Fortunately, I had a great crew that believed in the film and were committed to doing a great job. Director of Photography, Andrew Giannetta and I had spent three weeks in pre production making out a very detailed and extensive shot list so we were very prepared. We new what we absolutely had to get and we had our wish list as well. Michael McGee and I had rehearsed extensively. This was important not only because we had the bulk of the scenes that drive the story but because I was directing the film. I couldn’t very well stand outside of myself and direct myself on the set so I had to be prepared. Our NTSC playback monitor had picture but no sound. If I wanted to see a scene that I was in with Michael or any other actor I would only be able to see the picture but I wouldn’t be able to hear the dialogue. Due to time constraints I rarely had the time to look at the playback monitor anyway. So it really had to be a feel thing. Of course when directing actors in scenes that I wasn’t in I could either watch the scenes on the high definition monitor as they happened and listen with headphones or I would just watch directly without the monitor. All of the actors had been generous with their time for rehearsals and readings so we were prepared. Of course things change on the set but for the most part the actors knew where we were going and if they didn’t they were amenable to direction.
I did have a situation where an actor that was playing an important scene in the movie dropped out the night before. At this point my line producer was telling me that we were 4 days behind schedule, we were never going to finish the movie, and that “When the money runs out, the party’s over”. I had already rehearsed with this actor, blocked out the scene, he’d been fitted by the wardrobe department, etc…When we called to give him his call time, his manager told us that he had been scheduled to shoot with us in August, not July. I explained that we were only shooting in July and that we had never scheduled anything for August. I didn’t have time to get into an argument with his manager as we were trying to get another scene finished so I had to replace him. I called a good friend of mine that had very little formal acting training and had only played a small part in one play. I asked him to show up the next day. I coached him through the scene and he did a fabulous job. It turned out to be one of my favorite scenes in the movie.
Like any independent film there were lots of setbacks and frustrations. We’d have a permit to shoot someplace and when we’d arrive we’d find that the permit office had also issued a permit to a studio film with 20 trucks and trailers so there was no place for us to park or shoot. Locations that we had already secured suddenly wanted more money. It was boiling hot at our main location in downtown L.A. that we used for most of our interiors. All the exterior noise forced us to keep the windows shut. With the lighting set-ups in the July heat it was often 110 degrees inside. We had a number of 16, 17, and 18 hour days. We’d light a particular side of an interior and then shoot all parts of the many scenes that were being shot on that side of the room. Often it would be 8 to 10 hours later at 3am that we’d be shooting the same scenes now lit for the other side of the room. We’d have to have to come up with the same energy to match what the other actors had been doing 8 to 10 hours earlier. At 16 hours into a day this was not easy. Cast and crew were weary and tempers sometimes flared. I had no time to watch dailies. I had to trust my editor that we were getting what we needed.
That being said, things were going amazingly well. I knew that we were getting great performances. I knew that we’d find a way to catch up. And we were having a blast doing it. Michael McGee and I drove to and from the set together everyday. That was great because we could talk about the day ahead on the way there and on the way home we could talk about what had been done that day. The next thing I knew we were almost done shooting. I remember one of the electricians asking me, “When do you think you’ll have your post done and the movie will be ready?”
I said, “Six…maybe nine months at the most”
He said, “I hope so…I hope you’re not going to be one of those guys that never finishes his film…where two years later you never hear what happened…” I assured him that would not be the case. We finished principal photography at 10pm on the last day of July. By midnight everyone was gone. I felt very confident that we had everything in the can. I was in a state of bliss and had an immense feeling of satisfaction that lasted about twenty minutes.
Post Production:
The next morning the feeling of camaraderie that happens when you spend a month on the set with everybody was gone. Now it was me, 40 hours of dailies, a tape recorder, and a notebook. I spent 5 weeks watching the footage, speaking notes into the tape recorder, transcribing them, and e-mailing them to my editor. I decided it was best to stay away from the editing bay and let my editor put together a Rough cut/first assembly. I’d read that a lot of the great directors that I admire go on vacation and do something totally different to deliberately remove themselves from anything to do with the film so that they can see it with fresh eyes when their editor has something. I couldn’t wait to see what my editor came up with. And wait I had to do. I had a limited amount of money for post so I had to wait and wait and wait for months and months while my editor juggled projects. I was expecting to have my entire movie finished by the time I finally saw the first cut 5 months later in December. I didn’t know what to expect. I wasn’t completely horrified (but almost) by the 2 hour and 15 minute cut, but my fantasy of having an editor come up with a good version without me being there was completely obliterated. My editor had a poster on the wall that said something like “Editing is the final rewrite of the script…” I knew at that point that I was going to be at every future editing session calling the shots. I was receptive to and would incorporate any creative ideas but nobody was going to know the story, care about the details, and be more concerned about the final product than me. Thank God I had 115 pages of specific notes detailing every take. Depending on my editors schedule we worked odd hours on and off until April. At that point I was out of money and the project came to a halt.
For me the hardest part of making the movie was the WAITING. Waiting to get the money to shoot the film and start my post production. Waiting for the first editors cut. Now I had to raise more money. When I was editing with my first editor I realized that I needed to get some establishing shots and some good footage of the atmosphere in Venice. So I needed to raise enough money to rent a camera package again to go out and shoot everything I needed. I needed money for my final edit, musical score, ADR, Foley, sound effects, color correction, final sound mix, titles and credits, etc…
Finally I raised the money necessary to complete all aspects of postproduction. I edited for 8 more weeks with a new editor. This time I had the money to be able to edit ten hour days, five days a week. During this time we screened different cuts on the big screen with audience to see how it played. Finally, years after writing the stage play, The Rat Thing, as a feature film was complete.