The Cast Call

The beauty of having a small crew is that you’re nimble and can fit in tight spaces or, as we’d find out, be less conspicuous in the big outdoors… more on that subject later.

Here we were April 2007 with the goal to shoot a feature film ‘deconstructive’ style… a series of shorts, +/-10, that we’d submit to film festivals, YouTube, and everywhere else appropriate, along the way.  Even in hindsight, I think this is a darn good idea, and I have a story about a serial killer in San Francisco that’s perfect for this approach, it's Seven meets Sliding Doors… but I digress.

Confident of our plan, 7-minute script in hand, we set about the task of casting and quickly realized that we needed to find all our principal cast, even for the short, i.e. Anjelica, Mitch and Toni.  Since we were operating with zero budget, there was no discussion about hiring a Casting Agent, so it was up to us and resources on the Internet.

While Craig's List is always an option, as well as other indie filmmaker groups, my tool of choice was SF Casting.  I can’t speak highly enough of their service – a great resource for finding talented actors; even better for indie filmmakers, it’s free.  No sooner had we posted our profile and call for our cast and we were inundated with applicants. 

This is one of the most fun aspects of filmmaking… to actualize your vision of a character and see it embodied in a walking, talking human being.  I’ll confess, it’s a bit of a meat market… kind of like online dating, at least to start, as you flip through pages and pages of headshots.  Nope, too pretty… nope, too skinny… nope, too young… nope, no film experience… nope, nope, nope!  Until you get to the maybe, maybe, maybe and hopefully, yes, yes, yes!

We whittled the list down to our top three for each role and thus began the parade – through my living room – of actors hoping to bring their interpretation of our characters to life.

Compulsion... Characters... The Muse that Compels to Create...

One subject that fascinates Gino and I as filmmakers – and one we continue to explore as we develop the script for our next film Pitchin’ Papaya – is human compulsions. We are interested in exploring what compels people to act in certain ways, do certain things, even when it goes against their better judgment. It’s the core of Mismo and our tagline …when fate and freedom collide; meaning that while we all have free will, we permit our innate nature to make our choices, thus leading to our inevitable fate… and oftentimes resulting in a collision.

We first explored this theme in Compulsion, the story for which was sparked by a real runaway bride who, to avoid a trip to the altar, claimed she’d been kidnapped. Her story spawned a nationwide search for her kidnappers accompanied by a media furor. It was likely the furor that tripped her up… in the end, she confessed it was a lie… she’d concocted the entire story. In our version, the runaway’s impulse, “I simply had to get away,” leads to another compulsion – greed – that leads to her being kidnapped for real.

Had we completed the script, the themes of freedom versus security, predictable versus risky, and passion versus romance would have been explored. As it was, Compulsion took many forms before finally settling on the genre of road movie – and, alas, a production beyond our modest means.

With Mismo’s parallel story lines the opportunity for compulsions to collide is amplified, leading to an ending that led one viewer to comment, “it sent chills right down my spine.”

While we have created our characters for Papaya, I am guessing that, as we write the script, at least one of them is going to take us on a road trip with her compulsion. It’s our journey as writers… to follow the muse… see what transpires… and in the end, we always have free will to delete.

In The Beginning...

The genesis for Mismo was a script I had written some years previous that was in the vein of a revenge chick flick. We had this notion that we could make a portion of it for the next stage of the Scary Cow contest. We were not going to make the first ten minutes, but rather build a short around one scene in particular that we thought was visually rich – it involved a suicidal woman and a lot of flower petals. One team member was pushing towards making the film Bergman-esque – slow down the pace of everything – which, to me, translates as painful and… well, quite simply, not my style.

Gino and I got talking one Sunday evening about what excites us about film and filmmaking. We discovered that we’re both huge fans of Alejandro González Iñárritu and more specifically of films that do not follow a traditional linear path. Amores Peros and 21 Grams are in both of our personal ‘Movie Hall of Fame’.

Our conversation was invigorated and we were inspired; we decided that we would make a movie with parallel storylines. My script had three characters; the problem was that one of them died at the beginning of the film. So, heck, we’d come up with another script. Meanwhile, we were in a contest and needed to move forward.