(Setting up the production office – Lt to Rt: Line Producer Lindsay Rice, Costume/Makeup Designer Julia Rosendale, and That One Director Guy)

People like to think that movies are made when the camera starts rolling.  That may be when the footage starts rolling in, but any filmmaker will tell you that a movie is really made in pre-production, without it, there would be no cameras, no footage, no food, no sets, no locations, no lights, no crew, and quite simply, no movie. If making a film was like building a house, Pre-Production would be it’s foundation.

On Forever’s End, as with most indie films, we had a very tight timetable, but even more so given the restrictions we faced with a limited budget, limited crew, and especially (at least for us) limited time. We had only six weeks from the date the film was funded until our first day of shooting, this was in large part due to the restrictions involved in everyone’s schedules… and keep in mind, we may have had six weeks, but the script had not even been written yet! The film was funded based on a pitch and a promo/trailer, not a finished script, and obviously it’s near impossible to start pre-production on a film without it’s blueprint.

I had the entire script for the film already ingrained in my head and on a smattering of 40+ pages of hand-written notes, nothing more than a slew of ideas and outlines, so once the film was funded, I literally shut myself away in a room for two weeks and wrote it, page one to finished draft in 14 days.

While that sounds fast (believe me, it is… still a personal record at least), there went the first two weeks of our six-week pre-production window.  The moment I was finished, my line-producer (Lindsay Rice) and I started steamrolling through the script and creating all the breakdowns, budgets, location lists, prop lists, shooting schedule, booking crew and flights,  knocking it all out in a matter of days (sometimes fewer people can do things faster), while I simultaneously roped in several local friends of mine in Ohio (I was still in LA at that point) to start location scouting.

We had our first round of auditions (in LA) for our leading man literally the next week (see my post Casting Forever’s End for more details on that), I flew out to Ohio two days later and hit the ground running… and by running I mean sprinting.

(Test Photo – Charity & Warren’s first meeting during auditions)

The most important element to lock down at this point was our primary locations. My location peeps in Ohio had done an excellent job of finding me a variety of options, sending piles of location photos and videos of places all around the region, the trick was that I had never seen any of them in person and there’s only so much you can tell from pictures.  The first few days on the ground in Ohio I spent in a car, driving hundreds of miles around the region visiting location after location, finally landing on a fantastic 1800’s house located just outside the small rural town of Eaton, Ohio (near the Indiana border).  It was a heck of a drive from where I had been staying but I managed to make it out there several times to negotiate a deal with the owner to rent the place for a little over a month so we’d have an extra few days to start set-dressing the place (it was an empty house so we had to bring everything in: See my post on Production Design for that whole story).

The next location was all our outside fields, which were indeed shot in an entirely different place from where we shot the house itself (more than 100 miles away in fact) located in a remote countryside in northern Kentucky.

The last primary location to find was the downtown city streets and alley needed for the film, which we would need to completely shut down and control for several scenes. We ended up shooting them in downtown Cincinnati, and while it may seem backwards, the process of getting the required permits and police to block-off/shut down streets for us for a full day/night was actually one of the easiest things we did.  Unlike in Los Angeles or New York, there are very few film shoots in Cincinnati and as a result there was no big complicated permit-process to go through, and at the time: zero permit fees!  I had the permit in hand within 24hrs of requesting it and we were good to go. This was one huge reason for deciding to shoot in Ohio to begin with, not only did I already have a number of connections there from my years running the Film Fest, but from a financial perspective, there was simply no competition when it comes to cost-effective filmmaking.

While I was driving around scouting and locking down locations, I’d also stop at every garage sale I saw looking for older props and furniture, anything and everything we would need to outfit an entire house from the ground up. At one point we had half-dozen of the crew’s friends and family all out looking for items as well, anything we couldn’t borrow for a month, we bought second hand, including a piano (you’d be amazed at how many people are dying to just get rid of them!).

In the midst of everything else, I was in constant contact with my costume/hair/makeup designer, the fantastic Julia Rosendale Martin, who was still in New York starting to gather wardrobe options, effects makeup and everything else we might need.

When we finally hit the last week before production, everything seemed like a whirlwind, there’s always a point when you wonder if everything is actually going to fall into place, and for me, this was it.  This was the week Julia and the rest of the crew all flew in from NY and LA and daily back-to-back production meetings started immediately.

(Costume/Makeup Designer Julia Rosendale and I reviewing wardrobe options)

(Julia custom designing Sarah’s ‘pivotal’ dress)

(Finding and selecting wardrobe options for each “day” in the film that fit each character’s personality and progression is not an easy task)

Because I was filling so many different roles (as were most of the crew) it was a balancing act between 3 days of cast rehearsals, costume fittings, makeup/effects tests, and driving the hour out and back from the main location to set dress.

(About 1/4 of the picture FRAMES used to decorate just one set. You never realize how much you need until you starting decorating an entire house from scratch)

Even with all that, my focus went to rehearsals. Rehearsals are extremely important to me, and depending on the type of film and complexity of the roles, this time could have been spent in a number of ways. The big thing for us on Forever’s End (as with most films) is that this was the first time we’ve had the entire cast together in one place and the first time I was able to work with them as a group. We had the chance to do some basic run-throughs of some of the more complicated scenes,  including incorporating general blocking. The idea of rehearsals, at least in my mind, isn’t to get everything down and “locked” (like you might do in theater) but talk through and then work through any questions or concerns an actor may have regarding a specific character or scene and then walk through any potentially complex blocking. The end goal of rehearsals was really to get everyone on the same page, and to build confidence and trust, to give the performers a  chance get to know each-other, get comfortable working together and working with me. While rehearsals are certainly important, it’s just as important (from an acting/performance perspective) to avoid “over-rehearsing”, since the last thing you want is for the scene to feel staged, or come off as fake when you actually shoot it. I’ve found that more often than not, the best, most natural performances happen when actors feel the confidence and freedom to be spontaneous on set, quite simply, the freedom to act.

(Our full cast together for the first time during rehearsals – LT to RT: Lili Reinhart, Charity Farrell, Warren Bryson, Dave Wetzel)

With rehearsals complete and shooting only days away, there was no time to relax, the energy and excitement seemed to take over, the focus on getting everything done was only trumped by the joy of watching the pieces fall into place.

I’ve often told people that good movies are really made in pre-production, it’s the time when all the details  are ironed out, when you try to anticipate as many potential problems as possible and solve them before they ever happen, so that by the time you get to set, you can focus on actually shooting the movie; because once filming starts, once the machine starts rolling, you can’t stop it… and fixing any issue becomes ten-times harder. There’s no way to anticipate everything, but you can at least be confident that when those unexpected issues do arise during the shoot, you have the knowledge and preparation to resolve them without having to worry about all the petty details that could have compounded had they not been resolved earlier.

I’ve had the pleasure of working on hundreds of sets and in my experience I can say it’s immediately obvious from the moment I walk on set which productions did their due diligence in pre-production and which did not. While every production is unique, the majority of the issues that arise on most troubled sets could have been resolved in pre-production before they ever became a real problem. On big-budget studio-fare, issues are often resolved by basically just “throwing money at them”, but on an indie set like Forever’s End where finances are tight, there’s little room for error, pre-production was our invaluable foundation.

**Here’s some special Bonus Photos!  [These were “family photos” taken during rehearsals, later framed and placed around the main house set]

(‘White’ Family Photo)

(Sisters)

(Framed – a nice addition to the family living room)

Forever’s End is feature Apocalyptic Psychological Drama available worldwide November 25th, 2014 on Video On Demand, DVD, Blu-ray, Streaming and Digital Download. For complete details visit www.foreversendmovie.com

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(Lili Reinhart in Forever’s End)

Every time someone asks me “How did you find your cast?” or “Who was your Casting Director?” on a project I directed my response is always, “That’d be me.” There seems to be a few misconceptions for those who work outside the entertainment industry about how most films are cast and what, exactly, a Casting Director actually does. To be fair, this may vary a bit based on the project and the size of the role, but in general the one who makes all the final casting decisions on a film is the Director, not a Casting Director.

While Casting Directors have their merits (their -much abbreviated job description- is to help facilitate the casting process, not actually select a cast), I’ve found I rarely, if ever, use them. I generally prefer to handle the casting process myself and while I will often have an assistant or two help with the logistics, I usually review nearly all the submissions on my own regardless of if it’s for a commercial, music video or in the case of Forever’s End, an indie feature.

When looking to cast “unknowns” (IE: a public casting call) my process usually starts online, I use a variety of casting websites and services depending on the location of the shoot (LAcasting, for example, is a fantastic way to get a ton of submissions quickly, but not ideal if you’re not shooting in Los Angeles and hoping to find a ‘local’ elsewhere), as well as posting initial casting notices on public boards like Craigslist. In addition, since we were shooting Forever’s End in Ohio, (where Star Com, my production company was based) I also contacted the major local talent agencies directly, many of which I’ve have long-standing relationships, and had them also send over a number of potentials. It was from one of these agencies, Katalyst, that we ended up finding our leading man, Warren Bryson.

That process was still not a simple one and actually spanned a public casting call on both coasts. To start with though, we have to step back a year or two to auditions for a completely different, significantly larger feature film of mine previously titled “40 Miles”. Back in 2010 we were in the midst of pre-production on “40 Miles” and held a massive public regional casting call, specifically looking for one of the female leads who I wanted to be an unknown. Within two days of getting the word out, we had more than 3,000 submissions (just locally) and throughout that month-long casting process, I ended up whittling them down to two finalists: Charity Farrell and Lili Reinhart. After much discussion, the role finally went to Lili, but I knew I still wanted to work with Charity as well at some point, so when at the last minute the financing for “40 Miles” fell through (literally just weeks out from principal photography… which is another long, frustrating story for another time), I was left with some fantastic actors and no movie to put them in.

(Warren Bryson in Forever’s End)

In the wake of “40 Miles”, which was a huge hit to me, I decided to go ahead and shoot a small short-film to fill the time, a film titled “For Today”, which was a family-friendly story about two sisters in foster-care and starred, you guessed it: Charity Farrell and Lili Reinhart.

The two of them worked together so well that in the months that followed, with still no real movement on getting “40 Miles” started back up again, I ended up conceiving a new feature, Forever’s End. This time around, the film was developed specifically with Lili and Charity in mind, and designed to be made on a much more manageable budget I knew I could get. They would once again be playing sisters, though this time around very different characters and a wildly different dynamic. I get asked quite often how I chose which actress for which role, oddly enough, while I had written the film with them in mind, I had not specifically decided who would play which role until later. I knew either actress was capable of either role, but in the end it really just came down to age and availability -Lili was much younger and also very busy, we had to work-in our shooting schedule with her between two other features she was shooting and a family vacation all slated for that same summer, and since the Lily role required less overall shoot-time, the decision all but made itself. After shooting a short promo for the project, which subsequently succeeded in getting the project funded, two of my three leads were conveniently already in place.

Actors repeatedly working with the same directors is actually a very common occurrence in the movie biz (the Tim Burton/Johnny Depp relationship may be one of the most famous) just like any other relationship, once you’ve worked with someone you like, you understand, and get along with you have a tendency to want to work with those same people again.

With two of my three leads set, the last main role was that of Ryan, part mysteriously creepy dude, part hunky loveable boyfriend type (not the official description), I underestimated how difficult the role might be to fill. One key thing to keep in mind is that there are a total of FOUR roles in the entire film, for those of you who haven’t seen it yet, yes there are only four actors in the whole movie, one of which is only seen briefly. What that means is that the entire weight of the film has to be carried on the shoulders of the three leads, one misstep, one unconvincing moment and we could risk loosing the audience and the film with it. That’s a tall order for any actor, even more-so for someone new.

We did an initial search for potentials in Los Angeles, just because I felt there would be a much broader talent pool to pick from and by the time we were casting we only had a few weeks before production started. It was also extremely important that whomever I cast was convincing playing opposite Charity, as her would-be romance, so even on a small budget I spent the time and money to fly Charity out to LA to read with a number of potential finalists for the role. After a week of auditions and chemistry reads, still none of them clicked for me (or her), and with less than a month left before the start of production, I was getting concerned.

(Charity Farrell in Forever’s End)

I flew out to Ohio (where there film was shot) the next week to begin full-on pre-production, finalizing locations, production design, the works – while simultaneously setting up another full casting session locally, it was at this set of auditions that I first met Warren, and within 10 minutes of his first audition (reading with Charity) I knew immediately that he was our Ryan. It’s a weird thing from a Director’s point of view, you see so many talented actors that you wish you could cast, but they just don’t fit the specific role(s) you’re casting for, then at some point one walks into the room and wows you, they just click- you don’t see them as an actor, they simply disappear into a role, they ARE that character. That’s what happened with Warren, as with Lili and Charity before him and thus with the final addition of the wonderful Dave Wetzel (with whom I’d also worked before) in a small role, the cast was set.

There’s a phrase I like to use when talking about the relationship between Directing and Casting, “80% of your job is done by casting the right actors”. If you cast the right actors, they disappear into their roles, they become those characters with little extra work or guidance from the director. With a few rehearsals and one-on-one discussions with each actor about their specific roles (and how to best fine-tune them to their specific strengths and preferences) by the time we got on set filming, I had to do little more than arrange blocking and just sit back and watch my actors act. This isn’t always the case, and there are still opportunities for changes, ideas and improvements on set from all involved (which I encourage), but when the stars align, as a Director it’s wonderful to have the time to focus on the details and leave the acting to the actors.

–I’ll be posting new behind-the-scenes blogs every week from now until the release, don’t forget to subscribe to the feed and follow Forever’s End on Facebook for all the latest updates!

Forever’s End is feature Apocalyptic Psychological Drama available worldwide November 25th, 2014 on Video On Demand, DVD, Blu-ray, Streaming and Digital Download. For complete details visit www.foreversendmovie.com

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Check out our newly updated trailer for Forever’s End!

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FOREVER’S END will be released NOVEMBER 25th, 2014 (Thanksgiving Week) on Video On Demand (VOD), DVD, Blu-ray, and Digital Download. Look for it on iTunes, Amazon Instant, GooglePlay, Vudu, Xbox, Playstation, Vimeo On Demand, VHX, Gumroad and more!

Don’t want to wait until November to see the film? Forever’s End will also have an exclusive nationwide Cable VOD pre-release starting next week, on October 14th on Comcast, Cox and Verizon carriers.

Keep following the film on Facebook (and this blog) as we release tons of new Forever’s End media content and awesome behind-the-scenes exclusives over the next weeks leading up to the release!

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The first official trailer for FOREVER’S END has been released! Check it out below…

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Our goal in designing the look for “Forever’s End” (FE) revolves primarily around creating a realistic and convincing “world” that the characters inhabit.   FE takes place roughly six years after an unexplained post-apocalyptic event has devastated the world.

That said, my vision for FE is that I didn’t want a “traditional” feel that most of us attribute to apocalyptic movies, where everything is depressingly de-saturated, dark-greys, and dead. Instead what I was going for was a much more simplistic, but beautiful emptiness. My goal with the film was to keep it realistic, the world has ended, the people are all dead and gone, but the world itself is not. Buildings are now all old and run-down, but nature is blooming, the grass is green and overgrown, there’s a very lush feel to the movie which is in stark contrast to our main character’s years of solitude. I wanted the “emptiness” feeling instead to come from the idea of a single girl alone in a big empty house, which is itself lost in a sea of overgrowth… with nothing but overgrown fields and forest for miles in every direction.

The film takes place, in large part, in and around a remote farm and farmhouse where the lead character, Sarah, has been held up, alone for as long as she can remember.  We looked long and hard to find a house location that fit the bill, an old, empty hulk, surrounded by overgrown grass and weeds. What we found was just that, built in the early 1800’s with very little work done to it, original wood siding, metal roof, wood floors in every room, it was a fantastic find… what’s more, it was completely stark empty… which means we brought in every single item of furniture, every picture frame, every fork and yes, even every curtain into the place… specifically designed for the film.

The first thing to remember is that this is Sarah’s old family home, so it has to look as if it’s been there long before the world ended and has only in recent years become run-down (primarily on the outside, Sarah is somewhat of a neat-freak and taken good care of the interior… after all, what else does she have to do with her time?). That said, the concept was that the house would likely have been decorated by her mother and father decades prior and apart from a few updates, everything has since been frozen in time.

We went out and purchased, rented, or borrowed literally truck loads of old furniture, trinkets, curtains, bed sheets, dishes, lamps and even a piano… a whole house-full of stuff.  Because we didn’t want anything to be “new” or look too nice, at one point we had about a half dozen people going out to garage-sales, thrift stores, estate sales and antique shops in 6 neighboring cities in 3 states, anywhere that we could find items of the correct look, feel, and age to fit the bill.  Funny thing is, you don’t realize how much stuff you really need to fill an entire house until you start to unpack it all in the space.  We brought in the first truckload of stuff the week before principle photography, then realized we had dramatically underestimated how much we would need to fully fill the place… we were still bringing in and adding new items throughout production as we began shooting more and more of the house. By the end of the shoot we accumulated so much art department stuff that we filled a 26-foot truck, several vans, and a pickup.

I’ve added a few photos to this post which give you the general idea of the “before and after” look of a couple of the rooms.  The change is honestly quite remarkable, there’s just so much detail there most people will never even see on film (or in these pictures). I’m very proud of the results and while these pictures really don’t do it justice, once you see it in the film, if we did our job right, you won’t even be paying attention to the details, the little notes posted on Sarah’s corkboard, or the 50+ photographs in a montage on the wall in the corner of her room (which, by the way, are actually real pictures of Charity –the actress who play’s Sarah- growing up with her friends).

(All photos courtesy of the FE cast and crew)

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One of the hardest parts about shooting a film that takes place in a post-apocalyptic world is the issue of finding locations that have the right look and feel and are also convincing in order to immerse the audience in not only the story, but the world we’re creating for “Forever’s End” (FE).  Also, since we’re shooting the film entirely on location,  the locations become a character in the film, so for us, there’s no room for error, the locations have to be perfect.

While there are city elements to the film, FE, in large part, takes place in and around a remote, long forgotten farm. Due to a somewhat rigorous shooting schedule, we needed to have this location available to us 24/7 for a full month.  Not only that, we couldn’t just use any old farmhouse. It needed to be a specific age and feel, it had to be an 1800’s built house, un-updated and in poor condition, but not so bad that is was not habitable.  The key here is that someone still lives there, but the house itself and especially the outlying area, barns, surrounding fields and grass need to look as if they had been untouched in years, no cut grass, new siding, or growing crops. This was also one of the hardest locations to find.  In the week or leading up to me flying out to Ohio to start on-location pre-pro, our Line Producer, Lindsay (working with several local location managers/scouts) put out word to find some potential sites. By the time I flew in, she had me booked to see a half-dozen potential farms/houses for the first two days I came into town. Since the rest of the schedule and logistics revolved primarily around me selecting our main location, this had to be done immediately.

Keep in mind that given our time-table going into production on this film (which was based mainly on the availability of cast and crew as well as budget constraints) we only had about 3 and half weeks of actual full-on pre-production for the whole film. That includes location-scouting, permits, crew hiring, production design, costuming, rehearsals… everything from finalizing production insurance to booking hotels and flights on top of all the creative elements.  From the time the film was financed to the first day of filming was less than six weeks… keep in mind that I also wrote the entire script in that first week, cover to cover.  While that doesn’t’ seem like much time, we have an incredible team on board that pulled it off right on schedule without a hitch… it’s always wonderful working with experienced professionals that are efficient and effective, putting out amazing work on a deadline.

That being said, after looking at a number of potential farms, and a lot of deliberation, I finally picked a farm located just outside of the small farming town of Eaton, Ohio, which is located southwest of Dayton, Ohio, near the Indiana state line. I picked this specific house for a couple main reasons… first and foremost:  the look and feel of the house. It felt old and somewhat run-down, but lived in.

Secondly, the house wasn’t huge, but featured large rooms with lots of floor space, making it easy to move around with a film crew and camera in the space, and lots of windows (there were at least two large windows on different sides of each room) which helped incredibly in making the lighting of many scenes that much simpler (see my blog post on shooting with “Natural Light” HERE.)  Another reason is that the house was completely empty, which meant that we could do whatever we wanted Production Design wise with the interior of the place (more on the Production Design for FE in my next post). Lastly, of the several farms/houses we considered, this one was the most logistically sound location. It was within just a few minutes of major stores, restaurants, and only 15 minutes from Richmond, IN, where our hotels were located.  Now, it’s also important to note that because of its location we were not able to shoot any exterior wide-shots at the house itself, instead, we found a similar house (that the interior was not ideal for) located near the tiny town of Corinth, KY –literally the middle of nowhere-  which we used for most of the exterior wide shots/scenes, just shooting a few days there instead of a month or more.

Using completely different interiors and exteriors as the same location is commonplace in film, when cut (edited) together correctly, the audience would never guess that it’s not the same place (or in our case, a location more than 100-miles away).  Funny thing is, just as I’m writing this, Joss Whedon’s “Avengers” is shooting in three different cities, including Cleveland, playing it off as New York city (none of the cities they’re shooting in are actually New York), they will cut in wide-shots and you’ll never know the difference once it makes it to the big-screen. Just like most TV shows and movies will film inside (on a sound stage/set in a studio) one minute, then walk through a door and magically cut to a city street or rural neighborhood. We’re using the same principle on “Forever’s End”.  If we do our job right, you won’t even think about it (unless, of course, you just read this blog) .

Now that we choose that primary location (we’ll, two locations as it may be) we moved on to finalize our fantastic city locations. The city in the film itself is never really defined as one particular city, so we decided to use downtown Cincinnati as the backdrop to those scenes. I can’t say much more about that specifically at this point (I don’t want to give away too much about the story) but let’s just say we get to shut down streets and shoot some fabulous scenes!

Now that we had selected all our locations (in addition to Eaton, Corinth and Cincinnati, we also selected locations in Newport, KY and West Chester, OH) we finalized permits and worked through the hell that is the logistics needed to bring a film crew to town. A huge thanks to our Line Producer, Lindsay Rice, for being a godsend and managing most of these details so that I could move on to the fun stuff… Production Design, Camera Tests, Costumes/Makeup Tests, Rehearsals, and all the great creative goodness that is Pre-Production… more on all that in my next posts.

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Hey all! Just wanted to drop a quick note here and let you all know that I’ll be starting to add a plethora of blog updates that I’ve been accumulating over the course of production for “Forever’s End”.  Given that I was on location in Ohio for more than two months for the film (primarily living out of hotels) and working crazy hours on set directing, producing, and shooting the film, I simply didn’t have time to get all these posts written and posted.

That said though, I’ll be adding a large number of these back-logged production posts over the next few weeks… so keep checking back in every few days, I’ll try to post them all in chronological order for more easy readership.  I may also drop in a few exclusive production photos and other media, so stay tuned!

-JC

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I’m very excited to announce that my indie feature “Forever’s End” officially got the Green Light this week after a private investor stepped forward to fully finance the project!  That said, we’ve already begun pre-production prep and will be shooting the film in and around south-western Ohio this July, aiming for a late 2011/early 2012 release.

We’ve got a LOT of work to do between now and July, but my entire production team is already on board and ready to get this party started!  Stay tuned to this blog over the next couple months as I’ll continue to post updates about the making of the film as we go through the various stages in the production process.  For now, though, If you haven’t yet, you can check out some exclusive artwork and stills at the film’s official website: www.foreversendmovie.com

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As many of you are likely already aware, I’ve been writing a psychological thriller titled “Forever’s End” which we just announced a couple weeks ago, and a few weeks back I found myself wracking my brain to find the right “sound” that matches this particular story. The film (for the most part) takes place in a desolate post-apocalyptic world, following a lead character who’s been on her own for almost a decade. So, how do you write a highly-entertaining, edge-of-your-seat thriller about someone who’s stuck in the middle of nowhere? Then I realized, those are often the most intense, creepiest stories I like best… the trick is building, then keeping the tension high from start to finish. Now, if you’ve been following my blog, you’ll know that I always listen to music when I write, it helps me build a mental/emotional soundtrack to each scene, but this time around it’s been rough. Finally, after two weeks of banging my head against the wall, it hit me.

Now, for the last seven or so projects I’ve written, music has played a huge part in getting me in the right mood to create a specific scene with a specific emotion, and that’s worked to strikingly good effect. I have often spent long hours trying to find just the right song with just the right emotional impact that fits the scene I want to portray. In this specific case, however, no matter how many songs I played, none seemed to fit… when I’m in “the zone” so to speak, writing wise, I’m not easily distracted, but no matter what I played this time around, it would actually keep me from being able to write anything at all. Needless to say, this was terribly frustrating.

So, irritated, I shut my computer off and just sat there, staring at the wall, thinking. It was about 1am, I was sitting at my desk, half in the dark in my LA apartment. It was another beautiful night, so I had the window open. Now, I’m on the 3rd floor and given that this is LA, there’s almost always noise, cars driving by, helicopters, people, dogs, whatever– regardless of the time of day (or night), but last night was strange, at 1am there wasn’t a single car, not a single sound but the breeze ever so lightly blowing through the window. As I sat there, staring at the wall, the complete lack of noise is what finally struck me… “silence” is not a word I would ever relate to LA, so this was very strange, so much so that I realized exactly what I was doing wrong. It wasn’t that I hadn’t found the right music, it’s that what the scene needed was no music, nothing at all.

For the first time in a week, I sat down, grabbed a notepad and pen, listening to nothing but the breeze and started frantically scribbling down notes. In a frenzy, ideas and scenes started to come into my mind so quickly that I was rushing to put them down on paper before the next one made me forget the previous. Honestly, the whole situation kind of freaked me out, this is what usually happens when I find that right “song”, with my computer up, typing away… not when I open a window and stare at the wall. I wrote until I was too tired to keep my eyes open, but when I finally read all my notes the following morning (which was a bit of a task, when I’m writing fast my handwriting is almost impossible to read… even for me) I was astounded at how well all the pieces fit.
Now, for obvious reasons, I can’t tell you the entire story here (as much as I’d love to), and of course, I’m a little biased, but honestly I think this, my friends, is gonna be one hell of a story, and an even better film. Now, for all those of you freaking out about the music, there will still be a good deal of it in the film, it is a thriller, not a silent film, but the trick with music (especially in this film) is knowing exactly when to use it and when NOT to use it, since, if done right, silence can be just as powerful a tool to keep an audience on the edge of their seats.

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