Stuart Connelly's Blog - Posts Tagged "thrillers"
Nearing The Finish
While we're all used to calling the coming attractions at the start of theatrical films trailers, the phrase itself comes from original placement of the advertisements at the ends of features–they "trailed" behind the movie, see? So I find it somewhat interesting that it is only at the tail end of production, as we're working on the sound effects, credits, and VFX for my directorial debut (The Suspect)that I have the time, opportunity, and resources to get out in front of the film to share a bit of its construction with you.
The project was a labor of love from the get-go, and I feel as if coming out of the far side of its making, I've stumbled into possession of two distinct treasures. The first, of course, is the finished film itself–a psychological thriller centering around racism that, in true Sisyphean fashion, I took from a legal pad to a finished film over the years. That is something easy enough to share with you, this being a kind of golden age of distribution options. The film was the goal, obviously; the target we'd set our sites on. But there was a second, surprising aspect to the entire process I didn't see coming that I now seems to me to be nearly as important:
A comprehension of an artistic process that cannot be anticipated, planned on, or taught. It is pure distilled experience. A first film only happens one time to any of us aspiring directors. Once you see how it all comes together, how the gears mesh, you've become in some ways enlightened.
And it turned into an enormous amount of insight into the methods and strategies of independent filmmaking. There are instructional texts out there, of course. I've read them. But I promise you, nothing that tells you what it's really like to assemble the parts and go to battle on the front lines of production. There is a reason so many investors demand a director with feature experience and a producer with a list of credits before they sign a check. I, as a first time director teamed up with a first-time producer, was fighting with one hand tied behind my back. And yes, it's a Catch-22 since no one comes out of the womb with an IMDB directing credit to their name. There are ways over the hurdle, as this project can attest. The key to getting the traction to move forward despite this and the myriad other obstacles might come as a surprise.
With the expectation that many of you are in the same boat I once was in (a trying-to-break-in screenwriter who slowly began to understand that one has to make his or her own opportunities to break through) I'm figuring you may want to know more about my specific experience. How did we deal with agents, get actors to read the script, nail down schedules, locations, insurance, etc. etc.?
There are answers, and the journey is as instructive as it is complicated and inspiring.
Over the next several months I'll be chronicling the construction of the film. There are lessons to be learned, for sure. I hope I'll have enough material to compile if not a book, then at least something along the lines of a Kindle Single.
Now that I think of it, however, I'd like to add a third treasure to what I've accrued: A new and sure-to-be lifelong friendship with my composer, aide-de-camp and partner in crime (thrillers), Stephen Coates of The Real Tuesday Weld. Stephen has worked tirelessly on the score when his time might well be better spent publicizing his most recent album, The Last Werewolf.
So Stephen, allow me to step in and do a little of that work for you while you're busy synching to timecode and re-writing cues to my vague instructions in the middle of the night. Readers, this is a link to one of my many favorite albums, London Book of the Dead
If you support indie film, why not download a song or two and then come back here to report on what you've discovered in the comments section below? And stop by from time to time to learn lurid behind-the-scenes story of the writing, pitching, casting, financing, producing, location, scouting, catering and shooting of The Suspect.
Wait a sec... didn't I just say that this education is something that needs to be experienced? Yep. But I am a true believer that the power of the written word lies in its ability to transfer understanding. My experience came in the muddy trenches of production. Yours, on the other hand, can come from reading my account.
Lucky for you...
The project was a labor of love from the get-go, and I feel as if coming out of the far side of its making, I've stumbled into possession of two distinct treasures. The first, of course, is the finished film itself–a psychological thriller centering around racism that, in true Sisyphean fashion, I took from a legal pad to a finished film over the years. That is something easy enough to share with you, this being a kind of golden age of distribution options. The film was the goal, obviously; the target we'd set our sites on. But there was a second, surprising aspect to the entire process I didn't see coming that I now seems to me to be nearly as important:
A comprehension of an artistic process that cannot be anticipated, planned on, or taught. It is pure distilled experience. A first film only happens one time to any of us aspiring directors. Once you see how it all comes together, how the gears mesh, you've become in some ways enlightened.
And it turned into an enormous amount of insight into the methods and strategies of independent filmmaking. There are instructional texts out there, of course. I've read them. But I promise you, nothing that tells you what it's really like to assemble the parts and go to battle on the front lines of production. There is a reason so many investors demand a director with feature experience and a producer with a list of credits before they sign a check. I, as a first time director teamed up with a first-time producer, was fighting with one hand tied behind my back. And yes, it's a Catch-22 since no one comes out of the womb with an IMDB directing credit to their name. There are ways over the hurdle, as this project can attest. The key to getting the traction to move forward despite this and the myriad other obstacles might come as a surprise.
With the expectation that many of you are in the same boat I once was in (a trying-to-break-in screenwriter who slowly began to understand that one has to make his or her own opportunities to break through) I'm figuring you may want to know more about my specific experience. How did we deal with agents, get actors to read the script, nail down schedules, locations, insurance, etc. etc.?
There are answers, and the journey is as instructive as it is complicated and inspiring.
Over the next several months I'll be chronicling the construction of the film. There are lessons to be learned, for sure. I hope I'll have enough material to compile if not a book, then at least something along the lines of a Kindle Single.
Now that I think of it, however, I'd like to add a third treasure to what I've accrued: A new and sure-to-be lifelong friendship with my composer, aide-de-camp and partner in crime (thrillers), Stephen Coates of The Real Tuesday Weld. Stephen has worked tirelessly on the score when his time might well be better spent publicizing his most recent album, The Last Werewolf.
So Stephen, allow me to step in and do a little of that work for you while you're busy synching to timecode and re-writing cues to my vague instructions in the middle of the night. Readers, this is a link to one of my many favorite albums, London Book of the Dead
If you support indie film, why not download a song or two and then come back here to report on what you've discovered in the comments section below? And stop by from time to time to learn lurid behind-the-scenes story of the writing, pitching, casting, financing, producing, location, scouting, catering and shooting of The Suspect.
Wait a sec... didn't I just say that this education is something that needs to be experienced? Yep. But I am a true believer that the power of the written word lies in its ability to transfer understanding. My experience came in the muddy trenches of production. Yours, on the other hand, can come from reading my account.
Lucky for you...
What We Talk About When We (Don't) Talk About Race
I've just finished shooting my first feature film, called
The Suspect
. It's a psychological thriller designed to entertain the audience and keep them guessing, but-and this is truly painful to contemplate-I fully understand that the film owes its very existence to the ongoing problem of race relations in America. Racial tension is plot, is character, is environment in The Suspect.
Like Quentin Tarantino's D'Jango Unchained, my film comes at the expense-on the backs-of so many human beings who suffered under the cruelty of institutionalized slavery and its long echoing shadow, American-style racism.
William Sadler and Mekhi Phifer face-off in Stuart Connelly's The Suspect
The fact makes me feel a bit conflicted, though this conflict is nothing new, of course; tragedy of all sorts has always been the raw material for drama. This is the unrelenting truth for any artist. Still, of all the absurd things to tear at the fabric of society... The color of someone's skin? That pathetic reptile-brain idea is our undoing? This embarrassment is the central irony that circumscribes the problem. Those who are fundamentally opposed to racism don't want to dignify any aspect of it with discussion. So no one ends up talking about the realities of racial conflict, and in not talking we somehow feel the wounds will simply heal themselves. The fact of the matter is different: those wounds fester, and infection spreads.
For my part, I've always felt that each and every conversation about race, no matter how painful or awkward, is a stepping stone toward some better understanding and a solution to the primal problem. Yes, it is a sensitive subject. Yes, we tend to get awfully quiet around it for fear of saying the wrong thing. But conversation, like therapy, is its own sort of "talking cure." I for one want to talk it out-The Suspect is a natural extension of that drive.
Before I was given the wonderful honor of working with Dr. Clarence B. Jones on his memoir of the 1963 March on Washington, Behind The Dream: The Making of the Speech that Transformed a Nation , I wrote a screenplay that covered his entire life story. Now, Clarence was born in 1930, so I struggled with the shifting language of the black/white issue decade by decade-finding the right phrase in the spectrum from "casual" racism to vehement hatred for the 30s, the 40s, the 50s and so on. The sheer breadth of the language was shocking. Every time I typed one of those words, I felt some kind of guilt by association.
I wanted to apologize to Clarence when I handed over my draft. "This isn't me," I wanted to say. I wanted to tell him I was sorry on behalf of all white people. But ever-so-slowly I realized my hesitation was meaningless. Clarence had heard all those words before. He'd lived through my script for real. And nothing this writer-who was only trying to put his experience into a thematic context-could say would offend him in the slightest. He understood my intentions. In that light, those words that littered my script lost all their power to intimidate and debase and scar.
In honor of Black History Month, I've made my "e"-ssay on my experience working with Dr. Jones available as a free download from Amazon -- just click on the link here. I do hope you'll take a look at it. And if you're so inspired, do continue the conversation...
Like Quentin Tarantino's D'Jango Unchained, my film comes at the expense-on the backs-of so many human beings who suffered under the cruelty of institutionalized slavery and its long echoing shadow, American-style racism.
William Sadler and Mekhi Phifer face-off in Stuart Connelly's The Suspect
The fact makes me feel a bit conflicted, though this conflict is nothing new, of course; tragedy of all sorts has always been the raw material for drama. This is the unrelenting truth for any artist. Still, of all the absurd things to tear at the fabric of society... The color of someone's skin? That pathetic reptile-brain idea is our undoing? This embarrassment is the central irony that circumscribes the problem. Those who are fundamentally opposed to racism don't want to dignify any aspect of it with discussion. So no one ends up talking about the realities of racial conflict, and in not talking we somehow feel the wounds will simply heal themselves. The fact of the matter is different: those wounds fester, and infection spreads.
For my part, I've always felt that each and every conversation about race, no matter how painful or awkward, is a stepping stone toward some better understanding and a solution to the primal problem. Yes, it is a sensitive subject. Yes, we tend to get awfully quiet around it for fear of saying the wrong thing. But conversation, like therapy, is its own sort of "talking cure." I for one want to talk it out-The Suspect is a natural extension of that drive.
Before I was given the wonderful honor of working with Dr. Clarence B. Jones on his memoir of the 1963 March on Washington, Behind The Dream: The Making of the Speech that Transformed a Nation , I wrote a screenplay that covered his entire life story. Now, Clarence was born in 1930, so I struggled with the shifting language of the black/white issue decade by decade-finding the right phrase in the spectrum from "casual" racism to vehement hatred for the 30s, the 40s, the 50s and so on. The sheer breadth of the language was shocking. Every time I typed one of those words, I felt some kind of guilt by association.
I wanted to apologize to Clarence when I handed over my draft. "This isn't me," I wanted to say. I wanted to tell him I was sorry on behalf of all white people. But ever-so-slowly I realized my hesitation was meaningless. Clarence had heard all those words before. He'd lived through my script for real. And nothing this writer-who was only trying to put his experience into a thematic context-could say would offend him in the slightest. He understood my intentions. In that light, those words that littered my script lost all their power to intimidate and debase and scar.
In honor of Black History Month, I've made my "e"-ssay on my experience working with Dr. Jones available as a free download from Amazon -- just click on the link here. I do hope you'll take a look at it. And if you're so inspired, do continue the conversation...
Smuggler's Cinema?
In a recent interview, actor Ethan Hawke referred to one of his new projects as "smuggler's cinema," explaining it is "when you disguise an interesting film as a genre film." With much the same angle of attack, I set out last year to make a film that explicitly explores race without feeling like an "issue" film. The result is The Suspect, which just had its world premiere at the American Black Film Festival in Miami Beach.
A New Way to Look at "Black" Film
We've all seen the ghettoized and exploitative looks at the African American community, and the ways the same old tropes are worked time and time again. Why not tell a different story? Why not use those tropes as leverage, in a surprising new way? Why not use the unconscious biases of the viewer as an integral part of the storytelling?
Genre as State-of-Mind
The Suspect uses the psychological thriller model as a kind of Trojan Horse to explore real racial and cultural pulse-points. Combining and undermining the patterns of both the thriller genre and the way mass media presents people of color, the film — starring Mekhi Phifer (Dawn of the Dead), William Sadler (Iron Man 3), and Sterling K. Brown (Army Wives) — is completely finished.
Now we're looking for help in spreading the word and finding the right distribution path for the project, so the widest possible audience can experience the journey. We've reached out to you as a leader in the community to see if you're interested in supporting a new, exciting and yes... somewhat subversive... film project.
The Finish Line
The Suspect needs your power to assist in getting its message out. The producers require a small amount of financing ($25,000) to plan and execute a distribution and public relations campaign.
Please visit our Kickstarter page — you can contribute as little as one dollar, or dig a little deeper and in return receive some very cool rewards like books, music, and more...
A New Way to Look at "Black" Film
We've all seen the ghettoized and exploitative looks at the African American community, and the ways the same old tropes are worked time and time again. Why not tell a different story? Why not use those tropes as leverage, in a surprising new way? Why not use the unconscious biases of the viewer as an integral part of the storytelling?
Genre as State-of-Mind
The Suspect uses the psychological thriller model as a kind of Trojan Horse to explore real racial and cultural pulse-points. Combining and undermining the patterns of both the thriller genre and the way mass media presents people of color, the film — starring Mekhi Phifer (Dawn of the Dead), William Sadler (Iron Man 3), and Sterling K. Brown (Army Wives) — is completely finished.
Now we're looking for help in spreading the word and finding the right distribution path for the project, so the widest possible audience can experience the journey. We've reached out to you as a leader in the community to see if you're interested in supporting a new, exciting and yes... somewhat subversive... film project.
The Finish Line
The Suspect needs your power to assist in getting its message out. The producers require a small amount of financing ($25,000) to plan and execute a distribution and public relations campaign.
Please visit our Kickstarter page — you can contribute as little as one dollar, or dig a little deeper and in return receive some very cool rewards like books, music, and more...
