For years, ever since we shot the first part of PsychoPath in 2005 people have asked me, “When is the film going to be done?” Or the variation on that, which is usually accompanied with a doubtful smirk, “When are you going to finish that film?” Those that ask these questions generally haven’t worked in the documentary field. As most fans of the genre know, a film can take years to shoot, sometimes years to even find a story. Think of Harlan County U.S.A.. When the filmmakers went to shoot, the entire project was about an election in the miners union. As murders and other events started to happen, it became a film about the entire Harlan County wars. No one could predict that, and if a finish date was forced, we wouldn’t have this wonderful piece of documentary cinema today. Bottom line, it wouldn’t have been the same film. That’s where we are with Psychopath.
As much as I tried to push a finish to the film, I made no progress. It wasn’t because I couldn’t tell a story or complete something, I’d completed many projects before. It was because the story itself wasn’t complete. With the help of my friends at AboutFace Media, some maturity, and the advice of many other helpful film mentors along the way, we are headed back into those dark Oklahoma woods this fall. If you know the film, you’ll know the original footage I directed and shot myself. It was freeing coming out of the reality TV world to take a camera and run through the woods. As I’ve developed over the years, I’ve learned that it wasn’t just the camera work that kept me working as a filmmaker. I have an ability to talk to people, and to get them to talk to me. So this time around I’ll be taking a cinematographer with me, my good friend Rod Hassler. By doing this, I’ll be able to engage with people on a one on one basis, bringing a personal trust to the subjects the film that didn’t have before.
5 years have passed in our story, and I am ready to finish my film. What I am asking of you is maybe you could spare a few dollars to help us fund the project. It’s hard to compete with all the Public Radio fund drives and political campaigns begging for support at the moment, I know, but think of this as an investment in the arts. Without storytelling, we have no history. I’ve set up a Kickstarter page HERE. page for contributions HERE. Kickstarter is a fund raising site for creative projects. You set a dollar goal and a date. If you make the goal by the date, then they give me the money for our project. If we don’t make it, all contributions go back to you and you aren’t charged.
I dug deep into my vaults to get something from the years before I had to deal with labels and budgets (I use the word “budget” lightly). We’d grab a case of beer and a DV camera and just go wild shooting some crazy video because we could. Well, that’s what this is…Rex Aquariums “King.” The song was off of Rex’s second album “Back of the Room.” I had done a previous video for their tune “Alicia,” which was even more rough than this! I met Charlie Wadhams when he was playing drums for Kennedy, and he soon become one of my favorite people in the world. He went on to sing in Rex with his brother Chris, and then later to his own band. Charlie is one of the coolest people you’ll ever meet. He loves women, music, eating pizza with Tapatio on top. He’ll bring over a brown bag of tall boys and a stack of old movies! And when that’s all done, he’ll play you a song.
The video for “King” came about from a bunch of documentary footage I had been shooting for the band. I went to the old Eagle Rock recording studio The Ship (home of Earlimart) and shot the bulk of it on a Sony one chip camera. Then there was a live radio show they did on Danny Masterson’s “Feel My Heat.” After that radio show, we went to the ‘Ye Rustic, got drunk, and shot some more. The video was really comprised of lots of drinking and random scenes shot along the way. When I started to piece that all together, it wasn’t enough. Charlie had this idea of being dragged through Griffith Park playing his guitar to tie it all together. So again, we just went and did it. Rafael pulled Charlie along as I stood over him with a DVX 100 and walked backwards. After a night of editing, the sun rose and we had a video. Hope you enjoy something that came from the heart, back when I was young and didn’t know better!
Imagine, the biggest storm cloud you’ve ever seen passes over your set making a wonderfully diffused light but manages to never pour rain. You think to yourself, “Man, the film gods are looking down on us today!” At least, that’s what I always think. I like to invoke the term “film gods” when something amazing seems to go right for a project against adverse conditions. This could be inclement weather, location trouble, lack of proper gear, or whatever else the indie filmmaker could experience. It’s not any kind of real being, so don’t worry you’re not breaking the Commandments. The film gods are simply that added edge the project has you never could have planned! On Friday afternoon, the film gods aimed their mighty lens right on me in a very tangible form.
David and Bob, one in the same character
I was lying on the floor of my office staring at the ceiling panels. This is something I often do when I feel a bit down, or at a loss for inspiration. Bandit was at the big window growling and whining at the various dogs passing by below. Suddenly, there was a knock on my door. I jumped up to find it was my old friend Bob Connolly. “Saw your dog in the window, figured you were here,” Bob says in his drawn out cowboy speak. Bob is a local musician and has been playing music around the Columbia Gorge going on 30 years. I met him one night at Double Mountain, and introduced myself since his set consisted of a few Gram Parsons Townes songs. We’ve been friends since that night, and I’ve come to learn Bob is a huge fan of Westerns. He’s even built his own saloon!
Out of the blue Bob says to me, “Well, when you planning on finishing that Western?” He’s referring to Pine Grove. I’ve been trying to think of way to end it for over a year. I wrote a 5 page voice over for it once and planned on having Ernie Garcia read it, but he moved to Pennsylvania. Then I had considered doing something with old Buck Smith. The point is, nothing ever materialized. Before I could even answer Bob he tells me “Well, Hell why don’t we finish it tomorrow. I know you’ve been wanting to get that done so we could move on to the next one.” He’s right, I have. I think it was one of those things that I was scared to finish, because I wasn’t really sure what it was. Bob can see that I’m about to make some excuse, so he cuts in, “Come over tomorrow morning. We’ll get it done.” He took a swig from my bottle of Jack Daniel’s I keep here, told me how he prefers blended whiskeys and then left.
All of a sudden the 5 page script doesn’t matter. None of my notes matter. What mattered was that at 7:30am the next day I was going to shoot the ending…and we did. Friday night I started to think about what I wanted this to be. Leigh and I had made up the story and we knew the tone we wanted the finished film to have. I decided to interview Bob as if it was for a documentary on the story, since that seems to be what I was most equipped to do in terms of gear. When the narrative stumped me, I turned to documentary! When we arrived yesterday morning, the camera was rolling on everything. Bob was playing the part David Settje plays in the main story and this was as if we found him 40 years later. I gave him the characters background on the spot, and then asked him questions like I’d do on any other docu shoot. Immediately, he fell into character and I think we got some great footage that I would never have been able to write! Bob become that person! As a filmmaker, it was actually quite rewarding. It was like filmming a séance with a long dead person, but that person is someone you created to begin with!
Where do the film gods fit into all of this? Well, I believe on this one occasion they sent me a film angel. I know this all sounds cheesy, but all the elements fell into place. Much like Barry and AboutFace have been my inspiration for finishing Psychopath, Bob came and forced me to finish the short film. And the best part about being an instrument of the film gods? You may not even know the good you’ve done for a filmmaker. Thanks Bob for pushing me on this one!
The Buggles song “Video Killed the Radio Star,” was the firing shot that launched MTV. It was the first video they ever played, christening a new era of music and TV. It’s technically not the “first” music video, think Richard Lester’s work, but it’s the first in terms of MTV and that was huge. It inspired a genre of television, and spawned a whole new generation of videomakers. But the kingdom only lasted so long before MTV drowned in a sea of reality tv shows.
For awhile there where a lot of people talking about the death of the music video, this was right around 2005 or so. I remember because a few years earlier when I was in school, the believed path to commercials and movies was music videos. Do enough cool stuff in music video, then someone will give you some commercials. After you’ve made it there and massaged enough agency egos, someone else would give you a movie! You could buy a Ferrari, hang out with super models, and make Michael Bay jealous you found a parking spot in the fire zone before he did at Spagos. That last part is kind of true, I saw Michael Bay park in a fire zone in a bright yellow Ferrari.
The death of music video, it was coming like a filmmakers rapture. All of us PA’s that were counting on our one hit video to save us were losing hope. And then something unheard of happened, and that was called Youtube. Anything goes on the Youtube of that time, and that translated into a music video democracy! Quality meant nothing, as long as it gets seen. As we know, the quality got better and new sites opened up like Vimeo to display high resolution versions of work we really cared about. A result of the new outlets was that the dying music video industry realized that Youtube and Vimeo could be the final viewing spot for their products, and to put another nail in the video coffin, they slashed budgets. It’s not like MTV was ever going to show that video you made on Quintero Street anyway, unless you somehow got Beyonce to appear in it. What was meant to be our savior, Youtube, actually set the music video director back a bit in my opinion. It lowered the bar and expectations. Labels would almost be crazy to give a no name director anything over $5000 to do a video. But we kept making videos despite the budget and video pushes on, much like radio did after MTV. The internet gives new life to projects long forgotten, like the one I’m about to tell you about.
The version of The Buggles song that we shot was commissioned by Keith over at Setanta Records out of London. Keith was a good friend of mine that I met the few times that I had gone over to England to work with the band Kennedy. Even though he had stopped working with them at the time we made this, he and I had remained in contact and I was staying at his place on one of my trips. Keith had come home late one night after cycling the entire city of London, and found me awake watching Paper Moon around 4am…I couldn’t sleep. It was raining outside, and he broke open a bottle of wine. We sat at a big wooden table watching the grey sun come up over his garden, listening to music. By the second bottle of wine, he was telling me of a classical music project he was working on. The idea was to take pop songs, and give them an orchestral treatment. “Video Killed the Radio Star,” was one of those songs. Keith had convinced the wonderful French songstress Anaïs Croze to do the vocals. If you don’t know Anaïs’ work, you may have heard her sing with the band Nouvalle Vague. They have some pretty cool videos that I love, check a few of them here & here. These vids aren’t necessarily her singing, but they’re great!
In my morning drunkedness I had agreed to make a video for the song upon returning back to California. Keith gave me about $1500 dollars I think. The catch was that Anaïs would not be in the video, and we would just use an actor. So I got my friend Nicky to play the part of the girl. In true Godard fashion, I thought all you really need is a cute girl. The idea was that we’d give her a portable turn table and she’d go to the streets playing music for people. The crew would be slightly hidden and using long lens, we’d film the reactions people had to the music. Since I only had a CD of the song, the actual record we used was the theme song to “A Man and a Woman,” by Francis Lai.
Most of it was shot documentary style, since we didn’t plan the people we’d encounter. The only stuff I did plan was the guy dancing at the train station, and the musicians she meets at the end. We took my Arri 16mm camera to the streets, and shot every reaction along the way! It was a really fun day, and I was happy with results. Alfredo Ritta, who edited the video told me he was surprised by the honest reactions that people gave us, that in turn made it pretty easy to edit. In the end Keith didn’t like the finished product, and in fact didn’t use it to promote the song at all. He told me he was expecting something, “a little more like Everybody Hurts.” I love that video, but I assume R.E.M. must of spent at least a quarter million or more making it. So the project was shelved, and never released…until about a week ago. I decided that I was going to post it on Vimeo. I know I have the digibeta dailies here, but the only finished edit I could find is a 320X240 old web version. No matter, it needed to be seen.
Well, the video has taken a life of its own. In the week that it was posted on Vimeo, the website for MTV Brazil has picked it up and quite a few other music sites have as well. People seem to enjoy it, proving that the world didn’t need another “Everybody Hurts.” They would have been happy with something shot on short ends on a cloudy day, and envisioned over wine. Music video is not dead, its just taking a new turn.
I’m here in San Jose. It’s raining outside, and I go between the Radisson Hotel bar and the one in the bowling alley next door. Old people are busy playing Yahtzee and drinking cheap beer. It’s funny how I end up in the weirdest places day in day out…that’s what I love about this job. By nature, being a documentarian is living a life unpredicted. That is one reason why I jumped at the chance to be a cinematographer on the film WEEKEND when I was asked to work on it. It was the one time I could make something that I was allowed a little more time to focus on the imagery in a way I usually don’t get to.
I’ve written about the film before, but I didn’t have anything to show you. Well, that has changed. The filmmakers have posted the official trailer tonight, after several successful festival screenings at the Sedona and Phoenix Film Festivals. Please take a moment and check out the trailer. As the cinematographer of the film, this is something I’m very proud of. I hope you enjoy it as well!
Technical Note: Shot on the HVX-200 with a Letus Extreme & Canon Lenses.
WEEKEND is a Film by Josh Kasselman and Stephanie Lucas
Today is Easter, and even though I’m not that religious myself, I know that in the Christian calendar it’s the biggest holiday there is. My family back home in Oklahoma are extremely devout Catholics. Yesterday, I was talking to my mother on the phone. She was telling me all about the three hour Good Friday service she attended, and how sad it makes her to think of the suffering of Christ. It makes her so sad in fact, that in some weird way she can’t get enough of it. She went straight home and popped in Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ.” In her opinion, this is the best movie ever made. In fact, it’s so good she says that, “it’s beyond even being a movie.”
My Armenian Jesus - Altadena, CA
I’ll be honest, I’ve never seen the film. Other than The Road Warrior and Braveheart, I can pretty much do without Mel Gibson. He’s a conservative blowhard, a hypocrite (I can explain this in detail if interested), and an anti-Semite. Fun stuff! His fans don’t care about that because most of them are in agreement, including my mom. I asked her why she loved the film so much? “The scourging of Christ at the pillar. The amount of pain you see him suffering…it’s so…real. No one could ever film anything near what Jesus really went through, but Mel came close,” she said.
This answer doesn’t surprise me, it ties into a bigger aspect of our families fascination with darker imagery and movies. In fact, I was just looking at some Psychopath footage where I’m discussing with my friend Mike, the Marquez family devotion to Catholicism and how it shapes them. Mike’s a production designer that came out to to consult my Uncle Victor, and help him with some plans early on in the first year. He pointed out to me that when he first went into Victor’s home, he was surprised to see so many religious statues and icons. Right next to a Crucifix, there would be a head cast of Lon Chaney Jr.! Mike believes that the Catholic imagery and upbringing is responsible for Victor’s love affair with horror movies and the macabre. Meaning, if you are constantly presented with an image of your savior, bloody, beaten, and hanging from a cross, that will affect you. Then there is the talk of the “body and blood” of Christ. This is not to mention the catacombs, stories of the martyrs, and talk of demons and evil in the scripture. Christ’s death and resurrection was to clear our sins, save our souls so that we may have a chance at the afterlife. Basically, if your life goal is to die and live forever in Heaven, why wouldn’t you like horror movies? Its bible study by way of Fangoria Magazine.
Crown of Thorns, Hammer Horror Style
This all makes sense to me, because for the longest time I was really into Universal Horror films, Gothic Horror, and Tim Burton. I went into film school innocent, still going to church, and still a fan of these kinds of films. Put all that together, and you get a nineteen year old kid confused, but interested in venting some of that influence on screen. You have to understand that my parents didn’t want me to go to California. I had been sick just a few years earlier, and was still recovering from my illness. My mom was concerned for my health, but mostly she was concerned for my soul. She was certain that if I went to film school out West, I’d probably end up turning against the faith and being corrupted. God bless her. Under that kind of pressure, I wanted to show my folks back home that I still knew Jesus, and I was okay talking about him. In my mind, I was going to do something that they’d be proud of. That’s when I decided to make my Crucifixion film.
As a first year student, you have to take many different “basic” film classes. One of them was called Cinematic Language. Every week the instructor would assign you a certain genre of film to make, or a certain technique to utilize. The particular assignment this week was about Contrapuntal Sound. That meant a film in which the imagery on screen would be opposite from the audio or music. If you knew me in college, you know I was always wearing vintage suits and listening to old music. My favorite artist of the moment was George Gershwin. The music was picked, but what about the counterpoint content?
Suddenly, it came to me…Jesus.
Fauxman Soldier - Altadena, CA
I became a mad man, obsessing about how pertinent this movie would be…how pleased the family would be with me. I cut up an old pair of blue jeans, and wrapped strips of it with electrical tape making a cat o nine tails flogging weapon for my Roman soldier. Could have easily bought one of those at the sex shop on Colorado, but the thought never entered my mind. I rented a few pieces of chest armor for the Roman Soldier as well, and cast a buddy that was a bit rough in the part. There was an Armenian student in the photo department that I cast as Jesus. He had a beard, he had long hair, he was perfect! Everything was coming together, and I became quite the zealot working on the project. I read some passages from the bible describing the Crucifixion, and took some notes. I was going to cover all the hurtful, painful stuff in my film. Crown of thorns…check. Pierced with a lance and bled water…check. Stripped, mocked, and humiliated…check. The last thing to do was to shoot, so on Sunday we went up to the end of Lake Street in Altadena to a place called the Cobb Estate. It’s the beginning of a popular hiking trail, and the site of a former home of Harpo Marx. Perfect spot, as long as you don’t turn south and shoot toward Pasadena. The were plenty of trees and hills which acted as my personal Golgatha. There were even some railroad ties nearby that we pulled from the trail and used as the makings of our cross!
And then we shot the film. I don’t remember the shoot at all. Just the image of my Armenian Jesus covered in ketchup and dirt standing in my shower in a loin cloth washing off afterward. Here is the film we ended up with.
It isn’t a great film, but it got me an A. Looking at it 11 years later, I think it’s repetitive and extremely violent. At the time I was very proud of this film. It did exactly what I wanted it to do, made you look at the pain and suffering of Christ over and over again. Set against a popular song, my point was that Jesus was a big deal, and he had a big message. People today get so wrapped up in the mainstream idea of Christ, they forget to listen to his actual words. The “S’Wonderful” of Gershwin was there to make you think. It’s meant to grab you for a moment, and say “that’s a weird song for that image?” Maybe make you stop diminishing Him into a simplistic idea or into dogma talking point. Take a real hard look at Jesus, and listen…then maybe you can do his work. This is something I felt lacked in my religious upbringing…its all action with no substance.
I checked out a projector and reserved a room at the downtown Tulsa Library upon my first trip back home. I showed my entire family my hand cranked 16mm Bolex opus, hoping they’d understand what I was trying to do. Nope, no one got it. Immediately, my mother told me that this was heresy. She said that what she had feared was happening, I was changing. She even suggested I talk to a priest about the film after I explained to her what it was about. None of my reasoning was getting through. So today she’s certain that Mel Gibson is alright, but I’m a lost, pointless soul.
It was George Gershwin and Jesus Christ that woke me up. After that, I was no longer going to be a Christian for Christianity sake. I wasn’t going to numbly go through the motions. I was going to dig deeper and see if I could really hear what Jesus Christ was saying…and I’m still listening today.
Have you seen the car crash scene from Godard’s WEEKEND? If you haven’t, you should watch it here. Great scene from a pretty rambling film, but that’s not the Weekend we’re here for. The film I’m talking about is a project I was involved in, and one that is very dear to me.
Early last year, my friend Josh Kasselman asked me if I’d be interested in being the cinematographer on a project that he and his wife Stephanie Lucas were going to make later in the year. They had written the project together, and were making it through the Scottsdale Community College film program that they both attended near their home in Phoenix, AZ. I was truly honored, and I knew this was the kind of film I’d need to rejuvenate me.
One of the reasons why this film is so important to me is because I was going to be working with friends. That may not seem like a lot, but when you are driven in your day to day film work by money or a by creative brief to sell a product, friendship means a ton. I had met Josh back in 2003 at Mr. T’s Bowl in Highland Park. Josh was playing in band called Boxing, along with his brother Seth. I had always wanted to do a video for Boxing, but finally got my chance to do one for Josh’s new band, The Harpeth Trace later.
So I knew Josh through the music scene, and I met Stephanie through him. I didn’t know much about her, but every time we talked I knew she was an extremely kind and intelligent person. She was a teacher and also filmmaker herself, so they were really a couple I respected. When Josh and Steph decided to leave LA and move back to Phoenix where they had grown up, a little piece of me was sad. I thought that may be the last I’d see of them.
That’s the thing about life, you don’t know where it’s going to take you. Leigh and I eventually left LA ourselves, and we looked back at our life starting to see who the friends were and who the passing acquaintances were. About that time is when Josh called me about the film. He and Steph were working on a film about a dancer that kidnaps her own daughter, not out of malice but for companionship. They sent me the script, and I could see the possibilities. Simple story, but powerful. I had never considered Josh a filmmaker, he’d always been a musician to me. I was so wrong, Josh’s background was theater and drama. He and Steph had written something that called to me, and I wanted to be a part of it more than anything else I was doing at the time.
WEEKEND: A Cinema of Passion
When Josh, Steph and I would talk about films on the phone, we found that we were into a lot of the same directors and filmmakers. The one that kept popping up in conversation was John Cassavetes. I had always been a massive Cassavetes fan. Not only of his directing, but of the imperfect cinematography in his films. In fact, his work was almost documentary in nature because the actors were so damn good. You could tell when watching his films that the camera was there for one thing, and that was to document the life that was happening in front of it. The group of actors he worked with understood this. I’ve read stories that many times they’d gather for a spaghetti dinner before a long night of shooting, and then work all through the night, just to go to work on their day jobs all day long, come back and repeat. This was cinema of passion..that’s what I saw in this trip to Arizona. And of course other filmmakers and influences came into the discussions, but to me it was the patron saint of independent film, John Cassavetes that kept guiding my way.
The script focused on one central location, and two main characters. When you see that, you know there aren’t going to be any animated blue people involved, thank God. Our talks in preparation weren’t of RED cameras or hot women, zombies, or gun battles. This was going to be a film about human emotion. I have to tell you, that’s mainly what is missed in cinema today. I don’t care how much it cost you Mr. Cameron, where’s the story? Thank you.
By the time you get to the set, you let the references go, and you focus on your story. Josh and Steph know story, and my job was to paint the look of it the way they saw it in their minds. I focused on making it look as real as possible. It was to be as if this was a documentary of these people. We’ve been allowed to follow, but we weren’t really allowed to be there. Everything was a little uneasy, never quite settled, but never too shaky. It was a very exciting time for me as an image maker. They were focused on the acting and the performance, and their truly was a feeling in the air of the magic.
I could talk forever on the process, and how it made me feel, but I just want to say thanks to Josh and Stephanie for letting me be a part of this project. The reason I got into filmmaking was to tell stories, to work with people I love, and to move people with the work we’ve done. You guys allowed me to share your experience with you, and for that I am grateful. That’s cinema of passion, and that’s WEEKEND. The film premieres this weekend at the Sedona International Film Festival, and plays both Friday and Saturday night.
When there is a trailer for the film, or the film itself gets posted, I’ll be sure to put it up. In the meantime, for a little taste of my inspiration check out this trailer for a “Woman Under the Influence,” truly a masterpiece of American Cinema and one of Cassavtes’ best.
For years, ever since we shot the first part of PsychoPath in 2005 people have asked me, “When is the film going to be done?” Or the variation on that, which is usually accompanied with a doubtful smirk, “When are you going to finish that film?” Those that ask these questions generally haven’t worked in the documentary field. As most fans of the genre know, a film can take years to shoot, sometimes years to even find a story. Think of Harlan County U.S.A.. When the filmmakers went to shoot, the entire project was about an election in the miners union. As murders and other events started to happen, it became a film about the entire Harlan County wars. No one could predict that, and if a finish date was forced, we wouldn’t have this wonderful piece of documentary cinema today. Bottom line, it wouldn’t have been the same film. That’s where we are with Psychopath. 
