SPIRITEUR diary

SPIRITEur diARY:

What's cool for me as a writer is that right now the sort of scripts that Hollywood said were too small and too disturbing are exactly right for guerrilla HD moviemaking and the digital distribution world.

Last April we shot a guerrilla version of my script Red Hands (titling it Dirty Red Hands) in five days for five hundred bucks. It went really well.

SPIRITEUR was originally set in Maine - where I'm from. Originally the plan was to fly over there and shoot for a month at and around a mansion that belongs to a friend of mine who's the head of the neo Freudian society. But like many things, this ended up being way too expensive, both in production, and in compensation for everyone who'd have to take time off work.

I was in the high desert for an education conference last March and, like the other times I've been out there, I was struck by how creepy and intense the place was. I started thinking that the sandy wasteland could be a good metaphor for the Maine forest. After I had that, it was really easy to convert the script for the desert.

If you've got a strong story that you understand really well it isn't hard to modify it to different environments and the guerrilla restraints (few locations, few characters). As long as your metaphors don't step all over each other the story itself will remain solid and energizing.

This brings up the first major difference between a MONGREL production and a more traditional one. Traditional shoots focus on imposing the artificial world of the script and "vision" of the director onto a plastic setting. With MONGREL, we're very interested in doing just the opposite of this. I call it "environment" moviemaking. You find a really cool environment and really utilize and use it to modify and improve the script and vision. You respect what's around you and you work with it, not against it.