So, we made a film.
That’s not how it ends, and that’s not how it begins. It’s just lumped in there with the before and after in this knot of mashed-up time and space that physicists will discover in years to come and think “hmmm…” (I imagine physicists doing that a lot)
If you want to know about beginnings – well, it starts “Three brown guys walk into a Denny’s…”
It sounds like a joke. It is a joke. And then again, it’s not.
Or if you want to go further back, it starts with email.
I’ve known Adi for a long while now. We both grew up in various countries, but mostly India. We met in school. Worked with him on and off over the years. A few short films (some of which were actually made and didn’t collapse into a fiery pit of bad planning), corporate work, television… a lot of different stuff really.
During this knotted piece of space-time, he was finishing a directing and producing course at UCLA, and like every other person in his class (along with maybe about 90 percent of Los Angeles) his raison d’etre was making films. More specifically – a feature film. This, shockingly enough, is not as easy as it sounds. Making three feature films is even less easy, and this was the hare-brained plan that Adi and a friend of his had come up with. When I heard of this, I was supportive, enthusiastic, and had gained real appreciation for the term ‘hare-brained’.
They were already in talks for the first script. It was apparently a good concept, written by a good script-writer, and since I have neither read the script nor met the writer, I will leave it at that. There was also a line, or a concept, or something for the second script. Which left me with door number three.
I was informally invited to pitch a concept with the following limitations – minimal characters, minimal locations, minimal… well, everything. As any halfway decent writer will tell you – ideas are easy, it’s the writing that’s hard. By the next day five ideas were ferried across with genres ranging from historical fiction to murder mystery.
I won’t bore you with the details (because I hope one day to bore you with the actual films), but buried between ideas three and five was a supernaturally inclined film titled – Shadow’s Fall (yes, we lost the apostrophe somewhere in the depths of production, but that’s another story).
That’s how it really started.
Next – the Denny’s.
For more about the film, visit www.shadowsfallthefilm.com or Vimeo-On-Demand
Fragments From The Void 