So one of the best things about being an independent/student filmmaker is getting to work with people you absolutely love to bits. There's something really, really satisfying about getting together with a group of friends and in the timeframe of one or two days, or sometimes even one or two hours, just making something because you freaking can.
What's really great about the Oakland University cinema studies program, not to shamelessly advertise my own school or anything, is that even though most of the classes offered are theory or analysis-based (Film Theory, Methods of Cinema Studies, Masterpieces of World Cinema, Film History, etc.), the majority of the professors will allow you to make a film or other creative project for a grade. I ended up making a short documentary on film exhibition as my senior capstone. In my junior year, I wrote a script about globalization for my World Cinema class and then did a short documentary on the effects of globalization in Detroit for my Documentary theory class.
And in my second-to-last semester at OU, I teamed up with my close friend Morgan and my boyfriend Ian to make a short film for the film theory class that all three of us were taking. The movie we made was called The Auteur at Work, which you can see here, and let me just say, here and now...it would have been way easier to just write a paper.
Trying to work in a team when all three of you have wildly varying opinions and filmmaking styles is no picnic, but the thing is, that can always be worked around. Morgan and Ian and I just sat down one evening between classes and said, okay, what do we want to do? The assignment was to make a short film--not a video essay--about a film theory that we had studied that semester. We tossed out a few ideas, but the one that really stuck was making fun of several prominent filmmakers that we'd studied that semester by making a film about auteur theory.
And for those who have not suffered through endless film-school debates about auteur theory, allow me to briefly explain what the hell that is. Basically, auteur theory claims that directors deserve "authorship" for their films. So, by that logic, Big Eyes is not a Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski film, it is officially a TIM BURTON film. Because the director has the most creative input, they deserve to "claim" the film as their own, the way a writer claims authorship of their book or an artist claims authorship of their painting. A lot of people agree with this point of view, but there are definitely scholars, critics and teenagers out there who do not. Hence, the debate.
So Morgan and Ian and I decided that we would shamelessly make fun of auteur theory and several prominent 20th-century auteurs--Sergei Eisenstein, Jean-Luc Godard, and Orson Welles--with our final project. The story was simple: a director would write and re-write a script in the hopes of pleasing a producer and, in the end, would end up pleasing no one. The message was that in order to really be an auteur, you couldn't copy other directors' work, you had to create your own style or you wouldn't get the attention your work deserved.
It took me all of two days to write and edit the four-page script. We quickly decided that Morgan would be director and camerawoman, since those were her favorite aspects of production, and Ian, the tallest of the three of us, could do audio. Since Morgan had her hands full juggling final exams, Ian and I would be the editors and finish the post-production work. Morgan found our cast, too: her friend Cody would be the director, and her brother Collin would play the producer. We had a shotlist, we had a cast, we had props, we had a plan. Everything was in place.
And then, as always happens, once we got on-set everything went to merry hell in a handbasket.
Problem #1 came when we realized that the sunlight was encroaching on our chosen location for the producer's office. Morgan was about ready to go upstairs and outright yell at the sun, but that wasn't an option for obvious reasons, so we had to improvise. By moving office furniture to the right, we managed to keep both of our actors out of the blinding sunlight and maintain semi-even light through the scene. Crisis averted, but then we had to figure out how to make our audio work. We ended up calling our professor, the one who'd taught us to do audio and camerawork in the first place, and he told us how to solve the problem. Crisis averted again. And with the exception of Collin knocking over the table, we got through the scene with minimal outtakes.
The next major problem popped up when we realized we had nowhere to actually shoot the scenes from the Director's script. Ian and I ran out to find the next location, while Morgan, Cody, and Collin stayed with our equipment stash. Everywhere in the Oakland Center (where we shot the entire project) was occupied. We needed a long table to shoot the "Citizen Kane" parody scene, and we needed a place with a lot of light because two of our scenes were "deep depth of field" shots, meaning that everything and everyone in frame needed to be in focus, not just the people/objects in the foreground. After ruling out the food court and the basement, we settled on fireside lounge. Perfect, because lots of windows meant lots of light, and--miracle of miracles--there were several long tables that were not in use, right there, ours for the taking! Couldn't have been better.
Then we realized that lots of windows didn't just mean lots of light, it meant lots of backlight. Figuring out how to shoot without breaking the 180-rule while keeping our shots in the right light was a pain. Finally Morgan came up with the brilliant idea of shooting only one angle for each scene. Why not? Godard was famous for long takes, and Welles loved using a stationary camera and long takes to create a live theater-esque aesthetic. As for the Eisenstein parody shots, well, we could do that in post-production; he was more famous for editing than camerawork anyway. Problem solved.
The idea of the director's script was that it was a normal scene (we decided to have me passing a note to Ian, nice and simple) that got progressively more elaborate and jacked-up as the producer demanded more and more rewrites. First, he'd demand an Eisenstein-esque rewrite. Unsatisfied with that, he'd instruct the director to give him a Godard-themed rewrite. And when that wasn't good enough, he'd ask for an Orson Welles homage. And, crazy as we are, we decided that we'd shoot all these "rewrites" in order.
The first take, the "normal" shot, was easy enough. One take. Boom. We needed a close-up of Ian's wide-eyed "shocked" face for the Eisenstein parody, which we got no problem. One take, boom. Hey, maybe this was going to be easier than we thought...
Nope. Not even.
The Godard parody was one long shot. This basically meant that if we screwed up one thing, we had to do the whole scene over again. And because it was a parody of Godard, who loved to cram lots of details into his movies, we had a lot of little things to worry about. We had one guy (Collin, doing double-duty as an extra) pelvic-thrusting with flowers stuck in his pants. We had Ian fixing a Barbie polaroid camera with a candy cane. And I was supposed to come into the middle of this craziness and hand Ian a note, which Cody, wearing my Star-Lord mask and a feather boa, would snatch from my grasp with a pair of tongs. If none of that makes any sense at all, don't worry. It's not supposed to; it's a damn Godard parody for Pete's sake. But it made for some damn difficult filming. I think we did maybe three or four takes, not including all the rehearsal takes that we didn't film, before we got it right.
Finally we shot the Citizen Kane parody. The danger here was laughing. Collin played a butler, who passed Ian my note on a silver tray...while wearing my blazer, an old black velvet thing that, when put on him, was so painfully obviously a women's blazer that it bordered on hilarious. Then Ian would read the note and react...well...Kane-style. He was supposed to flip the table, throw furniture, and yell at me...and guess how much of that he was actually comfortable doing in a public place? If you guessed "zero out of three," you'd be right. "I'm worried about causing a scene," he told us. Ian, honey. We've already pelvic-thrusted with flowers in our trousers, run amok dressed like Star-Lord at the Pride Parade, and set off my broken alarm clock. We're way past causing a scene at this point.
I won't bore you with the details of post-production. Just know that if one of your editors is working through a cold and the other has the actual maturity level of an eight-year-old on Froot Loops, you will get nothing done. Seriously. We had to bust our asses, mainly because we wasted so much time laughing off said asses while we watched and re-watched the clip of Star-Lord-Cody snatching the note away while Collin pelvic-thrusted with the flowers in the background. (In our defense, it was finals week and we needed something to laugh about.)
But for all of that we made a damn cute film. I'm proud of it, and I truly hope that the others are, too. The moral of the story here is, work with your friends. You will love the results. Seriously.
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