It might not seem like much now, but this is a big one for me. When I mentioned "Marco Polo" was a turning point, it is because "Four Rocks Down" came after it and then "Quit" after that. These weren't the most time-consuming or most beautiful looking projects I've worked on, but they are the peak of fun I've had with the filmmaking process and the two best examples of storytelling in a catalog that does not have much emphasis on storytelling.
"Four Rocks Down" was shot almost entirely over 24 hours with two collaborators, Tom and Mark. It was a long, memorable night with a short follow up in my apartment the next morning. Months later I grabbed the shots of the burning shed when my dad conveniently decided to dispose of an old outhouse next to our hunting shack.
I had made my previous three films alone. Well, my brother stood in front of the camera for me a few times, but more often I pointed the camera at myself or some (other) inanimate object. There are limitations to that. Collaboration was necessary. Three people is still a small number, especially when they are the cast and the crew both, but it was enough to tackle an actual story. Whoever was not in front of the camera was shooting it. It was a luxury to be able to frame a shot and not have to worry about where I would fit into it and to have someone else trustworthy behind the camera not only hitting the record button but also moving the camera as needed (camera movement, imagine that!).
Mark had been trying to start up a film club during our senior year at college -- not a club where you watch films but rather where you make them. I got to know him in a film theory course we were both in. I enrolled to meet my art requirement, but honestly I was looking forward to it more than any other class I'd ever taken. The professor was an old film critic and a tough grader. I watched David Lynch's Blue Velvet six times over the course of the semester, paying attention to different aspects of the production each time and writing papers on them. Instead of a final exam, I received special permission to write a screenplay and used the opportunity to flesh out my script for "Dreamer," a project I had started a few years earlier. My professor ripped it to shreds but gave me an A. I still have his feedback and always planned to rewrite based on it (hasn't happened yet).
Mark and I, along with our mutual friend Tom, were the three interested in joining a film club. The trouble was we had just graduated. Mark was moving out of the state in, literally, a few days. (We made "Quit" together a year and a half later during one of his visits back home). I had let Mark read the "Dreamer" script and he wanted to shoot that, but we didn't have the locations or the cast or nowhere near enough time, so we came up with something more manageable instead.
"Four Rocks Down" starts with a languid pace timed to some Twin Peaks music, which is appropriate enough as this was made at the height of my obsession with that TV series. I was also watching a lot of film noir and was influenced by the movies with non-linear structures that were coming out around this time (e.g. Memento). That is what led to the ambiguous, "earlier" and "later" time jumps and the twist ending that holds up pretty well if you're able to follow everything that leads there. I really liked the idea of needing to watch a movie multiple times to understand it and seeing things differently when viewed from different perspectives.
Take the scene where Detective Gomez visits my apartment at night to bring me in for questioning... We see part of the scene and it fits perfectly into the original context. Later we revisit the scene, this time extending it, and it fits perfectly into the new context as well. It was a concept we would later revisit in "Quit", but it works better here.
The story concept was conceived during an evening at Plum's bar, which gets a shout out in the movie. I don't remember much from that night other than being absolutely thrilled to be discussing a project like this with two other people that cared about it and were interested in making it a reality. It's a bummer our partnership didn't last longer because I would love to have more results from those years following college. I made "Cottage Cheese" and "Drunken Laundry" on my own instead, but imagine what could have been.
We shot "Four Rocks Down" on Mark's Sony 8mm video camera (except for the burning shed scenes again, for which I used my dad's camera). Looking back, the camera was so easy to work with. I don't think it had the option to turn off auto-focus or auto-exposure, and it did pretty well in low light as long as you don't mind the grain that comes with it. We never could have recorded as much as we did in such a short amount of time if we had been using one of today's DSLRs. Setting up a shot with my camera now is a hassle... back then we just ran with it.
Obviously amateur entertainment like this requires a serious suspension of disbelief. I wish we'd had some more realistic looking guns. The fight scenes are stiff and obviously staged. And, come on, we fit half a million dollars in a shoe box? There's also no character development and bad acting (although we passed this off as the characters being bad actors since much of their dialogue is lies to each other). The movie is full of flaws and the casual viewer may not be able to look past them, but I have learned to love them.
Guess what -- you can't make a perfect movie with no budget. Lately I feel like my standards get too high. I think if I can't do something well, I won't do it. 15 years ago my creative life was filled with a "just do it" attitude... I was okay making something less than perfect. It's inspiring for me to watch this now.
I wasn't able to edit the movie until two years after we shot it. I didn't have a computer that was capable of editing video and I no longer had access to the college's editing suite. I wrote in an old journal at one point that the project was "doomed to the graveyard of incompletion." I guess I thought we didn't even have all the footage we needed and there would be no way to get everyone back together to continue filming.
When I did buy a new computer in 2003, I set to work on it immediately with what we had and somehow it all fit together. There was supposed to be more to the story, but when I was done I couldn't imagine it any other way. It was a magical experience and I absolutely fell in love with the editing process.
How about that twist ending? We were pretty proud of the ambiguity of who gets thrown from the car.
Sorry for the lack of "bonus material" this time. If I were to revisit the source tapes, I know I could find something to share. I'll add to this entry if/when I ever get around to that.
I promised myself I would get this entry posted before the end of the year, so here I am on New Years Eve trying to conjure up fading memories. The purpose of this retrospective is to get these memories written down so they are not forever lost. I'm afraid I can't do that fast enough these days -- too many other priorities, including a new short film that I am really excited about. I am so thankful I have the finished films themselves preserved (at least for now).
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