After a night spent on the coziest sofa in all of Appalachia, we headed up early to the top of a university parking deck, parked beneath a sign that read “No Parking / No Loitering,” and lined up the shot—my director and me, just the two of us that morning to grab a simple scene of my character looking off into the mountains, being sure to include the Massanutten Ridge in one of the shots as part of their investment deal.
Most of our time that morning was eaten up waiting for the students in their cars to turn around, to head back down the deck, their tires squeaking sharply on the painted concrete, waiting for them to slowly get out of our shot. But after an hour we had it—all the shots we needed, with no security called or angry students or staff to contend with.
And so we slid back into the low seats of our prop car, a 1984 Porsche, and drove out the deck and down the hills into another little mountain town, where gorgeous gray-clouded skies welcomed us into my director’s old haunts, it being the town where he grew up.
All is familiar to him here and I am just a wandering stranger. Just like my character. And I’m ignoring my ex’s texts and calls, just like my character. I’m hundreds of miles from home, just like my character.
It strikes me that what we were trying to do there was to make sense of the world and who we are, the place we have in it, why we do the things we do. And in our deepest hearts, we know we have something to say—but will anybody listen?
Godard famously said that all you need to make a movie is a woman and a gun.
Well, we had a forty-year-old car, two cameras, and the combined desperation of a half dozen halfway-employed twenty-somethings. We had nothing more than what we held in our palms, but we knew we would press our hands together to create some kind of diamonds.
For the shots at Kline’s, the ice cream bar downtown, we didn’t have any permission either, but it went just as well. Some teenagers stared us down, but that’s just what teenagers do—especially when you have a cameraman running around. I don’t think my director noticed anyway. If he did, he certainly didn’t seem to care. No cops or kids or guards or confused employees hassled us that night.
We took up a parking spot, I ate my burger (with no spit bucket), the neon reflected sublime off the tarnished silver paint of the Porsche, and all was beautiful. It went as smooth as a fine whiskey sipped between puffs of a victory cigar.
The peppermint shake I got afterwards was similarly divine, though it sent shivers through me, down to my numb toes after sitting in a cold car for about an hour. We called it a night—a successful quick few shots after a full day of filming.
It felt good, it felt right.
We returned to my director’s home, a townhouse he shared with his wife in a mixed neighborhood of families and college kids and those in between, with the intention of watching yet another Fassbinder film; he had become a mighty inspiration. Moreover, I was to stay there during the consecutive days of filming to keep me in town and near the mountains, where much of the movie was to be filmed.
I could tell that, while one of their cats was warming up to me, the other didn’t seem to like me at all, swiping and hissing at me whenever I tried to touch him. Still, that didn’t stop him from begging me for food whenever I was in the kitchen. A comedic irritation, but also a reminder that as long as I’m gracious and don’t swipe at the hand that feeds, I would not overstay my welcome—a perennial fear of mine.
As a matter of principle, I generally refuse to watch playback on set and hardly pay attention to the dailies the cinematographers share in the Discord chat. If I watch myself, I will become too aware of even the most minute movements that I detest in myself, every little action under a microscope. Every twitch, every breath, every squint of the eye, every tug of the lips, every placement of every finger. Every. Single. Thing.
It takes me out of the character. I start to try to be who I want to be, not who the director and script are guiding me to be, and I fixate on what I consider my own flaws instead. But when one of our producers sent a mock trailer in the chat, I allowed myself to watch.
Seeing myself on screen, saying the words someone else wrote and going through the fabricated actions of a scene, embodying the individual created by my director… it’s always as if I am observing a puppeteer pilot my body, and this mock trailer was no different. It’s dizzying, but with a hefty dose of euphoria.
Beyond that, I had acted before, but never to this degree—either so seriously or for such a large project with so many people dependent on me to understand the script and my direction and deliver a performance worth watching. But that melted away as the trailer played before me; this was someone else, wearing my face, speaking foreign words, and yet somehow I was still there.
I became overwhelmed with the realization that this was the result of all the decisions I’d made echoing out behind me in a metaphysical wake that disturbed others’ psychic ships, catching their attention, forever tied to their docks—a handful venturing out barely beyond the shallows, and even fewer leaving their positions to follow behind me, eventually pulling out ahead of me, now guiding me.
The path I had taken had led me to this point, to the heart of the Blue Ridge Mountains, to film a movie about cars, wandering, and aging.
I didn’t know much about cars when we started filming. I had to learn stick specifically for the role, in fact, but with every year I would like to think I had learned a little something about aging, and will continue to learn more as I get older and older.
Being on the closer side to thirty, I began to wonder what it would be like on the other side of that number—a somewhat arbitrary number, but nonetheless still taking its proximity a bit more seriously—and there was no revelation, no certain answers about what the future would hold. I knew that I would only find out in due time.
All I could say definitively was that, with each passing year, I somehow only felt younger. Sure, there are new aches and pains and other sensations, but my mindset became one of youth. Which is not to say that youth is only a mindset, that you can avoid growing old by sheer power of will alone. One day, I will grow old. My shitty tattoos will fade. My teeth will crack and rot. My hip will shatter when I fall in the shower, and I can only hope someone will be there to hear my cries.
But I could see that day was far off. I still had so much time, and with each year I acquired, it only seemed to get farther away—and the most juvenile thing of all is a fear of growing old.
Maybe that was enough of a reason to make movies with hardly any permissions or plan—to capture ourselves as we are now, flying on the seat of our asses across the pavement leading us to God knows where.
Back when my director wrote the script, when four of us holed up in the mountains for an extended weekend with no plan other than to write back in December, I recall he told us little of the project he had recently started and came to the retreat with the intention of finishing—just that he had to write a script. Over the weekend, I finished up a short poetry chapbook with the plans to self-publish in the spring. He completed this ninety-six-page script. I was mildly intimidated.
The birds outside sang “poo-tee-weet,” but we took that as a positive omen, even in the onset of winter, instead of some foreboding punctuation—the swan song of a failed novel lost on us in the light of its success. Quite the opposite, really; we allowed the melody to be the counterpoint to the music of our own creation.
That is to say, when I first read the script, it felt like an accumulation of our collected youths, a way to entrap our energy for those later on to find, and the character spoke to me. I was immediately interested in playing the lead role. However, my director already had eyes on somebody else, telling me he even wrote the whole role with them in mind, and so I didn’t even suggest that he cast me—we all understood that, as an auteur, as great as it is to be close with your whole cast and crew, when it comes to acting, it’s about the vision more than it is about working with your friends.
Besides, I was still willing to play another role, even as an extra, or hold the boom, or mark the scene with the slate—whatever I could do to be on set. I have never been one to languish in the spotlight anyway.
But that first pick passed on the gig, and the next thing I knew, the script was in my lap and I was agreeing to play the “protagonist” (doubtful he should really be called that, but unsure of a better word), and I realized that, should we actually do the damn thing, my face and voice and actions would be preserved somehow—even if it’s only on the shelf of friends’ and family’s dusty DVD collections.
Beyond preservation, there was also the hope that someone will see the film and connect with it, feel something pull their heartstrings, learn something about themselves and others, and feel less alone.
Yet is it so bad to want to be preserved? Are some of our oldest human discoveries not graves and monuments near ancient settlements, near the homes? Is not almost every religion offering up its own chance at preservation?
We scream into the void and eventually accept its silence—that it will not answer, and that someday we will be swallowed up into its grand expanse ourselves—but we scream and scream anyway, shredding our vocal cords, only in the hope that our companions hear our cry, to know that in the face of the great blank nothing, we are not alone.
And so we were together as we filmed this project, a production running on love, faith, and belief in our director, after we had been brought together by our artistic screams into the world over the years. We had all expelled our greatest yells and yawps and hoots and hollers into the nothingness that encaptured us—one at a time, politely waiting our turns at times, and other times releasing over top of each other—until we had finally found this opportunity to release all our energies together and all at once.
The beautiful, communal power of film.
Why guerrilla? Why not get the permits, build a set, pay everyone? I could argue that Hollywood itself was founded to avoid copyright laws from Edison on the East Coast—that we’re following a century-old tradition—but the less satisfying answer is the truth: money. A severe lack of it.
Time was also a constraint, of course, but we were young. Time was on our side. There was just no cash in our pockets, only lint and dreams.
It went beyond just the question of money, however, as my director’s insistence that locations are better than sets also seemed to fuel a part of his desire to film wherever and whenever we could. And that may belie a heated passion for doing things well, yet it also ran as deep as the camaraderie that flowed between us all on set.
We weren’t wasting money by wasting time. Since no one was really getting paid, there was no reason to cap things off by time. When someone fucked up their line, all was forgiven—just run it again. When someone forgot they had extra mics, no one cursed them out for wasting half an hour (even if it was cold enough that it felt like my digits would snap off at the slightest bend), because the point wasn’t to get it done quick or keep things under budget.
The point was to get it done. Preferably well. And, as my director said, to manipulate life into being our own set, into being our art, into saying what we need to say. All the world’s a stage, of course—and now we are here to capture it.
We filmed a short film a few years ago, wherein I also played the lead. It was a raunchy short focused around masturbation and death, and the plan was to knock it out in just about two days of actual filming, mostly at my director’s house.
Everything went well at first—morale was high, we got a good series of shots that first morning, I was excited and believed in the script—and then we went to a cemetery down the road to film one of the more important, longer scenes, with the most people on camera.
We got one shot in, one single take, before we were promptly asked to leave… rather impetuously, I might add. Most of the other scenes were indoors, at my director’s house, but the cemetery scene was crucial and not something we could easily fake in his tiny yard.
We had to scramble quickly to find a location for the rest of the graveyard shots, hoping to preserve continuity in any of the cuts, all the while losing daylight.
To top it off, as this scramble occurred, my partner broke up with me over text.
We managed to find a location with similar trees and lighting, and I held in my pain as we got a few more shots on location and back at the house. But once everybody else cleared out and it was just me and my director, with his now-wife in bed, it all fell out, causing a moment of silence to stretch out between the two of us.
Not the usual, comfortable silence that settles between us when we are both writing or watching fine cinema together, but a palpable, pregnant pause where the both of us had to consider how futile making even a short film might be. Anxiety prickled in the air—a tiny thunderstorm. No words were said. I shuffled off, down into the basement where I was sleeping, and smoked too much weed and cried myself to sleep.
The next day, we went along as scheduled, getting the final scenes in my director’s house, including the climax of this short film, even as we were unsure about the usability of the secondary graveyard shots, and I was unsure I would have any warmth to return to when we were wrapped.
Against this current, we beat on, ceaseless, wind at our backs, in white crests of waves of failure—and then it was the end of the day, calling out the martini shot. The filming was finished, it was sent off to post, and I returned to Richmond with a shattered heart, unsure of how the short film would turn out, feeling more lost than ever without a project or person to cling to, feeling as though everything beyond love were working against me—and even those two vague concepts were turning out to be only fair weather friends, never as reliable as I hoped they would be.
A few months later, in the dead of winter, the short was done. We had a small, private premiere in one of our cinematographer’s apartments. I introduced a childhood friend I had brought with me to my director and, before long, said childhood friend was on board running sound for a majority of my (or I suppose now our) director’s following projects, as my friend had moved up in the mountains a few months back and had hardly anything else to do beyond work.
The social knits were being pulled closer together. And imagine my surprise to see that my director didn’t even use the spare graveyard shots—the one and only shot we got at the actual cemetery was used in its entirety, without any cuts, and it worked marvelously.
The entire short was well realized; even though it never gained much momentum, it felt like something I could actually stand beside with pride and send to people, as raunchy as it was. But moreover, I will never forget the sensation that flowed through me at that premiere as everyone laughed and cheered at the short. It was the first time I had ever watched myself on screen in a room full of other people actively reacting.
I was used to putting things out on the internet and basing success on streams and likes—not on how hard my friends laughed or otherwise engaged with it. How wrong I was to ever do so, I realized that night, and how intoxicating it was to once again entertain a room full of people.
The connections we forge through art are greater than any drug you could ever take.
At that premiere, I felt unity, and I didn’t have any thoughts about my aforementioned “flaws” on the screen. Once it was a finished product, I could see the project as its whole. I could see myself for me, and then as the character. I could embrace myself in a retrograde reflection. I could understand what anyone could see in me, warts and all.
I saw my beauty, and I saw my deceit. I could see everything. The most enchanting mirror.
And now I had a belief in myself, and a belief in my director and the rest of the crew—all of whom are joining us for this feature film. Everything came together for us to create something that wasn’t there before.
Something that at least one person laughed at, even if it was only my good-humored aunt.
Something that was (hopefully) beautiful.
Funny how I can remember that there were no signs up at the cemetery warning off trespassers, much less filmmakers. Funny how no one seems to care even when we do ignore obvious signs.
I suppose the signs hardly matter. The cops don’t matter. The lack of money doesn’t matter. The lack of any almighty romantic love doesn’t matter.
What matters is doing the damn thing. To say something beyond average conversation, to bring an idea into fruition, to move people, to comfort them. To live life as the wild ride it is—collecting scars and memories, making enemies and friends.
In these fraught times, choose art, depose despair, and, if you have something to say, damn well might as well say it.
Written by Eric Kalata
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