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The Backstory In 2001 I was a new father and downsized from my San Francisco dot-com job. (Excuse the beginning of my oh-so-familiar story.) I thought screenplay writing would be a nice creative change from interactive design, so I took a beginning screenwriting course at U.C. Berkeley. My instructor cautioned against starting with a full-length film, so I started writing a short one. This is when I decided I wanted to direct. Besides, most of my favorite filmmakers are writer/directors (The Coen Bros., Robert Rodriguez, Kevin Smith, David Lynch). I owned a DV camera, a piano, an Apple PowerBook and a bunch of software. But no real gear. So I wrote to my strengths. No mics? Fine, no dialogue; I’ll tell the story with movement. No lights? Fine, I’ll shoot a film noir. I can edit it on my laptop and write and record the music myself. Between job hunting and playing daddy, I had only one hour a night to work on the film. But one hour a night over a three-year period became 1000 hours.
Since the majority of interesting story lines are about conflict and struggle, here’s where it gets interesting! Just as we were nearing the big filming day, of course things started to fall apart. The owners of the building I wanted to use for the club shots rescinded their approval. I crashed my car while looking for a new site. I was laid off AGAIN. Summer had to bow out of the project. Suddenly I had some actors I couldn’t use, no shoot site, no producer and soon, no money. But I still had a house payment and now two children. This is exactly when I called my mother, a.k.a. the new film investor. And with that we filmed the movie, all in one looong day.
I wanted to record it the same way many jazz albums were made in the ’50s: in the recording engineer’s living room. I was lucky to find Mark Lemaire, a local engineer who had recorded half of my ensemble previously, and (bingo!) also owned a portable recording rig. We recorded the score in Sage’s living room, all in one day, live. No headphones, no overdubs, no fear. (OK, maybe a little.) The Wrap I didn’t actually mention how I came to write Mantis. I was awfully fed-up with remakes of bad movies and Puff Daddy desecrating great pop songs. This was also the tail end of the new big-band craze, and the faux-vintage lifestyle had become as regimented as a prison ward. I wanted to see something new, even if I had to make it myself. So I wrote a genre piece that secretly doubled as anti-retro commentary. “Don’t steal experiences.” “Don’t be so artistically lazy; you’ll only make me realize how much better the originals are than you.”
software used to make this film Microsoft Word,
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