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Survival of Imbued: On Location with Nilsson
by Rob Nilsson
The nature of film is that its disasters begin early and stay late. The money is fickle, the loyalties fragile; the stakes, apparently high, erode to the picayune in the tick of a clock. It’s rare that a gift is given; rarer yet, reciprocated. But it does happen.
The film Imbued is an example. Never mind the chaotic circumstances which attended its downfall. The film was dead, and its death almost a relief. Too much to do. Resources inadequate to the task. Bills piling up. Nerves stretched to slingshot mayhem into the retreating behinds of the routed. No blame. Just the exigencies and their accompanying contingencies. All that remained was the coffin, lugged to the boneyard by a cortege of spavined nags.
But then, old Adam re-surged. You can’t give in to Mother Chaos. You’ll be swallowed up, yes; but the question is when. ‘Not yet,’ was the answer. And so two letters went out into the gloom. One was ignored. The other was answered: Stacy Keach was interested.
Given my love of the unmediated human moment, the conjoining of a point in time and an honest impulse (exquisitely apt, possibly coarse, but innocent of guile), I’ve preferred to work with everyday people rather than actors. Actors belong to a different era when actions and passions had to quilt together in a tapestry repeated in a theater night after night. Scripts and real people on stages tight-rope walk the same language, action and impulses for the length of an engagement in a hall with audiences in their seats.
Working in this environment requires the rigors of Wallenda-style training. There’s no editing when you’re on a thin wire 50 real feet above a cement floor. But editing is the soul of cinema. An absolute beginner can play (my word for ‘act’) in a naturalistic setting, and break your heart with simple sincerity, honest impulse, and trust that human nature is what’s wanted. Provided that an editing spirit can sift and sieve the miracles of form, balance, restraint, silence and emotion. Provided there’s a framework on which to tack the still-dripping hide. And if you fall, working this way, the audience will never see you hit the ground.
But I remembered Stacy Keach from Fat City, a signal inspiration of our old film collective, Cine Manifest, back in the 70s: small-time boxers in cowtown Stockton, California. And here, all of a sudden, was a chance to work with a hero of mine. He read my script/scenario that was intended only as a guide and a sounding board for situational improv. He liked the story, and, most interestingly, liked my lines. Did he have any time? Providentially. One week. The exact week. That was good… but the funding had dried up. Then, another bit of serendipity: with Stacy Keach, along came producer David Richards. Suddenly we were in business.
Donatello (Keach), a ‘feminist, humanist’ man, spends one night in an unfinished luxury condo with Lydia, a ‘realist’ woman. The man is a gambler. The woman, an expensive call girl who has come to the wrong room. Each has one epiphany over the course of the night. A light bulb goes on which would otherwise have remained off, without this chance encounter. That’s the rough. The whole film takes place 32 stories up, in the Infinity Towers near the Bay Bridge.
Liz Sklar, a San Francisco talent to watch, played the call girl Lydia. Fearless, fierce, smart, beautiful – Liz is my ideal of an actress. Without attitude, focused on the work, reaching, seeking, achieving, relatively new to film but a student of life, she routinely did 10-15 pages of dialogue with Stacey in long masters necessitated by the short schedule. Her boldness gave me hope that demanding female roles, such as Monica Belluchi’s in Gaspar Noe’s Irreversible, can be done in San Francisco without the crippling bluenose strictures which have recently posed as somehow ‘political.’
Mickey Freeman, inspired DP and longtime friend, wanted to take a more formal approach to light and picture, and so the Direct Action style movie I had envisioned took another step into the unknown: it evaporated. And in doing so, this film sought out and concentrated the assembled energies and talents, and focused them on a hybrid of traditional and ‘après garde’ techniques.
Stacy liked the lines. Mickey gave them a masterful expressionist frame. I used my paintings to add a rough hewn Fauvist element. Dan Gleich recorded sound like a zealous suitor, unwilling to hear ‘no.’ Producer Michelle Allen, who used to hang banners on battleships with Green Peace, produced the impossible with the improbable. Robert Harrison and Wayne Pesuit provided HD gear. Aaron Brown, editor of Imbued, doubled as AD during the shoot, and – long after hours – digitized as the city slept.
Nancy Bower, from my new Direct Action Actor’s Workshops, did an amazing role as Donatello’s daughter, calling from a broken idyll in a boozy hotel room with a naked man (Marcus Cleever) on the bed, asking Daddy not to hang up this time. Michelle Allen (also from the DA workshop and lead actress in 9 @ Night film #9, Go Together), as Donatello’s wife, tried to fix a humidifier (or was it a de-humidifier?) as she worked her husband on the phone, providing a clue to one source of Donatello’s fractured feminism.
Among the hard workers were friends, acquaintances, and others I had never met – such as costumer Carol Cleever and Karla Bruk (who did gorgeous work with Liz’s hair and make-up). No one made any money, and yet everyone seemed alive to some current plowing through the room. Maybe an attractive black hole whirled us into an ensemble, shaped by a mystic DNA generated in each by the company of the other.
I thought of us as irregulars doing asymmetric warfare with a system unaware we had infiltrated, stolen the fire, and disappeared into the night before the radar had a chance to register. A joy to work with Stacy, Liz, Michelle and Nancy, and a small, solid support crew including workshop members Ed Ferry, Irit Levi, William Martin, Samantha Van Steen, camera assistant Mike Cosby, along with new friends Jan Foster, the indefatigable Janine Aiello, and the irrepressible Bridget Burch, who fed us as if we were entitled to condo living and might even live to get used to it.
There is nothing else in the world like it. Stacy, for all his credits and international reputation, was the soul of hard work, concentration, consideration and appreciation for every contribution from every collaborator, large and small. This shows me that it’s not the yellow tape put around a set that protects artists’ visions from the Philistines. It’s the tape torn down around meaningless bureaucracy, separation of powers and talents, that allows the ‘best idea in the room’ to surface and struggle to be born.
I don’t like the current climate of judgment and correctness which hobbles the arts today. And for that reason I find very little ‘roughage’ in the arid world of museum, cinema, and theater. It seems to me that money and power have limpetted together to make drool, the ‘right’ sort of work – you know, the kind which offends no one and expresses all the right sentiments.
Sign me up with the wrong-headed, thank you. Mom and Dad took a night off from being good citizens the night they engendered me. And I thank them for it, and imagine I can still hear their eager gasps and screaming at an uncomprehending moon. Imbued, for me, was just such a scream. I thank all of you with leathery lungs who make life pregnant and films like this possible. You’re my kind of desperado: solitary, sunburnt souls, ceaseless seekers through the annals of the ordinary, courting the singular which can never be summoned but, hopefully, recognized just in time.
Rob Nilsson, Cannes Camera d’Or and Sundance Grand Prize Winner, has made 20 features and is showing the 9 @ Night Film Series, shot in the SF Tenderloin yGroup, in various venues this year. For more info: http://www.robnilsson.com
Posted on May 02, 2008 - 09:15 PM
by Rob Nilsson
The nature of film is that its disasters begin early and stay late. The money is fickle, the loyalties fragile; the stakes, apparently high, erode to the picayune in the tick of a clock. It’s rare that a gift is given; rarer yet, reciprocated. But it does happen.The film Imbued is an example. Never mind the chaotic circumstances which attended its downfall. The film was dead, and its death almost a relief. Too much to do. Resources inadequate to the task. Bills piling up. Nerves stretched to slingshot mayhem into the retreating behinds of the routed. No blame. Just the exigencies and their accompanying contingencies. All that remained was the coffin, lugged to the boneyard by a cortege of spavined nags.
But then, old Adam re-surged. You can’t give in to Mother Chaos. You’ll be swallowed up, yes; but the question is when. ‘Not yet,’ was the answer. And so two letters went out into the gloom. One was ignored. The other was answered: Stacy Keach was interested.
Given my love of the unmediated human moment, the conjoining of a point in time and an honest impulse (exquisitely apt, possibly coarse, but innocent of guile), I’ve preferred to work with everyday people rather than actors. Actors belong to a different era when actions and passions had to quilt together in a tapestry repeated in a theater night after night. Scripts and real people on stages tight-rope walk the same language, action and impulses for the length of an engagement in a hall with audiences in their seats.
Working in this environment requires the rigors of Wallenda-style training. There’s no editing when you’re on a thin wire 50 real feet above a cement floor. But editing is the soul of cinema. An absolute beginner can play (my word for ‘act’) in a naturalistic setting, and break your heart with simple sincerity, honest impulse, and trust that human nature is what’s wanted. Provided that an editing spirit can sift and sieve the miracles of form, balance, restraint, silence and emotion. Provided there’s a framework on which to tack the still-dripping hide. And if you fall, working this way, the audience will never see you hit the ground.
But I remembered Stacy Keach from Fat City, a signal inspiration of our old film collective, Cine Manifest, back in the 70s: small-time boxers in cowtown Stockton, California. And here, all of a sudden, was a chance to work with a hero of mine. He read my script/scenario that was intended only as a guide and a sounding board for situational improv. He liked the story, and, most interestingly, liked my lines. Did he have any time? Providentially. One week. The exact week. That was good… but the funding had dried up. Then, another bit of serendipity: with Stacy Keach, along came producer David Richards. Suddenly we were in business.
Donatello (Keach), a ‘feminist, humanist’ man, spends one night in an unfinished luxury condo with Lydia, a ‘realist’ woman. The man is a gambler. The woman, an expensive call girl who has come to the wrong room. Each has one epiphany over the course of the night. A light bulb goes on which would otherwise have remained off, without this chance encounter. That’s the rough. The whole film takes place 32 stories up, in the Infinity Towers near the Bay Bridge.
Liz Sklar, a San Francisco talent to watch, played the call girl Lydia. Fearless, fierce, smart, beautiful – Liz is my ideal of an actress. Without attitude, focused on the work, reaching, seeking, achieving, relatively new to film but a student of life, she routinely did 10-15 pages of dialogue with Stacey in long masters necessitated by the short schedule. Her boldness gave me hope that demanding female roles, such as Monica Belluchi’s in Gaspar Noe’s Irreversible, can be done in San Francisco without the crippling bluenose strictures which have recently posed as somehow ‘political.’ Mickey Freeman, inspired DP and longtime friend, wanted to take a more formal approach to light and picture, and so the Direct Action style movie I had envisioned took another step into the unknown: it evaporated. And in doing so, this film sought out and concentrated the assembled energies and talents, and focused them on a hybrid of traditional and ‘après garde’ techniques.
Stacy liked the lines. Mickey gave them a masterful expressionist frame. I used my paintings to add a rough hewn Fauvist element. Dan Gleich recorded sound like a zealous suitor, unwilling to hear ‘no.’ Producer Michelle Allen, who used to hang banners on battleships with Green Peace, produced the impossible with the improbable. Robert Harrison and Wayne Pesuit provided HD gear. Aaron Brown, editor of Imbued, doubled as AD during the shoot, and – long after hours – digitized as the city slept.
Nancy Bower, from my new Direct Action Actor’s Workshops, did an amazing role as Donatello’s daughter, calling from a broken idyll in a boozy hotel room with a naked man (Marcus Cleever) on the bed, asking Daddy not to hang up this time. Michelle Allen (also from the DA workshop and lead actress in 9 @ Night film #9, Go Together), as Donatello’s wife, tried to fix a humidifier (or was it a de-humidifier?) as she worked her husband on the phone, providing a clue to one source of Donatello’s fractured feminism.
Among the hard workers were friends, acquaintances, and others I had never met – such as costumer Carol Cleever and Karla Bruk (who did gorgeous work with Liz’s hair and make-up). No one made any money, and yet everyone seemed alive to some current plowing through the room. Maybe an attractive black hole whirled us into an ensemble, shaped by a mystic DNA generated in each by the company of the other.
I thought of us as irregulars doing asymmetric warfare with a system unaware we had infiltrated, stolen the fire, and disappeared into the night before the radar had a chance to register. A joy to work with Stacy, Liz, Michelle and Nancy, and a small, solid support crew including workshop members Ed Ferry, Irit Levi, William Martin, Samantha Van Steen, camera assistant Mike Cosby, along with new friends Jan Foster, the indefatigable Janine Aiello, and the irrepressible Bridget Burch, who fed us as if we were entitled to condo living and might even live to get used to it.There is nothing else in the world like it. Stacy, for all his credits and international reputation, was the soul of hard work, concentration, consideration and appreciation for every contribution from every collaborator, large and small. This shows me that it’s not the yellow tape put around a set that protects artists’ visions from the Philistines. It’s the tape torn down around meaningless bureaucracy, separation of powers and talents, that allows the ‘best idea in the room’ to surface and struggle to be born.
I don’t like the current climate of judgment and correctness which hobbles the arts today. And for that reason I find very little ‘roughage’ in the arid world of museum, cinema, and theater. It seems to me that money and power have limpetted together to make drool, the ‘right’ sort of work – you know, the kind which offends no one and expresses all the right sentiments.
Sign me up with the wrong-headed, thank you. Mom and Dad took a night off from being good citizens the night they engendered me. And I thank them for it, and imagine I can still hear their eager gasps and screaming at an uncomprehending moon. Imbued, for me, was just such a scream. I thank all of you with leathery lungs who make life pregnant and films like this possible. You’re my kind of desperado: solitary, sunburnt souls, ceaseless seekers through the annals of the ordinary, courting the singular which can never be summoned but, hopefully, recognized just in time.
Rob Nilsson, Cannes Camera d’Or and Sundance Grand Prize Winner, has made 20 features and is showing the 9 @ Night Film Series, shot in the SF Tenderloin yGroup, in various venues this year. For more info: http://www.robnilsson.com
Posted on May 02, 2008 - 09:15 PM
