Writer/director David Spaltro created “…Around,” a new drama about a film student living on the street to help defray college costs.
WWTW: What kind of production headaches did you experience during the shoot?
DS: On “…Around” we had 21 shooting days and over 190 locations all over NYC with about $175,000 production budget — all credit cards.
Locations fell through, some producers who were working with us permitted things incorrectly forcing us to completely change our schedule on a whim, a PA crashed a rental van containing the wardrobe on the Williamsburg bridge shutting it down for an hour on September 11th, we had four hours to shoot all the Grand Central stuff and couldn’t use a tripod, we shot at Columbia the weekend the controversial Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was there… on and on and on.
I was blessed to have any amazing crew picked by my great line-producer and partner Lee Gillentine, who as a gaffer for a year on low budget films in NYC assembled an all-star team of people he’d worked with. From my 1st AD Grant DeSimone who was practically Spider-Man making sure everything was flowing forward and getting the most out of every tiny penny, April Cary who was such a great professional with the costumes, and our great production design and art department team that would build a hospital set and paint it over night and turned someone’s loft apartment into five different locations.
No matter if you believe in an autuer theory or not no one can do a film by themselves, it’s a collaborative effort of director, actors and crew. When it meshes as well as it did on my film you can overcome any obstacle.
WWTW: Did you have an ‘aha’ moment during the shoot … a moment when you realized this is exactly what you want to do with your life?
I came home in the middle of the shoot having not eaten or slept in maybe two weeks and the art department had used my bed earlier in the day as set-dressing and forgot to return it. I laid down and closed my eyes for two hours on a cold, hard floor and had the biggest smile on my face and felt amazing. That’s how much I loved it. I loved the people who’d I fight through hell for, the actors and the crew. I loved the exhaustion and the work and the laughter.
The film I made is very much about finding your place and “home”, whatever that means to you, and filmmaking, being on set and that particular set, especially with those people… that’s the most I’ve ever felt at home, regardless of what was going on. I really miss it.
WWTW: How did you find Robert Evans? What made him the right choice to play Doyle?
DS: I met Rob through his girlfriend who was a bartender at a dive bar in the lower east side I’d occasionally take late night naps in during my “…Around” days. I stumbled in with a friend in the middle of the night during a blizzard and played a game of drunken football in the snow until sunrise with Rob and my friend against a couple of giant neighborhood guys who were tackling passing cabs.
Not exactly a classy “how-Scorsese-met-Deniro” story, but fun nonetheless.
I never considered him for the lead role as I began working on the script. I knew, long before seeing how talented and dedicated he was both to my film and to his craft, that he was a good actor, but he’s such a different animal from me. He’s from Alabama, a lot more thoughtful and slow speaker, and… just different.
While trying to find a place for him in my film I let him audition with a monologue and a scene for the film and help out and read with actresses auditioning for the role of “Alyson.”
It was the way they played off each other and Marcel Torres (“Logic”) carefully pushing Rob that made me see him as Doyle and I offered him the role on the spot.
WWTW: Talk about the festival circuit and your plans for “…Around.” What have you learned from the various screenings/festivals?
DS: We had a rough start to the festival circuit, mostly as we had to fix some color problems with the film and brought a new producer Nick Boris who handled that with a grueling, almost frame-by-frame process.
We were able to get into a lot of local festivals including a premiere at Tribeca Cinemas in September, the NewFilmmakers at Anthology, and most recently the Big Apple Film Festival.
We’ve also signed a deal with a new division of indie film guru John Sloss’s Cinetic Media, Cinetic Rights Management(CRM), that will be handling and repping “…Around” for various forms of digital distribution in 2009.
It’s a really innovative and groundbreaking attempt to be ahead of the curve and get new and exciting projects seen that otherwise would go undistributed or die an unseen death of two weeks some hole-in-the-wall art house theater. Much like the music industry, the advent of digital technologies are changing things and allowing more films to be made and, now, more than ever, more ways to find and see them.
WWTW: What’s next? Do you have a project in mind for your second feature?
DS: I have a project close to my heart that would be my next film that I’ve been writing on and off for a year now and hope to have finished shortly.
I’m also working on writing and selling some scripts to help better establish myself and also making enough money to finance the kind of films I want to make. I don’t know if the stories I want to tell or how I want to tell them will ever be gigantically commercial or epic, but for now I’m happy to straddle both worlds and find my way and still be able to tell the stories I want to tell and deal with the characters I want to deal with and work with the people I love. That’s probably the greatest dream I can aspire to, make films with my friends. That’s all I really want at the end of the day. Everything else is just extra.
(Photo: Molly Ryman and Robert Evans talk it out in “…Around,” the new film from David Spaltro)
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