(Note: This is the first in a series of interviews with emerging filmmakers. Directors who wish to be spotlighted at WWTW can email me for consideration.)
Director Richard Diaz wasn’t the only child to fall in love with movies after watching “Star Wars” back in 1977. But Diaz realized he wanted to be the person calling the shots on the movie set only a few short years later.
“I really started to get an understanding that this person on a movie set called a director was the main person at the helm and was in charge of telling the story. I gravitated toward that,” Diaz says.
Today, Diaz is starting work on his latest independent film, an action feature called “Dark Light.” It’s the follow-up to his 2009 action/film noir feature “Distortion.”
Diaz first learned his craft in film school, but at the time the digital revolution hadn’t fully begun.
“When I graduated [in 1996], everything changed,” he recalls. “I had to teach myself. Any chance I had to get a book or magazine on how a movie was made, I’d just soak it up,” he says.
Diaz embraced the digital technology and found it allowed him greater freedom as a filmmaker. Before digital, he took less chances for fear of cost overruns. He also dreaded film processing snafus that could ruin an entire day’s worth of shooting.
Along the way he drew inspiration from Robert Rodriguez, the “Sin City” director who famously made his first film for roughly $7,000.
“You don’t need a lot of money or a whole bunch of people when you’re starting out. It’s easier to come up with an idea for a film than say, ‘I need $500,000 to tell the story,’” he says.
Diaz shot a bunch of short films, but he realized only a feature-length project could showcase one’s full abilities. But his initial fundraising efforts “went nowhere,” he says.
Unknown filmmakers have precious little cache in the industry.
“I knew I needed to go out and make my own films by whatever means I had,” he says.
He cobbled together $3,000 to make “Distortion,“ the story of a man who sees people being murdered on this television set. Much of the money went to insurance costs and food for the cast and crew.
“You’re not seeing $1,000 on the screen,” he says.
He used his experience shooting and editing commercials to cut costs and streamline the movie making process. He couldn’t pay his actors so he worked around their schedules. That didn’t mean he cut corners on selecting the right people for the film.
“I don’t cast the first person who walks through the door. I try to find the best actors I can even under those conditions,” he says, a process that has taken up to eight months for him in the past.
The collective limitations forced him to be creative. When he couldn’t do a re-shoot on “Distortion” he created a new subplot to tie the narrative threads together.
Diaz runs into the same problems other indie filmmakers endure, from 17-hour days to the fear of not having enough money to complete the shoot. But he wouldn’t give up filmmaking no matter the hurdles.
“Sometimes, even when I’m editing something from the film at 2 a.m., I‘ll sit back and watch it. When it works, you get this excitement that‘s hard to explain, an excitement that only comes when you create something,” he says.
“Even at its worst, [being a filmmaker is] still the dream that I’ve had since I was four,” he says. “I’m not about to let that little kid down, the little kid inside me.”
(Photo: Chicago-based filmmaker Richard Diaz)
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