“A Girl and a Gun” Update

It’s been a very long time since I posted an updated on “A Girl and a Gun.” Much has happened in the past eight months… as the project evolved in exciting and unexpected ways.

First of all, around the time of my screenings at Sunset 5, I teamed up with producer Liz Federowicz. Together, Liz and I started All You Need Productions, through which we’re producing the film. Months of meetings, rewrites and strategizing followed.

By mid July, Liz and I hired Janet Hirshenson, Jane Jenkins and Michelle Lewitt of The Casting Company (Harry Potter, Transformers, The Da Vinci Code, A Beautiful Mind, Jurassic Park, A Few Good Men, Home Alone, The Outsiders) to cast the film… and a long search for our Ian and Anna began.

In the meantime, our project garnered the interest of a few fabulous cinematographers, with whom I’m still discussing the project… and Leslie Shatz (Twilight, Milk, The Road, The Assassination of Jesse James, Paranoid Park, Last Days, Dracula, The Mummy) agreed to do the film’s sound design, with Wildfire Studios handling audio post.

I’m a long-time fan of Leslie’s work. His sound designs have an intimate (sometimes internal) quality, and it’s perhaps in recognition of this sensitivity that he was awarded the Technical Grand Prix at the 2005 Cannes Film Festival for Last Days (you can read an interview with him here, at the FIPRESCI site). Per Diana Blake, Director of Business Development at Wildfire, Liz and I are his biggest groupies… a distinction we wear with honor.

And lastly, in the spirit of our story, a bevy of interest has trickled our way… as we continue to peddle our “dream-boxes” around town. The crooks and the criminals are among us and it’s near impossible to be sure who’s who. One thing we are sure of: “all you need for a movie is a girl and a gun.” We now have our girl… and the gun? Well, our waiting period at the local Wal-Mart is almost over. We’ll see you on the streets in March.

Isabel Lucas and me at Autism Speaks 6th Annual Acts Of Love Celebration. 

Out of the Sun and Out of the Moonlight: “Out of the Past” and the Hardboiled Poetic

Jacques Tourneur’s “Out of the Past” is, without a doubt, my favorite noir film… and one of my favorite films of all time.

It’s wonderfully shot, Robert Mitchum plays a great tough guy, Jane Greer is one of the most beautiful women to ever grace the screen and its dialogues and voiceovers have a poetic bend to them.

In noir, the femme fatale’s entrance is of great importance… and it doesn’t get any better than in these two clips.

In the first, she comes “out of the sun“… and, in the second, she walks in “out of the moonlight, smiling.”

Putting the “Girl” in “A Girl and a Gun”

Isabel Lucas, during an interview promoting Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.

And an interview and photo shoot for Australian FHM …with a link to the full PDF.

“By Night, My Love”

When we first meet Anna — our Girl in “A Girl and a Gun” — she mentions having starred in a film in her native Kansas… a film titled “By Night, My Love”. It was that experience that brought her out to Los Angeles.

This film is mentioned a few times and it’s the sole credit on her headshot. As such, we’re planning to shoot some footage from this film and put together a faux trailer, which we could then use as a promotional tool for “A Girl and a Gun”… in a similar manner that Hotel Chevalier served The Darjeeling Limited.

The role Anna plays in “By Night, My Love” is that of a classic femme fatale. Thus, I thought I’d shoot it in the style of a period noir… black and white, with voiceover narration, as if Anna had emerged from another place and time… a Kansas that hadn’t changed since the 50s. And, when it comes to the narration, I’ve always been stuck by the directness and strange grandeur of Sydney Greenstreet’s introduction to “The Maltese Falcon”… a role he would later rehash in the despicably hilarious “Across the Pacific”.

I guess the real challenge will be finding someone who resembles and sounds like Sydney… and then cramming all the requisite buzzwords into the trailer’s narration: astounding, astonishing, fabulous, incredible, fascinating, unbelievably exciting and diabolical. Oriental treachery, however, might not make the cut.

 

“A Girl and a Gun” Keyframes and Storyboards

Here are a few keyframes by storyboard artist Janet Kusnick (Kill Bill Vol. 2, The Road, The Day the Earth Stood Still), who storyboarded most of the film.

The storyboards for “A Girl and a Gun” can be found here, in a private, password-protected gallery.

“A Fedora and a Thumb”

Storyboard #47_20, by Janet Kusnick, for “A Girl and a Gun”.

  

Features Showreel & “Dustclouds” Clips

Features Show Reel:

  

“Dustclouds” Clips:

Understanding (Part 1)

Understanding (Part 2)

Delirium Waltz

Journey Outward

Mrs. Casanova and the Dust

“Sandcastles” and “Dustclouds” at 9th Annual Polish Film Festival in Los Angeles

Here are some pictures for the films’ screenings at the 9th Annual Polish Film Festival in Los Angeles… as well as from the Gala Opening at the Director’s Guild of America.

“Sandcastles” and “Dustclouds” Screening Together at Laemmle’s Sunset 5

Screening together for the first time:                                    Laemmle’s Sunset 5

Wednesday, April 30th                                                       8000 Sunset Blvd.

Sandcastles 4:00pm                                                         West Hollywood, 90046

Dustclouds  5:30pm                                                         View Map

Followed by a Q&A with Irina Björklund and me.

“A Girl and a Gun”

“All you need for a movie is a girl and a gun.”
– Jean-Luc Godard

When I decided to write a Los Angeles based story, I had certain criteria and self-imposed limitations in mind. That, and Godard’s famous quote. The criteria concerned subject matter, tone and aesthetic, while the limitations were anticipatory and dealt with financial plasticity… it meant writing a story that could be dressed-up or dressed-down to fit any budget.

My intention was to come up with a fairly simple, modern, neo-noir plot. It needed a salient love story, which I wanted to center around a street-tough kid and a beautiful girl with a gun, and all the usual, noir sordidness. I already spent enough time in Los Angeles to know what I would use as a backdrop: the after-hours speakeasies, desolate downtown streets, outdoor markets and neighborhood taco stands. Pit them against the lives of the Hollywood elite and you’ve got an interesting dichotomy.

When it came time to register the project and make it official, I had to give it a working title. So, in keeping with Godard’s formula, I decided on “A Girl and a Gun”.

Once I knocked out the first draft treatment, which was about twenty pages long and took me four months to write, the process picked up considerable steam. A few weeks later, I had a thirty-four page treatment, which I began to circulate amongst friends and industry folks. The response was universally positive. At present, a few weeks since then, I’m looking at a forty-some page scriptment, which contains all the major dialogue.

The next step is to write the actual script, which should come in at seventy pages and yield a ninety minute film. Run time is, of course, a concern. Since this is meant to be a commercial venture, I must keep everything lean and mean. Coming off of “Dustclouds” (a robust, 144 minute epic, edited down from a 165 minute work-print), the idea of working on a 100 minute film sounds very appealing to me.

With all that said, I’m now certain “A Girl with a Gun” will be my next project. “Accidentally on Purpose” will have to wait. Given the enormity of “Accidentally on Purpose,” I somehow think that this is for the best. If I were to do it now, I would have to face countless compromises, which the project was not equipped to handle; with “A Girl and a Gun,” I’m accounting for them. Furthermore, the script for “Accidentally on Purpose” still needs some serious work. I took it back to index-cards / outline twice last year and, although I finally have the story pinned down, it still needs a proper, dedicated rewrite. Beyond these two projects, “Blue Skies Bring Tears” is still a collection of notes, quotes, images and loose dialogues. I wish I had the mind to commit all of it to paper and come up with a basic outline or a simple draft treatment, but I find it impossible to inhabit all these worlds at once. For now, it’s “A Girl with a Gun” and the LA hipster world of my street urchin Ian.