When Life Can Be Stranger Than Plot

This year’s Sundance Film Festival is quickly melting into history, faster than new powder on a warm day on the slopes. But even while the memories of most of the films fade, the often amusing stories of how some of them came to be made and the bizarre tales from the sets remain to warm the hearts of indie film fans.

This sassy spirit still could be found at Sundance, even though the filmmakers’ pockets may have been deeper than in the past. For example, Dan Clark, director of “The Item,” a ghoulish parody of horror pictures that appeared in the dramatic competition, says that for one crucial scene they had to share the set with a porn movie.

“It’s the scene where I have this intense conversation with Fatty and I shoot him in the back of the head,” Clark says. “It was weird. We had to be really quiet. . . . There was all this groaning, and then they’d give my producer the thumbs up when they were done. My crew was a little freaked. I had to keep reining them in. But they were fascinated by us. Women wearing bathrobes and smoking cigarettes were wandering around our set.”

More prosaic, more typical and probably more harrowing were the experiences of director Lisanne Skyler on “Getting to Know You,” a dysfunctional-family saga that also appeared in the dramatic competition.

She says that four actors dropped out during the 10 days before shooting began. Because this happened around Labor Day, their efforts to find replacements were made even more difficult. And that was just the start of it. “People dropped out during the shoot,” Skyler says, including “a high-profile TV actress. The funny thing is, it worked.”

Pre-production was also a problem for Frank Whaley, director of “Joe the King,” another dysfunctional-family affair that appeared in the dramatic competition. He says he lost some of his investors because he refused to exploit star Val Kilmer’s face on the movie’s poster. As a consequence, they didn’t have the money in place until the day before his production office opened--this after six years of trying to set the movie up.

Even when the film is in the can, lack of resources remains a big issue. The makers of “The Autumn Heart”--surprise, a dysfunctional-family story that appeared in the dramatic competition--discovered 24 hours before the final sound mix that they didn’t have clearances for the music they were using. And they only had enough money to do one sound mix before sending the film to Sundance.

“Jim Brickman offered to let us use his music, so we postponed the mix,” says the film’s writer-star, Davidlee Willson. “I stayed up 48 hours straight.” From sheer exhaustion he says he made some deliriously bad choices (“There are times when the music is epic. Boom boom boom! Oh my God!”). And then when Willson was done, the mixers decided to “tweak” the sound a bit without discussing it with him.

“The first chance we got to see it was at Sundance,” he says. “The mix was horrible. I walked out and cried in the greenroom. I couldn’t watch it.”

Willson is not exaggerating; there’s a scene he describes as the “killer crickets,” in which star Ally Sheedy sounds as if she’s in the Amazon basin rather than the suburbs of Boston. There’s another in which a crucial exchange on a bridge between Willson’s character and his fiancee is swallowed by chirping birds and passing traffic.

“I still can’t watch it,” Willson says. “Honestly, I haven’t sat through the whole thing.”

As if this weren’t enough, technical problems during a screening at the Eccles Theater--Sundance’s largest and most important venue--rendered the already murky dialogue almost unintelligible. It turned out that they had the sound switched to the wrong Dolby system. Willson says he fought with the projectionist, who insisted that the problem was Willson’s mix, not the Eccles equipment. Finally, a Dolby engineer showed up and discovered the problem--20 minutes before the screening ended.

If these sorts of glitches can occur at one of the world’s most esteemed film festivals, imagine shooting a low-budget film in the Third World. That’s what director Tony Bui and producers Jason Kliot and Joana Vicente did when they made “Three Seasons” in Vietnam. The film, which tracks the lives of assorted Vietnamese and a lone American in contemporary Vietnam, went on to win the festival’s Cinematography Award, the Audience Award and the Grand Jury Prize.

Kliot and Vicente, who are married and brought their two young children with them, say the shoot was a nightmare, mainly because government bureaucrats were worried about the film’s content. They questioned the title (Vietnam has only two seasons), wondered why a leprous old man lived on a lotus pond (Ho Chi Minh was raised on one) and objected to a street urchin’s dismal plight.

The government never gave the filmmakers location permits, even though the film was shot entirely on location (this made the completion bond people a little nervous). The filmmakers never saw dailies, because the footage had to be shipped to the U.S. for processing, where it remained for fear that a Vietnamese ministry would not approve it. The production’s supply of white lotuses, a recurring image in the film and usually easily obtainable, was devastated by a blight. And then of course there were language problems.

“The art department might say we need bicycles with baskets full of lotuses,” Kliot says. “So they’d bring two bicycles with baskets in the front with two lotuses in each.”

“Our production designer, we think he had a breakdown,” says Vicente, laughing. “He just couldn’t deal with it anymore.”

Kliot cites a particular day that summed up the entire shoot. They were filming in a traffic circle where a host of women riding bicycles with baskets of lotuses were to fan out. When the lotuses arrived--thousands of them--they turned out to be green, though the filmmakers were assured that they were white underneath. So they spent two hours peeling them.

When it finally came time to shoot, Vietnamese park rangers wouldn’t allow them to proceed, and nothing the filmmakers said could dissuade them. Then Kliot had what he describes as an epiphany. He announced that they would shoot anyway; suddenly all the rangers and soldiers and cops disappeared.

“That’s kind of how we did the whole movie,” Kliot says. “Every time there was a wall, we just kept walking.”

And that’s how you make an independent movie.

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FIRST PERSON

A humorous look at how true independence can come at a small price. Page 87