The Action-Adventure Saga Behind ‘Ocean’

The recently concluded Sundance Film Festival was probably the best in years, and for good reason. Many of the films in the dramatic competition were produced by pros--the Weinsteins, Jason Kliot and Joanna Vicente, Christine Vachon, Maggie Renzi, Barbara De Fina--so the movies were less esoteric, more accessible. The downside to this professionalism is that the films were generally not as edgy as in the past, and the making of them was not as weird and wonderful.

One exception was Tony Pemberton’s “Beyond the Ocean,” a throwback to the days when the filmmaker’s efforts to get his movie made were more compelling than the movie itself. “Beyond the Ocean” didn’t win anything in Sundance’s dramatic competition, but it hearkens back to the days when independent filmmaking was, if nothing else, an adventure.

“Beyond the Ocean,” which took more than five years to pull together, is a drama about a young Russian woman who travels to New York to visit, and perhaps settle down with, the father of her unborn child. As she deals with the city and her boyfriend’s indifference, she is plagued by memories of her bleak Russian childhood, rendered in black and white, in which it becomes clear that the only man who really loved her was her uncle.

“I’ve always liked Eastern European films,” says Pemberton, who, though from Toledo, Ohio, speaks with a Russian accent (he now lives in Moscow). “Especially this Russian-Hungarian genre [called] ‘the black life.’ It means your bad life, nothing is worse than your childhood.”

Pemberton, 33, was originally going to make what he describes as a “fake foreign film” about Hungarian coal miners in Youngstown, Ohio, and about one of their women who goes to New York. Before moving forward, he went to Hungary in 1993 with his wife to visit her relatives and decided that it would be cheaper to shoot there. That plan went kaput when the country’s principal production facilities closed down.

That’s when the film’s back story really gets going.

Pemberton next went to Moscow--where his then-wife wanted to study Russian--and became convinced that it was the place to shoot. So he retooled the script to accommodate the new location. Pemberton was assisted on this venture by a Scottish cinematographer, an Austrian producer and his future mother-in-law, who was the mother of an assistant director on the film who became his second wife (his first marriage, which had brought him to Moscow, fell apart).

This “strong woman,” as Pemberton calls her, outraged when the providers of film stock were charging the production $200 a can (as opposed to the $70 they had paid previously), took matters into her own hands.

“She called the factory in the Ukraine and organized travel there and all kinds of papers for the border guards,” Pemberton says. “She went to the Ukraine, 12 hours away, and came back with 30 cans of stock that cost $30 a can. To get past the Ukrainian guards, she lay down and played sick. The Russian customs people looked at all the film cans and said, ‘You’re not sick.’ Then she did a crying fit and got past them too.”

*

More difficulties came Pemberton’s way when he hired a Russian director of photography to shoot pick-up shots. They agreed that Pemberton would pay him $1,000, but after three weeks of shooting, the DP “snapped,” according to Pemberton. He called up Pemberton and said that his fee was now $3,000. If he didn’t receive it, Pemberton was told he would never see the footage again. When Pemberton asked about the camera, he was told that it had been lost in a taxi cab.

At the time, Pemberton was working at a Russian advertising agency that handled such accounts as Revlon, Schweppes, and Cadbury. As with many large Russian businesses, the company had hired a private security firm composed of ex-KGB agents. Pemberton went to his boss, told him about the DP’s demands, and asked if he could use the firm’s security men to help him get his footage and camera back. His boss agreed and sent him to the firm’s security chief, who told Pemberton to meet with the DP and record their conversation, which he did.

Pemberton then arranged for a second meeting, to which he was supposed to bring the money, but instead he brought along a couple of the firm’s men.

“He [the DP] goes, ‘What did you bring all those guys for?’ ” Pemberton recalls. “And he gave me the things back. They kept talking with him. I felt pretty horrible when they kept threatening him. I never gave him any money. He was just scared.”

The next day Pemberton met with the security chief and was presented with a bill--$3,000. Stunned, Pemberton went to his advertising agency boss, who was also shaken. They decided that the best thing to do was for each of them to pony up $1,500. Pemberton got his footage and equipment back.

Once Pemberton had his movie shot, he faced more financial problems. He had played the classic independent filmmaker shell game with credit cards, moving his debts from one to the other, and now his creditors were making life uncomfortable for him. He decided to remain in Moscow, out of the reach of their phone calls.

Though this made economic sense, it came at a price. Pemberton discovered that the Russian film, television and commercial industries, such as they are, used the same voices over and over again. If Pemberton employed Russian post-production facilities, the heroine’s uncle would speak like dozens of other screen characters, as if Arnold Schwarzenegger, Mel Gibson and Robert De Niro all spoke with the voice of Homer Simpson. So he found his own studio and did the sound himself.

If all of this seems like Pemberton’s own “black life,” consider that “Beyond the Ocean” was one of only 16 movies picked out of 800 submitted for consideration for Sundance’s dramatic competition. He was also chosen by Variety as one of the festival’s 10 directors to watch.

After all that, he’s now considering moving back to the U.S. with his wife and young son, having reached a truce with his creditors through consolidation of his debts. It’s a classic, and perhaps endangered, Sundance story.

“Independent means several different things,” Pemberton says after a screening of “Beyond the Ocean,” at Sundance. “It means independent companies. It means independent spirit. It also means you’re all alone.”