Peter's House + Music

Two years ago when I started working on NICOTINE I wrote Peter's house scenes with a very specific location in mind. An actor I worked with on my first feature was going to let me use his place.  It was a style I liked and the layout gave me the very openness I was looking for. But since things didn't work out then (mostly because I wasn't finished writing) and he no longer lives in amazing Minnesota, I've been trying to find a different house. One pretty big scene would take place in the house, plus a few smaller, but equally important scenes would also happen. Whatever house we use, we'll have to spend at least three total days working on scenes.

A couple weeks back I drove around a few small close-knit neighborhoods looking for houses. For some reason I was smacked with a great deal of ambition, thinking that if I found that one house that "spoke to me", I could just use it. Well, that's not the case. Aside from not finding that house, it was an almost unrealistic idea. I don't know why I thought that.

Then last week as we wrapped up a scene, Rudy (who is playing the character of Scott) mentioned that if we wanted to, he would be open to letting us use his house. Awesome. Sometimes things just fall into place.

Nice layout to the kitchen that connects directly to a dinette area, plus wood floors. Wood floors. I love wood floors.

Rudy suggested, because one major scene takes place in the middle of the night, that we use his basement. There are two small windows in the basement, versus about six upstairs. That would mean we'd spend less money on room-darkening material for windows -- thinking that we'd shoot the scenes during the day to give us time, also, people are sleepy at night. I never considered anyplace but an upstairs living room for the major scene. But after looking at the basement, and also figuring out who Peter is and what his living arrangement is like with his girlfriend Courtney, it seemed to make sense that Peter had a sort of private "man cave" of sorts where he and his buddies would hang out. While I say this is Peter's house, it's really Courtney's house, and the basement change was approved by her. This is all subtext, of course, but it's the meat that brings the reasoning behind the character actions to life. That's probably as much character stuff as you'll get from me on this blog.

Scene 30 | Pages 32 - 36

7:45pm - 9:30pm

While we weren't able to rehearse with the entire space, we now have a better idea of how the scene will go down. Next week I will be working more at blocking out camera placement.

Harold standing in the doorframe at the top of the basement steps.

We've rehearsed this scene, including last week, probably twelve or thirteen times. It's evolving each time we run through it. My feedback and notes for the actors might be a bit contradictory in some aspects, because there are several different emotions behind the lines and behind why this scene happened the way it happened. But it's a good thing. That way all the emotions are on the table, we're piecing them together, and finding some kind of organic truth to the entire thing. 

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After rehearsing, Rudy and I sat down and talked about music for the film. Rudy is in a band called Dude Worthy. There's an accordion involved, and that's pretty awesome. Last week I told him that I was listening to a lot of Tom Waits while writing the screenplay; specifically I wanted Drunk on the Moon to close the film. Though we probably won't get the rights to it. Rudy is going to work on something that sounds like that, but isn't that. Guitar, upright bass, piano, sax -- all unpolished, scratchy, a bit rough. Though I stated early on that I didn't want acoustic guitar stuff, because every damn indie movie uses that. I don't want that. This cannot be one of those movies.

I was going to post a brief video of Rudy starting to put together some stuff, but blogger doesn't want to upload anything today. Bummer. Here's a photo, however.

Things are still coming together. Still unsure of when the first day of shooting will be. The more and more I think about it, I think the very first thing we'll shoot is the exterior stuff at Eddie's house.

As of right now we have $330, out of a goal of $1,000. If you'd like to donate to help me make my film, please click on the button below.