The Green light

 · 
July 22, 2007

Oh, I forgot to mention; one of the reasons the financiers agreed to my cast was that I cut 2 million dollars out of the budget. There is only one way to do this; cut shooting days. How do you cut enough shooting days to cut 2 million dollars? Cut the script.


So, I cut 20 pages and rewrote to cover the holes. Frankly, I think that last draft shocked the script into its best form. I ended up shooting the entire film, and a full-length music video in 25 days.

The rest of the cast had fallen miraculously into place. Gina Gershon as Toby’s manager, Cinque Lee (Spike’s brother) as the director of a serial killer reality show called Slice of Life, David Wain and Callie Thorne as K’harma’s publicists, Kevin Corrigan as Les’ only friend and Elvis Costello as himself in a celebrity cameo after David Bowie, Sylvester Stallone and Paul McCartney turned us down.

The schedule was intense. We were moving so fast I couldn’t lose focus for a second. I was literally making 200 decisions a day—thankfully a few more right ones than wrong ones. As terrifying as it was the rush was also exhilarating, like driving 100 miles an hour along the edge of a cliff.

I had designed the film as a kind of contemporary fable. Toby was the lost innocent wandering through the wilderness of NYC. Les was the troll he meets under the bridge that he must make a deal with to get across and K’harma was the lonely princess Toby has to help redeem her soul. This fable aspect helped me and the production team find the look of the film. Les’ grungy apartment became subterranean, with wall murals of forest glades and stuffed animals in the corners. I was shown a book of taxidermy rentals and told on our tight budget I could only afford three. I chose a squirrel, a deer and a jackelope--the fictitious desert rabbit with antlers.

In contrast, K’harma’s celebrity world needed to have a rich, seductive luster. For all her scenes we kept the camera (35mm) on a dolly and saturated the scenes with light. For Les’ scenes cinematographer Frank DeMarco designed a looser, handheld style that still had a strong sense of purpose. The handheld camera allowed for great interplay between Steve and Michael. Although all the scenes were completely scripted actors like these intuitively come up with spontaneous elements of behavior and the looser style of shooting enabled us to capture them.

I knew this spontaneity was crucial to Delirious. Two main film influences were Midnight Cowboy and A Hard Day’s Night. Both films have a raw vibrancy that is still thrilling today. On some of my previous films I felt that the pressure of filming took away some of my joy in being on the set. During the six years it took me to get the film together I’d made a vow to myself that if I ever did get on the set again I would put my soul into this movie. I would enjoy myself, no matter what. I would strive to create some joyful, living moment every time the camera rolled.

One of those moments came when I found out halfway through the shoot that Michael Pitt thought the jackelope was real.

 

Toby and the Jackelope

 

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TOM DICILLO

Independent Filmmaker & Musician