Notes on the Filming

The seeds of this screenplay came to me a few days before the Phantom Menace was released. I figured that after more than a decade of anticipation, even if I didn't like this movie I could make my own movie about people being disappointed by it. Last year I wrote the script under the influence of the Clientele's first full length album Suburban Light.

The actual filming took place in three all night sessions in late summer 2003. It was a good time but intense. We kept pizza, beer, and bug spray on hand and dialogue became more and more improvised as a night progressed.

We shot the construction site scene from 10pm till 6am. I wanted the dawn to look like dawn and for the actors to talk as if they had stayed up all night. It was Billy's second all-nighter in a row. He had just come from a twenty-four hour stretch of moving two truckloads of furniture up five flights of stairs. You can hear the exhaustion in his voice in the early morning scenes.

There were no street lights or electrical outlets at the construction site so we powered the lighting equipment, which consisted of a "winter blues" light therapy box, from a car cigarette lighter, turning on the engines every two hours so the batteries would not go dead.

The montage at the end of the film was necessitated by the fact that construction workers showed up before daylight, just as we were filming the morning dialogue. I remember the sinking feeling as I heard the loud engines approaching and watched the line of imposing trucks turn the corner and idle in our only exit. We must have made a strange scene, three cars in a cul-de-sac, pizza boxes, wires, and blankets hanging out of windows, and a light therapy box on a roof.

All of the visuals of Ian and Jason at dawn were taken in the tense rush of the three-or-so minutes after the workers arrived. We didn't get dialogue on the first take and instead of waiting around to be kicked out or arrested, we drove to a friend's house and recorded the ending dialogue on the porch later that morning.