Filmmaker Q & A for INTERMATE

1.  Please explain your inspiration and point of view when you first started developing and collaborating on the Sci-Fi feature film, INTERMATE and why you made this film. How or what prompted the idea for your film and how did it evolve?

I first started collaborating with a friend, Wayne Weber in the late 1970’s based on reading science fiction novels and short stories by Philip K, Dick, Robert Sheckley, John Brunner and many others. We felt that most science fiction films at the time did not show the original, imaginative worlds these books offered.  Also I must have been influenced by the popular TV show at the time, Charlie’s Angels, which had three female leads.  We didn’t have a script, we just made up index cards for various scenes. In the mid 80’s we had various drafts of a script while adding a third writer, John Powers who made the dialogue more realistic, and less verbose. There were many more drafts over the years. Even though I was involved in other projects, I never abandoned it.

 2.  What inspired you to become a filmmaker?  Please explain your history in filmmaking.

 I started using my father’s 16mm Bell & Howell magazine camera in the early 1960’s and was hooked. I bought a used16mm Bolex camera in the mid- 60’s, made several shorts including a horror film with friends and an abstract ice skating film shot in Central Park. In 1970 I made a 70 minute 16mm experimental, non-dialogue film, “Stop Motion”, a visually accelerated trip through New York using real people as well as fictional characters.

 Working with a couple of close friends and who’d moved from New York   to California, and inspired by filmmakers like Russ Meyer, I co-produced  and was cinematographer of a porno called “Hot Circuit”, that won first prize at the New York Erotic Film Festival in 1971. I also was the co-producer and cinematographer of the very successful sex farce, “The Cheerleaders”. Released theatrically in the summer of 1972, the movie was a nationwide smash.

 I was the director and co-producer of the cult classic, “Revenge of the Cheerleaders” in the mid-seventies, featuring David Hasselhoff in his first film screen appearance bare ass and all. An over-the-top world of high school anarchy, it was one of the wildest of all the drive-in teen sex comedies of the 70’s. Selected by Quentin Tarantino for the first Tarantino Film Festival in Austin,1996.

I was the producer, cameraman, and co-director of the critically acclaimed Beat Generation documentary “What Happened to Kerouac?” (1984) featuring Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, William Buckley, Steve Allen, and many others.

 I produced, directed, and photographed the holocaust documentary “Out of Europe” (2005), a tribute to my family, which had two days to escape Belgium in 1940 before the Nazi ground forces invaded.

 In 2012 I compiled a 139 minute bonus DVD called “The Beat Goes On”, to accompany a new release of “ What happened to Kerouac?” from Shout Factory

 3.  What do you want the audience to ‘take away’ after they have seen the film.

 That it’s not like any other sci-fi film. It’s based on a reality game that’s gone one big step past virtual reality where you have to find the right player to get the ecstatic flashout in an actual mini-universe. That’s why the reality repairman has to destroy it …to protect the order of the multiverse.

It progresses into different worlds where you don’t really know what’s going to happen next. It has a humorous sensibility throughout and pairs complex sci-fi concepts with far-out special effects while not taking itself too seriously, as this genre often does. The humor came out naturally as we were shooting the film. Many people’s take on the film is that it’s camp.

 4.  What is your relationship to the cast of this film and how was it working with them?

We didn’t have time to rehearse so we often did a quick run thru of a scene for camera and for blocking. But what could have made the performances less refined often made them fresh and unexpected. What really helped was that the three female leads, Lorynn York, Maya Stojan, and Malea Rose became friends and are still good friends today. Jonathan Goldstein was able to overcome the difficult challenges of his mixed-up dialogue of his reality repairman character. He brought out the humor in his confrontations with uncooperative Earthlings and the three space habitat women. We had a large cast, so It was fun for me to have so many new characters enter the film each day and it was fresh for them.

 5.  Where did you shoot the film and how did you find your location(s)?

 Finding and coordinating the many locations was one of the film’s greatest challenges. The first week we were shooting in the vicinity of Lancaster and Palmdale. It was great to get out of LA to give the film a more open, less metro look. We shot the desert scene in Jawbone Canyon, shot in an outdoor café for the punk scene, shot various car scenes, a night shoot at a motel, and a crane shot of Repairman’s walking down a smog (added VFX) infested deserted suburban street. In the following weeks it was challenging to get a hillside with a steep drop off near LA. We couldn’t get a real radio telescope location so we had to build a set. We had to scramble with just a few days left to find a vacant lot for the encounter between Repairman and Lleva or a parking lot for the rock club. It’s amazing that we found everything in time for the shoot.

6.  When did you meet your collaborators? How did those partnerships come about?

 I knew Wayne Weber in junior high school in Queens and started working with him on the project in the late 70’s. He was a science fiction addict and helped me appreciate the genre. He came up with the sci-fi worlds in the story and a lot of Repairman’s incorrect English. John Powers, I met through my ex-partner on The Cheerleaders, Paul Glickler. John made the dialogue more believable and concise especially with the characters from Earth that interact with the four leads from other worlds.

 7.  What was your biggest challenge with making this movie, and the moment that was the most rewarding to you, where you knew you had something .

The biggest challenge was the responsibilities and distractions of producing an independent film while also focusing on directing. It was also a challenge getting through several of the night shoots which can totally upset your normal sleeping cycle.

Most rewarding was hearing reactions from women at the first screenings that normally wouldn’t go to a sci-fi film. They really liked it, thought it was fun and wanted to tell their friends about it. Men seemed to think of it as very unique and that it could have a cult following.

The costume designer, Dakota Keller kept surprising us with amazing wardrobe for the women when they’re in the space habitat and also when they became escorts on Earth. The excellent wardrobe carried over to all the other characters too. It really added to the overall look of the production.

It was also rewarding adding creative visual effects, especially for the flashouts, which are the big bang moments for several key scenes. It wasn’t easy, as you have to go through many versions to make a VFX work. I was lucky to be dealing with two very talented visual effects artists, Patrick Lomantini and Worth Bjorn Walters.

8.  What made this project come together and be successful?

It came together having perseverance in finding the right people to help navigate through obstacles in order to make the film work. Being successful is having an ability to reject what isn’t good. The editor, Zach Wolf made problematic scenes work and was invaluable in structuring the film.

9.  Please elaborate a bit on your approach to making the film, including your influences (if any).

 Having not making a fictional film with actors and crew for many years, it was important to get a good line producer, Aya Nakano who had experience in low budget productions and getting a strong assistant director, Jason Sklar who knew how to control the set. They were essential in planning out the film, getting a good crew with a limited budget and getting the shots done for each day’s schedule.

10.  What was your most memorable experience about shooting INTERMATE?

The most memorable experience was actors doing adlibs that made the film more real and often more humorous. You can get so tired of your own script. The sci-fi dialogue was not altered; it remained mostly intact.  But if an actor comes up with better lines for their scene that they are more comfortable with or work better for their character, it can be a real bonus.

11.  Please address the music in the film. How did these choices come about?

I obtained music licenses for several scenes: including chase music and a soul song for the Jogger scene, rhythmic vocals and a rap song for the rock club, a spacey vocal for Lleva getting high, an upbeat vocal for the flashout montage, and country vocals to increase the tension in the car scenes with Desa and Mathew.

I had a nice mixture of original compositions by Spencer David Hutchings that complemented scenes in different ways. The motel scene was helped by the tension of the strings and percussion, while the Eric Satie-like keyboard anticipatory cue added to the scene of Lleva entering the hospital to find Repairman. A rich, climactic composition added to the grandeur of the four people flashing out for the hillside scene. Sometimes we even used some light guitar themes to hide bad sound.

I accidentally synched up Beethoven’s Leonora #2 Overture to the ending bedroom scene with Frank and Iastar in the alternate space habitat universe and was amazed at how well it worked. I couldn’t afford to use it so Spencer composed a classical piece influenced by Leonora #2 that was wonderful. It gave the scene just what it needed.

I got terrific sound effects editing and mixing done at Technicolor- PostWorks NY which really helped the film.

12.  How do you think INTERMATE fits into your personal growth as a director? How will it affect your future projects?

You need to be calm on the set, to be in a positive frame of mind, know what you want and to be visually intuitive of how best to shoot a scene. Having to cover so many locations and shoot so with many different setups I also learned not to take too much time in the first few setups of the day as it will make you have to rush to get in the scenes that need to be shot at the end of the day which are just as important.

13.  Share something unique about the film. It can be related to the subject, the title, the making of the film, the vision behind the film, casting, location, script, etc.

John Powers who was also the co-producer and I did a great job of casting the film. Good casting gives you a head start in making a film work. We got three attractive female leads that complimented each other very well. Jonathan Goldstein looked the part, performed very well at physical humor and was great at doing the voice over’s which narrate the film. Almost all of the smaller parts were selected by video auditions and we didn’t go wrong.

I changed the title of the film from “The Repairman” to “Intermate” as a more fun, original sci-fi title.

The vision behind the film is that three women from a space habitat in a parallel universe need to solve their problem of getting stuck on Earth and figure a way to get back to their space habitat home by finding the fourth player.  However they get separated into different story lines. It’s like one of those sci-fi paperbacks we used to read in the 60’s and we finally made it into a film.

14.  What are some of your favorite films, and what are your other creative influences?

I like the greats: Fellini, Godard, Kubrick, Antonioni, Fassbinder, Hitchcock, Scorsese, Mike Leigh, Olivier Assayas, Jacques Demy, among many others.

There are so many films I admire. Here are a few:

8 ½, La Dolca Vita, Satyricon, Barry Lyndon, Lolita, North by Northwest, Vertigo, Contempt, La Notte, Raging Bull, Pulp Fiction, Ali: Fear eats the Soul, Carlos, Blue Velvet, A Prophet, The French Connection, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.

15. Future projects in the pipeline?  Tell us!

I’ve been talking to a fellow filmmaker friend about collaborating on a project that combines non-fiction with fiction. Having actors in a real world environment but probably not sci-fi.