KAM: You started making Head Trauma in Spring of 2003, and it took about 3 years to make. Could you tell us a little about the film and why you decided to make it?
LW: HT tells the story about a man named George Walker who comes back home after a 20-year hiatus, and he comes back because he’s inherited his grandmother’s house. But when he gets back, he finds it condemned, slated for demolition, and inhabited by squatters. So, he decides he’s going to try to save the place. As he goes to save it, he ends up falling and striking his head, and starts having these reoccurring nightmares. And those nightmares start to cross over into reality.
I had had an experience in 1994 where I was in a vicious car accident, a head on collision with a garbage truck. My girlfriend at the time –she’s now my wife—we were in the vehicle at the time; I wasn’t wearing my seat belt and I went through the windshield, I busted my jaw, I was in intensive care for five days, and when I got out of the hospital, I was plagued by these crazy nightmares… fragmentations of the accident, weird symptoms, all kinds of lucid dreams and so on. I had a very hard time differentiating between what was [real] from what wasn’t. I always thought it was kind of interesting, and I filed it away, and then dusted it off in 2003, and turned it into a script, which I co-wrote with Brian Majeska. And we went to work on this movie. Initially, we thought that the film was going to take about 28 days or so to shoot. When we had a schedule for it, I convinced Vince Mola, who plays the lead and is normally clean-shaven, to grow a big beard for it and grown his hair out. So, that was a big commitment from him to do that part. And he said to me, “Okay, as long as it’s 28 days.” Well, ended up being 90 shoot days over the course of more than a year, and that was just because of the scope.
The scale and scope of HT is very ambitious… we have flooded basements, cars blowing up, we’re knocking down houses, we’re doing all kind of crazy aerials, and a lot of night shots. And all that was very ambitious for the scale and scope of the production. So what ended up happening was at times maybe we had 15 crew members and that was a really solid crew; and then other times, it was just me and the main actor. Now, I think with microbudget filmmaking, one of the best things you could ever do –at least through my own experience—is to know as much about all the different aspects of filmmaking that you possibly can. So no matter what, you can continue shooting. What happens is there’s an odds game, there’s a tipping point, and you want to make sure you get past that tipping point so you can actually complete what you started. Sometimes, the hardest part with microbudget filmmaking is the morale of the people who are working with you. So, the more you know about how to do something when someone comes to the set that day, or if they drop out, as long as you have your talent, you can pretty much do anything. Some of the more ambitious things in the movie were shot with a crew of, maybe, four people or a crew of fifteen, or even just me and the main actor.
KAM: I understand you used the DVX100 to shoot the film. How’d that work out for you?
LW: I think really well. We did a lot of testing; Sam Levy, my DP, and I had both been camera assistants for years. One of the first things we did was come up with a palette for the film, that was one of the first important parts. Because with a camera like the DVX100, or any camera, when you just turn it on, sure you can get good images, but it really comes down to the way you treat the lighting and how you want the movie to look. That takes a lot of time and preparation. So, working within the limitations of the format –such as mini-DV—we said, “Okay, this is very similar to reversal film stock.” It’s different from negative film because of its limited latitude; the highlights and the shadows don’t hold as much, you know, you blow out or you go really black. So, we did a lot of camera testing, and we built our own filter. We used lighting gels, and we opted to do that because I liked the imperfections of the gel itself when you put it between optical flat –which is glass. We taped them up using a CTO [Color Temperature Orange gel], which is used as color correction; and we took –¼ green [gel], which is used for fluorescents. And then we sandwiched them together and it created a really nice palette for the nightmares in the movie. And that was relatively easy for us to make and to do.
I like the camera a lot, but I think, like any other piece or gear, it’s a tool and it depends on how you use it. I think the results are really strong. At times, I wish we had had a little more resolution, but when we started, there wasn’t as much in the HD vein unless you were going to…a [much] more expensive package, which increases the cost all across the board.
KAM: I understand that you weren’t able to use the 24P advanced mode on the camera, simply because there wasn’t enough editing software that supported it at the time. What were the complications with using just the straight 24P option on the DVX100?
LW: Well, just to clarify, there are two modes on it: there’s the 24P standard mode and the 24P advanced. I wish we would’ve used the 24P advanced. We used the 24P standard, and the difference is it puts a 3:2 pull-down in-camera, whereas the 24P advanced allows you to get to a true 24-frame timeline when it’s supported in a post [production] environment. The reason we went with the standard was you could edit that in the 29.97 timeline. At the time, we were going to cut it in Adobe Premiere; we had done TLB that was, and it tended to be mostly PC-based. And what ended up happening was, over time, we made the decision to shoot that way because in the past, we’d been on the bleeding edge with certain things, and I just wanted to…be able to import and cut footage. And then sure enough, because it took so long to shoot, by the time we’d finished, it wasn’t as difficult to do as it was at first. So what ended up happening was we did a process that went in and basically removed the redundant frames and now everything’s fine.
