KAM: What were some of the money-stretching tricks you used while filming?
LW: One of the largest ones was I knew I wanted to have aerials in the movie, but aerials with a helicopter and a camera mount or a Tyler mount were very expensive. You know, any time you have a helicopter, it’s expensive. I had done a lot of jobs where I would be an assistant with helicopter shots, so I knew that whole side of it, and I knew that there was no way we’d be able to do that. And a friend of mine flies experimental aircraft, and his name’s Johnny Magic. He flies powered parachutes; a powered parachute is kind of like a go-kart with a big fan on the back, and the parachute is the wing. So, it kinda takes off and flies and can go about 20-some mph. …What we did was, we built our own camera mount for it out of aluminum rubber bands. So, for $60, we were able to do all of our aerials in the movie. And I should mention that for anybody that’s interested, the DVD for HT has over two hours of bonus material on it; there’s a whole thing about how we did the aerials on there. So, there’s a lot of behind-the-scenes things to take you into the process of how we actually made the film. That was probably the most cost-effective thing that we’d done.
Then we had the house, and the script called for the house to be knocked down. So, we ended up working in conjunction with the city of Scranton, and we looked at a number of abandoned structures. We found one and were able to rent it for, I think $300 or $400 for a number of months. And then in the end, the city ended up knocking it down. So it really kind of depends. I think at every turn, we were always trying to stretch the dollar, always trying to figure out ways to do things.
Most of the lighting that we did was done during the day. We used a lot of available lighting, and we offset it with Chinese lanterns. For instance, when it’s night in the house, it’s actually day. We had painted black cardboard wedged into all the windows, and we were only letting in a little bit of ambient light, and then we were accenting that with Chinese lanterns and practical bulbs and dimmers and things like that. You know, all the stuff you can get at, like, the Home Depot. Chinese lanterns are a little more challenging to find, but you can definitely find them; I think even Ikea has them. Our lighting package didn’t have anything bigger than a 1K. We did a lot of light mapping to figure out where the light was coming from at certain times of the day, and then we’d wait for those times in the day; we always kind of tried to find overcast days as well. Because of that natural light and using practical bulbs and Chinese lanterns, we were able to reduce what typically would’ve been an expensive lighting package, especially over 90 days. So, there’re a few things, just off the top of my head. I mean, we just kind of did it every step of the way.
KAM: Yeah, we feature a lot of articles in our magazine for ways filmmakers can save money, and a lot of them include different creative ways you can do your lighting and things like that. Well, you did some pretty over-the-top things to get the cool shots in the film. One of them, of course, would be the aerial shots with the powered parachute. What was the craziest stunt you had to perform to get a particular shot that you wanted in the film?
LW: Well, there were a bunch of them. Probably the most challenging was the flooded basement that we had. We built a series of containing pools in the basement, because we couldn’t just pour water into the basement because the foundation of the house was bad. Plus, you want more control than that. You don’t want the whole basement to be wet, because then you’re working in water, which is incredibly dangerous and difficult. So, everything we did in the basement was incredibly challenging; it took a lot of time, there’s a lot of safety to it, you know, making sure everything was tied up properly so no lines would fall into the water. The water was really cold. We had intended to heat the water, but we couldn’t, so it was probably 40-some degrees. So, the main actor spent some time in the water, and we tried to make it work with dry suits, we tried to do all kinds of things and in the end, we really couldn’t. So, we had to get in there and do it. So that was probably the most challenging and difficult stuff…there. But then, it was challenging when we blew up the car, and it was challenging when we did the ring of fire, and it was also challenging any time we did the aerial stuff.
I think what’s telling is I remember giving the script to [co-producer] John Stefanic, and John reading it and saying, “Well, there’s aerials in this, and there’s a flooded basement, and knocking down houses, and cars burning and exploding, and we have, like, $70K to do all this?!” And I was just like, “Don’t worry, we can do it all; I know we can make it happen.” And I think sometimes, it’s a combination of blind ambition, kinda mixed with, obviously, a degree of insanity. But we were able to do it, and we did have production insurance the whole time. I’m a big fan of that, and we got that for free actually. One good way to do that is if you ever happen to know someone who has a production company, or a corporate video company, or someone that has a policy already, a lot of times you can just ride on their policy. So, I was able to ride on a friend’s production company’s policy –a commercial production company—and the whole time we did the movie we had insurance. So, we made it through the film without any accidents; we didn’t lose any gear and nobody got hurt. It all worked out in the end.
