Ayuda
“What you see in this film is a much smaller piece of a larger idea. It is a short film that is part of a potentially larger story around the idea of exploitation of people. And I guess, the whole notion of a vampire continues that theme in a very literal way.”
“One of the things that was important to me, was to start the story from a place in the real world where we can see people reacting to something as they would in real life. In the case of this movie, I was thinking, what if you had to bury a body in the woods and you were hurt… where would go for help?”
“My first idea was to have an Uber driver help to bury the body! But that was a little too strange. So then, I came back to hiring help from the place where you would purchase the wood for the box. And so I guessed you’d probably go to Lowes Home Improvement Stores and get a couple of day workers to come and help!”
“I had a much longer script written for this film, but then I had to compress the script into what we could actually make. My original script had the Jeep driver pull up in front of a crowd of people and say, ‘who speaks English?’ He then selects the two guys who don’t. And that’s how these two workers wind up in the back of the Jeep. But that scene was just too difficult to pull off with this kind short.”
“And so the whole thing was supposed to start in an urban setting where they just keep driving further and further, until they’re out in the middle of nowhere. The idea was for the two workers to have no idea where they are at and where this guy is ultimately driving them.”
“I never saw these guys as two buddies who work as a pair. They were just randomly selected and don’t know each other. But nothing galvanizes people more than having an external shared threat. So in this case, they didn’t know if the Jeep driver was going to kill them or not.”
“I originally had a different opening scene to the one we used, where the two workers are crammed in the back of the Jeep. But when I saw this scene of the two guys sitting in the back, I knew instantly that was the one. It feels really uncomfortable with the two guys and the wooden box.”
“But to have a box big enough to put a person in, turned out to be a much bigger box than you would imagine! Part of the appeal of this scene is that shows immediately that the older guy driving, was just indifferent to the two migrant workers. He was never meant to be evil, he just needed their help to bury the box. For me, that power of indifference was meant to be a passive thing. The migrant workers were coming to help, so of course they would be sitting in the back of the Jeep with the coffin.”
“When I was planning this scene, the one thing I didn’t want was a pick up truck. I didn’t get a sense of this older guy wanting to blend in. I had a sense that events had conspired against him. And so, the story originally had him driving a station wagon, but I couldn’t find one big enough to take a coffin along with two workers.”
“The whole setup had this very interesting geometry and so in the end we determined that the Jeep would be the right vehicle to fit the coffin. It was really important to me that he didn’t turn up in something like a plumber’s van. But the sort of vehicle anyone could be driving.”
“This is the sort of story that invites you to think that you’ve already figured it out. For example when you open the crate and you see there is a young women in it…well you always knew that. But hopefully you don’t see what comes next.”
“Laura did a great job of being both vulnerable and vicious during the box reveal scene. She was actually thrown in the box and hit with a wooden stake, so much of what you’re seeing was real emotion coming from her experiences at that moment. She was actually locked in the coffin and then carried into the forest, so there was something very real about her vulnerability when they take the lid off.”
“The whole ‘jack-in-a-box’ moment, when she leaps out of the box and we go straight to black, was a scary moment to shoot. The whole idea was to have the audience read a half second of the situation and then have it gone, not knowing what happens next.”
“The kind of shots we were going for with this scene are wider. The sort of thing where the trees are swirling around the edges, which creates this sense of something very surreal closing in around them. For those shots of the trees around the coffin, I had these old Russian anamorphic lenses from Cineovision. I really liked the look of these lenses in the center of the frame, and then at the outer edges. It all became so swirly closing in around you. I wanted to create this sense of the woods being a dynamic part of that scene as well.”
“The location I also thought was very important. The kinds of rolling mountains they have in Virginia can be scary and disorientating. You can walk over a hill and find that everything looks the same in the next valley; so you can feel lost in that sort of landscape.”
“The goal here was find a location where you couldn’t see where you are. The reality is that the place we shot was part of a college campus and very pretty. It was actually 10mins walk from civilization and wasn’t in the wilderness as we were portraying in the film.”
“The funny thing is, the week before when we were scouting the location, all of the leaves were still on the trees. It was so beautiful and really felt like a secluded woodland. And just before we planned to shoot, the leaves fell off! So you can see a lot more of the woods than I actually ever intended. As the director, I still wish it had been leafier so they had less vision of their surroundings, but it definitely worked out in the end.”
“Most of the story is deliberately spoken in Spanish. Although I couldn’t write the Spanish dialog which was very frustrating because I enjoy writing dialog. I had to write this in English and then have someone who could capture the essence of it in Spanish for me. There is a lot that can be lost in the wordplay between the two languages and Spanish has a real poetry to the way it is spoken. So to make the dialog work, I had a close friend help me to do the translations.”
“In the opening scene he is trying to be funny and says that the driver is weird. But in Spanish, it comes out as this guy is a panty-head, which is so weird and funny when you think about it. On the day of shooting there were so many lines that tripped up the two Spanish speaking actors. One of the actors was born in the US and the other was born in South America, so I really had to give them a free rein to alter the dialog to fit their own patterns of speech for the characters.”
“They both had to do an accent that they were the most comfortable with, so they could hit the beats of the lines. They both have very different accents and the workers look very different as well. And so each actor had a different take as to what they should do in this situation, which I think really adds to the story.”
“When I was writing this, I kept thinking that not every worker from Latin America is an illegal immigrant, but everyone assumes they are. One of the characters says he has papers and is not an illegal immigrant and could call the cops if he needed to. But of course the driver is ignorant to all of that, because he is preoccupied with the vampire tied up in the box!”
“In shooting this short film, we had to rely a lot on natural light so the timing of scenes was crucial. When we shot the last scene the light wasn’t really holding all that well, so the DP had to use a wireless practical for the car scene. As a consequence the ending scene was ultimately shot in just under 10mins. We had time for just two takes and it was Laura’s first line in the whole movie, so it was a complete panic with so little light. But she just nailed it on the first take. We did one for the movie and one for the safety, so it was all pretty stressful.”
“I have been very happy with the level of engagement I have had with this movie and the many theories that the audience comes up with. It’s always fun and interesting to hear the theories that people throw out there. Where I was watching the first audience screening, I was sweating bullets, because there was a lot that I cut out because the movie was getting a little too long. So a lot of things didn’t make the final cut.”
“The big thing about this short is that the story is not over. I really wanted to keep the mystery going and there is so much more that could happen.”