Parrot
“My producing partner, Z. Joseph Guice, read a news headline about a gentlemen who carried a gun into a Drag Queen Story Hour. Although nothing happened, it really hit a nerve for him. He decided it was story that really needed to be explored, so he wrote the script and sent it my way.”
“It sat in my inbox for maybe three or four months, before I actually had a moment to read it. After reading the script I immediately got back to him as I felt this was a story that needed to be told; especially with everything that was happening that has divided our country. We knew that taking on this project, as this was right in the middle of Covid and we just had to work out how we would navigate the production. Being an independent, filmmaker was like the wild west when it came to Covid. So, that was a little bit of a challenge.”
“There was a real sense of timing for the film, as the topic was just so relevant in the moment. We knew we had to shoot it as soon as we could, so it really came down to us. Nobody wanted to give us money, it was Covid and people were either being laid off or facing the prospect of being laid off. And others were just trying to get their investments back from other things because of Covid shutting it down. And so, we ended up having to finance the film ourselves. We had a really good cinematographer who really believed in the story and agreed to shoot it for a fraction of what he would normally charge. We got a lot of people and crew who really believed in the story early on, which really helped us, but the Covid factor was a very big deal.”
“We started filming right at the beginning of Covid, right before any of the vaccines came out. The place that we were filming was still closed because of COVID, which in a sense, kind of worked out for us. But casting and getting all those people on board was really hard. We sent out the casting call thinking no one would respond since it was in the middle of a pandemic and oddly enough, we ended up getting a lot of responses with people wanting to do it.”
“We did have some struggles with the divide that exists in the US, we needed to work through what was safe and what wasn't safe. And there was a lot of people not necessarily believing in Covid, so we had to filter through a lot of that. We also had the new thing of testing. We had to get everyone tested, which was something we never had to do ever in the past. That didn't help with the budget at all, but thankfully, once we got in to the production it was pretty smooth.”
“We shot the film in Philadelphia PA, which we have to really thank Ian Morrison for. Ian is a drag queen in Philadelphia and played the drag queen in the film. There were two big challenges for the film. From a production standpoint there was finding and filming something like a library in the middle of Covid. And the other was where are we going to find a drag queen. The one big stipulation that my whole team had, including our cinematographer, was that we needed to cast an actual drag queen. We needed somebody who has experience with this story, someone who has lived the hatred from the other side”
“We literally just googled ‘Philadelphia Drag Queen’ and the most relevant result seemed to be Ian Morrison, who goes by the character name of Brittany Lynn. We reached out to Ian and asked him if he knew any drag queens that would be interested in being involved with this film. We asked Ian to put out our casting call through his network and we also put one out through ours. Weeks went by with no responses, we did get a couple of actors who wanted to put a wig on and play a drag queen. But we didn't have any actual drag queens, which we thought was interesting.”
“Ian did actually submit a response to the casting call. We narrowed it down to five and ultimately went with Ian, mainly because during his casting call, he wrote a monologue that was specifically around this exact situation that had happened to him.”
“People were protesting whilst he was doing a story hour, calling him all sorts of names and generally making the event uncomfortable. In that moment, we realized that this story is his story and we're telling his story. Later on, we asked him why we never did get a response from the casting call that he sent out for us. He told us that he never sent it out, because that was his part!”
“Because Ian was a local and had lots of great connections, we contacted a library where he had hosted a drag queen story hour. At first, the library actually said no, mainly because of Covid. We had this amazing librarian who worked at the library really go to bat for us, and push for it, so eventually we got the approval to shoot for four days.”
“During filming I think the hardest part was working with that amount of children on a topic that was pretty scary. We didn't tell them the background of the story or what it was about. We did however give them the premise of what was going on, just so they weren't saying at the end that they didn't sign up for this. But we didn't give them the whole story because we didn't want to scare them, as it's a pretty heavy film. Essentially given there is an active shooter out there and we didn't really want to go into that with them.”
“Our Lead child actor, Wesley Holloway, was incredible. It was like working with an adult; he's a professional. I think a lot of that is a testament to his parents. One of the last films that I did, ‘The Boy Hero’ has a kid in that I also spoke very highly of his parents. And I think when you have parents that are just super supportive it just makes working with kids that much easier, and also a lot more fun.”
“We were going for a unique vintage look on this film, so in terms of lens choices we ultimately settled on Cooke Panchro lenses that gave us a really beautiful soft look to the images. It also helped us when we got into the color phase as well. Our cinematographer, Rick Cook is incredible. He showed you can do a lot with very little. He made the production that much more worthwhile, and just really brought more to the table than we ever thought was possible. And that's just his ability to manoeuvre lighting and to be able to have motion to the camera with very little equipment, the whole thing really is a testament to him.”
“We ended up shooting it on the Red Komodo mainly because our cinematographer owned one. We tested that and an Arri Alexa and it came down to the fact that we were funding the whole film, and Rick was willing to work with us on keeping our costs down. Which made that decision pretty easy.”
“We did all the post work as I'm a freelance colorist by trade. I don't market myself as one but I pick up a lot of work in that space. We did all the post work inside of DaVinci Resolve and it was the first time we’ve had the whole workflow inside Resolve. We brought on our sound designer and composer, Keith Giosa, who is just incredible. All the media, all the syncing, all the editing and the sound work. The whole post pipeline right from beginning to end was done in Resolve.”
“It was honestly like night and day from what we were used to. Going from having to round trip things to having it all contained within one single application was just awesome. Our sound guy works in a different studio. With Fairlight up and running and we were able to bounce it over to him and then have it built and bounced back. It was incredible. The whole thing was so streamlined, it made things a lot less of a headache. The entire process was awesome.”
“Watching the film, there's always a million things that you would change, I think every film that I ever do, or that we ever do, will always have that element to it. But looking back on it now, the whole thing from production to post was probably one of the easiest shoots that we've ever done. The process was really enjoyable.”
