In school, I was awkward and anti-social. I had a hard time making long-lasting friends. Usually, I was soft spoken, and when I did say something, I ended up accidentally shocking or offending someone. I wasn't part of a clique.
Through Dan, I met a group of kids, still in high school when I graduated, that I started spending more and more time with. Among them was a girl that I took an immediate liking to. She suffered from panic attacks. On one occasion, she had one in the middle of our happy little group, and described it as "falling from a mountain." I was never sure if it was an act or not - a desperate plea for attention - but there was something sad about it.
In film school, they teach that film is a visual medium. That is, if you take away the music and the dialogue, you should still be able to understand the story. Arguably, dialogue can often be the most memorable part of a movie. How many movies can you quote memorable lines from? My films never had a lot of dialogue, but this time I was going to attempt something a little different; a silent film.
Having never studied the art of silent films, I knew I would be treading new territory. It was also the first time that I would be telling something serious. My past films had been attempts at comedy. But I wanted to do a film that evoked real emotions.
I wanted to become a writer because I wanted to create worlds for my readers to explore, and originally I got into filmmaking with the same ambition. But as I began studying films, I started to realize that one of the things movies did that books sometimes had a trouble with was conveying emotion. Books can generally do this with some heartfelt dialogue, and maybe even some touching scenery - but movies offer performances and music, enhancing the experience tenfold. With that in mind, I went to work writing A Walk Beside Eden.
The other reason I wanted to stray from dialogue was because I didn't want to have to worry about having actors memorize dialogue - and given that it was going to be a love story, I didn't want to be responsible for writing it. There's a fine line when considering a romantic story - on the one hand, you don't want to alienate the audience members who take your story seriously by throwing at them a bunch of mushy one-liners. On the other hand, you don't want to desensitize the romance just because you're a guy who grew up watching slasher movies. I didn't know how to write romantic dialogue, and I wasn't going to try.
Like Short Future, the original script for Eden told a personal story, and described a lot of situations I was going through at the time. My character, Adam, a nice guy but also a hopeless romantic, finds romance in a young girl, but gets tossed aside for the bad boy neighborhood bully. After Adam loses a few fights to the kid, he gives up hope and leaves the girl be. The girl, Candy, has a cousin named Eden who is sensitive to Adam's situation and decides to start dating him.
The two fall in love, during the traditional montage, and at the peak of their relationship they hit a wall when Adam realizes that Eden suffers from fatal panic attacks, and only has a short time to live. While this is happening, Adam has more personal issues with Candy and her tough-as-nails boyfriend Mervyn, who also had a backstory dealing with abusive parents.
It was certainly one of my more ambitious stories, and I didn't really have a clue how I was going to start filming it, but that was the ideal shooting script in 2006. While looking for actors to fill in the various roles, I started to get concerned that I wouldn't be able to find the right people for the two leads. I had no intentions of acting in this one, because the roles called for more serious performers. However, as time passed, nothing was getting shot, and I couldn't find anyone willing to act in the film.
I started going through the script, picking out locations that would be possible to shoot in. Originally, there was a scene at Spencer's Gifts, a scene within a hospital, and a scene within a cemetery; these were going to prove to be the hardest locations to get. But I was growing as a filmmaker, and I wanted this film to have some real locations. Besides, I had already shot every room in my house.
The management at Spencer's Gifts immediately turned me down. I discovered through trial and error that big corporations generally don't like when people come through their stores with video equipment - unless they can make some money. I faced a similar situation with the hospital. Because of all the privacy acts regarding patients, they weren't willing to let us film.
The cemetery was a different story. I started calling around to different funeral parlors, getting prices on funeral equipment. One of the funeral directors advised that I find a walk-in cemetery, which I hadn't thought of. Low and behold, I found one in downtown Beverly Hills.
The script also called for a restaurant, in which Adam and Eden have a flirtatious food fight. My wife Amanda was fortunate enough to know the owner of a local restaurant, and he was kind enough to let us shoot there for a couple hours. Once I had some locations, I decided it was time to make a few compromises.
There needed to be a romance between two characters. I knew that it was a pretty complex story, especially for a silent film, which ultimately followed several characters. The first critical decision I made was to once again take one for the team, taking the part of Adam. Amanda agreed to play the romantic lead. At that point, I realized it would be so much easier to shoot the majority of the film with just the two of us. I cut out the bullying boyfriend altogether, and Candy, Adam's former love interest, became a minor role. In this way I was able to condense the story and keep focus between the two main characters. It was a big compromise, but one that benefited the film.
I shot everything I could with Amanda and me, and then for whatever reason I lost momentum and we stopped filming for a year. As days turned into weeks, I got frustrated that I had a partial film on my hands, and I finally decided to get it finished in some shape or form. At that point, I hadn't directed anything since my 2002 short film, Attack of the B Movies, and I wanted to add another notch to my belt.
I called up a local bar and grill to hold an open casting call, and posted the event on Craigslist. Interestingly, I received about 50 phone and e-mail inquiries regarding the audition; only 11 people showed up. Because I was desperate for actors, I initially gave all of them parts; Sarah Galloway and Tameka Citchen were the only two actresses from the audition who ended up being in the film.
Sarah wound up being perfect for the role of the hard-to-get, sassy love interest Candy. We shot her scenes in one day. Ironically, her character was supposed to be a bigger part of the film, and we shot two different scenes in one day - but Sarah only had one change of clothes. She inquired how it was going to play out that way. However, a week later she contacted me and told me she would be unavailable for the rest of the shoot. I was able to string together both scenes to make it look like it occurred in the same day, so her single wardrobe worked to the film's advantage.
Dan took the role as cameraman, but I also had him offer his talents as a random extra in the restaurant scene.
For the scene at the hospital, I decided to shoot the sequence outside, intercutting footage of emergency vehicles and hospital exteriors. I found Eden's parents incidentally; musician Jim Ralston sent me an e-mail, initially wanting to record music for the film. Kim Czas called me on the day we were shooting exteriors for the hospital scene. She showed up on the set within the hour, and we began shooting a scene that I hadn't intended to shoot that day.
When I met Tameka Citchen, I admittedly didn't have a role prepared for her, but I didn't want to turn her away because of that. I thought up of a way to include her in the hospital scene as the mother of a newborn child; the idea was to have that parallel between life and death. She's in the film for a brief amount of time, as Adam walks across the street to visit Eden at the hospital, but it's a memorable scene to me.
The most profound part of the shoot was not Eden's funeral scene; it was my dad's. The idea was that Adam was a sympathetic character because he keeps losing people who are important in his life. We see that he has an intense relationship with his handicapped father, who is hopped up on pills and not in the best physical condition. To save time on finding an actor for the role, I enlisted the help of my real-life dad. I used the footage of him on his death bed, intercut with the funeral scene, in which friends and family mourn his passing, for a trailer that I debuted on MySpace. One of the first people to see the trailer was a cousin of mine, who called my grandparents crying, "How come no one told me that Uncle Bernie died?" To her, the footage was real. It was surreal to say the least, and for a while it really panicked some family members; but at the same time, it was sort of touching that it had that affect on people.
Another difficult scene for me was the last shot of the picture, where I have to mourn my wife's death. I actually did shed a few tears while filming the scene, although it isn't the most convincing performance ever. It goes to show just how much impact music can have on an otherwise two-dimensional scene.
I remember assembling the final project, watching it for the first time as a finished film. The experience was very emotional for me. I didn't own the rights to the music, but the selection I used throughout the film worked in spades. Everyone I showed the film to was incredibly impressed by how well it came together, and anyone who had seen my past work got to see how far I had come as a filmmaker.
I really knew I had a success when I showed the finished film to my grandparents. They were both reluctant to see it because of the scene where my dad dies. By the end of the film, I heard them sniffling from behind me, and naturally I just thought they had the sniffles. But they were really touched by the film. My dad, who had also seen the finished project, and who had always been my toughest critic, seemed to like it as well; although he couldn't understand why I went with such a depressing ending.
With A Walk Beside Eden, I wanted to tell a story that was emotional for the audience, but that also expressed one of my deepest fears; losing people close to me. While B Movies had been the most professional film I had done, having been shot on motion picture film with a crew, Eden was certainly the most polished. It goes to show that better equipment doesn't make a better movie. As it stands, Eden is my current masterpiece.