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In the dog days of summer, our fancy has turned to movie–making – we of the theater. We have ventured forth because we are just about there now, boys and girls. We are almost to that point now where it is as easy to make a movie as it is to write a story or paint a picture, so that now we can all be movie–makers, just as we are all writers and artists, right?
For his previous movie, Blood of the Beast, Georg Koszulinksi was named "Best Director" of the Rhode Island International Horror Film Festival. The movie won a "Grand Jury Award" at the Cinerama Film Festival, and the "Emerging Filmmaker Award" at the Dahlonega International Film Festival
Georg calls Silent Voyeur, his new movie, "an inquiry into morality." At the core of the movie is a porno–snuff film. In his Director's Notes to his screenplay, Georg writes, "Ostensibly, the subject matter might appear grotesque and violent, even pornographic, but my approach as director will be precisely the opposite, to call attention to our desires, which we satisfy daily when we watch the evening news, read the newspaper, or sit in dark theaters as silent voyeurs."
In the movie within the movie there is an Actor, a willing actor, because the other actors will not be willing actors. They will be forced into situations in which they will have to act as actors, but for them it will not be acting; for them it will be real.
The thing is, Georg explains to me at the Shamrock, he's shooting this on 16 millimeter film, actual film, so he wants to shoot the entire interior drama in one shot, like a play, something like Hitchcock's Rope.
Lara Sfire plays Veronica, the quick–witted victim who tries to talk her way out of trouble with an invented plot of her own.
I am familiar with Lara Sfire from her work in Sheila Bishop's musical Lick. There she was a libidinous shard of personality, sharp and alluring. Lara's own film I of the Voyeur, which she directed and stars in, will be screened at the Hippodrome Cinema on August 9. In I of the Voyeur, Lara plays three different women whose lives intersect. But they are like parallel lines that somehow converge. The stories of their lives are simultaneous and are determined by their environmental conditioning, a hinge that could swing one way as easily as its opposite just given a push. The title is eerily like a doppelganger for Silent Voyeur
Jake Molzan has recently returned from Greece where he toured with UF's production of Taming of the Shrew. A former Navy SEAL and Gator punter, Jake is a fabulous athlete, a big galoot with the craggy good looks to be our anti–hero, John Doe or Tanner or Victor, as he is alternately known, while desperately trying to fit together his own personality.
Nick Savage, musician, comrade of Bo Diddly, plays the nefarious Prisoner, who is also the porn film's cameraman. Nick is about my age (52), and he and I are the veterans of life on the set. Nick hasn't acted before, but that doesn't matter as much in the movies as it does on stage. The quiet intensity of Nick's performance is scary.
Eric Cheek is a drummer and plays the earnest young husband with a good–natured insouciance. He's new to acting too, but willing, even to the point of having a shotgun barrel shoved down his throat.
To begin to break the screenplay down into units of production, there are three acts. There are thirty scenes altogether, and there are three distinct timelines – versions of the truth, none of them pure. Then you have to break it down into interior and exterior scenes.
The Production schedule kicks off in mid–May with auditions. I don't audition much. By June 6 Georg has finalized his cast except for the Dead Man. That's when Esther Biggs, production manager of Silent Voyeur, takes Georg to see my live wire performance in Threepenny Opera and figures I will be a perfect Dead Man.
Turns out the Dead Man has a few tricks up his sleeve before he dies. In fact he's the Actor in the porno–snuff movie within the movie. Not a whole lot of lines, but crucial to the plot, a quirky character to be developed. The Dead Man is dead in the beginning of the movie, but it takes most of the rest of the movie to figure out how he got dead.
Through mid–June, Georg, cinematographer Adam Nikolaidis, and Esther scout locations for the interior and the exterior of the desolate cabin where the violent drama is played out. They find it, believe me, the interior in an abandoned tin–roofed Come to Jesus hellhole on a dirt road near Mincanopy, and the exterior falling apart beneath a palm tree and swallowed by gorse near Cross Creek.
The rest of June is spent shooting what's called the b–roll – that is the film Georg is shooting to be background to the a–roll, establishing the location and particulars behind the story in the foreground.
We start rehearsing in July. Rehearsing a movie is different than rehearsing a play. When you rehearse a play, you connect each beat, each unit of action, each choice to the next, finding ways to reveal them to the audience. In a movie, the camera does the showing. What you rehearse involves how to make it look like it never happened before, so the more you rehearse, the harder it gets.
The action of each scene needs to be rough–blocked. There are scenes in a moving truck. There's a scene at the motel where the ill–fated friends are staying. There are parallel scenes in the hammock where they are attacked and captured. And then there are the climactic scenes in the dread cabin where the snuff film is shot.
Shooting begins July 9, first at the Florida Motel. Then it's on to Louis' Diner, where Cameraman, Director, and Actor chow down before hunting their victims. Then we are along the road to Cross Creek. Adam is in the bed of the truck, shooting into the side–view mirror, Luke Zarazecki, our grip, is monitoring sound, as we tool along.
The next day is spent in the interior of the cabin. Cameraman and I plot to kill the Director. It's an actor's dream, despite the heat in a tin–roofed barn in the woods in Florida in the dead heat of summer.
On Sunday we head for Gold Head State Park to shoot the abduction scenes. We trek with all our equipment for half an hour into the woods till we arrive at the stream where the love couple will be attacked. The set–up is miserable, swarming with insects, wading in the stream, keeping the cameras dry, holding the cords to the boom out of the water. Nick and I hack our way through the brush to make our entrance. After half a dozen run–throughs we shoot the scene. We manage one other medium shot before the rains come. The company breaks ranks and scrambles for cover.
By mid week we are back to the cabin for the interior action scenes – a punch–up, some gunplay and its grisly results. By now poison ivy has spread all over my person – my personal person as well as my character's. Poison ivy sores are climbing up Esther's leg. And Georg is scratching at his ankles.
A little old lady wanders toward the Jesus Barn. Mrs. Hare is 91. She gave us permission to use the Jesus Barn. Turns out she doesn't own it, her son does, but she gave us permission nonetheless. She visits us on the movie set often.
Lara and Eric are lying on the Eric's spread–out sleeping bag in the shade of a tree.
"Y'all are gonna have red bugs all over you," Mrs. Hare says.
"Are they red?" Lara asks, brushing herself.
"Oh no. You caint see em. They call em red bugs because they leave red spots that itch like hell where they bit you."
Today Adam announces we have passed the halfway point in principal photography. By the time you read this, Georg will be in post–production, with his final cut planned for September 1.