Whenever I’m up late at night flipping channels on “the tube” (a phrase we’re going to need to change to: “the plasma”), I always seem to stop on a classic episode of The Twilight Zone or Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Those old anthology series are quite amazing: A half-hour long, few locations, not much budget for sets or special effects and yet, they are totally riviting. Rather than relying on huge casts and fancy camerawork, these shows had three central aspects that worked time and time again: A clever premise, great acting, and great writing. This seemed to me like the perfect (although somewhat lofty) target to shoot for when making my first short.
Since I had a feature script that I wanted to direct (hoping to use my short as a calling card), I knew the film needed to be similar - not in terms of story, but certainly in terms of genre, casting and mood. The premise just hit me one day - A guy stops his car on the middle of railroad tracks and says to the passengers, “I think one of you is a murderer. The next train comes by in 9 minutes and I’m not moving this car until we find out who.”
Once I had that, and had figured out who the characters were, the rest of the story seemed to write itself. It was just a matter of trying to foil every possible attempt the characters made to get out of the situation and then pushing them all to the point of breaking.
Where I really got lucky was in the casting. Anything that relies as heavily on performance as the script for “Us the Damned and God Himself” is at risk of failing miserably if the acting isn’t superb. And every one of the actors I was fortunate enough to cast did an amazing job. When I wrote that Lee becomes “a shadow of the man he was,” I just hoped that someone who would be able to at least convey a small sense of that. Mark DeLisle made that moment, and indeed his whole character, more convincing than I had ever imagined. Robert Sloan was nothing like the image of Jesse I had in my head. Yet he brought such a complete and total interpretation of the chracter that today, I can’t imagine Jesse portrayed any other way. William Cannon expanded on Will’s feisty, rebellous nature and added a number physically intimidating actions that were just perfect. Kasey Kelly imbued her character, Kate, with such kindness, warmth and likability that you can’t help but sympathize with her. And Gena kept the character of Rebecca just where you want her, unpredictable, hard to read and, at times, tragic.
I’m very proud of the final product that we, the entire cast and the crew, created as a team. I hope that, like those classic Anthology programs, the film will grab viewers and hold them captive until the final credits roll.
Hello and thanks for checking out our web site and our film.
Why this project and why now? As is true for many aspects of filmmaking, this project came about because of a number of outside influences.
After nearly 20 years of working in the business as a sound designer, editor, supervisor and mixer, I decided it was time to try my hand in the area that brought me out to Los Angeles from Kansas City, Missouri all those years ago. I’d been writing stories and scripts since I was in Junior High School and interested in film almost as long. It wasn’t until my college days at the University of Southern California School of Cinema-Television in the late 80s that I discovered sound. I knew I was fortunate when opportunities came to me in that area. And since I truly enjoyed (and still do enjoy) post production sound, down that path I went.
Of course, I kept writing scripts and working on ideas in what little spare time I had. And I took a few additional courses in screenwriting here and there. One script in particular, of which I am very fond, got sort of close to being made. The very talented director of Star Trek: Generations got behind the project and took it to his agent at CAA. As he became increasingly busy with other projects, it became clear to me that, although his interest never waned, more would be required on my part to make this project go. Later, another production company offered to finance the film with me directing. Even though the script is intended to be fairly inexpensive to produce, the budget was so low I felt I wouldn’t be able to do the script justice, so I declined the offer.
However, the idea of me directing the project piqued my interest. After all, I’d learned a lot since my days in film school. I used every movie on which I worked as a learning tool — a chance to see how professional editors change a film and hone the story, a chance to see how directors work with actors on the ADR stage and, indeed, the occasional chances for me to work with actors on the stage directly. I studied how the studio would change the movie after audience previews, what reshoots were done and why, what was working in the film and what was missing. I figured all of that experience must have some value and that I should be able to put that to use.
My wife knew enough about the business to know that if I were going to pursue directing the feature myself, I needed some sort of calling card — proof that I knew what I was doing. We discussed making a trailer for the film, but that didn’t feel like the right way to go. I had spoken to a lot of my friends who’d been down the same path and trailers only seemed to be helpful in very limited circumstances. No, a short film was the way we decided to go.
The daunting task of producing a short film on my own kind of pushed the idea to the back burner for a while. Enter my then Japanese tutor, Aya Nakano. She’d been studying line producing and had been on a number of sets. She was eager to try producing a film to get the experience and offered to produce the short. That was the final burst of steam which started this train rolling.
My wife and I decided that it was time to make the investment in making a short, but only if we could do it on a tiny, tiny budget. In order to make the most effective calling card, I decided to make a film which was very much like the feature script I mentioned above — same genre, same age-range of characters, same mood. (The only storytelling tools present in the feature which are not in the short are a sci-fi style McGuffin and a very nice relationship arc.) Yet, to keep our costs down, I needed a story that was easy to shoot quickly.
The concept hit me fairly soon — five people trapped in a car on train tracks with a train coming soon and the driver refuses to move the car until he discovers who in the car is a murderer. I ran the idea by several friends and coworkers and the response was positive. So I set out to write it. In less than a month, writing on weekends and evenings, the first draft was completed. The train had, in essence, left the station and begun it’s longer-than-I-ever-expected journey toward a completed, short film.