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Allison Anders'
Things Behind the Sun
By David Geffner
Allison Anders
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Things Behind the Sun is a highly volatile drama set in Cocoa Beach, Florida. The story centers on a rock-music journalist writing an article about a female musician whose indie radio single is about a rape from her own past. Starring Gabriel Mann as the journalist, Kim Dickens as the troubled musician and Don Cheadle as the singer's boyfriend, it is a film, described by its director, Allison Anders, as being "extremely intense, yet beautiful and poetic in its use of memory."
Anders originally wanted to shoot the Florida-based production on film, but the cost-cutting lure of digital video (DV) proved too strong. "I really wanted this movie to look like Monte Hellman's Two-Lane Blacktop," Anders explains. "I was actually disappointed when I realized the only way to make it was on DV - the cost savings versus film were 25%, and with our tiny budget that was a huge benefit. I was apprehensive because I just didn't believe you could get an electronic image to look as beautiful as Two-Lane Blacktop, which my DP, Terry Stacey and I, watched many times before we began production."
While costs were certainly a factor in Anders' debut DV effort, the most dramatic selling point was time: Anders had only 17 days to shoot Things Behind the Sun.
She made the film under the DGA's Low Budget Agreement. She describes the amount of footage the DV process allowed as "just astounding. I madeTwo-Lane Blacktop in 18 days in Los Angeles on film," Anders adds, "and we only got half the amount of footage we were able to shoot with DV."
Anders calls the DV learning curve steep, with new revelations coming virtually every day. Shooting in a wide-screen format, the director came to realize that any movement within the frame by her extras (due to the extreme sharpness of the digital medium), detracted heavily from her foreground actors. That same heightened resolution also required Anders to "pull down" the makeup on her entire cast. This actually turned out to be a bonus, however, because the downtime her actors spent in the makeup trailer allowed Anders to "grab key exteriors" for montage sequences, which could not be put on the board each day.
Anders laughs as she recalls: "If I had been shooting film, I never would have been able to run down to the beach and sneak in these beautiful shots. The speed of setups in DV is amazing."
Anders, of course, is no stranger to the rock music world. Her past films,Sugartown, Grace of My Heart and her debut indie feature Border Radio, all explored the creative turmoil inherent in the musical life. But, that same chaos was absent in the approach to camera placement and composition in Things Behind the Sun. Anders eschewed the rapid-fire movement that has become a hallmark of the lightweight DV equipment, opting instead to lock down the camera and let the actors' movement within the frame tell the story.
"It's almost become a cliche how much the camera moves with digital video," Anders rails. "The idea that the new language of film is the kinetic video thing bothers me. My feeling is that if you're going to move around a lot with DV, it should be with very low-tech equipment that highlights the noise and grain. If you're going for a high-quality image, like you'd get on film, then you need to just trust your actors and not fly the camera. Of course, the stillness in my framing worked well for this story: it echoed the flatness of Florida and the emotional states of the characters. I was determined not to make an MTV rockumentary just because I was shooting digital video."
Even as the characters in Things Behind the Sun struggle with intimacy in the context of sexual violation, Anders fell more in love with the digital medium with each passing call day. By the time the director reached post-production, at the high-tech Orphanage in San Francisco's Presidio area, she was a passionate convert to all things electronic.
"This film has flashback sequences," Anders explains, "and, I shot those naturalistically, meaning the way I remember things. But, that style didn't help the audience into the flashback enough - it was too linear and simplistic. With DV in post I was able to paint with the computer. I could desaturate the colors, adding and subtracting to create this effect of selective trauma memory. It was breathtaking what we could do, even with the tiny budget we had available."
When quizzed about the more serious claim that electronic manipulation can jeopardize an actor's creative intent, Anders is sympathetic but firm in defending the director's vision. She describes the filmmaker's responsibility as "shining an emotional light on all the characters in the film." Anders adds that: "directors manipulate the footage they're given, especially when you're dealing with fantasy or memory in a story. That's what we do and that's the basic trust between all the creative people on the set."
Although Anders goes so far as to say her digital experience on Things Behind the Sun was "without a downside," it's the overall promise of DV which excites Anders the most.
"The language of DV is very friendly," Anders notes. "Even non-techies like me who are still struggling to figure out some things about film, can be comfortable with a post-house which calls color timing 'putting on the sauce.' Women directors, in particular, will feel very comfortable with this process. As a result, more personalized women's stories will, hopefully, get made. That's what excites me the most about shooting in digital video - the hope of so many women directors finally having a voice to tell their stories"
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