FIVE IN FOCUS: Rob Nilsson's Top Five San Francisco Films Thursday, 11 December 2008 "Directed by Deniz Demirer, director of photography, Jonathan Silvio. A dramatic 2008 feature film shot mostly in the San Francisco Tenderloin about a young, modern-day jazz saxophonist played by David Boyce, a member of the Broun Fellinis. Jazz is back where it started, in dives (no longer smokey) with love of the music its own reward and life hardscrabble. Kaleidoscopic, instinctive, smart and unwilling to explain itself away. Look for it." Piercing the Dome Thursday, 03 April 2008 ".there is a pseudo-art and a spurious poetry which, instead of bursting through the vault of the workaday world, merely paints deceptive ornamentation upon the inner surface of the dome" - J. Pieper Recently someone said that three and a half years ago we had put ourselves into a prison. Then someone else replied that not only were we inside a prison, but we were devising an "exit strategy" out of that prison - an urbane way of saying that all we wanted to do was to escape, we wanted to be free. We'd built the prison ourselves, a labyrinth of sound and image encased within a weekly routine of filming and editing, generally 2 weeknights and an entire Saturday. We'd dreamed of building a palace, a palace where our creativity would run wild and where mere wonder took on the characteristics of work and accomplishment. We took up residence in that prison both willingly and unwillingly, out of obligation and from wonder. The exit strategy needed to be devised so as to save us. But from what? We're digging through walls of self-doubt, or a small barred window of maladjusted instincts. As Jake, the eponymous character of our movie, explains to Sophia his manager: If I could just get back to those 9 year old ears, you know, where it was all about how things sounded, I would do anything to get back to that. We are now beginning our escape. It took a year and a half to build the work-prison, and another two to devise the exit strategy. We'd gone over all the details meticulously; we'd proffered a limited amount of advice from our absolutely most trusted allies. At times we took risks to show someone the strategy, an expert that was to provide some valuable supplies, it had to be done. So far no one abandoned us, no one ratted us out. But now we are escaping. This is the escape. If we get caught here, still within the prison walls, it will take a long time to recover from the wounds and the punishment. If we get caught on the outside they will devour us, heedless of our cries. This is the way it is. Hungry are the critic dogs. Blind are consumer zombies. We want to be saved. We made art. This analogy of the prison escape manifested during one of our last editing sessions as we were nearing a so-called picture lock. I'd rattled something off about us having built a prison over the last few years and that we'd since been planning an escape strategy and Jonathan wittingly added that we'd intended to build a palace. We may have done both almost simultaneously. We were committed to finishing the movie slavishly, not for money, not for fame - but for something else. To seal up that scar that resides at the bottom of us all, to help palliate it perhaps - if only for a span of three and a half years. Thus far we feel the escape through the prison-palace is proving anti-climactic. All this preparation and my blood is hardly boiling. In a loud whisper, around the corner of Convention Hallway, past the Familiar Guards, up Probationer Stairs, I wanted to whisper to my colleague who was on my heels, that it had really been all about the preparation, all about the process. I glanced back at him through the darkness and knew he must have been thinking the same thing because he didn't look too perturbed as he looked down near his feet where a Familiar Guard's head nodded at us in its sleep and mumbled "pretty good, pretty good" through its fat lips. We were on our way. We had been perturbed when we were deep in the thick of it; in the thick of the forest, the process, our story, the movie Nocturnal Jake. Why aren't we now? More like poetry, or a philosophical essay, our movie attempts to transcend the nature of the Hollywood and Indie-fest fare: there is no what-is-this-movie-about. We believe that the philosophical nature of the film is incommensurate with the world of film as "industry" - of Supply and Demand, of the dramatic "arc". The more the world becomes consumed by supply and demand type films, the more incommensurable a philosophical movie of this type becomes with this world. That is because we acknowledge that we have no answers and we will never have the answers. The rift between a philosophical movie and a traditional Supply and Demand feature is growing. One answers nothing, the other everything. A philosophical movie becomes to us more and more distant, strange and remote; it even assumes the appearance of an intellectual luxury and is perceived as a load on the social conscience, as the unanswerable usually does. It is not our intention to denigrate the supply and demand film industry and to contrast it to an allegedly philosophical movie. That world of supply and demand is clearly part of this world, the world we make movies about. But what we do want to say is that our movie is free in the truest sense of the word. We had devised an exit strategy and that strategy consisted mostly on creating a movie which did not depend on outside funding, on a studio executive's go-ahead, or on cumbersome sets, pesky actors, and large crews. By industry standards this may not be a "useful" film. It may not be a box office hit; it may not be entertaining, morally sound, aesthetically consistent, conceptually user-friendly, stylistically recognizable, socially functional, it may not even be legitimized by whether or not you liked it. It was created for its own sake. We are interested in making cinema that moves and shakes, the way these terms were originally intended. We want to dislocate what an audience has for too long taken for granted as being natural, or self-evident, so that the usual compact solidity and obviousness is lost. We hope a person watching the movie can truly become lost. A victory is not achieved by escaping the prison-palace. A victory is achieved by entering the outside world and bringing back with us a few people to examine the inner structure, the resonant sounds; by suggesting to them that this prison could in fact be a palace, a place in which they would gladly remain, busily reaching inside in the hope of piercing the dome and accessing that aspect of wonder which allows us to see that reality can not be comprehended because its light is ever-flowing, unfathomable, and inexhaustible. Holidays Monday, 17 December 2007 We are nearing the beginning of the end with NOCTURAL JAKE. That is to say, the most difficult part of the process has just begun. Jonathan and I have had to separate as best we can the completion of the film with the end of our lives. We have taken some breaks to gain perspective, we have screened it to a tiny select audience and we have tried to flip everything on its head to find the elusive key that will ultimately unlock the potential we are convicted is trapped somewhere in the miasma of image, light and sound. Translating emotion into thought and then into artificial image has been for us like getting a PhD of sorts. In what exactly, who can say. But we have taken ourselves to film school and to life school all in one three year swoop. The breaks help to put things in perspective, as in every medium. How will all the pieces come together after such a long time of dedicated work with the knowledge that this is only one miniscule step on the road to mastery of a style, of a medium and ourselves? Given all this, we have a few more steps remaining to complete. Over the Holiday break we will dissect the images and scenes once again and focus on all the separate threads on their own terms, that is, without the impressions and interplay that they press upon one another. Our "Mother" narrator (Jake Overstreet's mother who went missing ten years ago) will be in the studio around January 7th, played by the local legend Rhodessa Jones. We have high hopes that she will be the genie that unlocks the potential, that skeleton key that so many films have sought to the bitter end - some were capable of unlocking the doors to insight, comprehension and sympathy while others only locked the door more tightly. Also, we have started work on the dream sequences with an artist by the name Steve Ogden; and Pete Wonder will be joining us on cleaning and sweetening sound as well as studio engineering. After completing five cues, we have put scoring the film with David Boyce (who plays the lead Jake Overstreet) on hold until we have picture lock. We wanna give HUGE props to our executive producers Kevin Gritzer and Eric Olden who helped with our initial and only investment as we delved deeper into finishing post-production. Thanks brothers! Getting Closer Wednesday, 19 September 2007 Much is happening at the moment, as we move closer to completing Nocturnal Jake. We have edited rough cuts of the majority of the 66 scenes from the film, and are currently in the process of raising money to bring in some outside talent to help us finish strong for the festival circuit. Deniz now has an iMac which helps our productivity and gives him peace of mind; Hiawatha Bradley is beginning to edit the film as we lock down the overall structure based on a tight treatment put together by Mr. Demirer. I'm finally getting the website up, and we're hoping to have Rhodessa Jones join us to narrate much of the film as Jake Overstreet's mother Kamila. We're also blessed to be scoring the film scene by scene with the very talented and generous David Boyce, as well as a few others musicians. Our goal is to raise funds to support these great talents and be a vehicle to showcase their hearts and minds with as much of the world as possible. Please help us out any way you can. Stay tuned for more, and let us know what you think of the trailer.