On the “making of” The Other America

……on making the film, by writer/director Eugene Martin: I began the process of writing the script for The Other America by observing and doing interviews of kids for a period of about 18 months in several large public high schools in Philadelphia.  I went in not really knowing what I was looking for or even what the story would be about.  I had an idea that I wanted to make a film about a homeless kid that does grafitti, but keeps both of those issues a secret from everyone.  I basically went to high school for periods of days and even a few weeks at a time so I could adjust to the rhythm of it.  I also attended several meetings of a student union and watched the activist tapes they were making. After my time in the schools, I interviewed a group of about 10 kids after they had gotten to know and trust me.  I ended up creating a core of three characters to write about based on these interviews.  As the project developed, I became less interested in filming scenes in a school, and for that matter, anything having to do with adult characters.  It felt right to keep the story focused on just a few kids, in order to make it personal and less overtly political.  If politics are personal at their heart, then the characters would have to tell the story in their own words, not mine.

As I started to cast the film, I ended up asking , one of the kids I met during this interview process, to be in the film, since I had based one of the characters largely on her.  She agreed, and over the process of the next year, I started to read other actors with her.  Her insights and help along the way were invaluable.  I then found Tobias Segal thru a casting/workshop process, and from there, I asked each of them to write down ideas for their characters that we could use in the film.

By Spring of 2003 I was ready to shoot the film with the following foundations in mind.  First, I would allow myself as much time and as many days as needed to shoot the film, even if that meant shooting a few days a week over many months.  (I ended up shooting a total of 32 days over a 4 month span.) Second, since I also decided that I was going to shoot the film in many real world settings, that I would shoot it on mini dv, sometimes with two cameras.  Third, as far as casting the film, I decided to finally only cast three actors for the lead roles (Tobias, Irene, and Vicky Wang), and two others for the supporting roles.  The rest of the cast would be real people that I would find as the filming began.  And finally, it would be done on a naturally paced schedule that would allow me to make story and character adjustments and edit as we went along.

The crew was very small – at the most it was five people, and often it was just two or three.  I decided to do most of the shooting myself after doing some tests with the new 24p Panasonic DVX100 camera. I took a few weeks to get comfortable with it, shooting scenes without actors.  Then I introduced shooting the actors when they were alone; after that I started doing some of the larger scenes. The idea of blending documentary and fiction techniques felt like the right call for telling this story authentically. I liked using the manual zoom on the camera, and finding the focus as shots were being made.

I have aimed for a kind of filmmaking that is direct, intimate, and unmediated.   In other words, I wanted to find a way to crash through the pretty staid conventions of filmmaking and get to this other place, although at times I had no real idea where I was going with it.  But that got me excited, and I think the cast especially enjoyed our long sessions of screenings dailies and quickly assembled versions of scenes; then spending time to talk about it and coming up with a plan for each day. If we felt like we didn’t have anything to offer that day, we would just watch dailies and go home.  Other days when we would hit a rhythm, we would keep filming into the evening.

Something has happened to my way of thinking about filmmaking from this experience. After I came up with this series of foundations for making the film, I embraced a new kind of freedom that comes with working with such a small cast and crew.  We never started anything before noon, so we could use the light of sunset and magic hour every day.  Also, we never worked longer than 8 hours, and for most days, we actually worked about 6 hours.  The actors did all their own wardrobe and make-up.  Food was kept simple, and we moved together in 2 or 3 cars as needed.  The whole project was made without any movie lights, and the sound was taken right into the camera with a simple boom mic I borrowed from Temple University, where I am on faculty in the School of Communications and Theater.