After directing indie feature Night Junkies, Lawrence Pearce has now made the transition to Hollywood. In the first part of his swimming with sharks diary, he details how he made the leap.

Article first published: March/April 2008

How does a young director go from shooting a £50k micro-budget flick to helming a $6 million action/thriller in two years? When I was 23, and fresh from finishing my film degree, I luckily landed myself a managing director position for a small post-production facility working for clients as diverse as the BBC and Uri Geller. Apparently the reason I got the job was because I was the only one out of nearly 100 applicants who didn’t write a CV. That’s because I didn’t have one.

During the first year, however, I learnt that my heart was firmly into writing and directing movies, so I left the company and set myself three goals: to shoot my first movie by the age of 25, to shoot my second movie by the age of 27 and to shoot my third movie, which would make my mark if the first two hadn’t, by the age of 30. When I turned 25, I panicked. I had written a few well-received but ultimately unbackable scripts and found myself floundering. So I assessed the marketplace, and more importantly my position in it. As a director, you are bunched in with the talent, and the criteria by which you are judged is a mix of your ability to do what you say you can, and the draw you have with the audience. Being a first timer, I hadn’t proven my ability, and I had no draw whatsoever with any audience out there. Put simply, why should any production company or investors take a chance with me?

A first time filmmaker’s biggest supporter is themselves, so I decided I would exec produce my own movie, that it would be of a minuscule budget, and that the film would fit into a genre that was do-able on a shoestring budget, yet that could guarantee an audience. The vampire genre will always have its dedicated core (or should that be gore) following, so I picked that. Here’s the tricky part. I didn’t want to make a standard low-budget vampire movie, as these directors often stay in B-movie hell for the rest of their lives. So I gave Night Junkies a drug-addiction concept, took away all supernatural elements, added a love story, and before long I had a script that seemed to have more layers to it than your average blood and fangs affair. Finding the small budget was easy: I took out loans that could cripple me. I found a rich businessman who was willing to match me pound for pound, and I raised £50k, which seemed small enough to be able to risk messing up, but big enough to hire equipment, locations and bacon sandwiches for four weeks. The crew were incredible in their generosity, working for deferred and basic expenses. And I have to say their dedication to giving Night Junkies every possible boost in production values was superb.

With the funds now secured, I hired Dean Fisher under the umbrella of his production company Scanner Rhodes to produce the movie, and department heads Nicola Dietmann (production designer) and Sadik Ahmed (director of photography) to bring their expertise to turning my vision into reality.

Preproduction

Our production office had its own kitchen, three rooms, sleeping quarters and even a shower. This is because we used producer Dean Fisher’s home while his parents were away in Tenerife for a few months. The production team worked 13-hour days over five weeks to put the whole shoot together for the minimal budget, and we blagged every deal we could. A particular location costs £1000 per day? Our location manager, Jean Crous, would find an even better option for £200 per day. In every area, our team scrimped and saved and blagged amazing deals. Without these deals, Night Junkies would have cost ten times what we made it for. I always had in the back of my mind one simple fact: this film needed to be a comparative success in the market place.

The only way to ensure this was to make the movie for less money than the minimum we’d be able to recoup with distribution deals. There is a balance, however. You can’t make a movie too cheaply or it just won’t sell: skimming on quality in any area is particularly noticeable in low budget movies, so every production decision was based on attempting to get production values that belied our minuscule budget. Our mindset was: “let’s pretend we’re a bigger movie and not accept anything less.”

The shoot

Production lasted four weeks, six days a week, 14 hours a day, and was tirelessly organized, running to a tightly held watch by 1st AD Richard Hatherell. We shot around Brick Lane (the very streets that Jack the Ripper prowled) and London Bridge; we had a lot of dark alleyways with street lamps to contend with. The lamps were flagged, or gelled, and shaped by the DP to create the moody shadows and ‘quarter back’ lighting that served my vision of the Night Junkies world well. I loved the work of DP Darius Konji on films such as Se7en; the darkness he and David Fincher gave that movie was something I wanted to incorporate into Night Junkies. But I also wanted to showcase vibrancy and danger, so the films of David Lynch, such as Lost Highway and Blue Velvet were also an inspiration. The interior scenes were handled in the same way, often with a single color cast (red for vampires anyone?) over a background fixture, and ‘quarter back’ lighting giving shape to our actors’ faces.

We made a decision to shoot on HDCam. The reasons were mainly down to budget restraints, as 35mm cameras and lenses were out of our reach to hire, and costly developing would cripple us. The production team searched high and low for the friendliest deal around, and we secured a Sony 750P for the four-week shoot. I really wanted to get as cinematic a feel as possible from the digital format, so DP Sadik Ahmed used zoom lenses and always shot on the long end of the lens. Zooming right in with minimal lighting gave us a suitably shallow depth of field. This of course meant we had a minimum distance of three foot from the subject at all times to keep this look, so often the camera would be crammed into a corner of a room, with the subject at the other end.

With no money for expensive tracks, dollies or cranes, movement was going to be an issue. I wanted to steer clear of too many static frames, so we opted for a heavy amount of Steadicam. The Steadicam can offer a slight drift that is far less intrusive than shooting scenes handheld, giving us shots that ‘breathe’. The Steadicam was used with a radio follow focus and a microwave transmitter to get pictures back to my monitor. We had four Steadicam operators at various stages throughout the shoot and all were superb in their craftsmanship, but I will talk about a particular day with Mike Scott.

Mike used a Tiffen Ultra Steadicam, which was state of the art early 2006. We had a scene involving a large room with one character sitting by a desk on one end, and another character standing by the door at the other end. The dialogue was menacing and conspiratorial and the atmosphere needed to be one of tension and listening in. We wanted two shots with a slight drift into each character simultaneously. Mike suggested we use a dolly. I said unfortunately we didn’t have one, no money. So Mike brought in his own dolly that was a conversion kit he built for his Steadicam cart. Based on a 4in Magliner, the cart was seriously customized with huge removable tires before he imported it from California. As a result it was extremely heavy and provided the stability needed to double up as a makeshift dolly. The cart was so bottom heavy that the Steadicam could float safely on its fully extended arm.

Steadicam on dollies is quite a common practice. In fact, a lot of The Shining was shot with Garrett Brown riding on a dolly or wheelchair. Hard mounting the Steadicam arm to the tracking dolly takes the strain off the operator and allows very fine slow movement, without having a totally smooth floor or rails. Back to our shot in Night Junkies, and we required a very slow track forward past foreground for both single shots. They were performed with the camera in low mode with the Mag-dolly being tracked slowly across the uneven floorboards. The Steadicam arm took care of any bumps and knocks, and allowed Mike to crane up over the desk to an extreme close-up of the character sitting behind it. The beauty about micro-budget filmmaking is that the limitations force the filmmakers to be inventive. This was a perfect example of how good production values can be achieved without the luxury of large budgets.

Post production

Our fine editor, Lewis Albrow, digitized the footage from the HD masters into Final Cut Pro 5 using a Sony JH3 HD deck via Firewire. Downconverting the HD footage to DV Pal anamorphic meant that Lewis could edit the entire movie on a Mac G5.

Lewis worked for 100 per cent deferred payment and croissants, and opened his bedroom to us for four weeks. Every few nights I would traipse over to his place and we would sit around his Mac G5 while he ran through the latest edited scenes. Lewis had a first rough cut within two weeks, which was fantastic, and the rest of the time was spent polishing the edits and trying inventive new ways to tell the story and bring the feel of the movie out. This included speed ramping and time remapping, jump cuts and other various techniques that melded perfectly with the overall style and approach of Night Junkies. This was perhaps the most enjoyable part of the indie filmmaking process for me, as it’s immensely satisfying to see all the cast and crew’s hard work come to fruition as the film started to take shape.

Once we were happy with a final cut of our film, and ready to move onto the online, Lewis exported all the edit information. EDLs (edit decision lists) held too limited an amount of information for us, and are notoriously tricky customers when transferring to Avid, so we opted for a Video OMF (open media framework). The benefits of transferring our edit information via OMFs were that the file could take across multi-layers, video FX (dissolves, etc) and some time remapping information. Since our edit used all three, we felt this was a good time-saving device rather than having to painstakingly copy it all out into Avid again.

We created our OMF using a third-party plug-in called Automatic Duck. For our online we used Avid Nitris, which used a third-party plug-in called Bridge to read the exported OMFs. Because Bridge was also designed by Automatic Duck, this ensured a smooth workflow between the two systems, enabling us to get through the auto-conforming quickly and start grading the movie for its slick, stylish look.

Our colourist was Paul Ingvarsson at Storm HD, and he was able to do absolute wonders for us. I spoke to Paul in stages about the look and style that I wanted for Night Junkies (dark yet vibrant, shadows pitch black, a dreamlike quality to the colors) and then I just left him alone to do his magic. When I returned a few days later, it was as if he had plucked the colors right from my imagination; he was so close to the original vision. A bit of tinkering and we were singing. There were a few tricks that he employed to create certain effects. In the sex scene between the two leads, Giles Alderson and Katia Winter, a ‘patch’ could be seen. Paul, frame by frame, darkened the area so creatively that when played at full speed the audience was convinced that natural shadows were obscuring their view of the naughty bits.

When Night Junkies looked exactly how we wanted it to, Paul synced up the sound mix, expertly finished for an unbelievably friendly price by Mark Verner at Mint Post with the score created by incredibly talented composer and West End veteran Michael England of Mouse Music. The HD master of our completed movie was now played out to tape and held preciously in my hands. Months and months of hard work, nerves, bravery, blood, sweat, tears, tantrums had come to this moment. What no one told us was this simple fact: making the movie was only half the battle; the other half was selling it to an over-saturated film market.

Distribution

Distribution territories are split into two main camps: domestic, which is the USA and Canada; and international, which encompasses the rest of the world. Being a first-time filmmaker, I had no experience of the market place. So we signed up a producers representative for the domestic, which is basically a middleman who takes 10 per cent to get you a distribution deal, and a standard sales agent for international. Typically the sales domestically match the sales internationally for Hollywood movies. Our reps negotiated a deal with Allumination Filmworks, which paid us a happy advance for the distribution rights, after months of seeming to be in the wilderness at the American Film Market and the European Film Market. Signing just before Cannes 2007 gave me a big boost, and I was able to go as an official first time director with a release date of 31 July 2007 secured in the USA.

Allumination has reported ‘above expectations’ sales for Night Junkies, and bearing in mind expectations were taken from figures for £500k movies rather than £50k, that means a very commercially successful movie. We are now gearing up for the international release sometime this year, but with the knowledge that the film has already delivered more than we could have hoped for in the USA alone.

The future

I am shooting two movies this year. One is a $6 million psychological action/thriller Cain’s Awakening; plenty of mystery and twists, attempting to sit alongside movies such as Fight Club, Memento and the Bourne movies. Karl Richards of E-Motion will produce Cain’s Awakening, with myself writing and directing. Executive producer AVT Shankerdass has already guaranteed distribution in the USA via his output deal with Lionsgate, and we will start casting in the next few months for a named star. Cain’s Awakening will be shot on Grass Valley Vipers, using up to four Vipers during the more complicated action scenes, and will incorporate a fair amount of CGI.

The other film is a character comedy called Mixed Up, produced by Jonathan Sothcott, with DP Jerry Pass.

Night Junkies has been incredible for me, not only in giving me a commercially successful and well-received start in the feature film industry; grabbing the attention of those working in Hollywood and London producing solid, medium budget theatrical movies, but also in giving me a steep learning curve. I believe that indie filmmaking is a great way to discover inventiveness when faced with limitations, in digging deep to overcome obstacles, and in providing the indie filmmaker with the opportunity to learn every aspect of film industry, technically, practically and structurally. Try it. It’s one hell of a ride.

• Myspace site with over 22,000 film fans and aspiring filmmakers: www.myspace.com/lawrencepearce
• Lawrence Pearce’s official website with monthly updates – www.lawrencepearce.com.

Lawrence Pearce Lawrence Pearce attended the world-renowned Chelsea College of Art & Design before completing a three-year film degree. He then went on to run a successful post-production facility before leaving to start his career as a writer/director. In 2006 he executive produced, as well as wrote and directed, Night Junkies. 2008 will see two more completed movies Cain’s Awakening and Mixed Up.