| This was sneaky, but it worked! Also, both Joel D. Wynkoop and I always try to use our real jobs in our movies as well. Think about where you work and how you might incorporate it into a movie, and ask your boss! All they can say is "no!" in a worst-case scenario! CREEP (1994) had some of the best locations of all my movies, in my opinion. The story was written around areas I knew we had access to. Joel D. Wynkoop knew a guy who owned a dairy farm way west of town, and we staged the opening car crash and murder there! The smashed up cars were free, by the way, towed there by a company that provided them for screen credits and cameo roles! And being that Kathy Willets, "AMERICA'S FAVORITE NYMPHOMANIAC", starred in the movie, we had strip clubs BEGGING US to shoot for FREE in their clubs! The one we chose provided free catering just because we filmed there! The office scenes and cabin scenes were lined up again by lead actress Patricia Paul, who had friends with cool places. The production value of the office scenes are excellent, particularly the ones with the expansive window view of Palm Beach in the background, with sailboats cruising along the intercoastal! And the cabin scenes were filmed at a cool house with dark wooden walls, no white in sight! Excellent! There was a scene in an abandoned church that line producer James Moore found, and we convinced the caretaker/actor to let us use it in exchange for a small role in the movie. Producer Michael Ornelas owned the pawn shop we used for a robbery scene, and Joel D. Wynkoop's nephew owned the cool-looking "house on stilts" we shot at early in the flick. The graveyard scene, where the killers exhume their mother and have sex over her corpse, was all fabricated in line producer James Moore's back yard! Obviously, no self-respecting cemetery is going to let you come onto their property and film such insanity, so our solution was to create fake tombstones out of wood and put crosses and such in the background, lighting everything in eerie blues and reds. Add fog from dry ice and a small "fog machine", and you can create quite a haunting atmosphere! Sometimes, you have to improvise and adapt for certain script needs. We needed a scene in a convenient store, and the one we had scheduled fell through. Four hours before filming, we lined up another store! That quick! The key? Some cash for the clerk (who signed the location contract!) and we had to shoot around any customers! This was a crazy day and is available on video in the behind-the-scenes documentary A DAY IN THE MAKING OF "CREEP", available through MDM PRODUCTIONS. The woods scenes in CREEP were filmed at an actor friend's ranch. The condition? That he could watch us film and that he got to meet Kathy Willets! Another valuable location where we could do whatever we wanted on private property and the production cost: zero! Another location coup that we stumbled onto while making CREEP was the building that blew up in the end. This scene came out awesome, and wasn't originally in the script. I found out a local hotel was going to be demolished by the team who did LETHAL WEAPON 3 and DEMOLITION MAN. The was no ordinary hotel- it was a historic twelve story building! So we immediately had aerial footage shot of the building before they blew it up. A few weeks later, they were scheduled to dynamite it for the public! I showed up with line producer James Moore and his people, and we mingled in to press spots with our cameras, and got shoots of this "public spectacle" from every angle and on every format of film and video, from Hi-8mm to Super-8 to 16mm film! With cool editing, we got a spectacular ending, an explosive ending, for next to nothing! I rewrote the script to add this scene in! I mean, if we would have been paying to demolish a building, it would have been a $50,000 shot! And you thought it was impossibly to get huge explosions on a micro-budget! Check around, they do stuff like this all over the country, all the time. The key is timing, find out when and where, and then good editing. For people who don't live in your area and don't know your circumstances in which you got your public domain shot, it'll look you spent an arm an a leg on something like this. | | |
