FYI:
Since the movie took
place during Christmas eve and needed snow for a lot of the scenes,
almost all of the outdoor scenes needed to be filmed when the weather
conditions were just right, which really sucked to film.
Nathan started to
grow his hair longer about 2 or 3 months into the filming, and then he
got it cut which wasn't actually as big a continuity error as I thought
it would be.
Although it took us
a span of 5 and a half months to film the short, we only actually were
filming for about 17-20 hours.
Originally, the
story was going to focus more on just the bizarre dreams and there
wasn't going to be as much story line about the affair and all the other
things that came from it. But I thought that the dreams would not
work if they weren't in some kind of context, so the story about
Jennifer and Andy was made to support the dreams, and that became much
more interesting to me. So I decided then to change the focus of
the story to that, instead of the dreams.
You would be
surprised at how out of order we filmed some of the scenes. I
basically always carried the script with me when I went over to the
Atkinsons just in case we had time to film a quick scene here or there.
When Steve tells
Nathan about the tainted food, we pretty much adlibbed the lines and
just about every time I tried to think of some different word to use for
diarrhea, and as a result, none of us (nic included) could ever keep
going with it and we ended up doing about 8 takes.
This really is the
most serious subject matter that Triad Pictures has ever tried to film.
The two movies
whose style I looked at most closely were Vanilla Sky and Eternal
Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Both movies contained not only a
destructive love in the story, but some very nightmarish scenes as well.
For the final
dream/nightmare, I wanted to glamorize Nathan killing Andy, and do
basically the opposite for the scenes of Nathan killing Jennifer.
For Andy's scenes, I wanted the camera to move a lot and look more like
some kind of action movie where the bad guy finally gets killed, and for
Jennifer, I just really wanted it to be more simple and real.
Jennifer, Andy, and
Nathan were all really good sports the entire time and really trusted me
when I don't think they quite knew what I was doing or even what the
final product was going to look like, which was and is really
appreciated.