Written, Directed, Produced and Edited by Jeremy Thompson
Starring Anna Roberts, Joel Heinrich, Will Martinez and Taylor Beia
Director’s Note: This 13 minute short film originally debuted in the spring of 2007, an exhaustive project I spent most of my senior year in high school working on. The school I went to had the opportunity to major in different art concentrations, of which I elected to be a part of the then new Motion Picture Arts department in it’s first two years, taking screenwriting, editing and production classes alongside all the more usual high school classes. Nearly everyone else in my graduating class went on to continue film studies in college except for me, although I’m very glad I had the two years working with film that I did; honestly in the time since I’ve graduated I’ve been encouraged to learn more about film from a critical perspective just by attending screenings and reading articles online. Besides, if there’s one thing making this film taught me, it’s that I’m not cut out to be a director, only maybe a screenwriter where I don’t have to think on my feet. I’ve still got several feature-length screenplay ideas I’d like to write someday, including an expanded (and vastly improved) version of Criminals Anonymous, and if anything learning philosophy while renting Antonioni, Bergman and Tarkovski movies from Netflix has been far more useful for any potential for future screenwriting than I think any college filmmaking classes would have been.
Please bear in mind this is a student film. Production qualities, while still quite good considering the constraints, are far from professional, and I can barely watch it myself without cringing every other moment. However if you can ignore the low-budgetness of it all, hopefully you can appreciate what I was trying to get at with the story. The basic issue presented in this story is: how do we define criminals, through actions or personalities? Legally it’s the former, although socially we (including my protagonist) tend to think in terms of the latter, and of course disastrous consequences ensue. This also taps into a subconscious fear people may of accidentally committing a crime, therefore becoming a ‘criminal’, a label that contradicts their own self-image as a human. Not that those dilemmas really come through completely in this movie because when you’re 18 years old and have the opportunity to film really over-the-top, sensationalist characters, that’s what you’re going to do, and as a result I think some of the situations overpower and even reverse any legitimate social commentary I was trying hard to make. Still, I think it’s reasonably good considering I made it in high school and only had a 30% idea of what I was trying to do; there’s an actual hook to the narrative and some fun scenes that even generate a bit of intensity and/or creepiness. Not all student films are able to achieve those things.
Some notes on the production: in hindsight I probably should not have chosen a story that had large parts of it taking place in a creepy convenience store, because that required we actually had to film in one. Figuring out how to ask for permission to let a film crew essentially overrun your business for a couple hours was only the beginning of the problems (thankfully the owners were very helpful and understanding in this regard), but then you have to deal with the fact that customers are not going to stop coming in when you’re filming a scene in which the characters are supposed to be the only people there. Amazingly there are no unwanted extras anywhere in the movie, but it did create unneeded amounts of stress while on location, having to wait up to ten minutes just to snag a ten second shot while trying to stay within a four hour schedule. The final scene I’m still not pleased with the location, it was supposed to be really creepy but compared to the scenes before it, it just came out sort of flat and a pointless change of setting. Plus it wasn’t until after I had my screenplay locked that I realized the completely unintentional but still pervasive influence by a certain Tarantino movie. Also kudos to my actors, who frequently had to film scenes with minimal direction from myself; I simply cannot direct actors, and I think that inability shows in certain scenes.
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