I have been so busy working on like 30 things at once so I haven't been able to keep up with my Career In Rewind stories. But, I will get them all chronicled over time, so thanks for sticking with me if you have. In my last post I talked briefly about my group of friends going around to rock shows and parties to shoot and edit some fun performance style videos. There is an important chapter between that period and this story. But it is pretty negative so I will talk about it later. So let's skip ahead to the first film my team made that was taken seriously. Up to this point we had only helped out on other film sets chipping in where we could, learning what not to do in most cases. So grab some snacks because this one will be long with a lot to take in.

The Making Of The Enemies You Keep

Here is the trailer if you don't want to watch the whole film just yet.
IMDb

Conception

Around 2010-2011 there was a lot of buzz around my film team. We had been shooting some good looking one-off videos and had tackled some larger projects. The whole purpose of getting into the craft was to make narrative films. We were huge fans of dark, hard to pick apart films, mostly in the Drama genre, but anything that had to do with psychological concepts. Most of the films I make are a byproduct of whatever I am studying at the time. The Seventh Seal was captivating my attention when we were talking about potential film projects. I was deep into studying the history of humans telling the story of playing chess with death. I also wanted to tell a story centered around common film-story-gangster style noir structures. I didn't want it to be standard by any means. I wanted the core story to be hard to piece together but with enough information to let you know what was happening.

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I dug deep into European experimental films and read a lot about films centered around 2 people talking and nothing more. 12 Angry Men had always been a film I loved and wanted to combine that with some of the aspects of The Grand Inquisitor from The Brothers Karamazov. These stories hinged on characters articulating philosophical thought experiments with those around them, but mostly themselves. Ultimately I decided to visit the playing chess with death structure because I hadn't found any modern approaches that felt genuine. The Story of The Enemies You Keep is entirely fake, however, it is rooted in a true story. One of my really close friends had just been convicted of a really crazy crime. Everything that orbited his actions weighed on me heavily and I had to express what I was thinking in some sort of artistic fashion. Most of the time I was thinking about what he might be thinking about. Isolation, having his back against a wall, fearing every minuet, basically talking with death from the time he committed his crime to the time he was arrested. I dug into what I might think about in that situation, I would have been thinking about my childhood, my friends and family, what they will think of me, what led up to where I was and so much more.

Writing, for me, is 90% abstract conceptualization and 10% actual work. I will spend a year thinking about a story before I commit anything to paper. In this period I am studying while kicking scenes around in my head until they all connect. Of course every script starts with a lot of ideas. Eventually those ideas get distilled down to what makes it on screen. So when I sit down to write, everything happens really quickly. Nowadays I am lucky enough to share a creative space and business with Chelsea Anders. She does the majority of the writing for our current films. But long before I met her writing took up most of my time. My roommate and I spent all of our time watching films, talking about them, and writing them. When I wrote The Enemies You Keep I actually moved in with my fiancée at the time (now we're married), but my roommate was still hanging out everyday. I wrote the whole script in 1 night and showed it to my roommate the following day. We re-wrote it together and took it to the rest of the team. Everyone thought it was cool and we decided to start pre-production.

Pre-Production As A Beast

This is where most people drop off, Pre-Production. Everyone wants to make a film and EVERYONE KNNNOOOOOOOOWWWWWSSSSS how to make a movie. Until it is time to actually make a fuckin' movie. Pre-pro, is the most boring part of the whole thing, for everyone but the director and producers. We started meeting once every 2 weeks to bang all the details and acquire everything we needed to make the film happen. This meant meeting businesses about locations, auditioning and rehearsing actors, finding crew and food accommodations. Everyone worked extremely hard and we eventually pulled everything together. The MOFA community introduced use to some talented actors and crew. Our friends all added their recourses through the Columbus, OH hip hop community.

Casting was easily the hardest part of course. Nobody want's to make a shitty "local film" and bad acting is where it all begins. So we auditioned as many people as we could. It was very hard to see that many people come through and have to pass them up. But ultimately we landed on a great cast, accept the character of death. This role was a non-speaking role, so we needed someone good to express this characters language without having the luxury of using words. Along the path of casting a lot of interesting things always happen. A friend of a friend told a friend who told a friend that we were casting a hip hop based role for Death. This led to an unexpected phone call from Bizzy Bone's close friend (cousin maybe? It's been so long that I can't remember). This sort of thing happens a lot, people tend to name drop just to get attention. But I gave the dude a chance, I told him if Bizzy calls me than I am interested. I had met Bizzy at shows, studio recordings, at a few house parties. So it's not like someone could fake a call from him. Trust me, if you have ever met Bizzy you know what I mean, he is unforgettable in person. Bizzy called me about 45 mins later and we talked about the film. He was super excited, we could afford him and we were 75% sold on the idea of him playing Death. We all had 1 concern, reliability, Bizzy is known for being a someone you need to get in the moment and make what you can. But showing up and dedicating a lot of time to something was a on our mind. Also, could he pull off the role on a technical level? We tried to set up a rehearsal time with him. After a lot of rescheduling it sort of ended with Bizzy explaining how he doesn't need to rehearse. No worries, he might be right, but we couldn't take that risk.

While conversing with Bizzy we were still auditioning like crazy for this role. One day we held an open audition, someone responded to this via craigslist. She talked about her son being much younger than the casting ad, and she wanted to know if we would keep an open mind and let him try out. Of course I was very interested, typically I will be happy to oblige someone when they reach out to me honestly. Her son Cristoffer Carter came and threw down an incredible audition. He read for the character of Jake but only to show his technical skills for the role of Death. We were fucking blown away. I went and talked to his mother immediately to let her know that her son is the real deal. We honestly didn't think we could cast him at this time though. We were still considering a lot of people and he was without a doubt the most challenging person to go with. So many questions had to be sorted out. In the end we found many viable references in history/psychology/film/etc that made working with a teenage actor more realistic within the goals of the film. We wound up casting him and dove into the challenge head first. We are all still very happy about this decision.

Casting Jake was easy because I had written the role for Dan Nier. He had been friends with all of the people making the film since the early days of breakdancing. We were happy to have him on board, he is a dedicated, talented person. Dan came out a few weeks prior to shooting so he could sleep on our couch and dive into the character.

The rest of the cast eventually fell into place. I have to say, I am still very close to almost everyone on this films cast. We all saw the potential and wanted to continue working together, and we have. The crew was my normal film team at the time. We have all since went in different directions. But we all really worked hard for this project, and well as a team.

Production As A Battle

In the process of shooting a film a million things change. Everyday you are bracing yourself for what is about to go wrong and fixing what went wrong the day before. But overall we all came together and made the best film we could based on the budget and tools we had. My good friend David Foulk followed us around while we made the film. Side not: I used to go by the name David Damen // back then. This was just a period of me trying a certain style. So all this stuff is directed by David Damen // but that isn't even a real person. I still have about 6 aliases I make video projects under and 3 I make music under. Weirdo stuff I guess. Either way, David's documentary does a better job than I could so just check out his thing if you want to learn about the production. But what I can say is that, producing and directing a film is INSANLY HARD!!!! Don't do it unless you have super thick skin and can make important decisions on the fly.

Post Production As A Monolith

After you have all your footage in place and the high of production planning is over.... what the heck do you do!!! When you are facing post-production on a film it feels like the walls are closing in on you. It really does, you have a lot of expectations and not enough to work with. Because there is never enough footage!!!!! Our editor came out to Dayton Ohio where I was staying at the time and we slaved on that cut. We worked on it day and night, I worked 40hrs a week and worked 40hrs a week with the editor. It went through many versions all very different from each other. Eventually we landed on the cut we have now and we couldn't have been happier. After that our friend Josiah Schlater of LADADA came out from Virginia to write and record the score. I wish I had more pictures from that because it was incredible. Josiah did everything himself and truly captured the sound of the film.

The End As Void

We premiered the film at The Gateway Film Center with a really cool turn out. Everyone who could come out really had a good time and the event was handled by Jason Dihr who was an amazing event coordinator. We placed the film in a couple festivals and that followed up with a lot more that I never kept up with. The film was not perfect and we still have a lot to learn. Our next featurette Poster Grrl is almost done and we plan on doing our online premiere here on Steem. Looking back at The Enemies You Keep it is surreal that most of the same people are still very close to me and we still work very hard to make hard to understand movies. This project was the first time I really felt that post-project depression. When everything is done there is no need for meetings and stuff to tend to. It takes some getting used to. But when you can sit back and watch your own film, it sort of cures those blues.

If you made it to the end of this post, then you should win some award I cant think of. But thank you, I hope you watched the film. Stay up to date with my blog as I talk about our next film soon.

Namaste,
XD

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