A Conversation with Filmmaker Zak Forsman

Many people are surprised to learn that the first film I directed was Heart of Now. We shot that in October 2007. It was a great lesson in working with actors, bouncing between scripted and improvised material. And it was a long road to final cut, sending it to festivals and now to its release on DVD through Vanguard Cinema. I think it’s a little funny that I’ve spent so much time in a DIY headspace, and ended up opting for a traditional distributor.  I have a pretty compelling reason for doing so, but to your question… while we were in post on Heart of Now, I made a short titled I F*cking Hate You that played about 18 festivals including From Here To Awesome.  And that was sort of the beginning of my “waking up” to the realities of independent filmmaking.  Through FHTA I met Lance Weiler and he introduced me to more people than i can count over the years.  I started attending SXSW and Sundance where I could meet and make new friends in the indie community.  And I became the editor of the New Breed blog on the Workbook Project which gave me a forum to talk about what I was learning and to converse with other filmmakers who were writing for the site.  I’m just now getting into a new movie and have a slate of projects I hope to do over the next ten years.  Two have microbudget written all over them, but the rest are part of a larger plan to pursue a model of financing and distribution that one can make a living doing.

I’m kind of spread all over in terms of where you can find me.  I think it’s true of anyone now, you can pretty much just google them to find out what you want to know.  Other than Facebook and Twitter, most of the action happens at:

Well, the truth is that growing up, my producing partner at Sabi and I used to make little vignettes on VHS camcorders that varied from toys coming to life to kill their owners to a bunch of 14 year olds running around in the woods playing soldiers in Vietnam.  On Heart of Now I wanted the experience of working with professional actors.  I think the two biggest lessons i learned were how to set them on a path and then get out of their way, and not to be too precious about the director-actor relationship.  It’s a unique bond, but it doesn’t need to be humorless and it doesn’t mean I have to have something brilliant to say between each take.  We can find it together.  I wanted to get the kind of authentic performances I saw in movies like Lilja 4-ever, Ratcatcher, Rosetta, The Son, and Breaking the Waves. Did it turn out how I expected? In terms of performances, yes. But structurally, the first act we shot was cut down considerably as my editor “re-discovered” the story within the material we shot.  We shot too much movie.

Down and Dangerous definitely has a much tighter and more aggressive and dynamic narrative than Heart of Now.  But within that structure, I’m very excited to play with each scene until they come alive and I feel quite comfortable using guided improvisational techniques to discover the magic that makes it special and worthy of its place in the story.  I also expect to surprise a lot of people who have seen Heart of Now and its handheld, naturalistic aesthetic. Down and Dangerous, while still feeling very organic to the story and characters, will reveal just how effective I can be in the use of composition, light, color, movement and more in the visual language of the movie.

By doing a breakdown of the screenplay, I come away with an understanding of the objectives and intentions of each character in any given scene. If we find that the scene as written is lacking an authentic spark, we’ll try to find it by tossing the written dialogue aside and letting the underlying objectives be our guide. So now, each actor is free to find new paths to the same goal.  And often, I’ll step in with a turn for the scene, or changing what they want from the other character.  It’s a process of discovery that often yields exciting results.

Heart of Now was an attempt on my part to follow an emotional narrative, more so than a plotline. Even so, those character arcs were always in the script at some point – often from the very beginning but they were also subject to rewrites the night before we shot any given scene. I expected the content would evolve as we shot the movie, and incorporating those new trajectories was very much part of that process. For this reason we shot largely in chronological order. It was a tremendous education on how to be attentive and nimble enough to adapt to what was happening. But I don’t want to just keep doing different versions of the same movie. I very much want to grow as a storyteller. Down and Dangerous represents a step toward a more tightly plotted narrative with opportunities for some very compelling performances wrapped in a strikingly visual package. There will be scenes with strong language, drug culture and adult themes of a romantic nature. Some gun violence and physical fights too. And it is my intent for these elements to be earned, and not gratuitous. So, in addition to the theme and everything that makes this story personal and worth telling, it holds within it some challenges in its form that I haven’t faced before. And those challenges excite me.

Ha ha! Yeah, I’ve said that. I’m not really sure what it means though. The movie I want to make is the movie I want to make. And I guess calling it an “arthouse genre picture” is my way of saying we’re stuffing the kind of authenticity you may find in many arthouse movies within a genre wrapper. I’m excited to construct and execute some inventive action sequences, definitely. They will be a lot of fun and an area in which I hope to push through on some creative barriers. For inspiration, I’ve gone back to the crime thrillers of Michael Mann and listened to all of his commentaries for each. He offers great insight into building up a criminal character with backstory and tradecraft. I’ve also revisited Straight Time, Narc, Casablanca, and others – these are the flavors floating around in my head.

We’ll start shooting near the end of October and into mid-November. Already, I’m making sure to push something forward everyday. But the team here will really begin heavy pre-production next week, now that our friends and family have effectively greenlit the movie by contributing funds via Kickstarter.  All of our backers are going to receive first-look access to reports including pictures and video from the production that will be issued as Kickstarter updates. For those that selected the $250 perk, they are receiving a “Smuggler’s Mystery Box” that is going to open a doorway to this fictional world we’re creating in a very fun way.

I’ve got to say that right here at the every end of this campaign, I am so humbled and excited by the tremendous support we’ve received. I’m looking at the countdown and in these final hours we’re experiencing a rally of sorts. New backers are jumping aboard, existing backers are raising their pledges – because they know that those extra funds will go very far toward crafting a better motion picture. It will allow us to expand our schedule a little and take more time to make the best damn movie we can. I feel like I owe it to the 350+ people supporting us. I want to knock their socks off with a fun, entertaining, romantic, resonant and authentic motion picture.