December 2022 - From the newsletter archive
While I have been to countless seminars, conferences and classes; listened to a lifetime’s worth of podcasts; been on many a set; gathered advice from friends, acquaintances, and film festival panels; I couldn’t help but learn a lot of things the hard way.
Every filmmaker has heard two pieces of what I would consider standard-issue advice for making shootable, low-budget films: write what you know, and set your film in a single location.
The theory goes that writers, especially new ones, will create more realistic scenarios and dialogue if they write from experience rather than imagination. And shooting in a single location, while it can be quite monotonous and visually suffocating, minimizes the time and money of shuffling between expensive set-piece locations, allowing filmmakers to focus more on character and story.
I have never been able to follow that advice. I always write stories that require loads of research because they don’t reflect my lived experience, and that take place in exotic locations, multiple countries, (think developing countries, gang-controlled big cities, hermit kingdoms, etcetera), with well-known and well-guarded architecture (think Baroque churches, Art Deco skyscrapers, particular funiculars, the 6th Street Bridge). No wonder it took me so long to actually shoot a feature film!
For NEXT TIME… I did spend a lot of time researching, but not for a story I had already started writing. When I moved to Berlin, I spent 5 years getting to know people and holding my ear to the ground, riding my bike around the city and getting to know the character of different neighborhoods, from quiet Altbau residential streets to the just-for-locals parks and the new construction ghost-towns and cramped flats in mid-century mid-rises; the script is what came out the other side. In the end, everything I wrote about was something I learned from my life and my observations: techno parties, misanthropes, daily cyclists, pan-European hipsters, eco-activists, creatives, 90s Adidas-tracksuit-wearers (it’s a standard issue for any long-time Berliner), luxury investors, well-dress real estate sleaze, street-corner interactions. Not having much money to make the film meant that setting it in a variety of “real life” places and situations, and casting actors who understood, and sometimes already inhabited that reality, was crucial. I wanted to make a film that looks like social realism or documentary, and then surprises you with some unexpected magic.
“Magical realism in a grungy, DIY setting” is the perfect aesthetic description of Berlin, and it’s somehow the feeling I wanted to transport. It’s also the essence of life in this city, where a combination of working-class-solidarity spirit, natural bounty, and generosity creates the feeling (especially in the summertime) that whatever the need, Berlin will provide. For me, the truth of Berlin’s magical realism is just that: “Berlin provides.”
A lot of times, that takes the form of something in a box on the street, with a note saying that the box contains free gifts for anyone to take. I’ve acquired a shocking amount of clothes, furniture, and appliances that way. (Otherwise I wouldn’t own a fancy milk-frothing machine!)
fLotte Berlin is a local organisation that loans expensive electric cargo-tricycles from community centres for three days at a time, for free, to anyone. People use them to transport their children to picnics, support a weekend pop-up business, or just to transport something over a short distance using a more green vehicle. So when my DoP, Steph, suggested we shoot the bicycle scenes from cargo tricycles instead of rigging car mounts, it made both aesthetic and practical sense. And Berlin provided through a couple of fLotte community centres from which we procured our free stunt vehicle rentals. (The one above is named Elsa, because every fLotte has a name and personality!) We took them from Weissensee to Neukoeln, from Wedding to Mitte — mostly on the same days. Elsa, pulled by energetic Olli, gave us the freedom to shoot tighter spaces and off-road bike riding sequences without drawing attention to ourselves, too. After all: the giant steadicam rig (see photo below) drew plenty of attention.
A few years ago, I researched the grassroots artist-community that had saved a giant, abandoned East German bureaucratic building from being sold by the city into private hands. Haus der Statistik, which was the East German statistics HQ before reunification, and a giant complex of abandoned office buildings for the 30 years since, was instead recovered and turned into public artist spaces with room for many of the collectives that have turned its ground floor into gallery space, theatres, and community centres. One of the buildings houses a giant upcycling emporium called the Material Mafia. It’s made up of a number of small groups, each with a different mandate to gather used trash, recycle it, and share it with the community. This is exactly the way in which Berlin’s solidarity often provides…
A bike workshop takes used bike parts and repairs discarded bikes, while making unusable parts into artwork. Our propmaster/bikemaster, Hannah, asked for their help procuring all of the bikes and locks she needed for the shoot, which could later be returned to them.
Another group finds used clothes, given away for free on the street, and washes them, repairs them, and rents them out for a small deposit. Thanks to this collective, we found many key costumes for free; in return, a lot of our thrift-shop-bought costumes were donated at the end of the shoot.
Artists bring paint, building materials, fabrics, and other extra materials to exchange them for new bits and bobs they need. Much of this work is not only non-extractive, it’s not-for-sale. One collective lends odd objects - radios, kitchen appliances, tools, chairs - like a library, on the condition that the borrower eventually returns the item. Orsi, our production designer, found paint, curtains, and other materials here throughout our shoot. The beauty is: when you use the extras of others and return your own extras, the system eliminates so much of the waste that’s usual on film sets.
But incorporating this real-life, “write-what-you-know” mindset to the culture of Berlin actually meant I too many different things that I knew. And this meant I had to break the other cardinal rule of micro-budget filmmaking: we shot for 12 days (an incredibly short schedule!) in 9 locations.
Retrospectively, I could say this was a mistake. Or, at least, “a learning experience.”
But maybe I’ll tell you more about that Next Time….
For now, I hope the generosity of Berlin’s upcycling, repurposing, and sharing culture inspires you in this season of gifting and generosity.
With much love for cinema and you,
Emily
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