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Lucy Adden as Mary-Ann in REDLAND, a film by Asiel Norton. Picture courtesy Zyzak Film Company. All rights reserved.

Redland (2009/2011)

Opened: 03/11/2011 Limited

Trailer: Click for trailer

Websites: Home, Facebook

Genre: Drama (English)

Rated: Unrated

Synopsis

As a family struggles to survive in rural America during the Great Depression, their daughter's secret affair begins a journey into the unknown. From writer/director, Asiel Norton, comes this story about the eternal laws of survival and existence, and how one act can begin the dissolution as well as the rebirth of a family.

Directed by Asiel Norton and stars Lucy Adden, Mark Aaron and Toben Seymour with Sean Thomas, Bernadette Murray, Kathan Fors, Elena S. Bell and Lacy Olsen. The writers include Asiel Norton and Magdalena Zyzak. The movie was produced by Magdalena Zyzak, Magdalena Zyzak and Zdzislaw Zyzak.

Director's Q&A with Asiel Norton

REDLAND came from an image I had in my mind of a man in a hat firing a rifle. I just had this image in my mind. Film ideas come to me in visions of images. I started to wonder who this guy was that was shooting this rifle, and I thought: 'he's a hunter; he's firing his rifle to feed his family.' And so I started thinking about who his family might be. Magdalena Zyzak (Co-writer/producer) started adding on her ideas. We're both very interested in Eastern European film, literature, and art (Magdalena's from Poland), and in Russia in particular they have the archetype of the holy fool, a character who's somewhat simple, and different, often mentally challenged who brings about great change, and is sort of connected to God in strange ways, a kind of spirit. We thought it'd be exciting for the daughter of the family to be a holy fool, and it kind of built off that.

As we were writing my father was fighting terminal cancer, and I was literally watching him die in a pretty painful manner. That obviously had a big impact on my psyche, and I was questioning what life was on the most basic level. I think the film in a way, is a metaphoric retelling of my childhood and my family, and my grappling with the ultimate mystery of life.

We shot in Northern California, right on the Oregon border. We had a 30 day shoot, which was pretty long for the amount of money we had, if you can believe it; particularly because we were shooting 35mm. A lot of indie films now, are shot in a really short amount of time. I think that time is essential to making a good film, it's honestly the most important asset you have as a filmmaker. Time to plan, time to rehearse, and time to get it right. I think many filmmakers now shoot films, and edit them much too quickly in order to get a quick turnaround on the money. But in terms of artistry, I think time is essential. When you look at the production schedules of most of the great films historically, they were amazing. They had more time to shoot just the boxing sequences in Raging Bull then we had to shoot our whole movie. I mean films like Lawrence of Arabia, Apocalypse Now, all of Kubrick's or Bergman's, Tarkovsky's, or Fellini's films, and these shoots are legendarily long. But it really shows in the outcome. We really had to spread our dollars to get that little bit of time we did have, but it was very important to do so.

We shot the film in the forest of the Northwest because that is where I was raised. I wanted to make a film about a world that I understood. I grew up in a sort of strange circumstance. My parents were hippies, and I was actually born in a cabin on a mountain. The film was shot on the adjacent mountain to where I was born. My family didn't have television, our electricity was pretty limited, our home was heated by a wood-burning stove, and our water was collected from a nearby stream. We had chickens, rabbits, and sheep, and my mom would actually knit clothes for my family from the wool of the animals. So the environment of the film reflects my upbringing.

I grew up really loving film, ever since I was a very, very young child. My parents both loved film, so I really got it from them. As I said, we didn't have television so my dad used to take me to a local university that was in a small town about 30-40 minutes away, and we used to watch classic films there. My whole family (there were six of us) would pile into this two door small truck, that should seat two, and we would drive down to watch movies. I think the first films I remember seeing and enjoying were Howard Hawks's Bringing Up Baby with Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn; Blake Edwards's Pink Panther series with Peter Sellers, and Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove. Also, Spielberg's E.T. had a big impact on me.

As a very young kid I always wanted to make movies, but I mainly wanted to act, and I acted in local theater. As I got older I started to notice that the films that I loved would have a certain person who directed them. And I would see these names of directors repeating on all these films that I loved and followed. I started to take more notice of the director of the movies instead of the actors in them. Also, like I said, my parents really liked films, so even at a pretty young age I knew about Hitchcock, Capra, Welles, and a lot of the great American directors. And then as a teenager, probably a bit through my dad's influence, I really fell in love with Kubrick. I also started to branch out and watch a lot more international cinema.

I think any time you want to do something good, it's always hard. I don't care what it is. If you want to make a good chair, or do anything else effectively, it's very difficult. If it were easy then everybody would be good at everything. I would say every aspect of filmmaking has its own difficulty. I think the main difficulty that we suffered through was lack of money. It made everything ten times harder, because we didn't want to make something that appeared cheap, or super low budget, even though we didn't have money. I think that life will always present challenges, but most of the time they are surmountable. You will always be taken to the limit, but with perseverance, the obstacle won't be so hard and you can achieve it.

I remember in casting, it took us around two months to cast the film right, and then we started rehearsals. The little boy in the film, the younger brother, PAUL, was originally cast with a different actor. As we were nearing the shooting of the film, for some reason his parents wouldn't sign the contract for him to be involved with the film. And as we were getting nearer to shooting, he still wouldn't sign. Finally the Friday afternoon before we were to start shooting we found out that the kid is homeless, and living in a car, and the people we thought were his parents, were not his legal guardians at all, and maybe he was kidnapped. This all came from a phone call from his agent. Literally the crew is already heading to Northern California to shoot, and we have no backup for this part. The agent then told us that he has a nephew that lives in Carolina that would be perfect for the part. He can get the child on a red eye, and we can audition him in Los Angeles on Saturday morning, then get up to Northern California that evening, and start shooting him on Monday -- we agreed. We are praying that this boy is okay, because good child actors are notoriously hard to find, and we didn't have anyone else. The child flew to LA on a redeye without any adult supervision, the agent picked him up, and drove him straight to our audition, and he ends up being great, much better than our original actor. He then jumps in our car, and we take him up to set, and start shooting that Monday. There were tons of obstacles like that, that kept arising, but every time, something would fall through at the end, something serendipitous that would allow us to continue, and most of the time, they were beneficial.

Honestly, everything was a new experience. I don't know where to begin. I also had a lot of intuitive thoughts about film that were reinforced through making the film. I think you can have a theory about something, but until you get practical knowledge, it can only take you so far. With this film, I really got down into the nuts and bolts of filmmaking on a very ground level, even more than I did in film school, because we were trying to do so much with so little. I would be both director and editor's assistant, logging footage and worrying about A roll and B roll, having long discussions with the negative cutter, things I never knew about, and quite frankly I would have never known about if we had money.

But the whole process was a learning experience, everything from being on a set directing a crew, trying to push, pry, cajole, and inspire people to get everything right; to editing, to get that rhythm, and put a feature film together (which is a different universe than a short); to scoring, sound editing, and mixing. The entire process is a learning experience.

From the very outset I wanted REDLAND to be a film experience - a cinematic experience. I want the audience to see and experience the mystery of life communicated through the medium of film. I realize that sounds grand, or to some people, maybe pretentious, but that is what I want. I think that all successful art does that. I am very enamored of films during the Post WWII period, films that aren't afraid to challenge, that let audiences see, feel, and experience life for all its mystery. American films of the 1970s were like that. Also, those films are uniquely cinematic, in that, I mean artistic works that don't depend too much on prose or theater, but work fully as cinematic experiences. The thing about these films that I like is that they have to be seen a few times before they are totally understood, but a full understanding of them isn't essential for their enjoyment. I like to think of our film as a sort of structured dream, a dream that has a beginning, middle, and end, that has a plot and character arch, but is still a dream none the less, and something that you experience, and are drawn out of yourself. But at the end of which you leave with questions, and the more times you see it, the more things become clear, but more questions always arise.

My next film that I'm working on now is HEAR I SING. It's from my own script. It's about a Jewish woman struggling to survive in complete isolation in the mountains of Ukraine during German occupation in WWII. She is forced to take the man who murdered her husband as her lover in order to save herself and her child. Inevitably, when one is working on a WWII film or something dealing with the Holocaust people always ask me, "why another WWII or Holocaust film?" And to that I answer, why not? Can there be too many WWII films? Can there be too many westerns? Or horror films? To me the Second World War is the most important event of the 20th century, and the Holocaust is at the center of the war. It's the war at its most brutal and destructive, and therefore it deserves telling. I also would say that there are very few western films that deal with the Eastern front, and there are even fewer films that deal with the Holocaust in Ukraine. This is before the death camps, and the Germans were just executing Jews in the field. Over a million and half Jews were killed that way, by bullet, in the Ukraine. Beyond which this film doesn't take place on a famous battlefield or in a concentration camp, it takes place in the mountains.