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Tadpole, may well turn out to be one of the most successful, a film made for a hundred thou- sand dollars that sold for five mil- lion at Sundance.
“Each point was worth $50,000,” he beams, “and every- one from the make-up lady to the script supervisor, to me and IFC, we all have points on the movie.” The success has doubt- less made his cast very happy too, established stars like Sigourney Weaver, John Ritter and Bebe Neuwirth and new- comer Aaron Stanford.
A sweetly perceptive coming of age story, Tadpole follows the romantic misadventures of intel- lectually precocious 15 year old Oscar Grubman (Stanford). He returns home from boarding school for Thanksgiving, arguing the merits of Voltaire and despair- ing of immature girls his own age. Oscar prefers the older woman, particularly his sexy stepmother Eve (Weaver).
Tadpole is witty, well written, poignant – all attributes that actors love in a script. And the promise of shooting the film digi- tally meant that it would also be a very swift production, 14 days as it turned out, which is some- thing that actors love even more.
“Sigourney was the first actor to come on board,” says Winick, “and as soon as she took the part she explained she was interested in the DV process, because she said she had heard it was like a hybrid between theatre and film. We talked about the process being different from 35mm, and the fact is I needed her for less time. It’s a 10 day commitment, as opposed to two months.
“My philosophy is to keep with the cameras really small – the ones we used are about the size of a water bottle – because I
kind of feel that that’s part of the different way of working, that theatrical feel for the actors that you wouldn’t get on a 35mm shoot. It’s a film set but the lights aren’t as hot and you don’t move as much furniture around. And with a 10-person crew, that was also something that was dif- ferent from the experience the actors usually have.”
InDigEnt productions include Campbell Scott’s Final, Ethan Hawke’s Chelsea Walls, Richard Linklater’s Tape (which opened here in the summer) and Alan Taylor’s forthcoming Kill The Poor. But the DV revolution has also recently attracted other top film- makers. Among them are Steven Soderbergh, who made his low budget but star laden, Full Frontal, in 18 days between more conventional studio pictures, and Marc Evans, with his Big Brother horror film, My Little Eye.
With high end productions like the Star Wars films being shot and projected digitally, and the con- tinuing development of technolo- gy that makes more modest pro- ductions from Winick and other bold souls like Mike Figgis possi- ble, the age of celluloid may well be drawing to an end.
Once the preserve of the rich, the powerful and the foolhardy filmmaking is about to become more democratic than ever before.
“We’ve only scratched the surface,” Winick nods. “You have to make aesthetic choices for your story, and that’s as true with DV as anything. We use it because we want to achieve a certain look.
“The danger is when people just think of DV as the cheap man’s way to make a movie so it’s going to look like shit. If you go with that approach you’ve lost before you’ve begun.”
Gary Winick will be speaking at BAFTA on 27 November (tbc). Tadpole opens in the UK later this year.
Photos clockwise from left: Director Gary Winick with Bebe Neuwirth in Tadpole; from the same film Laura Regan and Jennifer Sky (top); Aaron Stanford (second left below)
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Peepshow, Vicky Wetherill/Tom Blau Gallery