Indie Interviews #8: Justin D. Hilliard
Continued

FC: And it’s a film that is definitely worth revisiting. I was engaged to whole time, and I’ve carried it with me for days now. That’s one of the biggest compliments I can give to anything that I watch, that this movie has stayed with me, that it has been that affecting.
JH: Well, thank you.

FC: Well, you film this in many locations. Was it something that happened by happenstance, that you were able to film these in different locations or did you plan it out that way? Were you set on making this ambitious project, like you did? Going from Texas to London, was it planned that way?
JH: As soon as I started writing the other segments, from the moment I started writing Purgatory, it really just felt like a London segment. These characters, I really wanted to show that there was this history and kind of a believable romantic side to a somewhat elderly couple, middle-aged to elderly, that I haven’t seen a lot in films. That kind of darkness, that element of where they are at in there lives, that really just felt like London. I wrote it down and I told my producing partner that we have to do this in London. That was the biggest step. I had just gotten done with school and I managed to get a work visa through that. Even though I graduated I was able to get a cheap enough work visa to go overseas, have a job that got me room and board, research, finish writing the characters once I got to know the area a lot better, and just cast it, location scout it, and do everything on my own out there. My producing partner and some of our people here in America came over to help us out too.

FC: Your producing partner, Ryan Hartsell, he was the cinematographer, the director of photography for this film, correct?
JH: He’s the director of photography and co-producer.

FC: The vignettes, when you two were discussing the photography, did you film them distinctly for each segment? They seemed like they were. Did you have a plan for filming the differently, stylistically for each segment?
JH: We had a base for the whole thing. There are some color balance elements, whether it is complete desaturation for Narcissus that I had in mind before hand. Then it was really a matter of taking the stories and saying, "What do these really remind us of?" "Where are we at visually and emotionally whenever we see these characters?" We shot them all based on what we were feeling. We always ran multiple cameras. We shot Mini-DV because with our first feature it is like, we can either shoot film, pay more for it, but get one take out of the actor, or we can shoot Mini-DV and just run the camera then put the focus on the story and the acting first and embrace our limitations for our first feature. We can improve on the other stuff later, we'll make the visual style connect to the story so we picked an emotional story that is raw, emotional and kind of unsettling and I think that connects well to Mini-DV. 28 Day Later they shot most of that on Mini-DV or digital and that really adds to the film. With Wednesday it brings it more so to the docu-reality feeling that you get with Narcissus. It was one of those things that we planned and talked about until we were able to just feel it out when we were in the scene. The editing more than anything was kind of the thing, more so than the cinematography, where we were able to dictate what we were feeling with each story, within the jump cuts. There are just constant reminders throughout the film, especially in Luke and Lucy, that you are watching a film and that was intentional. We have so much coverage on this film, but we'll go to the close up instead of the wide and reverse the traditional order of things, just hints throughout the film that this is a film. When it comes to the final segment, you are kind of caught off guard, but when you connect it later it makes sense.

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