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The Making of "Bad Actors":
I contacted some friends of mine who are actors and asked them if they would star in an experimental film that we would shoot in a single day. No script. No rehearsals. Totally improvised. They would also use their real names, (which was the toughest thing I asked of them because the movie was called Bad Actors). All I told them was that it centered on an acting class and they had to be "drama queens," and I told them to prepare a monologue, but surprise me with it. Our producer, Nicole Visram, asked five more friends of ours to come out and operate the cameras. We used five Canon XL-1s simultaneously to shoot the movie. We owned one already and simply rented four more for the weekend. We paid for all this, which wasn't that much (a few thousand), on a credit card. The camera operators were positioned around the room, so as to get angles of all the actors and not shoot each other. We provided earpieces for each of them, which they wore snugly beneath their headphones, and then I sat in an adjacent room and watched via five monitors. By radio I could tell the operators to push in or pull out on whomever was speaking at the time.
The only outline of a script that I provided for anyone was the class instructor, played by Cissy Wellman (a regular on the hit 70's show The Waltons, and daughter of legendary film director William Wellman). This outline was her so-called "notes" during class, and it was full of material that made improvising easier on the other actors. We shot the entire film once before lunch, and again afterward. I spent the next two months editing it together, before we submitted it to the Dogme 95 committee for certification. In August 2000, they officially certified the film #16. Once we received our Dogme certification, an investor came forward to transfer the film to 35mm. This was an individual we had worked with once before on a web site, so that's how we found her. The 35mm print was completed in January 2001, and we began submitting it to festivals. It premiered at Cannes the following May, in the Marche du Film (which basically means we paid to have it shown there - again, the money coming from this same source), but it was not picked up for distribution.
Since then it has been accepted into the Melbourne Underground Film Festival, the Alexandria Film Festival (who have actually offered to fly us out and put us up - a first for us), and most recently the New York International Independent Film and Video Festival (another festival you pay to be featured in). We have also submitted the tape to various distributors in an effort to get it picked up. A break came when the notorious Aint-It-Cool-News web site reviewed the film and loved it. They even hosted a special screening of the film in their hometown of Austin, Texas at the downtown Alamo Drafthouse on August 11. Though Dogme films are considered "specialized," in this day and age of reality-based shows, Bad Actors is quite simply a reality film. And for anyone who knows actors, they will find it cuts hilariously close to the bone.
Shaun Monson
Director
http://www.badactors.net/
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