Your latest film, Under Spanish Skies, premiered this summer and is now available on most major streaming platforms. The Bearlift Films website explains, "After the sudden death of her husband, a reclusive artist invites lifelong friends to her farm in Spain and reveals a shocking plan. Before the weekend ends, the friends must reveal secrets from the past that will drive her toward a devastating choice.” Could you share more about the film and what it was like to work on this project?
This film started because, while I had made a feature-length documentary before, I'd never made a feature-length narrative film. I was turning 49 in the fall of 2018. My wife, who is also a very accomplished artist, a dancer, and a filmmaker herself, knew that I had this thing that I'd wanted to do for a long time, which is make a narrative film, and she said, "this is your 49th birthday, why don't you make a film for your 50th birthday? That gives you one year to get this done." And it was a.good push. When you have children and are married to somebody making a film, it's a huge sacrifice because it will take up their entire life and your life. I recognized that this was truly a gift. She gave me the green light and said, "I know it's going to be tough for all of us, but you've gotta go through it with it." So I had that first impulse but didn't have a story then. I also didn't have money to make the film, nor did I have a place to film. So, I started searching around. I did have a set of parameters that I knew would work well for a feature film. The first was that I wanted to shoot in one location, and I wanted it to be set in a limited period of time, either twenty-four or forty-eight hours. I also wanted the characters in the film to have known each other for a long time because, in this kind of film, you excavate the past. So, you use emotional pyrotechnics instead of expensive real life ones like car chases and explosions. There's also the practical advantage of taking the whole crew with you and shooting the film in one place. And this goes back to Aristotle, who discussed the unity of time, place, and action. It turns out he was also giving us a recipe for low-budget filmmaking.
There is a certain subset of films that have followed this formula well, films that I love like Jean Renoir's "Rules of the Game," "The Big Chill," or "Festen," by Thomas Vinterberg. So, I had a structure, but I still needed a theme. I ended up traveling to Venice to discuss a business idea with a St. Stephen's contact named Frank O’Halloran, who was, at one time, the Head of Boarding at St. Stephen's, and we've been lifelong friends ever since meeting each other. He's a little older than me, but over time, that difference seems to have shrunk between us. We were sitting in Venice, on a terrace overlooking the Giudecca Canal. He starts telling me a story of an elderly couple he used to know who had a very interesting arrangement. They had a suicide pact. They had agreed that if one of them were to die before the other, the other person would take their own life, not wanting to live without them. And they went through with it. They were quite wealthy; they had an apartment in Marrakesh, Morocco, and in the apartment, they kept poison with the plan being that one of them would go to that apartment, drink the poison, and end their life. Importantly, they didn't have kids, nor did they have a close family. They really only had each other. The husband was always very athletic, running marathons at sixty, and the wife had a lot of health problems but, ironically, he developed a very fast-moving cancer, and from diagnosis to death, it was only three or four weeks.
He was gone, leaving her alone. She spends six months traveling the world, getting rid of their property, and giving their money away to charity; she comes back to Venice, says goodbye to everyone, and, of course, everyone already knows about the arrangement, and they try to talk her out of it. She tells them, "no, I'm going to go through with it." She flies to Marrakesh and ends her life. I was back in Berlin a couple of weeks later, riding my bike, and I realized, this is it; I can use this. So I took this story and put it together with the format I had planned. I imagined the main character who is living alone, she has just lost her husband, and she invites her two best friends, who have known her since high school, to visit. A lot of shared history between the four of them comes out over the course of the movie. I based a lot of things on my St. Stephen's friends, and I was thinking about St. Stephen's as I wrote the film. I think those years, between fourteen and eighteen, disproportionately influence your life, at least they did for me. St. Stephen's certainly did. So, for these characters in their late forties and early fifties, there's a reckoning that happens.
The script basically wrote itself. I wrote it very quickly, and I was able to raise money off of that script. I wrote for some actors I knew and then for others I met. I went to Venice in January, wrote the script in March or April, raised the money in May and June, did pre-production in July, and filmed in August. It was a three-week shoot. For a feature film, that almost never happens; a feature usually takes three to five years to progress from no script to a completed film. There was almost something supernatural about it. So we did it. I shot the film before my fiftieth birthday. It took me a good two and a half years to edit it. Part of that was that the whole film industry just shut down. We shot in August of 2019, and then the whole world shut down in March because of the pandemic. It was probably a good thing for the film because it gave me a longer gestation period to go through the editing process. And the thing I always say about movies is that you really write them three times. You write them when you write them, write them again when you shoot, and write them a third time when you edit, and each time everything transforms a little bit. So that was a good process for me.