Of all the works I have done I believe, at least to date, this film has the strongest impact on me, at least emotionally. In the dramatic or emotionally driven projects I have produced I feel that connection to the material, but it always feels halved to me in comparison to this one. This is the only film I’ve made that honestly has pushed me to the brink of tears. At the same time, this film almost never happened. It was a sudden thought in my mind that told me to take the concept of another piece I had done and rework it.
Back in 2010 I believe it was, back when I was still shooting things with a $229 home movie camera that couldn’t even widescreen properly, I got a suddenly bug to shoot a film short. It ran about ten minutes and, honestly, could’ve been done in half that time. But the idea suddenly came to me about a young man who is very successful and caught up in the work that he does, so much so that he is blind to much of what has gone on around him outside of work. Not exactly a new concept, but the idea as to how what he was missing would become clear is what drove me. The idea of the film was for a girl, who goes unseen in the film, who is in love with him finally decided to tell him, but she does it subtly by writing a love poem and claiming it is for a class she is taking. Realizing how intelligent the lead character is, she claims that she gave it to him to proofread, but upon reading it several times it finally hits him that these words of love are meant for him. The poem is very simple, something anyone can understand, and the last half of the film follows the lead as he tries to understand his feelings and see if they are the same. The last shot is him opening his door when she comes knocking to “take the poem back”. The door opens, at night, and thus opens into darkness and everything cuts to black.
The film was an interesting idea, but also was a spontaneous project. There was no preplanning or shot listing. I just set up the camera and got several angles of me engaging in whatever the lead was going through. There were a few interesting shot ideas but it was just a thrown together thing so as for me to take an idea I had and turn it into something real. But the overall concept was still rather bland. It was just a guy in his room discovering something about himself. The blandness, along with the lack of preplanning, the poor video quality and the fact that I was playing the leading (and only) role in the film obviously led to it suffering terribly. But I didn’t really care because I had simply done it for fun. It was a short while, maybe six months or so, later that I wrote another short piece, maybe ten pages, about a man who suffers a break up from the love of his life, who is leaving him for another man. An underlying theme of the film was that she would have a car accident after the other man never shows and while she is on her way to beg forgiveness for her actions. She returns home and tries to communicate with him but he cannot hear her and the whole question arises as to whether she is dead or not. We find out in the end that she is not. Once again there was an interesting idea there, but there was something too predictable about it. It had that It’s a Wonderful Life vibe to me, that has been stolen and reused by so many movies; the idea of making a mistake and then when you go to rectify things nobody sees you or knows you. Life becomes a nightmare until the end when everything goes back to the way it was in the beginning, how it should be. But as I was pondering taking up the idea for the first I Love You, I Love You again, because I just loved that idea so much, I knew I had to upgrade the whole thing and actually conceive a script and shot list the piece. So as I was considering how to expand on the original story, the idea from this other script crept in and I started pondering that mystery of not knowing whether or not a character is dead. Taking the essence of that idea, I applied it to the lead in my newer version of I Love You, I Love You and it completely revitalized the whole production. It gave it that arc and that attraction to keep you watching because of the emotional connection as much as the mystery of it.
In producing this film, which ran a little over twelve minutes, I had shot listed 208 total shots for the film. This was my first effort into really delving into having a mix of shots. It was one of my goals to make the visual constantly change and I wanted to use the same shots as little as possible, unless it was pertinent at a particular moment. I had been so disappointed with the predictable and redundant cinematography of The Morning After and at the same time was so taken with the array of shots I had captured and used in The Starlet that I felt very compelled to do something that complimented that mixture of different shots. While I cut maybe some twenty shots while I was filming this new piece, it was an incredibly quick and effective shoot. At the same time, this was one of those practice pieces where I was testing myself in new ways I hadn’t really reached for in the past. There was no crew. It was just myself and my two actors. It was also early July and I remember that first day we jumped into filming early because even by 11 a.m. it was pushing ninety degrees outside (yes, it gets warm in Oregon too).
The shooting of I Love You, I Love You was an interesting journey as well because in the midst of the film, and I knew I was going to cut it this way, there are lots of moments of cutting back and forth between the characters. Furthermore, the film starts in the middle of the story, gets you almost to the end and then jumps back to the beginning before leading us back to the end again. So there is a lot of motion for such a short film and I knew it would have to be shot just right, with no mistakes, for a viewer to watch it and understand what place of the story they were in. As far as a chronological description of the revamped version of this film, just like in the first, the female lead, Natalie, writes a poem to the hustling and bustling love of her life, Evan. When he is not home she attaches the poem to his door and when he arrives home from a business trip a few days later he discovers it. One of the few identical aspects of this film to the original is that I used the exact same poem in both films. Seeing Natalie’s claim that she wanted him to read it to proofread it, Evan takes some time to look the poem over, wherein he discovers that this is a poem written for him. What the viewer doesn’t know at this time is that Natalie died in a car accident (tying back to that other script I wrote) right after attaching the poem to his door. So as he reads the poem we see Natalie lingering around him and we are not quite sure what it means.
Natalie is also seen dressed two different ways. In some scenes she is wearing a purple striped shirt, which represents moments in her life when she was still alive. In this shirt then we see her as she’s delivering the note to Evan’s place and when the car accident occurs. In other sequences we see her in her spiritual form, meaning she has already died. For these sequences I went with the classic spirit/angel concept of a white shirt. This allows one to separate which Natalie is there in various scenes. She wears the white shirt as she watches Evan reading the poem as she is dead by then and, of course, in the ending when the two come together for the last time, she is in that white shirt. After Evan realizes that he feels the same for Natalie, but that she is gone, he is overcome by the grief considering how long they had known each other and how much time they had to cultivate a relationship and he never pulled through because he was too busy to see what was right in front of him. He then goes to a gazebo, one of their favorite places to hang out and speaks to Natalie. She is in her white shirt so she is not really there, although the viewer is not able to put the pieces together of that yet. Then, after speaking briefly, Evan tells her that he wishes he could look into her eyes and say he loves her too, but he can’t because she’s not there. Then a reveal shot from the side and behind exposes that he is there alone.
From this moment he sits and begins comprising his own “I Love You, I Love You” poem for Natalie. As he writes and becomes more emotionally broken down we experience the events that surrounding Natalie’s car accident and his discovering of the poem on his door afterward. He snaps, breaks down and chucks his poem into the ground, feeling it’s pointless because Natalie isn’t there to read it. But as he sits there crying and the poem sits there mangled up, the spirit of Natalie returns, approaching Evan and picks up the wrinkled poem and reading it over. She sees the words and knows that his feelings are the same. She then steps up to Evan, revealing herself, and in the midst of his efforts to apologize to her she shushes him and, as she holds his written work up to him, simply says, “We know everything we need to know.” The purpose of this statement is fairly clear; that despite the fact that in the realm of our world they are no longer together they both know that they have true love for each other and that is something that will never be taken away. Natalie then walks away and, after giving Evan one last look, vanishes down a long pathway, leaving Evan there alone looking out after her.
I watch this film and, in particular at the end, I always get emotionally choked up by in, which makes me happy because it’s always a positive when you can be that effected by your own work. I feel we live in a world now a days where we’re so expected to be humble about our efforts that we overdo it and many creative minds refuse to accept the quality of the work they do. But part of the creative venture and our ability to continue at it and get better as we go along is to appreciate the work we’ve done. Don’t take the mistakes we made and use them as an excuse to tear ourselves down, as though we are perfect beings in the first place, but to use them as a remembrance for things not to do in the future. In every film project I produce there are mistakes made and things I find that I know I will address differently in later works. Because of this, the number of mistakes I make in the films I have produced have become less and less.
In shooting this piece, I managed to break it out over two days and we got the whole thing shot in about ten hours, we were moving that effectively. In one day we shot pretty much everything that happened at the gazebo which, when you watch the film doesn’t seem like much but you see that throughout the piece keeps returning there so there was actually quite a bit to shoot. The second day was everything else, which included the scene where Evan reads the poem and a few sequences that take place outside Evan’s house, which include Natalie placing the poem there and his discovery of it. So shooting was relatively easy. Editing the piece was a whole other story all together. I believe it was almost two months after before I finally got the whole thing finished. And part of that was becoming involved in other projects. I had been hired on as a DP for another short independent film and was even out of town in Seattle for a week as the best man in my friend’s wedding. So there were scheduling conflicts, but outside of that, when I took down a listing of all the shots I had captured it was over ten pages of college ruled paper because I had made up so many shots. Taking that large collection of shots I then had to separate them out based on what moments in the film they were going to be used. This was important seeing as the film goes back and forth so much. If I had just edited based on the initial order in which I downloaded clips I would have been bobbing back and forth in my list of clips while editing it probably would’ve taken an extra month to get it all do. So a key time saver for you editors out there: If you have a lot of shots, break them down and categorize there! You’ve save time and, perhaps, a little bit of your sanity.
This film was a great test for me in another way. When I had first launched into films, namely the film Second Chances I worked on in 2009, the film was a “talker”. It was almost all just people standing around talking about things. I was still somewhat of a novice editor and the sequences in that film just dragged on. I was one of those early filmmakers who wanted to keep everything in there. If someone needed to think about an answer to something I gave them eight or ten seconds of silence to do that, and these scenes just droned on. Even in The Way We Are, which I shot three years later, I cut about three and a half minutes out because the only real critique I got was that it dragged a little early on. And while I left many of the elongated shots from early in the film in, I did cut things down and it was still clear that I needed to continue in working on my ability for timing and to keep shots and sequences from becoming overly long. However, when one engages in practices such as this it is always easy to overcompensate and begin cutting scenes too closely. This is a critical error as well because it can make things look like they’re happening too quickly. When high schools and kids just screwing around making little films for fun they tend to make this mistake. When cutting between shots and people talking, the moment one finishes they cut the film and start the clip for the next person right when they start talking. This, of course, makes it look like people are constantly talking right on top of each other, which is not how people naturally converse. Even if we are engaged in a stirring commentary and really bouncing back and forth with each other, we still at least need that split second to ponder before we leap in and react to the words of someone else.
I Love You, I Love You provided a perfect chance to work my skills on this issue of timing with how much the film goes back and forth. And at certain moments the pace with which the film goes back and forth between Evan and Natalie increases and then decreases. There is also a good deal of background music in the film and the cutting of the film connects with that music so in some places the editing had to been in connection with that as well. The soundtrack of the film is actually one audio track, a royalty free track, that ran some twenty-one minutes. The song was essentially a mix of tracks run together, so it was like five or six tracks that were run together to make one. It was predominantly a piano track and it just had such a simple melancholic nature to it that I thought it would work. I was pleasantly surprised to see that it worked out as well as it did.
After cutting the film together I was fairly happy with it, but at the same time I felt somewhat disappointed. I had that ‘It’s good, but it could’ve been better’ attitude about it, which is an attitude lots of us have about our work, especially initially. When I spoke to the girl who played Natalie, who I worked with on another short project about a month later, I think she was surprised to see how emotionally charged it was. Her response was, “It was really good, I just wasn’t expecting it to end up like that.” I think she felt it was going to be a more linear storyline and that the ending wasn’t going to be as sad. My friend Carl, who played the lead of Evan, and who also played the lead in The Morning After, liked the film enough that right after he reworked his personal website, when he moved down to Los Angeles to continue his acting/modeling career down there, he included the link for the film on there as a piece of work he had been in. He had been in lots of plays, films and commercials up in Portland and there were only a few pieces that he had linked there. So obviously he liked the piece as well. And over time, after watching it a few more times my appeal towards the film has grown and grown over time and it’s now one of my favorites as far as the short films I have produced.
This would be the last dramatic film I produced before shooting a longer film titled The Runner, which I had jumped into work on within days of finishing shooting I Love You, I Love You. Because it was longer, it took much longer to organize and I was hoping to cast my friend Jeffrey in the lead role but he ended up working on the east coast for several months and I had to go with someone else. I definitely think I Love You, I Love You was the first film that solidified in my mind that as far as my favorite genre to work in would be the drama genre. It helped push me forward in wanting to make The Runner, which was a script I wrote and really liked, but never knew when I would actually want to shoot it. And now I am working on what will hopefully be my masterpiece, at least to this point, a feature length film titled My Inspiration. I have been preparing for production on that film since almost the beginning of the year and am planning on beginning production on at the beginning of May this year. As with The Runner, I had previously been planning on shooting My Inspiration a while back and had shelved it, not knowing when I would bring it about again. But just as well, I have found myself pulling that script back up and realizing that I need to shoot this film and create another powerful piece of dramatic work.
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