I came onboard to Johnny Hickey's (Director of Oxymorons & Habitual) newest project last summer. Johnny visits Los Angeles from time to time but most of our prep went through phone calls and emails. He broke down his story to me and it was this extremely gritty crime drama with themes that I could relate to from my hometown. He told me incredible things he wanted to do in this film. He had bank robberies, prison fights, police, hospitals, and drug dens and I just couldn't believe all of those things would be available to us in the city of Boston. Holy shit was I wrong.
As soon as I step into town, I immediately meet up with Johnny and we go right to work. First, is locations and when I say these are some beautiful locations, I'm doing it no justice. It's one of the oldest cities in America and every single stone is just weathered and rich with history and culture. The people are the tightest knit I've ever seen, and it seems like the world is available to us. My mind is blown, because in LA, I'd have to jump through 40 hoops ass-first and THEN pay a hefty bill on top of that. Things were seemingly perfect.
I had flown in with my Red Komodo kit and quite a bit of support gear. Plus I sent about a dozen packages ahead of me of things I knew we'd need on set. I was fully prepared to not only shoot this thing, but do anything I could to help produce this film. Turns out I didn't need to do much besides work on the scheduling and work out the shots. Johnny had just about every place we needed to shoot ready to go when we were. The crew started forming and was almost complete by the time we were getting close to shoot.
We only had a week to shoot this film, and we had a gung ho crew of straight up old school Boston filmmakers ready to get dirty. This project was hands-on, and needed to move fast and everybody was down. I just thought, "This. This is the shit I love."
Going into shooting, you really never know what to expect, or how it's going to go. It always feels like someone ripped off the door of a plane mid-flight. Not this time. I walk in the first day of shooting (arguably its typically your slowest and worst day) to Justina Valentine (from MTV's Wildn' Out) and Lenny Clarke (from Tough Crowd and Rescue Me) sitting on the couch, yucking it up while the crew set up the first shot. They're automatically opened up to the crew and it was an unbelievably smooth first day.
The week seems to fly by, and things went very well while we had our fair share of hiccups. Collaborating with Johnny was exactly that, a collaboration. Any issues we ran into, the plans would have to be adjusted and then we'd move accordingly. It really felt like this crew had become a machine by the end.
Before I had arrived in Boston, you have that sort of sinking gut feeling. That feeling you get on a shitty rollercoaster that you saw an out-of-date maintenance sticker on just before the ride starts. The thing about that feeling, is almost 100% of the time that I've felt like that in my life, it has turned out to be one of the most life-changing experiences for me that I come away with only positive gains. This time was no different. I think it's easy to get so caught up in our everyday world (at least for me it is), that you forget what's out there and you fear it. But it completely opened my eyes to filmmaking in places outside of LA and the opportunities that come with that.
If you ever get a chance to travel for your art, you should jump at that chance. The scarier it seems; the better.
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