For me, making a movie is about asking a question and then searching for it, trying to find it through the process — learning about it through the people you work with and through the places it takes you.
On September 11, I was a senior studying film at NYU. I remember the call from my mom. I remember finding my friends. I remember shutting off my camera because the people walking uptown were looking through me. I remember that fall very well. For two years I didn’t want to leave the city — and it was in that time that I wrote the first draft of my first feature, “How I Got Lost.” I was 23 years old and living in the East Village, sitting in the Life Café heartbroken scribbling in notebooks. When a blackout hit the east coast on an August afternoon in 2003, I was walking down the street. That night there was a bonfire in Tompkins Square Park – people dancing, singing, taking off their clothes. And we started over, all of us. The next day it was a different New York City.
I didn’t think I was writing about that time until five years later, on draft nine or so. Every six months I’d pull out the pages, mark them up, and write something new. I read “The Sun Also Rises” around that time, and it seemed like it had just been written. And I started collecting postcards of Edward Hopper paintings, drawn in by their loneliness and heartache.
The journey of the production was the journey of the film. We went through it as a crew. The actors worked each day in a different place as we shot nearly in order. My producers were my closest allies: Massoumeh Emami, Jared Parsons, Sam Mestman and Chris DeAngelis. All of us were in New York on 9/11, all about the same age, all trying to make a movie that captured what we had experienced. My director of photography Chris Chambers was my closest friend during the shoot. We lived together, walked to set together, got sick of each other, and continued each day to make lists and find inspiration. On the door of our production office were two make-shift signs: “No Retreat, No Surrender” and “Ambition Beyond Our Means.” Both were genuinely funny on no sleep.
Early on we decided that we were going to try to shoot with this new toy, the Red One camera. For filmmakers like us, it was catnip. But when FedEx lost it two weeks away from principal photography, we all aged a few years. It showed up eventually, and when it did we didn’t ask questions.
After principal photography ended, my DP and I were driving through Illinois shooting highways surrounded by fields when we were suddenly pulled over by a State Trooper for driving 20 MPH on a state road with a speed limit of 60 MPH. I explained to the trooper that I had been looking at the sky.
“Lookin’ at the sky? Lookin’ at the SKY?” He stomped his feet and shook his head, and wrote me a ticket for being an insane filmmaker.
The real joy of filmmaking is in working with the talented people you find along the way, who are crazy enough to come along with you. At the end of the day, they make the magic between action and cut, and once it’s over… it’s sad — like you’ve lost your friends. Therapy has taught me this is something I do to fill my life up. And which I continue to do.
It’s been a few years since we finished the movie. It’s out in the world — on Netflix streaming, iTunes, and Hulu. But to a certain extent I still haven’t come to terms with the fact that it’s over.
Last weekend we started shooting “Snuggle Bunny“,(<—click here for the Facebook page) a short developed through the We Make Movies workshop, which I wrote with Stephanie Sanditz. Time to start over, again. The mottos remain the same: “No retreat, no surrender” and “Ambition Beyond Our Means.” On my checklist: another cup of coffee, a new stack of legal pads, and a pen that feels good on paper.
Thank goodness.
Joe is from St. Louis. He works as an editor on “Glee,” and has a beagle named Scout. Also, he loves writing things and hearing actors say them. He recently directed “Snuggle Bunny,” which he wrote with Stephanie Sanditz.
Websites: howigotlost.com | IMDb-Joe Leonard
