Posts Tagged: God's Land: Production Diaries
by staff on November 1st, 2011 at 7:30 pm in The House
[Editor's Note: House Rewind is a collection of House articles from the month gone by—a recap of the posts you loved and those you might have missed.]
In our extensive coverage of The New York Film Festival, House contributors reviewed Le Havre, 4:44 Last Day on Earth, A Dangerous Method, Martha Marcy May Marlene, This Is Not a Film, The Turin Horse, and The Descendants, among many other titles.
In the latest installment of The Conversations, Jason Bellamy and Ed Howard discussed Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon.
In the new series Oscar Prospects, R. Kurt Osenlund looked at the Academy Awards hopes for buzzworthy contenders Carnage, Moneyball, The Artist, and The Help.
In Music, the House added to its Playlist the latest from Charlie XCX, Icona Pop, Small Black, & Hands and Teeth; Kurt Vile, AU/Palais, & Phantogram; and Shimmering Stars, Amanda Mair and Cate Le Bon.
Reporting from The São Paulo International Film Festival, Aaron Cutler offered coverage of such films as The Kid with a Bike and A Trip to the Moon, Jeanne and Hanezu, and Outside Satan and Breathing.
Continue Reading »
Tags: Barry Lyndon, Belleville, Charlie XCX, Chinglish, Daniel Clowes, David Foster Wallace, David Henry Hwang, God's Land, God's Land: Production Diaries, House Rewind, J. Edgar, Le Havre, Martha Marcy May Marlene, São Paulo International Film Festival, Shimmering Stars, Stanley Kubrick, The Artist, The Descendants, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, The Great Northern Brotherhood of Canadian Cartoonists, The Help, The Iron Lady, The Kid with a Bike, The New York Film Festival, The Pale King, The Turin Horse, This Is Not a Film
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by Jeremiah Kipp on October 28th, 2011 at 12:30 am in Film
[Editor's Note #1: In honor of this week's release of Preston Miller's movie God's Land, we are republishing the set diaries that Preston and producer Jeremiah Kipp wrote during filming in 2009. This is a joint effort with Fandor, which will post the even-numbered diary entries on the same days the House posts the odd-numbered entries. God's Land will open at the Quad Cinema in Manhattan on Friday, October 28th. You will also be able to watch the film for free on Fandor from Friday, October 28th until Sunday, October 30th. Click here for more information. Our thanks to Kevin B. Lee.]
[Editor's Note #2: The following is the ninth in a series of on-set reports by producer Jeremiah Kipp on God's Land, a feature film written and directed by Preston Miller, whose previous feature, Jones, was covered by The House Next Door here (review), here (interview), and here (podcast).]
Days Sixteen & Seventeen
My God, just when you feel like you've got a hold of something, or you're moving forward at a good steady clip and sense that karma is on your side, things can rapidly take a turn for the nightmarish. Day sixteen is easily, without a doubt, the worst and most painful day of shooting on God's Land. After a week of scheduling with the actors and striking out with his location scouts, our fearless director Preston Miller suggests we just go into a famous department store chain, head straight to the grocery section, and proceed to steal shots there without benefit of insurance, paperwork, clearance or permits. I'm no coward when it comes to this stuff, but it's an insane proposition when you're stealing shots involving over a half dozen actors, most of them Asian-Americans dressed in white cowboy hats, hoodies and sweatpants—and involving three pages of solid, crucial dialogue—and involving child actors—and involving said child actors crashing shopping carts together for fun. Trying to shoot something like this is just madness—maybe even stupidity. Maybe we could have done it another way; but we decided to go for it to get those scenes completed and behind us. Continue Reading »
Tags: Alex Blakeley, Alex Gavin, God's Land, God's Land: Production Diaries, Jackson Ning, Jodi Lin, Matthew Chiu, Preston Miller, Shing Ka, Super Mario Brothers
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by Jeremiah Kipp on October 27th, 2011 at 12:30 am in Film
[Editor's Note #1: In honor of this week's release of Preston Miller's movie God's Land, we are republishing the set diaries that Preston and producer Jeremiah Kipp wrote during filming in 2009. This is a joint effort with Fandor, which will post the even-numbered diary entries on the same days the House posts the odd-numbered entries. God's Land will open at the Quad Cinema in Manhattan on Friday, October 28th. You will also be able to watch the film for free on Fandor from Friday, October 28th until Sunday, October 30th. Click here for more information. Our thanks to Kevin B. Lee.]
[Editor's Note #2: The following is the seventh in a series of on-set reports by producer Jeremiah Kipp on God's Land, a feature film written and directed by Preston Miller, whose previous feature, Jones, was covered by The House Next Door here (review), here (interview), and here (podcast).]
Days Nine & Ten
The heart of the film is in the domestic scenes between the husband and wife. While I feel the point of view of God's Land is from the child, Ollie (Matthew Chiu), it's the conflict between the parents that sets everything in motion. The father, Hou (Shing Ka), was a successful doctor and gave everything away to join this cult—which has relocated its members to suburban Garland, Texas—and his wife, Xiu (Jodi Lin), is a non-believer. The key scenes we are shooting over the weekend involve testing the marriage. One of the scenes involves the two of them in bed: The husband is trying to sleep, the wife wants to speak with him about the past, how they met, the time Hou met her father and felt so uncomfortable because he didn't know what to say, and also to get him to talk about how she was the most beautiful woman in school, a beautiful flower in a sea of "frumpy bespectacled weeds." It's one of the scenes we used for the auditions, and I always found it to be incredibly poetic and beautiful, as well as tense—not to mention familiar. I think guys have a habit of rolling over and going to sleep when women want to talk. "Just go to sleep," Hou mutters, "or at least let me sleep!" Continue Reading »
Tags: Arsenio Assin, God's Land, God's Land: Production Diaries, Jackson Ning, Jodi Lin, Matthew Chiu, Preston Miller, Shing Ka
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by Jeremiah Kipp on October 26th, 2011 at 12:30 am in Film
[Editor's Note #1: In honor of this week's release of Preston Miller's movie God's Land, we are republishing the set diaries that Preston and producer Jeremiah Kipp wrote during filming in 2009. This is a joint effort with Fandor, which will post the even-numbered diary entries on the same days the House posts the odd-numbered entries. God's Land will open at the Quad Cinema in Manhattan on Friday, October 28th. You will also be able to watch the film for free on Fandor from Friday, October 28th until Sunday, October 30th. Click here for more information. Our thanks to Kevin B. Lee.]
[Editor's Note #2: The following is the fifth in a series of on-set reports by producer Jeremiah Kipp on God's Land, a feature film written and directed by Preston Miller, whose previous feature, Jones, was covered by The House Next Door here (review), here (interview), and here (podcast).]
Day Six: An Interview with Wayne Chang
We are approaching the middle of our shooting schedule, and finally making some headway. But as the weekends push on with God's Land, the balancing act of juggling a dozen actors' schedules is starting to wear on the production. Our lead actress, Jodi Lin, who is in almost every single scene, got paid work for the following weekend and we have to figure out how to shoot around that. Preston will have to operate the camera instead of Arsenio Assin, our director of photography, because he had a last minute schedule change. There would seem to be no romance and glory in making films at this no-budget level. Continue Reading »
Tags: Amy Chiang, Arsenio Assin, God's Land, God's Land: Production Diaries, Jackson Ning, Jodi Lin, Preston Miller, Shing Ka, Wayne Chang
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by Preston Miller on October 25th, 2011 at 12:30 am in Film
[Editor's Note #1: In honor of this week's release of Preston Miller's movie God's Land, we are republishing the set diaries that Preston and producer Jeremiah Kipp wrote during filming in 2009. This is a joint effort with Fandor, which will post the even-numbered diary entries on the same days the House posts the odd-numbered entries. God's Land will open at the Quad Cinema in Manhattan on Friday, October 28th. You will also be able to watch the film for free on Fandor from Friday, October 28th until Sunday, October 30th. Click here for more information. Our thanks to Kevin B. Lee.]
[Editor's Note #2: The following is the third in a series of on-set reports on God's Land, a feature film written and directed by Preston Miller, whose previous feature, Jones, was covered by The House Next Door here (review), here (interview), and here (podcast).]
Days Three & Four
Like most of the others working on God's Land, I have a day job that has nothing to do with filmmaking or entertainment. I depend on the job to support my wife and two kids, the youngest only three months old. Shooting must be done at specific times, usually on weekends so as not to interfere with the cast and crew's money jobs. This means that even though a shooting schedule exists and is constantly modified, not everything that's listed on a certain day will actually materialize. It's up to me to see it all the way through. When resources are temporarily missing, I have to come up with solutions to keep this train moving lest the riders decide to jump off. Continue Reading »
Tags: Alex Gavin, Allison Pantoch, Arsenio Assin, Carrie Kiamesha, God's Land, God's Land: Production Diaries, Jeremiah Kipp, Jodi Kiamesha, Jodi Lin, Leif Fortlouis, Nancy Eng, Preston Miller, Robbie Sinder, Scott Perry, Shing Ka, Spaghetti Western
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by Jeremiah Kipp on October 24th, 2011 at 12:30 am in Film
[Editor's Note #1: In honor of this week's release of Preston Miller's movie God's Land, we are republishing the set diaries that Preston and producer Jeremiah Kipp wrote during filming in 2009. This is a joint effort with Fandor, which will post the even-numbered diary entries on the same days the House posts the odd-numbered entries. God's Land will open at the Quad Cinema in Manhattan on Friday, October 28th. You will also be able to watch the film for free on Fandor from Friday, October 28th until Sunday, October 30th. Click here for more information. Our thanks to Kevin B. Lee.]
[Editor's Note #2: The following is the first in a series of on-set reports by producer Jeremiah Kipp on God's Land, a feature film written and directed by Preston Miller, whose previous feature, Jones, was covered by The House Next Door here (review), here (interview), and here (podcast).]
[Photo Credits: Shing Ka (all, except logo); Leif Fortlouis (logo).]
Day One
The 8-year-old boy, Matthew, is clutching his mother's sleeve tight and holding her hand. He looks very pale. As the director of photography, Arsenio Assin, sits on a nearby couch inspecting the Hi-Def camera, which is state of the art and still has that "new car smell," and the filmmaker, Preston, assembles the costumes, which are, to say the least, quite bizarre (a white cowboy hat, white zip-up hoodies, white sweatpants and Texarcana cowboy boots), the boy seems to wonder just what he got himself into here. We load up the passenger van and drive out to the shopping mall, where we will proceed to shoot these actors in these strange costumes moving through this consumer-driven space. Matthew barely says a word to us; he is going through something completely interior—and completely personal. Continue Reading »
Tags: Arsenio Assin, Béla Tarr, Fandor, God's Land, God's Land: Production Diaries, Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Jeremiah Kipp, Jodi Lin, Jones, Leif Fortlouis, Matthew Chiu, Preston Miller, Shing Ka
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[Editor's Note: The following is the ninth in a series of on-set reports by producer Jeremiah Kipp on God's Land, a feature film written and directed by Preston Miller, whose previous feature, Jones, was covered by The House Next Door here (review), here (interview), and here (podcast).]
Part I: Days Eighteen & Nineteen (Jeremiah Kipp)
The final days of principal photography are upon us. God's Land has been a long haul, exhausting but ultimately rewarding—it reminds me of when I used to run marathons. At a certain point in the middle of the run, the mind concentrates only on moving forward; as the finish line nears, there's a surge of renewed energy.
Preston and I enjoy our location scouting in New Jersey, where we stumble across the perfect location for our hotel scenes. The King's Inn has an outside décor that resembles a pyramid converted into a NASA space shuttle by way of 1950s Americana kitsch. In other words, we took one look at it and knew it was Preston's cup of tea. The hotel owners were reasonable and supportive of low budget independent cinema, though they did enjoy telling long anecdotes about how MTV shot there, and the abundance of trucks and lights and personnel. Preston smiles, acknowledges the grandeur, and tries to make it clear that our mom and pop operation is nothing like that. We're small potatoes! Continue Reading »
Tags: Carrie Kiamesha, Geeta Citygirl, Gloria Diaz, God's Land, God's Land: Production Diaries, Jodi Lin, Matthew Chiu, Nancy Eng, Ostaro, Ranjit Chowdhry, Sharon Spiak, Shing Ka
1 Comment »
by Jeremiah Kipp on August 18th, 2009 at 8:30 am in Film
[Editor's Note: The following is the ninth in a series of on-set reports by producer Jeremiah Kipp on God's Land, a feature film written and directed by Preston Miller, whose previous feature, Jones, was covered by The House Next Door here (review), here (interview), and here (podcast).]
Days Sixteen & Seventeen
My God, just when you feel like you've got a hold of something, or you're moving forward at a good steady clip and sense that karma is on your side, things can rapidly take a turn for the nightmarish. Day sixteen is easily, without a doubt, the worst and most painful day of shooting on God's Land. After a week of scheduling with the actors and striking out with his location scouts, our fearless director Preston Miller suggests we just go into a famous department store chain, head straight to the grocery section, and proceed to steal shots there without benefit of insurance, paperwork, clearance or permits. I'm no coward when it comes to this stuff, but it's an insane proposition when you're stealing shots involving over a half dozen actors, most of them Asian-Americans dressed in white cowboy hats, hoodies and sweatpants—and involving three pages of solid, crucial dialogue—and involving child actors—and involving said child actors crashing shopping carts together for fun. Trying to shoot something like this is just madness—maybe even stupidity. Maybe we could have done it another way; but we decided to go for it to get those scenes completed and behind us. Continue Reading »
Tags: Alex Blakeley, Alex Gavin, God's Land, God's Land: Production Diaries, Jackson Ning, Jodi Lin, Matthew Chiu, Preston Miller, Shing Ka, Super Mario Brothers
1 Comment »
by Jeremiah Kipp on August 5th, 2009 at 5:00 am in Film
[Editor's Note: The following is the eighth in a series of on-set reports by producer Jeremiah Kipp on God's Land, a feature film written and directed by Preston Miller, whose previous feature, Jones, was covered by The House Next Door here (review), here (interview), and here (podcast).]
Days Eleven, Twelve, Thirteen, Fourteen & Fifteen
We are over halfway through shooting God's Land now—and seeing light at the end of the tunnel for some of our principal actors. All of the heavy domestic scenes involving the family inside their new Texas home have been completed, most of the cult scenes are also in the can. The biggest one remaining is a dialogue scene between Teacher Chen (Jackson Ning) and Xiu (Jodi Lin) with the other members in the background. There's a series of scenes coming up involving a hotel that will be a little tricky. But this weekend, we're doing a series of small catch-ups—an assembly line of tiny moments within the film. Continue Reading »
Tags: Gloria Diaz, God's Land, God's Land: Production Diaries, Jackson Ning, Jodi Lin, Lee Ka, Nancy Eng, Preston Miller, Shing Ka
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by Jeremiah Kipp on July 29th, 2009 at 8:20 am in Film
[Editor's Note: The following is the seventh in a series of on-set reports by producer Jeremiah Kipp on God's Land, a feature film written and directed by Preston Miller, whose previous feature, Jones, was covered by The House Next Door here (review), here (interview), and here (podcast).]
Days Nine & Ten
The heart of the film is in the domestic scenes between the husband and wife. While I feel the point of view of God's Land is from the child, Ollie (Matthew Chiu), it's the conflict between the parents that sets everything in motion. The father, Hou (Shing Ka), was a successful doctor and gave everything away to join this cult—which has relocated its members to suburban Garland, Texas—and his wife, Xiu (Jodi Lin), is a non-believer. The key scenes we are shooting over the weekend involve testing the marriage. One of the scenes involves the two of them in bed: The husband is trying to sleep, the wife wants to speak with him about the past, how they met, the time Hou met her father and felt so uncomfortable because he didn't know what to say, and also to get him to talk about how she was the most beautiful woman in school, a beautiful flower in a sea of "frumpy bespectacled weeds." It's one of the scenes we used for the auditions, and I always found it to be incredibly poetic and beautiful, as well as tense—not to mention familiar. I think guys have a habit of rolling over and going to sleep when women want to talk. "Just go to sleep," Hou mutters, "or at least let me sleep!" Continue Reading »
Tags: Arsenio Assin, God's Land, God's Land: Production Diaries, Jackson Ning, Jodi Lin, Matthew Chiu, Preston Miller, Shing Ka
1 Comment »
by Jeremiah Kipp on July 14th, 2009 at 12:10 am in Film
[Editor's Note: The following is the sixth in a series of on-set reports by producer Jeremiah Kipp on God's Land, a feature film written and directed by Preston Miller, whose previous feature, Jones, was covered by The House Next Door here (review), here (interview), and here (podcast).]
Days Seven & Eight
The kid is standing there punching my hand over and over again, monitoring his breath. Matthew Chiu, age eight, who has never acted in a feature film before, is working himself up for a scene where he has to attack another child actor, Brandon Suen (who plays the role of "Jesus," the spoiled son of the cult leader—his sister Caitlyn plays "Buddha"). He has to endure a scene where he is nearly tied up to a tree and humiliated by bullies, then in a burst of rage lashes out against his oppressors. He has to knock Brandon to the ground and assault him, slapping him in the face, saying, "I'm not bad! I'm good! I'm good!" It would be a trying scene for any actor, and Matthew is just a boy. So there we are, with this child actor punching the palm of my hand over and over again, doing deep breathing exercises, in order to prepare for this scene and find the necessary level of exhaustion, frustration and energy to get through the scene. Continue Reading »
Tags: Brandon Suen, God's Land, God's Land: Production Diaries, Jodi Lin, Matthew Chiu, Preston Miller, Shing Ka
1 Comment »
by Jeremiah Kipp on June 24th, 2009 at 9:10 am in Film
[Editor's Note: The following is the fifth in a series of on-set reports by producer Jeremiah Kipp on God's Land, a feature film written and directed by Preston Miller, whose previous feature, Jones, was covered by The House Next Door here (review), here (interview), and here (podcast).]
Day Six: An Interview with Wayne Chang
We are approaching the middle of our shooting schedule, and finally making some headway. But as the weekends push on with God's Land, the balancing act of juggling a dozen actors' schedules is starting to wear on the production. Our lead actress, Jodi Lin, who is in almost every single scene, got paid work for the following weekend and we have to figure out how to shoot around that. Preston will have to operate the camera instead of Arsenio Assin, our director of photography, because he had a last minute schedule change. There would seem to be no romance and glory in making films at this no-budget level. Continue Reading »
Tags: Amy Chiang, Arsenio Assin, God's Land, God's Land: Production Diaries, Jackson Ning, Jodi Lin, Preston Miller, Shing Ka, Wayne Chang
2 Comments »
by Jeremiah Kipp on June 8th, 2009 at 9:30 pm in Film
[Editor's Note: The following is the fourth in a series of on-set reports by producer Jeremiah Kipp on God's Land, a feature film written and directed by Preston Miller, whose previous feature, Jones, was covered by The House Next Door here (review), here (interview), and here (podcast).]
Day Five
I was away from God's Land for a few weeks, producing an independent feature in Sarasota, FL. It was a rigorous experience, and while we are not supposed to talk about "project mayhem," I can say that we were chased by alligators in a rubber raft, I saw armadillo and wild boar in the wetlands, shot on planes and speedboats over the Gulf of Mexico, filmed an elaborate and risque magic show, and set up car rig shots on designer cars that, when fitted, seemed like vehicles from Mad Max. Ah, yes, "project mayhem" was an intense and enjoyable time, but when I come back to NYC, I'm dog tired and it's hard to settle back into the rhythm of God's Land, which is slow, meditative, put together by a handful of loyal crew members, and hangs together by what feels like cardboard boxes and chewing gum, and the will of director Preston Miller. Continue Reading »
Tags: Alex Cox, Alex Gavin, Arsenio Assin, David Groman, God's Land, God's Land: Production Diaries, Gregory Crewdson, Jodi Lin, Matthew Chiu, Preston Miller, Repo Man, Shing Ka, Wayne Chang
1 Comment »
[Editor's Note: The following is the third in a series of on-set reports on God's Land, a feature film written and directed by Preston Miller, whose previous feature, Jones, was covered by The House Next Door here (review), here (interview), and here (podcast).]
Days Three & Four
Like most of the others working on God's Land, I have a day job that has nothing to do with filmmaking or entertainment. I depend on the job to support my wife and two kids, the youngest only three months old. Shooting must be done at specific times, usually on weekends so as not to interfere with the cast and crew's money jobs. This means that even though a shooting schedule exists and is constantly modified, not everything that's listed on a certain day will actually materialize. It's up to me to see it all the way through. When resources are temporarily missing, I have to come up with solutions to keep this train moving lest the riders decide to jump off. Continue Reading »
Tags: Alex Gavin, Allison Pantoch, Arsenio Assin, Carrie Kiamesha, God's Land, God's Land: Production Diaries, Jeremiah Kipp, Jodi Kiamesha, Jodi Lin, Leif Fortlouis, Nancy Eng, Preston Miller, Robbie Sinder, Scott Perry, Shing Ka, Spaghetti Western
1 Comment »
by Jeremiah Kipp on May 4th, 2009 at 5:45 am in Film
[Editor's Note: The following is the second in a series of on-set reports by producer Jeremiah Kipp on God's Land, a feature film written and directed by Preston Miller, whose previous feature, Jones, was covered by The House Next Door here (review), here (interview), and here (podcast).]
[Photo Credits: Wayne Chang (all, except logo); Leif Fortlouis (logo)]
Day Two
Our director Preston Miller had a clever idea—we have scenes involving the Asian cult giving a press conference for journalists, and Preston thought it would be meta to cast several film critics (many of whom were supportive of his first feature, Jones) including House Next Door editor Keith Uhlich and contributors Dan Callahan, Kevin B. Lee and Vadim Rizov. In my email blast to my colleagues, I mentioned there would be free beer and BBQ, that Preston created a lively and fun atmosphere of good will, and that it would be a pretty easy day. Little did I know almost everything I said in these statements would be a lie, but at least the most important ingredient remained in place, namely, the free beer… Continue Reading »
Tags: Arsenio Assin, Dan Callahan, God's Land, God's Land: Production Diaries, Jackson Ning, Jeremiah Kipp, Jodi Lin, Jones, Keith Uhlich, Kevin B. Lee, Matthew Chiu, Preston Miller, Shing Ka, Vadim Rizov, Wayne Chang
1 Comment »
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