Movies You Made: “The Bicycle”

When I attended the Austin Film Festival in October, I got the opportunity to spend some time with a pair of filmmakers, Chris McCoy and Adam Neustadter. You may remember the short film Commencement Adam made that I featured here. And my March 2012 interview with Chris, who has written three screenplays that have appeared on the Black List, is here.

Chris and Adam were in Austin to screen at the Festival a short film they created together called The Bicycle.

Here is some background from Adam and Chris:

Scott: What was the genesis of this project?

Chris: The original germ of the idea came from the fact that my bike kept getting stolen, and then I began hallucinating that I was seeing it around Los Angeles. I’d see a bike whiz by, I’d momentarily go that’s my bike!, and then I’d realize that it was not my bike and I was suffering from bicycle PTSD or something. I started thinking about what might have happened to my bike after it was taken, which was an idea I ended up discussing with Adam. We’d both wanted to work on something together for a long time, and telling the story of an inanimate object — and humanizing that object, making you feel sympathy for it — felt like an interesting challenge. So we began working on the script.

Scott: How did the script process play out (i.e., story development, writing, revisions)?

Chris: I would take the pages for a couple of days, then Adam would take them for a couple of days, and we would just go back and forth until we had something that we were pleased with. It was a short script, so it didn’t take long.

Scott: Why give the Protagonist (the bicycle) an English accent?

Chris: There is actually quite a logical reason for the Bicycle having an English accent — the bicycle we used is a Raleigh, which are famously made in Nottingham, England. So of course it would have an English accent. It would be preposterous for it not to.

Adam: We also liked the implied backstory it gave the bike. How did this old British bicycle end up in Venice Beach? You know he must have had some hard miles to get to where we meet him.

Scott: How many days for the shoot?

Chris: The shoot was three days, all day. We wanted to reflect the Bicycle’s journey from the ocean to the hills and back again, so we were all over the place location-wise. For the shot overlooking the Pacific, we snuck into a construction site in a fancy part of town and had our crew keep watch for the cops. The apartment stuff at the beginning is actually my apartment in Venice.

Adam: And the crack den where Chris repairs the bike is actually behind my place in Los Feliz. We got a nice cameo from my neighbor’s cat, Carson.

Scott: Any good anecdotes about production?

Chris: Yeah, we needed a beaten pickup truck for an important scene, but none of the rental places we talked to had a truck that was quite smashed up enough, and even the places that had vehicles which might be right tried to charge us exorbitant fees when they found out we were going to be filming. We had no money for the production, so we really didn’t know what we were going to do — no pickup truck, no movie. But we were scrambling, praying something would work out.

Then we were doing the scene where the passerby throws the bike down the steepest hill in Los Angeles — which was a nightmare to shoot because the bike wouldn’t roll straight since we’d smashed it up so much, and that hill is incredibly dangerous to begin with because we didn’t have permits and were just begging cars to stop while we got our shots — when all of a sudden this guy rolls by in a perfect, smashed GMC pickup truck. He had a great face and said he was an actor, so we offered him a couple of hundred bucks to both be in the film and let us do whatever we wanted with his truck. He was game, and totally great. We even brought him back the next day to do pickup shots. He was awesome. Lou Bernstein.

Adam: Lucky Lou. We actually had a man-with-a-van type of guy from craigslist on the way, but we cancelled him the moment we met Lou. We weren’t even going to show that character on screen originally, but now I can’t picture the film without him. Great face.

Chris: Another story: when we were throwing the bike down the staircase, I almost accidentally ripped Adam’s face off with it because I was standing too close to him when I hurled it over my shoulder. We have it on video. I’m basically a half inch from killing him with the equivalent of a fifty pound crowbar, and you see him bolting out of the way.

Adam: Yes, that’s true. Luckily it was a great take that we used in the edit. And luckily I have good reflexes.

Scott: How about festival appearances?

C: Austin Film Festival, Mecal Barcelona, Interfilm Berlin, LA Shortsfest, Rhode Island International Film Festival, Woods Hole Film Festival and the Bicycle Film Festival, which is a traveling festival that has played all over the world. Every now and then we hear that our film just screened in Italy or Switzerland or Portugal and it’s a nice surprise.

Scott: What advice do you have for screenwriters and filmmakers about producing short films?

Chris: I would recommend making a short to anybody. Find a way to do it cheap, call in favors, and do something that you really care about, because you’re probably not going to be reaping huge financial rewards off a short. You’re doing it because you love film and you have a story that you want to share and hanging out at festivals is a blast.

And man is it satisfying to see it up on the big screen.

Adam: Absolutely. A lot of people get caught up waiting for the perfect conditions for their project. With a short, I think it’s best to jump in and make it by any means necessary. You really do learn something from every shoot, so the sooner you make your short, the sooner you can make another, and with each project you get better and more confident. That’s why so many early student films aren’t that great. Because the filmmaker hasn’t had a chance to practice and learn from his or her mistakes. That’s actually one of the best things about film school. That you can get all these bad ideas and obvious choices out of the way early while nobody is watching. But really, anyone has the opportunity to make shorts. If you are interested in being a filmmaker, my advice would be to go out and make a film. Even if you have to shoot it on your phone, make your film and keep making them.

Here is The Bicycle:

Here are the credits:

A short film by Chris McCoy & Adam Neustadter

Cast: Shawn Christensen, Lou Bernstein, Sarah Heyward, Michael C. Hsiung, Tim Bennett, Chris McCoy, Tom Sykes, Ivy Strohmaier.

Matthew Waterson as the voice of The Bicycle.

Director of Photography: Todd Banhazl
1st AC: Justin Cameron
2nd AC: George Nienhuis
Costume Designer: Audrey Neustadter
Art Department: Jake Frank
Editor: Adam Neustadter
Sound Design: Elliot Thompson
Foley Mixer: Stephen P. Chesley
Composer: Dominic Matar
Colorist: Kevin Cannon @ Prehistoric Digital

Official Selection:
Austin Film Festival
Florida Film Festival
Mecal International Film Festival of Barcelona
LA Shorts Fest
Woods Hole Film Festival
Interfilm Berlin Film Festival
The Bicycle FIlm Festival

Congratulations to Adam and Chris! You may follow them on Twitter:

Chris: @thatthere

Adam: @adamneustadter

By the way, I will be running the Movies You Made series again next year, so if you have a short or feature length film that you’ve been involved with as a writer, actor, director and/or producer, and you’ve got either the movie or a trailer I can embed in a post, hit me up with an email.

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