Movies You Made: “Thirteen”

March is Movies You Made month at Go Into The Story where we feature the work of some independent filmmakers.

Today: Thirteen.

Production notes from writer-director Markham Cooke:

Thirteen is a short I wrote and directed. It premiered at the Palm Springs Short Film Festival.

It was shot in Toronto with Tony Nardi in the lead role, and Jeremy Benning as dop and steadicam operator. Andrea Stewart and Alex Olegnowicz produced, and Eric Cadesky and Nick Dyer wrote the music.

Here is the 8 minute movie Thirteen:

I asked each of the filmmakers in this month’s series to answer this question: What inspired you about this particular story to make it a movie? Here is Markham’s response:

While we were shooting I joked that after travelling so much directing documentary, the only reason I wrote this was so that I could walk to the set — it was all within three blocks of my house. That’s only partly true.

I wanted to write a short where you were entirely inside the head of a character who wasn’t the most loveable or sympathetic guy. I started out with the notion of making him an “unreliable narrator” and you would only find out later that he’d been lying to you. But then I asked myself, what would happen if he was actually telling the truth, but through omission and assumption (and maybe our innate desire to believe in the ‘good guy’), the audience didn’t really understand what they were being told until the ending.

It was a fun challenge, and the use of narration let me get tell a moderately big story in less than eight minutes. Along with producer Andrea Stewart, I decided to shoot the scenes mainly in one set-up, without reverses or cutaways, in order to push the audience even closer to the main character (that was our theory, anyway).

I wrote the narration before shooting, but re-wrote extensively once picture was locked — the structure remained the same, but word choice and sentence structure changed considerably.

The two big changes were the early scene in the fish store — when you hire two terrific Italian-Canadian actors and shoot in Little Italy, you let them improvise in Italian. Even if they curse. And the ending on the page was straight, linear. I rearranged it in the editing room. It seems more dynamic to me, but also, because everything leading up to the end is in these long floating takes, the sudden non-linear jump cuts help the story come to a conclusion, it seems to me.

Drop by Comments to give some feedback on Thirteen.

Tomorrow: Another Movie You Made.

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