Bullseye

Less than a week since wrapping production, we are in the final stages of editing my cycle 2 film, "Bullseye". Last time I blogged, I had no idea if the result would be a good or bad film. All I knew was that I was confident of the vision I had for the movie. Well, now I am happy to say that I've made my very favorite movie the way I wanted to make it. Action, quirky comedy, drama, and a hearty happy ending.

The movie will screen at AFI this Friday. I can't wait to see what everyone thinks. I'll be putting it on my web site in the next couple of weeks.

It was a lot of fun directing action scenes and creating precise comedic moments with my amazing cast. More importantly, this was the first time I direct really emotional moments in a movie. I really loved it. My collaborators were superb to work with. Will Beckley, my cinematographer, brought a beautiful look to the movie. Using a wide lens, desaturating the colors, increasing the contrast, applying a yellowish filter for the exteriors, and fiddling with the shutter speed for the fight scenes gave the movie a very special look. He was also wonderful to work with, and we're probably going to go on making movies together as partners for a long long time.
Our producer, Seunghye Jung, was fantastic. Her positive energy and perseverence put everything in place so we could actually get the movie made. She really took care of business.
Finally, working with Jason Shwab, my editor, was a lot of fun. I found that we had a very easy way to communicate, and I think his background in music really supported his sense of rhythm. Very easy to work with.

Bullseye is by far my biggest movie yet, and it's the type of Hollywood movie I'd like to make as a commercial release. I'm having a blast! Next movie, cycle 3, will be a drama, my ode to imagination and Superman.

My next movie

This week I will shoot my cycle 2 film, and I'm pushing the scale to something bigger than anything I've done before. I'm doing an action/comedy with insults and pain at the expense of the protagonist. I'm finally going to make a movie where I'm not holding back on my kind of humour. I have a wonderful cast of very colorful people: a loser "hero", a contrasting nice guy, a nasty villain, a mean little girl, a cute dog, and three goonish henchmen. I have fights, I have comedy, I have drama, action, pain... you name it.

It's taken a lot of energy trying to get this movie to where I want it. Part of the creative/collaborative process of working with several people is that you're all trying to stay on the same page. One of my struggles with this movie was with the back and forth disagreements on the approach of writing the movie. Our writer, a wonderful peace-loving person, saw the movie as a nice comedy with slapstic physical humour, one-liner jokes, and some sight gags. I saw the movie as a story of a loser who goes through physical and emotional pain in order to redeem himself. I wanted to get mean and offensive with the humor.

In the end, after ten drafts of the script, I was not convinced that I was happy with what we had, so, with my writer's permission, I took over the writing and wrote the movie I wanted to make. The thing I'm getting at here is that I think it's very tough sometimes for everyone to see the same movie, and at the same time we all have to be respectful of each other. Keeping a balance between the two is very important, but in the end, you can't make a movie you don't want to make.

So now I hope I will end up with a unique and original movie that entertains the audience. I'm challengin myself to something bigger than any of my past films.