2008 – Paris in 1975
In February, Steve and I had a screening of the first 30 minutes of our film. I recruited my mom, my brothers and some people from work to view and offer critiques. Overall, the feedback was good. However, it was unanimous that the very beginning was confusing and not very interesting.
Steve and I put our heads together, throwing around different ideas that included Stonehenge and vampires attacking a European village during a snowy blizzard during the middle ages. Then we tempered our thought with what resources we had available. I took our notes and went away for awhile to try to whip up something interesting that didn’t require us to re-use any of our original aging cast.
We would start the movie in 1975, France. We already had the film end in Paris, so it would make sense to start there. Rather than have a title card that said, “Paris”, I wanted an establishing shot of Paris with the Eiffel Tower prominent enough so text would not be needed on the screen. I went online and found a fellow who sold various stock footage. It so happened he was traveling to Paris the following month and asked me what kind of shot I would like. So for $400, we got a nice custom establishing shot of Paris filmed from the top of the Notre Dame church.
Now all I needed was to find 4 new actors, 3 who spoke French, one cobblestone street, an iron gate and an old stone church.
The cobblestone street we found back in 1995, when we were shooting our original Eden story. It was the opening scene with us following Eden at leg level as she walked along the road to meet her lover. Since it was the only cobblestone street in Portland, we were back 12 years later only now following the legs of a new character in an entirely new context.
Wanted: A church willing to let this inside.
The first church I contacted about filming a scene with an evil possessed chess set never got back to me. The second church representative looked at me strangely and said, “Sorry, no.”
For the exterior, we decided to guerrilla shoot (shoot without permission) a stone church downtown. It had fantastic large wooden doors with iron ring door handles. We were to shoot on a Friday night and the street parking in front of it had to be cleared. I arrived shortly after 6:00 pm and waited for about an hour for one of the four spots to become vacant. I pulled in and called my brother (the now wrapped Sully) to pick me up. We went to his house where I had my dad’s truck loaded with all our equipment, including a large HMI light that we would use to blast the church steeple.
I returned to the church and waited another 30 minutes when another parking spot became available. Two down, two more to go, but I was out of vehicles. Fortunately, David Cascadden (who plays our villainous Castile) was in town and was willing to stop by and take some pictures – a luxury we never had on previous shoots. He filled the third parking space and by that time Steve arrived to fill the last spot.
The hard part had yet to come. We needed to vacate all four spots and keep them open in order to shoot our actress walking up to the church entrance. Any cars would block our view. It was a very popular area with a lot of restaurants and bars nearby. Vehicles constantly buzzed by looking for parking. For some reason Cascadden had traffic cones in his van, so we used those to reserve our location.
It took us some time to set up the huge HMI light, hoisting it some twenty feet in the air. We accompanied it with a few smaller ones to effectively light up the large church. I was nervous with all our gear spread out along the block, exposed to theft. Also, our lights were so conspicuous that surely a cop or someone from the church would approach us and ask what the hell we were doing.
We were only on our second take. Our actress, Anita Lugliani was walking up to the church door with a case containing our evil chess set, when a school bus overran our traffic cone and parked in front of the church. It was full of inebriated young people. I didn’t know such busses existed, but I had plenty of time to observe it as the barely legal kids stumbled out. Many casually discarded their beer on the sidewalk, one even stooped and vomited. I wasn’t sure where they were headed, but didn’t really care.
Steve Herring, Anita Lugliani, and David Eblen waiting for the bus to spill out its drunken contents.
After about 20 minutes, the bus departed and we quickly combed the area cleaning up the mess. 30 minutes later we were wrapped.
We found our church interior inside an independent bookstore. It had a creepy dark basement with rows of narrow shelves housing large tombs containing old newspaper archives. It could easily be confused with a Parisian church catacomb protecting/imprisoning ancient and evil lore best left alone.
A few weeks later, the whole film was wrapped. However, I had declared the entire film wrapped before.
