BEHIND THE LENS #299: Featuring Andre Phillips and Charles Vuolo

It's a jam-packed extended show this week thanks to our special guests, filmmakers and co-directors ANDRE PHILLIPS and CHARLES VUOLO, plus some very enlightening and fun prerecorded exclusive interviews with writer/director NICHOLAS JARECKI and writer/director LOUISE LINTON.

First, take a listen to our exclusive conversation with writer/director NICHOLAS JARECKI talking about his latest film, CRISIS. Much like his first film, "Arbitrage", Nicholas delivers a hard-hitting and riveting film, this time centered around the opioid crisis and the business of drug trafficking…through the Northern borders. Listen as Nicholas discusses at length his approach to the script and working with his actors in its development following the "first draft", casting, his extensive research into the various elements of the opioid crisis which set the stage for the three narrative threads which compromise the story, cinematography and finding visual tonal bandwidth through color and light, location selection, shooting on Kodak film and not only his reasons for so doing with CRISIS but a wonderful discussion on the beauty and need for film in cinema, and why he chooses "morally gray" areas and societal issues to tell stories.

Then co-directors ANDRE PHILLIPS and CHARLES VUOLO are back on #BTLRadioShow talking about their first feature, LUPE. Our regular listeners may recall that Andre and Chuck were last with us in March 2019 while LUPE was on the festival circuit and screening at Cinequest. Now, LUPE has distribution and is available on HBOMax! An intimate, yet complex story, of an immigrant struggling with their transgender identity while searching for their missing sister in New York City's underground sex industry, listen as we again talk about story and actors, but a longer segment on the show this go-round, we dig deeper into the story itself, casting – notably the outstanding young actor Pedro Rodriguez who plays a young version of Rafael Albarran's lead character "Rafael", shooting in the Dominican Republic as a stand-in for Cuba, working with cinematographer T. Acton Fitzgerald and the handheld yet stylized look of LUPE, shooting flashbacks with a life and vibrancy rarely seen in films, the importance of choosing "grittier" underbelly locations in the boroughs of New York City, editing and finding not only a tonal balance but a story balance between past and present, and the distribution process.

We round out the extended last 30 minutes of the show with our exclusive conversation with writer/director/producer/actor LOUISE LINTON talking about her directorial debut, ME YOU MADNESS. You've already heard me rave about the film over the past few weeks, now hear what Louise has to say about the "making of": the importance of physical details with production design/costume/set dress in the telling of this story and serving as character exposition, crafting rapier dialogue, paying homage to the femme fatale and classic films of the 40's and 50's, selecting needle drops that serve not only in paying homage to the 80's but that serve as dialogue within the film much as the 1950's MGM musicals, working around coverage issues in editing and with pick-up shots, navigating set closure because of the Woolsey Fire in Malibu, distribution and deliverables, and lessons learned as a first-time director not the least of which involves insurance.

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