I’ve been meaning to post about The Last Time for a while now.
My third narrative collaboration with Ryan Schnackenberg initially appeared to be our most achievable yet, and felt appropriately scaled to our budget and resources. Two old friends take their yearly road trip upstate in an attempt to perfectly recreate the drug fueled traditions of past years. Mostly exterior daylight, only one night scene, limited cast and locations, 14 pages all in. How hard could it be?
Turns out…pretty hard.
Our scout revealed so much. We found perfect locations for the bulk of the film scattered around a patch of forest and fields in upstate New York. Disparate and overgrown, much of it would have to be reached via the ATV’s at our disposal. I knew that meant travel and staging times would not be on our side, especially with a small crew during the heat of mid-summer. We attempted to plan accordingly
Even with the best laid plans however, there are times when your shoot dates happened to take place on the hottest weekend of the hottest July ever recorded (according to NOAA). Of course, when that happens, you also find out on the morning of a full day of car work that your picture vehicle has no AC. That’s what filmmaking is sometimes though - it’s sweaty and tiresome, and at the end of each day the entire cast and crew jumps into a smallish above ground pool together and laughs it off.
You deal with the heat, the mud, early mornings, late nights, and (in this case) the monstrous dobsonfly biting your hand. You do it because everyone is there for the exact same reason.
You love making movies, even when it hurts.
All of this would be ridiculous to state without noting that these inconveniences, or a million other factors, easily could have sidelined the shoot had it not been for Lex Jubara’s thoughtful and meticulous production on this project.
Ryan sent out this quote to the cast and crew (along with the screener) once we we locked color and sound:
"Modern life is full of nondescript melancholy, of discomfort, of queer relationships which beget emotions that are half-ludicrous and yet painful and that an inconclusive ending for all these impulses is much more usual than anything extreme.”
Virginia Woolf on the Short Stories of Anton Chehkov
It really captures the tone of the film, and moreover feels like a succinct description of our work together thus far - snapshots of unique moments of human entanglement.
Check out the trailer here.
See more of Ryan’s work at the Cult Images website.
Below are the few bts pictures i managed to pop off while we were shooting:
