Filmmaker Notes
Project History
From the beginning, Dear Pillow was meant to be a provocative three-character piece that could be shot for virtually no money. Bryan wrote the first draft of the screenplay in July 2001 and in the fall of that year, we decided make it, with Jake producing and Bryan directing. The initial auditions were held in May 2002 and that’s when we found Viviane Vives, who we immediately cast as Lorna. Viviane and T. E. Kolenda, her partner at their production company Barcelona Films, came on as Associate Producers. Their enthusiasm for the project, and the fact that we won a grant from the Austin Film Society’s 2002 Texas Filmmaker’s Production Fund, encouraged us to send out the script. It caught interest from a couple of well-respected character actors so we decided to try to raise money for a 35mm production. However, we faced a tough time fundraising with such a challenging script.
We found the perfect Wes when we met Rusty Kelley in November 2002. Extremely bright and talented, already an accomplished filmmaker and musician, and still in high school, Rusty was definitely the one. We returned to our micro-budget plan and Rusty’s two week Spring Break in March became the anchor for the production. Throughout January and February, we moved quickly to fill out the remaining cast, crew and production needs. Well-known Houston casting director Gary Chason (Paris, Texas; The Last Picture Show) first offered to help us find a Dusty but eventually became the clear choice himself. Gary introduced us to Ken Murphy, who became our Executive Producer. Ken’s 24p Panasonic DVX100 Mini-DV camera allowed us to achieve a look much closer to film than any other pro-sumer camera available. The film was shot over 23 days during March 2003, in and around Austin, Texas. Leslie Milligan, the production designer from our last short film, “Pleasureland,” dressed our two apartment locations from top to bottom. Jake served double-duty as Producer and Cinematographer, Carla Campbell as Line Producer and Martin McCreadie as Sound Recordist.
Jake started cutting scenes in May and continued throughout the summer 2003. Ken Murphy made it possible to bring on an additional editor, Kyle Henry, (who had done some amazing editing work on the Sundance-award-winning Manito and his own documentaries), and a post-production supervisor, Alka Bhanot (who came to Dear Pillow with 10 years of experience producing television in India). We had a series of rough-cut screenings through August and September, which helped enormously to refine the story, characters and pacing. The last months of post-production also involved intensive work on the score with Houston DJ Jeff McLaughlin.
We were overjoyed to discover in mid-August 2003 that the film won a Texas Filmmaker’s Production Fund Grant from the Austin Film Society for the second year in a row. Dear Pillow had its world premiere at the 2004 Slamdance International Film Festival.
back