"La Nina" Pushing Forward

With a mere two and a half months left until cameras roll on my ultimate passion project, La Nina del Desierto, the pre-production materials are flowing. We've gotten our schedule and budget approved by the school, and subsequently our Green Light.

Furthermore, storyboards have been finished (see top and bottom), and, perhaps most exciting of all, our production has been selected to receive a grant from Fotokem. They will develop, for free, up to 10,000 feet of 16mm or 20,000 feet of 35mm film. This means we can essentially shoot as much as we want. Thank you, Fotokem!

Now all we need is a grant from Kodak for the film and a grant from Panavision for the cameras...

In casting news, I suppose I can reveal who we were romancing to play the lead role of Javier, since we never got through to him personally, and his agent very politely rejected us.

Danny Trejo is NOT Javier Martinez!

Oh well. The good news is, I scoured IMDB for other similarly-aged, grizzled-looking, Mexican-American bilingual actors who've had a decent amount of acting experience (I'm suprised I found any at all), and I came across Joaquin Garrido.

Joaquin Garrido MIGHT be Javier Martinez!

He'd be perfect. I contacted his agent and she said that he's in Mexico currently, but should be very interested in the role. Fingers crossed!

That's it for now. I leave you haunted by the pint-sized spectre that is ... La Nina del Desierto.

M. M. No More?

I've decided to stop using "M. M. Rempen" as my pen/screen name. It's such a mouthful. And people don't know what to call me. Em Em? Mmmm? Eminem?

So now I'm just going to go by most of my full name - Michael Malachi Rempen. That way, those who know me as Michael or Mikey can call me that, and those that know me as Malachi can call me that too. End of story.

No movie news! But I did meet Sean Penn the other day.

Back to Booming

I've decided that this part of my site should be more than just a plug for myself. I was watching an interview with Jason Reitman, director of Juno and Thank You For Smoking, two of my favorite movies, and he said that when he was at film school, he would have like to know about what other big filmmakers were thinking and doing in film school to get to where they were. Other stories that might motivate him to keep going.

That led me to think that maybe it would be interesting if I talked in a little more detail about what day-to-day life is like for me at film school. Not that I expect to be some big director some day, and that these blog posts will be feverishly pored over by film students clamoring to follow in my cavernous footsteps, but at the very least, I'll be able to look back on this later in life and remember what was going on senior year. Dear diary...

This last weekend I was the all-important boom operator on my classmate Scott Sullivan's senior thesis shoot, The Gory Details. Though I was doing it for class credit, I felt like it would be fun to be back on set. I like being on set, and the boom operator is a great position. You get to be right there in the middle of the action, but you're not responsible for all the heavy lighting and grippage. You can chat with the actors and you get to do a lot of sitting down. When it is time to hold the boom pole, you build arm muscle. I remember reading somewhere that boom operators make a lot of money. I can see why.

I'm working on the script for a feature film, and it's incredibly difficult. After having spent so much time working on short films, I feel comfortable with short form storytelling. There's a clear beginning, middle, and end, with little room for tangents. But the feature is a whole other beast. I have characters and a basic plot, but I know that if I start writing, I'll crap out at page ten, out of ideas. I need to have it totally outlined on note cards or something similar before I can really buckle down and start writing. That's difficult to do.

The other hard part is that you can't force ideas. Ideas come to me when and where they feel like it, and not before. It's usually before falling asleep at night, when my mind is shutting down. So that means that writing a feature takes as long as it takes my ideas to settle into coherent forms that fit with what I've currently got. It'll happen, I'm sure.

And now for the plug. The Awards page has been updated to look shnazzier. I think it's pretty sweet.

"Silver Lincoln" Screens in Santa Fe!

I just got word that The Silver Lincoln was accepted to screen at the New Mexico Film Expo in Santa Fe this week! Now I have to find a way to get a copy from Orange, California to Santa Fe, New Mexico by the day after tomorrow...

In celebration, I revamped the Awards page. I'm not sure I like the new look.

"La Nina" Location Scout

My DP, Boa Simon, and I recently went on a camping trip to scout some locations for La Nina del Desierto. We found some incredible places.

Click on the pictures to see bigger ones!

The Korea Times and the Corner Store

A few weeks back, a lady from the Korea Times emails me for an interview, concerning the whole Korean exchange trip we did over the summer. I answer her questions, and she tells me where I can pick up a copy a few days later. Funny thing is, it's all in hangul, or written Korean. Still, it's worth putting online!

I've seen a few cuts of The Corner Store now, and it's looking like we're going to shoot some pickups. We never actually see the exterior of the store, and it might be good to get those shots to split up the film's scenes, which have trouble transitioning from one to another.

Other than that, I'm surprised how well it turned out. We were so stressed and unprepared when shooting it, due to the single week of pre-production we had available (the DP, Joel Remke, and I were making up shot lists an hour before the shoot each day), that I was worried it would turn out to be cinematic trash. But we got lucky! It's not half bad. Everyone else involved agreed, with equal surprise.

As for La Nina del Desierto, I'm working on procuring a certain Hollywood actor to play Javier in this reincarnation of my first short film. I won't say who until he says yes or no. Suffice it to say that you've definitely seen him before - this guy works like mad.

And I'm off.

More Press and More

I've put up two more articles in the Press section. The first is an old one from high school graduation that I'd forgotten about. The second is more recent - it's in the Chapman University film school's magazine "In Production," and the article involves my trip to South Korea and the movies we made there and here in California.

Speaking of South Korea, I had a chance to watch dailies from The Corner Store, which is the movie that we made here after our trip to Korea. We made this when it was the Koreans' turn to have a cultural experience, and they crewed on our set. One of them even had a role.

Anyway, the footage looks decent enough (it was shot 35mm, it should look good), but it was hard to tell because we were watching it on this tiny screen, SD. I'm sure it looks great HD. It didn't look like there were many options, however, as far as coverage goes. Our editor, Robin Hartwig, certainly has her work cut out. It's hard to say at this point if it's going to be any good. I really hope it is! We all worked our hardest on it.

Pre-production on La Nina del Desierto is now in full swing. Producer Matt Sullivan and I have been working hard on casting and crewing up. Next weekend, cinematographer Boa Simon and I will go camping in the desert north of Los Angeles to try and find a few good locations. Should be fun.

In other news, I've had the wonderful luck of getting what is called the Hayde Scholarship here at Chapman University. It's not a financial scholarship. Basically, I meet once every two weeks with Chapman's filmmaker-in-residence, who this year happens to be Jocelyn Moorhouse. She directed Proof and a number of other films I haven't seen but definitely will! I'm hoping to talk with her about my forthcoming Albuquerque-related feature script, which I hope to have complete by the time La Nina is done.

Finally, The Silver Lincoln is 100% complete! I have a trailer up on its page explaining that I'm not putting it online because I want to submit it to festivals, and a lot of festivals won't accept a film that's available online. I also say on that page that a DVD of Lincoln (which is awesome, comes with sweet features) costs $5 plus shipping, but all I really want is money for the shipping, which should be around $5 anyway. In any case, contact me if you're interested in getting a copy and we'll figure something out.