Making "The Fourth":
A Diary of a No-Budget
35mm Film Production
by
Jared Varava
When Jeremy asked me to write an article for MFM about the “how to’s” of 35mm-based independent filmmaking, I was immediately unnerved. By its very nature, to claim any sort of authoritative position in the trade is probably just setting oneself—and, more tragically, one’s readers—up for terrible misguidance. My experience making movies independently—via scrounging, begging, bribing, coercing, manipulating, and flat out getting lucky—has been somewhat successful, but that’s not to say that it is a model for success. It’s one way to do it, but certainly not the only way. All in all, what I’m trying to say is, I don’t really how you should make your movie. That is something you know how to do much, much better than I do. But I humbly offer you my story, in hopes that you might empathize with it, that you might be inspired by it, and, mainly, that it might help you realize how VERY possible it is to get a 35mm Panavision camera on a low-budget set.
“The Fourth” was a film that my older brother, Justin, and I set out to make in 2004, not long after I moved to Los Angeles. I had just finished the undergraduate film program at the University of Iowa, a school with a wonderful, though perhaps excessively liberal, approach to the craft. They have a brilliant but undeniably bohemian faculty, with a blatant infatuation for avant-garde documentaries and the hard-to-define grey areas between the standard phases of film history. It was the type of environment that inundated its students with close analyses of the most revolutionary—usually alienating—filmmakers and encouraged us to do things like “find our own voice” and “push the limits of the medium.” The instructors were all minor celebrities in certain small-but-devout circles of the alternative cinema scene and, not surprisingly, they lectured very little on the “business” of modern Hollywood filmmaking. They were well-versed in the ways of both film theory and criticism (we are not talking Leonard Maltin here, people), they drank mulled wine in their quaint, carefully cluttered homes, and, most fascinating to us, produced work that semi-consistently went on to screen in venues like MOMA and The Guggenheim. To me, having been raised watching mainstream fare like Hot Shots and The Mighty Ducks, this world was something new, a place where people had definite and smart-sounding opinions about the most subtle, allegorical references in Man With a Movie Camera and discussed concepts like the femme fatale in terms of things like pistols and phalluses. It was exciting and romantic. Really, who needed multiplexes when there were museums? To me, these people were artists. And that’s exactly what I wanted to be.
Justin Varava (writer) plays boom operator for a fake
whirlpool commercial.
Needless to say, when I finally arrived in Los Angeles, I didn’t have the most marketable reel. I had an intense understanding of the psychoanalytical theory behind Fritz Lang’s American work, sure, but frankly my four years of production courses had culminated in a collage of carefully reconstituted New Wave and Italian Neorealist tropes, mixed and matched and modernized, and then set to a soundtrack of obscure 70s punk rock. Which, to be fair, is not necessarily a bad thing. I could’ve easily chosen far less reputable filmmaking movements to draw inspiration from (ahem, torture porn), and certainly worse musical genres. And in truth I still argue that those films were, and are, decent early efforts. Naïve, perhaps, slightly unfocused, yes, but nevertheless, they were attempting to say something, genuinely trying to play with established conventions and invent a new, effective filmmaking voice. And, in the end, shouldn’t that be the mission of any responsible filmmaker? If my move to Los Angeles taught me anything, it was quick and it was this: most people’s answer to that question is “No.”
It’s the age-old dilemma—art and commerce—and an important debate that every independent artist, especially filmmakers, must dedicate some serious thought towards. Is it worthwhile to educate oneself on how the cinema has ended up at its current state, or should we simply understand and embrace the elements of said current state in hopes of appealing to broad audiences and assuring ourselves long and financially prosperous careers? Personally, I’m a fan of education. I see the films I made in college as important steppingstones that eventually led to the type of filmmaking I now believe to be important—a more conventional style, though still very much on the fringe of the mainstream. And nowhere is this progression more prevalent than in the making of “The Fourth.”
When Jeremy asked me to write an article for MFM about the “how to’s” of 35mm-based independent filmmaking, I was immediately unnerved. By its very nature, to claim any sort of authoritative position in the trade is probably just setting oneself—and, more tragically, one’s readers—up for terrible misguidance. My experience making movies independently—via scrounging, begging, bribing, coercing, manipulating, and flat out getting lucky—has been somewhat successful, but that’s not to say that it is a model for success. It’s one way to do it, but certainly not the only way. All in all, what I’m trying to say is, I don’t really how you should make your movie. That is something you know how to do much, much better than I do. But I humbly offer you my story, in hopes that you might empathize with it, that you might be inspired by it, and, mainly, that it might help you realize how VERY possible it is to get a 35mm Panavision camera on a low-budget set.
