Lemonade
Around Christmastime of 2019, I began prepping my first short film. Well, it would have been my first short film.
The reason this shoot was important was that a producer had expressed interest in making a feature script of mine, but she wanted me to direct. I had never even considered directing prior to 2019, but if someone is willing to make your movie, you’d be surprised what you’ll do to see that happen.
I would obviously need to learn how to direct.
I decided to start by making a short film based on something else I had written. The plan was for an office-bound zombie outbreak movie called Does Lauren Look Hungry? We had a script, cast, crew, location, costumes, props, several gallons of theatrical blood, and a couple of fake limbs. We were nervous but excited and set to shoot at the end of March 2020.
Or not.
Canceling production of my short film was hardly the most awful thing that happened in early 2020. It felt like the apocalypse was already upon us, zombies or no.
Still, I could feel the possibility of getting my feature made slipping away. Or, worse yet, the possibility of showing up on my first day of directing a feature with literally no idea what to do. I was desperate to gain this experience, but a confined space filled with actors pretending to eat each other’s flesh was not going to happen in March of 2020.
What could I do?
Wait … could I do something?
Maybe.
I remembered a short story I’d begun drafting a few years earlier. In it, a mother drives from Ohio to California to murder her son’s girlfriend.
Let’s not talk about the inspiration for the story.
Instead, let’s consider its possibilities.
· One actor
· She’s alone in a car – not even crew breathing in her unmasked direction.
· The small crew would spend most of their time outside, masked but in the open air rigging lights and cameras to a car.
· We’d be on the road, but nobody was driving anyway, so traffic wouldn’t be an issue.
I wrote a script that would run about eight minutes. My friend Cat sat in the driver’s seat and did all the work. Essentially, she memorized and performed an eight-minute monologue while literally driving a car in the middle of the night with a bank of lights mounted on the hood to blind her. If COVID is the villain of this story, Cat McAlpine is its hero.
My friend Alberto (DP extraordinaire who also put together the crew) and our sound guy Eric sat far apart and masked in another van driven by my husband, George. They kept a short distance ahead of Cat’s van to lead her and record. I pretzeled myself flat in her hatchback (so the camera wouldn’t catch me), hugging a monitor and shouting things through my mask like, “That was great! Try it one more time and be more dead inside.”
Did the police come, lights flashing, to investigate a group of hoodlums defiling a cemetery?
“Honest, officer, we’re just shooting b-roll!”
We were!
And by about four am, we’d wrapped filming on my first short. Godspeed went on to play a bunch of film festivals and was picked up for distribution by UK Film Channel. We shot another short film the following year (two actors, entirely outdoors) and then, in May of 2022, we shot Obstacle Corpse, a feature film that you can rent right now on Amazon Prime. Do it!
Necessity is the mother of invention and Cat McAlpine is the mother who may drive all night to kill your girlfriend.
If you’d like to see Godspeed, here it is: https://vimeo.com/426073831?share=copy
To submit your own story, email us at heycanwetalkaboutcovid@gmail.com.
