‘Cold December’ in February

Made for $3,000, using local actors and shot in town, Brian Wright made his debut film “Cold December” to speak to Chicagoans

By Dan Ochwat

So this young guy lives in Chicago, married, no kids, slogs through his 9-to-5 job every day, hits the gym afterward, comes home to his wife and complains about his dull life. Then he drinks too much on the weekend. Sound familiar?

I know, how dare I generalize you (the reader) like that. You (the reader) probably lead a very interesting life. However, it sounds familiar to me (the reporter) and to Brian Wright (the writer/director). Raised in the suburbs of Chicago, Wright knows this type of person well and wrote his feature film debut about this cycle of life, questioning it, not discounting it, but at some point the bitching and moaning has to stop and a man needs to ask himself what he really wants from life.

Such is “Cold December.” A movie being released on DVD on Feb. 26 by Echelon Studios. Wright filmed it over five days in Chicago in December of 2006 and made it for $3,000 (not including the price of the camera), using seven actors and three crewmen — it’s the definition of indie.

“I wanted to make a movie about people I know and make it as realistic as possible,” Wright says. “I set out to make something that has a social commentary to it. If you rent it, you’ll be challenged, or it will challenge ways of life. There’s no way to do things. People will watch it and say, ‘Well, what am I doing? What am I doing that’s so special?’ Me, as a filmmaker, I want to make movies, and I can sit here for years and say, ‘My life, my way of doing things, directing movies, is the best job. It’s better than a 9-to-5 job.’ But at the same time, I know that I could be full of shit. I could be wrong. That’s what it says.”

“Cold December” will be available on Blockbuster Online, Netflix, some video-on-demand outlets and mom-and-pop video stores and can be purchased at www.singahe.com. Wright is a graduate of Columbia College in Chicago and lives in Los Angeles, where he forever shops around his scripts and projects.

With a little money scored from the sale of a tanning salon that he and his wife owned and ran in Scottsdale, Ariz., just off the Arizona State University campus, he set out to make his first feature film (he has also directed shorts). Wright said he lived in Arizona just for a change of pace, and it’s where he wrote “Cold December.”

In December of ’06, he returned to Chicago, lived in an apartment at State and Monroe, filmed his first movie and then moved back to L.A. in August. “Cold December” is nine scenes, a talk-heavy film that in part was influenced by “Closer,” the Clive Owen, Natalie Portman movie that Wright says was only 10 scenes. The influence only goes as far as structure: having a few scenes limits the budget and the grueling schedule for the actors.

His main creative inspiration was “Swingers,” actually, a Midwest anti-”Swingers.”

“I wanted to make a counter movie to that,” Wright says. “If that’s what’s happening in L.A., and that still continues to happen now, it’s just the clothes are different, then I want to make what’s happening in middle America. This is how I see suburban middle America, what I see them doing, which is getting married, buying a townhouse, getting two cars, getting a job that they’ll be in for the next 35 years, and there it is. That scares the shit out of me.”

Wright shot the film with a Sony high-definition camera, recording about 720 hours of footage that he edited down to 82 minutes. The shoot was five days, with one 15-hour day and another 12-hour day. He used his apartment (his living room was turned into a bedroom for the film), friends’ homes in the city and suburbs and a gym that a friend worked at. He also shot in some locations in Chicago, particularly Grant Park, because as a huge NBA fan, he wanted to visit the spot of the Chicago Bulls’ championship celebrations.

He also had a larger vision in mind, describing a certain bench in the park that faces Lake Michigan. Shoot the bench one way, and it’s simple cars driving by on a gray, December day, he says. “You do the opposite of that shot, and it’s this gorgeous cityscape behind them, and they’re dwarfed by the buildings,” Wrights says. “It’s a reveal within a scene. There’s a conversation, and they’re hurt; they’re hungover. When the scene flips, I turn around and show them in the city and that they’re a part of something bigger and that’s a good thing. It’s a neat shot.”

To bear the December cold with him, Wright used an assistant director, a sound guy and a general on-set helper. He also hired seven actors. The lead is Chris Fountain, a close friend of his, who he had to fly out from L.A. for a week. He’s written four scripts with Fountain and says the two are on the same wavelength when it comes to movies. Fountain also worked almost as an assistant director on the movie because of how much he helped with the other actors.

Wright hired one other friend for the film, but the other five actors were hired off the Craig’s List website. Everyone was non-SAG. He auditioned roughly 10 actors for each role (in a conference room in his apartment building), receiving upwards of 50 submissions for each role off Craig’s List, reiterating in his mind just how much talent is in the city. They may not all be working actors, but there is a strong film community in Chicago, he says. Each actor received $100 a day, cash. “A couple of them had just moved to Chicago, (and) it’s the first thing they’re in,” Wright says. “It was a neat set-up for them.”

By the nature of the film, being so dialogue-heavy, a lot of the actors were free to improvise, both out of creativity and because it’s inevitable to forget a line when shooting nine heavy scenes.

“I like that stuff, put a camera on them and let them run,” Wright says. “If they know the character, then it’s probably going to be juicier than the script that I wrote.”

He said he did do a lot of work with the actors, too. “I pride myself on shooting quick,” he says. “I know what I want. I set it up, do a lot of rehearsal with the actors. I get them in and talk about the character. What do they think about it, because ultimately they own it.”

Wright cut the film on his home computer and really didn’t shop it around before approaching Echelon Studios. He had submitted the film to one festival, the Chicago Underground Film Festival, but wasn’t accepted. Yet the festival circuit was never really in his plans, so it wasn’t a setback. Wright’s leery of festivals: “They throw out masterpieces if you didn’t fill out the form properly. They need a quota, and as soon as they get it, they say, ‘Who cares about the rest?”

He also feels festivals can be “a little bit stuffy.”

“I didn’t make this for industry people,” he adds.

From pitching projects to Echelon Studios in the past, Wright always had them on his radar.

“They were first in line,” he says. “It’s a small-budget movie. I wasn’t kidding myself into what it was. It’s not a theater independent movie, it’s an indie indie, true low, low budget,” he says. “I knew that’s where it would end up, and I didn’t really care. As long as it was distributed by someone else besides me, standing out by my trunk handing out copies. I had my eye on them, made the call, and they said, ‘Yeah, let’s do it.’ ”

Echelon has a $30,000 marketing budget and is distributing 10,000 copies. Wright receives no money up front. “They didn’t buy it from me,” he says. “Little companies don’t do that, but they do put it out, and there is a back-end deal. After they recoup, I get a certain percentage of everything after that, which is small, too.

“I just want it to be out there and want groups of people to see it,” he says. “IMDB, and message boards like that, when it does get out there, people will respond to it. They’ll say, ‘This is the worst movie I’ve ever seen.’ Or, ‘I like this part,’ or whatever, and that’s the feedback I can’t wait to have. If it’s good or bad, it doesn’t matter to me. As long as I get something out of people. I want something out of people.”

With all art, you can only hope for reaction. Next for Wright, he’s beginning to shop around a new script called “River Rose in the Horn of Africa.” He says it’s a blend of adventure with political and social commentary. He’s also pitching a project with actor Peter Navy Tuiasosopo (the Samoan center from “Necessary Roughness”) about the Hawaiian musician who did a version of “Over the Rainbow.” As typical in Hollywood, there are issues with rights to the song, despite Wright having a script and star ready to go.

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