Charles Weinstein’s Under the Bridge

Stephen Ashton (SA): This is your first feature,
right? What films did you do before that?

Charles Weinstein (CW): I’d made two professional
shorts outside of school. I went to the San Francisco Art Institute
where I worked at Zoetrope for a short time. Then I went to NYU
and studied dramatic writing. I then wrote a "Hollywood" screenplay
and, to make a long story short, the idea got ripped off and I
kind of learned from that experience that it was silly to just
do a purely commercial film, to feed the system. Ater that experience
I remembered what I learned at the Art Institute, and the film
teachers that taught us that it’s great to make your own personal
films. They told us to do that and work at the Safeway, if we had
to, because that will be more fulfilling in the long run. So in
’87, I decided to do exactly that, and I made a short film called
The Idiot, which was a really good script with lousy direction.
With that experience, which took about a year to do, I felt that
it would be best to improve my directing by going into stage. So
I worked as an assistant director at the Ensemble Studio Theatre
in New York, which was a pretty important theatre company at one
time. Its members include people like Ellen Barkin, John Voight,
and Danny DeVito. I worked there for about four years and directed
a lot.

I made a short film called The Gutter Song, and
shortly after that my long-term relationship broke up and I was a
bit lost. I found myself questioning marriage and values and all
those things. About that time I met these families of renegade squatters
who had built this subculture lifestyle on the banks of the East
River. I met a guy named John, this older street philosopher, and
his friend, Sammy, and Sammy was a trip because he lived without
money in New York City. He was a fisherman, and he would catch crabs
and eels, even seahorses, and he’d pickle them. Sammy and John were
displaced longhoremen who lost their jobs working on the docks, but
they stayed because they loved it there in a romantic sort of way.
On the surface Sammy seemed crazy, but actually, he was living a
life that I desired-he was living on a beautiful piece of land, he
was self sufficient, they had this whole life without slaving for
the American dollar. And there was a familial compassion to their
existence that I was attracted to.

So I wrote a great screenplay and unfortunately it
got me a William Morris agent who convinced me that she could raise
a lot of money for the film. That never happened, but it did cost
me two years of frustration. I eventually decided to go forward
myself. Preproduction was very painful because there was no money
to offer, so we interviewed lots of people for every position and
had to sell them on the project. So with each person we’d spend
a good hour or two trying to convince them to do the film. At that
time we secured a little bit of cash. My mother gave I think it
was $5,000, and we got a grant from Panavision’s New Filmmakers’
Program. I met (DP) John Thomas, and I really liked the film he
shot called The Night We Never Met. I took him to where these characters
lived, and told him I wanted to use these actual locations to film.
Once he saw them, he was sure he wanted to shoot the film. He told
me we have to shoot it in color 35mm to show the incredible beauty
of this garbage dump.

SA: So what do we see on the screen, their
actual place?