Charles Weinstein’s Under the Bridge

Charles Weinstein’s Under The Bridge was selected
the winner of the MovieMaker Breakthrough Award at the 1997
Taos Talking Picture Festival. The movie is a warm, touching look
at a group of would-be homeless friends living on the Brooklyn
waterfront, told from the point of view of a boy whom they befriend.

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?

CW: Yeah, the actual place where they lived.
Another thing he had said to me was that very few filmmakers write
realistic scripts that can actually be shot. He meant that young
filmmakers write these scripts with scenes that can’t be shot in
a low-budget way. John is a very warm and patient person. Many
cinematographers have a sort of macho arrogance because, quite
frankly, they know a lot more about filming on the set than directors
because they spend so many more days shooting than directors, who
rarely get the opportunity to be on set. So John was patient with
me and taught me how to shoot a film.

Then I met a very passionate Melissa Leo, who
I’d seen do brilliant work on the stageand in the Homicide TV series.
Melissa was very determined, and fought for this part. I’m in debt
to all my actors; they gave more than just acting to the film. Many
actors worked as producers, built the sets, and contributed more
than their art to the film. I think that’s important for an independent
film.

I really learned a lot. On my first weekend I shot
20 pages of the script. I learned that a filmmaker has to make
choices, and you may not get all the coverage you want, but you
just have to move along. You either finish the film or you have
one long piece of celluloid hanging in your shelf for the rest
of your life. That was pretty scary.

SA: What did you do for raw stock?

CW: John Thomas had shot for Law and Order,
and he knew that he had lots of short ends. We received a lot of
short ends for next to nothing from Law and Order. Also, Bob Mastronadi,
gave us some real fresh Kodak stock, probably around 6,000 feet.
We shot at least 70,000 feet, but it was mostly short ends. SA:
Did you ever think that…here it is, my first feature and, Jesus,
am I nuts-this is so far off commercial track that I might be better
off writing poetry… It’s an expensive art form to experiment
in.

CW: Yeah, I had tons of insecurities, because
the industry was very cold to the film and said, did you ever think
that homeless people will never buy a ticket to a homeless movie,
they can’t afford to go see a movie.

SA: Film has to go through this incredibly
cold, systematic, money-driven process.If you’re a poet, you xerox
off your poetry and read it in a coffee house. As a filmmaker,
you have to be out there on the screens. You need an audience,
people who are going to be moved by your film, which is why you’re
making it in the first place. Why not look to alternative sources,
put a damn screen up in a community center, or book some sort of
a university place and make an event out of it so people can come,
and have people that care about the issues say yeah, we’re in business,
too, we’re in business to make a difference. Commercial exhibitors
may not be cold at heart, but man, that’s an expensive machine
that has to be fed with huge, marketable products.

CW: I really believe that a lot of these distributors
are not even aware that they’re part of this great paranoid system
that really doesn’t want individual expression. Film is a very
powerful medium, and the distribution of it is really limited and
controlled.

SA: Even when the Academy celebrated independent
film this year, the only distinction they made was that independents
were made outside the studio system. Whereas what you’re talking
about as being independent are personal films, films that are challenging,
films that go beyond. MM

For more information, visit http://www.filmactingparis.com/Aboutcharles.htm