MovieMaker asked writer-director Shane Bannon to share his experience creating the short film, “The Perfect Place to Cry,” which he filmed in one day. It screened at several prestigious film festivals including Dances With Films and Fantasia. It is available now on Alter.

Like with so many dreams, I only half remember making my latest short, “The Perfect Place to Cry”. It went by so fast that it felt less like a film production, and more like a midnight romp through the woods.

In late June of 2022, an image came to me while I was lying awake in bed around 4 a.m.: a man staggering out of the dark forest, into the headlight beams of a car. A little odd, a little dark. The perfect spark of inspiration for a short film. I jumped out of bed and started to write. It took me about fifteen minutes to finish the two-page screenplay. The next morning, I showed it to my roommates (and closest collaborators), Celina Bernstein and Matt Kleppner. The three of us have been working together since college, and at this point they are the first readers for everything I write. They immediately clicked with the story, and we started brainstorming how to bring my insomniatic fever dream to life.

Writer/Director Shane Bannon talks with Actor Jesse Howland while Actor Kevin Owyang gets into character – Photo by Celina Bernstein

Celina joined the film as our Producer and Lead Actor, and Matt came on as the Director of Photography. They were my first and only choices for those roles. But there was a catch: Celina was going to be out of the country for all of August, and Matt was set to start his second year at AFI right after that. This meant that if we wanted to make “The Perfect Place to Cry”, it had to happen fast. We quickly pulled together the rest of our crew, and prepped to shoot three weeks later, over one short summer night. Everything came together so fast that I didn’t have time to question or expand on the initial two pages. I just tried to hold onto that fleeting sense of dream logic. And, despite the typical stress involved in putting together a production, the whole process somehow felt easy.

Everybody knows that making a film takes time, money, and more than a little logistical Tetris. Some of my own projects have seen post-production stretch on for years. With all the work that a production entails, it can be easy to lose sight of your initial vision for a project. Budgets, actors, and locations can change on a dime. Your favorite ideas for a story can slam head on into the hard immovable wall of reality.

But sometimes, you get lucky. Sometimes, you write a script in one night, throw together a production team on a whim, and shoot it as fast as you can. Without enough time to second guess ourselves, we had to rely on our intuition. 

It’s a great feeling, having everything go right. In filmmaking, people often say that everything that can go wrong will go wrong. But in my experience, if you know what you want, if you trust your collaborators, and if you take pleasure in the bumps that come up along the way, a whole lot of luck can find its way to you. 

Left to right: Matt Kleppner (Cinematographer), Mon Castro (Line Producer), Celina Bernstein (Actor/Producer), Shane Bannon (Writer/Director), Sofie Somoroff (1st Assistant Director)

Production itself was its own logistical puzzle. As a filmmaker, I’m a bit of a minimalist. I try to shoot for the edit, getting only the coverage I need for each moment. But this time, the stakes were higher than ever: we had one night to shoot “The Perfect Place to Cry”, and in mid-July, that’s only nine hours of darkness. There was no time in our shooting schedule for shots that might not work. Knowing this, a week before the shoot, I summoned Celina, Matt, and Sofie Somoroff, our 1st AD, to shoot a video storyboard of the entire film on the dirt road behind our house in Los Angeles. Editing together this footage provided a test run for the story we were trying to tell. In the end, we only filmed one shot that didn’t make it into the final cut of the short. Everything else was just as we had planned it.

My favorite moment of the shoot perfectly encapsulated what it felt like to make “The Perfect Place to Cry”. While most of the crew began packing up for the night, Celina, Matt, and I piled into our picture car to capture the opening shot of the movie: an interior of the car driving along a dirt road. I felt giddy, sleep deprived, and incredibly grateful for my friends and collaborators that came out to make the film happen. The sun was just about to come up, and in our haphazard rush to get that last shot in, I felt all the excitement of the process that had gotten me into making films in the first place. We might as well have been high schoolers shooting some no-budget horror movie on a camcorder. It’s moments like these that make filmmaking worth it. When you surround yourself with the right people, they just might make your dreams come true.

“A Perfect Place to Cry” is available to watch now on Alter.

Main photo: Celina Bernstein in a still from “The Perfect Place to Cry” – Shot by Matt Kleppner