The Legend of Juan Jose Mundo is a film set in 1984 that feels like it could have been made in 1984 — if only the high school students of the time were able to recreate their world with the wisdom only memory can provide. Married co-writers Michael Walker and Susan Gomes built the story, about a teenage girl’s complicated crush on a Spanish exchange student, from legends around Gomes’ high school years in the suburbs outside New York City.
For our latest Films at Any Budget, Walker, who directed the film, describes how the thoughtful, funny and altogether charming film came together. One of the most charming films we’ve seen in years, it plays Saturday at the Waco Independent Film Festival and arrives in theaters August 20.—M.M.
My first film, Chasing Sleep, starring Jeff Daniels, was a $2 million dollar movie, financed by a French studio, and shot on film because it was 1999 — a different world in terms of movie making. It all took place in a house and I was planning on shooting it in my house in Seattle for cheap before I got a call from the producer who had read the script and wanted to make it.
I thought my budgets would go up after that, but after ten years of not getting a movie made, I lowered the budgets instead. I did two movies for under a million — Price Check and The Maid’s Room. My last two films, Cut Shoot Kill and Paint (not the one with Owen Wilson), cost about $250,000. As the budgets came down, I learned that I had to find a balance between what I wanted and what I could afford. I’m always amazed at what I can get for the money. I’ve seen films that cost a lot more than mine that don’t look nearly as good. I learned a lot making movies on those budgets.
The Legend of Juan Jose Mundo is a high school movie that takes place in 1984, about Julie, who has a Spanish exchange student stay with her family at their house. While he hooks up with every girl in school, Julie has to figure out her feelings for him. The budget was about $2.5 million, which was my biggest budget ever, but it was stretched thin because of what we needed to shoot. Among producer Ted Hope’s many rules for making a low-budget film is this: not too many characters, not too many locations. I had both, and the ’80s.
When the money came through, I called the production company American High. In 2017, producer Jeremy Garelick bought an unused school in Syracuse with the aim of making high school comedies, which he’s done ever since with producing partner Will Phelps. We had sent them the script a couple years before and they had passed, but they were enthusiastic. I told them we were still making a high school movie and they had a high school — would they be interested in some sort of deal? They have a soundstage that qualifies for the New York state tax incentive built right in the school. They came on as executive producers, and we rented out their school between their productions.
We were able to cast The Legend of Juan Jose Mundo without needing to cast big stars. It was mostly by design, but searching around, there just weren’t a lot of kids that could play high school students who were big enough names to get a movie financed. Stars cost money, so I guess you could say we saved money by not having stars. But stars bring money too – and they definitely help when you’re trying to sell your film.
Casting The Legend of Juan Jose Mundo
The most important part of shooting any movie, after the script, is the casting. Casting low-budget films is a challenge because agents, managers, and casting directors aren’t generally interested. These films don’t pay that much, they fall apart, they suck, they disappear – seriously, why would anybody get near these films? I’m lucky that I’ve had a couple of things at Sundance, which goes a long way when you’re trying to sound serious. And also, I have a great, award-winning casting director, Paul Schnee, who runs Barden/Schnee Casting with Kerry Barden, who cast Chasing Sleep. They get agents to take my films seriously. Many in our cast haven’t done a lot yet, but they will be stars very soon.
Alexandro Byrd, a graduate of the University of Michigan’s theater program, was working at a steak restaurant in Atlanta when we cast him. He had literally done nothing outside of school. He plays the title character. Anna Mirodin, who plays Julie, was a child actor from Toronto. She had an amazing quality to her that was exactly what we weren’t seeing in the other actors who auditioned, as good as they were. We had to get her a special visa and we didn’t actually know she could do the movie until two days before we were shooting. She arrived the day we started shooting.
I would have loved to have had all of the cast together for a couple weeks just getting to know each other and bonding and rehearsing. That wasn’t happening. Luckily, the actors all bonded anyway, and they’re all still friends.
For other characters, it turns out that one of the best theater schools in the country is at Syracuse University. There just aren’t a lot of great actors outside of New York and L.A., and we couldn’t afford to fly everyone in. But the SU kids were genuinely good. Every actor that came in was good enough to cast. I ended up casting some of their teachers, too.
Ideas
In my previous films, I had dealt with SAG, but not with many other unions. In theory, I am all for unions. I want people to be protected against large corporations. But we were a Tier 0 film up in Syracuse, not a massive corporation, and we had to work with the deals that the corporations negotiated. Sometimes it just didn’t make sense. For example, to watch the playback of a shot, you need someone in a union position to show it. This might have made sense back in the day of VHS video playback, but today, you just have to push a button on the camera. So I decided we didn’t need that position and saved, I don’t know, $20,000? Was I really going to spend that for the three or four times I wanted to see if we got a shot? Playback is a time trap anyway.
One thing I learned is that the lower the budget, the more you really have to have the film in your head. I always storyboard everything so I know which scenes need more time, and what equipment we need for each shot. I make the first schedule of the movie, which gives me a chance to say things like, This is where we need more time or This is where we can shoot a scene in one shot. I know what the consequences will be of not making the day.
You need more ideas than you can ever get into your film, because so many ideas will not make it, and you can’t be sure which ones will or won’t. Things change while you’re shooting and that masterpiece of a film in your head is constantly under attack. You need to be able to bend and figure things out as you’re shooting, so that even though the film isn’t exactly what you set out to make, it’s still a masterpiece.
We had 21 days to shoot this film. I’ve shot films in 18 days. On these tight schedules, you’re not going to get a lot of coverage, especially if you want it to look good. Practically, I tried to think of the film in terms of longer shots that covered everything I needed. Creatively, I wanted the camera to have a certain style. Without coverage, you won’t have as much film to set the pace in the editing room, so you have to do that on set, in camera. This is why you really have to know your film before you start shooting.
Cinematographer Kristy Tully and I tried to light and shoot the movie like a film that was shot in the ’80s. It wasn’t a rigid rule, because rigid rules on low budgets are disasters. Kristy came up gaffing film in the ’90s and knew all the old lights, and we tried to use lights and lenses that were used then, as well as some of the styles of the time. We threw a few shots into the film that were trendy in the ‘80s, like colored lights in steam in the hot tub. They thought that was pretty cool then – and it is!
We had an amazing production designer, Annie Simeone, and a great team behind her. We tried to divert as much of the budget as we could to her department. Our movie is based on stories that happened at White Plains High School in 1984, so Susan, my wife and co-writer, gave them tons of pictures to work from. They lined a hallway of the school with these pics and did an incredible job recreating them. The basement in the movie looks almost exactly like the basement Susan hung out in back in the day.
I spent days before shooting trying to figure out how we were going to recreate the Times Square of the ’80s. I even thought about using stock footage and CGI-ing our characters into it. I researched how to create worlds in Unreal Engine. But in the end, it didn’t matter. I couldn’t afford any of it. We ended up shutting down a street in downtown Syracuse and turning their glorious, restored Landmark Theater into a shitty theater in porn-filled Times Square. It was much, much cheaper than VFX, and it looks much better.
You don’t want to go into the editing room with the hope that it will save your film. But editing is a beautiful thing! There are all sorts of tricks we used in Juan Jose. You can create coverage by zooming into a shot. You can turn two shots into singles. You can smooth out a bumpy shot that isn’t working. There are so many tricks today that weren’t available when I started out.
The Soundtrack
This is an ’80s movie — these kids listened to music. Mixed tapes are part of the story. We needed a soundtrack, and songs cost money.
Our music budget ended up being about $200,000. We were able to pay for it because Central New York had an incentive for shooting there, on top of the New York State incentive, and I was able to redirect those funds back into the movie. Peter Davis, our music supervisor, had endless patience with me. Some songs were pitched to us, but mostly we found songs and sent them to Peter. He would tell us no way or maybe, and then try to get the rights for a price we could afford. Mostly, it was no. Occasionally, we were close, and I had to write a passionate letter to someone telling them how important their song was to our movie. Eventually, we got a great soundtrack with some songs that I still can’t believe we got.
Preparing a film that you’re directing takes a lot of work — before preproduction, when there’s time to have ideas without cast and crew biting at your heels. On an indie film, you don’t get paid for that. It’s so hard to do this work, because films are a fantasy until you’re actually shooting them. A lot of times, the movie doesn’t get made and all of that work was for nothing. But that’s the way it is, and that work needs to be done.
The Legend of Juan Jose Mundo arrives in theaters in August 20 from Persimmon. Tickets to Saturday’s Waco Indie Film Festival are available here.
Main image: (L-R) Ben Heineman, Anna Mirodin and Chase Vacnin in The Legend of Juan Jose Mundo. Persimmon.