FAQS

Being locked down during a world wide pandemic, hiding from an invisible monster.  I started wondering… what if we could actually see the virus and as it evolved, it got larger or more dangerous.  If we could see it, wouldn’t it be easier to avoid it or kill it.  Then there was Pixar’s WALLI, a sweet movie about a cute robot going about its day, cleaning up the mess the Earthing’s made before they all disappeared.   That’s how we started, with Cami’s character cleaning up the mess in her ravaged neighborhood by burying the bodies. That gave me enough to start writing and soon after the two of us started shooting the opening scene.

Since we started during the pandemic, I wrote to what I had.  Cami and I live together so I wrote Sami, the lead character, around her and used her deafness, and the cochlea implant she wears to hear, as part of the plot.  We shot the opening scene on a rainy day and I sent those edited 9 minutes to Anzu Lawson, a great actress I’ve worked with before.  She forwarded those 9 minutes to several actors she knew, and they forwarded it on to ones they knew.   Last scenes we shot, I got lucky and convinced Jamison Jones, a good friend and exceptional actor to join the film.  He would play the father of Sami in flashback scenes.  Finding young Sami was the toughest casting challenge we had.  She needed to have natural talent, not be shy at all.   She also needed be Latina and resemble Cami.   We sent out over 80 requests for auditions through several actor channels out of LA.  At least 35 recorded auditions and it was looking hopeless until I saw 8 year old Hannah Zamora’s audition and I knew immediately – this is the girl.  Hannah had a lot of sass – a spark that you just have to have naturally.  Hannah turned out to be an incredible find  – took direction like a pro and two incredible parents that stayed with us for the duration of Hannah’s scenes.  I’m super excited for her future.

On the very first day we started to shoot there were storm clouds and rain.  We worked our way around to the field behind the house where high tension lines passed through overhead. I had set up a shot looking up at Cami, framing a high tension tower far off behind her.  Cami was speaking the first lines in the film and she suddenly stopped, turned dead serious.  I looked up to see what she was looking at – a heavily tatto’d kid on a bike saddled with a big bag of taco shells.  This wasn’t just any young kid, this was I’d realize later, the son of pretty dangerous gang members that rebuilt cars a few blocks away.  He wanted money for the shells, but we weren’t buying, and he wasn’t leaving.  He asked how much my camera was worth.  Since I was using a tiny Sony A6500, I could easily pass it off as a POS.  I shoo’d him off like a brat but before he rode away, he stopped, pantomimed aiming a rifle at us and pulling the trigger.  Grinned, then left.  Cami got anxious and said we had better leave but since we were behind our own rental house, we could not go straight to the house, or he’d know where we lived.  And then others would know as well.  So we went to the street, got in my car and drove around for an hour.  Eventually we came back to the house, got the car in the garage and kept it there the next week.  We knew the neighborhood wasn’t the best, in fact they burglarized the house and took a lot of Cami’s stuff before she even fully moved in – but it was the perfect location for the film and sometimes you trade production value for peace of mind.   I did learn from then on, to treat each person with reverence, no matter how big or how young they were.

Not really central them, but going through a pandemic taught us all that – “Getting out is harder than getting in.”

At the beginning it was relatively easy for people to retreat into the safety of their home.  Obviously the fear of an invisible killer was enough to get us all inside.  Two years later, when things started to reopen, many had a very hard time leaving their “safe place.”   The Womb addresses that in a scene where Sami talks to a parakeet in a cage and tries to convince it that it shouldn’t be sad because its much safer inside the cage.  She’s really talking to herself and convincing herself to get the courage to leave the house and confront the scary world outside.   It’s something we all could relate to.

I was but I enjoy subverting the obvious.  The Womb is probably the safest place we experience in our lives.  In the film it’s a place we return to when we want to feel safe, but it’s dangerous because people get stuck in nirvana and in the pandemic, when people started crawling out, many had created new realities that in my opinion caused a real decline in mental health that has yet to heal.  One of my earlier one liners was “A father’s undying goal to save his daughter from herself.”  A lot of parents feel that these days.

The Womb took a ridiculously long time to finish and during that time, I changed my view of what the film was really about.  I tried to stick to the original script idea but the world and the events kept interfering and telling me – NO – go the other way.  I stopped fighting it and as in the book, ‘Tao of Pooh,’ I let the river take me to where I needed to go.   I ended up with a movie that is basically saying:  Life without risk is no life at all.

It’s a more contained location than my other films, but a much more esoteric concept- and I’ll admit, it’s been a real challenge that took a few years of reworking to pull it all together.  Since it’s a “puzzle” movie, those that enjoy figuring out a mystery will get satisfaction putting the puzzle together.  Those that like simple good guy beats bad guy stories may not enjoy the film because it demands more attention.  Whichever type you are, the ending will definitely shock you.