STRANGELY in LOVE “What If Charlie Chaplin
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STRANGELY IN LOVE “What if Charlie Chaplin and Fyodor Dostoevsky were put in a blender?” Sundance award-winning director, Amin Matalqa’s third feature film Strangely in Love takes a comedic look at rejection, heart-break, and two lonely idiots falling in love with the idea of love in a Chaplinesque adaptation of Dostoevsky’s novella, White Nights. Strangely in Love twists this Russian classic into a quirky fairy tale set in modern-day Los Angeles. When Amin recommended the original book to Michelle Lang, producer and lead actress, she thought it was one of the saddest stories she had ever read. “I knew Amin and I wanted to make a comedy together, so I figured he must have told me to read the wrong story! I called him and he immediately burst out, ‘Isn’t it hilarious?’ I didn’t know what to say. I mean, it’s funny if you find heart-break and pain humorous.” Says Amin, “I fell in love with Dostoevsky’s writing after reading Crime & Punishment and Notes From Underground. I found humor in his bitter dark characters, but when I read White Nights, I saw my naive self all over that book, and it was surprisingly hilarious. I knew the desperation that character had gone through from first-hand experience back in my college years and thought to adapt it with a spin of my own.” Our interpretation follows Fyo who falls in love with a blind woman, Nastenka, and decides to help her win back her lover, Steve (who’s gone off to Africa to save some children) just so he can spend time with her. “I felt compelled to turn it into a movie with the whimsy of one of my heroes, Charlie Chaplin, and I wanted one of my favorite actors to play the lead: Jemuel Morris.” Amin had worked with Jemuel on his very first short film when he moved to LA in 2003, and went on to cast him and Michelle together in his 2007 thesis film, Morning Latte, at the American Film Institute. So the trio reunited forces to play and workshop the story into a film adaptation through an organic filtration process. Over the span of six months, while Jemuel let his beard grow into a human black hole, they took Dostoevsky’s dialogue, deconstructed it, improvised upon it, and rehearsed the scenes in the park, searching for inspiration on location. It was a back and forth process until the dialog and action started to crystalize into something ready to shoot. Says Jemuel, “Every week, Amin would come back with new dialog pages and we’d read them and experiment out loud, then when he’d say ‘this is so stupid’ while laughing uncontrollably, we’d know that we’re on the right track. It was a lot of fun to explore behavioral comedy that wouldn’t seem so obviously funny on the page, but because it was so specifically dependent on the hesitations and the delivery we found in our explorations, it worked. And if it didn’t work, we’d keep trying something new until Amin laughed like an idiot.” Adds Amin, “It was fascinating watching Jem and Michelle transform themselves into these isolated lonely characters with such commitment: Michelle blindfolded herself out in public and hung out with people at the Brail Institute in order to understand what it’s like, then slowly found Nastenka’s voice and behavior, which is nothing like the real Michelle; and Jem completely transformed his body posture from this handsome Don Juan to a hunched Dostoevskian troll, embodying the Underground man not only with his physicality, but also deep in his eyes. He wasn’t the same Jemuel I knew before the film, and the comedy really came from their unawareness of how naive to the world they were.” With Jemuel and Michelle as the leads, the team cast Sean Carrigan (The Young and Restless, Single Wives Club) as Steve, the third part of the love triangle. “The first moment we heard Sean say ‘Nastenka’ with his Southern twang, we all burst out laughing. He completed the dynamic with an energetic blend of George W. Bush and Elvis Prestly.” And in a twisted supporting role, Amanda Plummer (Pulp Fiction, Hunger Games) decided to join the team to play the unpredictable nun, Sister Sarah. Says Amin. “We invited Amanda to come to the table read instead of just sending her a script, and the next day she called and said she really enjoyed it. I asked her if she’d like to join our cast, and she said ‘yes, but let’s make Sister Sarah more fun!’ So I rewrote the role for her and she brought so much unpredictable energy to it. Every take was like a box of chocolates filled with new surprise. I loved working with her.” With such a small cast, Amin didn’t want the film to feel like a play, so he saw an opportunity to create characters out of three other central components in the film: the Camera, the City, and the Music. This would be his third feature collaboration with Cinematographer, Reinhart Peschke, and they decided to make the Steadicam operator, Manolo Rojas, one of the actors through his lens. Instead of shooting conventional objective coverage, the camera would become an active subjective narrator, sometimes even refusing to look at the characters because of their constant dance around one another. Adds Amin, “I wanted the camera to have an opinion about what’s going on... when to look, when to get in their faces, and when to leave them alone. We did a lot of long three minute takes with no cuts and very specific choreographed moves that came out seamlessly because of the performance of our camera-man ‘SuperManolo’. It was like a dance between him, Jem, and Michelle.” As for the city of Los Angeles, “we had a real opportunity to show the contrast between the whimsical romantic qualities representing Nastenka (who lives in one of the original Disney Snow White houses and hangs amongst sun-drenched Fica trees with gigantic roots and chirping birds) and the urban sprawl that Fyo lives in, where police sirens are constant, and ugly alleyways and old red brick buildings keep everything muted in the shade. Filming took place all over LA, from Hollywood to San Pedro, Korea Town, Los Feliz, Santa Monica, Downtown, USC, Runyon Canyon, and Elysian Park. Adds Michelle, “The range of beauty and ugliness really makes LA one of the most interesting cities to film in, if you can find fresh new corners to explore.” As for the music, Amin re-teamed with his close collaborator, Grammy- nominated composer, Austin Wintory, who had also scored Amin’s first feature film, Captain Abu Raed. Amin: “This movie simply wouldn’t work without the music. There’s a purpose behind every beat and phrase. It’s not background music, it’s foreground score.” As Austin jokes, “Amin makes movies just so he can get them scored. There are several sequences where the movie plays like a silent film, and the only ‘dialog’ is the music.” This time around, they would expand the range of orchestral colors and styles to represent the characters and their transformations. For example, in Amsterdam they recorded the Chromatic Harmonica played by Dutch Jazz artist Hermine Derlou to represent Fyo with a Waltz, whereas Steve had his own motif of an abrasive Tango played on Spanish guitar by world renowned guitarist Scott Tenant. And throughout the score, the orchestral playing technique mutates from the old fashioned style of a Chaplin film to a modern sound enhanced with hollow electronic synth layers. Also central to the film’s love story is the song “Simple Love” by The Controversy, which was written when the band read the script a few months before filming. “The song was so beautiful it ended up organically inspiring the tone of the whole movie even before we started filming,” says Amin. Austin then took the melody from the song and reverse-engineered it to create Fyo’s theme using the same fabric of notes. Thus, Fyo’s theme evolves throughout the film until in the end it comes to full fruition in the form of the song. Strangely In Love, a Paper & Pen Films/Origin Films production, was shot on the Red Epic and Scarlett over 15 days. SYNOPSIS: Fyo, a naive ignored man-boy, falls in love with Nastenka, a hot- headed blind girl, after he stops her from hanging herself from a tree because she’s in love with Steve, who’s gone off to Africa to save a bunch of children. Fyo will do anything to be around Nastenka, even if it means reuniting her with her heroic lover. Strangely In Love is a whimsical adaptation of Dostoevsky’s classic novella, White Nights, set in modern day Los Angeles. TAG LINE: Fyo loves Nastenka, Nastenka loves Steve, Steve loves Steve. BIOS: Director/Writer: Amin Matalqa Born in Jordan and raised in Columbus, Ohio in a family of pilots, Amin left a business career behind in 2003 and moved to Los Angeles where he could pursue his childhood dream of filmmaking. He received his MFA in directing at the American Film Institute in 2007 and went on to win the Sundance Film Festival’s World Cinema Audience Award for his first feature film, Captain Abu Raed, which he wrote, directed, and produced. Captain also became Jordan’s first Oscar entry and won 27 international festival prizes, including the $100,000 grand prize at the Heartland Film Festival.