08.31.10 – Cole Wiley was recently interviewed by writer, festival scout, sales rep, and production company consultant Vanessa McMahon for Fest21.com. The article, “Talking ‘Quietly’ with Cole Wiley” explores candid details about the making of the award winning film and touches upon various topics relating to the journeys of an independent filmmaker.
Here’s a quick excerpt from the piece:
I am super proud to present my good friend Colen C. Wiley. Cole and I met at an NYU interview four years ago where each of us had been interviewed by the NYU film teacher Milcho Manchevski, director of a favorite film of mine, Before the Rain (1994). Cole Wiley is the most educated up and coming filmmaker I know. He is a Harvard Law School grad and now an NYU Film school grad with his first short film having won awards in short film festivals nationwide and actively at work on his first feature film. Here today, my buddy Cole talks about his award winning short film Quietly (2009).
VANESSA: Cole, can you talk to us about your film Quietly? What is it about and what inspired you to make this film?
COLE: Quietly is a 17 minute drama about a quiet and unassuming 15-year-old boy who is struggling to separate his mother from her abusive boyfriend. Willing to do whatever it takes to make this happen, he begins to consider extremely drastic actions to save his home and family, but ends up finding that the consequences of his choices lead him into territory that he was not intending to explore. The inspiration for this film actually came from a few images that popped into my head after reading a quote from the infamous filmmaker, Federico Fellini. It reads “If there were a little more silence, if we all kept quiet…maybe we could understand something.“
That quote sent my mind racing. I began to think about how, underneath it all, the quietest people probably have the deepest and darkest stories to tell. That notion is no different for Italis, the lead character in Quietly. I wanted to create a story with a young character that was faced with a situation where it seems as though he is only willing to speak about anything relating to his heartbreaking situation at home on the rarest of occasions. While Italis is a product of circumstance, just like all of us, his situation is pushing him to a point where he never thought that he would venture.
VANESSA: I love the film. I’ve screened it once in Italy on computer and once in San Diego on the big screen where it sent chills down my spine it was so good. Do you have any stories or anecdotes you might have about the process of making the film? And this being one of your first films, how hard was the process to make it from the script to the screen?
COLE: I always feel like answering this question in relation to any project that a filmmaker undertakes could take days. Every film is such an interesting process. There were certainly challenges involved with the transition from script to screen and also from the cutting room to the final product as well. The process is never easy, but there are certain steps involved that are always the same. First of all, you have to make sure that you have a compelling, well- structured story on the page. If the script isn’t working, you’ll never recover from that. Casting is always critical as well. If nothing else, I feel that I was able to get strong performances on this project from pretty much every actor that appears on screen. From that point, it becomes about handling all the logistics related to the shoot, executing the plan, improvising when necessary, and then pulling it all together in the editing room. The most important thing to remember when cutting a film is that you’ve got to remember that even though everything is already shot, you still haven’t really found your story until you piece the images together. Scenes get cut, shortened, and modified in ways that surprise everyone. In the case of Quietly, we ended up cutting an entirely different ending than what was in the script. The film actually ends with an unplanned pickup shot that I grabbed with my lead actor on a whim. At the time, I just thought it was a nice looking shot that might be useful at some point, not realizing that it was going to be the closing shot for the film. Why did we change scripted ending? Because the revised one was much more effective…and it was shorter. And shorter is often better.
With all that, I would say that the major obstacle with this production was financial. Budgeted at an amount that was ten times bigger than any other project that I had produced to date, financing Quietly was an undertaking that involved a lot of determination, some creative resourcefulness, and a little bit of luck. With no angel investor that was willing to step up and finance the project in one check, I was left with only one option: to ask every family member, friend, and close associate that I had ever met if they would be willing to support the project with even the smallest contribution. Three months later, I had raised more than $15,000, more than enough money to get the project in the can.
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For those looking to read more, the full interview can be found HERE.
