Writer/Director Rick’s Schmidt’s DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT
From my earliest efforts in feature filmmaking, from A MAN, A WOMAN, AND A KILLER (co-directed with my then-roommate Wayne Wang, ©1975), the movies I’ve been involved with as an artist-filmmaker have been fueled by the improv process, coupled with performances by non-actors. And real-life stories have also been included in the mix from the very start. ‘A MAN…needed a narration to pull the footage together, so I brought the three lead actors into a recording studio and asked them personal questions about their youth, how they were raised, what they thought of their fellow actors, etc. What was most fascinating to me was combining real life with the fictional structure in storytelling. Jumping back and forth added a new dimension to the material.
NO TEARS OF BANKERS benefited from such juxtapositions, and a fully improv approach. Before flying into Rome, Georgia to join my co-producer and lead actor Barry Norman, little was settled in the story except for the facts that (1) Barry would be owner of a Victorian B&B headed for foreclosure, (2) we’d need to locate someone to play his movie wife, and (3) that it would be shot at the Claremont House B&B where I’d been housed one year earlier while attending the Rome Intl. Film Festival with a feature, Mirage, made in Santa Fe in 10 days with co-producer Stephen “Jules” Rubin.
Actors Barry Norman and Brittany Hannah in a scene from NO TEARS FOR BANKERS.
After I traveled to Rome, Georgia, and got settled in my room at the Claremont House (see above; 4-poster bed and Victorian ambience…) ideas stared flooding in. I tried to remind myself that a good movie can come out of such chaos. In fact, Barry Norman had been in the first Feature Workshops in 1995, where we co-created BLUES FOR THE AVATAR with four others. And that movie had played Slamdance Film Festival (our movie was one of only 17 features selected out of 800 submitted) and had won a Silver Award at Houston International. Barry and I were hoping we could succeed again.
Barry had already set up two rather grand situations, one set for the following Tuesday (I arrived on a Sunday…) at the local Victorian Tea Room where we’d be joined by the entire Rome Red Hat Ladies chapter (see below), including 45 elderly women decked out in red-plumed hats and scarfs). And secondly, for the upcoming Friday night, where indie band’s songwriter/guitarist and singer Roger Miller, from the famed band Mission of Burma, would play a set at a local deli. OK. Something was ‘solid’ even though I wondered how these seemingly unrelated events would fit into the story.
When the actual owners of the Claremont House, Holly and Chris McHagge, agreed to play the ‘help’ things looked more promising. And when Barry’s friends Gregg Parnell showed up with his teenage daughters, along with world famous wrestler Sid Eudy (AKA Sid Vicious), we suddenly had a couple wild card! Also, when the B&B guest of the McHagge’s, famed southern attorney Stan Jackson, agreed to do a real-life story for the camera, there was another piece of the puzzle. Most importantly, when Allen’s brother, Derek Bell, brought a woman friend Brittany Hannah to the set, someone he thought could play ‘the wife,’ there was suddenly hope to covering that role (thankfully she agreed!). This is the kind of ‘luck’ that happened for us! When a filmmaker goes IMPROV for making a movie these kinds of miracles seem to be waiting to happen!
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(Page 25, below, excerpted from THE FILMS OF RICK SCHMIDT 1975-2015.)
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(Click on arrow below to see FULL MOVIE):
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