WAKE, the writing and directorial debut of Henry LeRoy Finch, began with little more than a screenplay, a filmmaker’s will to make something, and a few very dedicated people….oh, and a very, very old house in Maine.
The house, itself, is a character in the film. So inspired by the house as a setting for a story, Finch tailored a screenplay he had originally set in Mexico to the house in Bath, Maine. Built in 1745, and the site of a famous skirmish between the men of King George and the American settlers, what better location for a family drama, a play, a timeless story? The twist: Finch wanted to shoot with modern technology, in a cinematic way, capturing great performances without the encumbrance of a large crew, lighting, and so on.
The setting of the house provides an authenticity to WAKE, a New England soulfulness that can’t be replicated. It provides a perfect meeting place for four estranged brothers on the eve of their mother’s death. It is a house haunted not by ghosts, but by history. The family cannot let go of the past, carrying each of the brothers with it, like the moody river the house overlooks.
Finch completed the first draft of the screenplay while staying with his wife, producer Susan Landau Finch at Blackberry Farm in Bolinas, California. Polishing and rewrites were being done as pre-production began in January, followed by casting and assembly of the crew. Landau Finch conducted the casting which took place in both Los Angeles and Maine. Maine casting consultant Dee Cooke brought in many excellent actors while Finch and production designer Eric Matheson scouted locations. East Coast crew from both the Portland, Maine and Boston areas were interviewed and hired.
Finch wrote the part of Kyle for Gale Harold who was in Toronto shooting "Queer as Folk" for Showtime. Harold then went immediately onto off-Broadway, later having to leave the successful play, "Uncle Bob", early to join the rehearsals of WAKE in Los Angeles. Northeast native John Winthrop Philbrick was cast in Maine, where he had returned to raise a family after spending several years acting in Los Angeles. Gibbons, McManne, Judd, and Paik all lived in Los Angeles where readings and auditions took place. They were each carefully selected for their roles.
The rehearsals in Los Angeles took place at the Salvation Theatre in Silverlake, California. The entire cast assembled for a week, honing their characters under the guidance of director Finch, culminating in the work that is seen on screen. SzuSzana Megyesi would arrive each day laden down with thrift store finds and studio rentals for costumes for the actors. Much of the rehearsal was videotaped by Matthew Clark (artist-in–residence/documentarian) almost as if he were another part of the ensemble.
The rehearsal week finished with a read-through attended by the film’s Los Angeles based department heads, as well as by executive producer, Michael Donaldson, music supervisor Nic Harcourt, singer/songwriter Ramsay Midwood, producer Susan Landau Finch, director of photography Patrick Kelly, as well as Martin Landau, who heard the piece for the first time.
Pink rewrite pages were flying frantically just before the read-through and yet the screenplay was read as if the actors were their characters. In just one week, they had indeed become a family. When the cast broke into one of Ramsay Midwood’s songs "Spinnin’ on This Rock", serenading the man who wrote it as if they had known it since they were young children together, the entire room was energized. The movie came alive that day and a shared family consciousness was born. The actors and crew were ready to fly to Maine and tackle the impossible: accessing their source work to bring it to the screen, in an exceptionally tight shooting schedule of just over two weeks.
Finch and Kelly went ahead of the group for a few days of scouting and storyboarding. In Maine, the ensemble was welcomed by Eric Matheson (production designer), Dave Schwartz (sound recordist), Randy Visser (gaffer, UPM), Jill Reurs (script supervisor), Greg Lutton (boom operator) , Suvi Booth (assistant to producer, coordinator) and Margaret Rockwell (executive producer) who lives in Bath. Production had all of two days to set up.
The team hit the ground running on a rainy Sunday when everyone got drenched to the bone in the scenes where Raymond first escapes. Much of the film was shot in sequence, and the rain dictated the opening look of the film. Emergency panchos, cans of soup and many pairs of socks forced the production to go over budget the first day, balanced by other graced moments along the way.
Chez Panisse cook Jerome Waag--- on leave for a two-year stint at the Zen monastery Tassajara and enroute back to his position in Berkley---- offered his services to the production. The thirty-some odd cast and crew hummed along happily on two meals a day prepared improvisationally by Waag. "Cooking is like jazz…" he would say in his thick French accent that was until the producers forced him to shop at a "Super Store", then cooking was a whole new frontier of bargains-in bulk. In his spare time, Mr. Waag, also an artist would help out with the art department or hold a clapper. A meal a day was ordered from local restaurateurs.
The meals were served either on the lawn by the river, or back at the Rockwell house that functioned as the Production office or, "Command Central". The West Coast family had now bonded with the East Coast family and the meals carried on well into the night. Eventually groups would take off for their different cottages, houses or B&B rooms. Friends and family in the area had put up a lot of the cast and crew and many Bath locals aided with the production in varying capacities.
The atmosphere was intensely fiery fueled by the work, the adrenaline of a short schedule, the citronella torches, and a well of creativity and talent. Each night there was a sense of gratitude that a group of people could successfully come together and create something in a beautiful place without many unnecessary constraints.
Digital dailies were being cut together by Joshua Noyes, the associate editor, in an upstairs bedroom of the house while shooting was going on downstairs. It was a great meeting of the old and the new, seeing the textures of the house come alive on the Macintosh. Matthew Clark spent many hours set dressing the house and preparing the whiskey so that it would be the exact right color, filling the bottles for which he had carefully drawn custom labels. Eugene Rittal, the former owner of the house, stood watch over the crew, telling stories about his family who had roots in the region for many years. Quite a character, and a nuclear fusion expert, Mr. Rittal kept the cast and crew entertained with scientific theories and looks at his mint-condition, vintage Mercury Cougar.
Production designer Eric Matheson and artist-in-residence Matthew Clark augmented the found furniture and objects in the house with props and furniture from local vendors. Only one set was built, as was scaffolding for lighting.
Hair and make-up team Sharon Phillion and Julie Duffer arrived from Boston and transformed Rainer Judd and Dusty Paik into Dusty and April respectively, the "good-time girls" that Jack brings home to celebrate Ray’s first night out of jail. Patrick Kelly’s theatre background was put to great use when Finch wanted to choreograph the party scene, and so was able to treat the camera as if it was another actor, interacting and thus capturing the chaos of the night. Finch also continued to keep the actors in a creative and improvisatory spirit.
Dihlon McManne (Sebastian) spent an eerie first night before shooting, alone in the house. Finch and Clark had painstakingly dressed the room (although it never appeared in the film) as a set to provide McManne with Sebastian’s personal effects including eyeglasses, a pocket watch, photographs, etc. "It was spooky," says McManne. "It really gave me an insight into the emotion of my character -- feeling trapped in Momma’s house.
Finch engaged security chief Shane McKenna to help him mastermind a character exercise for Blake Gibbons, the actor who plays Raymond. Gibbons had expressed the desire to visit or to spend the night in jail as background for his recently emancipated character. Unbeknownst to Gibbons, (and to producer Susan Landau Finch) McKenna and a team of two, hulking security guards drove up to the house when Blake was dutifully learning his lines, "arrested him", threw him in the back of a black Suburban, blindfolded him, and took him to an undisclosed location.
There, they locked him up, and inflicted upon him much humiliation, a cold shower and gave him a bed, made of no more than a military-issue wool blanket on a cold floor. Around three o’clock a.m., they threw him out. By then it had dawned on Gibbons that the demonstration was Finch fulfilling his desire to ‘experience’ prison. "First I thought ‘Oh no, what’s Roy going to do without me? Then I thought as these two huge guys were coming after me, what the ----(!) did I do?" recalls Gibbons. Unorthodoxy became the norm with WAKE, a renegade film in which an environment was created where magic could happen for the creative people involved.
The four brothers also took part in two, extensive, taped, unscripted scenes. Beneath the light of the full moon, the brothers re-enacted their past based on the intense source work discovered in the Los Angeles rehearsals. The shack scenes were an opportunity for Finch and Chris Anderson to design sound that worked with the actors’ internal, emotional landscapes. In WAKE, both sound design and music composition was handled by the same creative team. Chris Anderson has composed music for over forty-five scores. Anderson and Finch collaborated together seamlessly and have agreed to work together once again on "Sleepwalking."
Music Supervisor Nic Harcourt, musical director of NPR station KCRW and host of Morning Becomes Eclectic, introduced the filmmakers to Ramsay Midwood’s music. The songs, which offer a sampling of Americana from blues to folk to country, are a perfect fit with the mood and feel of the film. Midwood is currently touring the country singing many of the songs from WAKE. Other songs were provided by Big Sounds International, a division of Emperor Norton Records.
Martin Landau agreed to play older Sebastian. What a serendipitous decision that turned out to be: his shoot days would be the last days of filming, it would turn out to be Mr. Landau’s birthday, and it was the fiftieth anniversary of the year he did summer stock in nearby Peak’s Island Maine, his first foray into acting.
Susan Landau Finch, Martin’s daughter had only worked with her father officially one time prior to WAKE, when she had had a hand in casting him in Francis Ford Coppola’s "Tucker" with her former boss and mentor, producer Fred Roos. Although brief, father and daughter relished the opportunity to work together on WAKE; a great warm-up for Henry LeRoy Finch's "Sleepwalking" written for Landau that will go into production next year.
Landau’s arrival was a perfect excuse for an impromptu party attended by the entire ‘WAKE family’. The festivities were an appropriate Maine homecoming for Landau as the ensemble nature of WAKE is much like his roots in the American theatre. Eugene Rittal’s brother, Elwyn and his wife, Judy joined the party. The real life brothers sharing memories of the house in Bath with all who had come to call it home seemed fitting as well.
Director Finch has spent his summers in Maine since l965 when his father, a philosopher and professor at Sarah Lawrence, purchased a hunting camp on rural Moosehead Lake. No game hunting takes place at Camp Caribou; just the hunting of creative and philosophical thought processes.
Camp Caribou is a place where many writers, poets, philosophers, artists, and friends have retreated from the bustling, commercial center of New York. Located just four-and-a-half hours from historic Bath and five hours from Portland, Maine and less if one travels on the Kennebec River. Finch and his wife, Susan, plan to divide their time between Maine and California.
The river plays a part in WAKE’s final scenes; the brothers share a memory about their father that utterly levels them. The memory involves a boat on a river, the wake of the boat; the wake of WAKE.
Associate Editor Joshua Noyes relocated to Los Angeles after filming was completed to help Finch with post-production planning and a rough assembly. They worked furiously cataloguing all that was shot, a daunting task in the digital world, as all takes are ‘printed’. The original rough-cut came in at just under three hours. All post-production took place at a loft in Silverlake. All editing was accomplished with Final Cut Pro, and music composition, sound design, and dialogue editing on Pro Tools/Digi Design.
Editor Gus Carpenter graced WAKE with his time and invaluable talent. After the rough assembly was complete, Carpenter began the work of shaping the unruly wild child into a tangible ninety-minute tale. Finch and Carpenter became excellent foils for each other, true opposites in many ways, with their dynamic visible on the screen.
Matthew Clark generated all post-production artwork and graphic design including titles, posters and website thanks to the new flexibility of media. In this way, the artwork was an integral and organic part of the evolution of WAKE. Clark is currently at work on the ‘making of’ as he shot approximately fifty hours of footage in-between refilling whiskey bottles and dressing sets.
Screenings of the DVD output direct from the editing system were held at both the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute and The Los Angeles Film School for a few students and colleagues. Notes were taken into account then Carpenter and Finch were back at it, editing for a few more weeks, involving the next small-handpicked audience into the feed back process.
Anderson and Finch completed the score in August 2002. The mix was completed in New York by long- time collaborators Finch and DiGiorgi at Acme Sound.
WAKE is a character-driven film where innocence is sacrificed on the altar of indulgence and carelessness. It is a story about shared memory and pain. It is a soulful look into a family on one night, a night that changes the course of their lives forever.
