An Old Script Revisited
- Christopher Flippo
- Feb 22, 2017
- 2 min read
The Down and Yonder script sat in a folder on an old laptop for five years. It was written in a cheap apartment in the San Fernando Valley, mostly as a way of dealing with a particularly vicious bout of homesickness. There’s another reality where it’s still sitting there, collecting (proverbial) dust.
But that’s not the reality we live in. Rather, it’s not the reality we chose. In 2012, Cindicate started making shorts, most of them just exercises in style and storytelling. We needed to make those early shorts to get them out of our system: we were never going to figure out who we were until we figured out who we weren’t.
And, in time, we started to think about Down and Yonder script. It stayed with us and it stayed on our minds. The stars kept aligning: we met Chris Schulz, who we quickly realized would make a wonderful Wally, our lead. Geoff James’s skills as an actor only grew, and we knew he could make a nuanced and heartbreaking Sugar Baby.
And the technology changed, and it allowed us to make our film. Digital vs. film is a debate that still wages on, and we’ll weigh in on that in detail another time. But the truth is “Down and Yonder” wouldn’t exist without digital. It allowed us to cut our teeth inexpensively. We were given access to tools that had not been made previously available to filmmakers at our age.
So in the summer of 2015, we got together, a crew of about twenty, to film the script that had sat in that folder for so many years. What had previously been four to five friends running around in the woods grew to a small army. It was challenging.
And the truth is we were fortunate: we were surrounded by a support system of family and friends that believed in us when we sometimes didn’t. We had a community that took care of its own and housed us, fed us, and allowed us to shoot in their establishments.
Making things is hard. It’s frustrating, infuriating, and it sometimes makes us wonder why we do it. But the answer is simple: we do it because we have to do it.
And in the end, it’s always worth it.
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