Hong Kong , December 6th 2010 I embarked on a journey with a very talented group of extreme characters to shoot a dark comedy before moving to Los Angeles to expedite my film career and continue trying to fund our horror western feature FISTFUL OF BLOOD with Ninja Turtles creator Kevin Eastman.
A LITTLE LESS CONVERSATION is the story of 3 troubled men whose lives violently converge while they are all seeking the object of their hearts desire at a Chinese Mexican fusion diner. Vincent is a talentless artist seeking the love of his ice cold promiscuous muse , Stephen the super hero costume clad lawyer who's legal career has descended into a part time at a comic book shop who desperately wants his family back and Nicky, a drug addicted homophobic criminal who quite simply wants drugs, money and Sulu/ George Takai to be digitally removed from the entire Star Trek franchise.
So with no time, no home ( a long story ) and less money ( A longer story ) I set out to make this short film with the very special group of people and relationships I had nurtured over most of the 10 years I lived there. The original script I had written was 90 pages. A first draft that I was about to go into second that now needed to become a 30 minute short.
As with many creative endeavors that start out with tons of passion and no budget, some money needed to be procured. So I took the last bit of money I had to leave the country with and figured I do what i always do ...figure it out later. The primary location of the diner was provided by one of my executive producers TAMMY GREENSPON. One of the most impressive women I've ever met in any country. She has a franchise of American diners in Hong Kong called THE FLYING PAN ( get it ? ) that have been enormously successful. I would sit in that diner on many an occasion and ask myself what would happen in this American diner if these fictional characters were to get together on one fateful night in downtown Los Angeles ?
I contacted VICTOR PENA ( a talent as technical as he is creative ) who I had creatively collaborated with on all of my music videos and told him I wanted to shoot something completely fucking bizarre and personal before I left. He said if it was under 20 minutes and he liked the script he might be down with it. Victor liked the script and said yes but dates changed and he wasn't available. He introduced me to a very special man as backed out. That man was PAUL MOGG who became my co-director. A rarer human being has never walked the Earth. Buried in commercial work at the time Paul Mogg made himself available to ALLC every minute he could. I was not secure being in front of the camera and directing at the same time. It's awful. I'm trying to be this obscure violent wack job in front of the camera and I'm concerned about the lighting, props, fellow actors performances and the schedule for the rest of the day. This is how they should punish serial killers is all I could think the whole time I was acting even with Paul there as my security blanket.
Some where in the middle of production between leaving my apartment and sleeping in the street with my rottweiler Alabama I got taken in by my ( now ) wife SHOOBIE DOO who was working as Jean Claude Van Dammes PA at the time. She helped me by producing the film with me and quite literally giving me shelter. There was a countdown on as to when I had to leave the country and having to leave my son TOMMEE SHERPA was a black cloud that buried my every waking minute while I was trying to be creative. My son is a critical character in the script and most of what he does in the story was written around what he actually did in real life. He's a natural performer but a lot of what we shot was a crap shoot because at the the time he was being inundated with so many languages that he couldn't speak very much english.
We had a 30 page script with a loose ending and many things had to be rewritten and improvised based on talent and location availability. My Director of Photography canceled and then my next DP read the script that was loaded with super heroine strippers, guys arguing about the subjective morality of guys sucking cocks, drugs, and comic book trivia and backed out last minute as well because he didn't get it . It's very American but very French at the same time in that it's character driven. It has a plot but it's not the focus of the film. Real life doesn't always have a master plan or a definitive plot. We're all unique molecules bouncing off each other at different speeds and ALLC is a reflection of that. "SHIT HAPPENS" should really be the films tagline.
"Less IS More" is the films current tagline, a phrase from the 1855 poem Andrea del Sarto by Robert Browning that's been adopted as a precept for minimalistic design .
The American comic book store that the schizophrenic character Stephen ( Keon Woong Lee ) works at is BIG MIKES COMICS. This was a bar that we converted into a comic book shop with donations from comic shops all my personal artwork was owned by my son's uncle Pawan Rai who's also in the film. The bar is called Dharma Den and was essentially our production office until it got taken over by late night drunk bar workers. I had a hand in designing and building the place and like all good things it came to an end fast so we needed to set up shop on the road.
BIG MIKE LEEDER who plays twins , Messy Big Mike and Almost Clean Big Mike really deserves a whole show on his own. Honestly That;'s one of the plans is to offshoot BIG MIKES COMICS as a regular webisodic adventure in the spirit of SPACED. Why do these Odd Couple'esque set of dysfunctional English twins operate a comic book/ strip club in downtown Los Angeles?
Why not !
