Compiled by Andrew O. Thompson
Sponsored by:
by Eric Rudolph
Compiled by Andrew O. Thompson
Sponsored by:
The Road to Nowhere | War and Remembrance | The 1999 Independant Spirit Awards | U.S. International Festival
The Road to Nowhere
by Eric Rudolph
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| Perpetual slacker El Cid Rivera (Damian Young) promotes his nonsensical philosophy at the neighborhood bar in Going Nomad. |
The lead character of Going Nomad is burdened with the grandiose name of El Cid Rivera (Damian Young), a heroic moniker that the 33-year-old struggles to live up to while drifting at the fringes of urban society. Every night at a quiet bar, he talks a big game with his like-minded, similarly underemployed buddies. But the majority of this drifter's energy is channeled into overnight driving marathons during which he pilots his gigantic, gas-guzzling Ford Lincoln through Manhattan's streets. As a self-styled "Asphalt Nomad," he relishes the wide-open, empty spaces of a temporarily-deserted world capital.
Soon enough, however, El Cid's life is impacted by his old nemesis Geraldine Fusco (Jourdan Zayles) — whom he once viciously assaulted in a fourth-grade game of dodge ball. Clad in a tight-fitting police uniform and sternly slapping a nightstick in her palm, Officer Fusco is a threatening and enticing figure to Cid — around whom she hovers, emanating the threat of retribution. One day Fusco breaks out in a run after the reedy, balding Rivera, tackling him and pulling his arm behind his back. She then surprises El Cid and herself by asking him out. An odd romance flowers until Fusco heeds her lifelong calling to become a Texas Ranger.
"I wanted to show that the small man can still be heroic, and to show New York City as a small town where glimpses of heroism are still possible," says Art Jones, the writer/producer/director of Going Nomad. "Cid is an extreme example, but I think just about everyone has sat around with friends, saying 'I don't like what I'm doing, I was meant for better things.' Invariably, someone will reply, 'Well, go do something about it!' At one time or another we all realize we don't have a clue as to how to take even that first step."
Going Nomad has been unspooling successfully at various festivals around the country, gaining fans and good reviews along the way. This $450,000 film about hard-core urban slackers came to life in full 35mm glory thanks to an energetic director who is anything but a go-with-the-flow type: he was once an account executive with marketing giant Grey Advertising until he left to head up Great Jones Productions, a Manhattan-based industrial film production company that's existed since the early Nineties.
To capture the elusive dreams and longings of El Cid and his cohorts on film, Jones enlisted director of photography John Inwood, a longtime stalwart of New York's indie film scene whose feature credits include Bottomland, The Daytrippers (see Production Slate in AC March '96) and Six Ways to Sunday. A key challenge for Inwood was translating the elusive magic of Cid's late-night auto cruises onto the screen. To enhance the driving scenes, he utilized black nets on the backs of Zeiss Superspeed prime lenses mounted to an Arriflex BL-4 to "soften and blow out the highlights, especially the car headlights." He notes, "Inevitably, there will be comparisons to Taxi Driver [shot by Michael Chapman, ASC], but we were after a completely different look. Taxi Driver is hard-edged; El Cid's world is softer and much more dreamlike."
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| Asphalt nomad Spud (Craig Smith) tells his tales of nighttime New York City journeys. |
Inwood, who shot a great deal of The Daytrippers while seated inside a cramped, day-lit station wagon with his actors, had to take a different approach to the solo car sequences of Going Nomad. He towed Cid's ride with a camera car and used lights inside and outside, as well as fast film and the Superspeed lenses. "Obviously I couldn't light the whole city," he says. "We ended up shooting wide open at T1.3 while using Kodak's 500 ASA EXR 5298 stock. On the dashboard, we had just a 6" tungsten-balanced Kino Flo, gelled with a 1/2 plus-green. The tiny Kino Flo provided a little fill, maybe half of what a key light would've been for Cid's face." This low-key, in-car lighting schematic effectively avoids the visual pitfall of having the driver appear overlit.
Aware that available street lighting wouldn't give the city the desired "comedic" ambiance, Inwood hit the near background with a camera-car-mounted Par light (gelled with 1/2 plus-green) to open up shadow areas. "There's a lot of green in the streetlights in New York," continues Inwood. "So in addition to staying with the look of the green-gelled lights, I also wanted to tone things down in the overall background. I used an FLB filter on the lens — losing about 1/2 a stop — but the colors look good. Overall, there is not a lot of cyan in the background. I wanted warm, soft, colored light, not a greenish haze."
To gain further control of this movable mise en scene, Inwood often panned a strongly-gelled green, blue or red light — mounted on the camera car — across the windshield or the side of Cid's vehicle.
In addition to the 5298 he exploited for night work, Inwood employed 100 ASA EXR 5248 for day exteriors and some day interiors. A sparing number of day scenes were caught on daylight-balanced 50 ASA EXR 5245, while the extensive bar and apartment interiors were filmed with 200 ASA EXR 5293. To save money, all emulsions were purchased from other productions through New York's Raw Stock clearing house. "That was a bit of a risk," Inwood admits. "The cans were all complete and unopened, but we were never absolutely certain that a can hadn't been sitting on a radiator or in the sun." Fortunately, the filmmakers didn't come across any bad stock.
The Asphalt Nomad's vehicles of choice are the full-sized American cars of the early Seventies, the kind often referred to as "boats" or "land yachts." To emphasize the cushy vehicles' expansiveness, Inwood photographed them as often as possible with wide lenses, particularly a 12mm and 18mm. "For driver's-side shots of Cid, we mounted the camera out farther than usual. With the 18mm, you see much more of the car than you're used to. We used a 12mm lens for his final 'perfect ride,' and it seems as if you can see the entire car. During one of these scenes, he turns a corner near Times Square, and the combination of the lights with the wide shot of the light reflecting off the body of that big car is quite beautiful."
While wide lenses were favored for the car shots, and "because Going Nomad is a comedy," Inwood also used 85mm and 135mm lenses, especially for images of Officer Fusco, the tough cookie with a tender heart. "We wanted her to look good and for the background to drop out of focus," the cinematographer explains. Fusco also had the benefit of a Tiffen 1/4 Black ProMist filter. Aside from the netting placed behind the lens during the shooting of night exteriors, however, Nomad was primarily photographed clean.
Though the production had the streets mostly to themselves while filming overnight driving sequences, the daytime shoots in Manhattan were another matter entirely. "We kept the crew small, so we could turn on a dime," says Inwood. A scene in which Cid helps his pal Chuckles go north of 14th Street for the first time was mainly a "stolen" sequence achieved with handheld and long-lens shots. Per his personal preference, Inwood employed reflectors to control the natural light.
The filmmakers did manage to grab one spectacular location despite the fact that the production wasn't permitted to shoot on the site. In one scene, Cid summons Chuckles to a meet him under an elevated section of Riverside Drive near the George Washington Bridge, where he holds court with a grandiose presentation of his ever-confused philosophy. The roadway above the characters is supported by a series of huge steel arches that continue on in a straight line, seemingly forever. "It is a setting with the wind, echo and visual sweep worthy of a Charlton Heston epic hero," says director Jones, who acknowledges a bit of a fixation with the legendary actor of such epics as The Ten Commandments, Ben-Hur and yes, El Cid.
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| El Cid strikes a majestic pose under the backdrop of Riverside Drive's corrugated archways. |
Jones had initially planned to simply capture a still photo for use as the film's key art under the arches of the Drive. The image he had in mind was a shot of Cid striking an ornament-style pose on the hood of an Asphalt Nomad vehicle. The director resorted to the elevated roadway only because the location originally selected for Cid's impassioned exegesis was being drenched with rain. Though the Drive's backdrop of grandly receding support trestles proved more majestic than the original choice, there was still one problem: the production only had a still-photo permit. Jones notes, "The police escort from the Mayor's Office of Film and Television told us to forget about it. However, we'd lined up the shot and I asked the officer to humor me and take a look through the viewfinder at the shot of the arches. After he did, he said "You got it!" and set up cones and redirected the modest traffic in the area. We shot for four hours!"
Jones views this key scene of one man's running monologue as the central core of Going Nomad. "Cid has a glimpse of the greatness that eludes him, and that eludes us all. It was an important part of the film, because I think everyone wants to feel that moment of self-confidence and of being fully alive. No one in the audience is going to go out and lead an army into battle, and neither is Cid. This was a chance to give Cid and the audience that brief glimpse of heroism within a great setting."
When not shooting semi-guerrilla style on the streets of New York, Nomad's cast and crew worked at a studio just north of the city's Westchester County suburb. Explains Inwood, "We shot the bar and Cid's apartment interiors at set builder John Romeo's studio. The sets had been built for another production, so it was affordable."
The nameless bar where Cid and his pals Chuckles, Tully, Eddie and Rev meet every night (and where even a slight change in group seating arrangements causes controversy) is dimly lit and reminiscent of an Edward Hopper canvas — a place that's been gradually reduced by time and the city's gentrification. The set was illuminated simply, with cool hard light outside and a warm soft source indoors. Blue-gelled Fresnels were positioned outside of the set's windows, producing patterns through their venetian blinds. Inside, the key light came from a gold-gelled Kino Flo. This source was ostensibly motivated from the bar area across from the windows, and the boys' table. In reality, the fixture hung almost on top of the table from the studio's grid. Accent lights were used to enhance the requisite bar decor, such as a dartboard.
"There was an enormous amount of material to film in the bar, so there was minimal tweaking of those two sources from shot-to-shot," Inwood explains. "We only did a considerable amount of relighting if a character looked toward both light sources in a shot." The cinematographer gratefully credits his long-time key grip, Ben Wolf (who worked for cameraman John Thomas on Under the Bridge, see L.A. Indie Film Fest coverage in AC June '97), for stepping in as cinematographer on several days' worth of bar sequences while Inwood was ill.
While Jones admits that he sometimes feels lost when Inwood talks about photographic detail, he has nothing but enthusiastic praise for the cinematographer and his longtime crew. "Through the lighting, composition and subtle dolly moves, John Inwood, Ben Wolf, and the gaffers, Joe Foley and Sean Sheridan, really gave the film a big taste of the 'little man as an epic character.' They were great at punching in at key dramatic moments. For example, when Cid is done leading the terrified Chuckles across 14th Street, there's a shot that drops below his chest; as we look up at Cid, he has a heroic profile and that sharp chin line. We borrowed several techniques from Heston and Victor Mature films, and they lent just the right touch to Going Nomad."
© 1999 ASC