Independent Film Channel Productions

presents

in association with

Beech Hill Films

and

Journeyman Pictures

C-Hundred Film Corp

movie

OUR SONG

SYNOPSIS

Our Song is the story of three teenage girls facing the challenges of growing up in a world filled with uncertainty, risk, and, ultimately, hope.

Following Lanisha, Maria, and Joycelyn through the hot August streets of Crown Heights, Brooklyn, Our Song explores the ways in which family, friends, and community all compete to shape a young person's life, plans, and path, along the way offering a rarely seen glimpse of teenage inner-city life.

During the closing weeks of summer, the small moments and dramas that mean nothing and everything to a young girl navigating her way into adulthood start to accumulate. And these girls and their friendships change forever.

OUR SONG

PRODUCTION NOTES

with writer/director Jim McKay

Interviewed by Stephen Garrett

Tell me what OUR SONG is about to you.

In a very simple way, OUR SONG is a story about friendship. But it's also a film about choices, the choices we make and how these choices are influenced by our environment in terms of our families, friends, income, health, education, and so on.

What compelled you to make the marching band the center of gravity around your characters?

My very first ideas for the film were about a group of young girls who were outside the "cool" sectors of their peers. I had done a whole draft of the script when one day I was walking in downtown Brooklyn on Jackie Robinson Day and this small parade came flying by. And there was this marching band playing "I'll Be Missing You" by Puff Daddy and just completely rocking the house. It was this very inspirational moment, because in the faces of the kids in the band, I saw the characters from my story. I decided right then to write a band into the script. A year later, I thought I was about to shoot the film, so I went looking for a band to use and I found out who the band was that I had seen that day - the JRC Steppers. I called them up and Tyrone Brown, the director, invited me to a parade. I went out to Crown Heights and they took me with them on the bus to Mount Vernon for the annual Memorial Day parade. I fell in love with the band, the kids, the program. And that was the start of a year of hanging out, observing, and writing them more into the story.

The function that the band serves in the story is the same function that it serves in the lives of the real kids who are a part of it - a safe, stable, educational and positive place for kids to go to, kids who may not necessarily have safe, stable environments in their homes or neighborhoods. A lot of the film is about how our outside environment affects our internal growth and the plans that we do or don't make. So in this story a lot of the outside forces for the girls are barriers - the bureaucracy of the school system, the home environment and whether or not it's emotionally supportive, finances, health, safety... And then in the midst of all that chaos, there's this band, which is, to some degree, an oasis.

Where did you find the lead actors? Their performances are so strong...

We did traditional casting sessions and also a few open calls. Kerry Washington and Melissa Martinez came in to the sessions and Anna Simpson came to one of the open calls. She had seen a flyer on the wall at her high school in Queens. For all three, this is their first film. Even still, their experiences and their techniques are all very different. So it was a fun and interesting challenge figuring out how to communicate with each one of them individually and then as a group. The audition period was so long it was almost like rehearsals. Each of the actors probably came back five times, each time reading with different combinations of girls. Once we hired them, they started rehearsing with the band immediately. I took them out and introduced them to Tyrone, the band director, and he threw them into the band as if they were any other kids joining up. Then we had a month of regular rehearsals before the shoot. So once we were on location, they were ready.

I'm at a bit of a loss to say much more about them because I think their work is so strong and beautiful that it speaks for itself and I don't want to sound obnoxiously proud. So I'll just leave it at that....

How much time did it take to make the film?

Well, I wrote for a year and a half, then spent a year with the band while I rewrote and tried to raise money at the same time. When it became clear that I wasn't going to find the outside money I was looking for, I made the choice to move ahead and started putting together a team of people who would ultimately work together to get the film made. I had had an experience with GIRLS TOWN that sort of worked out in the end and which was largely based on faith and recklessness - educated recklessness. And so I put together a strong team of people, starting out with Alexa Fogel as casting director (who would later, with her partner, Joe Infantolino, become a co-producer) and Paul Mezey, with whom I was working on SPRING FORWARD, as producer. And I felt like once we got the ball rolling things would come together in one way or another. Michael Stipe was already on board and then Diana Williams came on as the third producer and here we had all these people working for free on nothing but faith and a belief in the project... It was terrifying, as usual, but still, it's easier to jump off a cliff if you've got a bunch of people who you like and respect who are jumping with you.

So we cast for about four months in early 1999 and then shot for 20 days in July. It was a pretty quick shoot, which was kinda nice, in a way. Then the edit was about four months long. And here we are.

How did GIRLS TOWN influence OUR SONG?

After GIRLS TOWN, I felt I had accumulated a lot of other stories about teenage girls that I hadn't put into that film. And I was also acutely tuned-in to that population, so every time I was out walking, or riding the subway, I was observing young people and coming up with scenes from their lives. I wanted to make something about young women and I wanted the story to be smaller than the one in GIRLS TOWN. I wanted to show the moments, the small, subtle moments that make up an experience. I felt confident as a writer by then and I started taking notes and writing scenes. My early outline was called "The Other Girls" because I specifically wanted to make a film centered on characters who were real - outsiders who didn't look like they just walked off a music video shoot. So there's some common ground between the two films, but I think mostly because they're both about young women.

But specifically about lower-class minority women.

Well, you can see how different the girls are in the specifics. The cast of GIRLS TOWN was mostly white and the cast of OUR SONG is mostly black and Latino. And the girls' ages are different - they were 17 to 21 in GIRLS TOWN and are 15 and 16 in OUR SONG, which, as anyone who knows young people can tell you, is a major difference. Finally, the setting for GIRLS TOWN was fairly suburban, whereas OUR SONG is more inner-city. So the two films cover some similar terrain, but it's only because there are so few films in existence about these characters that the similarity jumps out at all.

How would you respond to criticism about being a white man making teenage women ensemble pieces?

I'm constantly checking myself about what and how and why I'm doing what I'm doing. I think there's a lot of culture and story stealing that goes on and I don't want to be a part of that. I've tried hard to be very collaborative in my work and make sure that I'm telling stories truthfully and responsibly.

I also think people in the film world have a responsibility toward the people and communities with which they're working. I've helped raise some money for the marching band and have committed to doing a big benefit screening for them next year. We did a mentorship program during the shoot in which we teamed kids from the band up with crew members so they could learn some things about how films get made.

I have no illusions about what this film did or can do for the participants' lives, but I've tried to have a relationship with all the people in the film that was more than "get in, shoot, and get out". I'm sure that I've gained much more from that relationship than anyone, in terms of my own personal growth and enlightenment. And I just hope that the people we worked with are proud of the film and feel good about their work and experience.

As a filmmaker, I feel like when you're given the opportunity to make a film, it's a pretty special thing. To waste that opportunity by doing some that's self-centered and unoriginal is a waste of time and energy. All these movies about struggling writers or actors ... it's frustrating to me. Making a film is a struggle. You spend three or four years of your life obsessed with this story, why not learn something in the process? Why not experience something new and enter into a new territory?

There's a certain universality to the stories in OUR SONG, to the choices that we make at that age in terms of what we want and who we want and what we think of ourselves. And so a lot of the things in the film could happen anywhere with any characters. But I chose these characters cause they were the ones that I wanted to see a movie about. And I hoped that others would, too. I mean let's be honest, does the world really need another coming-of-age movie in which a teenage white boy experiences his first wet dream?

GIRLS TOWN and OUR SONG have some similar aspects and themes -teen pregnancy or staying in school, for instance - but they compliment instead of repeat each other.

One of the big challenges I faced with OUR SONG was that I had three very different characters all dealing with very different stories: Lanisha is struggling to keep her friends and family together and to push past all the adversity put in front of her and "succeed"; Maria finds out she's pregnant and has to figure out what she wants to do about it and how it's going to affect her own plans; and Joycelyn finds herself drifting from her old friends and seeking acceptance from these other girls who are a step-up from her on the social ladder.

What I didn't want was for the film to be seen as a story about teen pregnancy, and that was a challenge because that's the one story of the three that's the easiest to put a label on, the easiest to define, even though the way we're showing it is hopefully new. So I tried to show the stories via their nuances and the things that are not said rather than address all these dilemmas directly.

The film is very subtle in that many of the scenes are just intimate moments where the girls are talking and bonding.

I think audiences today are used to being force-fed every bit of information necessary and, as a result, can sometimes have a hard time dealing with the blanks, the in-betweens, the unspoken words. Trying to stand firm and be committed to this desire to leave holes, to join the story in progress and to not explain every little thing and yet still give people a cohesive story that doesn't completely alienate them was a challenge. When you're that age in particular, but also throughout our lives, you rarely end a friendship in one fell swoop. Everything isn't always clear-cut and cleverly articulated. I tried really hard to say the things I wanted to say without saying them outright.

What kind of conversations did you have with your cinematographer, Jim Denault?

Jim and I watched some of Frederick Wiseman's PUBLIC HOUSING together. It's one of my favorite films from last year. We also watched LA PROMESSE and A DREAMLIFE OF ANGELS and talked a lot about these very realist, visceral-feeling stories. But when it came down to it, we followed the story and made up our shooting style accordingly. I think what we ended up with is very clear stylistically, even if it wasn't necessarily always intentional.

We basically echoed the reality of the world we were shooting in. When we were in very controlled circumstances where the girls' lives were more safe and controlled, then our framing and lighting reflected that. And when we were out on the streets and dealing with distractions and unlocked spaces and hectic backgrounds, then our shooting was accordingly less controlled. It's pretty simple, really. For example, when Lanisha is with her dad, we're in the safest space in the story - he's literally a security guard. And so those scenes are shot locked-down with a tripod and carefully lit. We made a decision before we shot that we wouldn't use a dolly at all, just a tripod and hand-held. We had a skeleton camera crew of three and a very, very small lighting package. We didn't have a lot of locations locked before we shot, so we often got there and made decisions on the spot. We had shot lists and some loose storyboards, but often, Jim and I felt our way around the film instinctually.

But the film is scripted.

Absolutely. We started with a full script and very little changed, aside from a few things that weren't working in rehearsals or small bits of language that the actors turned around. Once we were on location, a number of things changed because of extenuating circumstances.

You're dealing with a 60-piece marching band as one of your lead characters, half your cast is under 18 and non-professional actors, forget about pagers and cell phones, some of our actors didn't have phones at all or weren't always staying in the same apartments.... Not to mention the fact that our three lead actors were taking the subway to location every day, from the Bronx, Harlem, and Far Rockaway. So there were tons of potential challenges. But in the end, all of them were overcome in one way or another.