“From Pocket to Projector: Discover How Jamie Grefe Filmed Two Movies on His Phone!”
The mansion, huge mansion in the valley. This actress, Mariana Carvajal, I had met her before at a social function, at a premiere. And she was great. And she had specifically mentioned to me that she liked slashers. So, I got her number. And I remembered her. And when it came time to shoot these movies, I was like, I’m going to call her. I need her to be in these movies, right? She’s like slashers. She had a really good energy. But pitching and that’s the hard one, dude, pitching somebody. I’m like, hey, so like I got this movie. I want to shoot. What’s going to be is it’s going to be two movies, but we’re going to shoot them in one day. And there’s not going to be a script. You know, that’s actually harder than shooting somebody like the sorority girl movies. You know, models are more used to modeling. They model, you know, do this, do that, do this, do that. An actor, I feel like that’s where it’s like, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, who are you? Like, what have you done? You know, like, what is this? And her manager was like, can he at least send you like a breakdown of what it’s going to be? So that actually forced me to kind of write out a bunch of shots. So, I did. And I was not deceptive. You know, I wrote out from my heart two different projects. I said, you’re going to be the lead in one of them. And we had another girl from an agency. I said, she’s going to be the lead in the second one. She’s going to make these two movies. They’re very similar. But, you know, so it goes with 12 hours. The day of the shoot, we everybody showed up. So, I had one camera. You’re wondering about the crew, right? So we have one camera guy, Louis Di Stefano. He’s a Greg regular. He’s a great guy. He’s operating the camera. Microphone is on the camera. So, we don’t have to worry about a boom mic. Don’t need that. All-natural lighting. I don’t want any lights. Just we’re going to use whatever natural lighting is available to us. Now, we brought a light. We didn’t use it. We didn’t touch it. Brought some props. And the funniest thing is the night before I was at the producer’s house and there was this wig in his garage and I gave it to Chris Spinelli, the producer, and I said, put this wig on. Chris put it on. I was like, wow, you look pretty cool in this this this long black haired wig. I said, let’s bring it with us. And I said, well, this here’s a fake machete. I said, let’s bring this with us. I mean, Jesus… might use it, right? So we had a box, one box full of props and catering. You know, it’s easy, some food, camera, microphone and camera. No lights. One camera guy, one producer/ad, Chris, me, Mariana showed up and then we had another girl, Amber. She showed up. I shot Mariana for like 30 minutes in the garage. I just shot some of these things. I’m getting into it. I can start to feel the movie. OK, I know it’s going to happen. She’s going to encounter the slasher in the house at some point. This is going to be like the Shining. But I’m going to be there. It’s me. It’s going to be me. You know, shot her. Then I switched to this other girl, Amber. Now, listen, Amber is like she’s like coughing, sneezing. I’m shooting her. Same kind of thing. Okay, do this, sit down, act like you’re scared, act like you’re sad, be scared, be sad, put your arms like this, do this. She goes, I have to call my agent. It’s like 10 o’clock, 10am. And I’m all like, okay, we’re doing this, we’re in it right now. It’s starting to reveal itself to me. Didn’t even look at my shot list. She calls and I’m like, oh, shit, not a good sign that somebody wants to call their agent when you’re on set with them.
