“From Pocket to Projector: Discover How Jamie Grefe Filmed Two Movies on His Phone!”
Ashley
So, if there’s a writer out there listening to this podcast or a director listening to this podcast who wants to take a shot at shooting a feature film in one day, what are some tips? Just give us a couple of tips on that. Where should they begin?
Jamie Grefe
I think beginning with the limitations is, it was everything for me. I had to think from a space of limits and the limits defined what was possible. So you don’t have two locations, you have one, but within that one location, you have multiple rooms. Within your rooms, you have multiple parts of a room. So actually, you have a lot of locations and a blank wall is a blank wall. So that’s always a location, that’s a location. So, you see how that works already? You have one location. Some people go, oh man, I got one location. Dude, do you know what I did with one location? I made two movies. Imagine if I had a hospital, imagine if I had two days to make two movies. So that limitation, and then who are you working with? So, what I really loved was that, remember I told you those movies I worked on with Greg before, he brought like there were like 30 people on set and all this, yah, yah, yah, yah, yah. Okay, I made it very clear and he agreed with me, dude, this is a closed set, 100%. It’s going to be boom, boom, boom, boom. Nobody in, we’re in, okay, lock the doors. Nobody’s even allowed in the house. Nobody, you know, unless it’s an emergency obviously or something like this and that. No, no surprises. So like having that like space with those people in that moment created that, you know, I was almost like a conductor, don’t do this, do that and do this too. And you’re just, you’re so in it that it’s like a theatrical, it’s like, it’s very theatrical on that day. So you feel, I think you feel, I mean, I can’t speak for Mariano or Chris, but I mean, I can tell you when Chris started embodying that character from Love Never Leaves with the wig and he became, he gave, I’ve seen him in like 20 movies. He gave a performance that was just so different. I have never seen him go into that space of acting before. He went into it and he was there. So, there’s that. So, it’s like, who are you working with? You know, what location do you have? But then you’d get, you have to know like, I’m going to be doing this and I’ve got to accomplish it. So, you have to think in terms of time, like you have to think like, like I got to get my shots. Like if I don’t get my shots, the movies don’t get made. So you cannot overthink things. You don’t really have time to do more than one take. You do it in one take, dude. How can you do two takes?
