In Conversation with Michael Oblowitz Director of Confidential Informant
Confidential Informant stars Mel Gibson, Dominic Purcell, and Kate Bosworth
Josh Itzkowitz wrote and produced Same Boat
Date: 13th April 2020
Director: Chris Roberti
Producer: Josh Itzkowitz, Josh Melrod, Ben Scheiner
Writer: Josh Itzkowitz
Lead Cast: Chris Roberti, Tonya Glanz, David Bly
Budget: Very low
Financing: Donations from Cast and crew made up the bulk finance
Production: 8 days
Shooting Format: Sony A7sii
Screening Format: 1920 x 1080 (though we filmed in 4K)
World Premiere: Cinequest
Website: http://sameboatfilm.com/
indieactivity : What is your film about?
Josh Itzkowitz: Same Boat is a low-fi, sci-fi comedy about a time-traveling assassin who inadvertently falls in love with the target he was sent to kill. We filmed it in secret on board an actual cruise ship, and the idea came about from brainstorms that Chris Robert (Director, star, co-writer) and I had.
indieactivity : Tell us about the festival run, marketing and sales?
Josh Itzkowitz: The film premiered at Cinequest. Another filmmaker friend had recommended the fest to us, so we decided to submit. In general, we tried to be selective with where we would submit and created a strategy and budget to help guide choices. We had some reach festivals as well as festivals that had a history of programming indie comedies like ours that made up our choices.
Related Story: Same Boat by Chris Roberti a Time-traveling Assassin Sci-fi, Rom-Com
Fun fact, we submitted a rough cut to Cinequest the year before we got in, got rejected, then spent the next year reworking the film and resubmitted our finessed cut. It was a hard-learned lesson to never submit a film until it’s completely ready. As far as distribution goes, I had worked with Dark Star Pictures on Empathy, Inc., the last film I had produced. Dark Star has been a reliable and transparent partner on that film, so it was an easy choice to send them a screener of this film. Chris and I were thrilled when they decided to come on board and acquire the film.
indieactivity : Give the full Official Synopsis for your film?
Josh Itzkowitz: James and his trainee Mott are time-traveling assassins sent form the 29th century to kill individuals who would do damage to the future. It’s tiring and unrewarding work. When they arrive on a cruise ship in the early 21st century and Mott takes ill, James finds himself with some downtime and makes the most of it – inadvertently becoming friends and romantic partners with the woman he has been sent to kill – Lilly. For Lilly, meeting James is a nice diversion that is much more dangerous than she can know. Along for the ride are some of the cruise’s staff: Gary, Katja, and Carlo – stewards on the ship who are dealing with their own anxieties and dreams. Along with the seasick Mott, these characters collide and change the future, the past, and each other.
indieactivity : Development & Financing?
Josh Itzkowitz: I had thought it would be a novel idea to make a film on a cruise ship from a production standpoint. A lot of pain points in an indie production disappear in that type of environment- craft services, catering, set design, background actors, lodging, etc.… Of course, trying to film in secret on an actual cruise ship brings its own production woes, but that mostly seemed like a fun and interesting challenge. I approached Chris Roberti asking if he wanted to be a creative partner in the project, and he was down to collaborate.
Chris and I had met on Jammed, the first film I produced. I had really loved Chris’s comedic voice, thoughtful but incredibly silly, and we were both interested in trying to make a film with that tone. We spent a few months working on a script and then decided to take a “test cruise” to location scout and see if what he had written might’ve been possible to actually shoot. We quickly learned that it was not, the story was too big, and we then came up with the new story that the film turned into. The very first idea that started the new script was about how unfortunate and hilarious it would be if someone got broken up with on the first night of a cruise ship.
As far as financing, we knew we wanted to have a really intimate crew and production. We were more interested in keeping it small and on our own terms, than trying to raise traditional amounts of money. I was intrigued by a micro-budget Ed Burns film directed called Newlyweds that was made for $9k and everyone who worked on it got equity. We went by the same approach, ensuring that everyone who worked on the film got equity, but took it one step further by asking if cast and crew would be willing to pitch in small amounts of money (for ex. to cover the cost of a cruise ticket) and in exchange receive an investor’s share of equity.
Those who were financially able to do so, did chip in a small amount, so for the most part, the investors of the film are mostly the people who worked directly on it. We wanted as much as possible to have the film be made up of people who believed in the project both financially and creatively.
indieactivity : Production?
Josh Itzkowitz: Our pre-production process was pretty normal looking. We had deadlines we aimed to hit that involved things like locking down cast and crew and doing sound and camera tests which we did on the Staten Island ferry.
For the actual production, it took a little while to figure out a system that would work best for trying to film incognito on the cruise. For the camera, we used an A7sii that I owned. It’s great in low light, shoots 4K, and looks just like any other DSLR that someone would bring with them on vacation. Darin Quan, our cinematographer, has a background shooting indie films and doc work, so he was incredible at working the film as a one-man crew. We weren’t able to use a tripod, and it was pretty astounding how steady everything looks given that all he had was a camera strap around his neck. Ben Scheiner, a friend who had also helped produce Empathy, Inc. was there for half the shoot, and was the only other dedicated crew member we had. In total we were a crew of about 2 ½.
Audio was a bit trickier. We couldn’t use a boom in public, and we learned on our test cruise that there was too much interference to use a traditional wireless lav kit. It took a few tries before we found the Tram TR50, a lavalier that sounded rich but also had little handling noise. For actual recording, we used the Tascam DR-10L. It’s this tiny recorder that can fit in someone’s pocket that a mic plugs right into and records two signals at different levels in case one of them is too loud and clips.
We were nervous about having audio be recorded that couldn’t be monitored (those recorders just have one headphone output and no wireless capabilities), so we decided to plug a Bluetooth transmitter into each Tascam, and then use a Bluetooth receiver with earbuds plugged into it to listen in and make sure the audio sounded decent during takes. Myself and Jeff Seal (who plays Gary) would take turns monitoring sound. The setup also worked well in that it was visually lowkey. For a slate, we used an ipad app called No Budget Slate. It was free and we were afraid an actual slate would give us away.
The entire filming took 8 days. We took two back to back cruises (each one was 3/12 days), and then filmed for another half day in NYC to get the beach scenes at the beginning and end of the film.
In post, I edited the first cut. As we were cleaning it up for festival submissions we brought on Will Mayo, an editor friend of Chris’s to help clean up my work. After our first round of festival submissions didn’t go as well as we had hoped, we decided to rework the film a bit. Around the same time, the film had gotten accepted into a program called The Edit Center. TEC teaches students how to edit feature films, and they work on actual footage, taking dailies and giving the filmmakers a rough cut/assembly by the end of the 2 week program.
We were excited to work with those students and see what new ideas they might bring to the film. Through that, we met Josh Melrod, a NYC/Vermont based editor who teaches at TEC. He usually works on bigger budget projects, but had an opening in his schedule and was intrigued to rework our original cut. It was the largest cost we decided to take on (and Josh was working at an incredibly generous and discounted rate) but Josh was a really smart and thoughtful collaborator and really helped get the film into better shape. At the time it wasn’t an easy decision, but looking back, it was the best decision we could have made.
Darin Quan, our DP, did most of the VFX, designing the visuals of the text that were overlaid on top of the time travel device. Brian Flood, our sound mixer, did all of the sound design, foley, a couple of compositions, and handled the ADR, which we had to do for a few scenes. He made the film sound way better than we could have imagined. Matt Dimare, a Chicago based musician who also does color correction on the side came on to be our colorist.
The last real challenge we had in post was music. We had decided we were going to use mostly songs instead of a score from a single composer, so we set about tracking down songs and bands from people we knew to recommendations from friends. This took quite some time to find all of the music that made it into the film. In total we had 16 different bands/artists contribute to the 45 music cues in the film.
indieactivity : Festival Preparation & Strategy?
Josh Itzkowitz: We premiered at Cinequest. I love that they actually program indie films and not just the hits from bigger fests like Sundance. They’ve built up a nice reputation, and out of the 4 screenings they had for our film, most were well attended. It was a great fest for us to get into. Unfortunately, SXSW happens right around the same time, so there’s not much press happening for the films that screen there, including ours. After that premiere, we played at a handful of fests. All were a good time with good screenings (shout out to Middlebury New Filmmakers Festival) but none really helped with getting press for the film. One of the nice things about working with Dark Star, is that leading up to the release of the film, they brought on October Coast, a PR company to help spread the word and get the film coverage. I had worked with October Coast on Empathy, Inc.’s release, and like Dark Star, they were really easy to work with, and went above and beyond putting in time and energy to get the film out there. We’re quite lucky because, without the resources of a distributor or PR company, it always feels like an impossible challenge to get a film covered.
indieactivity : The Release?
Josh Itzkowitz: Our film gets released on VOD on April 7th! After that, there’s always a hope that the film can land some sort of SVOD, TVOD or broadcast deal. We were supposed to have a small NYC run leading up to the digital release, but that got canceled because of the coronavirus.
indieactivity : Advice from the Filmmaker?
Josh Itzkowitz: Choose your collaborators wisely! From development through post-production, it can take years, and you want to be surrounded by people in each stage of production who believe in the project just as much as you can. You’ll need to rely on those people and your community to keep you sane and to offer feedback on everything from scripts, to trailers, to posters, and cuts of the film. Chris Roberti was a great collaborator to have on this film, and without him, Same Boat would never have happened.
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