Amin Matalqa, Michelle Lang, & Amanda Plummer, "Strangely in Love" (Part 1)
Recently, The Film Yap caught up via email with director Amin Matalqa (“Captain Abu Raed”), actress/producer Michelle Lang (“The Legend of Bruce Lee”), and Emmy Award-winning actress Amanda Plummer (“Pulp Fiction”) to talk about the new film “Strangely in Love,” which will make its world premiere at the Heartland Film Festival on October 19th.
In addition to making the rounds on the film festival circuit, the film makers are making “Strangely in Love” available on Blu-ray, DVD, and HD digital download in order to raise distribution funds. Details may be found at their website.
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The Film Yap: "Strangely in Love" is such an unusual film, a whimsical farce of a romantic comedy based on a rather somber short story by Dostoevsky. What interested you in this story and how did you first become involved in the production?
Matalqa: I found myself hooked on Russian literature after reading "Crime & Punishment." I especially liked Dostoevsky's psychological humor between the lines of the grim darkness in books like "Notes from Underground" and "The Idiot." Then, when I read "White Nights," I thought, "Wait a minute. This is a book about me. I know what it feels like to be madly in love with a girl who doesn't even know it. That's how I was throughout high school and college. I've been there and suffered through the pain of listening to my muse tell me about the guy she's in love with. I even tried to help her with advice. And that's what this book is about. Except I looked back and found the suffering hilarious.
I pitched it to my friends Jemuel Morris and Michelle Lang, who had acted in my short films back when I was at AFI, and we decided, "Let's turn Dostoevsky into a Chaplin-esque comedy set in a modern L.A." We said, "Let's just make the movie without waiting for a big budget." We raised a shoestring budget while workshopping the material over the span of six months. I wrote a stream-of-thought script at first and then we started playing with the dialogue and building on it with layers as we grew the team and found interesting locations that informed the tone of the film. The music also played a role before the shoot as well. I sent the script to the band The Controversy, for whom I'd been planning to make a music video, and they came back a week later with this beautiful new song for the movie that committed me to the naive tone I was experimenting with throughout the rehearsal / exploration process. It fit so well before we even shot the movie. So all the creative elements came together organically as we built the vehicle we were already driving. We had a very creatively fulfilling collaboration from everyone.
Lang: Amin and I worked together on his AFI Thesis film, "Morning Latte." We always wanted to do another project together, and a few years ago he sent me "White Nights." When I first read it…it was so sad! I couldn't believe he wanted to make it into a comedy! I loved the pain of the lead girl, her confusion / desperation / need for love. It's such an extreme … and yet such a base emotion.
Plummer: I had seen "Captain Abu Raed," directed by Amin Matalqa, and loved it so very much. And then I met Amin, and felt and heard from him such love of film. I wished to play with him. And luckily I did. He has a music in him that I could feel in wave upon wave, so I enjoyed that one day fully.
The Film Yap: Amin, your film "Captain Abu Raed" was a huge success at Heartland in 2008, winning both the Grand Prize and Audience Choice Awards for Narrative Feature. What are your thoughts on returning to Indianapolis to premiere "Strangely in Love"?
Maltalqa: Heartland was such an incredible experience for me. I'll never forget it. The hospitality, generosity and the audience's love for the film was above and beyond anything I'd imagined. Naturally I'm thrilled to be back to share my personal comedy. I really hope they enjoy it. “
The Film Yap: Michelle, your character, Nastenka, is blindly in love, both literally and figuratively. How did you prepare yourself to play this role, both in terms of her disability and her extreme naïveté?
Lang: When Amin called me and said, "What if Nastenka was blind?," I was jolted by a current of fear. This was a huge challenge and it scared me and thus I knew I had to do it. I gave myself three months to research the blindness, both researching the medical side and doing observation / experience work. Nastenka lost her sight later in life, which I thought was an important distinction. So I did a lot of research on how that could have happened (from a medical standpoint) and then I went to the Braille Institute in L.A. to do a lot of observation work. The first class I sat in, I was struck with how much the blind students could pick up / observe despite not having sight. I was sitting quietly, and one girl sat down next to me and "looked" right at me (I could have sworn she could see me) and asked, "Who are you?" It was uncanny.
I spent a lot of time with one particular gentleman who let me shadow him as he went about his daily life. Getting to see his day to day activities was priceless. After doing a lot of research, I would get a "spotter," make my way around the streets with a blindfold or go through my days in my apartment with my eyes closed. I didn't want Nastenka's blindness to be distracting; it had to be something that was a part of her, something the audience accepted without reservation. That meant I had to deactivate my eyesight and learn to rely on my other senses. Only then did I feel I could forget about "being blind" and be able to play the emotional truths of the scene. It was great fun to get to explore the challenge of it.
As far as Nastenka's emotional naïveté: Her mother was a film actress and died when she was very young. (Hence Nastenka's lovely dresses … all of which were her mother's.) After her mother died, she went to live with her blind, overbearing grandmother. While living with her grandmother, Nastenka's only escape was the cinema. Not having a female role model to look up to, and without any frame of reference for how a "real" relationship should be, Nastenka drew her personality traits / how she was around men from the movies like "Some Like It Hot," "Breakfast at Tiffany's" or "The Seven-Year Itch." These women became her "mother" or her "role model" for how she should behave with men. Couple that with the isolation she felt living with her grandmother, and it was easy to tap into her naïveté when it came to dealing with "real world" issues.
The Film Yap: Amin, in contrast to "Captain Abu Raed," which was a drama, "Strangely in Love" is quite whimsical and fantastical. What is your process like directing a comedy as compared to a drama?
Maltalqa: You know, the end goal is very similar with both films. I want to always make movies that make the audience feel something. What's funny is that my instincts first lean to the absurd and the funny. It took a lot of restraint when I made "Captain," but I still kept some humor in it to balance the drama. My second film, "The United," was a Disney sports drama, but I injected a lot of comedy into it. "Strangely in Love" was the opposite. I wanted to entertain the audience through comedy first, with the hope to earn their emotional investment in the characters' journeys by the end of the film. So even though it's a comedy, I'm still striving to make it a sincerely moving experience by the end of the film.
I love blending abstract surreal psychological aspects into film, and this was the perfect opportunity because Dostoevsky is all psychological, but I thought it would be fun to play with it in a comedic way. As far as the whimsical elements, they organically started to feed into the tone of the film from the location scouts and costumes. Michelle and I were driving around L.A. looking for a good house to suit Nastenka's personality, and we found one of the original Disney houses that Snow White was modeled after. We just knocked on the door, and the owner, Randy, was so generous to allow us to film there. Then our production designer suggested we go look at these magnificent Fica trees down in San Pedro, and the moment we saw their huge roots, it became obvious the universe was sending us signs to feed the character of the film. This also informed our choices for wardrobe. We start with Nastenka wearing colorful and vibrant dresses, then by the third act she's in drab pajamas. Fyo starts in Chaplin-esque bow tie and by the end he's in modern jeans. There's a big transformational arc to the film that I'm very satisfied with.