12/23/08 I’ve been asked how I eventually got started on ZERO BRIDGE when I arrived in Kashmir, given the difficulties. And I keep mentioning this video to people, so I thought I’d finally post it. So, I was in Kashmir about four months before we began to shoot the film. The previous four months were spent in pre-production.  Mostly that meant I was focused on taking in what was around me -- faces, sounds, places, stories -- and adapting it into what I had already written much earlier. Even the down-time was spent recording ambient sounds and shooting a few short documentary “exercises.” This I recommend for a number of reasons. You’re filming but without the pressure; you’re out of your writing room and trying to engage with living people. Sometimes it’s good to start by filming people while they are concentrated on something physical, like manual labor, because of its intensity: when a person is engaged in a repetitive physical task he becomes tired and his self-consciousness evaporates. Language differences between actor and director matter less because his face and body tell a vivid story without any words.

I filmed a back-breaking day in the life of a group of masons and called it DAY OF CONCRETE. Not only did watching people working allow me to bypass the audition process (at least initially) for interesting faces, but shooting this helped define the look, sound, and feel of what I thought the final film might become. It was a rehearsal, only with non-actors, and also had the benefit of forcing me, in real-time, to both stay on my toes as an operator looking for shots, but also as an editor looking to make the cuts and continuity work.

[At minute 14:42, watch for a brief cameo by Ali Mohammed Dar, who was eventually cast in the leading role of Uncle Ali in ZERO BRIDGE -- Enjoy, and feel free to comment, embed and share.]

Press Conference @

*****

*****

*****

*****

*****