Juggling With Chainsaws & Chipmunks

#6 - Kate Talbot [Producer]

I too have a morbid fear of actors; particularly ones in hot demand like Chester.

They are difficult to schedule as people, with far more power and experience than I, have them locked into scary and immoveable television and film contracts. This makes pinning actors down for rehearsals/costume fittings/shooting (the list goes on) nigh on impossible.

What was clear however was that we wanted Chester! He was the key to the project. With him on-board we could convince other 'in-hot-demand' actors to join our bandwagon of craziness. We needed to find a way to keep him as our lead actor, while adjusting to his ever-growing professional commitments.

And this is where Bound By Blue really began. Instead of an 80-minute feature centred around Chester and Frank we would create four separate 20 minute stories joined at the head and the 'tale'. This gave us several selling points. Firstly, Chester no longer had to commit to an entire feature. By our figuring 20 minutes of screen time was a slightly longer short film; not a huge ask really (or so we thought).

Four separate stories also meant that our lead actors would only have to be scheduled together for the opening and closing scenes. This also overcame the massive obstacle of Chester and Frank only being in the same state as each other for 10 days in six months.

We were quickly able to sell this idea to Chester and Frank and things seemed to be back on track.

What we hadn’t been bargaining on was how many support actors we were going to need. Lots and Lots of support actors; 48 to be exact! Our little production (which Dave was originally planning on shooting over 10 weeks with a maximum of 5 people on set at any one time) had suddenly taken on a life of its own. (Remember we had NO money!)

We also now needed to write three more stories and cast two lead actors. Enter stage right: Debbie Zukerman. A true gem sent to help us drag this lump of an idea kicking and screaming into production. Debbie became not only one of our four lead actors, but casting agent, location scout and personal masseuse to the producer.

But I'll let Debbie tell us her version of the story in the next installment of the Making of Bound By Blue (also known as – Is That Squealing Noise My Producer Imploding?).