I’ve been making short films for the past seven years in the UK, and have made the leap into features in the last three years, thinking I wasn’t going to worry about shorts anymore. But the recent upheaval with the UK Film Council and entrance of the BFI shorts scheme has changed my mind. And in late 2011 when director Abbe Robinson came to me with the suggestion that we make a short film in Venice called ‘The Girl and the Gondola’, and she had some money to do it with and plans for raising more, I thought, ‘why not’.
Needless to say I wasn’t really anticipating the level of work that would be necessary here…
Venice is tough. A really tough place to work. Its great to visit and see the amazing things to see as a tourist. But practically? To work there when you cannot drive anywhere, don’t have a boat, and have a lot of equipment and people to move around? Nightmare! Beyond nightmare – it pushed me to my limits.
Now I’ll say right now that we made it, with the help of some friendly young Venetian film and art students and recent graduates who we were able to connect with. And the film will turn out lovely, especially after we go back to the floating city at the end of March to shoot some necessary pick-ups for a day. The rushes look beautiful, we’ve got strong performances from our actors (in Italian), and I can’t wait to reach picture lock.
But what a royal pain in the arse.
Let me tell you about the film first. ‘The Girl and the Gondola’ is a script written by Abbe, about a young girl or about ten years old who wants to be a gondolier, like her father. ‘Pah’ say her friends and family, ‘there are no girl gondoliers, they don’t have the biceps’. But Carla, our hero, is undaunted. She has heard of a woman who is becoming a gondolier – a woman she wants to find out more about. There you go – the story.
It was an independent concept dreamed up by Abbe, but then we heard about a real-life story of a female gondolier, Giorgia Boscolo, who passed the age-old gondolier test in 2009, and caused a raging controversy in Venice – a rather conservative place with incredible values held for traditions. The script started to evolve a bit – we liked a few of the issues that Boscolo’s case raised. They found their way, some of them, into our story.
But let’s get back to what it was actually like over there, to make a film, as an American producer working in Britain (Sheffield) with a British crew. And taking them all to sunny Venice.
My origins are Italian-American, which I think really helped me a lot – the people there seemed to warm to me a lot more and I seemed to speak their language (not Italian – my Italian is extremely weak) when it came to how we do business and do favours. There wasn’t a lot of money in this film, so we had to do a lot of butterin’ up and buyin’ drinks. But I did think that there were distinct differences in working with the Venetians that were a far cry from experience and work in the UK film world.
First, you can’t make agreements that involve money on email or on the phone. You need to meet face-to-face. You have to sit down, have a coffee, talk about things (all manner of things) for a half hour or so and then maybe squeeze in the matter at hand in the last three minutes of the meet as you are getting up and realising that you need to be at your next meeting, which will involve the same process again. So that deal gets made, as long as the coffee goes well and you had a good chat. See, all during that chat about weather and your favourite films – and maybe that kid over there on the other side of the Campo who’d better be careful he didn’t fall into the canal while playing football – all during that time, the Venetian, the Italian, the person you need to help you – is sizing you up and pretty much from the first couple of minutes has decided whether or not he or she is going to be your buddy.
This isn’t too different from my childhood in Brooklyn, New York. The kids did this. You were classed as cool or not, in or out, in seconds on the sidewalk.
Second, the real Venice is not a place that is as bustling as the San Marco or the Rialto Bridge or any of those places – that is tourist land and its very, very different from what the real Venice is like. The tourist places are full of people – sometimes so full that is a wretched place to be stuck at the busiest times – you can’t move, its very expensive, and its tough to actually see or do anything like get into the museum you want to see or get a ride in a gondola.
But then you go off the beaten path a bit, walk for 20 minutes or so – and you find this quiet place with hardly anyone about, in the middle of the day, every day, and the most laid-back, chilled out people ever. That was the real Venice. People that work when they have to, that are usually on the move, that have a bunch of stuff that they should do but will get to when they can. Its a place that takes itself at its own pace.
When you are making a film and you’ve got kids in it, and you can’t work with those kids for longer than eight hours a day, and the light is fading, and the crew is tired, and people are starting to curse the name ‘Speranza’ (which is pretty ironic in that my name in Italian means ‘hope’)…..this sort of lifestyle is not always welcome. You need to push and prod people that are very surprised at you when you tell them there is a job to do. They look at you in shock. Especially if you are not paying them and they are basically on a placement with your company.
We finished lunch one day and made the announcement to get back on set. The English crew and the actors all hopped to it – getting back to locations in a matter of minutes. But as I went through the heads and bodies back on set I noticed we were down a few. After a short while, I went back down the street to the restaurant. The five or so Italian assistants were all still sitting there, smoking, drinking coffees, chatting away and looking as if there was not a care in the world. ‘People’, I shouted, ‘we’re all back on set – we need you – why are you still here’ etc. They looked at me as if I had a couple of tentacles coming out of my ears. And spoke Martian.
Yep, its an interesting place to work.
Having said that, we were worried that the long hours and the language barriers would really come to affect the performances of our young actors – the delicate ten year olds we had with us on our set. Funnily enough, they were the least likely of all of us to become unhinged at the constant setbacks we all seemed to suffer. There we were, 30 or so people, flailing about on the side of a canal in Venice, trying to catch a bit of light, trying to make a gondola move the precise way we needed it to, trying to get a shot in that we just conceived, trying to make a deal with a non-English speaking gondolier and avoid crippling costs – and so on – its was stress-city….and in the middle of it all our quiet little actors would simply wait until they were called to action. And then they sprung into it, did it, made us all wondrous, and waited during the chaos in between shots to die down again.
Without them, I would have hated Venice completely. I came really close. What a terrible place to hate. Its so beautiful – some people dream of going there their entire life. It wouldn’t be right to despise it.
But boy was I on the edge.
I’ve got more to tell you about this experience – more because I’m going back at the end of March. Stay tuned….
Rob Speranza is a producer from New York living and working in Sheffield. ‘The Girl and the Gondola ‘is his 14th short film, and probably won’t be his last. He also runs the South Yorkshire Filmmakers Network, a filmmaking resource for Northern filmmakers and beyond – www.syfn.org
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