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MillimeterDream Job: Video Beginnings
Aug 1, 2006 12:00 PM, By Cody Holt
Chris Suchorsky couldn’t make the film he set out to make, but he found success with Failure.
Things started badly for Chris Suchorsky as he set out to make his first feature-length film in the summer of 2000. With only a week of vacation time away from his day job at a New Jersey ad agency, Suchorsky spent his first shoot day renting video equipment he didn't know how to use. By the time he was ready to stage his first scene that evening, his actors (read: his two best friends) were drunk.
Following the success of Failure, which won Best Documentary at both the Back East Picture Show and Freedom Film Festival, Chris Suchorsky (pictured, left) has begun work on a documentary about the New York-based indie-rock band The Damnwells.
“They were extremely uncooperative but very funny,” Suchorsky recalls. “They kind of set the stage for everything else that happened that week. Everyone else who showed up was just as bad. They were terrible actors.”
Despite the rough start, Suchorsky says his instinct told him to keep the cameras rolling, even during the downtime between bad scenes. “I never really believed the acting, but whenever the actors were just sitting around and talking, it was much more real,” he says.
At the end of the week, Suchorsky says he had five hours of footage of his friends flubbing their lines and telling him how incompetent he was as a director. It wasn't the footage he needed for the film he set out to make, which was based on his narrative script “Executing Love,” but he knew he had something. Only a day after he finished shooting, inspiration hit — he would make a documentary about his failure to make a movie.
Over the next two and a half years, Suchorsky worked sporadically, piecing together his footage, which he shot primarily with a Canon XL1, using a Sony DCR-VX2000 for pick-up shots. In early 2003, he finished editing his 35-minute documentary in Apple Final Cut Pro and called it Failure.
To his surprise, Failure was accepted by the first three small film festivals he submitted it to and in the spring of 2004 was accepted by the Phoenix Film Festival. After a four-star review in Film Threat magazine, the Independent Film Channel optioned Failure to a three-year broadcast deal. It premiered in late April and was rebroadcast throughout May and June.
Suchorsky, who now works at a pharmaceutical ad agency putting together multimedia projects, is currently working on a rough cut of his second documentary, which he plans to complete in mid-September for submission to Sundance.
“I'm surprised I'm still making films,” he says. “After that first week of shooting, I thought it was over. But I held onto the dream for more than two years, and in the end it paid off.”
For more information, please visit www.failure-movie.com.
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