I am so so happy to announce that No Matter What will be screening in New York as part of the Rooftop Films Summer Series. When I heard about this festival a few years ago, I thought it was the coolest idea ever and I feel honored to have been invited to screen there.

Our screening will be Saturday, June 4 at 8:00 PM at Open Road Rooftop (Lower East Side)

Here’s a little more about Rooftop from their website:

Rooftop Films is a non-profit organization whose mission is to engage and inspire diverse communities by showing movies in outdoor locations, producing new films, teaching filmmaking to young people, and renting low-cost equipment to artists and non-profits. At Rooftop Films, we bring underground movies outdoors

But Rooftop Films is more than a film festival. We are a community. We are a collective collaboration between filmmakers and festivals, between audience members and artists, between venues and neighborhoods. Our goal is to nurture a vibrant independent filmmaking community not only by exhibiting the work of low-budget filmmakers but also by providing essential support systems for those who otherwise have none. Rooftop Films is keeping this vital mode of filmmaking alive and well in New York City and beyond.

www.keegandewitt.com

And while you’re there check out some of his other music, too. It’s basically my favorite.

No Matter What – Trailer from Cherie Saulter on Vimeo.

My amazing friends Dan and Chris at Friends of the Institute are going to be screen-printing some for us to put up in Austin. Exciting times!

Check out the full SXSW line-up here. We’re in the “Emerging Visions” section.

You’re probably asking yourself what we’ve been doing these last few months. The movie was already shot, right? Edited too. Shouldn’t that be it? If it were only that easy. We’ve spent the last few months essentially making things that were good much better. First, our infinitely talented composer, Keegan DeWitt, wrote a fantastic score for the movie. Then we spent some time cleaning up the production sound. Matt and Waylan came all the way out to Los Angeles to do some ADR- basically re-recording any of the lines in the movie where the audio wasn’t the best on set. For example, we shot a scene in an operational diner and, while the guys’ performances were great, they were at times hard to decipher over clattering dishes and yelling waitresses. So we re-recorded the dialogue for that entire five minute conversation. My amazing sound designer, Josh Eckberg, and I unanimously agreed that Matt and Waylan must lead secret lives as voice over artists. Those guys are pros!

So now we’re putting the very last polishes on the movie. Tweaking colors, spellchecking title cards (including the special thanks to all of you for your enormous patience) and doing the final sound mix. We’ll have updates on screenings soon, I promise. I’m doing everything in my power to make sure you get to see this movie. At the end of the day that’s really all I want- for people to see the movie and connect with it and take something away from it. Almost there. Be stoked!

The last thing we need to take care of is sound design. The investment we had lined up to pay for our post production expenses fell through and we’ve been scrambling for the last few months to come up with completion funds. I decided recently that, since this was such a tiny movie made by friends, the best place to go for help in finishing it would be friends who believe in us and believe in the project. This is where you can help!

I started a Kickstarter project today and I would seriously appreciate any donations you can give us, or if you can’t do that right now, please spread the word to anyone you know who might be interested in helping.

Check out our Kickstarter here!

You always think you’ll have more time to prepare. That you’ll know what you’re getting yourself into. There were two days on set, night shoots, where we were outside on the coldest days of the year. Seventeen degrees in Florida. Before we left my parents’ house where the entire crew of ten was staying I heard everyone talking about how many layers they had on. Jay turned to me at the kitchen sink, “I’m wearing two pairs of pants.” I went to my room to get similarly layered before leaving. Tights, leggings, three pairs of socks, pants, three shirts, two sweatshirts. I had the distinct impression that I was suiting up for battle.

It’s a little like that, making movies. At least at our budget level. It’s not the glitter and sparkle that I think people refer to as “movie magic”. Somehow it always ends up being more of the unglamorous crawling through the dirt in a two foot gap under a trailer or cleaning a house that’s been abandoned for ten years so it can be shot in the next day or running at full speed on rocks for eight takes in a row. These things that seem the most like work, that demand the most resolve, these are the things you talk about later. Or maybe that’s just me. I’ve been told that I thrive on the adrenaline that comes from everything falling apart around me. Maybe that’s a bad thing. I read somewhere (it was probably a Harry Potter book) that the truest friendships are those forged through shared crisis. There’s a deeper sense of camaraderie involved. I feel like a similar thing can be said about making a movie. If it were easy, if there weren’t some sense of everyone coming together to overcome obstacles to accomplish something, it would be far less meaningful.

I don’t mean to say that the moments that are fun and exciting aren’t memorable. Of course when I think about the movie I’ll think about skateboarding and riding trains and Matt and Waylan shooting each other with Roman candles in the woods. I’ll think about that first day on the train when it was just me and Brett and Jay standing on the engine car and just as the train started to pick up speed Brett turned to me and smiled. I was almost giddy. And he said “you love making movies.” He’s right.

If there’s anything I’ve learned about making movies it’s that the things you expect to be the biggest problems usually aren’t. Not that they don’t end up being problems, but something else will invariably trump them. And it’s those things you don’t expect that make it interesting. You don’t expect that every car involved in the production will break and you never plan on how many times you’ll have to call triple A. It doesn’t occur to you that you’ll get phone calls where people say things like, “I don’t think he’ll call the cops, but maybe you should come down here” or that you’ll have to talk yourself out of getting arrested before going to set. Things like locations falling through and crew backing out never make sense at the time, but I have to believe that there are reasons for these things.

On the day Brett left I asked him if he believed in fate. “It’s funny,” he said, “I was just having this conversation with Matt.” I asked him what Matt thought. “Definitely. How else could we all have ended up here together and doing this?” That works for me. I have much faith.

More soon!

Matt Webb will be playing “Joey”

and Waylan Gross will be playing “Nick”

We’re still in the process of locking in some of the remaining cast. Things are looking good, though.

More updates soon, I promise!

-cherie