"The Book of Caleb"…Good God, just rolls off the tongue doesn't it. I'm not really sure where to begin. The story has taken me close to six years to tell. The first thing that I remember is while writing the 1st draft, there was this feeling that this story I was telling was something that was important, something that needed to be said.(at least to me) All the trials and pain that the words being laid on the page meant were going to come in the future seemed worth it.
I was 19 and in college at Florida State University, and it was right around the time I was beginning to really see how big the world was. How small my world of high school and my friends and my life back in Bucks County Pennsylvania was, and that the nature of the universe is change. Change is how physicists measure time…and that world that was so special to me, as big as it felt, was small and fleeting.
I was a finalist in a pretty prestigious contest in college and the temptation to move to LA and use it to jump start my career was very tempting, but there was business I felt was left unfinished back home. If nothing else it, the film became a way for me to preserve the relationships I had from home that were so valuable to me. The script was written with my two best friends from high school. One of the main characters, Swank, was named after my best friend. The film became my living time-capsule.
I designed one of the main characters, Montag, as my personal champion, an eerie premonition and symbol of the kind of person I would have to become to make a feature film in suburban Philadelphia that would be taken seriously. A character that lives with his parents and sacrifices everything to accomplish his goals, not for personal gain, but just so that him and his friends would always have something to do, so that the relationships would never get stale.
Contrary to the opinions of others, I do not hate woman. I do hate the way relationships, slowly drain people from their friends and from their dreams, and knew that it was a woman's power over my friends that would cause them to drift away in the end, would make the white hot burning need to accomplish something significant seem less important.
So I came back, and began assembling piece by piece all the elements that would bring this idea into a tangible piece of time. I lived in my parent's basement. What surprised me the most I think was the spirit of my classmates. I had honestly thought this film would be a low-low budget kind of thing, shot on black and white, or video. But it was the passion and sacrifice of my friends and classmates that allowed us to shoot 35. Almost all the crew worked for free, and the community took us in with food and shelter during out grueling 6 months of pre-production and production.
After spending years getting the script just right, once production started it became its own living breathing animal. The cast breathed life into each character, and because of our low budget limiting certain elements of the script being shot, they were able to adapt and take the story in many different directions.
Now as the project that had defined my identity for most of my twenties is finally drawling to a close. After all the ups and downs, the big plays made by people that I never would have guessed, the inconceivable let downs of my few "sure things", and the sizzling creativity of some truly brilliant and hard working individuals ( Individuals that I'm sure you will hear of again). It leaves me with a great feeling of emptiness. Why? Because we did it. Together we somehow kept this things nose up, and that is something I don't feel will ever be taken away from any of us that poured our guts into this little film. My feeling of emptiness is that I am left with the looming question of "what greater mountain is there to climb?"
If a film of this quality can be made from the basement of the director's parents' house for no money by a bunch of twenty something and "that dude that played the principal in the breakfast club", what else is possible?
This is the prologue of "The Book of Caleb".