We made a great deal of headway towards the completion of principle photography last month in June with film shoots taking place every week that month. I have one shooting day left with Jack Ritchie and maybe 4 more shooting days left on the slate with Dirty Fritz before I can call wrap on this film. July's heat here in Southern California has slowed production a bit and I have decided to take a much needed break from the constant summer heat to write a small piece here describing the film Das Puppets and the work we have completed so far. All though our budget is none existent by Hollywood's or anyone's standards for that matter, I did set out to create a highly stylistic and vividly dark film with what little means were at hand. With an often empty wallet in my hand ingenuity and imagination have gone a long way towards that end and thrift store finds combined with good old fashioned dumpster diving have proven fruitful throughout the making of this film.
The whole nebulous time line thing found in some films use to really throw me off but still I learned to appreciate this style sense early on in the lavish cartoon worlds I discovered in the Heavy Metal magazines I poured over in the 1980s, and the likes of Terry Gilliam films, he is a master of this visual style. See Gilliam's 1985 film Brazil where he creates a bizarre future universe built out of hot-rodded 1940s technology and costumes. Stylistically I also had in mind for inspiration while writing Das Puppets the British television series Darling Buds of May, which I have heard some of the cast members speak of the conscience effort to disguise the exact time period that the television show is taking place in and there by create and Alternate fantasy time-period in doing so. All of these examples influenced me to craft Das Puppets this way with its own multifaceted time period. When the film opens after the title sequence it is obviously set in the 1960s Germany we can tell this from the stark industrial architecture of Studio FUZZ, and the clothing of the Fuzz Assistant played by Zen Josey. The film switches periods to the 1940s 1950s with the first appearance of Dirty Fritz in his lair and its strange collection of artifacts. The Gypsy Witch, played by Diego Sanson, with Gypsy's wonderfully period horror film set pieces and her fantastic costume could have come right out of the 1941 Wolfman film starring Lon Chaney Jr. from which the scene is loosely based. The Sneaky Pete's, played by Lee S. Whitaker, dressing room is covered in 1920s and 1930s photographs, perfume bottles, and there is a telephone at her dressing table from the 1930s. (This is a working telephone by the way that use to reside at the bed side of writer director Fred Wilder during the early to mid 1980s, now only seeing service as a studio prop.) The character Sneaky Pete herself is very much a show-girl from the 1920s that steps out of that world and into the 1960's of the Studio FUZZ with the ease of a mysterious and sneaky chameleon. The remainder of the film is set in Germany of the 1960s with the exception of the ending which reverts to a combination of elements, from the 1930s and 1960s, from the 1935 get away car driven by Dirty Fritz, to the 1960s television set we see on the desk of the FUZZ Director in the closing scene of the film that again is an eclectic mixture of distinct elements from several time periods. All of this hopefully aids in creating and sustaining a dream like world for our pretty puppets to play in one in which imagination questions our grip on reality.
Fred Wilder, July 2009