As we get nearer to the festival, we will be featuring the various filmmakers whose work will be screening throughout the festival.

Introduce Yourself: Los Angeles native Craig Saavedra comes to directing from the executive suite, having held various positions in development and production at numerous production companies before donning a director’s hat for 1999’s TV movie RHAPSODY IN BLOOM starring Penelope Ann Miller, Ron Silver and a teenage Michael Shulman. In 2006, after focusing on writing, Saavedra teamed with a now-adult Shulman to form Starry Night Entertainment. He considers SHERMAN’S WAY his feature directorial debut.

How did you become interested in filmmaking? My dad was a terrific storyteller, filling my head as a boy each night with tales from around the globe. He was very visual in his descriptions of faraway lands, exotic peoples and adventures that a middle child of seven could only dream about while stuck in suburbia. When I was around 11 or 12, he came home from his job at Sears with a box full of discarded Super-8 cameras and asked if I wanted them. It wasn’t long before I turned our back yard into a back lot, complete with an entire western town – saloon, jail, you name it. My brothers and I built the street with a forced perspective and placed the smallest kids in our neighborhood at the end, and the biggest kids closest the camera. At one point our collection of sets included a log cabin and a pirate ship with a 30-foot mast.   Eventually, I even filmed some of the stories my dad had told me.

Years later, after saving up to buy my own top-loading VCR, I began devouring every movie I could rent. The local video store was my film school. It was also where I learned that most of my father’s bedtime stories were not original, and in fact mere retellings of the films he saw at the movie palaces that lined Broadway in the downtown Los Angeles of his youth. “It’s not the story” he’d say, “It’s how you tell it that makes a film unique.”

I entered the film business as a story reader for a big producer, then ran a post-production facility and eventually landed at a job in development. My entrée into directing came via producing, not a typical route. But extremely valuable when attempting to direct a tightly financed independent feature.

Tell us about your inspiration and vision for the film: My partner Joaquin, (who incidentally was our DP) and I have an adopted son, so I was looking to do a story dealing with unconventional fatherhood.  When Mike (Shulman) and I formed our production company just after he graduated from Yale, the story we ended up developing more closely resembled our odd-couple relationship than a father-son story, but still managed to deal with issues of fatherhood.

Visually, for better or worse, it’s not a splashy piece. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s beautifully shot, but the material didn’t call for a heavy-handed directorial flare. Which totally sucks because my first directing effort was a TV movie, so I really wanted to break free from conventional coverage and be overtly cinematic, but ultimately, I had to serve the story, which didn’t call for anything of that sort.

SHERMAN’S WAY is probably more mainstream, more “studio” than most indie fare. I hope to challenge myself a little more, break free from my comfort zone, with my next picture. Who knows? Maybe I’ll do an incestuous, Lesbian love story set in a Parisian mime community during the first World War. That screams for edgy visuals, don’t it?

What were some of the biggest challenges in making and completing the film? Time. As with many indie films, the small budget doesn’t necessarily hinder you with lack of equipment, or rawstock or the tools needed to manufacture the film, but rather a shooting schedule that prohibits you from getting all the coverage you need, and in a comedy, coverage is essential. We had three weeks of prep. Three weeks to crew up, lock locations, design and build sets, shop for wardrobe, assemble equipment, etc. And in the middle of our prep, our UPM took time off and got married. It’s a miracle we finished on time and on budget. Of course all I see on screen is what I didn’t get. I’m just thrilled audiences are responding so positively to the film.

In addition, we didn’t cut as we shot. Our editor Chris Gay was still at AFI wrapping up other projects, so when he was finally brought onboard, he had to play catch up with tons of footage. Plus, he was a one-man editorial team since we couldn’t afford any assistants. That put a lot of pressure on him, but he handled it brilliantly.

In the spirit of Jackson, what's your favorite Western? I love the genre so it’s a little hard to narrow it down. I just saw RED RIVER on the big screen, which was a treat. And THE SEARCHERS, of course, is a classic favorite. I also love THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE. But if I had to boil it down to just one, I’d have to say George Steven’s SHANE is my absolute favorite western. Maybe it’s the unconventional casting of the somewhat short Alan Ladd that had me identifying with him. Or his surrogate fatherhood to little Joey. Or perhaps the stunning, yet accessible cinematography and locales that made it stand out from so many cookie-cutter westerns of that era. Unlike others in the genre, the film’s success seems to lie in the dimensional characters and it’s deliberate pacing rather than mere action. Whatever the case, it’s a film that I can watch over and over and never feel that it’s overly dated.  Although, inexplicably I can’t help myself from crying out “Shane! SHANE!”  every time Ladd’s character exits a scene. Go figure.  

Sherman's Way will screen at 7:00 PM on Friday, June 6th at the Center for the Arts - Studio One and at 12:30P on Sunday, June 8th at the Center for the Arts - Studio One.