Business Ethics [First project from Wernham Entertainment Inc.]

[Nick Wernham]

Hi, guys. I have posted this at a few other places (including the Red Users Toronto group here), but I've really been enjoying posting at RedUser for the past little while so I thought that I'd share something that I've been working on with the community here.

I'm a director. My younger brother Simon and I own and operate a small production company together called Wernham Entertainment Inc. We are fairly new (we just formed the company about a year ago), but we completed post-production on our first project about a month ago. It has been an eight month labour of love involving some talented and hard working friends, some new and some old. The film is a short, dark comedy about a man who runs a Ponzi scheme entitled Business Ethics. Here is a synopsis of the film:

While in business school Zachary Cranston (Gil Bellows) comes to believe that ethical decisions are just another form of cost-benefit analysis. Deciding that the rewards of fraud could outweigh the eventual costs, he runs a Ponzi scheme, in spite of the knowledge that he will eventually face the consequences. A hedge fund is the chosen vehicle for his nefarious enterprise. He exploits the greed of others through promises of higher returns, taking pleasure in lying about his investment results, while spending his investors’ money on his own amusements. Neither his auditor nor the securities commission is successful in stopping him. But Cranston never forgets that eventually he must pay the price for his misdeeds. His fate, though, is not quite what he expects.

“Business Ethics” emphasizes humour in its examination of the human frailty of greed. The film chronicles some of Cranston’s triumphs, as well as his narrow escapes from detection, revealing his descent into darker realms of immorality. The film is the first creative collaboration between writer Richard Wernham and his two sons, Nick, the film’s director and Simon, who produced the film alongside Genie Award-winning short film veteran Lori Lozinski. It features a talented and experienced cast including Bellows, Lauren Lee Smith, Colin Mochrie, Kenneth Welsh and Julian Richings.


At this point I am unable to upload any of the footage, but here are a few screen grabs. First though, a few facts about these pictures:

1) We shot on two perf 35mm. With the deals we were able to secure from the friendly folks at Panavision and Kodak the total cost of shooting 2-perf wound up being pretty similar to what it would have cost to shoot Super 16mm and for the look of this film our cinematographer and I really wanted the finer grain that 35mm provides. We considered shooting Red as well, but I think that for this project 35mm was the right choice for a variety of reasons.
2) What you see here are screen grabs from the 1920x800 (two perf 35mm has a 2.40 aspect ratio) dailies. They are highly compressed and have not been colour graded. It looks A LOT better after colour grading and when projected from the final print (2k digital intermediate).
3) The key references for the film in terms of the look were The Shining, Capote, Miller's Crossing, Barry Lyndon, A Clockwork Orange and Goodfellas. Yes, I know. A lot of Kubrick. We see a lot of Kubrick homages done by filmmakers of all experience levels done these days, but it seems like (at least among those of us who are just getting started out) they tend to be done ironically. The idea of doing a rather ambitious, unironic Kubrick homage really appealed to me. Obviously there are plenty of shots that reference other films in that list as well as some that aren't listed, but the three Kubrick films are definitely the best-represented (in one way or another).

The Cast

Gil Bellows

Lauren Lee Smith

Julian Richings

Kenneth Welsh

Colin Mochrie

Maxim Roy

Brandon McGibbon

Chuck Shamata

Julian DeZotti


Some of the people who have been most closely involved in this film from start to finish are my brother Simon (producer), our father Richard (screenwriter/executive producer), our mother Julia (executive producer), Lori Lozinski (producer), Gil Bellows (lead/executive producer/mentor), Chayse Irvin (our cinematographer), Michelle Szemberg (editor), and myself (director). Many other people have worked extremely hard on this project, contributing their talent, time and creative energy. It's been an amazing learning experience and I am quite proud of the work that we have produced.

I will add some more shots if there is some interest. I hope that you guys like these, even though they probably aren't the best representation of the quality of the final result. Thank you for taking a look.

Hopefully we can get into some good festivals next year and some of you will get a chance to see it and give me some feedback. That is the main reason why I cannot post any footage yet because I worry that doing so would negatively impact our chances at having a good festival run. So far we have submitted to Berlin, SXSW and Tribeca and we plan to submit to others going forward.

 

[Justin Kirchhoff]

Looks good. What stock did you shoot on?

 

[Nick Wernham]

Thanks, Justin. It was a lot of Vision 3 5213 and some 5219. I'll acknowledge that my understanding of different film stocks is more limited than that of our DP though. Chayse, because of his superior knowledge, provided a good explanation for reasons why we might go with different stocks and then together we made a choice based on that information.

 

[Demetri Zuev]

The shots look really good.

Nick, a director-to-director question for you, I can see that you had a great cast and the majority of actors are in their 30s and beyond. Can you share your experience working with the actors, maybe some techniques that you used during the process, I've worked with some professional actors of this age and I know that it's kind of hard for a young aspiring director to "operate" such a cast on both physical and psychological levels. It would be great to have an insight from someone who's in the same boat.

 

[Nick Wernham]

Thank you, Demetri. I feel very fortunate to have worked with such a talented and experienced cast. To be honest I'm not sure that "operate" is really the appropriate verb in this case. Perhaps with some directors that would be the right way to describe the interaction, but it certainly isn't my style and I don't think that it would have worked for this film given that I am just getting started out and our cast is so accomplished. It was, from my perspective, a very collaborative actor-director dynamic. Most of my on-the-day direction was more around whatever specific blocking adjustments needed to be made rather than major alterations to the performances. There were very open, friendly discussions in prep and I'd make sure that I was comfortable with the choices being made by each actor for their performance, but our entire cast came in with really strong ideas that just needed subtle augmentations here-and-there.

I am certainly not an expert, but one of the many lessons that I got out of this experience is that one of the keys when working with a more seasoned cast is making sure that you are getting as much mileage as possible out of their experience. If you feel the need to make really huge changes to the performance then, in all honesty, I think in a lot of cases you either need to reevaluate your casting decision or give some more thought to whether the change you want to make is really appropriate. Perhaps there is a more subtle change that can achieve some of the other elements of the story/performance that you want to emphasize while allowing the actor to stick with something closer to what they naturally bring to the character. Generally if the right person is cast in the role and you take the time to go over who the character is with them and how that character fits into each scene that they appear in the best possible performance will be whatever feels most natural to the actor after they have been given some time to reflect. At the very least, it's usually a really good starting point.

There are a couple of moments in certain performances that in retrospect I might have asked to see done differently, but I'd imagine that's the case with every film. The days move quickly and you sometimes miss things. In the end I am very happy with the work that our cast did. They were a joy to work with and delivered great performances.

 

[Kristin Stewart]

Congrats ! The cast seems great indeed. Please keep us posted when you've got a trailer up.