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Interview
with writer/director Michael S. Ojeda
Q. Can you supply some background
information on yourself and your company,
Reigning Pictures?
A. I grew up in Des Plaines,
Illinois, a northwest suburb of Chicago.
I started making short movies when I was
around 10 years old with Joel Goodman, the
producer of “Lana’s Rain.”
Joel and I are lifelong friends who went
to high school together and then to Columbia
College in Chicago where we both studied
in the Film Program. During the 90’s,
I was the cinematographer on a number of
independent films such as “The Ride,”
“Three Days,” “Language
of Love” and “Eden.” Joel
and I, along with executive producer Jeff
Dillard, formed Reigning Pictures in 1996
in anticipation of making “Lana’s
Rain,” which is the company’s
debut film and also my first film as a director.
Q. How did “Lana’s
Rain” come to be?
A. “Lana’s
Rain” is a project that literally
has been years in the making. The script
has gone through many stages and evolved
over time. In 1993, I worked as the cinematographer
on a Chinese soap opera shot in Chicago’s
Chinatown, and worked with a cast that didn’t
speak English. The immigrant experience
really intrigued me and that sparked my
interest in developing a project with people
with a language barrier who find themselves
in another country struggling to make it.
Then a short time later, there was a cover
story in Time Magazine about the boom in
prostitution around the world, with a big
growth area coming out of the post-communist
Eastern European region. There were some
pretty compelling stories there such as
a mother and father waiting in the car while
their little daughter walked the streets
and picked up johns. It wasn’t always
the gangsters and pimps. They did anything
they could to survive. For some reason,
that really affected me and I couldn’t
get it out of my mind. I knew there was
a story that I wanted to tell.
Q. When did you actually start
writing the script?
A. Sometime in the mid-90’s,
but the original screenplay focused on the
Chinese character, Julian, so it started
as a totally different story. I decided
it just didn’t work and it was too
violent a piece. I wanted something more
emotional and meaningful and realized I
could better tell the story I envisioned
if I changed the focus to the character
of Lana. She is the character you feel most
compassionate about. Out of my first draft,
only one scene remains in the final film
- the scene where Julian finds Lana in the
alley after she’s beaten and he mends
her wounds. After I shifted the emphasis
of the film to Lana, it took about a year-and-a-half
and five drafts of the script before I was
satisfied with the result. During this time,
I worked with Max Kuhar, a Croatian who
served as my consultant and as co-producer
of the film. He made sure that everything
was logistically correct. In addition, Joel
Goodman was very instrumental in fleshing
out the story and the three of us worked
closely together.
Q. The character of Lana is
a Bosnian Croatian. Could the story have
worked in the same way if she was from another
country, like Russia or Poland?
A. My grandparents were
Polish Jews who were able to escape Germany
right before the holocaust. I was struck
by the similarities of the war in Bosnia
and what happened earlier in Nazi Germany.
It hit me in a personal way and I thought,
what if some of those suffering people could
come to America and try to start over? That
was the connection. However, my characters
could’ve come from anyplace there
is oppression in the world. And, as long
as people see America as the “Land
of Opportunity,” the story will remain
timeless.
Q. Your grandparents had an
influence on you. What about your parents?
A. I was raised by my
mother. She is one of the strongest women
I’ve ever known. Growing up there
was great turmoil in the family. She had
it very rough. I’ve seen her down
but she has always bounced back and prevailed.
I tapped into her strength and perseverance
while making “Lana’s Rain”
and I think that’s why I wanted to
write a strong woman’s role. My father
on the other hand, came to Chicago from
Puerto Rico with nothing when he was 14-years-old.
He ended up sleeping in an abandoned car
and wandering the streets of the city looking
for a place to stay until some prostitutes
took him in. So some of the stories my dad
told me, as well as others that I’ve
heard all played a part in shaping this
film.
Q. How was the character of
Darko developed in the story?
A. During the war, escaping
Bosnia was almost impossible for the average
citizen. If they did, it was usually to
Western Europe not to America. However,
the criminal element like Darko could find
a way to buy themselves illegal transport
to America. This character is loosely based
on a man named Celo, who was called the
Godfather of Bosnia, a real mobster who
ran the black-market scene over there. It’s
pretty much a fact that there are a number
of East European mobsters hiding out on
the streets of America. Lana would not have
been able to escape to Chicago without Darko’s
underworld connections. Going back to that
Time Magazine article about prostitution,
I didn’t want to use a father and
daughter so I changed the characters to
a brother and sister. Darko is a ruthless
bastard who knows only one way to make a
buck and uses his own sister to get it.
It would be one thing if this scenario was
out of left field, but sadly, it’s
based on fact. Like the Time Magazine article
said, its effect is most devastating on
an individual level and that’s why
the story is told from Lana’s perspective.
Q. Where did you find the actors
who play Lana and Darko?
A. Finding the two leads
was an enormous challenge. Joel did an international
casting call because we wanted actors who
could speak Serbo-Croatian with an authentic
accent. He contacted talent agencies in
Croatia, London, New York and Los Angeles.
We reviewed a lot of tapes and thought we
had found Lana in Tatiana Mathews, a woman
who was very popular in the former Yugoslavia
during the later part of the 1980’s.
However, after we brought her in to test
and do a scene, it was apparent she just
wasn’t going to work out, so we were
back to square one. In Chicago, we were
spreading the word and seeing a lot of actresses
until we got word a model wanted to audition.
We didn’t think anything was going
to come of that, but she came in and did
the scene in the shower, which is a difficult
scene to begin with, and she blew everyone
away. She did it in such an explosive, powerful
way that she won the role on the spot. The
funny thing is we had this international
search going on and she lived six blocks
from our office. Her name is Oksana Orlenko
and it turned out she was a trained actress
from Ukraine who came to Chicago about five
years ago. We were so fortunate to find
Oksana, whom I believe does a terrific job.
The search for someone to play Darko went
on for several months. We were close to
signing actor Goran Visnjic, but he landed
a role on ER and became unavailable. Then
we found Nickolai Stoilov, a Los Angeles
actor from Bulgaria, and I’m very
happy with his performance; he has a great
screen presence. He’s had a number
of small roles here and there and now I
think his career is ready to take off.
Q. When did the actual shooting
of the film take place?
A. Like any first time
independent film, finding financing wasn’t
easy so there was a gap between finishing
the script and shooting the film. That’s
one of the reasons the film has been a long,
four-year process. When we finally got the
money through private investors and once
the casting was set, we were ready to roll
in the summer of 1999. The actual shooting
lasted seven weeks but was spread out during
a six-month period to take advantage of
the changing seasons. We finished shooting
in February, 2000 with postproduction lasting
right into 2002. A couple of pick-up shots
were filmed in 2001 that will help explain
some of the plot twists a little better.
Q. This seems like a big movie
to tackle on your first time out - shooting
on two continents, dealing with a foreign
language, lots of different locations and
a crew of 100 people. Did you sometimes
wish you were working on something a bit
smaller?
A. No, even though it
has been a huge ordeal, this is the story
I wanted to tell. I like original stories
and wanted to do something I haven’t
seen before. As a director you need to be
able to see without limits. I don’t
let someone else do the math. I decide what
we need to do, I figure out how to do it,
and then we do it ourselves. I believe that
you can do anything if you break a project
down to its fundamentals and then tackle
it head on. Sure, there are monetary limits,
but if you are savvy enough, there are always
cost saving things you can do. For example,
we couldn’t buy or rent a trailer
home so we found a guy who ran a lumberyard
to donate lumber in exchange for a bit part
in the film. Then we built the trailer home
ourselves. That’s where Joel comes
in. He’s a great producer who is always
finding innovative ways to get the job done
for the least amount of dollars.
Q. Are there any past films
or directors that have influenced you?
A. A couple of films come
to mind. “La Femme Nikita” was
an inspiration because it was about a woman
who was down but came back. It’s a
dark film, visually very exciting, and it’s
also about a young woman who goes through
a transformation like Lana does. Probably
my biggest influence growing up was Michael
Mann, whose second film was “Thief,”
a gritty, made-in-Chicago film. I loved
everything about it; the look, the mood
and feel, the reality of the characters,
there was nothing glossed over in it. His
use of Chicago was excellent. I tried to
use Chicago to my advantage also by making
the city overpowering; to make the characters
seem dwarfed by the city’s big skyscrapers.
Like“Thief,” the first two acts
of “Lana’s Rain” are purely
a drama, but in the third act, I cut loose
and enter a violent nightmarish hell. Also,
although my film is based in reality, my
visual approach reflects a more stylized
heightened reality. One other director I
have to mention is Andrew Davis, someone
who grew up in Chicago and made so many
movies here. He consistently used Chicago
as a setting better than anybody else, in
movies like “Code Of Silence”
and “The Fugitive.” I even used
two of his favorite supporting actors from
Chicago in “Lana’s Rain,”
David Darlow and Ron Dean.
Q. Is there any one thing that
you would want audiences to come away with
after seeing “Lana’s Rain”?
A. I wanted to make the
character of Lana a flesh and blood person
audiences can care about and root for. At
its center, it’s a film about the
resiliency of the human spirit… Lana
is a young woman who is stripped of all
her values, all of her innocence. Everything
in her life is destroyed, she’s an
outsider in a strange country who can’t
speak the language, but through all her
trials and ordeals she can still come back
and take control of her own life and find
her own way. That’s what I was hoping
to achieve because that’s how people
are; you can beat them up, push them down,
stomp on them, and they can still come back
and persevere. A lot of people from around
the world wonder what would happen if they
come to America. The American Dream is very
far-reaching, but the flip side is that
it is not the fantasy they see on television
shows or in Hollywood movies. This film
is about the other side of the dream. There
is a harsh reality, a fierce struggle to
survive and to fit in thousands of miles
from home; going from feeling like an alien
to feeling like you belong. Hopefully, people
will connect with the story in some way,
to feel Lana’s pain and loneliness
and struggle, as well as her eventual triumph
and redemption.
To contact Michael Ojeda, please send
him an
e-mail at this address: arain555@aol.com
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