Well before its release, a film is already an adventure in itself. From his own life, director Matthew Nourse drew from troubling coincidences and artistic meetings in plain poetry.
On the other end of the phone, the voice of Matthew Nourse
reveals a brutal awakening. If night in Paris, the morning has hardly woken over
the hills of Hollywood. He speaks of passion of this project that brought
together artists from all horizons. His first film, just finished at 25 years
old, tells a story that revolves around Eddy- a vagabond who comes back to his
hometown after a year on the road. Matthew explains, “My best friend suddenly
died in my last year at college and I began to write. Events that happened
around my life and the lives of people I knew influenced the story in a
parallel, but non-direct way. It turned out that even Ryan Donowho lived a
similar experience just before I gave him the script.” The film is orchestrated
around striking coincidences, as if all were connected amongst reality, the
actors, the crew, and the story to become a unique experience. Almost everybody
on the project is an artist. While preparing for the film by doing collage work,
‘The Pacific and Eddy’ became almost a project within a project. Matthew Nourse
makes meetings that ring true; “I showed my drawings and collages to Michelle
Blade, an artist in Los Angeles. She began painting the very night after having
read the script. Dominique Swain, a sculptor herself, watched Michelle work a
lot to prepare for her role as a painter.”
IMAGINE
A fan of The Beach Boys and John Lennon, Matthew Nourse let
this sentiment of the 60’s fuller yet sad hint softly in his images. Kelli Scarr,
musician and long-time friend, brings her versatile sensitivity to the music of
Brit Rock Legend Nikki Sudden, who plays mysterious Silhouette, a shadow who
follows Eddy like his conscious. Nikki Sudden, a mythical figure of late 70’s
rock music with his group the Swell Maps (praised by Sonic Youth) involved
himself personally in bringing to the film the sublime songs of Epic
Soundtracks, his adored brother, who died in 1997.
The music is one of the matrices of the film. According to
Matthew, the projection of the existential quest faced in the terrors of
adulthood. He said to have cultivated in his piece the blazing contrast between
simple everyday tragedies and the sophisticated beauty of the world. [The writer
hears] the birds sing at the top of their lungs on the rooftop, throwing a ray
of unforeseen sunshine into our conversation, proving thus the accuracies of his
vision. Matthew speaks of a California outside of time, barred from clichés of
surfing and palm trees. He explains these hidden forests, the streets sprinkled
with the sunshine of San Diego, where one can look around and see nothing,
contrary to Los Angeles where it mints a huge price on the smallest paving
stone.
But how does a director of 25 years of age put up a first
film? “The creative contributions and costume design of Hollie Velten, my
girlfriend, helped me produce the film and took part in its artistic conception.
The only compromise that I absolutely refused to make was to shoot on video. I
grew up with a certain idea of cinema, admiring the films of Jim Jarmusch and
Francois Truffaut. It was a real problem because it wasn’t a project for HD. For
this character study, this group portrait, I had to have film and its power of
fascination.”
DEER HUNTER
For the moment, the trailer gives an idea of the film, with
its pernicious beauty and of the ravishing charisma of “the bomb” Ryan Donowho
who embodies Eddy, his big fawn eyes reminiscent of the memory of death.
Drummer with the group Pagoda alongside fellow actor Michael
Pitt, Ryan is not only an actor but songwriter as well, currently working in
Texas on a solo project. He speaks of Eddy as “a dreamer and a loner who cuts
himself off from society by running away from mourning. He is a tender person,
angry at himself and at the world. Contrary to Eddy, off-screen in real life, I
am a drummer, a man of the shadows. I like to be withdrawn, with the exception
of the times when I would play drums in the streets of New York, in the subway,
when I needed money. I love this; to create a show, assemble a small crowd in
public, in an impromptu fashion.”
We can bet that in some time, the crowds will be meeting in
dark rooms to follow the beautiful internal voyage of Eddy out until the edges
of the Pacific.
*Translated by Nikki Nemzer
*Since the publication of this article, Nikki Sudden sadly passed away in on
March 27, 2006
