Sundance Film Festival

I overhear director Alex Rivera’s publicist telling him that my interview will probably focus on some technical aspects of the film. He seems to think he’s not the right person to address that topic. I’m thinking “ok not all directors are technical”’ Except it soon emerges as we talk that Alex cut Sleep Dealer himself on Final Cut Pro, built the animatic for the 400+ effects shots in After Effects and Photoshop, and even did a couple of final effects shots himself in AE (on his laptop). To him, that’s not technical. His fluency in editing and effects software is just how he gets the job done. No more technical than using Microsoft Word to write this post.

Rivera’s film was nurtured through the Sundance Lab process. Lisa Rinzler shot it in 45 days of principal photography in Mexico City, Tijuana, and the northern state of Queretaro. She fought for Super 16 over HD, Rivera says because she didn’t think HD would have the latitude for the intense harsh midday light they would be working with, and the highly saturated, contrasty pallete that would mostly be achieved in camera.

Sleep Dealer also benefited from a HDCAM-SR DI at Pacific Title and effects supervision from veteran Mark Russell (Hellboy and Minority Report). About a third of the character-driven sci-fi film was visual effects. Set in the very near future it envisions a bleak, plausible world of worker drones, globalization run amok, and border warfare, what Rivera calls “a true story.”

As Rivera cut for performance and character, he roughed in the effects as he needed them. “If I needed a jet plane to go by, I just built it quick in After Effects, or used Final Cut’s compositor…or some Phtoshop. When we locked picture we had a Frankenstein film of footage, temp effects, still photos for reshoot…At that point Mark stepped in very forcefully to break it up into components and get them to effects houses in China, India, Mexico. We had armies of students throughout the country working on this.”

The goal was all the effects of an Independence Day on a micro fraction of the budget, using every modern moving image trick there was to ape the big blockbusters.

“We needed the tools of fantasy to tell this story,” which Rivera sees as a shot across the bow of politics, but also of filmmaking. “I doubt it will be seen as a perfect film,” he says. “I hope it will be seen as a provocation. The tools are available now to visualize storytelling on grand scope, grand scale, and with ambitious visuals.” Hollywood doesn’t own that vocabulary any more.

Sleep Dealer is in Dramatic Competition and screens tomorrow (6:30p) in SLC at the Rose Wagner Center, Thursday (9:15p) at the Eccles and Friday (8:30p) at the Racquet Club. Click here for theater info