Making 4EVR
Thursday, May 7, 2020
4EVR recently went online with this phenomenal introduction:
4EVR, directed by Sergio Pinheiro and written by Joe Fordham, a psychological tale of sadness, revenge, anger, and lust that is as complex as the media used in it. Cell phones, webcam, and Facebook meld with Polaroid photos and an outdated answering machine, which acts as an otherworldly device for the dead’s use to haunt the living.
– Cati Glidewell, Bloody Disgusting, World of Death
This launched a one-month run on Youtube where, at the click of button, our baby was at the mercy of anyone with opposable thumbs.
That’s a scary thing for a filmmaker, pushing your newborn out of the nest to face the anonymous pollice verso on YouTube. In a self-reflective mood, I decided to make a record of where this little movie came from.
Sergio and I met at my first film festival show of The Glitch in Atlanta, 2008. While Glitch 
was an Outer Limits flavored science fiction short, Sergio’s The Procedure was a smart Twilight Zone style horror. We hit it off, and after a while we decided to pool our resources and make a short together.
I’d recently been attempting my next production, more sci-fi although in a different vein to Glitch, and I had shot some preproduction material with a wonderful young actress, Alana Kearns-Green, who I had encountered on the Glitch festival circuit. Sergio had recently purchased a new camera, a Mk II Canon 5D. When I lost the location for my new short, I proposed our collaboration – Sergio shooting and directing, me writing something new for Alana, based on one of the stories in my notebooks. We’d co-produce and split the costs.
I drew up a list of about a dozen story ideas. We both agreed on horror, a mutual love, and Sergio picked my log-line, a ‘ghost in the machine’ idea, about what happens to the social media presence of loved ones after they are deceased. We watched Repulsion again 
together, and I turned out several drafts, which Sergio and his friends critiqued.
We ended up with what we felt was a pretty tight 12-page drama. Our focus was on character and backstory, with a haunting that relied more on subtext, mood and tension rather than explosive gore, but with a visceral sting in the tail. I pitched it to Alana. She sweetly admitted that scary movies were not her cup of tea. But she agreed to meet with us for coffee at Dupar’s in Studio City. Alana scribbled on her script, offered some ideas, and we were off to the races.
More brainstorming transpired as we knocked ideas around, working out the identity of Alana’s character, the sad and lonely Ginny, and her co-stars – her brother’s needy room-mate, Alastair (Brian 
Rohan), and Ginny’s brother, Mikey (Matt McNutt). Sergio and I had already thrown in some personal ideas – my confusion at a girlfriend whom, years ago, had an extraordinarily close relationship with her brother; and Sergio’s childhood fear of his mother’s sewing scissors. Alana, Brian and Matt all brought along their own ideas.
Our sweet and charming Brian – who had blown us away with his display of unhinged rage and paranoia in Richard Gale’s short film Criticized – made a brilliant Method acting suggestion. Before his first meeting with Alana, Brian quietly asked if he could meet his co-star in-character, adopting a shy and mysterious mien behind his horn-rimmed spectacles. Sergio and I agreed, and we kept Brian’s secret, allowing him to stealthily unnerve us all by maintaining his gaze a little longer than normal.
Alana, I knew, was a highly intuitive and professional performer, and while she remained polite and creatively engaged, she responded perhaps instinctively to Brian’s lingering stares, slinging barbs his way during their characters’ exchanges. We encouraged our three performers to improvise. While Sergio directed, I aimed my mini-DV camera, and Ginny’s sadness and irritation at Alastair made our skins crawl. Months later, on-set, the moment after we wrapped Alastair, Brian revealed his true nature to Alana, and it was like Clark Kent removing his spectacles. A wonderful moment that I captured on my fly-on-the-wall 
documentary camera.
Matt, we found through a lengthy casting call, seeking our all-American boy next door, the apple of his adoring sister’s eye. Matt had the task of playing a ghost, seen only in Ginny’s idolized memories of her brother, killed in a car crash. Matt came back with pages and pages of hand-written notes about Mikey’s childhood with Ginny, two loners who retreated into fantasy at an early age – Mikey was ‘Bear’ to Ginny’s ‘Bee,’ based on their costumed personas one fateful Halloween.
Many video workshops followed, with Sergio directing while I rolled tape, and then edited 
with sound effects and Bernard Herrmann music. Our ‘Three’s Company’ skit was one of my favorites. We got Ginny, Mikey and Alastair together in Mike and Alastair’s apartment, where the subject of Michael’s French-speaking fiancée arose to drive a wedge between them – Ginny’s jealousy of Sylvie, Michael’s defensiveness, and Alastair needling tensions in a bizarre attempt to corner Ginny.
We had some fireworks going by the time the actors got together on set, for our long shooting weekend. At least, that was the plan.
Months later, we gathered on location with all our team in tow – camera, lighting, sound, art 
direction, props, stunts, makeup effects, stills, craft services and, our biggest extravagance, a real rented taxicab. As Sergio’s line producer, I drew on my knowledge of indie filmmaking workarounds that enabled us to obtain a miraculously insured and copyright-cleared generic yellow cab.
Our location was perfect. After weeks of searching fruitlessly for a suitably old Hollywood haunt, without massive location fees, we bumped into our art director’s friend, Andrea, at Sergio’s fiancée’s birthday party. Andrea lived in a 1920’s condo in downtown Silver Lake. It was Ginny’s perfect hideaway. And our cinematographer, Chris Saul, intuitively knew how to bathe the rooms in a womb-like glow, framing compositions around a ghostly chandelier of seashell chimes that 
happened to be hanging in the living room. We all kept tripping over those damned things on set, but they were so Ginny – fragile and delicate.
We never dreamed we’d be able to afford a cinematographer as talented as Chris. He was one of our A-list selections, and luckily for us he was interested, amusing, unflappable and available. Watching Chris and Sergio work together was wonderful. And when Chris’ window of opportunity closed for a second weekend shoot, Danit Sigler stepped in to artfully follow Chris’ lead for some very challenging scenes.
It was a tough shoot. It was my goal to enable and to offer my support, but never to step on 
Sergio’s toes. Sometimes that meant being locked out of our claustrophobic location, while they were inside shooting, and I sat on the steps outside at 3AM wondering how in hell I was ever going to complete my current day-job work assignment, writing about a gigantic Marvel superhero film for Cinefex magazine. But we got the shots; nobody 
cracked; and we mopped up the last drops of blood as the sun was rising at the end of Shoot Day Four.
Exhaustion and elation were followed by months of recouping energies and editing. As producer, stopwatch in hand, I could tell Sergio was finding his shots on set, so one of my three-quarter page scenes – subplot in Ginny’s mental breakdown – ran three minutes. We hired an editor, Danny Daneau, a fine filmmaker in his own right, who worked through the footage for a first director’s cut with Sergio. It ran 23 minutes.
Two final names must be mentioned for this confessional to be complete. God bless Austin Wintory, who created the music for Sergio’s previous short. Austin promised way back that
he would step up to 4EVR. And, bless him, he honored that, despite having become a much-sought-after, award-winning orchestral composer. Austin patiently listened to us blather on about Herrmann and Morricone, suggesting a ghostly Edda Dell’orso vocal that could vocalize Ginny’s mania. To my surprise, Sergio called me to Austin’s studio to record the saxophone. Enter Ian Roller, saxophonist extraordinaire, with a giant hunk of brass, a baritone sax the size of a bazooka, which provided the primal voice of Ginny’s madness.
Sound designer Eric Marks put the final gilding to our Swiss clock mechanism of a thriller. 
He took all of our ideas and sound-stems – including a reel of sound that I had inadvertently deleted while brain-dead one long night on set – and he wove together Ginny’s acoustic world. Eric crystallized our wild imaginings, some of which recalled our original Repulsion-inspired nightmares of Ginny’s cave-like ambiences of sound.
At our first festival in Oregon, 4EVR looked like a million bucks (it was half the cost of our previous shorts) and it sounded like gangbusters. We had a solid festival run, but more rejections than we anticipated. Not one of the venues where Sergio and I last played 
accepted us, including our home countries of Portugal and England. But then, where we did play, we won awards.
Oregon Scream Week, Hollywood Horrorfest (four awards, including ‘Best of the Fest’), Kapow, Nightmares, Panic Fest, Cryptshow, SF Indie, Montevideo Fantastico, Louisiana International and Horrible Imaginings, we thank you. It has been thrilling to experience our creation in a theatre, projected up huge, with an audience in thrall.
Most of all, we are grateful for the friends 
we made along the way. That’s what it’s all about, the support group that keeps independent film alive. Dad has asked me, ‘What’s in it for you?’ Well, it’s certainly not money. But if you pour your heart into it, you meet other creative people, and you all help each other continue to make more.
4EVR was direct result of that, and we’re proud of our baby. I hope she finds her audience. And if you are inclined to click, we hope you do so late at night, and be very careful about what you find online.
Photo credits: 4EVR unit photography Matt Ullman. Nightmares Film Festival photo by Daniel Combs. Hollywood Horrorfest and SF Indie photos by Patti McMahon. All other images Donnybrook/Flashfilms.
