When Alex first approached me about playing “Cindy,” the devoted “church lady” whose sheltered life lies at the heart of Child of God, I was intrigued for several reasons. I was excited about the prospect of playing my first lead in a feature film after nearly eight years of acting, although the idea of improvising the whole movie and working without a script was daunting to me. The only improv work I had done up to this point was extensive work in the re-enactment shows like True TV’s “I, Detective” and “Murder by the Books,” where I usually played victims or killers. We improvised dialogue a lot, but it usually was not used in the final scenes. I was excited to work with Alex, whose reputation as as a talented filmmaker preceded him, although I didn’t know him personally. But mostly I was interested in the subject matter. Few films deal with the issue of spirituality these days, and as we talked about Cindy, I realized that I shared a great deal with the back story Alex was developing for her.
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Cynthia Corral participated in Child of God as an extra on our last day of shooting and survived the record-breaking heatwave to tell the story:
About six of us plus the two actresses went into a small church room where we sat down around a conference table. We had to pretend to be discussing the “sermon” we had “just heard” and then Jennie Floyd was to pipe up with a line that was completely shocking, insensitive and inappropriate. The extras just had to go silent as Marya Murphy then had to respond in a manner that was so heartbreaking I wanted to get up and give her a hug after each take. Luckily we only had to do that scene a couple times over; I don’t think any of us could take Marya’s increasingly heartrending performance.
We were let go after that. Jennie Floyd assured me her character was not the insensitive jerk she appeared to be in that scene, and Marya has told me the movie is not depressing; I’m not sure I believe either of them, but there are certainly 20-25 people at that church who cannot wait to see this movie when it comes out!
This is absolutely accurate reporting–the acting is that good. Read Cynthia’s entire post here.
We want to thank Cynthia and the San Jose MetBlogs gang for being so incredibly supportive of our two June film projects. (Read Cynthia’s post about the Amity production.)
Child of God isn’t my first improv project. It’s not even my first improv film (Antero Alli’s The Invisible Forest occupies that place on my resume). What’s new for me with Child of God is that I’m developing a character with a full story arc. I’m not an abstract representation of the protagonist’s psyche, I’m not a 10 second expression of a dystopian concept (Canary), but a fully fleshed out person in this film.
Most of us are using our own names for our characters, and we had very little information about our characters to start with. The lines between the actors and the people we portray were very, very thin. We knew a basic starting scenario, a few pertinent facts about what had happened before the film begins, and that the first shot was going to be the troupe discussing our options.
The cameras were upon us without so much as an “action.” The game was afoot. We shifted immediately from talking about what we might do in the scene to doing the scene itself.
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Two of likely four shooting days have been completed on Child of God. We’re shooting this feature simultaneously with Amity (Child on Saturdays; Amity on Sundays), and within Child of God we are often shooting disparate scenes simultaneously. It’s enough to make this author a little schizo. I am acting, producing, shooting, kid-wrangling, singing, casting, catering, brainstorming, driving, negotiating, deliberating, pontificating, fuming, aching, capturing, sunburning, procrastinating. It’s an intense and exciting time.
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