Starring Steve Buscemi as director Nick Reve, LIVING IN OBLIVION highlights a day on the set of Nick's film where everything that could possibly go wrong, actually does. Struggling against ever-escalating odds to maintain his integrity and his sanity, Nick is both helped and hindered by his bumbling, if well-intentioned crew, headed by his cinematographer Wolf (Dermot Mulroney), a cameraman whose leather gear suggests that he is more inspired by Billy Idol than Sven Nykvist; a leading lady, Nicole (Catherine Keener), a talented but neurotic actress who is involved in a romance and a rivalry with her leading man, Chad Palomino (James Le Gros); an iron-willed assistant director, Wanda (Danielle Von Zerneck); and, for the first time ever on-screen, a Gaffer.
LIVING IN OBLIVION's numerous interwoven plots and intrigues include, at last count, two explosions, two nervous breakdowns, one upset stomach, two seductions, eight dreams, one broken heart, one fist fight and four goatees supporting the theory that what happens behind the camera is usually more interesting than what happens in front of it.
Joining a long list of memorable movies-about-movies, the film has been described by DiCillo as "a contemporary DAY FOR NIGHT(MARE)" and, like Truffaut's film, it is part valentine and part vendetta, an alternately affectionate and acerbic lampoon of the egos, eccentricities, foibles and fantasies of the film world and, by extension, the rest of the world.
At its chaotic crest, the action depicted in LIVING IN OBLIVION could go a long way toward preventing anyone from ever making another movie. Depicting filmmaking as a series of calamities either to be survived, averted, or put to use, the film drew its initial inspiration from DiCillo's own love/hate relationship with the filmmaking process. "Even before I made JOHNNY SUEDE, I was fascinated by the crazy duality that exists on a film set. All of your energy goes into creating this fake, perfect reality that can be destroyed by a sneeze. For a director, especially on a low-budget film, the threat of this ever-looming chaos can be a nightmare. Much of the underlying angst and desperation in LIVING IN OBLIVION came from my first-hand experience of this."
When one of his feature projects stalled in 1994, DiCillo realized he wanted to make a movie, any movie, immediately. Just at that time, he ran into an old acting school friend who'd seen JOHNNY SUEDE. DiCillo recalls, "He was so eager and enthusiastic about movie making, telling me how lucky I was to have made a 'MOVIE,' working with actors, directing. I just had to burst his bubble. I told him that acting in a film is usually excruciating; you can be in the middle of this incredible acting moment and suddenly a light will blow and the whole thing is gone forever."
DiCillo realized then that most people have no idea what filmmaking actually involves. Nor do they necessarily understand that, like all group efforts, it is laborious, tedious, and plagued by disagreements and disorganization. DiCillo recalls, "I've been on a lot of movie sets and seen all this crazy, chaotic stuff going on just outside of the fake, fictional world everyone was trying to put on film. And many, many times I found that this crazy outside stuff was a million times more interesting." It was at this point that DiCillo decided to use this idea as a theme for a short film.
In what would be the first in a series of happy accidents, DiCillo soon received a visit from actress Catherine Keener, who had played the female lead in JOHNNY SUEDE. Having felt that Keener's work in that film never garnered her the attention she deserved, DiCillo decided "I'm going to write this piece for her. I'll put down a couple of pages and give her something to laugh at. I actually wrote the first thirty minutes of the film two days before she arrived." This half-hour piece, then titled SCENE SIX, TAKE ONE, would star Keener as the star of a film-within-the-film, who is experiencing great difficulty performing her big scene.
With project in hand, DiCillo, Keener and Keener's husband, actor Dermot Mulroney, simply decided to film it. "We all said, 'Let's do it. Let's scrape up some money, shoot it on 16 millimeter -- whatever it takes.'" Rounding up the rest of the ensemble, which includes actors Hilary Gilford and Michael Griffiths, (who would later expand their roles and join Marcus Viscidi as producers), LIVING IN OBLIVION began it's life as that short film, based on a chance encounter, and written as a showcase for Keener. "Everyone pitched in some money. Nobody got paid and we shot the first part in five days."
Though he always felt that the film contained the seeds for a feature, DiCillo was nonetheless prepared for it to exist as a self-contained short. What he wasn't prepared for was how well it would turn out, or how much, this time around, he would enjoy the act of filmmaking. "Those five days in that little studio were absolutely incredible. All the actors were there all the time, all the crew. We were just constantly shooting. And by the second or third day we all felt 'Something's going on here.' I was actually kind of frightened after I finished it because I thought that the only way anybody would ever really see it was if I made it as a feature."
What enabled DiCillo to expand his one-act
sketch into a full, three-act story was the fact that "this movie came out of
me," he adds. "I didn't have to go anywhere to write or to research it, because I
was so familiar with it." And then, in broadening its sweep, DiCillo realized
that the sense of frustration he was trying to convey, the insecurities he was
trying to dramatize, the interpersonal conflicts he was recording applied to any
world, not just his own. "Most of the time," he says, "the focus seemed to stay
on the real strivings and genuine emotional concerns of these people." As
particular as the film world is, DiCillo shaped it so that anybody who has ever
had a spectacularly bad day, and anybody who has ever had a dream collapse -- or
come true -- can identify.
Raising the financing to film the rest of LIVING IN
OBLIVION before its large ensemble cast
dispersed, was the next challenge. During flirtations with several possible
investors DiCillo was about to sign what he
felt was a disadvantageous deal when "again," he recalls, "a miraculous event
occurred. I was on the phone arranging my ticket to L.A. when my call waiting
clicked and it was Michael and Hillary, offering to find a way to help
finance the film. I fell out of my chair. It was a miracle again that the entire
cast was available when we wanted them. And it was a miraculous shoot."
The family feeling that made LIVING IN OBLIVION
possible extended throughout the making of the film. Contributing to the esprit
de corps was a sense that the crew were the
stars of the film -- that jobs done by the camera operator, boom man, script girl
and caterer were actually being depicted in the film, creating what DiCillo describes as "an interesting sort of
chemistry between crew and cast." In fact, in the
first five days a lot of the cast were asking the crew for direction. How do you
push the dolly, how do you hold the boom? Suddenly a technician is sitting with
an actor saying 'well, actually this is the way you run the Nagra,' or this is
what you do with the slate' because most actors, like most people in the
audience, don't really know."
Another interesting dynamic was created by the fact that DiCillo required his cast and crew
to perform badly on purpose: shots needed to go out of focus, microphones had to
drop into the picture, actors needed to blow their lines. "I was particularly
pleased with the fact that I was violating 'the frame.' I remember the very first
shot that we did -- a close up of Catherine --
and we were supposed to drop the boom into the shot and the boom guy just
couldn't do it. He made these gentle, little moves. I just grabbed the thing and
shoved it into the frame. But, you see, as filmmakers we're always doing just the
opposite. Everything is always about pretending that there's nothing outside the
picture."
For cast and crew alike, DiCillo's scheme created formidable formal
challenges. "I actually woke up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat,"
DiCillo recalls, "thinking 'How am I going to get Catherine to create a progressively disintegrating
performance?' I actually took a piece of paper and wrote 'Take one, take two,
take three, take four.'" Then he and Keener mapped out the takes on a scale of
one to ten, with respect to quality. "We tried to give each take a numerical
place, to help us keep track of where we were in the arc of her performance. In
actuality this helped very little and most of the subtle changes were Catherine's
spontaneous inventions."
Summing up this aspect of the film DiCillo
says, "Any director, or anybody in the film business, has had to feel that
sometimes the process is the most antithetical to art there could ever be. That
it is the most tedious, boring bunch of bullshit they've ever been through."
However, this sense of frustration must have been offset by the pleasure he had
making LIVING IN OBLIVION. Because, ultimately,
DiCillo depicts the joys to be found when things finally go right. "There is a
certain thrill in it. When you get a shot, when everybody works together, when
somehow, something magical happens. There's nothing like it."
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