From Epic to Intimate: Shaking Hands with COVID
In the Spring of 2020, we began the process of adapting Andrea Miller’s seminal piece “BOAT” to the screen. At the time, we didn’t have any clear sense of how COVID would affect our process, and so we determined to make Andrea’s choreography our starting point, rather than the extraordinary conditions in which we were adapting it. Below is a short summary of how we were schooled by the pandemic into a new way of imagining the sublime, and how often the impulse for grandeur and exoticism can cloud one’s vision for more fitting opportunities closer to home. Click and hover over the photos to see the evolution of our location scouting and the inevitable reality checks along the way.
After the initial relief of locking locations, I was utterly discouraged at the deconstruction process that we had just endured due to pandemic logistics. Every reductionist decision felt like it compromised the integrity of my artistic vision for the film. When production week came, there was nothing left to do but surrender to forces outside of a director’s control. Only then did I realize that the pandemic was offering us all an opportunity to be more creative through the severe limitations we faced at every turn. Instead of proving that we could pull off business as usual in a global health crisis, we begrudgingly shook hands with the pandemic and got down to making the work.
True inspiration comes when we embrace the thorny barriers. In this case, the result is a more honest film than we originally envisioned — a film that has much less to do with us and our abilities and can begin to speak about the things of life that really matter: love, loss and the infinite. What began as a project of epic proportions has seemed to mature into one of epic intimacy.
-Ben Stamper
Andrea Miller and Ben Stamper direct Haley Sung through the last shot of the film.