When most film students take the Sight and Sound film production course, they struggle to come up with a basic plot for their film..[I write this as a former Sight and Sound student whose project, indeed, had no plot].
Ray Tintori, on the other hand, not only came up with a complex plot involving faking your own death multiple times, but turned his six-minute “Jettison Your Loved Ones” into an official Slamdance Film Festival award-winner. With that under his belt, Ray is getting to work on blending Frank Baum and evangelical spirituality for his senior thesis film, helping man the Film Series, and making a music video for a Swedish pop group.
KR: How did you get involved in Slamdance?
RT: I art directed Benh Zeitlin’s thesis film, “Egg,” which won Best Animated Short at Slamdance last year. After I finished “Jettison Your Loved Ones”, Benh gave a copy of it to the programming director at Slamdance. She liked it and put it on their website. It won the November online competition, so it played in the festival.
KR: What was it like having your film screened?
RT: It was really neat to see it play in front of an audience who had no idea who I was or that it was a Sight and Sound film. I made the movie thinking that like 10 or 20 people would see it. Because it got put on the Slamdance site, thousands of people watched it. The combination of that and getting to see it play a festival has been a truly bizarre experience.
RT: But it’s really fun to sit anonymously in a theater full of strangers and hear them react wildly to a film you made.
KR: For people who don’t know what Sight and Sound films are like, explain what it was like making the film.
RT: I shot it in two days, I wrote it in one night and I edited it in about four days. We had 11 minutes of film stock and we made a six-minute movie. We did one take of everything.
KR: How did you decide to make such a complex film?
RT: I wanted to make a really kinetic film, where everyone is just sort of kicking and flying through the air. My favorite short film is “Heart of the World,” by Guy Maddin. I wanted to do something like that. Something sort of like a three-chord movie, like a Ramones song, really fast and simple and kind of scrappy but with a lot of energy and some elegance borrowed from old silent films.
KR: How was the experience of the festival itself?
RT: It was really exciting and kind of harrowing. I saw a bunch of great movies and I was really happy to be there showing “Jettison Your Loved Ones”. At the same time there is just a tremendous and urgent sense of desperation in that town. It’s everywhere and it demands your attention.
KR: Did you see anything good that we should look out for?
RT: I saw a really outstanding film called “The Proposition”. It’s a Western.
Nick Cave wrote the screenplay and he hums over every other scene. I also saw a great documentary called “B.I.K.E.” about street jousting and drug-addiction.
KR: How about your thesis? What’s it about?
RT: My thesis film is an adaptation of the origin story of the Tin Woodsman from “The Wizard of Oz.” It’s about how he went from being a normal lumberjack to the heartless hollow rusty shell that he is. It’s a really great story that almost no one knows. Baum wrote it when he was dying and delirious. It’s truly dark and very romantic. It’s a lot about self-destruction and lust. I moved the story to a sort of abstract America and replaced all the Baum magic with evangelical spirituality. So it’s pretty vivid.
KR: What was the shoot like?
RT: I spent the summer reading Herzog on Herzog and set out to make a movie where the shoot was like a Herzog shoot. On the first day, the path to our set flooded and we had to cut a path with machetes in order to carry a Wright-Brothers style airplane through the woods. At the moment I picked up the machete I realized what I had done to myself and to everyone I care about. We were dealing with boats and airplanes and the main character is an enormous special effect. Lee Pender played the Tinman and he was a real hero of mine. His suit is like a torture device, practically razorblade spandex. Everyone on the crew did amazing work under some pretty psychotic conditions.
KR: Are you involved with anything else other than your thesis?
RT: Zeitlin just got funding from Rooftop Films to make a movie called “Glory at Sea” in Greece, on the island of Ios. It’s about the aftermath of a shipwreck. We’re shooting the whole thing on the water. There’s barely any sets, just a few fragments of ships slowly sinking, and people strandedout in the middle of the sea. After that we’re going to go to Prague and shoot a movie in Jan Svankmajer’s studio about the Middle Ages, called “The Birth Canal”. In the immediate future I’m trying to make a few short films this semester besides my thesis and a music video for this Swedish pop group called Cake on Cake.
KR: Do you have anything else to say?
RT: Everyone should go see “The Misfits” in the Film Series. It’s amazing.