Guerrilla Filming with Martina Reese
Art for the Sake of Art
By CIRCE McNAUGHTON
Despite having a degree in Graphic Design and a day job as the Director of Marketing and Communications at Concordia University, Martina Reese spends her weekends knee deep in creek water with a 10 pound camera slung over her shoulder trying to capture a perfect shot. She didn’t pick up a camera or even write a script until 50, but since she started she hasn’t stopped. She has five short fiction films under her belt and a sixth one–which I had the pleasure of starring in– currently in post production. She writes, directs and produces each film herself, primarily working with first time actors to generate a piece of gritty realism.
Martina struggled finding her niche in college. She took a year off from school before attending the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she changed her major three times. “I’ve always been a little developmentally challenged,” she laughs. She describes herself as a “generalist,” and explains it has “always been hard for [her] to narrow that into one tiny little major.” She entered college with ambitions of being a foreign diplomat and graduated with a degree in graphic design. This eventually lead to her becoming the Director of Communications and Marketing at Concordia University.
She remembers watching the film majors check out equipment on campus and never having a compulsion to study film. “I look back on that and wonder ‘why?’” she says, frustrated, then continues to explain, “years and years and years later… on a whim, I signed up for a digital film making course at a local community college.” Going through a divorce and having one of her two children leave for college left her feeling isolated. “I was also self-employed at the time,” she says, “so I just wanted to do something. Get out of the house.” She thought film would be a good technical skill set to have as a graphic designer, and at the time she didn’t necessarily see it as a mode of creating a narrative or communicating an idea. But when she started the classes she “fell in love with it and had no interest in doing anything practical with it.
“I just felt like I had ideas and my ideas flowed freely, it wasn’t a chore or a labor to come up with an idea for a project… and then there was a lure to turn these ideas into a project”
Her filmmaking “started off with a bunch of little pleasant surprises.” Her first film entitled “Vicky Gets Dressed,” stars her daughter, Victoria Reese, getting dressed and has no dialogue. One Boy, starring her son, Andrew Reese, has 12 spoken words in it. Both of them clock in at under five minutes. “I didn’t think of [film] as a script… I thought of it as visuals and mood and communicating a lot non-verbally.” This juxtaposes her most recent film, Floating Man, which is a 40 minute long, dialogue driven film. The evolution of her films wasn’t always pretty, though.
“I did make a movie a couple years into my [film] career called Out, which had a lot of words and when it was all done I just thought it was the biggest piece of shit. It was like embarrassing, so I pulled back from that and then, again, started making films with very few spoken words.”
When her films are light on dialogue, the focus for her is “trying to communicate a lot. Not by over explaining but by leaving things mysterious and open-ended.” She wanted to try her hand at dialogue again with Floating Man. She laughs and says, “I fell into the deep doo-doo trap of writing a whole lot of words and now I’m trying to sort that one out.”
“My first film was very simple.” She explains she just set a camera down and recorded her daughter examining herself in different outfits in the mirror. The biggest issue she had during production was Vicky getting annoyed and tired of filming. This foreshadows Martina’s biggest roadblock with filmmaking: finding people willing to be unpaid actors. Prospective actors tend to have a little skepticism when agreeing to work with Martina. She says, “it’s like, ‘what do you want me to do?’ ‘is this going to be a waste of time?’ ‘will I be embarrassed?’” In the beginning, before she had a large body of work to show people, “it was difficult to get people on board.” Even when people say yes, “no ones knows what they’re getting themselves into.” Lots of people say no, “but a surprising amount of wonderful people say yes and then we have these amazing experiences.”
Which actors sign on often dictate what films Martina can make. She explains, “I approached two high school girls about a movie I had about death, and one after the other, they politely declined. So that was the end of that movie.” She laughs, then goes on to reminisce about Floating Man, “But I had another movie idea about two young women who go on a kayak trip and find a dead body, so I hit up my daughter’s friend, Belinda, and her friend Circe”—that’s me!—“and they said “Uh, Yeah! We’ll do that!’ So that movie got made.” That’s how Martina’s projects either get green-lit and or shot down.
Martina explains that her favorite aspect of filmmaking is “the sense of lives crossing paths with people and we sort of walk this path together and then we have this record of what we did together that will always be there. And as we age and change and move on there’s this little sweet moment that’s been captured forever.”
“I’ve been able to get more ambitious as I’ve gotten some people in my life who are willing to work with me, film after film.” Susan Erickson, a film professor at Concordia, has worked on four of Martina’s films. She prompted our lines during the Floating Man shoot and was an invaluable asset to the filmmaking process.
Since she doesn’t have access to sets or theatres, available locations also drive which narrative arcs Martina can write. Setting itself is huge hurdle for her films. She explains, “it all becomes a matter of where can I shoot without being kicked our or having other people bother me.” She admits that “a lot of [her] movies are driven by that very thing. Where can [she] shoot without getting busted?” Often times, this lands Martina in risqué situations with people abrasively telling her she can’t film there. She laughs as she remembers, “I shot a scene in an ‘L car by doing a bit of guerilla filming while the real car was running,” which resulted in city employees kicking her and her dozens of extras off the car. Martina reveals a lot of the filming is done haphazardly and is very unglamorous. She says a lot of times, she’s screaming demands like “push the wheelchair while I sit it in with the camera so we can get a tracking shot,” to her helpers.
Martina admits she doesn’t know what she plans to do with her films. “I was a finalist for a film festival. I almost made it into a film festival—the Athens Film Festival. I didn’t even realize until months later that is was Athens, Ohio, not Athens, Greece!” She doesn’t plan on stopping anytime soon, though. Floating Man is halfway through post-production and she is already planning on another longer, dialogue driven film. “In an ideal world, I would make film full-time. But it’s not an ideal world.” She reveals she has no intentions of making practical films, which is why she keeps her filmmaking a secret from her employers, fearing they’d request her to direct promotional videos. “I want to make art, not commercials.” She elaborates, “I’m pretty discrete around my place of work that I even do have this hobby, because I don’t think there’s anyway that people finding out that I love filmmaking and like my job can be good for me, professionally.” As far as trying to transition to professional filmmaking goes, Martina explains that during a panel at the Chicago Short Film Festival, she heard dozens of young filmmakers asking questions about funding and distribution and she realized something.
“I just don’t feel like figuring out how to distribute my six flawed short films is a really big issue for me. I can just chill about that. I’ll put ‘em on Youtube. If people wanna watch them, I’ll send them the links.”
