The part of “Drew McCullough”
was originally written as an American but as we worked with the script, Pattie
Kelly kept seeing Victor Burke in the part.
We had met Victor, a very talented and successful Irish actor, a couple
of years ago when he had spent some time in the U.S. As we began the casting process, we auditioned a number of actors
for the part of Drew but could never get Victor out of our heads, so we lured
him over to read for the final callbacks and sure enough, when he and Salli
Saffioti (Lacy Hamilton) read together, that was it. We had our Drew and Lacy.
Just prior to beginning
pre-production on “Welcome to September”, we had worked with David Leisure on
another project. It occurred to us that
he could be a very interesting “Elliott Faydo”, and once he read the script, he
agreed. While classically trained,
Leisure is best known for his comedic roles and the part of “Elliott” gave him
a chance to explore the inner workings of a very interesting, multi faceted
character.
Our crew was made of up
veteran production personnel as well as students from the Long Beach State Film
Department. What an amazing
collaboration between the pros and the young aspiring filmmakers! The students played an active part in the
production in all departments from camera to lighting and grip to art
department and wardrobe. Everyone worked
beautifully together and we think everyone, pros and students alike learned
something from each other. All of the
students working with us were amazingly talented, dedicated and
professional. Such a pleasure and we
thank them for a job very well done!
Because
of our very tight production budget, we had to get a bit creative with our
locations. For example, the art gallery
is actually a hair salon downstairs from our production office. The owner graciously allowed us to dismantle
the salon and had the faith that we could get it back together again. That got a little dicey around 1 a.m. one
night when the art department photos of what the salon used to look like were
so out of focus, we couldn’t tell exactly where everything went. Good news though, the owner of the salon
loved the way we “redecorated”! Other
locations that were creatively created included Lacy’s apartment – the living
room of the producer’s house, Drew’s bedroom – an empty office in our building,
Taskey’s Carpets – a building management office next to ours, Gi’s garden and
Elliott’s house – our associate producer’s back yard and living room and Buck’s
bar and Lucy’s diner – two standing sets at a prop house in Sun Valley. The only location that we didn’t have to
create was the Laundromat. Exteriors
were generally completely different locations from the interiors, but it all
worked together seamlessly due to great scouting and careful planning.