Director Statement:  Matthew Gratzner, Writer/Director/Producer

With Mutiny! I wanted to tell a story featuring the contemporary challenges we face every day-- from the personal conflict of managerial responsibility, to gender inequality and the insecurity and toxicity of overt-masculinity—and our most prominently personal challenge-- the general lack of one’s self-awareness.  The story is also a very subtle social commentary on today’s divisiveness and tribalism— with Valentine representing the far right, the Captain representing the far left, Mr. Phoebe representing center and Mr. Twiddle as the news… however all told as an Action-Adventure Comedy, set in the 17th century with swashbuckling pirates… because honestly, who doesn’t love Pirates! 

PREPRODUCTION

From the start, this film has been a true hands-on passion project for me— since I have a strong background in design and fabrication, the project gave me the opportunity to not only write and direct, but I made 99% of the costumes and fabricated all the main props.

We had three rehearsals to work out the timing of all the dialogue, blocking, and swordplay.  Since many of the actors had experience with live performance, they were able to learn and perform their roles from start to finish of each scene. 

I was very fortunate to have an absolutely, multi-talented cast—who were all terrific actors and additionally very talented theatrical combatants.  Since I also have a background in theatrical combat from many years ago, I knew what I needed specifically for each of the action beats.  Terence Rotolo (The Captain) and Robert Chapin (Valentine) choreographed the lion’s share of the fights; Then the other actors and I refined any of the moments of the Mr. Phoebe (Angie Teodora Dick) fights with Ned (Paul Anthony Scott) and Bellamy (Peter Bisson)—And Angie did a stellar job not only embodying the role of Mr. Phoebe’s personality, but her two on one fights she handled masterfully.

The character of Mr. Twiddle developed out of a happenstance relationship.  There were only five pirates in my early drafts of the script—and while the crew was following the Captain in search of the treasure, I had Ned and Bellamy playing a penny whistle and concertina to give them something to do on the march.  I would have had the actors just pantomiming the instrument playing and added the music in post.  But Bob Chapin (Valentine) a very talented musician in his own right, said it bugged him to watch people on screen faking the playing of an instrument.  

Which prompted me asking, “Besides the other six people on the planet who would notice this, your point is…?”  He suggested his friend Chris Halsted—a talented screen actor, accomplished musician, and musical theater actor—who happened to also be extremely skilled at playing the concertina.  So, I created the character of Mr. Twiddle and wrote the lyrics to the songs and Chris wrote the original sea shanty music—his character was a stellar addition to the film and gave the project greater depth.  Also, this addition to the story hammered home my theme of one’s lack of self-awareness— the Captain loves being entertained my Mr. Twiddle’s shanties, however he’s never caught on they’re always about him.   

Because we only had two days of Principal Photography, I needed to make sure every single minute of shooting ended up on the screen—so I drew around 265 story boards for the film.  This allowed me to tightly schedule the shoot and identify inserts that wouldn’t require all the cast and crew and could be bumped to a small half-day of production for another day… but more on that later…

PRINCIPAL PHOTOGRAPHY

The shoot was challenging mainly because we had to delay twice because of unseasonable rain in Los Angeles in both November and December of 2019.  We pushed our production until Mid-January 2020.  Our Producer, Camille Balsamo-Gillis, did a great job constantly pushing our shooting permits.  But once we locked our shoot dates, Principal Photography went splendidly and the cast and crew were just wonderful; Our Director of Photography, A.J. Raitano and Stedicam Operator Mic Waugh did a terrific job capturing all the moments.  However just as everything was going great… in the middle of our first day of production, a rogue storm cell, not forecast in any weather prediction, blew in with gale force winds and pouring rain.  But we still kept shooting since we couldn’t come back for another shoot day at this location and something shot is better than nothing shot.   The storm lasted about an hour and a half and fortunately wrapped up during our lunch. 

But, while the rain dripping off of everyone’s hats and costumes was hilarious, it didn’t match anything else we shot… However, thanks to Bob Chapin pushing me, we were able to quickly re-shoot all the main dialogue scenes prior to the fights on our second day of production.  And thankfully the actors were so professional and very well-rehearsed, we managed to re-shoot the entire scene from top to bottom (five script pages worth) in only an hour.  And if not for our DP A.J. and Stedicam Operator, Mic’s agility on our two cameras, we would have never made our day.

EDITORIAL

Once the film was in the can, we moved on to the edit.  Our exceptionally talented Editor, Scott Hill, was wrapping up a project but was able to start on the film in mid-February.  He did a stellar job seamlessly intercutting scenes with our impromptu reshoot.  And especially worked his editorial magic on the comedic timing and action to get every joke to land and every sword hit to be more exciting than the last.  Scott’s creative and technical contributions are invaluable to the success of this film.  After the bulk of the edit was completed, I mapped out our insert shoot to happen at the end of March… but then the world changed…

QUARANTINE TIME

With a full quarantine in Los Angeles county, we had to delay our insert shoot; But this gave me a good use of my time… building the longboat in the opening of the film.  

Originally my plan was to rent a longboat from the Los Angeles Maritime Institute and shoot it during our Principal Photography—but the boat was much too heavy to wrangle on the beach and would have eaten up our morning getting just those shots.  I decided I would build just a few insert sections of the boat and deal with the opening in tighter close-ups on our insert day—but since now I had the time, I designed and constructed an eight foot, completely sea-worthy, longboat—which represented half the length of the full-sized boat… all on my patio and in my living room…  (Thank goodness my wife has the patience of a saint) And because now the boat was larger and could float, it gave me the opportunity to widen out on some of the shots.

We finally were able to squeeze in our socially-distanced insert shoot in mid-July 2020 and it went off without a hitch-- We were able to get all of the shots needed to complete the edit.  Now it was time for Post Production!

POST PRODUCTION

Like with any film, what started as an assumed “handful of Visual Effects shots”, ballooned into about 115 different shots— the bulk being environmental augmentations.  And I was extremely fortunate to have a very multi-talented individual to be our VFX Supervisor—the same person who also happens to play the character of Valentine in the film—Bob Chapin.

The obvious shots, like the ship on the horizon and the wide shot of the pirates showing their unending path looking for the treasure were composited by Bob, with the digital painting of the ship and the matte painting landscape created by me.   And if you look carefully at the ship’s rigging, you’ll see pirates scurrying aloft… all elements of Bob and his wife Jess, he shot in their apartment!

But it’s all the invisible effects shots that always catch you by surprise—there are over twenty sky replacement shots, matching the clouds as we crosscut in the same scene shot on two different days.  And the many, many digitally painted out shots of a very large and prominent lifeguard tower on the rocky bluff that we couldn’t frame out. 

And then there’s painting out all the tourists and various looky-loos, (including the knucklehead who was driving golf balls off the background cliff) to maintain the appearance of a deserted Caribbean Island.  It was quite a bit of work, and it’s all seamless—Bob singlehandedly did an amazing job.

The post production sound company, Formosa Group did a terrific job cleaning up all of our wind-blown and ocean-crashing contaminated dialogue; Along with creating some great foley work and sound effects, then all mixed by Sound Mixer, Martyn Zub.

But it’s the Music that truly captures the feel of adventure and excitement of the film—and I cannot say enough great things about our composer, Joy Ngiaw—who did a remarkable job not only writing the score which embodies the tone and feel perfectly-- but she created and engineered all the music using digitally sampled real instruments.   Joy’s music is one of my favorite creative aspects of the film—it’s just magnificent.

The color correction was accomplished by colorist Craig Price at Gradient FX.  Olcun Tan, the owner of the company was very generous and accommodating since the work was being completed during the pandemic.

MARKETING

And finally, it was time to create a poster that exemplified the Comedy-Action-Adventure that is Mutiny!.  I wanted the poster to feel like an old-school adventure film from the ‘70’s or ‘80’s, ala the amazing poster artist Drew Struzan.  The approach I chose was to pull screen grabs of all the actors with each character in multiple positions.  Then in Photoshop, I manipulated each of the actor’s positions and facial expressions to best capture their personality and action.  But even though the images were pulled from the film’s 5K footage, it was still too grainy and in some cases details, like the actors’ eyes, were either too much in shadow or completely dark.  So, I completely repainted the characters by hand, digitally in Photoshop.  The background is an amalgamation of a photograph of the parchment map I made for the Captain’s prop in the film.  Then I utilized a torn border I made from a canvas theater prop I made years ago—digitally blended into the edge.  The parchment map I also use as the background in the main title card at the end of the film, with a digitally hand painted “Mutiny!” title. 

FILM FESTIVALS

We were very fortunate to be selected to screen in many films throughout the world—and win some awards too!  But with the pandemic in full swing, some of the film festivals had to be online—however, once vaccinations were administered, I was lucky enough to travel around the county for a number of in-person film festivals— which was a terrific experience—nothing compares to seeing a film with an audience projected on the big screen. 

MUTINY!: THE ADVENTURE CONTINUES…

When I finished writing the script, I felt the characters and their foibles would make a compelling series. During rehearsals and watching the cast interact, I saw the potential in continuing their adventure, which spurred me to draft the series’ outline of the episodes. And demand for additional stories was truly confirmed after witnessing the feedback firsthand in the various film festivals we had to travel to— So… I’m currently writing Mutiny! the Series, and targeting pitching it in the next few months.

OUR FLAG MEANS DEATH

Also, when I finished writing the script back at the end of the summer of 2019, I thought the style of the humor was similar to some of the films Taika Waititi had made, and wanted to show him our finished film and discuss the potential of a series… who would have ever imagined a year later, September 2020, coincidentally just as we were wrapping up post, it was announced Taika Waititi and show creator David Jenkins, would be making the HBO pirate comedy, Our Flag Means Death… it was CRAZY!! The similarities between the two projects is unbelievable—especially the subsequent episodes of Mutiny!, which no one from the HBO show had ever seen.  And now that Our Flag Means Death is prepping Season 2, I hope it helps get Mutiny!, the Series made…