San Francisco - July 1st 2003

 

It was a sunny day when I was driving to SF to go to William's house for rehearsals. Somehow I was sure that I wanted to produce a simple short in which I could use just one location. In 10 seconds I had a flash I imagined one guy opening a door of a hotel room and pointing his gun straight to another guy. I began to act both roles almost like a monologue and somehow I had the sensation that it was not bad ... at all. I called my office number, I waited after the beep of my voice mail, and I said : "Who the f#@! are you ? ...I said who the F@#$ are you ?" and I kept going with "No body ...". I had to leave 5 messages on my voice mail to capture all the ideas that were popping out of my mind.

One week later I was re-playing the voice mail and writing down a simple screenplay with Pier who helped me with my English, adding some good ideas especially for the end : the title was ENCOUNTER. A couple of weeks later I sent a copy to Matt. He liked the script, our ideas, our enthusiasm. I reached him in LA, we spent one weekend together reviewing every single line of the script.

We were ready to go. I decided I wanted to play Diego and we decided to put an ad on the internet for auditioning Leroy, the other character. In one week we got 60 guys ready to come to our audition. But Matt called me: "Listen I reviewed the script ... I did some minor changes". I was scared because we were close to the audition. So I called Pier, he came over to my place and we decided to print a copy of the script each and read it, independently. He went out. Leroy was no longer in the script, instead there was a girl... LORETTA !!!

15 min later I was saying : "I have a problem ..." - "Me too" -- "I love it !" - "Me too !"

So that was a BIG problem. One week before the audition I put out another ad with "Add. female role" ... In one week we were ready to see 25 girls, after having received more than 50 emails. We made 2 rounds of auditions and we had to decide. So we decided that Me, Pier and Matt had to write down a list of 4 girls (always independently), compare the lists and try to find a compromise.

NO compromises: at the first position of every list there was Pia Shah ... so we casted her and now we're just ready to ROCK !!!

 

Luca Costa