Today we’d like to introduce you to Michael Cuenca.
Michael, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
I’m a first-generation Cuban American and I learned how to speak English through cartoons and movies I would watch on television. Since then movies have played a huge role in my daily life. There’s this Francois Truffaut quote, “Three films a day, three books a week and records of great music would be enough to make me happy to the day I die.” And that’s me in a nutshell. I watch about a movie a day. So naturally I started making my own movies. I’ve been a micro-budget filmmaker in Los Angeles for a dozen years now. I’m self-taught and self-finance everything. I’m a bartender and that’s how I’m able to have a flexible schedule and afford to do what I do.
I tried to make my first feature film when I was 24. I used up every cent I had saved from working at record shops and vintage clothing stores during my teens. It was a disaster, I never completed it, and am not very proud of the footage we shot. But I liked the supporting cast and I spun them off into their own episodic web series. This is of course before streaming was widely accepted and the norm so we had some problems getting it out there. Those who did catch it seemed to dig it and it started to build a cult-following. The show was called Oblivion and it followed a group of subculture/alternative-lifestyle characters in various melodramatic and comedic arcs. I had a couple pitches; it was never picked up but I kept making episodes anyway for a couple of years. The cast was mainly friends. Oblivion was my film school.
In 2009, after one of our Oblivion shoots, my car was broken into and all of my filmmaking gear was stolen. I was broke at the time and I couldn’t recuperate my stuff without the help of a crowdfunding campaign. By then I had to start working a nine-to-fiver, which was actually a six-to-six. I would work all day, thankfully it was data work so I was behind a computer screen, and it allowed me to touch up scripts, plan my shoots, send call sheets out, etc. and then shoot all evening, edit deep into the night, run off two hours of sleep, rinse, wash, and repeat until the weekend hit when I could film daytime scenes. Eventually, I got canned and received an “artist grant” a.k.a. unemployment (har-har), so now I could work on Oblivion full-time! But… I also couldn’t afford to pay for my own apartment! I moved into a sort-of-commune… artists of all sorts, mainly musicians, lived there. One of my roommates was Joey Halter who I had met on the set of Oblivion. He was intended as an extra but he cracked me up so much that I extended his role on the show. While living with Joe we started coming up with an idea for a series of sketches starring this character he would randomly slip into. We named him ‘Jerry’ and while writing the sketches I expanded them into a feature script mixing in my love of crime stories and pulp comics.
Jerry Powell & the Delusions of Grandeur was shot in black and white over the summer of 2011 on a budget of less than $500 and premiered in December of that same year. It follows Jerry Powell (played by Halter), a gas-huffing thief with memory distrust syndrome, and he’s an unreliable narrator. I planned on following up Jerry with my adult fairy tale Zora in Desire. A much more serious production, I had interest from Tom Waits’ people to attach him as a narrator, I had a lead actress set, I had a producer who was really passionate about the script, and then it all fell apart. I was upset. After all this hard work I gotten nowhere. So I corralled my best friends – Joe, Dan Rojay, and Steven Escot, who I also grew close to while working on Oblivion, and we decided to make an experimental feature. Kind of like an anti-film production. With a small outline, I rounded up actors that I loved working with from prior productions and we made a movie without a script – just a simple premise – making up everything as we went along. We would shoot, I’d go home and edit the material, come up with some form of a story, send the actors an outline of where we were going now, and then we’d film some more. It’s the most fun I’ve had working on anything and we all bonded. The booze, the drugs, the emotions, all real. We shot for seven days, compiling a dozen hours of footage, and I made it into a movie.
By the Wayside premiered in May 2012 at the same theater Jerry premiered it and it was the worst experience of my life. The movie ended. No one clapped. Dead silence. I was mortified. I recut the flick. Made it tighter. It played along with Jerry at the Yonkers Film Fest and it won me the HITCHCOCK AWARD FOR BEST DIRECTION.
Still, I could not get distribution for either film. So I decided to focus on music instead, playing in different incarnations of Dignitary, this dark alternative band with various friends. I made some interconnected music videos along the way for Dignitary and other Los Angeles bands, so I didn’t quit filmmaking entirely.
Dan Rojay and I collaborated on a neo-noir/detective script called Evenings With Leo. Could we make it no-budget? Maybe. But I wasn’t sure if I was ready to tackle something like that and wanted to do a lighter movie first. So what did we do? We wrote the script to I’ll Be Around, featuring a cast of hundred characters (!)… a movie that would capture my experience with the music scene, our struggles as artists, mixed in with fatalism and philosophical characters. “Lighter”, my eye! We got it out to some producers. They would make it, but only if we focused on one band and their followers, and if we changed the fate of some characters… changed the ending. We said no way, that would defeat the whole purpose of this thing. We wanted to show a domino effect and how every person we come across, no matter how big or small the part, affects our lives. “Everybody plays their part.” Like musicians in a band. But working on the script to I’ll Be Around gave me the confidence I needed to make a no-budget movie again. It really got me out of my rut. After a successful Seed&Spark crowdfunding campaign I’ll Be Around began filming in the fall of 2018. It is the most difficult thing I have ever worked on. I’m no spring chicken anymore and paying bills as a bartender, plus filming for long hours at a time, plus balancing everyday responsibilities put a tax on me. I wound up in the ER. And as usual, unable to afford a full crew, and with my assistant directors volunteering their time and rightfully being lured by paying gigs, I had to manage things on my own, with our DP Jessica Gallant being the only permanent crew member. Here’s another Truffaut quote, “Making a film is like a stagecoach ride in the old west. When you start, you are hoping for a pleasant trip. By the halfway point, you just hope to survive!”
Physically and mentally exhausted, I intended to make a backup of all the IBA footage, you know, just in case anything happened, knowing my luck. I ended up reformatting the wrong hard-drive. I wiped the assembly cut I was making of the movie, and I wiped all the footage we had been shooting for the past couple months. That was it. I thought I’m not meant to be doing this. I just can’t anymore. A dozen years as a guerilla filmmaker and I can’t anymore. But alas! Thankfully Jessica had backed up everything we had shot to that point.
I’ll Be Around wrapped principal photography in January of 2019. We had some pick-ups left and two major scenes to shoot: one with a Hypnotist, the other with a Record Shop Owner. After months of emailing, several phone conferences, and meetings to lock down actors for those parts we finally filmed the scenes this October with comedian Johah Ray as the Hypnotist and Dinosaur Jr’s J Mascis (one of my alt-rock heroes) as the Pawnbroker.
IBA was always meant to be this epic film… our intent was a two-and-a-half hour run time, so now the film exists in two cuts: my director’s version (the hang-out cut) which runs at 140 minutes and a much more streamlined, mainstream cut meant for the festival circuit at 123 minutes. The film is premiering at the 22nd San Francisco Independent Film Festival and I have several distributors interested in the project.
What are your plans for the future?
I’ve been simultaneously working on another feature that’s being shot in segments over five years to show the characters aging in real time. It’s about the friendship between these two Mod-obsessed young men in their twenties and how their friendship changes during that time span. That’s The Boys About Town and we recently finished shooting the second segment. We were set to finally start filming In the Ditch, a sequel to By the Wayside, this month but we’ve pushed it back to (hopefully) later next year due to scheduling conflicts. We had a very small window to make that movie work. Dan and I hope to find a little bit of success with IBA and maybe that could help us fund Evenings With Leo. I also have a smaller feature I would like to work on, especially after the madness that was IBA. I wrote the last draft of the script thirteen years ago and it all takes place in one location, three to four characters, simple, and can be done over a weekend.
Please tell us about Blvd Du Cinema Productions.
I’m a big fan of the French New Wave filmmakers. And those guys, especially Godard, had a crew of about five to seen people. Ingmar Bergman did as well. You don’t need all these hundreds of people standing around on set. My point is to prove that you can tell a visual story without having to spend millions and millions of dollars on a production. You can make something of decent quality for a quarter of the cost of a Hollywood production.
Do you look back particularly fondly on any memories from childhood?
All my memories are tied into movies. Or visual entertainment. Running home from school and to watch the Super Mario Bros cartoon. My brother taking me to my first comic book convention and then buying me a plethora of X-Men comics at the local comic book store. Standing in line on a hot asphalt one early Saturday morning in 1993, in line for Jurassic Park on opening weekend. Those are my warmest memories.
Contact Info:
- Website: http://mikecuenca.tumblr.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mikecuenca_
- Facebook: http://facebook.com/themichaelcuenca
- Other: https://vimeo.com/mikecuenca
Image Credit:
Gabe Huerta
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