Here's one way to make a film on a shoestring budget: seek out celebrities on the street, writes Sasha Brodsky.
ALAN COOKE WORE out 10 pairs of shoes while filming his documentary Home. He estimates that he walked 10,000 miles through the streets of New York as he tried to capture his experience as an Irish immigrant arriving in the city.
The end of Cooke's long journey may finally be in sight. The movie was shown on TG4, at the Galway Film Fleadh last week and will be shown again at the Irish Film Institute in Dublin on August 24th. It has already appeared at film festivals in the US.
The miracle may be that Homewas made at all. In this era of blockbuster budgets, narrator-producer Cooke and director Dawn Scibilia managed to make a feature-length documentary featuring A-list celebrities such as Liam Neeson, Mike Meyers and Susan Sarandon - all on a budget of less than $50,000 (€32,700).
Homehad its start in 2001, when Cooke arrived in New York on a month's holiday. The lean, bearded 38-year-old Dubliner was taking a break from an acting career that included a role in Conor McPherson's Rum & Vodka. "I was very quickly caught up in the city's poetry," says Cooke. "It was just such an interesting place that I ended up not leaving for five years."
Cooke wanted to write a play about his experiences in New York but it wasn't going anywhere until he discovered that Scibilia, his neighbour in Brooklyn, was a recent film-school graduate. They decided to make a film together based on Cooke's impressions of the city, interlaced with interviews with as many famous people as they could muster.
Cooke spent months working the phones to try to line-up celebrities. "It was pretty surreal because I'd be sitting in my boxer shorts in my kitchen having these agents call and tell me that Mr So and So would be returning my call," Cooke said. "The next minute my landlord would call and be wondering where our rent was."
They bagged the biggest name in the film, Liam Neeson, through one of those happy accidents that seem to happen surprisingly often in New York. Cooke was sunning himself in Central Park when he spotted Neeson walking by. "I went up and introduced myself as a fellow Irish actor and we started talking," Cooke says. "I couldn't believe my luck."
The writer Frank McCourt says it was Cooke's persistence that got him on camera. "There's an almost shy quality about Alan," McCourt says. "It's like he doesn't want to bother you but he doesn't give up." McCourt was also impressed by Cooke's roster of stars. "He got everyone...Jesus, he got Woody Allen and that's like getting God himself."
At times, all it took was legwork to get the interviews. Scibilia met Susan Sarandon at a film premiere and introduced herself. They found actor Rosie Perez after waiting for her outside the theatre of a Broadway show she was performing in. "I thought she would shoot us for a second there," Cooke says. "But then she took us back to her dressing room and we did the interview."
As they interviewed stars, Cooke and Scibilia tried to camouflage the fact that they were working without a budget. The film's $50,000 price tag is a paltry sum even by the standards of independent documentaries and they made the money themselves rather than looking for investors.
Cooke had a variety of day jobs ranging from selling construction equipment to moving furniture during which he was run over by a truck in the Bronx and nearly killed.
They saved money by shooting the film digitally and found the small camera to be more flexible. "We were able to get a more realistic, intimate portrait of the city because the camera is less obtrusive," says Scibilia, sipping a cup of tea in a café in New York's West Village.
They pinched pennies by working without a crew. In the film, Cooke talks about how much New York reminds him of Dublin, describing Brooklyn brownstone buildings carved up into smaller living spaces.
He missed Ireland and the Irish sense of humour, describing it as "a certain way we laugh about things even though they seem incredibly dark". But Cooke says he needed to escape Dublin to find "a sense of possibility". "Dublin is a small town, New York is a city," he says.
There is a moody quality to Home. While the film barely touches on 9/11, Cooke talks about the shadow left by the attack. At one point in the film, he says: "I came in 2001 and everyone says the city wasn't the same. But the risk, the leap of faith is what makes the journey."
The filmmakers' own leap of faith continued once they finished filming. Post-production took six months, as Scibilia holed up in her basement studio editing their footage. Musician friends contributed to the movie's soundtrack because Cooke couldn't afford to buy the rights to commercial music.
As they neared the end of production, their nerves were beginning to fray. Cooke's wife was getting sick of hearing the word "home".
Finally, their persistence began to pay off. The documentary was shown at a festival at New York's Lincoln Center. Film director Jim Sheridan wrote that Home, "beautifully captures the Irish immigrant's journey through the myth and mystery of New York". The positive reviews and word of mouth got the film airtime on several US television stations.
Last year, Cooke moved back to Ireland with his wife to write a book about his New York experiences which had left such a strong imprint. "I felt like a ghost when I came back to Ireland because so much of me had changed when I came back from New York. The city will always stay with me."
STARRY ENCOUNTERS
SUSAN SARANDON, actor"What you try to do when you travel to someplace else is let go of who you are so you can absorb what it's like."
WOODY ALLEN, film-maker"The ironic thing about my perceptions of New York is that so much of it comes not from New York, but from Hollywood's conception of New York."
FRANK MCCOURT, author"In New York you're always about to discover something and I think sometimes it's your own soul."
PETE HAMILL, author"You can arrive here at 15 from some other place, from Haiti or the Dominican Republic or Europe or some place and you're a New Yorker two days later."
MIKE MYERS, actor"From my point of view, New York has the right to talk about itself constantly. I grew up in a city that has no dish, there's no Toronto food, there's not one song written about it and there's not one famous movie."
LIAM NEESON, actor"When you do go back to Ireland, or home then as it was, people would ask about New York,
'What was it like, what was it like?' And you say,
'Well it was like, this happened and that happened . . . I'd like to go again for a holiday, but I wouldn't like to be raising a family there,' I always remember saying.
"And of course that's exactly what I'm doing now, raising a family right in the heart of New York."