The_Film_That_Changed_My_Life

128 Austin Chick
Chick: The very first film I made in my first year in film school. Well, backtracking
a little bit: I saw that Wenders movie, and then it was later in that year
that I suddenly realized that film was what I should try to do. It didn’t immediately
dawn on me. I knew there were two ways to become a filmmaker. You
work on a film and you try to work your way up. And obviously a lot of people
were going to film school. I didn’t really know anything about film school, but
I ended up figuring out where I should go and going to film school.
So the very first film that I made there was really just a straight-up
Wenders rip-off. Films of that time, Kings of the Road, Alice in the Cities,
films with an essential protagonist, two protagonists, sort of wandering
aimlessly. With some bare bones to the story, but really just an excuse to
sort of move the camera through a bunch of different locations and to create
a feeling. Maybe explore some thematic issues but not really any real plot. So
I did this short; it was ten minutes. It was the only short I’ve ever done.
What was it called?
Chick: It was called Arrive. It opens in an airport, JFK. It’s about a guy who
returns to New York who had been traveling in India for a while, and he’s
come back without telling anyone he’s come back. He is without any place
to go. So he calls a friend, looking for a place to stay. He calls a number of
people, and he’s unable to reach anybody, including his friend upstate. He
figures he’ll just go up there and hope he’s able to reach him. So he takes a
train to upstate New York, gets there, still can’t reach his friend, and ends up
wandering around this unnamed upstate town. We actually shot it in Peaks
Hill, and Ossining, and a couple of other places, so we combined the small
towns within an hour of the city. He wanders around all day killing time,
calling his friend. This is the early ’90s before cell phones, so he keeps getting
the guy’s answering machine, and the outgoing message on the machine is
“Blues for Sale.” You know that song?
I think so, yeah.
Chick: Great song. He keeps calling and leaving messages and ultimately
never gets ahold of his friend. He wanders out of town and sleeps in the
woods. That’s the end of the film. I shot it in black and white, 16mm black
and white. It was all shot without any sound, so all the sound was dubbed