Burning Down A House for Real When Your Low Budget Film Can't Afford CGI

When you are so used to seeing almost anything in CGI these days, setting a house on fire and burning it down on screen for a low-budget independent film becomes amazing and eye-opening. But that is exactly what I saw in a wonderful buddy road movie called Two Tickets to Paradise which I viewed at the Fine Arts Theater on Monday, April 7, 2008. The film was acted, directed, produced and co-written by D.B. SWEENEY who came to talk to us about it. His co-writer is BRIAN CURRIE. While I watched the sequence, I thought it doesn't look like CGI, but how could they afford to burn a real house down, dilapidated or not? Later, Sweeney confirmed that it wasn't CGI in an interesting story about what an independent film producer using his own money has to go through to keep down costs.

The movie itself is a funny, delightful, and heartfelt comedy about three blue-collar best buddies who have hit some snags in their lives. They are on the verge of forty and their lives, which looked so promising in their twenties, aren't what they imagined them to be. The college football hero is gambling his family's future away. The rock-n-roll aspirant drives a beer truck and is away from home too much for his wife to stay faithful, and the Valedictorian uses his smarts to be a local store clerk. It's easy for many of us to relate to what these guys are going through, even if the specifics of our lives are different.

It's blue-collar banter and sensibilities all the way through, but it is strong buddy relationships of guys who are there for each other for life whether they can express it or not. And for those of us who love these kinds of friendship stories which weather whatever you throw at them, the payoff is huge and very satisfying in the end.

It was a blue-collar tale for a reason. Sweeney, who hails from New York, said that he has many firefighter friends who were involved in the rescue and retrieval actions of the horrendous terrorist attack of 9/11. While he didn't lose any really close friends to that attack, all of his firefighter friends knew people who were lost. He said there weren't enough honor guards to bury all the firefighters properly so they were going to funerals well into February, even with going 5 days a week. Sweeney said every day was grim for his firefighter buddies.

"Every day they were going to funerals, going to the bars, and falling apart," Sweeney said. "These guys. It was tearing them apart... physically, emotionally. So I turned to them and said, you guys gotta take a night off. You gotta go bowling. I don't know, go to a movie. And they looked at each other and said, Movies? Nobody makes movies for us." And so that's what Sweeney set out to do - make a movie for guys. "Specifically for guys who when they were 20 years old, they were hot stuff. And now that they are 40, they're horseshit." In other words, many of the things that his friends recognize they are facing in their lives today.

One of the amazing things about this film is that on an independent budget of little more than a million, they managed to really burn a house down for one tiny sequence -- it wasn't even a major plot point, just some tomfoolery between the guys. I'm not sure what CGI flames would cost, but you can usually tell when they are, and when they aren't. Sweeney said that he had to travel around the area looking for an abandoned place he would be allowed to burn down and for permission to do so. Since he didn't have a large budget to make that happen, he was lucky that some people recognized him from a movie they liked and were willing to help him. After that, he tried to trade on that recognition whenever he needed favors. And luckily he's done a few recognizable films so that if one didn't produce a response, another might.

Apparently, this movie has been doing very well in festivals. Sweeney said that one of the feedback comments was that he made the movie for guys and not women. So he said, he put the Hooters section in. I don't know if he was kidding when he said that, but if he wasn't, then he doesn't know much about what appeals to women. Later, when I got to talk to him, I told him that that didn't do a thing for women... what was for women was at the end -- the three-way hug that acknowledged the importance of their friendship to each of them.

Obviously, he was more comfortable with the note from his friends that he didn't have enough T&A in it. To fix that, he put in Rollerbladers, he said. I don't remember them at all -- shows how interested I am in T&A... maybe if it was something else & A...

Anyway, he also wanted the Rollerbladers to give the feel of being in Miami for the Superbowl when they were filming in North Carolina in June. In fact, he said the challenge was to make North Carolina seem both like "Pennsylvania in winter and Miami any time. I think there are about 29 palm trees in Wilmington," he said, "and I shot every one of them 51 times."

The story about shooting the Rollerbladers is a lesson in how creative independent producers have to be when they are using their own money on a film. He was there in Miami when the Bears lost the Superbowl to the Colts and figured he should spend a day shooting South Beach and the Rollerbladers, but he couldn't afford the $200 for 10 days permit, especially when he only wanted to shoot for one day. So he asked a buddy down there who has a post production house whether he had ever shot down there. His friend said yes, but he didn't have any current permits. So Sweeney took an old one and whited out the date so he could use it for the one-day shoot. For the Rollerbladers, he couldn't afford SAG rates so he got this brilliant idea to use strippers, then admitted to us that the SAG actors would have probably been cheaper.

As luck would have it, Sweeney didn't get away with his subterfuge because the two cops who caught him filming said that the City of Miami had suspended filming during Superbowl week. What saved him was the one saying, "Hey, aren't you that guy in Fire in the Sky?" -- a movie about firefighters in which Sweeney played the lead. That recognition bought him grace, where the cops told him not to be there when they came back.

Recognition of past roles played a part in other production problems, namely burning down the house. I was glad that someone else was taken enough with that sequence to ask the question, "Did you really burn down a house?" Sweeney directed his answer to those of us in the audience who were writers, saying how much fun it is to write something like that. But then you have to go find a house to burn down and they couldn't find one. "The people in North Carolina love their houses." So he drove around North Carolina and found three houses with red X's on them and wrecking crews ready to demolish them.

So he goes up to the guy in the hard hat on the Land Rover, he says, and says, "Hi, how you doing? I'm the guy from Fire in the Sky and could you not knock down the house for five weeks because I'm trying to make a movie here?"

Did the hard hat fall over himself for the celebrity from Hollywood? No, he told Sweeney to get out of there. Sweeney said he drove to the next town over, which was Dublin, North Carolina, and he figured that it was a good thing that his name was Daniel Bernard Sweeney. Luckily, the owner lived in that town. Sweeney sought out the fire house and hoped that at least one of his movies might bring him a little good will. Whether it did or not is anyone's guess, but the firefighters offered to make burning down the house a fire training exercise if he'd buy the beer. So in the end, he got the house and the scene shot for essentially zero dollars.

Awesome people helped him make this movie, which he attributes to building relationships with people throughout his career and then just asking them if they wanted to participate. And being awed when they said yes. One guy asked him about the big hockey connection in this movie, which would obviously be a big draw for the audience Sweeney was going after. Sweeney said that he's more known for the hockey movie he made, The Cutting Edge -- that one of his oldest friends is Chris Chelios and he told him that the only way he'd put him in the movie is to make him deaf and weak, to counter the Captain America image and the fact that he is still a top guy in hockey.

Sweeney said that Wayne Gretzky has always been nice to him. That he hired his wife, Janet Jones, because she's a terrific actress but never gets much of a chance to demonstrate it. Hence, he wound up with the whole Gretzky family. "That's her mother in the scene with her. That's the Gretzky kid."

He said that Wayne was on the set every day. And he told a great story about them filming a football game in San Diego (UCLA vs UCSD game) where Wayne became his extras wrangler and handed out T-shirts and beers to the extras playing fans of each side of his fictitious teams. He also mentioned that USC became Marshall (the fictitious school) in the movie because they refused to give permission to use their logo so that they wouldn't lose the fictional game in the movie.

Asked about how he liked the various roles he had in the movie, Sweeney said he liked directing but we could keep producing. That with the best script and the best director, acting was the best job in the world, but producing was a headache. And that he'd never use his own money again.

To wrap up, Sweeney said it was a deliberate choice not to go theatrical distribution. That sometimes a theatrical release just puts a large deficit onto your movie which you then might not pay off and end up carrying onto the back of the DVD deal, which is not the best of choices.

It was a fun evening with a very enjoyable movie and a Q&A I learned a lot from, especially now when I'm producing Jim's movie and appreciate any tidbits I can get from independent producers who start a project with little capital behind them and yet persevere and make it happen.