“The Sprinter” Part Three: Filming
As I mentioned in the previous post, “The Sprinter” is divided into two basic shot types. There is the mad bursts of erratic imagery and noise and there is the linear narrative of the man acting out his ritual. In this post I’ll talk about filming the linear narrative of “The Sprinter.”
The day of the shoot was beautiful. Justin and I went to Ringo’s house to pick him up and to give him his wardrobe, which consisted solely of a white button up shirt. His own, high-water pants and worn in shoes would work fine. We asked him to shave. He obliged. Then we started filming.
We kept the day long shoot as organic as possible. There was no shot list or storyboards, just what felt right at that moment and in those places. Our only guide was a preconceived route that Justin had established and which we completed a number of times.
We filmed everything with a trusty Minolta XL-Sound42 that Mike Semrad loaned us which I have yet to return.
As I mentioned before, we shot everything on 8mm. I did almost all of the filming that day. Ringo is very photogenic and was a natural in front of the camera. The majority of the footage was shot in the car as we drove around, so I tried to find unexpected compositions incorporating the landscape through the windows of the car, while catching Ringo as often as possible. For some of the shots I rode with Justin in a separate car, filming Ringo as he drove the route. For others I was out on the road filming and for one shot I rode on the hood of the car, filming Ringo as he drove.
Stills of Ringo driving.
As a collaborator, Ringo was perfect. He’s not an actor by trade, but he dove headlong into the role. This would’ve been a challenge for some people – there was no dialogue, no other actors, just Ringo, driving, thinking, sprinting. He would ask us what this guy would think about, questions about his past, what kind of job did he have. Some of it we had answers for, but some of it we just left open to Ringo’s interpretation. More than an actor we thought of him as a partner.
For the final shot of the film we went to a long gravel road outside Lincoln. As I touched on before, the scene consists of the man parking the car, leaving the door open, walking between two points in the road and sprinting back to the car. Its his moment of release, its clarity in the midst of his clusterfuck world. It represents everything that is human and primal about this man, it is the tears of his grandfather manifest in every step.
We shot it a number of times, Ringo was a trooper. He almost threw up.
We filmed the final scene of the car driving away and we went and drank beers on B-Rad’s porch.
Inspiration: One of the most direct cinematic influences on us during the making of “The Sprinter” was Dziga Vertov’s “Man With a Movie Camera.” Its a silent film which follows a filmmaker as he documents life in a number of Russian cities. The film didn’t have a script or employ the use of professional actors and although it was a silent film (with no titles) it was accompanied by live music when it was released in 1929. It is a beautfiully crafted film and we felt a real kinship with Vertov’s techniques and intentions as we created “The Sprinter.”
Some of my favorite images from the film:
