Noir genre movie Night Drive is out today, telling the story of Russell (AJ Bowen), a driver in LA who picks up a new  fare, Charlotte (Sophie Dalah), who’s determined to get a box back… and in doing so changes both their lives. The movie is written and co-directed by Brad Baruh and Meghan Leon, and the latter – who’s also a preditor (that’s producer/editor, not a misspelling!) for the Marvel Studios Assembled series – chatted with Paul Simpson…

What was the original idea for this – was there a particular image? Was it the character of either of the two main characters, Russell and Charlotte, or was it the actors?

It really was the actors. My co-director Brad and I had worked with them on his previous movie called Dead Night and AJ played Sophie’s dad in that movie. We really enjoyed working with them and were trying to come up with a concept to work with them again that we could finance ourselves and was fairly self contained.

I took a lot of ride shares and Lyfts because I don’t own my own car and public transportation in Los Angeles is pretty terrible so I had that in the back of my head as a possible set up. Brad and I started breaking the story together; we knew we’d have these two characters and there would be this mysterious MacGuffin with the box.

When we finally got to ‘What’s in the box?’ Brad made this suggestion which we ended up going with.

My first instinct was ‘That’s a terrible idea’ but then the more I thought about it I realised, ‘No actually, that provides a lot of interesting possibilities.’ And so when I wrote the screenplay we backward engineered a lot of the dialogue and the character beats to play into that reveal.

Obviously it affects Charlotte’s character, and there is that same feel when you finish watching that there was in The Sixth Sense: ‘I’ve got to the end of it, right, now I’m going to go back and watch it again with the knowledge of what it is.’ When you make a movie like that, are you consciously making it for two audiences – the audience who see it the first time and the audience who sees it a second and future times? Because you can never not see this film once you’ve seen it.

That’s a good question. I honestly don’t think we really thought about it that way. We tried to just tell it as much through the Russell character’s perspective so that the viewer would be going on the ride with him. He’s obviously your eyes and ears on the story and he’s reacting in the way, hopefully, you would react if you were in a similar situation. So even though there’s a lot of heightened and strange things that happen, we keep it grounded through his point of view in the story.

There’s a lot of noir tropes that you’re mining. It could be Chandler or Philip Marlowe – you can see Bogart in AJ’s role.

Sure.

Is that genre something that you enjoyed before or is this something new to you?

No, I love noir.

It’s funny because Brad and I both have very different interests and taste in movies, AJ as well. The three of us have a Venn diagram of the different things we like and there’s a sweet spot in the middle. Brad and AJ both really like horror films and drama films like that, and I grew up watching a lot of classic movies and Bogart movies, The Maltese Falcon and things like that – Turner Classic Movies shows just tons and tons of classic movies. I’m just a big fan of that kind of storytelling and a big fan of the noir genres.

The three of us really love the Coen brothers, who definitely do a modern spin on a lot of noir stories and that was definitely, tonally, what we were going for, with the bit of humour added in there. In noir you have a man, generally, who gets wrapped up with a woman who has a lot of secrets and ends up going on a crazy adventure with her and that certainly is part of the set up in this movie.

You mention AJ as one of the creatives on it; how involved was he in the creation?

He was pretty game. We pretty much said, ‘We want to make a movie with you’ and Sophie and he said ‘I’m down for whatever.’ And because I was pretty friendly with him – we became much closer friends as we made the movie – I tried to base the character as much on him as possible and thankfully he really connected with it. He’s said that this character is the closest to him as a person than any other character he’s played before.

He definitely was an asset as far as producing – he’s the one who found Scott Poythress who played one of the other characters in the film and the two of them, I think went to college together in Georgia so they’ve been friends for a long time.

It’s tough because it’s such a small film and everybody was wearing a lot of different hats, so everybody had a lot of involvement. There would be days when it was just Brad and Sophie and AJ and I with a Zoom audio recorder in the cupholder while AJ’s driving through Los Angeles. He really has a skill for acting and driving, which is a lot harder than you think, to be navigating the streets and traffic while also remembering your lines and hitting all these emotional beats. He was really a big asset on set.

It’s presumably easier to react as yourself than to remember ‘Oh no, I’ve got to be adopting a southern accent or a stutter or particular character trait’. How much did you do on the streets of L.A and how much were you doing with back projection or similar?

We did about 50/50. We started off with the rear projection, we did about three days of that. We had done some camera test maybe six months or a year before we started shooting just to make sure that we could get it to look convincing.

Brad was also our DP and he had created the back plates that play behind them when they’re shooting. Initially we had done a really dirty test in his garage with a projector, just to see how the perspective of the plates would look and how far back we could get shooting them, figure out different angles before we ended up on a stage.

So we started with three days doing rear projection on the stage which was a good way to jump into things and we ended up doing a lot on the road.

Another thing that evolved over time was the camera rig for our picture car. It started off with one attachment and then that wouldn’t seem great so we’d get suctions and magnets and all these different cables – and it ended up being this big octopus looking thing holding the camera onto the car.

We tried to get as much stuff out in the world as possible, as safely as possible for our budget. We didn’t have the car on a trailer – AJ was actually driving it. I think we tried to show as much LA scope as possible as well with those driving shots.

What was the biggest challenge for you creating this?

I think the biggest challenge was some of the weather. When we were out on the ranch it was very unseasonably windy and rainy. We don’t generally get a lot of rain but for whatever reason it was just the luck of the draw that when we ended up on this ranch, which is very flat and dry, we had this crazy wind. There were a couple of nights where we just had to hunker down and the locations people were pretty generous and gave us another day or two for free because we weren’t really able to get as much shot as we wanted to.

Because of the crazy wind, we weren’t able to put our lights up. We had a limited light kit and we were trying to have as much of a natural look, as far as things being illuminated by the car headlights and the wind really prohibited that.

Then a couple of times we actually got flat tyres on our picture car and since it’s an independent movie, we only had the one car so we ended up having to get towed back into LA and get the tyre replaced. Another time, we got a flat tyre on Sunset Boulevard. in the middle of the afternoon!

Beside that stuff went pretty smoothly and thankfully everybody on the cast and crew was really game to just roll with everything.

If you’re shooting on Mulholland Drive or on Sunset, presumably you still have to get permits to do it or was it more guerrilla filmmaking?

It was a lot of guerrilla filmmaking. We definitely stole some shots here and there. Obviously, the hardware store and places like that we were permitted for and the ranch. But a lot of the stuff on the street, we were just running and gunning. That’s part of the fun of it, trying to get your shots as quickly as possible before somebody comes up and is like ‘Hey, what are you guys doing?’.

You’re both credited as directors, how did you work that practically?

Brad and I have worked together for I guess twelve years, doing all this stuff for Marvel. We started off doing behind the scenes material for Iron Man 2 and we’ve been doing Marvel stuff ever since then. So we’ve developed a shorthand and an understanding of each other’s strengths.

I like to say, he was pictures and I was words – he was operating the camera and I was really interacting with the actors a lot. Obviously we would consult with each other about certain things but especially because it was such a low budget film we were able to cover everything together without going completely insane.

It helped that the cast was small and that he could really focus on the visuals and I could really focus on performance and we both felt pretty confident in each other’s abilities to translate our shared vision into the final product.

Night Drive is out now on digital download from 101 Films