By ELEANOR O'SULLIVAN
MOVIE WRITER
FOR YOUR consideration: a young filmmaker with a paper-thin budget but plenty of passion for the job.
Vince Pereira is hunched over an editing machine in a small room that's jammed with no-frills furniture, a fax machine, empty soda cans, empty junk food bags and snippets of film in brownish piles. He's in grunge attire and he's talking deliberately, quickly and with verve.
He's talking about sacrificing for the art of making movies.
"I sit here late at night and agonize over shots. Like whether or not they're two frames too short. I'll look at them and say, 'I shouldn't have taken those frames out!' I'd cut out five frames of footage, and not thinking, just sort of tossed them aside.
"And then an hour later, I'd look at the scene and realize I needed those five frames. So I'd be here in the middle of the night, with all the footage poured on the floor, looking for these five frames of film. That happened three or four times and I always found them."
You couldn't invent for the big screen a more typical scenario for a struggling independent filmmaker even if you had the $25 million Hollywood pours into the average movie these days.
In contrast, Pereira spent $40,000 officially, plus about $3,000 from his pocket and from his friend-producer, Paul Finn, to make a first-time independent effort called "A Better Place."
Shoestring, yes, but insubstantial, no. "A Better Place" has a singular style and strong lead performances. In the film, two outcast adolescents, one a newcomer to school, the other a self-confessed misanthrope, become buddies and take on a school bully with violent consequences.
Scott Mosier, who has produced "Clerks" and "Mallrats" for Red Bank-based Kevin Smith, is executive producer with Smith on Pereira's film.
"What do I think of Vince's film? I think he did a great job. On a first film, you can tell how really good it is by the performances, that's really the way to test it, and the editing. Vinnie got really good performances from his two lead guys, and the editing works," Mosier says.
Smith attributes his entry into film to Pereira.
"Vincent was actually a role model for me in the early days, back when I didn't know anything about filmmaking," Smith says. "I'd been into writing, and Vinnie actually was the most encouraging person I'd met at the time. He was the first one who read pages from 'Clerks.'
"He said, 'This is good, you should keep going.' He was kind of the guy who inspired the whole thing. Were it not for Vinnie, I don't know whether I'd be sitting in this (production) office in Red Bank."
"Vinnie's isn't an audience pleaser like 'Clerks.' It can get relentless at times. People might become uncomfortable with some of the stuff in there. To be perfectly honest, I don't think Vinnie's film could get the distribution that 'Clerks' did."
Pereira says the tough subject matter of his debut effort just seemed a natural way to go.
"I'm not into comedies as the type of thing that I want to do. When I first got into films, I got into horror films as a young kid and they got me interested in making films," Pereira says.
Growing up in the Leonardo section of Middletown Township -- elementary and middle school in Leonardo followed by graduation from Middletown High School South -- Pereira regularly went with his father, Kenneth Pereira, Leonardo, to the UA Middletown movie theater on Route 35.
"This was in the mid-1980s, and they had a revival double feature of 'Texas Chainsaw Massacre' and some new horror film, and we'd go and see those. Or it would be 'Dawn of the Dead' and 'Creep Show.' That was always fun."
Pereira said his influences include the films of horrormeisters John Carpenter, Dario Argento and George Romero, visionaries Stanley Kubrick and Peter Weir, and classicist David Lean.
"I've always been interested in dark subject matter, but I didn't want to make a horror film for my first because people who make horror films wind up getting stuck and that's all they ever make. I wanted to make a film that dealt with darkness and violence but that wasn't a horror film. And I've always been interested in stories about teen-agers. I was first inspired by the case in Britain of the two 11-year-olds who abducted the 2-year-old and murdered him on train tracks."
The murder took place in February 1993.
And, Pereira says, his misanthropic protagonist was drawn partially from his own experiences.
"He reflects a certain extreme side of myself as sort of being anti-social and very much a loner in high school," Pereira says. "I had a core group of friends but I didn't socialize with the higher echelon, if you will. This film is me getting out all that repressed teen-age angst in a positive way by turning it into a piece of celluloid."
He said he went home one day and wrote 10 pages and asked Smith for his opinion. He knew Smith would tell him if it were bad, he said. "He read it and he was really into it, so I kept going. Then I slowed down for a while, either because I got lazy or was scared."
Pereira shelved the script for months. Then "Clerks" became a hit and Smith, back from on-the-road promotion of his film, visited Pereira at the convenience store.
"'You know Vinnie, you should finish writing that script. That was a really good idea and if you write it, I'll produce it,'" Pereira said Smith told him. "That got me going again."
From that point, Pereira said he wrote in earnest, reading new material over the telephone to his friend Finn, a talented editor who eventually became the film's producer. Pereira finished the first draft March 1, 1995, brought it to Minnesota where Smith was filming "Mallrats," and the trio of Pereira, Smith and Mosier decided filming should begin in the summer of 1995.
A second draft, which Smith approved after its middle section was "smoothed out," followed. Auditions were held in early June, and filming began Aug. 7 -- with not enough time or money to indulge in the fancy directorial footwork of his idols, Pereira says. "Your budget dictates that you have a three-week shooting schedule, so there isn't much time to say more than 'tone it down,'" Pereira says.
There was an early snafu with the first cinematographer -- he failed to show up, sending a newcomer instead -- but Pereira says the shooting went smoothly. The bulk of the film was shot in Leonardo, including at Pereira's home on Burlington Avenue, and his old haunt, the beach near an abandoned lighthouse. He says he wrote the script with these locations in mind.
"His initial reaction was very negative," Pereira says. "He gave us a laundry list of problems, of things that he suggested we cut. He felt we had a film but he didn't trust me to edit it, but within a week, I cut a half-hour out of the film and showed it to him, and he changed his opinion entirely. He liked it a lot."
"It's a very personal, honest film," Hawk says. "And for a first-time effort, that is very important. So many young filmmakers try to do these parodies or farces that have nothing to do with their lives. Vinnie has made a movie that comes from within himself and I admire him for that."
Hawk said he was impressed that Pereira was willing to edit his work without fuss.
"He let his babies go, as all artists must," Hawk says. "That is the sign of a real professional."
"His comments very much coincided with my opinion," Pereira says. "There were scenes that weren't working that I knew about in the rough cut. While you're filming, it's hard to tell, but when you get it back here in the editing room, it's perfectly obvious. Luckily we had enough that worked that we have a 90-minute film."
Mosier also is optimistic that "A Better Place" would be picked up by a European film festival. In fact, he says, Europe "could be the real market for Vinnie's movie.
"Ultimately, you want both American and European distribution, but in the end, if it does happen that you only play European film festivals and it does very well, then you can go back to people here and maybe get $250,000, $300,000 for your next film.
"The (independent film) ladder is a lot longer and it takes longer to get to the top, but it's nothing to shake a stick at," Mosier says. "It's just a different avenue that a lot of people have to take."
Two essentials in negotiating that fragile ladder are producers like Mosier and Smith and dedicated filmmakers like Pereira.
"It's a high risk," Mosier says. "We don't have the time to hang over the shoulders of these people and watch everything they do. We were in post-production on 'Mallrats' and basically it had to be, 'Vinnie, here's the money and I hope you figure it out as you go along.' You know they're passionate enough, you know they'll work all kinds of hours. You know it will get done."
Posted: 06/06/96 04:30:16 PM