Max Rissman’s debut feature, the supernatural romance Upon Waking, is out February 14. Ever since he was four years old, when he forced his parents to watch and subsequently act out The Wizard of Oz with him nightly, he has been captivated by the power of stories to transform the mundane into the magical. After attending college at Washington University in St. Louis and completing New York University’s MFA program in filmmaking, he followed the yellow brick road to Los Angeles, where he has been creating stories about characters coming of age and embarking on journeys of self-discovery. His web series Root for the Villain was an official selection of the 2018 Austin Film Festival, and his feature screenplay Hit Me Harder was featured on the 2020 GLAAD List.
As any filmmaker knows, there are so many unknown variables, so many uncontrollable circumstances, so many things that can go both horribly wrong and shockingly right when making a movie. Like jumping from a 10-story building and landing in a thimble of water, no sane person would accept the impossible odds of everything perfectly falling into place.
You feel vulnerable and exposed, making a massive bet in time, energy, money and creativity, with the slimmest chance of succeeding. You rip your heart out of your chest and hold it out for all the world to poke and prod and judge. You plan and schedule and visualize and struggle to think through every detail in advance, and then it all goes to shit. But then the shit spontaneously congeals into the form of a Michelangelo sculpture. Sometimes there is nothing you can do but appeal to the mercy of the movie gods, and more often than not they benevolently intervene at the last possible minute, rescuing wayward filmmakers from disaster and doom.
Throughout the making of Upon Waking, my upcoming supernatural romance film, I felt like a plaything of the movie gods. I was constantly being tossed about on the waves of uncertainty and doubt, but life preservers kept falling in front of me just as I thought I was about to drown. I spent more than a year writing first drafts that went nowhere, desperately wanting to abandon ship and work on something new and fresh, but deep down understanding that I needed to plod onward, no matter how long it took. Eventually the story began to reveal itself, though it felt less as if I were creating than as if the story were finally allowing me to discover it.
Once the script had undergone sufficient drafts, I had to take the terrifying next step of actually picking a target shoot date and committing to make the film a reality. I knew that I would be dedicating years of my life and a large amount of my personal funds into the project, and I had no guarantee that it would ever see the light of day. I knew relatively few cast and crew in Los Angeles, where I was living and intended to shoot the film, and I had to rely on scores of people who I’d never met before and lacked shared history and trust. It was a far cry from the world of film school, where I was surrounded by friends and collaborators with whom I’d built longstanding relationships.
My experiences making Upon Waking were relatively tame compared to the on-set horror stories I’ve heard from other filmmakers, but we had no shortage of close calls and near disasters. Our first producer and cinematographer dropped out, but that’s standard fare. We cast the two lead actors a week before shooting and the rest of the cast on our lunch breaks during that first week, but that’s not particularly unusual.
Then there was the emergency dental procedure that one of our lead actors needed the day before principal photography. It was a weekend, but luckily one of our producers was friends with a dentist who came in after hours.
There was the saboteur, jilted because she hadn’t been brought onto the project as a producer, who did her best to shut our production down with any means at her disposal. She reported bogus labor violations to the Screen Actors Guild and tried to have our Canadian cinematographer’s work visa revoked.
There was the week the entire cast and crew got sick, but thank goodness it wasn’t Covid, or else our entire movie would have gone belly up. Mercifully, it seemed to hit everyone one at a time, so only one person was hacking and coughing between takes on any given day.
There were times when I felt arrows were raining down all around me as I madly dashed through an obstacle course. But I also felt the protection of some guiding hand, which nudged me in the right direction and picked me up when I fell on my face. I didn’t know what I was doing half of the time, but I knew that if I just kept running forward, I would eventually make it to the other side. Now, six years after I started writing the first draft of the script, I am finally making it to the other side, ready to share Upon Waking with the world.
From the first time I stared at the blank Final Draft document, with no idea what story I even wanted to tell, through all the near misses and close calls, and finally culminating in the struggle to find a distribution deal, fear and uncertainty were my constant companions. But I also felt the steady guidance of a force greater than myself which prompted me to keep taking one step after another. Call it the “movie gods,” or anything else that might suit your fancy, but without them this film, or any other, would have been impossible.
And in a way, filmmaking is excellent training for life in general. We never know what is around the corner, what obstacles might be in our way and which of our plans might fall apart. If you stop your routine to think about how you truly have no idea what the next five minutes might bring, you might be paralyzed with fear. I know I sometimes am. The only way I am able to cope is to trust that the universe is at least somewhat benevolent, that creative work wants to be born, and that an artist who embarks on an impossible mission can trust in the aid of something unseen and impossible to explain.
Featured image shows Max Rissman with actor Elsie Hewitt on the set of Upon Waking.
