00:00 Hello, this is Melissa, Hale-Spencer, the editor of the Altamont Enterprise, and we have a real treat today. We have the producer, director and lead actor of a new film, Joe Murphy and I really February, incredible actress, Meg Alfonso who are here to talk about the place just right, so welcome. Thank you. I'd like you to start with, where did the idea for this film come from?

00:31 Well, I guess it really Kinda two things came together. One is the movie for your audience. You have seen it yet. It's not a silent movie, but most of it takes place without dialogue. The story is it takes place after a global pandemic has left almost everybody. Most everybody dies and all the survivors are left unable to speak, so the story takes place or the action without words because I just, as somebody who likes to watch movies, I always was drawn to two movies, whether it was say a who done it or a horror movie where you know maybe there's one person being a, trying to figure something out, one person being stalked or just to people who are communicating without words and body language, facial expressions can, can really convey so much as opposed to sometimes you get a talking movie where everyone's just jabbering in and it's oftentimes not as interesting.

01:37 Yeah. I found. Watch again, it made me focus on exactly those things. You are constantly trying to interpret what was happening. It made you much more engaged than the usual sit back with a popcorn kind of thing that happens before you. You were on the edge of your seat. There was very quiet suspense in it, but it was the kind of suspense that made you participate as as it went along.

02:01 Well, I'm glad to hear you say that because that was my hope when when writing it, conceiving it and making it is you really do have to move it like this. If you're not going to have a lot of dialogue, you really do need to draw the audience in and have them kind of participate in, in, in, in the story. So.

02:19 So where did the impetus to make a movie? It's a huge undertaking. What do you do in your other life?

02:27 Well, I had in the past 10 years, I was most part most of the past 10 years. I was an attorney too. About a year ago I transitioned to doing more environmental policy advocacy and research work. But to answer your question to how did I get in to do this movie making business, I actually is my second film. I 15 years ago I kind of, I was kicking around down in Washington DC. Then I moved to New York. I seemed like a lot of fun. I knew some friends who were actors, directors, writers, and so I, I jumped into that world and did a first low budget feature and long story short, me and my wife, the whole family thing, so I thought, okay, well when you get a real career, so at the law school and became a lawyer, but now after 10 years of selling and having the kids, you, you're, you're, you're a little more settled. I just got the itch again and I thought, you know what the Heck I've done it before. I can do it again. And I had this idea and I thought this is something that I could do on a very low budget slash no budget basis. And so what I had to do then is now I've got. I wrote the story. I've got to find some actors.

03:43 Yeah. I want to hear about meg. I heard before we started in the Umat through your wife's yoga class, you were in the same class. Tell us about how you became an actress and a little about yourself as an interest. Do you mean like how he found out yourself? I've read in your five, been performing since I was tiny,

04:10 so like I had a big huge boys always or I would sing in church when I was little. I started dancing when I was five years old. I did ballet and that was performance and then when I was in high school I found theater and throw the inner. I found my love which were the acting, so I did like community theater and regional theater and I went on to study musical theater. I studied with the Abbey Theater studio in New York City, which is meisner technique, which is all about I'm using the other actor and like what they're doing to play off of that much is what I loved about Joe's film is because while it wasn't speaking, there was a lot of me playing off of him or me playing off of what was going on around us. So there was so much like. But the physical acting that we were able to nicely balance like our facial expression and what we wanted to come there because it was all strict. They, you know, imposs, you know, trying to get to the root of the emotion and the story that you're trying to tell. Yeah, I don't want to give away the story, but I'm going to give just enough so that I can ask you some other questions. So what happens is with this pandemic, it starts where it's like in an old fashioned xerox machine running off notices about it and then it, it goes

05:42 to a scene in the winter and the seasons seemed very important in the film. You get a whole sense of the time passing where

05:49 a man and a woman are clearly very, very sick and dying. And then it cuts to avert

05:58 spring scene with Joe and his character and his two children. And it becomes very clear as he looks at the wedding picture on the wall that he's lost his wife to this pandemic. And the children ultimately go on a journey with him where they end up at your place. And the thing that's really amazing is how much you do just with, as he said, facial expressions and gestures. Because it's clear that you want to be kind. But you want to protect your place and um, as the movie progresses and I don't know it, there's a whole genre of travel, travel literature, you know? Yeah. Huck Finn down the river with Jim and Carol whack and it has a lot of those qualities of on the road. Tell us about why you did the on the road thing and as you travel with your children in the movie, what kinds of things it is that you learn and come across.

07:04 Sure. Well, in terms of you kind of behind the camera, one of the reasons why we did it. We kind of turn lemons into lemonade. So this was a extremely small budget movie. So we try to turn that on its head and make that an advantage in that. Normally if you've got a lot of money, you're hiring people, you're bringing them in for a few weeks if larger budget, a few months and it's very intense. You're working shooting six days a week, sometimes seven days a week, long hours. And then everybody goes away. Um, what we did is we said, well, we can't do that, but what we can do, let's find out what people are available. Let's come in and shoot on a weekend and then if we need to come back two months later, do the next scene. Fine. We did that. We actually shot over the course of several years and thought it was one year because of the seasons that enabled us to shoot in winter, summer, fall.

08:00 And we incorporated that into the movie. So the story, you can see the timeline progressing in the story as if you had, if we had more money, we might've said, well, sorry, we can only shoot in month of July and crammed everything in the July. Um, so similarly were able to shoot a lot of different locations, um, because we didn't have to worry about a big crew going to location and setting up. We said, hey, let's hop in the car and drive to this place and shoot there. Um, and so we're able to, to do a lot of, a lot of locations and really wasn't a difficult to turn to, to break out of the set and turn it into a road movie. And one thing you had asked before about how we met meg and his ties into how we ended up making the movie is that when I met meg I wasn't thinking, oh I'm, I'm on the look for and looking for an actress.

08:52 When you're a small budget movie maker, you're looking for an actor, an actress, you're looking for someone who can help out with the crew. You're looking for someone who can, has a great interesting location that you can bomb from nanny. Right? So I met Meg, she was doing a cooking shoot for a photography shoot, personal or sap, but less. So he and his wife came and they did the photo shoot for my website. We were, we were there, the actors and the Ma and she just happened to drop in small, small, small talk that. Oh yeah, I did acting back in New York City and in my mind is going, Ding, Ding, Ding. Just met her act dress, so I filed that away in a year or two years later when I'm like, okay, I've got a big movie. I said, hey mag. Remember two years ago you said you're an actress. Well guess what I'm doing? And then went from there. Oh Wow. That's a great story. Well,

09:48 on this road trip is, and it doesn't sound eerie, it does not sound like your usual Halloween chills movie, but you and your children walk into these deserted houses and they're perfect suburban. Everything's clean, everything's neat. It looks just like your next door neighbor's house, but there's this sense of creepiness about it because of the setting and knowing there's the pandemics. So I would think when you're trying to find, you said, you know, low budget ways to do it. You probably visited your friends' houses is my gas. We did

10:24 one were the story opens up in the winter and you see some people being sick and then as you mentioned, the time passes and it's springtime and later on it seems to be summertime and there's guys walking in. My character is walking into a place to try to scavenge some food and there is a fully decked out Christmas tree and so again, that's one of the things you don't have to explain it. You don't have to have to character saying, oh Gosh, these people must've died right around Christmas right here. The context it gives you that, but we were able to shut that door and Christmas time again, the advantage of low budget movie. We didn't have to cram everything into a July shoot. We could shoot over a course of several years, so I was actually visiting my relatives in Baltimore and it's like, hey, it's early morning. Everyone else is still sleeping. I got my camera, let's shoot a scene. Oh, isn't that opportunistic filmmaker?

11:19 Well, you used it to good advantage. I'm. One of the things that carries the plot forward is once you're on the move, you need a place to settle and I think that's what makes the movie kind of universal. It isn't one of these, you know, pandemic movies where you see fields of dead bodies or it's just a very individual look at it and we all have a sense that we, we need to be in the right place. And um, when you first visit to the characters have names I don't even know. I was concerned. I kind of struggled with, for the poster and the credits, you know, because they're very rich character. But then do I want to call them, you know, girl, one girl to farm woman. Ultimately that's kind of what I've been doing and just trust that people will go see the movie and discover how rich, when I started to say the meg for lack of the farm woman, she's very independent but because she has her chickens and you know, she's able to live where you're going around with your, your character's going around with your hammer and trying to break into houses and steal little packages of processed food.

12:26 Um, but you have the sense when you first visit there that this is the right place. Cause Meg has a little boy who was friendly with the kids. And that she's tough. She's very tough. She's so nice to see you like this because you look very different. She's actually very beautiful woman, you know, with the line earrings and the edit in the film, the first scenes you're fierce, you're just fierce and even when you return and the children's play and you kind of accepted that tour of the house where you can go and where you can't.

13:10 A lot of conversations about that ask if there was some struggle because I'm not naturally like that even though my theorist person. So we're like definitely. He's like, do you want to go out and like be like more like angry about it. I'm like, oh, but like we accomplished what we needed too. Yeah. Oh Man.

13:27 It worked. It worked. And then there's a later scene where after you've gotten kind of a little comfortable with each other and no one knows what's behind the door to your room and you through gestures are inviting him in and he takes it almost like a proposition. The way I read that scene. And then you open the door and here is you're very, very sick husband behind the door and that's just such a poignant moment because it shows that you've developed a relationship and that there is something that goes beyond the fear that people feel in a situation like that. And I just wonder how much of that chemistry is because your friends or was this all what you learned with Levy in the acting techniques?

14:13 I think at that point we were pretty comfortable with each other because we had that marketing together for so long. Um, and just basically whatever I find as an actor in general and like working with Joe, like I trust Joe, but also as an actor, like when you're asked to do something, you step up to the plate and do it. That's what makes a good actor. You step outside of your comfort zone and you do what needs to be done for the character and that's how you make it realistic. And that's how you portray a story. So he's like, this is what we're trying to do. So we did that.

14:53 There were a couple of different types of experiences working with the actors. One Meg just mentioned is when meg, Meg's an experienced actor and so she gets. She knows the drill, right, so you're. You have to give each other trust and you're working together to create something artistically and then when you're working with kids, sometimes they might have a short attention span or they don't understand the process of making the movie. They may not understand the full narrative. Well, they definitely didn't know the full narrative because they didn't want to lay it on them. Oh yeah, this is a pandemic movie and everyone's dying.

15:26 No, I just saw these two young girls were playing these parts without knowing that larger arc of the story. Right. I would say in this, in this scene, this is what's happening, so you're curious here or you're or you're hiding something or you're feeling guilty and if if it's late in the day and the kids just wanted a cookie or they wanted to get the heck out of there and go play with her friends, and I knew that I would lose them. I say, okay, you know, smile, okay, okay, b, okay, frown or significant and they would do this. So, but then sometimes you know, they really go above and beyond. You were really surprised they were remote. They would, I mean they would just ad Lib things that you think, wow, I mean I've worked with trained actors who didn't do that and just the little details, like there's one habit that the young their two daughters and that the younger daughter has.

16:11 She loves to steal other little twisty things, but the things that close up those little plastic things and there's a scene where she's admiring her collection, she kind of spreads it out like a flower and you're just thinking, oh this is true. This is childhood. Even in the middle of this pandemic, you know, this is what kids do. But then it actually turns out to be part of the plot because when she provokes her sister, her sister knows a special private collection and sabotages there. So through the movie, they're these very. Anybody that's a mother. There are these very sort of familiar things that you know the kids do and they seem so natural

16:55 with each other and with you in their setting. Well that's one thing I wanted to play with is that too. I wanted the movie to kind of go touch and go with the different feelings where it's a pandemic movie. Right. But like you said, this is not a movie where there's a thousand dead bodies and we've got two young kids here and kids kind of react to their, their environment and they're always trying to create a sense of normalcy even in a very abnormal. So one to do to be able to show kids being kids and also sometimes the circumstances were draw that out. If they're bad guy showing up at they have to to run for their lives literally. And sometimes they would combine the two. For example, they had played a game where they were playing doctor but in this instance they were coughing and realize this thing maybe recreating to your opening scenes and so I'm hoping hoping that the audience will kind of appreciate it.

17:58 That's what the kids are doing. And I guess they've been real life examples of that, you know, kids playing through the horror that they've lived through. Well, tell me about the music. It seems important. I saw the credits. You also composed music for this and there's an opening as the first couple that we don't see again because they've died. They're listening to Beethoven and the radio and then later one of the daughters at the piano is playing that it seems to be kind of tell us about how you use music and in the brochure some important. And music's important because without dialogue every now and that, I just wanted to spice it up with some audio, some music, some sort of other, um, other sounds. And again, making lemonade out of lemons. We were not, we didn't have a budget to go out by popular music and modern music.

18:56 So you get music from told old dead white guys write a beethoven. He does not know you don't have to pay Beethoven anymore. And the, the actress Mandy Smith, she has actually had been playing that tune on the piano. So I thought, hey, let's put that in the movie. Um, and also it's a nice counterpoint, just such a light and sort of um, well known score that it, it um, contrast is sweating, suffering, dying. It's going on in, in the midst of it. What about the pieces that you wrote? Yeah, they'll was just us goofing around on the piano, not a great piano player. Some people, my family are taking lessons and so I would just tinker around. I thought, hey, I kinda like this chord progression here. And so I thought it might might fit the mood for opening the movie has a little bit of, a little bit of atmospheric sound to it and then at the end to kind of pep peppier version and it just seemed to fit.

20:04 So what is it you hope people will get out of this movie? What is it? Why did you go both of you to all this trouble to create this? I did it because it's fun making movies is fun and I wanted to work with these people. I had known the kids for awhile and I know nothing and the other folks in the meg and I know from a previous acting and directing experience is just a lot of fun. Um, and then to be able to create, take the project that you worked on, editing it and then show to strangers and have them appreciate it. That's kind of a second level kind of enjoyment. Yeah. I want to talk about the marketing of it and the prize you won. But another thing I just wanted to reflect on, and

20:48 maybe you can both help me. What struck me, because dialogue is so rare in the movie. It's only in the flashbacks. Your wife, your husband and you know, you know, that you remembering. You don't have to do the fuzzy thing because people are talking and that seemed with your husband's just a tiny little scene in the kitchen and the boy is now, I don't know, waist high, but he's, you know, in one of those slings. So He's a baby and your husband is asking you sort of what you need and you're, you're just, your face is entirely different. Your posture is entirely different than in the current time that the movie set and you're, you say, you know, basically I don't need anything babe. Hold on line, but just tell a little about what it's like to go through the silent film and then Andy's tiny little with your wife or your husband. These memories that were you playing like a different character almost. Then

21:50 it's the same character. If you reflect upon like a real life where you have a good moment when you're in a good point in your life when everything is going well for the most part and you have the people around you that you love. That was just, that was her when she hadn't gone through all of this pain and like last, like they have both gone through so much loss like myself and don't run the fat. I'm like, he had lost his wife. My husband was sick. Um, so in, in a sense I had last time I had lost that aspect. But when you go back to current and day, you see someone who's fighting for what she has, trying to protect what she has. She's essentially on her own. That's enough to change a person. She's on guard. Take on God. There's that one scene where she like holds hands with a little girl. You just feel like, oh, it see the layers of who she was before all of that stuff happened. She starts to warm up to them, but I'm winning bond through that amount of pain. It does change you as a person. Yeah.

23:02 So I know you won an award and I have to look at my notes to see what it was. The next big thing. Independent filmmakers festival. You got

23:10 32 prize. So tell us about the festival and when. What the prize was Mitch. Good thing. Independent filmmakers festival. It's actually an inaugural festival. First Year fest down in Alexandria and we submitted an online screener and we were fortunate enough to be one of the films selected, so I was thrilled just to be selected into the festival and then I found out that was one of the. They gave three different prizes and we were one of the prize winners and so that, wow, this is, this is, this is really rewarding because you do, you do all the work on the movie and He'd do it. The movie should be its own reward and it is, it's fun. But then when someone else could get the external validation, it's like, oh, well that's even better. So really appreciate that. So how, what happens next with the film?

23:55 How are you going to market it? Where can people eventually see it? Sure. Well, there's a two step process. This next 12 months or so, we've, we've already started submitting the film to festivals around the country more so northeast region because I want, if I get into a festival, I want to be able to go to be able to drive there and promote the film and you know, meet the, the, the festival goers ever been to a festival. Tell me what they're like. Have you been to them too? Just because the two of you to a festival. There are many different types of their big ones, little ones. There are original regional ones that might be one for specific theme, like a women's film festival or lgbt festival. We're environmental festival, um, so, and you have to pick and choose you unless you've got unlimited budget for festival fees.

24:50 So I, I, you know, I've been spending them to festivals that are on smaller scale side and that more regional that might have an interest in it into local or regional filmmaker. And so basically it film festivals operate on the idea that, you know, where people who love films and there's an audience for something that's off the beaten path. You know, if you want to go see a Hollywood movie, you just go to the multiplex. Um, if you want to see an independent movie, it's a little easier nowadays with Netflix and everything else, but there's still some, something magical about coming to a theater with other people who love movies and watching something new and getting just a different perspective. And uh, there's an audience for that. This is an audience for that. Most every place you go. And so the fun thing about being at a festival is not just going to see the movies but being with some like minded folks and it's kind of like going to a, to a and to see an art show if you have people there who enjoy, you know, staring at a painting and getting something out of it and a to, is that comradery, they're not very different experience to be around people who live towns and like who like kind of like spend time like interpreting it.

26:03 I definitely see what you're saying is that yeah, they probably share the same vocabulary and see things that people like myself and don't really see because we haven't made one film expert anything that if you'd just like to watch movies so you can go to a film festival and you have an opportunity to see something that you might not see at the regular theater. So. So at what point is the general public going to be able to see this film? Tentatively we're planning to do with theatrical release about a year from now, next October. Uh, certainly in Albany and perhaps some surrounding areas as well, and if we do well at festival, some would hope for, as you do well at festivals, you win some awards and you get some interest from a film distributor who might say, well, we want to pick up your movie and we're going to promote your movie and we're going to distribute it on a wider basis. So that's what we hope for, but if that doesn't work out, we'll just, we're in a theater and sell some tickets locally and then, and then that'd be thanks to the Internet, you can put it up on the Internet and there are various platforms for doing that. So you could download watching. Yeah. Watching for a dollar buy for $5 or whatever, whatever the pricing may be.

27:19 So Meg, I want to hear what's next for you as an actress and I love it if you could back up, I think it was in September that you put on when color girls considered suicide, when the rainbow isn't enough, what, what, um, what are you doing in the future? And tell us a little about that. So, um,

27:36 where a for colored girls, that was a production that I did in September, I babbling, but I'm, it's been a play that has been on my mind for 10 years, so a decade. Um, it was, I picked up the Choreo palm on top of a and a during a point in my life where I was having a really rough time and art to me like performance art that I make is all about what I interpreted it in everyday life, like about humanity, like how people interact about like my own soft. So that was really a passion project for me. Um, and I use that play to tell a story about all the things that women go through. And we did a shadows green. So we took the play the script and we did the script as is but added contemporary artistic elements. So I also choreographed, we had additional dance numbers, there was music, there was a shadow screens, we have shadows playing in the background memories. We use all different parts of the theater. We did immersive parts of the show is a very, um, wonderful, exhausting, Cathartic.

28:53 Well, that's the beauty of live theater, but it's also makes me so sad because I missed it. You can't go see it. Like you can see a film later. It was. But here's the thing, the next project

29:03 I'm working on, it was born out of doing that project, so I'm creating a documentary you found that I decided to do when working on the plane, so I have footage of that. The surgical performance footage of rehearsals, interviews, that documentary is about self love post trauma. So it's about women and the trauma they go through and how they heal from it. And what happens after. How are you do the work?

29:36 Well, I have to have you back once you finished the documentary. That's fascinating. So part of the footage is going to be from the rehearsals and performance that happened in September, but you're interweaving it with interviews

29:48 when they're interviewed two other people. Uh, if we got some funding, I'd like to do some interviews in different communities, but as for an hour, just like local interviews, which I think would be a very interesting documentary. Is it focusing on women of color or is it trauma in general? The majority of women of color, but I'm also interviewing women who are not of color, so it's really about the story, you know, because I find in the play for colored girls it was primarily about when I've called her, it was about women of color, but there are aspects of that play that can act to speak to a white person, white person get all like. And it's all about like, I feel like it's finding that humanity, you being able to see something through someone else's eyes and that's what art shows us. It takes us on a journey that we otherwise are resistant to or we're not open to. We don't experience. It allows us to see what we do not see. And with this documentary with doing the play, that's what I want to shut off.

31:00 Sounds very ambitious but very worthwhile. So I guess we are almost, we are out of time, but just to kind of turn that back on you, what is it from your film using Meg's kind of frame for why you do art? What, what is it you hope that it taught people are showing people that they might not have thought of had they not seen your film? Well, no, I think there's a connection

31:26 if you do art well, you're going to have a connection between the artists and the audience and that's something that we strove for, uh, when we're, when we're making the movie. You were editing the movie and something I got out of megs play with a seat at the Albany Barn and it was a very powerful experience. So I think that you had two projects there and I'm looking forward to seeing Meg's documentary. Just to follow up, you have to ask where to see the movie and I was remiss I didn't tell you that we have a website, www dot the place just right. Dot Com. If you go there, you can see a two minute trailer of the movie and see. Read about the actors and.

32:11 Good, I'm glad you got that out there because you could sign up. Check that, sign up and we'll tell you when. Great. Well do either of you have any closing thoughts? I know you have many, many deep thoughts, but things that you think are so important to you, it didn't come to that website. That's really a really exciting website. You got a lot on there, but any, any philosophical clothing and closing thoughts, anything to our listeners

32:40 with is they go about their busy lives. I feel like, you know, like when I kind of got from doe and from myself is like if you feel the desire to make art, do it. You know, we need more art in the world. Good art thought bar. Yeah, I think. I think meg, meg set at all. Great. Well thank you so much.

 
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