Chris Suchorsky:
To Succeed You Have to Fail
You have a lifelong dream of making a movie. You decide it’s high time you made good that dream. So you hire your friends to act. You rent equipment. You wake up earlier than you’ve ever waked up in your life.
But you encounter some problems. Your friends can’t act. You barely know how to operate the filmmaking paraphernalia, which you could ill afford to rent anyway. Your vacation time runs out.
Now what do you do?
Well, if you’re Chis Suchorsky, you turn that — your failure to make a movie — into your movie. You call it “Failure” — but Steve Herold at Upstage Magazine calls it “a hilarious look at the world of low-budget filmmaking.” An official selection at the Tambay and Phoenix film festivals, it also wins Best Documentary at the Back East Picture Show (a Hoboken, New Jersey, film festival). And the Independent Film Channel broadcasts it. Dreams do come true.
“When I finished college, I decided I wanted to do the Robert Rodriguez kind of thing, where you write your own script, get your friends together, and make a film.”
His Story
Suchorsky’s dream started early. Cable TV entered his New Jersey home when he was four. “It was 1980,” he remembers. “Cable blew me away. I loved movies. And I started to watch a lot of the behind-the-scenes specials that would be on HBO. I’d watch ‘The Making of “The Empire Strikes Back”’ or ‘The Making of “Fraggle Rock.”’ Anything. I wanted to be a filmmaker.”
His parents, however, had different ideas about his future. “My parents wanted me to go to college, get a degree, get medical benefits, and work like a dog forever,” he says. “I wasn’t big on that.”
Nonetheless, he struck a deal with his parents: he’d earn a “safe degree” and they would in turn send him to graduate film school. (For the record, his mother doesn’t recall making this deal.) En route to keeping his end of the deal, Suchorsky enrolled in a class called “Film Production.” This was nirvana, he says.
He started taking as many film classes as possible. “I even took classes I wasn’t in,” he says. “If there was a film class offered, I’d just show up and do the work and learn, without receiving any credits for the class.”
Finally getting to work with film gave him some big ideas. “When I finished college,” Suchorsky says, “I decided I wanted to do the Robert Rodriguez [of ‘El Mariachi’ fame] kind of thing, where you write your own script, get your friends together, and make a film.”
Ever since cable TV entered his home when he was four, Chris Suchorsky wanted to be a filmmaker.
He knew he needed to learn Final Cut Pro to edit his film, but his resources were so limited he couldn’t buy it himself. He got creative. “I basically talked my bosses into buying a version for the company, so I could start doing motion graphics for them,” he says. “The real idea was that I wanted to learn it to edit the film.”
Reel Life
First, however, there were some hard realities to face, like having little experience and even less money. “I could barely afford my car payment and gas to get me to work,” he says. Upon graduation, he had found an entry-level job at a small ad firm. “I decided to write a script while I was sitting there and figured by the next summer I could take some vacation time, rent a bunch of equipment for a few days, and shoot the film.”
For the next year, Suchorsky prepared himself, reading everything he could about screenwriting and filmmaking.
Disaster
Finally, he was ready. But was he? “The summer of 2000, I set out to make my first feature-length film,” he says. “But I did no preproduction at all. I decided to wing it like Kevin Smith and Robert Rodriguez, to put all my expenses on credit cards and go. I figured that you didn’t really have to plan anything. So I started shooting the film not knowing how to use anything. I don’t even know how to use the cameras I rented.”
In other words, failure seemed inevitable. “The first night, I had to go to New York to rent equipment,” explains Suchorsky. “By the time I got the equipment back from the city and got the actors together, we had already missed a day of shooting. And by the time I was ready to shoot, they were kind of delirious, and at that point they didn’t really feel like acting. I was the one doing the shooting, the directing; I’m holding the boom pole, I’m doing the audio. While I’m trying to figure out how to work the stuff, my actors were getting drunk. It’s only the first night and everything is already falling apart.”
