Chris Suchorsky:
To Succeed You Have to Fail
By the end of the week, he knew he couldn’t finish. “I didn’t have the resources, I didn’t have money, I didn’t have a crew, I didn’t have anything that you’d normally need to make a film,” he says. “Very early on I had an idea that things were not going to work out, but my plan was to keep shooting and I’d get as much as I possibly could. So I ended up with about four or five hours of footage of people flubbing their lines, telling me I was a moron, of bad acting and my friends screwing around on camera. It was like a diary of an attempt to make a film.”
“An Attempt to Make a Film”
There was his inspiration. Suchorsky remembers that it was about a day or so after he had finished shooting that he got his idea for “Failure”: he could make something out of the footage that he had. Not the original something he had in mind (which, it might be worth noting at this point, was a film called “Executing Love,” written by Suchorsky himself), but something else entirely — a film about the making of a film he couldn’t make.
He thought he could test the waters by cutting a trailer first. In doing so, he could also get to know his way around Final Cut Pro. “Once the trailer got put together, I had something I was truly excited by,” he says. “Everyone I showed it to was like, ‘I really want to see this movie.’ After the trailer was done, I started working on ‘Failure.’”
“I ended up with about four or five hours of footage of people flubbing their lines, telling me I was a moron, of bad acting and my friends screwing around on camera. It was like a diary of an attempt to make a film.”
Detour
But even failure, evidently, takes effort. Suchorsky got a new day job, more rewarding and remunerative than his first, leaving him less motivated to finish failing. “I did continue to work on the film,” he says, “but I worked at a much slower pace than I normally would have if I was broke and the official starving artist. I became relaxed about the movie and focused more on my career in advertising and buying a home and so on.”
For the next two years, he tried out several ideas, but none of them really worked. Frustrated, he decided simply to finish. “Somewhere around the beginning of 2003, I just got tired of trying to change it,” he says. “The film was going to be what it was. I ended up with a 35-minute documentary.”
Waves of Success
Once he finished, though, things started to change. Around the spring of 2003, he recalls, “I started researching film festivals and submitting the film to see if I could get in or not. Amazingly, the first three film festivals I entered I got into, and the first film festival I attended I won Best Documentary. Then for eight or nine months, things died down a little bit, and I didn’t really hear anything. The film got rejected by a lot of festivals, and I thought that was the end of it.”
In reality, though, it was only the beginning. In the spring of 2004 “Failure” got picked up by several more festivals, including the Phoenix Film Festival. “All of a sudden,” he says, “I was in competition with films with Billy Crystal and Guy Pierce in them. That was a pretty big thing, a pretty interesting moment to be hanging out at a place where they’re asking you to go speak at an event with John Landis.”
He and Landis were in a seminar together, and Suchorsky couldn’t quite believe it. “They were bringing in local children to talk about filmmaking,” he says. “I mean, Landis directed ‘Animal House.’ I have a documentary about how bad a filmmaker I am. I’m not sure what they expected me to have to say to these kids.”
Once again, he thought it was over. But then he got a four-star review from “Film Threat.” Then came the biggest surprise of all. “The Independent Film Channel optioned ‘Failure’ for a three-year deal for television broadcasting,” he says. “It’s been a significantly interesting past two years.”
The Tools for Success
Apple hardware and software were critical to his being able to make and promote the film, Suchorsky says. “Not only did I use Final Cut, but I also did the website, postcard, and poster on my G5. For that I used Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, and Dreamweaver. In addition, Rich Adams used Logic Pro to score the film.”
He muses on the impact these tools have had on him: “Apple has allowed me to make my dreams come true. I’ve always wanted to make films, and I’m doing it. The film I ended up with wasn’t the film that I set out to make, but it turned out to be pretty good anyway. If it wasn’t for a Power Mac and Final Cut Pro, people like me could not make their ‘Failures’ a success.”
