2007

In the first half of 2007, I shot some of the first few scenes for BETWEEN LIFETIMES and I realized that the story was incomplete and broken. There was a beautiful tale hidden behind the cute vignettes that I saw as a small story.

The filmed scenes became a demo that is now on Youtube. The small scope of the project required that I played the lead for the demo, partly because I had a hard time finding the right actors. Most of those audition videos shall never be shown. I will hide them even from myself.

I took advantage of the fact that I was in the lead role, and filmed myself in scenes wherever I thought it appropriate. Around the time, I had gone to northern China on a business trip that turned into a little dangerous adventure hiding from gangsters in Dalian , west of Korea. I ended up in Fushun, where the last Emperor of China, Pu Yi, spent imprisoned for many years. Once released, he spent the rest of his life as a gardener.

I spent a week in Fushun with the translator for the gangsters and her parents. Doris (her Western name), a sweet girl, who did not want to go in the direction she saw as wrong, showed me a bit of the non-tourist China. In one trip to the castle of the first Manchu emperor, Nourhachi, we found costumes, so I made up some situations that would fit in the fifteenth century, and added them to the archives for the demo. Who knows? Some of those scenes may end up in the final cut.