Presidential Palace in Asunción

2011
     
Lucas and I returned to Santa Fe, but in December, I had to turn around and go back to Paraguay, to Asuncion. My mother had been diagnosed with brain cancer and had only two months to live. I had a wonderful time with her and my siblings once more. My mom and I read a whole book together. Then she flew away with 2010 to the nether realms. I am so grateful that Lucas met her and for all those days we spent together as a family. I felt even more charged to renew my efforts on BETWEEN LIFETIMES.

While I was in Asuncion,  I heard a story from the housekeeper, about truckloads of body parts that the military had dumped in the slum where she lives. This happened during the Coup-d'etat, when President Stroessner was run out of Paraguay after a streak of 34 years of iron rule. That incident and others, gave me an idea for a new script. It's amazing how one gets impressed as a tourist -that is what I am now to Paraguay- and then inch by inch one falls in love with it again. There is no way to completely decipher human nature. Thank God for small things.

After missing two flights back and making it to my mother's funeral in a serendipitous turn of events, I was back at Crystal Mesa Farm.

It is time to look for locations, refine the script, always be aware of the funding, break down the script, put together a crew, and pay for it all somehow, either with money, sweat, or shares.

In April, we visited with Alan, a line producer who we liked right away, because of his earnest, simple approach to life and filmmaking. If I can work with this man once, it will be worthwhile. And should once be good, why not do it always? I am a sucker for small crowds, which renders me mediocre in the shmoozing realm. But I am a firm believer that, at the right time, the right people and funding come together. One has to keep the senses open to seize these instances.

So, is life easy? Absolutely not. That is not why I came here to earth. But life is exciting, challenging, and full of surprises.

Downtown Asunción: First movie theater I ever went to watch Godzila with my mom. Now sits abandoned and empty.

Last week, Lucas went to India with his former principal and classmates from middle school. As I am standing at the airport, in walks this unassuming guy who looks like someone I should know. Then, I recognize him. He was my first choice for the lead character in BETWEEN LIFETIMES-After wondering if I should bother him, I decide to give it a try. What do I have to lose?... really. I am truly free for a while. I caught up with him in the security area. We spoke just a little. He was very cordial and introduced himself. I gave him my card, and lo and behold, when I got back home, he had already sent me an email asking me for the script. He made my day, regardless of whether he likes the script or not. It is just so reassuring to know that not every Hollywood actor or actress is so full of themselves and their appearance. He is the kind of person I would invite to my house or introduce to my friends.  He is perfect for the part in every way. Who knows, he might like BETWEEN LIFETIMES. But I must keep pushing forward.

Possible location here for the entrance to small town in Mexico

Locations: I have been traveling up and down New Mexico. I believe I could shoot the entire film right here in the land of enchantment. Mexico is there, should we want to use it. And Bourbon Street in New Orleans, in my friend Claudio's store, Marie Laveau's House of Voodoo.

There are the scenes I shot in China, and some Paleolithic caveman-like outtakes in Joshua tree. This is nothing short of an exciting roller coaster. My job is to stay alive while I keep pushing forward.

So finally I am up-to-date with the beginning of this dream. Please feel free to join me, if only by  sending good energy. Everything counts. With that, here is a quote I received from the Kabbalah Centre -another journey I started in Paraguay, thanks to my sister Sonia.

Push Your Rock 

Wednesday July 27, 2011 

There once was a man who had a huge desire to please God, so he prayed day and night until one day a Voice spoke to him, “I want you to go and push a rock.”

The man woke up the next morning elated, and ran outside to find a huge boulder.  He began pushing it, but nothing happened, so he kept at it all day.  The next day he did the same, yet it still didn’t budge an inch.  He went on like that for     three months, until one day he got so frustrated that he stopped pushing.

That night he had a dream, and the Voice asked him, “Why did you stop pushing?”  “Nothing happened,” he answered. “Nothing happened? Look at you! Look how determined and focused you’ve become. Look how powerful your  muscles are now. You’re no longer the person you were when you started. 

Besides, I didn’t tell you to move the rock; I told you to push it. I’ll move the rock when it’s time.”

Keep pushing your rock.  It'll move at the right moment, in the perfect time, when you least expect it.  And amazing things are happening, even if you're not noticing them yet.

Dawn at Crystal Mesa Farm

2010

Although Mexico was not the right place to pursue a life, we were able to unplug for some time to come back with renewed vigor, and although Philippine and I are no longer romantically linked we remain dear friends.  I wouldn't have it any other way. Gracias Mexico.

When it was time to say goodbye to the sea, I drove straight back from Sayulita to Santa Fe in twenty-nine hours. In Mexico, the speed on the toll roads, are reminiscent of the Autobahn in Germany. I only stopped in Mazatlan to watch the semi-final of the World Cup between Spain and Germany. Go Spain!

Well, little more than a day later, I was at my friend Marie’s Bed and Breakfast, the Crystal Mesa Farm, where I settled in and have remained ever since. It is such a wonderful place with the perfect back porch. During moonlit nights, it feels as if here, one lives at the bottom of the ocean.

It was time to reconnect. To go back to BETWEEN LIFETIMES with a vengeance. My friends and I started WISDOM TRIBE FILMS. It is a blessing to work with people one likes and respects. I actually love Carrie and Lauri. Carrie is in New York, although she lives on the Jersey side in Demarest. Lauri is an incredibly intuitive camera guy with a Finnish name who knows why the whites in the monitor are not true whites -because they are in the wrong format or whatever. He amazes me with his mind that can easily understand a digital image or a stroke of pastel when he paints on canvas.

Opa and Oma's house - 1938

In August of 2010 I went to Paraguay. That is where I come from. It is hard to take Paraguay out of the boy. With Lucas, I visited my family, introduced him to my mom for the first time. On a cold winter evening, in a ceremony on the majestic Paraguay River, I also buried my dear friend Alexis Gonzales. During his lifetime Alexis directed many theatre productions around the world, and on several occasions served as jury at the Cannes Film Fest.

Lucas and I literally went to the edge of civilization after spending the night in a German colony having Sauerkraut, and all sorts of German goodies, for lunch. We visited the ruins of my grandparents' home; Jews who had escaped from Vienna in 1938 -the industrialists transplanted to the jungles of Paraguay during World War II. An old man of about seventy five, Inocencio, took us to the stone walls and the well, all that remained of the house at the foot of a hill. Turns out Inocencio knew my father as a child. 

Ireneo's wife does the laundry by the stream on the side of the road, January 2011

My father died 30 years ago 20 miles away from there, at the edge of the jungle. I took Lucas to the little cross on the road that commemorated my father's death right by the site of his foreman's house. The house of the foreman, Mr. Venancio, wasn't there anymore. But we found him. He now lives, where 30 years ago, except for one house, civilization ended. Now, over the hill, and across the stream there were about twenty homes. Lucas and I felt as if we were in Africa in the 1800's. It felt like we were approaching the edge of the world. Lucas felt so good, he wanted me to teach him Spanish, and when we were done with Spanish, Guarani. Guarani is the language that remains from the Native Americans; the peasants adopted it as their language. This makes Paraguay a bilingual country.                        

                                              

My father on a cart pulled by oxen circa 1950 in Paraguay

Back to the USA.

Sayulita

2009

By 2009 I found myself a little discouraged from trying to get BETWEEN LIFETIMES funded, and after a few rejections, this interesting French Lady, Philippine, showed up in my life and we headed off to Sayulita, Mexico, thirty miles north of Puerto Vallarta, where we spent a good part of 2009 and some of 2010. But Mexico by the Pacific ocean, as wonderful as it can feel, was not for me. After months, it can feel like a "one-way ticket to Palookaville". The mountains speak their own language, very foreign to skyscrapers. And the sea wants to be quiet. It only understands its own roar.  Lucas lived in Santa Fe with his mom, so I had to come back and forth. Also my friends Mary and Marie who may as well be family to me, live in Santa Fe, and of course Lauri Hakola, my business partner, friend and Director of Photography, and chosen brother. This traveling back and forth proved to be too hard. Eventually, both Philippine and I had to come back; I for Lucas and she, for her son, Sage.

Mountains East of Vallarta

In Mexico, I was still able to find beautiful locations for the ending of BETWEEN LIFETIMES. One after another, places of a sensuous nature showed themselves, beckoning me to stay, to come back, to not forget…

We visited deserted beaches, jungles exploding with colors and palm trees, we climbed on cliffs by the Pacific ocean. Philippine loved it so much she bought a piece of Land in Sayulita. We visited Patzcuaro and Janitzio for the Day of the Dead, spend a few nights in Morelia, an old city that reminds me of Madrid in places. We even lived in Puerto Vallarta for a month, six blocks from where Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor lived during the making of NIGHT OF THE IGUANA. It wasn’t all easy, but Mexico was wonderful. 

Cruz de Huanacaxtle

These places, indelibly etched in my mind seemed the perfect setting for parts of BETWEEN LIFETIMES; the more I saw, the more the script pulled me back to attention. I had put it aside for long enough and, even with its perfect location, Mexico was not the place to resurrect the film. It was time to cross back over the border again, back to Santa Fe, this time for good. It was time to get back to work.

American Civil War

2008

In 2008 I woke up from that “dream” with a finished script. Now, I just needed to find the funding and everything would come together. Not so easy.

There are thousands of writers, filmmakers, con-artists, pseudo-artists and bad filmmakers, vying for the same window. And if you say film, everyone looks at you with dollar signs in their faces until they see you are not coming from Hollywood. And the first, superficial doors close. These are great times to meet and know the friends who will remain in one’s life.

There were some close calls. People were interested in investing or serving as guarantors. There was even an offer to work with people from India. At the moment it sounded so good, since the story involves re-incarnation. But this situation as well as a few others fell through for different reasons, such as discrepancy in budgets, misunderstandings, and even one group being interested in acquiring the script and work with their own people to produce the film. My goal is to make this film, not to write scripts and sell them. That rejection was mutual, but it was disappointing nevertheless.

2008 came to an end with a few re-writes, associates that never became, and a slight feeling of gloom. 

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.

China

In the second half  of 2007, I lost everything after divorce. It was my choice.  I had to jump in the driver seat of a cab for about six months while I worked on the script. There was an Irony here. New drivers don't get many calls and don't get the best calls either. So, I spent a great deal of time waiting for rides working on BETWEEN LIFETIMES. I guess, that was my first professional writing gig, since I was being paid to write in long waiting hours.

When I finished the script, I had to leave the taxi company. It just wasn't conducive to a healthy life. The lack of sleep and especially the bad, fast food, when the sugar lows were at their lowest in the middle of shifts, added to the cast of characters who would jump in and sometimes make you think you were having an out of body experience--as in nightmare.

Working in a place where my services were not quite noticed came in really handy. And eventually, by the end of 2007, the first draft of the feature length BETWEEN LIFETIMES emerged.

2006

The ideas of time-travel and of multiple lifetimes have always intrigued me in their similarities. It's the stuff of fantasies and stories throughout history. And somehow in these times the idea of multiple lifetimes has become more accepted.

The biggest inspiration for the story was hearing Lucas as a toddler, speak about the time he was in the stars before he came here to earth. Of course it might just have been his imagination. Later on he would come up with these fantastic stories where he was one of the players -stories about traveling in time, planting the tree of life, walking on water, or being able to visit any place in the world and live there for a whole year in a matter of seconds. He told one friend that I had battled the Nazis in a U-boat and then narrowly escaped by hitching a ride on a dolphin while he rode on a whale. His young friend, of course believed every word.

I started to see the value of his jumping around in his imagination. And I started to draw from it myself. At the same time I, was going from one lifetime into another in the rocket ship of divorce. My ex-wife and I had always written together. As a response to our separation, I decided that it was time for me to strike out on my own.

In the beginning I had no high aspirations. I was looking to make a short film. I finished the first draft; 22 pages.