Lost Mexican Highway

By Juan Data
“I’ve always been interested in the connection of animal spirits and things like that… the afterlife. What happens when you die? Maybe through evolution, somehow, there’re still animal instincts connected to us.” That’s the initial premise behind Ryan Harper’s first feature movie, Circulation, the story of a Mexican woman who suffers a car accident after being kidnapped on an empty highway in Baja California, Mexico.

But Circulation, which will be premiering on June 7th at The Roxy Theatre in San Francisco and was selected for the horror and sci-fi film festival Another Hole In The Head, is a lot more than a bizarre b-class indie flick with a little bit of gore. Circulation is also the story of a college teacher with a degree in biochemistry that one day, while having some beers at the local bar with his childhood best friend, made the resolution, “why can’t I make a movie? I like to write and I can figure out how to film a movie!”

With absolutely no background in filmmaking and no connections to the industry, he started the lonely journey of self-producing his own first movie. To make matters even more difficult, he decided the movie would be totally shot in location in Mexico, oh, and did we mention he doesn’t speak Spanish?

“Right before I had that discussion with my friend about making a movie, I took a long trip to Mexico. I was driving the truck, the same one you see in the movie, all the way down to Cabo San Lucas and back, on a two weeks road-trip by myself. And I remember driving one night and I fell asleep on the side of the road, and I woke up and it was the middle of the night but I didn’t know what time it was because I didn’t have a watch. I’m like ‘I can’t go back to sleep so I might just get on the road and start driving’ and… I thought that I was driving for like five hours, or eight hours, indefinitely, and it never became light and I thought ‘well maybe I died and this is like my afterlife, just driving this highway forever’. That’s where the idea came from.”

Q1: Exactly how dangerous was filming in Mexico?
- People say it’s dangerous, I never had any problem.
- I certainly looks dangerous in your movie!
- Yeah, but you know, people always warned me “don’t go to Mexico” or whatever, but I’ve been down there a lot of times I never had any problems. Never heard of anybody having any serious problems.

The challenges of self-producing your own big screen debut are many more than regular people think. First of all, you have to come up with a budget. “I kinda have a rough idea for the budget,” explains Ryan whose only income source at the time was a part-time teaching position, “My dad gave me 5 thousand dollars and my aunt gave me another 5. I paid for the rest. Maxed out my credit cards. It ended up being 50 grand total and for me that’s a lot of money, but not so much for a normal film made in a foreign country”.

Q2: What other difficulties did you encounter while filming in Mexico?
- There were far less problems than I imagined. Everybody was very hospitable. I got all the permits before hand. I had to get a permit from the State of Baja and one from the city of San Felipe and the highway. They were all very easy to get, people were very nice. The people from the highway patrol didn’t even gave us a permit, they just said it was OK to come down and shoot there… on an email…. and that was it!

Circulation is a bilingual movie with subtitles. The main star, Yvonne De La Rosa only speaks Spanish throughout the film. Her counterpart Sherman Koltz does all the English talking. Ryan says he was dating a Mexican girl while working on the script and she helped him with the Spanish dialogue, but his original idea was not to use subtitles.

Later in the production process he changed his mind, the movie, directed in the style of David Lynch and David Cronenberg, was already confusing enough as it was. “The plot isn’t very clear, a lot of people are confused by the movie because it’s not straight forward and I don’t give any answers, you kinda have to figure it out. Also the characters are doing things that are very animalistic, but the audience might not realize why. Luckily most of the reviewers, played close attention to the movie and they seemed to get it, but I’ve shown it to friends and family member who didn’t understand it.”

Someone who apparently loves challenges, Ryan Harper is already planning his next big move for his filmmaking career. He’s flying to Iraq, all by himself, to shoot a documentary “about film makers in Iraq. About a film festival that takes place in Baghdad,” and he concludes, “my parents still don’t know, so I’ probably won’t send them this interview.”

Visit webpage www.circulationfilm.com

Monday, June 9, 2008  |  Share This