Digging Deep

Don't go down to the basement: cellar director Ben Hickernell (here) and actors Lenny Haas and Pete Pryor (below).
Photo By: Michael T. Regan

FestIndies' cellar gives new meaning to the term "underground film."

by Elisa Ludwig

The synopsis of cellar sounds like one of those brainteasers about an icicle and a corpse: Two friends who have been estranged for eight years wake up to discover they are trapped in somebody's basement. They have nothing but a pantry full of canned food, a can opener and a gun with one bullet.

The dramatic possibilities are endless, and Ben Hickernell has explored quite a few of them. In its lifetime, cellar has been a stage play, a Fringe Festival performance, and now Hickernell's first feature, the opening night selection for this year's Festival of Independents.

Hickernell, the longtime beau of CP food and listings editor Juliet Fletcher, initially conceived cellar with his Haverford College classmate, Bill Dawe. Both were members of the school's Lighted Fools comedy troupe, and they repeatedly improvised the scenario to write the script, imagining themselves in the leads to draw out the psychological reality of living in captivity. "We were really interested in how Western contemporary people who have never been at this baseline of existence would handle the situation," says Hickernell. "Where do you go to the bathroom if there's no toilet? Where do you sleep if there's no bed? And of course, these philosophical questions come up when you drop all the external stimuli. When we improvised, our conversations were usually questions, like, "Is this still my life if the life I knew is still out there?'"

In play form, cellar was last staged at the 2001 Fringe Festival. Two years later, Hickernell took a break from acting in Philadelphia to intern with New York production company This is That, best known for the films 21 Grams and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. At This is That, Hickernell saw producers working against the grain to produce idiosyncratic, compelling movies. The experience got him thinking about other ways to make films with artistic integrity in the post-Miramax era.

Drawing from his own background, Hickernell devised a model based on the theater world. "Theaters have always been run as nonprofits with grants from foundations. I thought it would be interesting to make films that way," he says.

To test out the idea, Hickernell formed Reconstruction Pictures. When the company began looking for its first project, cellar seemed like an obvious choice, and he forged a partnership with Theater Exile to co-produce the film. It was a simple story that could be filmed with a low budget, and its early life onstage made it an especially good fit for the hybrid entity.

"The Theater Exile thing was emblematic because this film really has a theater sensibility," says Hickernell. The crew, he points out, came mainly from local theater, and the cast consists of Barrymore nominee Lenny Haas (Ned) and Barrymore winner Pete Pryor (Fenton) in the leads, and Karen Peakes and David Howey in supporting roles.

The nonprofit model allowed the company to approach funding in a novel way. Part of Reconstruction Pictures' modus operandi was to spend most of its budget on talent rather than technical equipment (the entire film, including the score, was edited on a Macintosh computer). "People have been amazed that for such a low-budget movie the acting is so good. I think it's because everybody was able to take three weeks off to make the movie," Hickernell says.

Bringing the play to the screen had its challenges. Hickernell's prior experience in film production included a two-hour feature he made in high school called Tough Cookies 3 (1 and 2 were shorts) and freelance production work. The play had to be rewritten to work as a film, and Hickernell added flashbacks and gave characters Ned and Fenton a new life outside the cellar.

During the Fringe, cellar was staged underneath AKA Records in Old City, where Hickernell could essentially subject his audience to the same confinement and dusty atmosphere Fenton and Ned endure. "People would cough down there, but afterward they would say they thought it was cool that they could experience what the characters were experiencing," he says.

For the movie, realism had to be achieved through camera work. Inspired by the grainy look (and, perhaps, the lowercase title) of 28 days later, Hickernell decided to shoot on digital 24p video, which he felt would add to the aura of dark suspense while tapering production costs. Sixty percent of cinematographer Mike Vechesky's camerawork was handheld, so when Fenton first wakes up, disoriented and panicked, the camera seems to be absorbing the reality of the situation along with him. Lighting principally relied on two sources — the basement's naked light bulb and a spot on the actors. Most scenes take place in the cellar, and Fenton's and Ned's flashbacks are set inside their homes so there is no visual reprieve from the story's claustrophobia.

With its static staging and ambient quiet, the film retains a theatrical feel. But for the stage-trained actors, the filming was more intimate than anything they'd done onstage. "There is something really personal and private about working on a film, because you're in this basement with no audience and you can get sucked in to this feeling that it's really happening," says Lenny Haas.

In that same spirit of verisimilitude, Haas did not wash his hair for three weeks. The two lead actors also couldn't shave or clip their fingernails during the shoot. While the dirt on their faces came courtesy of makeup artists and assistant directors Deb Seif and Whitney Estrin, the stains on their clothes are genuine basement dust. "The hardest part was actually getting there for the day and putting on the same clothes that hadn't been washed," says Haas.

If nothing else, cellar has proven that it's possible to make a smart, engaging film that doesn't exploit its cast and crew or rely on a formula of two parts explosions to one part breasts. While he's not sure the theater-film collaboration will be sustainable over the long haul, Hickernell would like to expand his nonprofit concept into an arts center that produces one feature a year while offering film education classes to the community. He already has an idea for his next low-budget film, which he plans to begin shooting in 2006. In the meantime, Hickernell hopes cellar will appear in other festivals and that he can eventually sell it to video. "It's not that my ambitions are modest. They are ambitious ambitions. But they have much less to do with dating Paris Hilton or buying an island off the coast of Mexico. Telling a good story is much more fulfilling. And fun."

cellar screens Fri., April 8, 7:15 p.m. at International House and Mon., April 18, 9:30 p.m. at the Prince Music Theater.

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