This project has been in a drawer for a long time now. It was my grad school thesis film that I wanted to make when I went back to Lithuania in 04/05. It proved to be way too ambitious. At the time I think it was a 30 page script. The whole thing crashed and burned, bam, straight into a brick wall of problems (see November 04 in the archive) ouch. It was a reckoning for sure.
I'm glad it failed when it did, no long-term damage done and I hadn't spent any real money on it yet. I've been slowly growing it ever since into a feature length script. When I was in Lithuania last October I met with another producer. It was a reminder of just how tough it is to get something like this done there. There's almost no industry, so there's almost no equipment around that's worthwhile. No money. But there are lots of theatre actors and lots of raw talent. And maybe more than anything, the whole country is jam packed with locations that are visually striking and completely authentic. I'm kind of hedging until the HD technology is ready for something as tough as this and within my reach financially.
The story is about a young man's rapid decent from innocent boyhood to soldierdom and guerrilla war in the forest. The initial inspiration came from my coworker Gintaras. He was my good friend and coworker when I was teaching English during Peace Corps in a small town called Kupiskis.
His story was simple. He said his uncle used to sleep sitting up with one hand under his chin and another across his leg. We were at his little ramshackle country cottage when he told the story. He tells stories a certain way, and his big ones almost always start with a mysterious opener. I was still new. I'd only been in Lithuania for six months at the time. I had no idea where I was and hadn't begun to tap into the things that had happened there.
"What?"
"That's how he slept in those days when one wind blew red and the other blew green. That's how it was in little farm houses like this one."
"Why did he sleep like that?" I didn't even know why he was talking about his uncle. I was watching TV on a tiny Russian made black and white.
"He went into the forest to help. He was some kind of patriot you know. In those days, the wind blew red during the day, the Soviets would come to take food." He was peeling vegetables with a knife and dropping them into a pan. His huge thumbs worked a carrot. "At night the wind blew green." He pointed out the kitchen window toward the trees.
"So that's the red wind, the Soviets. So what's the green wind?"
"The Forest Brothers, they were living in the forests. The partisans."
"Why at night?"
"That's the only time it was safe for them to move. They came to farms to get bread or potatoes, but you see it meant that the farmers were feeding both sides. They were trapped."
"So why did he sleep like that."
"He slept like that the rest of his life. I remember watching him in our apartment in Vilnius. He sat sleeping on the edge of his bed like this." He sat resting his head on one hand hand and crossing his lap with the other. "He was waiting to fight. He slept sitting on logs in the forest. Waiting in case of a fight, this hand on his gun."
The image of a man sleeping like that, was a lightning strike on my imagination. What forces, what fears could be so strong that they could shape a man's behavior like that? Gintaras has a way of lighting history up. It's the moment that got me started on this.
Since then I've learned a lot of Lithuania's history and its tremendously dark and difficult. In less than a 80 years there've been four occupations, the Jewish holocaust, mass deportations to Siberia, over fifty years of Soviet occupation and two eras of democracy and independence. And much of the history is still alive in the memories and personalities of the oldest generation. It makes it an incredible place to talk to people. Its a little country physically, you can drive across it in less than a day. There are only around 3 million people, but it's a case study in human behavior and survival that seems almost infinitely deep.
Today, the old people who lived through WWII and the era of Stalinization that followed tell these stories with so much emotion that it can be overwhelming. There's a sense of urgency. Time is passing and the stories haven't been told. Under the Soviets history was suppressed, so it wasn't until the early nineties when the Soviets fell apart that people began to formally organize the history and present it. Still, most individuals have no outlet for what they know. The countries youth are understandably moving on.
I inadvertently took on a small part of the responsibility when I started this project.
At the moment the script is one act shy of being a full-blown feature script. I still need to write a prologue, which recently arrived in my head off the winds here in Baghdad. It's been a good place to ponder the story. Listening to soldiers talk has helped a lot.
Here is a drawing my friend Stephen Hawkings did last year. The Soviets are sweeping the area and the three main characters are caught as they try to secure enough food to wait them out. Chickens fly as the chase ensues and one of the Forest Brothers goes down. Stephen is doing more development drawings next week; I can't wait to see them. This is the very best reason to be a filmmaker: because it's a big form that has lots of space to invite talented people in to. I'll share them as they come.
He never updates it, but here's Stephens website: www.hawkbird.blogspot.com. Very talented guy me thinks.
In the meantime Bush League is slow cooking into a rough cut. I feel a lot relief as I edit it. I've been worried that a certain feeling had gone away. The first few times I ever edited I felt a really deep affection for the footage and lots of excitement. Very much like Christmas as a kid. It was a pleasure to go into it and watch it unfold. A lot of that feeling has come back with Bush League.