COFFEE AND ICE CREAM
Sweet Thing taps into familiar feelings of youthful loneliness and discovery
By T. LaBeeJennipher Foster as Liz in Joe Lia's Sweet Thing. Photo by Ryan Jones.
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Director Joe Lia openly confesses that his new feature film Sweet Thing is autobiographical. “It’s pretty much me and my college friends trying to find out about love and drugs,” he admits. There would be nothing unusual about this except for the fact Lia is a guy and the two main leads in his film are girls.
“I did that to make it a more interesting story,” Lia says. “I felt like those feelings were so universal that it really doesn’t matter what gender you are, we all go through it.”
Lia shot with a CP 16mm Vietnam War-era news camera during the summer of 2006, primarily on Whidbey Island, with a few scenes in downtown Seattle, Port Townsend, and University of Washington dorm rooms. The film centers around two 19 year-old girls and their summer of longing and discovery. Liz, played by Jennipher Foster, takes a job at a coffee stand during the day, while partying and searching for love at night. Jody, played by Seattle’s own Beth Isen, is a recreational drug user who abruptly quits working at her father’s law firm to drive her own ice cream truck. Their separate paths converge when Jody pulls her ice cream truck into Liz’s coffee stand.
Beth Isen as Jody, with Michael McFadden. Photo by Jaun Rivera.
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“The film is totally about loneliness,” Lia says. “It’s about finding that person and sometimes when you do find that person it can’t work out.”
The interactions of characters in the film illustrate the point. Whether its Jody and her always-busy father, Liz and her virgin boyfriend, or Jody and Liz between themselves, it seems like someone is always wanting someone they cannot have.
“If you notice, the sex is always about emotion, not the physical pleasure,” Lia adds.
When talking about the making of the film, Lia says he was surprised by the amount of time it took. “I wrote it when I was 23 and it didn’t make it to the screen until I was 27. It was surreal to see how much I over thought things back then. I’m nothing like that now.”
After graduating from USC’s film school, Lia got together with a couple of his classmates, Matt McUsic and Guillermo Rodriguez, and set out to make a film.
A native to the Northwest, Lia always knew he was going to shoot his film on Whidbey Island. “Mostly because I knew beautiful places were there and I could shoot there for free. So many films have been shot in LA that there is nothing new to show.”
For casting however, he initially thought he would get all of his leads from LA, and all his supporting cast from Seattle. “In LA I only found Jacob [Teixeira who plays Liz's boyfriend] and Jennipher,” he says.
For all the other parts Lia had to rely on Seattle’s actor community. “I remembered Beth from high school and luckily, unlike most of the other people I knew from high school, she was still doing what she said she wanted to do with her life, acting.”
“Luckily Seattle just has tons of actor communities,” Lia relishes. “When I got here my parents helped me out by plugging me into the community theatre.”
Even with the support of family and community Lia still found himself in a few tight jams. “Some of the casting was on the fly. I would have to call people the day before or sometimes the day of.”
These guerilla-style filmmaking conditions made Lia take notice of something he found to be pleasantly surprising: “The good will of others,” he says. “There were a lot of people who worked for free, cooked for free, donated their time, let us use locations for free.”
It seems like filming Sweet Thing has help solidify Joe Lia’s opinion on filming in Seattle. He feels, “There’s no more beautiful place in all of North America and the acting here is on par with any other place too; LA, New York, Chicago, any of them.”
Joe Lia. Photo by Ryan Jones.
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CREW BOX: Sweet Thing
http://www.myspace.com/sweetthingmovie
Writer & Director: Joe Lia
Producer: Joe Lia, Matt McUsic, & Guillermo R. Rodriguez
Cinematography: Matt McUsic
Editing: Guillermo R. Rodriguez
Music: Patrick Kirst