The Guarantee

What would you do if the star of your film refused to appear on camera? This was the problem I faced while making THE GUARANTEE.

It all started when I met a man in a crew van headed to New Jersey. We were both going to work in the art department on a fiction film, and during the ride, he told me an incredible story about how and why he decided to get a nose job. Five years later I called him up, out of the blue, and asked him if he would be willing to tell his story on camera. And, he said no.

But, he did say he was willing to tell me the story as long as I didn’t show his face. So, okay – this was a bit of a dilemma. His story was amazing, it had stuck with me for five years, and I didn’t’ want to give up.

I wondered if maybe coming up with a solution to this problem could actually serve the story. So I decided to experiment.

I had already made a short film about photo retouching – and since this was part 2 in the series -- I thought, “what if you could draw the image of what you wanted to look like, and become the drawing?”

Teaming up with the illustrator Robert Castillo – we decided to draw his story out and have it flow in present tense through his illustrations. And, so what started out as just an audio interview --- became THE GUARANTEE.