Gen Art preview: When a Man Falls in the Forest

[The Gen Art Film Festival] continues tonight with a screening of [Ryan Eslinger](http://www.genartpulse.com/archives/2007/03/film_festival_f_5.php)'s low key character-driven drama When A Man Falls in the Forest. The movie premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival and also screened last month at South by Southwest. While critical reactions to the movie have been wildly mixed, there's little doubt that Eslinger has written a provocative story and brought together a variety of talent, including Sharon Stone (who also has a producer credit) as the shoplifting wife of a workaholic husband (Timothy Hutton). I spoke with Eslinger over the phone this morning, and told him not to worry too much about tonight's screening; the Gen Art crowd, at the very least, knows how to be tolerant. Tickets are still available, so don't hesitate to check it out if you've got the time. Don't forget: the admission price also gets you into a very generous afterparty.

NYP: You’ve shown the movie at two festivals so far. Any progress on finding a distributor?

RE: I think I’m about to make a deal with a distributor. I can’t say who it is. The contract isn’t done. They’re supposed to tell me today if the deal went through or not.

Did things pick up for you after the festival screenings?

It was a combination of South by Southwest and Berlin. In Germany, a lot of people weren’t out there. It’s a huge festival, but people can’t make it that far. Berlin is a bigger experience. More overwhelming. Every festival is different. SXSW is also very different. Very laidback.

What sort of audience reactions are you getting?

I feel like people are kind of polarized—they either really like it or they really hate it. If they don’t like it, they really don’t like it. It doesn’t seem like there’s a lot of middle ground. I don’t know what to attribute that to. You come to a point in the movie where some people are applauding and the others are leaving the theater. I don’t know what to make it.

Does that response catch you off guard?

It was a little surprising that people react so strongly to it. I think, primarily, it had to do with the plot. I don’t follow a typical three act structure, so it’s a little—I don’t know. People label it “experiment,” or whatever they want to call it, but I was just playing with the plot, not doing the typical progression.

So people are either pleasantly surprised or frustrated.

 Yeah, that’s a good way of putting it. Some people are frustrated because they’re looking for specific things that I don’t do in the movie. I don’t send a hero off on his journey…it really doesn’t follow that at all. The crux of the story is about three guys, and they’re all about forty or fifty. They’re all at different, lost points in their lives. A lot of people have been labeling it a midlife crisis movie, and that’s not what it is. Midlife crisis begin a little earlier than that. It’s basically three or four [interlocking stories].

Where did the idea come from?

I had originally written about the last ten pages of the script, and I just kept writing. I had some ideas from before that I had wanted to write. I don’t write from real life. I write characters. I think of somebody in my head that I find some personal identification with, and then I’m able to write several stories. When I finished the script, Sharon Stone agreed to do it, and then the financier, Kirk Shaw [at the American Film Market] came on after she was attached to it.

Did Sharon Stone’s involvement have a radical effect on the movie?

Audience-wise, I have no idea. Financially, it helped people understand how they can market the movie and try to make their money back. It hasn’t fully played out yet. I think it is beneficial, but there’s pluses to having famous actors and pluses to having unknown actors. Sometimes you have an actor who’s known, and seeing them on screen they carry a lot of baggage—but not necessarily in this case. I don’t really pay so much attention to where the movie falls on a person’s career. They all threw really great ideas at me. They would come up with things that weren’t in the script and I gave them a certain amount of room to bring their personalities to their characters.