Jon Rosten: Valley of Angels

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By: Nicole Holland

George Katt, Jon Rosten and Danny Trejo on the set of “ Valley of Angels .”

On the impending North American DVD release of “Valley of Angels,” IFQ sits down with Director Jon Rosten as he discusses his feature film directorial debut, independent films, distribution, character development, Danny Trejo and LA’s gritty drug culture.

IFQ: Your film “Valley of Angels” screened at the New York International Independent Film & Video Festival (NYIIFVF). Tell me about your experience and also the festival circuit, in general.

Jon Rosten: The NYIIFVF was a great time. We were looking for a festival in the Los Angeles area to debut our film. The NYIIFVF was the ideal place for us to do that, not only because it worked into our schedule time-wise, but we also felt it would be cool to debut “Valley of Angels” at the Sunset Laemmle since so many great independent films screen there. It was the only festival we screened at, although looking back at it I wish I would have entered it in more. I just didn’t have the time to put it through the whole festival circuit. Hopefully I’ll be able to enter future films in more festivals.

IFQ: Was this your feature film directorial debut?

JR: This was the first feature-length project that I directed. I waited several years for the price of HD technology to become affordable and more importantly for my writing skills to develop to the point that I felt they needed to be at for my first feature. Around the beginning of 2005, I started to feel like the right time was coming. After much preparation, we were shooting by the week after Thanksgiving, later that year.

IFQ: “Valley of Angels” won several awards at the New York International Independent Film & Video Festival (NYIIFVF): Grand Jury Prize for Best Picture, Danny Trejo for Best Actor in a Feature & George Katt for Best Breakthrough Actor. How do you feel about the awards?

JR: I feel very proud. Danny has had so many memorable performances throughout the years and I think his portrayal of ‘Hector’ in “Valley of Angels” will definitely go down as one of his best. This was a chance for him to play his bad-ass antagonist character at a whole new level, and I’m happy he was awarded for his fantastic portrayal of the most ruthless drug dealer you can imagine.

I told George Katt just before we started shooting that this movie was either going to work or not based on his performance. It was a lot of pressure placed on his shoulders, but he pulled it off. His performance is definitely award worthy.

But most of all I feel very proud for everyone involved in the production. We set out to make a very cool, very memorable, low-budget indie film that could hold its own against the current crop of big studio movies. I really think we succeeded and I’m so glad that we have awards to show that all of our hard work paid off.

IFQ: “Valley of Angels” (under the title ‘The Edge of Nowhere’) won the Grand Prize Top Script in the Writemovies.com Screenwriting contest. Tell me more about this.

JR: During one of the early drafts of ‘The Edge of Nowhere,’ I decided to get some coverage done on the script to see where it was at. I also decided to enter it in a contest just to see how far it could get in its current stage. Writemovies.com offered a contest entrance/coverage combo, so I entered the script.

It ended up winning the contest – the top script out of 1,000 entries. So at that point I knew I was getting the script into decent shape. I felt incredibly good about this because the script was very low-budget in nature. The fact that it could compete against scripts written for unlimited budgets was a very good sign.

IFQ: How did the concept of “Valley of Angels” evolve?

JR: I knew that my first film had to not only be very low-budget in nature – but that it had to have incredible depth, and work both as an indie character movie and an action movie. I didn’t want to start off with a pure art film and risk not getting distribution.

Since I lived in Los Angeles it made financial sense to shoot the movie here. An LA drug story was the obvious choice. However, there have been a lot of them done over the years. I had to come up with a different slant on the story. So for many months I tossed around ideas in my head and fine tuned them to the point where I had something original and satisfying enough to write down on paper. Once that first draft was done, it was just a matter of fine tuning the characters, giving them more depth, and making the plot more intriguing. It took a couple years but I finally got it to the point where I was happy with it.

IFQ: Your film is character driven. Why did you choose to focus on character development?

JR: The short answer is that I wanted to make a movie that I would be happy having my name attached to. I’m not into movies that are big on visuals and low on depth. It’s not enough for me to be taken to a place and introduced to a character. I want to see how that character interacts with his or her world and how they evolve from that interaction. Show me growth or show me retraction in some direction or I’ll lose interest.

We all know that the drug world exists. It’s not even that inconspicuous in Los Angeles. Developing a character that the audience takes interest in, and then showing how that character changes through his interaction with drug world events (often beyond his control) makes for a really interesting drama if it’s done well.

IFQ: You live in LA and the film was based and shot in LA, so did you bring any of your “LA personal experiences” into the story when you were writing the script?

JR: When I first moved to Los Angeles, I didn’t realize how prevalent the drug culture was here. It didn’t take long however for me to realize that it had permeated throughout the areas of privilege just as thoroughly and deeply as the areas of the underprivileged.

What shocked me most was how privileged drug users were so casual about their drug habits. The thought that injecting hardcore drugs into their bodies might be a little dangerous never seemed to cross their minds. Their whole week was spent waiting for that weekend to come so they could cut loose and give themselves a break from their real lives – irregardless of the many potential dangerous consequences that they faced.

While I didn’t know any drug dealers, I often wondered about how the drugs made their way to the higher class areas. It was this thought that was the genesis of the Hector character in “Valley of Angels.”

IFQ: Your film probes into the gritty drug culture with privileged West LA young adults infused with East LA drug runners and reality. In modern day, we are seeing heroin, crack and meth make their way into upper-class homes and American suburbia. What’s your opinion on the ever-growing drug problem in the US and why is it seeping into privileged society (kids who are born with “silver spoons” in their mouths)?

JR: I feel every human being has the potential to give something great to the world. The problem with illegal drugs is that too often people’s lives who are users become solely focused on using drugs. They become dependent on society, instead of rising to a greater purpose and finding a way to give. Every time I see takers in the world, I think about how much better their lives and the world in general would be if they were givers instead.

The fact that illegal drugs are prevalent in all social classes is evidence that there are empty people seeking to escape their realities throughout our civilization. I wish we lived in a world where people said to themselves ‘how am I going to better the world?’ instead of ‘how am I going to escape the world?’ That being said there are a lot of people who are smart enough to stay away from life destroying substances.

IFQ: You chose to create and produce this film independently. Why?

JR: The Hollywood studio system does some things consistently well – cinematography, editing, distribution, marketing to some extent. It even does an okay job with casting. However what it consistently fails at is delivering good, intriguing stories. This is partly because of the development process that scripts go through to get to the screen. If I had tried to pitch this script to a studio, it would have been hacked up and changed based on the ideas of many executives, most of whom shouldn’t be making any creative decisions.

If you’re a studio and you go to Christopher Nolan and say ‘We need you to make a superhero movie, and you’re in complete control,’ you’re probably going to end up with a solid product. If you go to a typical development team in the studio system without giving complete control to someone who knows what they’re doing, your chances of getting a quality film are about 1 in 10. Hollywood fails 9 out of 10 times consistently. They have for decades. Knowing this, it would be very hard for me to hand control over something I wrote to a studio.

Sometimes having a large budget that a studio can provide is worth giving up control. But in this instance I had written a low-budget script, so I didn’t need a large capital investment. I felt that my first project should be my project. If it’s going to rise or fall, let it be on my shoulders. That way, if it fails I can only point the finger back at myself.

IFQ: What’s your opinion on studio films vs. independent films?

JR: I love good movies that move me. Whether it comes from a studio or an independent filmmaker – it doesn’t matter much to me. A lot of studio features lack depth and a lot of American independent films rely too much on their quirkiness. But every now and then you watch a great one and it makes the movie-going experience all worthwhile. If it’s a studio film, you’re like ‘how did that film get made through that process?’ If it’s an indie film, you’re like ‘how did that work so well with such limited resources?’ I guess in that respect it’s more satisfying to watch a great indie film.

IFQ: How long was preproduction, with the actors and finalizing the script before shooting?

JR: We started casting around March of 2005. We finished around October. I was working full-time at Warner Bros. and going to grad school part-time, so everything took awhile to finish. The producers and I wanted to make sure that we spent ample time during the casting process in order to get it right.

Other than casting, most of the preproduction was handled during a few weeks before principal photography.

The script was a work in progress for a couple years. It was in pretty good shape by the time we started casting, but didn’t get locked down until we started shooting. And even then it was more of a general path for the actors to take. I insist that actors bring something to their characters. Some of the best lines in the movie are adlibs.

IFQ: How did you get Danny Trejo on board in “Valley of Angels”?
JR: We contacted his agent and said that we had a part in an award-winning script that was written for Danny. If there’s one way to attract talent, it’s by putting a high quality script in front of them. I think once Danny and his agent read the script, it was obvious that this movie could not be the same without him in it.

IFQ: How was it working with Danny?

JR: Danny was great. I remember the first table read – as soon as Danny started to read his lines we were all looking at each other with our jaws dropped. It was at that point we fully realized what he was bringing to the project.

Since we were so green in many aspects, Danny’s experience really helped us. He showed us how to stage some of the fight scenes to make them look more realistic. He’s a real great guy to work with. When you place the camera on him and watch him do his thing the results are amazing.

IFQ: Why did you select up and coming actor George Katt as the lead? He’s created serious buzz on IMDB for his acting in “Valley of Angels.”

JR: We brought in several dozen actors to read for the lead role. Over several months we were able to whittle it down to about eight actors that we thought could pull it off. After having the different candidates read with different actresses, we felt that two were above the rest. When we brought those two in for a final round of auditions, George’s tremendous emotional range won him the role.

IFQ: When was your first interest in film?

JR: I always had an interest in film but never thought it would be a realistic career path. During my second year of engineering school, I was beginning to get the feeling that it wasn’t as creative a career as I had envisioned. I remember watching Adrian Lyne’s “Jacob’s Ladder” and was immediately convinced that I was destined to be a filmmaker.

I wasn’t quite brave enough to transfer to film school, but I did transfer to a TV Production program at a different university. And as soon as I graduated I moved to LA and started working in television and in my free time I started to learn how to write.

IFQ: Which directors and writers influenced your directing and writing styles?

JR: You have to start with Orson Welles. If there’s a writer/director in the history of film that most auteurs want to emulate I’d think he’d be on the top of the list. A contemporary writer/director that I respect a lot is Robert Rodriguez because he’s pushed forward digital filmmaking and shoots a lot of his stuff at his own Texas facility.

There are so many tremendously talented writers and directors today; it’s hard to just choose a few. The aforementioned Christopher Nolan is definitely one of the best. Mel Gibson has been doing great work as well.

IFQ: What advice do you have for writers or directors trying to get their project green-lighted, not discriminating between projects aligned with a distributor or if it’s an independent project?

JR: At every stage of a project’s life, from inception all the way up to the audience watching the finished project in a theatre or at home, every person involved is looking for something that resonates with them and moves them. That’s what it’s all about. The best way that I can think of to get a project made is to come up with something that is going to resonate so strongly with people, it would be impossible for people to say ‘no’ to the project. This of course is much easier said than done. It’s not just about making a quality film – it’s about making a quality film that resonates strongly with moviegoers. That’s what producers and studios are ultimately looking for.

IFQ: How did “Valley of Angels” secure distribution?

JR: We met up with Stu Alson from ITN at the festival. After a little discussion we were convinced that he was as passionate about the film as we were. We talked to a few different organizations, but decided in the end to go with ITN.

IFQ: What qualities were you looking for upon signing with ITN Distribution?

JR: You want someone who believes in your film as much as you do. We spent years of work on this project, so you don’t want to mess it up in the final stage. Distributors get a lot films so it’s easy for them to start viewing their product as commodities. You don’t want that – you want someone to view your film as the special creation that it is.

IFQ: Tell me about the upcoming nationwide DVD release of “Valley of Angels.”

JR: February 5th is the North American DVD release date. We’re excited because it’ll be in a lot of stores. It’s actually up for presale now online at places like Amazon.com, Target.com, Bestbuy.com, CircuitCity,com, etc. It’s been a long process so it’s going to be exciting to finally be able show our project to people.

IFQ: Any upcoming projects?

JR: Yeah, my next film will be called “The Final Transition.” It’s a horror/thriller about a very evil professor who keeps a tight grip on a fragile student. I hope to start shooting sometime towards the Fall of 2008, but that will depend largely on the potential SAG strike next summer.

I want to shoot it on the new Red One 4k cameras but would prefer more time for the bugs to be worked out on them.

I actually wrote “The Final Transition” before I started shooting “Valley of Angels.” In a couple of months I hope to have the time to start the final rewrites and start poking around LA for more great actors. It’s going to be sad to completely finish “Valley of Angels,” but jumping back on the horse to do a different genre will be a whole lot of fun.