Production Notes:

In July of 2008, six people drove four hours from New York to East Dorset, Vermont to shoot Impolex. Four days later the other half of the cast and crew would join them. By the time the second half arrived, half of the film had already been shot and the crew was a full day ahead of an already preposterously short seven-day shoot. Staying in one house, the crew was cut off from all the comforts of civilization: no internet, television or phone reception. Basically, the perfect conditions to shoot a film about being lost, alone and isolated in the woods.

The film follows Tyrone as he wanders aimlessly through the woods of an unidentified European country, with one German V-2 rocket in tow, as he searches for the final, unaccounted for V-2. Removed from society or culture, Tyrone has nothing to keep him company save for his own delusions, the people from his past who appear to him and the woods themselves: vast, labyrinthine and endless.

Director Alex Ross Perry’s original vision for the film would have been nearly dialogue free, focusing on Tyrone walking silently for the duration of the film. Months of script revisions and rehearsals altered this plan drastically, with characters being written into and out of the script based on recent acquaintances, the availability of actors and the personality of those involved.

The strongest and most essential personality of the film is Riley O’Bryan, as the bumbling and under qualified soldier Tyrone. Alex worked with Riley at Kim’s Video, the notorious New York video store. The first day of dreaming about this project, Alex presented the offer to Riley: let’s make a movie. You’ll be in it, and you’ll be in pretty much every shot. We’ll need to start work immediately and probably shoot in seven or eight months. ‘Let’s do it’ Riley said. Riley possessed the right combination of matinee-idol looks, a blank vacant stare and a general sense of befuddlement and confusion that made him perfect for the role. The role of Tyrone was conceived for, with and owned by Riley O’Bryan from day one.

Kate Lyn Sheil was, and still is, the only professionally trained actress Alex knows. Having met at New York University, Alex instantly thought of Kate when picturing a strong and commanding adversary for Riley to play off. Having spent time around them both socially, Alex knew how unusual and uncomfortable the exchanges between Kate and Riley could be, and decided to utilize this to the utmost for the film.

After several months of rehearsal with Riley, Kate and supporting players Ben Shapiro and Bruno Meyrick Jones, it was off to Vermont with a twenty-seven-page script and several dozen more pages of notes, lines of dialogues and outlines for scenes to be improvised. It was here that the contribution between Alex and cinematographer Sean Price Williams blossomed into a full-fledged creative partnership. Long an admirer of Sean’s beyond-encyclopedic knowledge of film (it was Sean who played a key role in Alex getting his job at the video store), this was their first professional collaboration and Alex’s amazement at Sean’s skills, intellect and instinct grew every day of the shoot. It is entirely due to Sean’s expertise as a director of photography that Impolex could be shot on 16mm film in six and a half days.

Once the shoot was ahead of schedule, a creative freedom to experiment and explore overwhelmed the remainder of the week. Additional scenes were written over games of Monopoly and shot the following morning. Improvisations were extended. Characters were added to scenes in which they did not previously appear. Everybody’s ideas got used, and virtually nothing got left out. Using only natural light to shoot forced the days work to end around four o clock every day. The rest of the evening would become a beautiful combination of barbecuing, badminton, board games, listening to hundreds of old LPs and fully utilizing the house’s sauna.

It was a beautiful time for the entire crew, commonly referred to as the best time of everybody’s life. When the shoot ended on Alex’s twenty-fourth birthday, the crew drove home, laughed about the memories created in one short week and began dreaming of another film that would reunite the principal cast and crew, and would allow them to disappear from society for even a few days to make it a reality.