'Don't Let Me Drown' headed to Sundance
Saturday, December 27, 2008
When screenwriter and film producer Maria Topete, 34, was a senior at Oakland's Skyline High School, she and two friends decided to make a movie. They borrowed some equipment and set out to find subjects to interview on the topic of being biracial.
"None of us had a video camera and none of us knew how to work it, but we thought we were doing really well. We found a cute boy to talk to; it was all going great," Topete remembers, sitting in her parents' living room on a cold and sunny December day.
"And then when we came in and put the tape in the player to see what we had, there was no sound."
It was an inauspicious cinematic debut for Topete, who would not attempt to make another film until college, but she has since regained her footing. Together with her husband, co-producer and film director Cruz Angeles, 35, Topete has made a feature film that will premiere at next month's Sundance Film Festival. "Don't Let Me Drown," a teenage love story set against the backdrop of post-9/11 New York, will be among the 16 films vying for the festival's Grand Jury Prize.
Already, the screenplay and early versions of the film have garnered notice: In 2006, Angeles was awarded the Sundance/NHK International Filmmakers Award, and Topete and Angeles were invited to the Cannes film festival to participate in L'Atelier Du Festival, an emerging-artist program.
Angeles and Topete, who were visiting the Bay Area with their 8-month-old son, Julian, for part of the holidays, say "Don't Let Me Drown" is their seventh collaboration.
"Eight, if you count him," Angeles jokes as his son plays with a book.
The Oakland-born Topete and the Los Angeles-bred Angeles met as undergraduates at UC Berkeley. While neither one had plans for a life in film, they both took Emmy Award-winning Asian American studies Professor Loni Ding's video-production class, where they worked on a documentary on youth in East Oakland.
"We fell in love in the editing room," Angeles says.
Another important influence for Angeles was rhetoric Professor David Cohen, who took Angeles aside after he turned in an essay on famed Japanese director Akira Kurosawa.
"When I read his first paper I was amazed at how sophisticated it was and I though that either he was a filmmaker or he should be," Cohen writes in an e-mail. "This lead to a series of long conversations, and I certainly did urge him to follow his own lights and do what he obviously loved and was incredibly talented at.
"Among a group of truly amazing undergraduates I have had at Cal over the past 30 years, Cruz stands out as one of the most memorable."
One of the reasons the husband-and-wife team has worked so well together - their films include shorts "The Show" (2003), about a Deep South lynching, and "The Negative" (2007), about a photographer working in Mexico - are their complementary interests. Topete says she feels inspired by characters more than visuals or plot concerns. "I was always interested in writing," she says, mentioning silent 1924 German film "The Last Laugh" by F.W. Murnau - a movie with only one title card - as an example of "a beautiful character study." Angeles lists auteur directors (Kurosawa, Wong Kar Wai, Satyajit Ray) as influences.
"Maria's definitely more into details - the details of characters - so we go back and forth a lot," Angeles says, "Sometimes we bicker, but that's OK."
"Don't Let Me Drown" sprang from conversations between Topete and Angeles after 9/11. Life in New York, where they have lived for more than a decade, changed dramatically after the terrorist attacks.
"It seemed like everyone was looking over their shoulder, expecting random violence," Topete says, "We were talking about how New York, which had felt really safe, seemed like where we grew up - which was not very good." Topete and Angeles each had seen rampant gang violence and the blossoming of the crack epidemic take over their neighborhoods in the '80s.
The story they wanted to tell embodied some of the new fears on the minds of many Americans while not being explicitly autobiographical. The two high school-age protagonists - Lalo, whose father is a Mexican immigrant working to clean up ground zero, and Stefanie, whose sister died in the attacks - have direct connections to the tragedy. Their friendship and romance becomes a sustaining force in trying times.
"We just started to remember our own childhoods, how daydreaming about a crush could help drown out the craziness," Topete says.
The two began working on the script in 2002, and went through at least eight drafts along the way. Both held down jobs to pay the bills: Topete worked in public relations, and Angeles earned a graduate degree from New York University's film school and then began freelance film editing. Most spare moments were devoted to writing or working on other films; their social life, Angeles says, laughing, was "pathetic."
But the work paid off. They were selected to be part of 2005 Sundance Screenwriters and Filmmakers Labs, which allowed them to get support and expertise from a range of film experts.
Filming began in October 2007 in Brooklyn, after a laborious casting project. Angeles and Topete saw about 500 kids - "We wanted to do grassroots casting, not just choose from the same 12 head shots" - and say that they are especially proud of the young actors' contributions. "Really, stand-out performances," Angeles says.
As their son wriggles between them on the couch, Topete and Angeles say that 2009 is shaping up into a very busy year. Even as the film industry, like everything else, has been shaken up by the bad economy, the pair doesn't seem hung up on commercial concerns. When asked what his hopes for the film are, Angeles says simply, "I want as many people to see it as possible."
E-mail Reyhan Harmanci at rharmanci@sfchronicle.com.
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