DGA Monthly

2 I D G A M O N T H L Y The final character portrait within Rebecca Miller's indie triptych, Personal Velocity, represents the deeply subjective experience of its protagonist, Paula (Fairuza Balk). After a chance decision leaves Paula unharmed while an out-of- control car kills the young man with whom she was walking, she runs—away from the accident and from her life. She drives in a near fugue-state and picks up an abused teenage hitchhiker — apparently trying to rescue something in her world. Paula drives to her mother's house from which she had run away, leaves the boy in the car and goes inside. As her mother's unwelcoming boyfriend drifts in and out of the kitchen, Paula tells her mother about the accident and that she is pregnant. Miller draws her audience in and out of Paula's memory as she recounts the events and puzzles the meaning of it all: her life as a runaway, her boyfriend's appearance in her life, her pregnancy, the accident, and her chance survival. It's significant to note this micro-budget film's place in history as one of the early American digital features to achieve acceptance and commercial success at a time of profound skepticism and resistance to video — in 2002, it won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance and John Cassavetes Award at the Independent Spirit Awards. S H O T T O R E M E M B E R Running on Empty Rebecca Miller's 2002 feature, Personal Velocity, is a series of vignettes where three women struggle to free themselves from the men who restrict their personal freedom. In this article, Miller — who recently won a DGA Award for her documentary series, Mr. Scorsese — recalls how she crafted the final sequence. | by Rob Feld portrait by Lynn Goldsmith "It was hard for me to get money for my movies," Miller recalls, "so I started writing a book of short stories. Gary Winick called me and told me about InDigEnt. He said, 'We own these digital cameras, and we think we can make 10 films for one million dollars. Would you be willing to make one of your scripts?' He suggested adapting three of my short stories and gave me immense freedom, which got me excited." Miller approached the limitations of the camcorders by embracing their strengths: speed, maneuverability, the intimacy with the actors for which the small size of the cameras allowed. She framed tightly for portraiture rather than wider shots, where the digital image would break down at the edges. Without budget for locations or much art direction, they shot in found spaces where they could step into an existing life — in the cabin used for Paula's mother's home, they did nothing but rearrange furniture and decorate the refrigerator. Influenced by films like George Cukor's A Star is Born, she also compressed some sequences into a series of still frames supported by voiceover. Using all her resources and those of her team, with each small ember Miller sought to express the greater fire. In this sequence, Paula doesn't know where she's going but has picked up this hitchhiker. We've only seen the boy from Paula's point of view, almost a part of her dream. She's leaving him in her car with the engine running—is that a bad idea? There's a destroyed quality to this image — like a memory. The Sony DSR-PD150P PAL cameras we shot on were still primitive and you could feel the digitization. We were on zoom lenses the whole time but they didn't work well in wide shots, so we didn't go wide very often. It's one of the reasons the aspect ratio is 1:85 and we made the film a series of up-close portraits — to lean into the strengths of the cameras and use medium and close shots. We wanted to feel close to the characters in their realm. Each woman's story is epic, but here big things are being decided in a small arena. 1 Paula enters and you hear from the voiceover that she hasn't been here in two years, since her mother got a new boyfriend. The decision to have a male narrator helped because there were already three female stories, so his voice was like a red line over a blue field; something that kind of popped. Crickets give a sense of the country, maybe stirring her memory. The idea was to be so far inside Paula's way of experiencing the world that you almost are her. She's an orphaned person. Our production designer, Judy Becker, had little budget so we had to knock on doors and ask people if we could shoot in their house for free. Then we used the patina of their existing lives, so we got a sense that these places had real pasts — so much of the film is about how the past informs the present. It was like we were shooting inside a life, which is very difficult to build from nothing. 2

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