On The Hard Cut Double/Feature

(coming later this year)

This project has always been close to me, though the film that it has ultimately become was accomplished with much serendipity.

Originally envisioned as a genre-crossing narrative told through the structures of film noir and horror, “The Hard Cut Double/Feature” has since taken on an entirely new life of its own. While it started as a detective story in its early script stage, it soon grew into two film ideas – the first movie would feature the sardonic detective Roddy Tillinghast tracking down a lost film print in a film noir populated with underground gangsters, femme fatales and immortal satanic cheerleaders. The second film, by juxtaposition, would take place over the exact same events of “The Hard Cut” but through the point of view of two of the underworld gangsters, Rocky & Alex. This second film had been titled “I Woke Up Screaming the Day I Died” and was ultimately the result of a knee-jerk artistic reaction to the current (and ongoing) state of corporate culture vs. the working class.

Throughout the lengthy post-production period, these two films would morph several times, cut after cut, each shaping their own cinematic personalities, while simultaneously it was becoming clear that these stories could never function to their full potential without each other. In the end, the innovative group of producers made the decision to permanently connect the two films together in “The Hard Cut Double/Feature”, a project that has now become a genre-bending film noir/horror/grindhouse opus that tells a cinematic tale unlike anything that I've seen come from these genres, individually, before.

-V.