Frank Ross is the director of Oh! My Dear Desire,. He contacted me a while ago to ask if I would watch his movie and review it. It was the first time anyone had asked me to do such a thing. I watched it with some trepidation: what if it sucked? Good thing it didn't. In fact, it was pretty darned good. His movie does what recent suburban dramas like One Hour Photo failed to do very well, which is to peel back the layers of suburbia and show the dirt underneath. His characters are real people, people you could run into at the coffee shop, your baseball coach. They're not wearing signs that read "victim wife," etc. They are real coming into a scene and you can imagine them going on with their lives afterwards.

I met Frank at a coffee shop in Oak Park, Illinois. He is well-spoken and intelligent, and he has a self-deprecating sense of humor. He has a tall-person slouch that goes well with his self-effacing manner. Frank is 22 years old, and he has two feature films under his belt. He made me feel like I have done nothing with my life, and I considered slapping him. I thought better of it, and talked to him about movies instead.

Mike: You wrote, edited, directed, did the cameras… is that because you're power-mad, or was it a budget thing? Let's not call it power-mad…

Frank: Yeah, because that makes it a really honest answer you want, if you call it power-mad, because the answer is yes, it is because I am. On the last movie (his first feature, which he will not let me see), there was somebody else touching the cameras. He got his friend, his dad owned a wedding company, so we borrowed the cameras. They were really nervous about people touching them, so this other guy was the only one who could touch the cameras, and it got me really agitated. And there were about a dozen people at any given time helping out, hanging lights, so I didn't really have to do anything on the first one, and I think it kind of made me more assertive in less important aspects of doing everything.

Mike: You became a little Napoleon?

Frank: Exactly… "Don't put your hands there," that kind of thing. "You're disrupting the actors when you go like this" (makes hand motion). It just made me really uptight. Plus it was my first movie, so I was nervous. So Joe (Imbrogno) the production guy, we got two cameras, so it was just me and Joe. That'll work. It's because I can't answer questions on the set. While we're shooting, if you ask me something, "does this need to go here?", I have no idea. If I take it and I'm touching it and I put it there, that's where it should be.

I can't think on the set. I try really really hard not to think, so I have to be really prepared to not think, but I can't explain my preparation to anybody. Plus, when I think things out too far, it's not going to be any fun when you get there. So the goal, when I wake up, what do we have to shoot, things like that, I think about the actors who are going to be doing it… so I don't have time to think about do I want the Kleenex box on her nightstand? And when there's a dozen people there, they ask you that. So I actually end up saying no to everything and yes to everything, leave it there, then that gets you in the wrong mode. It just leaves you stupid. And Joe is smart enough to just do something on his own and know that it's ok. He'll do things on his own. He'll ask me a question, and when I give him a half-assed answer, he'll do what he wanted to do in the first place.

Editing it wasn't a budgetary thing because I don't want anybody else to edit it. I like editing a lot. When I edited the first one, halfway through I figured out what I was doing. When I finished it, I kinda just shelved the movie because it wasn't very good. Long story short, I guess it was because I'm kinda power-mad. It's just that I don't want anybody else's hands messing with my stuff. If you're putting together a puzzle, and everyone else sees where this piece should go.... Actually, I never even thought about it.

Mike: About hiring a crew?

Frank: No. It was just, "Joe, you want to help?" Because I was working on hiring a crew... I have the rights to this play that I want to make into a movie. So I was working on getting "names" attached to it, and hiring a crew for that, and it drove me crazy, because you have to deal with agents, and a lot of agents were really mean to me. Some of them are just horrible, horrible people.

Mike: Why, because you're not Steven Spielberg?

Frank: Exactly. Because you call up and you offer them a part, and they don't want to read it, they want you to tell them about it. I'm not some shit-shingle salesman, it's not aluminum siding. It's a really good story, and you have to read it or else what would be the point of making it? If I could explain it to you, we wouldn't make it. So they don't want to use their imagination because they do get a lot of stuff, so I tried comparing it to other movies. I started going on and on, and I'm nervous as hell, and she says, "You know what? I have to go." And it was a really high-powered agent, Kevin Spacey's agent.

Mike: You were trying to get Kevin Spacey?

Frank: I was trying to get Kevin Spacey to play the part of Joe. It was before he did K-Pax, so I still liked him. And I saw Pay It Forward, and I thought, "wow, that's the worst movie I've ever seen." And that was about a week after I had the conversation with his agent. And I got Nicole Ari Parker to say she wanted to do it. She's on Showtime, on "Soul Food." And then just going back and forth, and not writing anything, not working on anything of my own, I was starting to be a jerk to everybody in my life. So without really thinking about it—I cried a lot—and then got the idea and wrote Oh! My Dear Desire, and that's how it happened.

That's exactly what it was: going crazy not doing anything. And the original plot line—guy rapes a girl, the dad finds out and carves "rapist" in his back, the mom calls the cops, and the cop comes and it's the dad—that plot line is about four, five years old. Bob Hart came up with it; it was a "Twilight Zone" short idea, he just laid it out like that, and he says, "That's cool."

Mike: And they just abandoned it?

Frank: Oh, yeah, well, he's not a writer, he's a painter, and it's just his idea. He thinks them up when he's talking to anybody...he had 100,000 ideas, and for some reason, Anthony (Anthony J. Baker, who played Adam), in the movie, Tony, he liked that idea; he tried writing little short stories for it, scripts.

Mike: He was very good in the film. Is he an actor?

Frank: The only other movie he's been in is my first movie, which we both wrote together. And compare the performances, it's just sick how much better he got, because he actually—I think watching yourself in a movie, you figure out how to do it. He's—I love him.

Mike: I was very impressed. Where did you find everybody else?

Frank: Tim and Tony are brothers, and they're my two favorite people in the world, so that was easy. And, most of them are from Doreen Bousquet, who played the wife, she had an acting company where she did murder mystery interactive plays...and the cast members were all really good, and I met all of them over the years, just here and there. Tim (Tim Baker, who played Barry the coach) is really funny... Tim and Julie (Julie Rogers-Baker, who played Adam's mom) are married; they met through Doreen. So it was this one big acting group, and I liked all of them. I wanted to write a part for Tim, and I wanted to have Allen (Allen Kalfas, who played Frank the teacher), and of course Tony is just going to be in it. I don't want to be in it—if I write a part for someone my age, and why wouldn't I, it's going to be him. He really wanted to do something, and he was the only one who read the script before it was done.

The only people who came in through auditions were Denise Blank, who played Nicole and who I now love, who is now my new favorite person. She came in for auditions, and her cold read, how she just read it the first time, is basically what you see in the movie. Amy Bahde auditioned, and all the other girls who read for Terah—I should show you the tapes; they're hysterical, they're so horrible, they're really really really bad. And this is an important part, someone that I considered playing myself (smiles broadly) because we couldn't find anybody to do it. And then she came in and read for Meegan originally, because I was going to have the girl who played Meegan play Terah. Am I being too long-winded?

Mike: No no no. Because when I transcribe it, I can cut out whatever I want, make you sound as stupid as I want. What about the actor who played Joe?

Frank: Kurt Naebig is a professional. He's the only one in the movie who pays the bills with acting. His students give him a lot of scripts, but he never really does them, because he has to pay the bills. I offered him this, and he said he'd do it. He was really, really good, he was always on time, and I had the schedules planned where if Kurt needs to go do a voiceover for a few hours, we shot around him. I thought it wasn't enough to offer him, but he liked it. He said he'd get to it eventually, that he'd read it, and he read it the first night I sent it to him and called me the next morning, said he'd do it. So that made me really feel good.

Mike: How did rehearsals go? Did you welcome input from the cast, changed lines and stuff? Was there anything you remember being improved?

Frank: I think every person made the words that I wrote better. Denise Blank knew things about Nicole and asked if she could put them in, and I said yeah. We would rehearse Friday night for as long as it took, a few hours. We'd get together, not really rehearsing, just talking—some actors don't do it the way they're going to do it on film until they actually do it. Like Tony, when he reads it through, he's basically saying the lines, and you think it's going to suck, then he does it completely different, except for maybe one thing that he liked. So you can't say to him, "You're not going to say the lines like that?" because he won't. And then Julie, who's acted for a very long time, it's going to be identical every time she does it.

Mike: Does that make it hard to actually do the scene?

Frank: No, because they respect each other. I never block people out. I never tell them that they need to come here, and walk here. I might grab them during the take move them over there. But you can't tell somebody where to walk. We usually have them run through it before I shoot it. Do it as comfortable as possible, for you. Because you give them all that freedom, they kind of contain themselves closer to what's on the page. With Kurt, you give him all the freedom, he did his different every time. He wouldn't just do the lines different, he would do his emotional scale different. It was really hard to cut because it would be different all the time, because he had never been given that freedom. He did a scene in Road to Perdition (which was cut), and Sam Mendes gave him a lot of freedom, but not as much. So they could do whatever they want.

I hate it when things are canned. I'm not going to tell you to not say something. I don't like to tell people what to do. A lot of times, if they did something I didn't like, I would just ask them about it, and they would figure it out themselves. People aren't stupid. I'm not smarter than anyone on that set. Each and every one of them is the most talented person I've ever met. They're going to do the script. They're not going to write a separate scene and then come in and do it, so why restrict people?

Mike: Were there any scenes that you or the actors found particularly difficult, like the rape or Joe's attack on Adam?

Frank: Both of those specifically. Convincing Tony—this is the first mature decision I've ever made as a director—he wanted Kurt to throw him on the ground. He wanted to get hit. "Throw me on the ground, and film it, then I'll get a bruise, and we'll shoot the rest of the movie with me with a big bruise on my face." Well, maybe we shouldn't. Maybe we shouldn't take our lead actor and slam his face on the ground. His hands are really tied, and he is really fighting Kurt. That was hard for them. That's the only way I know how to do it. I don't know how to make it look like they're really struggling. We were trying to figure it out because we didn't want anybody to get hurt. It was really hard on Kurt—Kurt is an adult, he's not one to be messing around in parking lots with kids. Tony's a 20 year old virile guy, and he's fighting as hard as he could, so Kurt got really tired. But they had cues: if Kurt was hurting him, Tony would just stop struggling, and that means stop whatever you're doing. When his face actually hits the ground, we put the camera on the ground and put his face down there, and everybody stood around and picked him up, and we just played it backwards. There's only about six frames of it, but it works.

The rape scene was the hardest because we were all really nervous about doing it. He's going to be crawling all over her, touching her. The people whose house we were using were asleep in the next room, and they got up at one point. Here's the thing when you borrow people's houses, they all say, "No problem. Come in, you can spend all night, eat my ham, and take my wife." Then it gets about midnight, and they have to work tomorrow morning, and they get really whiny. And you know they're going to be fine tomorrow; you can't just pack up and leave when they say you have to go. "OK, just one more minute, one more minute." They're going to hate you for about an hour, but tomorrow they're going to be fine. It's working through that point when they hate you, when they come out of the room and say, "I have angina, Frank, I can't have people..." And you say, "I know, Rich, I know." And meanwhile, the actors are sitting on the couch and wondering if he saw them. It was kind of embarrassing for them and nerve wracking. Amy was trying to be encouraging, but I was fucking nervous. Who am I to tell people to do this to each other? "OK, uh, you touch her booby." I think I'm going to get better at it, but I think the problem is that I have a suspicion that every girl thinks I'm a pervert. Uhh... it's probably just me. You see, because I was raised Catholic. I got a lot of guilt.

The other difficult one, which is also a good example, is the kitchen scene, where Tony asks about his dad. I wrote that, I understand it, but it's one of those things I couldn't explain to them. Julie called me and said "I don't understand this." Well, I really don't either. You're frustrated because the words aren't there, so you're making stuff up, so the more you say, the more you're getting frustrated. You're not showing it, then suddenly she snaps at him, says "Well, I don't know what to tell you." It's a really personal scene, and I couldn't really explain it. They were getting really mad at me because when I tried to explain it to them, they would get even more confused, so I told them to take it, go into the other room, and come back with something, and we'll see how it goes. That was one scene where I should have stepped up. I like the way it came out, but neither of them are happy with it. I like it because now I can watch it and say, "Oh, that's why." So it's kind of a neat thing for me. But they don't like it because they feel like they don't look like they know what they're doing.

Mike: Is there anything you'd do differently now? Now that you've seen the finished product?

Frank: If I made it again? I wouldn't change anything. If there was one thing that I could change, I wish some of the dark scenes were a little brighter (laughs). I just don't like a lot of... it's supposed to be dark. I don't mind just seeing them when the light goes overhead. If it's dark and you're in a car, it's hard to see the other person. Maybe I would work a little harder at... no, I wouldn't do anything differently.

Mike: This is a "duh" question, but was the choice to do it on digital aesthetic or financial? It's a dumb question.

Frank: Yeah, it's a dumb question (laughs). You know what? I don't think... there's one movie idea I have that I want to shoot in 8mm, but other than that, I want to shoot video. I don't want to shoot film because I think it's too expensive, it's a really long process. I think film's really good and I love the way it looks, and it kind of lets me down that I have this feeling that I'm never going to want to shoot on film. But I'm trying to stick with the whole idea that people our age—our lives are on videotape. Everything is on video. The more movies we get that are shot on video, where it starts to be an option and people accept it, the more movies can be made like that. People won't care anymore. I just want people not to care. Take it for what it is.

Mike: How did you fund the movie?

Frank: Tips. Waiting tables. I had some left over from the first movie, and I bought the cameras, around $5000. A lot of it I borrowed and then paid back, but it was all basically tips. What I would do is work all week, and all those tips went to pay for food, snacks for the actors. All I had to do was feed them. If you're going to do a low-budget movie with friend actors, they're going to do great, they're going to love you, and you'll have a lot of fun if you feed them. Food is the most important thing to have: snacks, knowing where the closest delivery place is. Who said an army marches on its stomach? Have food around. That's basically all it cost: food, tape stock, a few rental fees... I shouldn't tell you the places because I didn't tell them I was shooting a movie. The rates are different if you're shooting a movie.

Mike: It's not like you're Martin Scorsese coming in here asking for a discount.

Frank: That's another thing: people imagine huge productions, but I'm going to have a light. Not a truck, just one light. Singular. So you have to be sneaky.

Mike: So tell me a little about trying to get into the festival circuit.

Frank: It sucks. It really sucks. You send out the movie, and I email them the reviews whenever I can, but I've just never gotten a yes about anything. I got some good news today from Urban Media Filmmakers (he ended up winning their highest award), and she read both reviews and she was like, "cool!" I get positive feedback, but the thing about festivals is that you're kind of going blind. I like sending the reviews because I think maybe it will remind them of the name. Some of them say that they're for real independent filmmakers who make movies with no names attached and do it because they have to. I read that and think, "hey, that's me." Then the movies that get in are really weird. Very experimental, about clones and talking wallpaper.

Mike: That's what was missing from your movie.

Frank: Right, the talking wallpaper. We had a scene in there but we cut it because you could see a light stand (laughs). The movie isn't weird enough to be underground and it's not huge and dramatic enough to be mainstream. There's this middle ground where people don't care. I'm kind of lodged in there. I'm not going to change. So, you send it in blind and a long time later your rejection letter comes. It's really disheartening and I feel like I don't belong because it hurts my feelings every time I get a no. I like it when they get back to me and say that maybe I should just take the experience and move on to the next one. At least they're being honest, but it still hurts, it's still not nice.

Mike: What are your influences? Directors, writers, actors, whatever. Do you have any? I was going to ask you for your top ten movies, but that's hard.

Frank: I had a big changeover because I was very set in my one way of... Citizen Kane, 8 1/2, those were the only two great movies, which makes for a confused person. Then I saw The Bicycle Thief and my heart melted. I'm a big fan of Paul Morrissey. There's three movies that I think are really good, Flesh, Trash, and Heat. I rented Flesh, I watched it and I loved it, and I got upset when it was over... I was like, "Was that a completely new experience for me, or were they just really really stoned?" Because it could be either one. So then I rented Trash, and it was the same thing: was it a really fun experience or are they just stoned? There's a book written about them that's been out of print for a long time, and on the first page was Morrissey's refusal to work with anyone who was using drugs. I almost wept I was so happy. That's what he wanted, that's how he made the movie. He's a big influence on the way I shoot, because the way he shoots is a tad boring, but how long he holds on people, and the chattering, is something I want to be able to get to, the feeling his movies give me. They're very dirty looking, and I like the way that looks.

One of the reasons I like video is that it looks like an after-school special and a basement porno all rolled into one. Right in between after-school special and basement porno is something really truthful. So I like him, and I like John Cassavettes a lot. I kind of get upset at all the worship that's going on, I wish they would just enjoy the movies. They're just watch and experience kinds of movies. I still like Federico Fellini; I can't get rid of that. I kind of wish I didn't like him. I've loved him for such a long time, I kind of want to be done with that. Do you ever feel like that, like you just don't want to listen to Whitesnake anymore? But I think that's where all the dreamy things come from. That is how I see things sometimes. So, Fellini, Morrissey, Mike Leigh.

Mike: So how did you get interested in making films?

Frank: I don't really know. I wasn't really there when it happened, to be honest with you. I didn't mean to at all. I was at technical school for TV production, and I thought editing was kind of fun, but I didn't know what I wanted to do. Tony wanted to write a movie, and I knew he would never make it, and he'd be depressed about it. So I get all the notebooks together, and I realize I don't know how to shoot a movie... I read a lot of textbooks, and I got really confused as to what a movie is and should be. I made A Story in a Life, which is my first movie, and I hated it when I was done with it. Somewhere in there I decided... no, I still haven't decided, but—suddenly I have an office. I don't know how it happened. I didn't mean to do all of that. It was kind of an accident.

Mike: Do you plan on taking any film classes?

Frank: I thought it'd be fun to take some film history classes, but I got the textbook and went through it, and it seemed kind of fun. I took one class with a real pompous ass of a teacher. Psycho is a good movie and it's really fun to break down, but this guy was crazy. Everything meant something: the headlights are eyes, stuff like that. So I started to get really bored. Tony always drove me to class because I don't have a car. I wanted to stop going to school, so I had to convince Tony to drop out too so he'd stop coming to pick me up. So I convinced Tony by going on these really long rants about how we were wasting our time, we're not learning anything we're going to be using. He's a musician and a very talented one too, so I told him he could be recording music, doing whatever he wants, he could get a band together. I could be—I could be writing. We could make movies, we could do whatever we want to do but no, we're stuck in class. He was like, "yeah!" He thanks me sometimes and he yells at me sometimes for doing that, but it worked out. I'm happy, and he's happy too.