The film Usher came out of many influences: initially because I’ve been working in a movie theatre for the last 15 years, listening to and watching films. I’ve stood in the lobbies hearing what the people leaving the theatre respond to (or not), and how they respond. It’s an education all studio executives should have.
I’ve also been impressed at how employees reflect the mood of their workplace.
As the character of Blake in the bar scene in Usher limns, movie theatres should be considered
museums in which art is displayed, hallowed places that are fast disappearing in this age of megaplexes.
So in Usher we put one type of very genre-specific character (a hit man) and put him into a
rather self-reflexive (if underdetermined) situation and see how he (re-)defines himself. The lead
character, Ash, has his perceptions and feelings challenged — indeed subverted, as he finds
he can’t understand, or really cope.
As important as the
characters are the setting they’re in — the beautiful art-deco movie theatre that
in real life was completely restored just prior to a planned demolition in 1988.
(The Orinda Theatre is now a national
historical landmark.) Such a setting allows us to explore film genre-specific narrative
tropes in a quite determined “art space,” a film theatre in a film about film
genres... and we never even see what’s on the screen. Appropriate since no one ever
talks about films in Usher, neither the customers nor the employees. We made that
decision early on primarily because actually showing or talking about films would be too
self-conscious. (And it’s so... Quentin Tarantino.) It also fits that neither the
customers nor the staff in our film appreciate the art surrounding them.
Usher came about after conversations with my producer about the “perfect” indie movie, one that would take advantage of locations you had easy access to (the theatre), free reign to shoot all day (or night), and casting people you knew to play the characters they already were.
Ash, although a hit man in unique circumstances, has a classical character arc — the narrative puts him in a strange and stressful situation in which he has to respond, by growing wiser or perishing. Usher is a laboratory — an experiment using cinema to take the audience on a similar journey, to challenge their expectations and assumptions about a “hit man in hiding” story. May they arrive at a transcendental understanding, as Ash eventually does.
