“WELCOME TO EARTH”

DIRECTOR'S STATEMENT
By Michael Mongillo

In the winter of 2003, at the age of 34, soon to be 35, I realized that I was spinning my wheels as a filmmaker. I had written, produced and directed a number of well-received shorts, I had a multi-award-winning feature in worldwide distribution, and although I was proud of many of these movies, in my mind they all required the qualifier, “As good as they can be given their short shooting schedules and micro-budgets.”

I was doing the best that I could and had nothing to feel ashamed of. I wasn’t slacking. I was learning. Perfecting my craft. I was a responsible filmmaker. I made choices that I could answer for. No style over substance here. I wasn’t full-of-shit. But I wanted to make a movie that I didn’t have to contextualize, even for myself.

It didn’t seem like there was any way this was going to happen though. My collaborators and I had spent the years since completing and marketing our first feature, “The Wind,” trying to get two very original and exciting feature projects off the ground. A festival of, “We love the material but it’s not what we want to make right now,” from several small to well-known film production companies was our lot. So although these movies were extremely doable for under a million without the fear of compromise, no matter how many avenues we explored, they just weren’t going to get made.

So I reminded myself of the attitude that propelled my first feature: No one else is going to make your movie for you. Scrape up what funds you can and find a way to make your movie. Just concentrate on doing good work and your audience will find you. Many of my influences (Sam Raimi, Richard Linklater, Brian De Palma, John Sayles, David Cronenberg, John Carpenter) for both the art and business of filmmaking did it this way; not just for their first or second features, but often for their third and forth movies as well. As the sayings go, a writer writes, a painter paints. If I was a filmmaker, I had to make films.

So that’s what I did. Or more accurately, what we did. Making movies is the ultimate team effort and my two main collaborators are writer James Charbonneau and editor/technical wizard Taylor Warren, without whom I’d have a pile of unproduced screenplays and a big bitter ball of rage in the pit of my gut. So after a few inspiring speeches all ’round we set off to, once again, reverse engineer a movie (a process that mandates writing a screenplay that we could realistically shoot and post with the money we had raised and with the equipment and resources on hand).

The result is the micro-budget feature, “Welcome to Earth,” the making of which was easily one of the best, most rewarding experiences of my life. To illustrate this, here is an excerpt from the letter I wrote to the cast and crew the week after we wrapped principal photography:

“If I haven't told you all enough already, making W2E was a unique and wonderful experience for me. When the press asks of our soon-to-be sleeper hit, ‘Mike, did you know that ‘Welcome to Earth’ was going to be such a great movie when you were making it?’ I'll say the same thing that I've heard (and never really believed) from the casts and crews of many of the great, inspired movies that I love so much. I'll say, ‘Yes, we all knew we were doing great work while we were making the movie. We all pulled together and had fun too. Everything just seemed to go right when, on movie sets, everything that can go wrong usually does. Not only were we blessed by the Movie Gods when we were making W2E, we were all lucky enough to know it, while it was happening.’ Then I'll start to cry.”

And now that the movie is done, I still feel this way, even though I still have to contextualize “Welcome to Earth” with the, “As good as it can be given its short shooting schedule and micro-budget,” qualifier. But now I’ve remembered something that I should have remembered back in the winter of 2003:

It has been proven again and again that abundance of time and money does not necessarily make for better filmmaking. A movie should stand on its own regardless of how it was made. And “Welcome to Earth” stands on its own.

- Michael Mongillo, 2005