A meeting with Ryan Collins, Filmmaker of the upcoming musical, Bar Songs. Filmmaker Interview and Image by Lizabeth Nieves The “I grew up in Greenville, South Carolina. I went to college in Winston Salem, North Carolina at the North Carolina School of the Arts. I went to film school and most of the people graduating from film school wound up in L.A. or New York City. I wound up in New York. I got into film with a class in high school. I always loved movies, and I worked in a video store for 3 years in high school. I watched every Woody Allen movie, Cronenberg’s stuff, and Kubrick. I had free reign to check out whatever was coming out at the time. After film school, I moved to N.Y.C., and I guess it wasn’t all that thought out. I came up here to freelance, which I did. Up until the time I started the film, I worked sound gigs and did a lot of sound recording, editing, and boom operating. But all that stuff wasn’t really fun for me. When I had the opportunity to make the movie, I jumped into it. Bar Songs is a musical. When I was twenty, I moved to Wilmington and started writing a bunch of songs. I wrote sixty odd songs in a couple of years. It’s mostly about my experiences, they were always kind of humorous songs, and it was a lot about drinking and getting into trouble. I went into film school for four years and didn’t think about it much. My senior year in film school, I started writing a screenplay that would incorporate all the songs I wrote in my early twenties. I finished it in 2008, and then didn’t do anything with it for several years because I didn’t have enough money to make a film. When my mother and grandmother passed away, I had the opportunity to try and make the film. Bar Songs has been in process since September of last year. The film is about a dead-beat alcoholic who is not gainfully employed, and on the weekend of his 30th birthday goes on a bender. It’s all about drinking, and it’s all in Queens. Many elements of the film are autobiographical, but most of it comes from a place over a decade ago for me. It was fantastic doing everything locally in Astoria. We were able to shoot all our locations for free. Everybody here was really great. We shot at Hell Gate, The Sparrow, The Beer Garden, Astoria Park, Vesta, and Shillelagh. Everything was shot in Astoria, except the jail scene. Ideally, after the film comes out I would love to go to some film festivals and have a good time, see some cities I haven’t seen before. Best-case scenario, someone wants to buy an R-rated musical. I don’t know if that’s realistic, but that would be the best-case scenario. End of the day worst-case scenario, I made a movie and finished it, and I would go back to work doing editing. 10 | BOROMAG.COM | NOVEMBER 2014 CHARA CTERS Would I make another feature? Yes, I have a few ideas. I have an idea for another musical. In a few years, I see myself holding a boom pole and doing sound gigs, but ideally I see myself directing another film, or anything.” www.barsongsmovie.com /barsongsthemovie
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