IN-D

Adaptation of James Obarr's: The Crow

The Production: Part 2

When their comic-book-script called for outdoor locations, Ullman and Jackson utilized the more urban portions in their hometown of Rittman, Ohio, to convey the grittyness of O'Barr's asphalt apocalypse. "O'Barr was almost documentarian in his portrayal of Detroit as it was in the early eighties," Ullman says. "The buildings, the street names, and even the nicknames of the villains all existed at one time. We shot our exteriors in the parts of Rittman that most resembled the architecture and style of O'Barr's Detroit. Largely, this meant shooting in and around the factories that provide jobs for much of the city's scant population."

           Even with written consent from the property owners and prior notification given to the local dispatch operator, police officers would regularly interrupt shooting to inquire what was going on. "The problem with shooting a no-budget feature on location is the simple fact that you are not on a set,” Jackson says. “You're also not 'on location' in the same respect that bigger budget films are where there's a crew, lights, and equipment. You're just in some public place where, people think you're really arguing or fighting. They don't know what's going on. They might not even see the camera. They just see two people fighting, so they're calling the cops. We talked to so many cops! The biggest issue is that we had to deal with people who didn't know what was going on. People were hassling us, bothering us, people driving past, things like that."

     While much of the location work for JAMES O'BARR'S THE CROW was done on a shoot and run basis, there were scenes that required more than one day at a particular location. The most often visited site was a stretch of country road where the murder of Eric and Shelly was to have taken place. "During that scene we never had more than one actor there at the same time," Ullman explains. "I had to shoot most of that scene one-on-one with whichever actor I could get on a given evening and bring them together later in the editing. It was sort of tricky, but it worked out well in the finished product. When Matt and I were shooting my part of that scene, where Eric has been shot in the head and he's just lying, bleeding, on the road, people were stopping their cars to see if I was all right. Matt would just flash the camera and wave them past."

            Another frequented location was a condemned house, on the edge of town that was used by the filmmakers for the exteriors of Eric and Shelly's abandoned home. In the book, before offing the last few gang members responsible for his fiancée's death, Eric sets fire to the remnants of their home, burning with it all that remained of his former life. When Ullman discovered, through a friend involved in the fire department, that a local, dilapidated house was to be burned down for fire practice, he seized upon the opportunity to incorporate it in the movie.

           In order to firmly establish the building as the doomed lovers' abode, exterior shots of the house were filmed prior to its scheduled demolition, as well a scene in which Ullman enters through the basement and begins climbing the stairwell to the attic. This scene had to be shot, not only at night, in a removed and unlit portion of land, but in the rain. This put a damper on Ullman's plan to light the action with the headlights of his car.

            “We needed light, and there was no light at all. I drove my car around back with hopes of using the headlights for our lighting, but because it was raining, which it needed to be in the scene, the car got stuck in the mud.  The sequence also called for me to fall in a nearby creek and subsequently shed my wet burial clothes. So it's forty degrees outside, and I'm wet, barefooted, and half-naked, trying to push my car out of the mud! We ended up walking home completely covered in mud and having to get the car towed. But, if you discount the tow fee, that location and its on-camera demolition were one hundred percent free.”

            That was not the first time Ullman finished a night's work covered in mud. For the movie's opening scene, in which his character rises from the grave, he had to be buried alive. “We dug a big hole,” Jackson says “but not quite big enough for him to lay in without crunching himself up into some sort of ball. Then we actually buried him in the dirt with sort of a mock, half-coffin lid over top of him. He did have a snorkel at some point, so that he could breathe a little bit of air, which I would plug up from time to time to piss him off. We actually pulled it off, surprisingly well, just by burying him with that lid over top of him and showing it from the right angles.”