TORONTO - Brad Furman was trying to catch his breath. The previous week had been a whirlwind of excitement and stress, as his debut feature film, "The Take," starring John Leguizamo, Tyrese and Rosie Perez, had had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival (Sept. 12) and a press/industry screening the following morning.
We caught up with Furman, 32, a Lafayette Hill native and Friends Central grad, at the film festival's Varsity Theater, not long after that screening - and he was still wired.
Worn out but wired.
A group of his Philadelphia buddies had joined him in Toronto for what they thought might be a trip out of "Entourage." Furman was hoping for a little R&R after the mad rush to finish the film. But there was no time to relax and that was fitting - the adrenaline fueling Furman now is the adrenaline that fueled the incredible story of the making of "The Take."
The journey from Philadelphia to Toronto oddly enough started in Atlanta - in a film theory course at Emory University. Furman had gone to Emory to play basketball, his first passion, but Evan Lieberman's film course sent him on a more realistic - barely - career path.
Lieberman had studied screenwriting at the American Film Institute and he told Furman that if he really wanted to be a filmmaker, Emory wasn't the place for him. So he transferred to NYU's Tisch School of the Arts and was driven to get even more serious about his dream after his cousin passed away.
"It really put into perspective for me life and understanding the fragility of life," he said.
So Furman went to school and went to work.
"I worked for Barbra Streisand as an intern," he said. "I worked for [producer] David Brown as an intern. I then met Nancy Glass, going home for the Jewish holidays. She was the host of 'American Journal.'
"I'd played almost a year-and-a-half of basketball at NYU and I decided to finally give up that passion for basketball and transfer it to film, to work for Nancy. I started out as an intern but then her assistant became pregnant so I became her assistant, then I started producing small segments and was making a living while I was attending NYU film school."
Over the summer, while "American Journal" was on hiatus, Furman went to work for B-movie/cable-movie veteran Andrew Stevens in Los Angeles. "It was my first exposure to filmmaking, guerrilla filmmaking and B-movies," he said, learning skills that would serve him well years later on "The Take."
From there, a Streisand contact, Cis Corman, helped land him a job at ICM, where he met Elaine Goldsmith-Thomas who, at the time, represented Julia Roberts.
"I worked with Julia for three-and-a-half years," he said. "I worked on 'Erin Brockovich,' 'Runaway Bride,' the end of 'Notting Hill' and the beginning of 'Traffic.' And that allowed me to work with great filmmakers like [Steven] Soderbergh. Eventually I decided to leave Julia because it was time for me to graduate - as a filmmaker, you either are or you're not. So I shot my first short film, 'Fast Forward,' and I was very fortunate it won a lot of awards and got me finally seen as being a director.
"But I was really struggling to build my career and make money - I made a documentary called 'Buried Alive in the Blues,' " Furman said. "I had had a lot of experience with low-budget filmmaking so I was able to make a good chunk of change off that, it was a great thing for me. I also had started doing music videos and in an effort to keep doing films I did a short with Steve Gutenberg, I did a short, which I'm very proud of, for the Rape, Abuse, Incest National Network and I cast Rachel Bilson in it, who became a big star on 'The OC.' So I was chipping away."
But the movie business is full of disappointments. "I had been attached to a $15 million film with Focus that exploded," he said, reeling off a series of near-misses. "It was just this constant . . . fighting, trying to get where I wanted to go. Until finally I found this one money guy (ex-Minnesota Viking wide receiver), Matthew Hatchett, who really believed in me as a filmmaker.
"He said he wanted to invest in me, he would put all the money together for my film and I put him in touch with the producer of my film who I had met playing basketball, Braxton Pope, and the three of us together found the script to 'The Take,' written by Jonas and Josh Pate (NBC's "Surface," "Deceiver")."
"The Take" went into production in July 2006, with an $800,000 budget and a too-short 18-day shooting schedule. So Furman had credibility, a script, a budget, the full support of star John Leguizamo and a cast. Now, all he had to do was make the movie.
"We are a movie that has been absolutely plagued," he said.
"We had gun violence on our [East L.A.] set - there was a strangling and a gun was pulled. We had the police come and shut the set down. We had a crew that was so frightened they quit. My hair girl quit so Rosie had to do her own hair. Investors dropped out. We had a kid who we shot a whole day with who lied about his grades - he was a D and F student - so he couldn't work, so we had to rush and re-shoot everything. Leguizamo was in his trailer and because there was no money, transport was literally pulling the trailer away with him in it. It was unimaginable.
"We'd shoot 12 hours with John and with crew and then [a few of us] would go out with John at night and shoot 8 more hours - we were working 20-hour days for 18 days straight.
"The producers ripped 10 to 15 pages of the action sequence out of the script two days prior to production [due to lack of money] and with no permits we ran around Los Angeles with Tyrese and John, unpermitted, with multiple cameras, and we shot the whole action sequence in a day-and-a-half.
"My crew was maced. We had security chasing us at the produce mart. Tyrese ended up running from the security and the police."
But everything's cool now, right? "We found out two or three weeks ago that we got into the festival," Furman continued, "and we hadn't locked picture at that time. So I said to the head of the studio [Sony has picked up distribution], 'It's going to be a blessing and a curse if we get in. A blessing because it's a true honor and it gives the film a certain amount of artistic validation, a curse because I knew I wasn't going to sleep for 2 1/2 weeks to prepare.
"I literally came with the print on the plane Friday to deliver it."
But everything's cool now, right?
"Then last night during our premiere . . . the print cut out in the middle of the movie."
But the story of "The Take" has a happy ending.
"Toronto has really embraced the movie," Furman said. "We had a sold-out 700-person theater last night, Leguizamo and Tyrese both attended the premiere, the Q&A was great, everybody stayed, it was crazy . . .
"My father mentioned that it was one of the best nights of his life . . . We've been through a lot to get to this point." *
Look for "The Take" in theaters and on DVD in 2008. "Variety" last week called Leguizamo's performance one of the strongest of his career and said "An unlikely but entertaining amalgam of 'Heat,' 'Memento' and 'Regarding Henry,' Brad Furman's streetwise caper drama 'The Take' is elevated by the potent performances of John Leguizamo and Rosie Perez and a momentum that seldom stops."