CREW

Director, Script, Photography, Visual FX, Sound and Editing: IVÁN CORTÁZAR

Assistant Directors: JUAN RECAMAN, HYUNOH KOO Dub: FERNANDA NAVEIRA-CASTRO

CAST

YACO NECHES

HYUNJIN KOO

ELENA LEE

PRODUCED BY

PRODUCTION NOTES

Filming in the New York City Subway was quite tough. In the past I tried to get the permits for another projects to film in the subway, and at the end I always gave up because of the bureaucracy, the money it costs and also, because I got lazy. So for “Sutphin Blvd” I decided to do it “guerrilla style” with only few handy people. I downloaded from the Internet some legal documents from the MTA website. These articles explain about the good manners and rules of conduct for photographers but these rules are quite ambiguous about the legality of filming on the subway. I voluntarily censured the articles that didnʼt benefit me and I just printed the ones that would help me in case things went wrong.

Soon into the shoot, these articles got mixed up with my storyboards and camera cables, so the  “emergency excuse” “we are just students doing nothing” wouldnʼt have worked very well when the cops would see the legal papers mixed up with bottled blood for FX.

SUTPHIN BLVD.

SYNOPSIS

“Sutphin Blvd” is the story of a pervert, a very mysterious woman and a late night ride in the New York City Subway.

TECHINCAL FICHE

Genre: Fantasy, Horror

Length: 4 minutes 12 seconds

Exhibition format: 1080 24p HDCAM or DVD. Color

Origianal Format: RedOne Digital Cinema 4K

Sound: Stereo

Place: New York

SPECIAL THANKS

DANIEL CORTÁZAR, ALVARO VEGA

But we were lucky and the only incident we had, was a woman shouting at us something about Jesus Christ and we all going to hell while filming the scene when Yaco (the main actor) fakes abusing Hyunjin (the sleeping actress). But this incident made me happy because it proved that the acting was very convincing. I must say that I am very proud of Yaco, the actor of “Sutphin Blvd”. He is a very shy person in front of the camera, but he overcame his fears and this is his debut as an actor. He decided to act in “Sutphin Blvd” not voluntarily though. I forced him and used my friendship and some bribery tricks. He finally agreed to act, doing an exceptional job. I also must say that the woman abused is my wife, and during the shoot, after the first laughers she closed her eyes and never knew the kind of dirty things Yaco was doing to her until she saw the final cut. 

We spent 4 full nights filming underground, sharing subway rides with transportation workers, drunk people and people who wakes up to go to work at hours that I didnʼt even know existed.

The heat was unbearable, and we waited endless hours waiting for the right subway train. We spent much more time waiting than filming. 

We filmed in the F subway line between Queens and Manhattan. We decided to film in Queens because we thought in Manhattan there is always people, but to our surprise, in Queens there is also people 24 hour and it was really difficult to find empty subway cars even at late night. To make it even more difficult the F subway line has 2 kinds of subway cars, so it was very painful to wait at 3 am 40 minutes to the next subway just to realize that it wasnʼt the right one.

What started as a simple short between friends, ended up being quite complicated because of logistics. At the end we ended up wasting more blood than the FX blood I used, because as a side note, Yaco (the main actor), during the filming days he had abdominal pain that after the shoot, turned out to be an abdominal hernia that had to be treated urgently in a hospital via surgery. I am convinced that he had this problem before we started filming but I am positive he will use this inconvenient situation to bribe me back in the future. 

Iván Cortazar, Director of Sutphin Blvd.