Tahoe seems like a long way from Singapore, but for film student Kyle Haskett, it’s really a journey back home. Haskett, 27, is a graduate student at New York University Tisch School of the Arts Asia, NYU’s second film campus. He grew up in Burlingame and visited Tahoe as a child on family trips. Now he has chosen Tahoe as the location to shoot his thesis film, “New Earth on the Barrens,” a short movie about a young woman traveling across the rural frontier of a post-apocalyptic world.
Haskett was inspired to study film by watching old Super 8 mm movies that his father made as a teenager. Haskett’s parents met through the movies. His dad would cast a friend’s sister in his films whenever it called for a female role, and that girl eventually became his wife. When Haskett was a child, whenever his mother was out for the night, he and his father would watch spaghetti westerns together. Those movies had enduring impacts.
“I wanted to write a story that I would like to watch, and one like those I used to watch with my dad,” Haskett said.
And that’s exactly what Haskett did. He calls the movie a dystopic western. The movie takes place in the future after the world as we know it has collapsed — the economy is in ruins, fuel has run out, and all infrastructure is in a state of disrepair.
“People have reverted to a frontier-style living,” Haskett said of the movie. “It was interesting to think about what people would be doing if thrust back in time.”
The film follows a young woman and an older man who are tasked with re-establishing commerce and trade with nearby settlements. When they come across a group of slave traders, they kill the men for their horses, but soon discover that the group had been holding a young boy captive. The woman decides to bring the boy along, a choice that changes the course of her life and, potentially, her survival.
The movie is being filmed in four locations around Tahoe: near the Tahoe City Cross Country Ski Center, on abandoned stretches of Old Highway 40, at Yuba Gap, which was scorched by a 2001 fire, and at the defunct Iron Mountain Ski Resort off of Highway 88. The ski area, which closed in 1995, is now a ghost town of vacant buildings and lifts, including the original lodge and hotel – a perfect place to film a futuristic western, à la “Mad Max” or “Road Warrior.”
“I felt that I had two options with shooting in the U.S. — L.A. or Tahoe, desert or mountains,” Haskett said. “I would rather be here because I spent so much time in Tahoe as a child, and I think movies are more interesting when they are away from L.A., which has been shot so much.”
Haskett is scheduled to begin the 10-day shoot on Aug. 19. He has cast the two principal actors, but is still looking for a teen-aged boy and extras, as well as production assistants and an art director.
Although most films today are made using high-definition digital cameras, Haskett decided to go with an old-fashioned format — film. He asked for help from Panavision, which had awarded him its New Filmmaker’s Grant, and the company agreed to provide all the camera equipment necessary to shoot the movie on 35mm film. Additionally, Kodak gave him a generous deal on film stock.
“Film is a dying medium … but when we pitched our story [that takes place] in an analogue kind of world, companies were eager to help out students who were willing to used an older method of filmmaking,” Haskett said.
Haskett needs to raise $25,000 to make the movie, and as of publication had raised $10,000 through a Kickstarter campaign that ends on Aug. 10. He hopes to have the movie finished by January, and to hold the premier at the Village Cinemas at Northstar. He’ll also enter film festivals. His end goal? To get the short movie into the hands of a producer so that he can make a full-length feature film.
Between now and then, Haskett has to complete another project — a documentary film about an organ transplant issue in Iraq. The movie, “Insha’Allah” (“God Willing”), follows the journey of an Iraqi-American doctor as he travels to Kurdistan to perform three living-donor liver transplants for the first time there. Because cultural and religious mores prohibit organ transplants from cadavers, Iraq only allows transplants from living people. This is problematic for those in need of a new liver; the liver is such a delicate organ that healthy donors often die on the operating table. According to Haskett, live-donor liver transplant surgery is so risky that only 40 hospitals in the U.S. are willing to perform the operation.
“But in Iraq,” he said, “it’s the only option.”
Haskett discovered the transplant story through his mother, an ultrasound technician in San Francisco who traveled with the doctor on his second trip to Iraq. Haskett hopes his documentary, which will be a feature-length film, will raise awareness about the liver transplant problem in Iraq and will generate funds to build the country’s first liver transplant center.
~ For more information about “New Earth on the Barrens” or to make a donation, go to www.neotb.com or email paintedhorseproductions@gmail.com. Comment on this story below.
