INTERVIEW WITH “WHALING CITY” WRITER-DIRECTOR, JAY BURKE

Jay Burke is a filmmaker and screenwriter from Dartmouth, MA. He earned an M.F.A. in Film from Columbia University and a B.A. from the University of Notre Dame. Prior to his film career, he spent six years as a management consultant with Accenture in Chicago, Boston, and Sydney, Australia. Burke has served as Director of Photography on the basketball training series Building a Champion, starring Lakers coach, Phil Jackson. He is the recipient of a 2005 screenwriting development award from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for his feature script Whaling City which is scheduled to film in New Bedford, MA in spring 2010.

BridgeThink: What’s the scope of this production in terms of crew size, length of proposed shoot?

Jay Burke: Unless our budget changes significantly, we will shoot for a total of 20 days (5-day weeks and 12-hour days).  The crew will be very small, probably around 20 people for the length of the shoot, with a few extras for “special” shoot days that require more lighting or setup.

BT: Have you set a date to begin filming?

JB: We will be shooting in the March-April 2010 timeframe, and prep will begin in early February 2010.  We continue to seek additional equity investment in the project to lengthen our shoot and lure bigger name actors, but are moving forward with the amount we have nevertheless.  I encourage people to check for updates on our project website which is http://www.whalingcityfilm.com.  There is also a mechanism on the website to contact the production if anyone wishes to learn more about investing in the project or donating or contributing to it.  We have structured the project in such a way where certain qualified investors could be eligible for protection on a portion of their investment and things like executive producer credits.

BT: Filmmaking is much more than just making a film. You had to build a bridge to the fishing community to tell this story. Can you comment on that outreach process?

JB: Since I am dealing with two worlds that were very new to me (marine science and commercial fishing), I needed to do a lot of outreach and bridge building, despite the fact that I was born in New Bedford, MA and grew up in the area. I did some early homework to pinpoint a collection of names in commercial fishing and at SMAST (School for Marine Science and Technology at UMass Dartmouth), then reached out via phone and email and introduced myself and my project.  I found plenty of people in both worlds that were very receptive and extremely generous with their time and knowledge.

Our outreach will continue as we gear up for productions. Since we are shooting at such a low budget, we will need to partner with individuals and groups to help us get this film made.  We are actively looking for all sorts of resources—including locations, boats, office space, vehicles, parking, cast and crew housing, etc. Anyone who can help should contact us via our website, www.whalingcityfilm.com.

BT: How is the fishing community receiving the story?

JB: Those in the fishing community who have read the script have responded very positively.  There were times that I questioned my right to tell this story, having never personally fished.  However, I recall Francis Ford Coppola noting that Mario Puzo never once in his life met a mobster, and yet wrote The Godfather.  I am certainly not implying that Whaling City will be the next Godfather, but I have done a lot of writer research on the fishing industry.  This includes written research, but I also went out and interviewed fishermen and other people in various segments of the industry, handed them the script and asked them point blank to tell me what I had wrong so that I could get it right.   I feel a sense of responsibility to the fishing community to get it right, and I am doing my absolute best to do that.  I am not attempting to candy-coat anything, but instead aiming to portray commercial fishing as faithfully as I can and with a great deal of respect.  There are other pieces of work where fishing either gets romanticized or its gets smeared…I have no interest in doing either.

BT: The struggle your story depicts co-exists with the rest of the community who may have lived in the area for generations, yet many people (unless they have a family member or friend who is a fisherman) don’t know the struggle. Was there a specific moment when you realized you knew how to translate this story onto film?

JB: One night sometime around 1999, I strolled alone through the historic district in downtown New Bedford, and a heavy fog suddenly rolled in.  All I could see were cobblestones, lamps and fog, and traces of a few old buildings, and it just suddenly struck me what an incredibly cinematic place I was in.  The next day I wrote a 10-page short film about a fisherman returning to town after a long trip at sea.  At that stage I did not really have any understanding of the real issues in the commercial fishing industry.  I never ended up producing the short, but a year or two later I came across a very detailed, multi-part series in the Boston Globe on struggles in New England’s fishing industry.  That was the first moment I began to see how multifaceted and complicated fisheries issues are.  I continued my research over the years, and here I am today.

BT: Can you please talk about some of the specific locations you will be filming?

JB: We will be shooting a good amount in New Bedford, including a well-known historical building, a fish packaging/processing plant, one or two fishing boats, and at one of the local colleges.  Since we are just starting with prep, we have not yet created our location agreements or gone out to have anything formal signed.  As I mentioned, we are certainly open to offers for locations and logistics help.  As a small independent film, our budget is very, very tight, so any no-to-low fee element will be looked at more closely. We will have property insurance and workers’ comp.

BT: How has it been working with the cities and towns you will be filming in to prep this project?

JB: The city of New Bedford, where the majority of the film takes place, has been outstanding in terms of understanding our needs and supporting us.  We will also be shooting in one or two nearby towns, but most likely we will be shooting on private property, so have not yet been in contact with any other municipality other than New Bedford.

BT: Tell us about your cast.

JB: We have one or two smaller names signed on with letters of intent, but their involvement is of course dependent on our exact scheduling dates.  We have a top-notch New York City based casting director we will be working with, and will also be doing some local casting and limited Los Angeles casting. We will also audition and cast a handful of “non-actors,” i.e., people who actually work in the fishing industry, but have not been professionally trained as actors.

BT: Who are the key people instrumental in bringing this story to the screen?

JB: Producers Geoff Quan and Chip Hourihan have really helped push the project along, but at an ultra-low-budget the bulk of the producer work will be in early 2010.  My entertainment attorney, Andrew Lund, is very knowledgeable and has been extremely generous with his time.  Of course, I thank the Alfred P. Sloan foundation for their generous seed money, as well as our two (so far!) equity investors in Seattle and North Carolina.

BT: A film usually has a long road before it gets realized, did you experience any bumps in road along the way?

JB: I don’t know how interesting it is, but financing the project has certainly been a curve in the road.  I received a substantial Alfred P. Sloan feature film production grant in 2007, then met with a lot of people and started to assemble a team.  I began my search for additional project equity a week or two before the stock market tumbled (around Sept. 2008).  I recall sitting in meetings with co-production companies in New York and people just looking at their blackberries and excusing themselves, cutting the meeting short to call their brokers to try and stop the bleeding.  The bleeding really didn’t stop, so this year indy film equity has been as hard to come by as it probably has in 40 years.  Despite that, we managed to partner with two additional equity investors, who got us to a point that we felt we had enough money to get started.  Although we continue to seek equity financing, our new attitude is to shoot the film for the amount “in the bank” when we get to production– and to very carefully screen and source crew members that have the ability to work with limited resources.

BT: By making Whaling City what do you hope this story will do for the fishing industry and for those who see this struggle for the first time on screen?

JB: I hope to depict the various sides in the fisheries debate in a balanced way. My story is told from a commercial fishermen’s perspective, and perhaps leans slightly in that favor, because I think the fishermen’s point of view is often underrepresented.

For example, the average person probably doesn’t know that a couple decades ago, fishermen were lured with high-incentive loans – by the government and financial institutions – to expand the commercial fishing fleet.  Today, with the increasing focus on environmentalism, many of these same fishermen are now being scapegoated and vilified for things like over-fishing, and they are understandably upset about that.  I don’t think we should turn a blind eye to managing fisheries in a sustainable way, but we need to respect the fact that a lot of the fishermen have been out there for generations, and it is not just a job for them, it is a culture and a way of life.  It would be a travesty if we squeezed these guys out only to have corporate entities swoop in and essentially steal away the resource by snapping up the right to harvest it on the cheap.

I also hope to demonstrate to the film industry on the festival circuit how rich of a city New Bedford is both culturally and historically, and just how film-friendly of a city it is becoming.  At the heart of it, we really want to make a great, local film that also tells an important story, highlighting some of the fisheries issues in an entertaining, dramatic, and compelling way.  We are very excited and appreciative about working with the Greater New Bedford community, since we will need plenty of local help and support to execute the project successfully.

BT: Thanks Jay!   We’d love to check in with you as your team moves into production.

Tags: "Whaling City", FILM, fishing industry, independent, Jay Burke, New Bedford, School for Marine Science and Technology at UMass Dartmouth