Click the image above for a larger view of Nick Damici and Jim Mickle’s autographs on our Toronto Zombie Walk poster.To open the festival they chose a movie called Mulberry Street. It is a picture about zombie sewer rats in New York . At least this is what it says in the synopsis. The movie itself was very, very different. Set almost entirely in one apartment building, a tenement, the movie is described by writer/actor Nick Damici as a character piece that happens to have zombie rats. And it’s true. This is a collection of very moving stories about people who live together and have built a community, but are then — bizairrely — attacked by a plague of rat bite-infected zombie humans who have taken over Manhattan.
What is most interesting about this picture is that it takes it’s time. Written by Damici and director Jim Mickle, they wanted to take time to set up their characters and not simply present a guy, then give you a reason to like him; present a girl, then give you a reason to like her; a formula that Hollywood today knows so much about. The movie itself revolves around eight central characters: a working single mother and her school skipping-son; a former boxer and father (Damici as the central character); his war veteran daughter, who has more than emotional scars; a very lovely gay man; a war vet from another war, always hooked up to his oxygen, and his son; and a genuinely jovial, but ill-fated superintendent. When creating these characters Nick and Jim said, they wanted to create for the viewer people who actually inhabit these tenements, or used to, before they were all moved out to create a ‘better’ New York. To do this, they use almost the entire first 45 minutes of an 85 minute movie to finely tone and present these characters. I must admit, for the first while I was very impatient. Frankly, I was bored. But once I got past my need to have 7 second cuts, spoon fed to me by the MTV generation’s need for speed, I began to relax into the idea of simply watching people go about their day. Nick indicated to me outside the theatre afterwards that he and Jim felt that ‘…nothing could happen until it got dark,’ which is an extremely bold choice in today’s movie climate.
Giving their characters the time to develop, however, is the heart of this movie. Obviously, being a zombie movie, there are — in fact — zombies and many of the characters die, but this movie is a seriously hidden gem made by some very committed filmmakers with integrity. As we were leaving the theatre we noticed that the director, Jim, and the writer/main character, Nick, were right behind us. We stopped to congratulate them and chat about the movie. When congratulated on the tone of the movie Jim said that at first people didn’t like it and they were afraid that they’d made the wrong choice, but as it screened more people began to love it and they were really happy with the end result. He also discussed that this was not the original vision for the movie, it was initially to be set in the country somewhere and was to have been a much larger scale. In the end, due to budget constraints, they shot most of the movie inside Nick’s kitchen in New York, the bar across the street owned by a girlfriend of a friend and guerrilla style around New York. ‘We got shut down by the cops a lot,’ Jim said laughing, ‘But then we’d tell them that we were NYU students or from Law & Order or something and then we were cool.’ The next day I was told by a fellow movie goer that they made this movie for a mere $60, 000 USD, which is not only a small feat in and of itself, but also highlights the beauty of the digital film age. Anyone can be a filmmaker, but not everyone can do it as well as these guys.
On a non-film related topic, when Nick was telling me why they decided to have all of the action start after dark, he relayed to me his experience on the day of the World Trade Centre attack. Having never actually met someone who was in New York on the day I was riveted. He had been sitting at his kitchen table eating breakfast and reading the paper. Then a plane went flying by ‘lower than any plane I’d ever heard’ and then they not only heard but *felt* an explosion. His girlfriend was horrified, but he said ‘nah’, while she ran to go see what was on TV and sure enough, life as we knew it had changed. What was fascinating to me about his story was that it was actually this event that influenced the way in which he wrote this movie, something it took them almost 40 drafts to do. He felt that people had just got up that day, gone to work and then something happened, so why not frame his story the same way? What this did was show me that for the rest of us, life has moved on. We gripe about the war and increased security; new reasons to justify racism, but to the people of New York, that day will be seared into their memories. It continues to affect the way in which they live their lives 6 years later and for what I imagine will be many decades to come.
Jim, Nick and to everyone else who worked on this movie, you guys did great work and I wish you nothing but the best in your future endeavors.
Oh and P.S., that necklace Nick wears in the movie is real, not a prop. He was still wearing it at the premiere.
