Mick Lexington

I would say the genre, generally speaking, is drama. But you're taking that a step further. I like to look at it as it's sort of a level of what I call hyperrealism whereas it's realism. I would say it's like realism on steroids, to quote a phrase. So a little bit of that. I'd like to also say I think that it falls very much into the arthouse category in detail of arthouse it's not very much a big budget commercial release. It has very much that indie flavor, indie tone to it, that which I quite like

A lot of this is done for a personal creative satisfaction. You know, I'm putting it out there and if somebody enjoys it, that's great. And if they don't, and they want to pass on it, that's fine too. Not looking to change the world yet at the same time, I'm looking to put a nice piece of art out there that someone can enjoy. So that would be the aspirations of it.

We're actually in negotiations with a couple of different companies for distribution right now and handle our distribution. So we are looking to have this distributed on one of several platforms, but like I say those talks are ongoing negotiations. We're not going to really make a decision until we have several more episodes ready to go. We've filmed and released one to the festival circuit. Episode Two is in post, Episode Three is part of it as opposed but we still have one scene to clean up on that. And we've just started shooting some scenes for Episode Four.

Ideally, looking to do 12. It would be pretty much a three part story of the first act being the first three episodes, episodes 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 being act to and then a conclusion, kind of limited 12 may divided up to six episode series. Having had a decision on that yet, but ideally you're looking for 12 but that's the target right now.

Exactly. The objective of anything that's like a first episode or a pilot is really to bring the user in and sort of set up, what I like to call set the story of vector in a direction. So that's, that's how I see the the first episode doing. I like very much working in the episodic format because you're able to actually tell a story and develop it out. The story from Lipstick Traces, I would say from start to finish right now is probably outlined 70 to 80%, but with each episode, I'm tweaking that a little bit, looking at how it can move that story in a more interesting direction. And it really would be telling a complete story in all episodes together would tell one complete story yet having said that, I like each episode to be self-contained. So you could look at one episode and that could be a contained unit but it is still part of a series of stories.

Oh exactly yeah, very much so. And that was really the intention when we started making it. Now that I I'm involved much heavier in the project, I realized that's gonna that would make a very long film. So maybe it will be edited down, maybe in two parts or I have no problem as well releasing the three hour film if somebody wants to take a look at it.

Well, I think all of my all my fiction writing and I really look at the filmmaking as an evolution from writing because I've spent a lot of time training as a novelist before I got back into film, but I look at all of your all my fiction there is some basis for reality in a character yet. I think sometimes if you take a character and paint them to be exactly what they were in real life they might be a little bit tedious or boring if you take in all the aspects of it. So you want to tweak that and you want to heighten that also. A lot of times I make combined to two different personalities into one character or take different aspects and mix that. So I think a lot of my characters are based in some sort of observation of reality, either someone I knew directly or some of that I knew of. At the same time to a lot of it is just fictionalized made up. I was pretty much done. I can see a lot of it. I can see some of it is it is taken from real life. A lot of it is is fictionalized, it's that's the beauty of fiction is that you can actually just let your imagination go and tell a story.

Right. Well, that didn't have much of an influence on it. That was more of a pastime but I studied film in college for about a year and a half and I was very bad student in both high school and college and I quit college and there was so many other things I wanted to do. Also that was right before the advent of digital so film is really a lot more laborious at the time. Actually you could record video but it just didn't have the same luster that film had. So in order to get a finished product on a film it was much more labor intensive. So I left film for a while and I did a lot of things. I moved to Paris and in London where I was worked as a musician for a while. I played rhythm guitar and vocals in a band called Checkpoint Charlie in London. Then back to that I moved back to San Francisco where I started studying creative writing. So I've worked as shouldn't say work but I participated in fine arts and painting, music writing, and I did all that and then before it came back around to filmmaking now that it was digital that I found it about a lot more less laborious and much easier to get a finished product out. But having done all those different art forms to I think that all added to the that adds to the filmmaking because such a filmmaking encompasses so many different aspects. You're looking at, apart from storytelling, you're looking at visuals, sound effects. The way music is layered on to create effect. So all of that had a big impact on the work that I'm doing now.

Oh, that's an interesting question. Because I think New York is always present in all of my work. I would say New York is a character that appears in all of my work. Whether it be overtly or not, when you look at one of my pictures, you can tell that New York is very much present and prevalent, both visually and as a reference and also very much as a muse.

Sure. We did well, I had a TV series in development, which was called Shanghai, Shanghai. And there was pretty much just falling out between myself and the executive producer. I really didn’t like the direction he was taking it. That was the first project I was really ever involved in seriously so I was coming into it a bit naive. Unfortunately, because it was a first project and didn't have a lot of knowledge in the business, I gave up too much creative control and really didn't like the direction it was being taken. So I pulled myself out of that.

I had written a novel when called Mr. Jack and I decided I was going to take that and put that into a mini series, a first film that I realized it was too long for a film and that's what I love the idea of episodic content because you can really let a story develop over a period of time. We began filming that in two late 2019. And it became evident right at after the first of the year, beginning of 2020 that we were going to have to put things on hold because of COVID.

And then a couple months later, an actor I worked with Raymond Turturro and I were talking and we just want to get out and start filming this just to be active, but we know we can’t, we have to be limited because of COVID. So we made a little short film called Was Brooklyn just a dream? - It's kind of an experimental film, sort of very kind of Lynch in style. And really did that with very little budget preparation just kind of threw it together to have some fun. And right off the bat we were accepted to seven different festivals and it got a one Best Director Award.

If we can do this without… I don't want to say without thinking but without really preparing properly and without addressing it properly, what the kind of success we could get. We took a little time and we put something into it now. We weren't able to get back into Mr. Jack right away because it's an indie film and we look at the budget we have on that. We were pretty restricted because of the sag which is the Screen Actors Guild union over here had put a lot of restrictions on us because of COVID and that was to to fulfill those who was going to really take our budget because of that so I thought we're gonna do a nonstate little project in the series of short films that I've got kicking around in my head, and that's when Lipstick Traces was born. So that was kind of the evolution into that. We're definitely getting back to work on Mr. Jack probably within the next six to nine months, but right now we're really, you know, fully committed myself the cast and crew to, to finishing up this project first. I was just gonna say that's sort of the evolution of what brings us right to here.

Pretty much well, it's a lot of the people that were cast for Mr. Jack. I really liked using my cast over because I very much love to create a personal relationship with the actors that I'm working with. That way I'm able to see what they're capable of, I know what they're able to do, what they will not do. And that is a big influence then on how I'm going to write for that character and how their character is going to interact in the story.

That's not to say that the character is the same that they play that as the are personality wise, it's just saying what I'm looking to cast to their strengths. And I know what I can work with them. And I love working with these people over because, first of all, we all this proved to be, I think, starting to form a really good bond. It's a really great team. We all know what we're capable of. It's like it's kind of like a sports team in a way that you rehearse with or you train with and you start to know what they're capable of. So you're able to make better plays because of it. That would be kind of a loose analogy. It's not the best analogy, but sort of like the way the way that kind of think about on that

That's it's really a bit of an easter egg and I love putting that in there but not overtly putting it in there. And then can you say you just notice it, you know, some people will get it. Some people won't. And I'm not going to preach and point a finger and say, hey, look at this, but I think that's a really good illustration of the complexity of layers that are actually in the story if you look you know, there's, there's something mentioned in episode one, and that might not appear again till episode four, and that could be related to something else. So the story is very layered and complex.

Exactly. And this is this I think goes to what I look what also what I feel is important in not just cinema but all art should continually be done experience of viewing the experience of participating in. It is something that compounds itself with every time you look at it, whereas you look at something as strictly entertainment. Okay, like say like one of the Marvel films or horror or something, you watch it, you watch a horror film. You see the person jumps out and you get scared and that's that satisfies your piece of entertainment. But a piece of art should continually be complex with each viewing of it and that's what I try to do in my films.

Well, I think it starts out a little bit ambiguous but I'm really trying to apply with the first episode is that there is obviously a history there. Now, I'm not saying what the history is. You don't know what it could be. It could be father and daughter. It could be subordinate. You only see that there's some sort of history there. And that I think will be later to find. You know, it's a lot of like I say it's a little ambiguous at first and it's intentionally ambiguous.

I don't know, I’ve never actually seen Shrek, I don't know. But I taken it from the Leonard Cohen song is. Yeah. So it's actually the line from the Leonard Cohen song, are we? And really what it implies is that you know that I look at the story of Jade as part of the probably the central figure and central story throughout the series on Lipstick Traces. And she's very much a phoenix rising from the ashes, which is was the minor fall the major lift, that's the reference refers to

Exactly. Very much in that you mentioned that. Joseph Campbell is a huge influence on my work.

Ah, well, we mean COVID was unnecessarily difficulty was a condition that we had to deal with and the way we saw around it to make this project as opposed to this other project, which was going to be much more difficult because of the the conditions of COVID. I really don't look at situations as being difficulties or challenges or more challenges than that the difficulties those are always addressed. Well, episode one was done on a really tight, I was written very economical and a very tight budget. So one of the difficulties might have been finding locations like several times we find we'll scout a location and we will try to steal a scene and what I mean by that is get in there and film it without a permit or just get it do it, you know, get everybody to get the actors. One of the scenes I had a location scouted for the the entrance to Jade's new apartment which is actually the entrance to Kat’s apartment and we were all set to shoot we're with there and then about a block away. This was in New York City in the late summer, early fall. There was a guy about a block away playing saxophone on the street. So we immediately you know, couldn't use that because of the sound. So we were a couple blocks away. We found the entrance, and I think it was actually Arielle Hope that notice that we found the heart graffiti on the door. And then we started noticing that hearts kept appearing and all the scenes that we were shooting there was a heart or someplace that it's I became a bit of a theme. So we immediately christened that as the location for Kat’s apartment where or Jade would find her for solace. Since then, you know we every time we see a location with hardware, like what can we film here?

So it’s actually yeah, it very much at its best become sort of like a happy accident. Accidental theme that's kind of just shows up in all of a lot of our seeds. When we're fitting wardrobe, one of the cast members, Keeley, she had there's a heart pendant on her zipper of a dress. Jade notice that she had heart sunglasses, all this stuff just kept that sort of like popping up.

Sure well, couple of things. One, you know, don't let anything get in the way of getting your story out. And so like you say, that Guerilla aspect, which I think is really prevalent a lot in filmmaking is because you just want to be able to don't let the government get in the way of letting getting your story out for what. Also I think what's really important is to have a good story. I have something to say and see that is I wouldn't say a bit polished but developed. I think a lot of young filmmakers are more interested in creating a visual impact as opposed to telling the story and I'm not criticizing that if anybody wants to do that, but I'm saying from a personal standpoint, it's something that I've always make sure it's taken care of. So like I said, don't give up creative control and get your story out there.Sure well, couple of things. One, you know, don't let anything get in the way of getting your story out. And so like you say, that Guerilla aspect, which I think is really prevalent a lot in filmmaking is because you just want to be able to don't let the government get in the way of letting getting your story out for what. Also I think what's really important is to have a good story. I have something to say and see that is I wouldn't say a bit polished but developed. I think a lot of young filmmakers are more interested in creating a visual impact as opposed to telling the story and I'm not criticizing that if anybody wants to do that, but I'm saying from a personal standpoint, it's something that I've always make sure it's taken care of. So like I said, don't give up creative control and get your story out there.