Excerpt from Press Kit

The inclination to shoot something in Vegas wasn’t purely a decision of convenience. On artistic levels I figured it would provide a certain degree of production value not commonly found in most short films as anywhere you point the camera – whether it’s the desert, a casino, or the neon lights of night  - you’ll find something intrinsically cinematic. The problem arose upon further dissection of the story when I realized most everything I liked about it was something tonal or intrinsic to the way Lee had written it. To film the plot alone would have been sufficient but not as affecting as the read. I knew to make the film as enjoyable as the story the most important thing to adapt was the feel or tone of the piece. Passages as rich in mood as “She’d said he was crazy, then had taken him to her apartment and bathed him with a sponge in the tub to get the smell of the casino off before they made love.” needed to have some cinematic equivalent and it was my challenge to figure out what that would be.

I started first by attempting to define the “thru-line” of the film. By the end of the story Luther has lost the apartment, the car, the money, the girl and most importantly his dignity. The line “there are worse things you can lose in life than a bet” seemed a very appropriate insight. From there I worked my way backwards, feeling it best to define the present day world as an uninviting, depressing, noirish landscape and the past as it’s opposite.  I felt this was best accomplished by taking all the assorted tools a director has at their disposal (camera, lighting, casting, locations, art direction, wardrobe and make-up) and creating a distinction between how each would be used to portray the individual “worlds.”

It was important for me to create a sort of “Vegas Noir” and not something typical of most films set in Vegas. I didn’t want it to be the tourist’s perspective of the town, utilizing the devices that have become the clichés of that genre, such as helicopter shots of the Strip. Luther’s world is not the glitzy thing that the Las Vegas travel and tourism board presents itself as but rather the day to day grind of a dealer – so used to his surroundings as to be unimpressed by them. His world is not that of the posh mega resorts of tomorrow but rather the gritty downtown casinos of yesterday. Living in the town for the year that I did proved an invaluable resource in simply being able to observe the things inherent to the city, and select which ones were not commonly portrayed on film. In the end, I’d like to believe we showed a side of Vegas not commonly seen in most mainstream movies.

Gene Zaremski

Producer/Director, The Run