Friends, family and curious guests packed the AMC Showplace 12 Thursday night for an exclusive screening of Ball State alumnus Kenny Stevenson’s independent film “Cheery Point.”
The film is set in a dystopian future where citizens are required by their government to inject themselves with a drug called “Torpase,” which shuts down their ability to experience emotional or physical pain.
A group of people called “Springers” refuse to use the drug and must go into hiding to keep their emotions. They rebel against the “Pasers,” the dominant group in control who use the drug and view it as vital to social stability.
The evening included an appeal for students to get involved with Versa Studios. The organization wants to create groups at different universities to teach students cinema outside of school and help them to pursue projects.
“A lot of these students have their own ideas and we give them a group of people who will take it and run with it,” said Dylan Pieri, Cheery Point publicist.
The members of Versa want to recruit out of this organized pool of talent for future projects.
Producer Kenny Stevenson
Q: The film contains a lot of religious or philosophical aspects to it. Where did the writers draw from to include these things?
A: There were four writers: myself, Adam Baily the director, and then two other writers, James Treakle and my fiancé Allison Flood. Each writer had a different spin. We knew when we approached it the concept was pretty broad. I’m a big fan of the show “Lost” from ABC, so it was an experimental film where wanted to see if we could achieve what “Lost” did as a TV series in seven seasons and try to emulate that in a film form. How we wrote it was an emulation of that. I’m a big fan of sci-fi. “ET,” “Star Wars,” all that growing up. Adam brought the love of “Lord of the Rings” and J.R.R. Tolkien. James Treakle — I’m not too terribly sure where his interests lie, but I think they’re in line with Adam. Allison is an English teacher, so she just kind of has a lot of motifs in mind that were helpful. A lot of the inspiration came from themes like existentialism: the idea that one person’s truth is not another person’s truth. Truth becomes a person’s individualized reality based off of the experiences they’ve gone through.
Q: Do you have any advice for students who are attempting to develop their own startups whether they are short films or other like-projects?
A: Join Versa studios. Dylan [Pieri], the publicist for “Cheery Point,” and the associate producer Andrew Bennett, they are the head of the expansion project for Versa Independent Productions. What they do is go around to other college campuses and set up these different groups that specialize in teaching cinema. I really recommend that students who are interested and really taking it seriously, seek out that group. Because even if you want to do your own thing, joining this group you will truly gain a basis and understanding of what it takes, and the logistical standpoint to make it happen.
Q: Are there any other current projects for Versa Studios?
A: The next feature is still going to be cerebral and nature. It’s still going to be sci-fi, it’s going to have elements of horror, it’s not going to be nearly as broad. All I want to hint at is that we’re going to play on the idea of what it really means to be an alien. It’s going to be pretty neat, we’re excited and we’re looking at, already, some pretty big actors.
Director Adam Bailey
Q: Stevenson said that each of the writers contributed something distinct. What was your contribution?
A: I have lots of “Lord of the Rings” interests. For this one in particular, Kenny talked about having this wide cast. Lots of different people, lots of different perspectives, lots of different backgrounds and back-stories. First off, we wanted everyone to be morally gray. This also led us to not really quite having an antagonist. One of the first things I did, that I think really benefitted the script, was the creation of the character of the mayor. One of the first scenes I wrote for him was kind of a variation of the talk between him and Cory in the beginning. From there I began to help rewrite. Actually, Kenny and I were out location scouting down in Louisville. We already had the finished script — it was a very rough draft though. I was looking through it in an office as he was going and looking for more locations. I spent an entire evening without sleep. A couple days later, I sent it over to James Treakle and let him take a really large pass at it. The thing is, throughout the whole process we were talking through email or Skype or I was going to his house at two or three in the morning just revising the script until we had it down to what it was. Even then that didn’t stop because there was a lot of additional scenes that Kenny later thought of to include that kind of helped with the back-story and other characters. So he would write that and send it to me and I would revise it a lot. I wrote a couple of original scenes but I did a lot of revising.
Q: There seems to be heavy use of color during certain scenes. What did you try to communicate through that, if anything?
A: From the outset, I wanted to be very blatant with Springers (characters who abstain from the drug Torpase) and the Pasers (characters who use Torpase). “Cheery Point” was all white. Normally, you have the good guys in white and the bad guys in black, which what I’m doing is not strictly speaking original at all, switching so the good guys are in black, because black has all the colors because it absorbs all of them, while white bounces back all the colors. I wanted there to be this heavy sense of green at different points. There’s either this eerie green when you’re in “Cheery Point,” or this fresh lively green when you’re out there [in the Springer camp].
Q: The film has a very pronounced score. Did you, as the director, do any coordinating with the musical choices for the film?
A: I am an avid film score listener. I listen to soundtracks in my car when I drive anywhere. When [we] were going though the score, while I didn’t have a direct hand in writing any of it, I went through and found songs from various soundtracks, from like “Lost.” It took a lot of inspiration from “Lost.” I made this playlist of songs and cut them together and sent them to Kenny and Blake, who did the score like “this is what I had in mind.”
Q: What did being a part of this mean to you?
A: It’s a big question. It meant that I got to collaborate with a lot of really passionate people. Which was kind of a real blessing; I didn’t realize what I was getting into at first. It also means that I can do this as a career. I’m moving down to Austin, Texas to start persuing this as a film career. It means that I not onlyget to be around a lot talented, inspired, passionate people, I get to realize a dream but I also got to propel myself forward at a very young age at doing what I want to do.
