The Sky Is Blue With Lies (Phaedra)

Cast, Crew & Director Notes

I love that we got to use some experimental methods to create a narrative feature. For about half of their dialogue, the actors were given prompts instead of scripted lines, which was a very clever thing that John did to elicit great performances, as well as to contribute to the overall documentary vibe of the film. My favorite part of filming was seeing how the actors answered the prompts, not knowing what they’d say, or which prompts would cause a big reaction. The talents were all fantastic, they’d think for a few moments then relive a real memory, something that was very true in their own life. I think the prompt that consistently got the biggest reaction was "Have you ever known anyone who served in the military? What were they like when they came back?" Later John cut it up to make those responses be about the characters in his story, and blended those reactions with the scripted lines.
—Kevin Kino, cinematographer, second crew director

I was amazed by the cameras John was using, and how briskly, professionally and peacefully he ran his sets and elicited performances from actors. I remember thinking how I wished every job could feel so amply fulfilling while enjoying every second of it. When an actor works a good deal, he can forget the myriad details of a line read or something like that; what he remembers is the quality of the experience, and John made it so interestingly collaborative; where we were able to improvise. He brought such a literate sense of achieving a performance arc with it all. His direction helped nourish the creativity of the performer, if the performer was equally smart and could respond to this articulate direction in kind. Honestly, I recall only this very halcyon experience of painless pleasure.
—Theodore Bouloukos, featured performer

John asked me to tell stories from the 80's. No problem. I graduated high school in the Spring of 1983 and by the end of the summer I’d moved to New York City for the rest of my life. Fueled by MTV fever dreams and tremendous bravado, I got into enough trouble to have plenty of stories to tell. The era has a rep for a reason and I dove in head first, for sure. So, preparing for "The Sky is Blue With Lies" offered a really fun opportunity to unleash. In the bathroom, my friend Heather and I had a good laugh about the 80's without having to say much at all. There we were, primping with the big hair and stark make-up, and I think the conversation went something like, "Right?" checking ourselves out. "Oh yeah."
—Gabrielle Penabaz, featured performer

This was my first time working on an independent film. John's approach to telling the story felt more like a documentary, and that made it very comfortable for me. I'm a performer, but not a trained actor, so I appreciated his nontraditional approach to the script. He asked me a series of questions, and I gave answers, instead of memorizing lines, and for which I was very grateful. Rather than have me be "in character," he had me pull from my own personal memories to respond to these questions. It felt very natural to me. I remember the day we shot was right around my birthday, in November. It was unseasonably warm and rainy, and I tried my best to bring an outfit that would suggest the style of the decade (late 70s, early 80s) without trying too hard. I found this green ringer t-shirt at a thrift store, with a logo on the chest — for a summer camp, or hotel I think, and John preferred that to the other wardrobe options. We made the look complete with some bell bottom jeans. I remember I was late to the call time because of the rain and the good old MTA, and I was rushing to get ready in the hotel bathroom, and have the make-up person look at me, then I jumped into bed with Heather Litteer, with whom I was sharing the scene and hadn't met until that moment. It was all such a wonderful experience!
—Sunny Hitt, featured performer

Film is such an interesting art form, especially being a stage actor by trade. Many moons ago, I was cast to film a scene as myself, but also as a character within the world of The Sky Is Blue With Lies. My lines were not scripted and I was asked to speak honestly about summer love and what it means to me. Many, many moons later, I see footage from the scene and surprise myself with how candid and clever I was. And I know how that sounds, but, really it was a reminder to trust myself and my thinking — even when I feel like I have no idea what I'm doing. And that is the power of storytelling: to show us ourselves. And the storytelling in The Sky Is Blue With Lies is like nothing you've seen before. Utterly human, visceral, and raw, this story cuts right to the core of how we feel.
—Lori Elizabeth Parquet, featured performer

Working on The Sky is Blue with Lies was like walking into the back alley's of my own mind. John would gently guide me along the path of Sky. There's so much mystery and intrigue with John's stories. He let me as an actress make some of my own decisions improvisationally, allowing for beautiful surprises and cinematic magic. John's was a truly original journey, at the end of which we found the gold, or in this case the blue sky. I looked for and discovered within my self the story of Candy and Donny and Po, and answered: where are they now? As a director, John knows how to pull things from you. John is a poet, and watching him direct is like watching a poet bring a poem into being. Sky is a modern day film noir—femme fatales and fascinations and bad boys—and an existential masterpiece.
—Heather Litteer, featured performer

We had exciting shoots, and time traveled to 70's New York. With the film's docu-style approach, we caused some astonishment. I was in full wardrobe and full 70s attitude, as we strutted through the Feast of San Gennaro in Little Italy, and cruised the backroads of New Jersey in an old Pontiac convertible. Playing Fara made me feel like a real badass, with so much inside her lonely soul. Watching the post production process has also been fascinating; the film was shot in high resolution on digital cameras, but now it feels like it was truly the product of an old time editing room. It was an honor to work with the director / author John Reed, who's masterminding turned this mythology into a modern, bluntly realistic but exceptionally beautiful feature.
—Sini Hill, lead actor

I grew up in TRIBECA in the late 70s and early 80s—my parents were part of the thriving artist community that was there. My introduction to the type of film that I think of in relation to this project were garage screenings of Super 8 movies shot by artists. I remember two masterpieces: one was a film by my stepfather, which documented in real time a fly landing on, flying off, and returning to a fluorescent bulb; the other film, and unfortunately I don't remember the filmmaker, was a stop-time animation of two people sleeping in bed on a hot night.
A year or so after those screenings, me, my mother and my brother were cast as Romans in James Nares’ Rome 78. Nares' chancy filmmaking made a deep impression on me. The New York style, tracking back through Warhol and the B (or, uh, C) New York Cinema of the decades previous, didn't strictly reproduce a reality that was scripted. The goal was to approximate a scripted scenario with readily available elements. That remained as a tenet of No Wave filmmaking, and later iterations of a New York (increasingly underground) style. My mother, Judy Rifka, was central to a context that extended from No Wave to Charlie Ahearn's Wild Style, to the East Village films that have been roughly categorized as Cinema of Transgression. (I wrote a bit about this on Gawker: http://gawker.com/my-gay-uncles-1683953793 ) Late 70's and 80's theater had also incorporated media; allowing the live event to influence the "script" was common to, let's say, the Ontological Hysteric Theater or the Wooster Group.
The loss of the bar "Magoo's," to me, marks the end of old downtown. For years I'd had it in my head to reset Phaedra/Hippolytus in the TRIBECA I'd known. (In 1983, I saw the Mabou Minds / Lee Breuer’s version of Oedipus, The Gospel at Colonus, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.) The technology of The Sky is Blue With Lies is of today, but the idea was to use new technology with a No Wave attitude; tech could allow us to never lose our feeling for each other, for the assembly of artists collaborating on the project. The lines for the lead characters, Candy (Aphrodite) and Donny (Dionysus) were scripted, but the other players, the members of the "chorus," were directed toward details, insights and commentary that was extracted through questions that I asked them (the questions were scripted but not included in the film—all the audio with my voice is post-production embellishment). The intention was to seamlessly stitch improvisation and scripted material.
I wanted The Sky is Blue With Lies to be a story, but also an awakening, an ephemeral moment imprinted upon "art." As much as possible, I wanted to fashion a memory: a mythic story yes, but also something so true to its own time that to watch it is as if to remember a collective past.
—John Reed, writer /director