Every year at the Hamptons International Film Festival, there is a film that captures the local East End experience. This year, many believe that film is ON THE END, written and directed by Ari Selinger. In a half-hour Zoom call, Ari Selinger shared the story of how his debut writer-director indie-drama film came about.
He said, “I was location scouting all over New York, and I found myself on Navy Road (Montauk) back in 2011 with my production designer friend. We were two 20-year-old film students (NYU) looking for a shoddy auto repair shop that we could use to shoot a film. There I met this guy, Tom, in front of his very dirty property. He was fixing a car. He came up to the window and not only told us about numerous people to talk to… he just knew all these names, and he just seemed to be a resource. He’d always be whispering in my ear about this thing he was going through with the town, about this battle, about him trying to keep his house. And it totally went over my head at the time. I did not know very much about zoning laws and property values, and maybe I was a little bit cavalier about it, but back in 2016, there was a big piece in the New York Times on his story.”
Mr. Selinger then laid out how Tom’s story became the movie, ON THE END, “I had a little bit more appreciation for films with these kind of intimate details that I found really interesting, and I thought, let’s do a little bit of digging. I have the personal, I know the guy. And if there’s a real story here, let’s see how deep we can go. And his love story, I knew personally, I knew that his heart was lit up when he was with this female friend, Freckles, and that mixed with the possibility of him needing to leave his house, I thought there was a lot of drama there. I remember in 2020, I gave him a call and I said, I’m gonna try this out.”
Then the magic happened, “I wrote a little outline down on a napkin. Let’s see where this goes and what he had. Then it was like the floodgates opened. I had opened Pandora’s box. He had so much to say, and I basically put it all down in a screenplay that was about 300 pages, and I thought, let’s see if I can whittle this down.”
Selinger spent a long time, “Just kind of breaking down his story to the point where I thought, here’s the main narrative. I found it. It was a little bit like trying to package it, but I thought I found a good folk tale, a modern folk tale, about the people that really live in Montauk, and not the type of typical Hampton story, you know, that people are accustomed to.
Next came the reality of shooting a movie. Selinger explained, “We shot it in Montauk. We at first looked at Belgium, if you can believe it, because of their tax credit. I went over to the beaches of Belgium, to see if I could get it done there, but I remember thinking, hey, how do I get to Belgium? And B, there’s no way I could fake this anywhere besides Montauk if I wanted it to be a Montauk film. We shot it in 23 days, and we shot about 14 days or so out in Montauk. A lot of the interiors we filmed in Brooklyn because the character is a hoarder, so we just covered up the windows. But yeah, we shot in the end of April 2024 into May 2024. We shot it on one camera, the A, the A mini. We set up all those lights up on the beach one day and one of those Montauk heavy winds snapped one of our sea stands. That was something I’d never seen. And we backed up for a day. But essentially, we were a little crew of people that I had gone to college with, and we were doing the same thing we did when we were 19.”
There is always an evolution when a project becomes a reality. Ari Selinger expands on this when he said, “When I started writing it, I thought I was getting a testimony about a guy who took on the town, a David and Goliath Tale. As I was making it, I realized, well, all great stories are actually love stories. So this is now going to be my backdrop, this struggle with the town.”
Selinger said, “Tom’s kind of offbeat romance is not Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn falling in love. It’s two outcasts falling in love in a hoarded house on the beach that I thought was a nice way to subvert the classic love story. And it’s a little bit of a sneak attack, too, because it’s a little bit funny to be talking about them, but at the end of the movie, you’re really crying for them. You’re seeing how the larger world inevitably plays a part in how their lives develop. So I try to just make it feel like a slice of life with just the realities of a changing town and what that can do to someone’s relationship.”
The cast consists of Tim Blake Nelson, Mireille Enos, James Badge Dale, Lois Smith, Anna Chlumsky, along with Desmin Borges, Matthew Mayer, Glenn Fleshler, Michele Hurd, and Sawyer Spielberg.
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