State of the Art

Twenty Peaches in a Box

by Peg Aloi

Allowing actors to improvise their own scripts could seem experimental, even dangerous. For a first-time director it sounds like a recipe for disaster. But for 26-year-old filmmaker Carlos Hamill -- whose locally produced feature-length debut Twenty Peaches in a Box is getting its world premiere at the Harvard Film Archive this Friday -- it's all in a day's work. "One interesting thing about working like this is that I don't consciously think about the results while I'm going through the process. It's like a documentary in that way."

Twenty Peaches is the story of three very different sisters, their alcoholic father, and a motley assortment of West Roxbury friends and neighbors (the film was actually shot in Jamaica Plain). Hamill -- a native of Puerto Rico who majored in drama at Johns Hopkins before graduating, in 1996, from the BU film program (his photographer, David West, and producer, Barbara Bouquegneau, also went to BU), -- gathered together a few student actors he'd worked with before, auditioned a few more, and basically turned them loose.

"Some of the characters were based on real people, like Ozzie," says the director, referring to a sweet hoodlum who crashes at a Hare Krishna temple after narrowly escaping arrest on drug charges. "The actor, Jason Taylor, spent a lot of time at the Hare Krishna center on Commonwealth Avenue." Other characters evolved as challenging roles for the actors, like Norman (played by Mike Fitzgerald), a socially challenged young man who drools, allows Ozzie to steal from him, and fawns all over pretty Katherine, the youngest sister. "In real life, that actor is nothing like that; he's a boxer. You'd never recognize him."

Although Hamill's method of allowing actors to develop the film's storyline based on their character improvisations was a dream for some performers, others found it daunting. "It was hard to find the right actors who'd be willing to do this. First, it's low-budget. Second, not having a script, not knowing what the film was about, most actors weren't willing to commit to the project from the start."

Other unexpected difficulties arose from this unorthodox process. One actress, after creating the middle-sister character (Sylvia, a college dropout cut off from her trust fund who works as a stripper to make ends meet), moved abruptly to New York, forcing Hamill to recast the role on short notice. The film was shot in 20 days, though rehearsal and script development lasted more than three months.

Hamill counts Steven Soderbergh among his favorite auteurs, along with John Cassavetes, Mike Leigh, and Jean Renoir. "I admire them because they don't try to come up with answers for everything." As for his own film's ambiguous, anti-genre form: "I happen to enjoy the fact that most people who see my film don't know whether they're supposed to laugh or not. So far, no two people who've seen it have said the same thing about it, and I like that."

Twenty Peaches in a Box will screen at the Harvard Film Archive this Friday, September 25, at 8:15 p.m.; a reception will follow.