With a talented cast, quick dialogue and beautiful cinematography (all DV), The Last Romantic is an example of great storytelling that's not limited by a small budget. After recently winning the Emerging Filmmaker Award at the Starz Denver Film Festival, "The Brothers Nee" spoke to us about their experience making the film, abusing relationships and using family members for slave labor.

Tell us about your backgrounds. How did you get into filmmaking?

Adam: We got our start making little movies in our backyard, as probably most kids do, but ours were awesome!

Aaron: It seems like it's just been a process that we've always been involved with. I think in part, because we're making just as much money off of our movie now as we did back when we were 9 years old.

Adam: But when we got older, Aaron went to film school at UCF, I moved to New York and acted here and there. I think those two things are what facilitated us to be able to make the movie. And the fact that I, spending time in New York, where we ended up shooting the movie, introduced me to a lot of the actors that are in the film. All the locations were places I had seen or lived. Aaron had spent time learning equipment and actually acquiring equipment by stealing from UCF, while disguised as a ninja.

Was this a project you two had been working on for awhile?
How did the story come about?

Adam: Before starting work on The Last Romantic, we had other scripts that we were thinking about doing first, but the realization of how hard it would be to get the money we needed... caused us to stop and rethink.

Aaron: The genesis of the movie was... We had another script that we were trying to move forward with and in the course of working on that, Adam called me up one night and described a scene to me. It was actually the scene in which Calvin's sleeping in Central Park and Nana comes up with her dog, wakes him up and proposes to him. So we started asking, "Who is this guy? What's he doing there?" What was exciting, was that it was very doable. It was the kind of thing that felt... like a much more natural first start, something to cut our teeth on, and just get out there and see what happens, see how people respond to the color of our filmmaking. So we started talking about it, and within about a month's period we had the script put together.

Adam, you mentioned you knew some of the actors in the film?

Adam: Yeah I knew Shalom from this very short lived TV show call The Jury that I just did for about a week. I met her on there and had become friends with her and the rest of the cast. Jane Bradbury I'd met from doing a little indie film when I first moved to New York, and kind of stayed in touch with her, then she came and auditioned for the movie. So that was somebody else I knew. Actually a lot of people I knew didn't end up in the movie, sad to say, because they're great actors, but there simply were not enough parts. But Urbaniak is actually one who just came in an auditioned out of the blue. We have a lot of respect for him and his work, so we were very excited that he actually auditioned for our movie.

Aaron: He had us at hello.

Did you do any improv or anything special to help with the actors performances?

Adam: With certain people we would do some improvising. With James Urbaniak we would do the scene the way it's written and then just let it go... He was very good at that. For the most part, though, we stuck pretty tightly to the script.

Aaron: The thing that made directing the actors go more smoothly than anything else was, we were very fortunate to have some very talented actors. They just stepped right into it and you didn't have to say very much just, "Go a little bit more this direction. Go a little bit more this way." And they knew what to do. It's a wonderful thing when you've got people who are responsive and adaptable and just talented at their craft.

You mentioned you had other projects that seemed unattainable because of the cost. How did the funding go for this film?

Adam: Robbing banks and babysitting.

Aaron: Second mortgages and credit cards.

Adam: The fact that we had the money to make this was because some people made some great sacrifices. So in those instances, even though it's not much money, it really makes you want to make that money back so that those people can get their money back.

Aaron: We had the advantage of a very sacrificial cast and crew as well. Everybody went above and beyond. I think there were a few things coming out of pocket that shouldn't have had to come out of pocket...

Adam: Yeah... Shalom bought all of her wardrobe. She was telling me that she thought she had some jazzy clothes that would be funny for the character to wear. What that ended up meaning is that she had to go shopping for it. So she bought a couple pairs of shoes, she bought all this different stuff, stuff that didn't get used, and she wouldn't let us try to pay her back for it. There were things like that throughout, where actors were very aware of what film they were in and responded very generously to us.

Let's talk a bit about the look of the film. What camera did you use?

Aaron: We shot it on Panasonic's AG-DVX100A. That was their new 24p miniDV camera. As soon as we had made the decision that we were going to shoot DV, we also made the decision that we're not making any excuses for something not looking good. Instead of saying, "oh well it's an indie movie, we're shooting DV and so we don't need to try", we put a lot of effort into the look. We took very seriously the shot composition and the color schemes. Then in post, we took advantage of the fact that, the kind of color correction posting that we could afford to do with miniDV was the kind of stuff that—even if we had gotten a big budget, we wouldn't have been able to afford to do on film. It just costs so much more to be doing color correction, color timing and stuff like that on film, but on miniDV it doesn't. You don't need to be spending $275 dollars an hour to be on a DaVinci machine, a benefit that we took full advantage of. I think it was something in the neighborhood of 3 months that I ended up spend just working on the colors in post. I could not have afforded that on film.

What was your approach to using different looks in the film? Like the first shot in Times Square or how the shots with Mudi are always in black and white...

Adam: The story is coming from Calvin Wizzig's perspective—it's based on a novel that he wrote, which doesn't actually exist but we made it up for the sake of the movie, to clue audiences in to the fact that everything they see is being filtered through Calvin's own perspective. He sees this girl Mudi as a total French new wave femme fatale, so she is seen in black and white.

Aaron: He arrives in New York and New York is just glowing, it's something new, so we made it's colors really pop in that first shot of Times Square.

The variety of shots were great. Some of shots look like digital and others look like they could be film...

Aaron: One of the things that we decided early on was that we were not going to try to make DV be something that it isn't. We're not going to try to make DV be film, we going to try to make DV be really good DV. So I think in part, not trying to come up with ways to make it into something else but instead, exploring the medium's strengths... we were able to accomplish some stuff that I'm really happy with.

For the party scene, were you crashing somebody else's party or did you just shoot during one of your own?

Adam: We tried to invent a party. The extras were a bunch of friends, who didn't realize what it was to make a movie—that they were just going to have to hang out for a long time. A lot of them ended up leaving, or asking if they could leave. So we shot this party scene with like five extras and it looked terrible. What we ended up doing was re-shooting a large portion of it. Me and my roommate at the time had the same birthday, so we just told people it was our birthday party. Everybody came and then we turned on these big lights and shot for a minute. I don't know how pleased they were about that but we made it work for the film. That's basically what filmmaking is, building relationships so that you can destroy them in one fatal swoop.

What was your approach for the music? How was it developing original pieces for the film?

Aaron: Well music is something that we considered very, very important to the process. We had been discussing that back when we were scripting the movie. It wasn't actually until we began production that we heard some demos of some music that Band Marino had done. Our younger brother, Jonathan, is in Band Marino. He had a demo CD that he played for us. We heard it and said, "you know what? These guys just might be able to do it." So we began exploring the possibility of working with them, and began nurturing a creative relationship with the band. Nathan Bond, who leads the band, was extremely gracious in his time and commitment that he put into just working and working and working the scenes and their songs, trying to find exactly the flavor that we were looking for.

And then for Mudi's scenes, we were very fortunate to, after much searching, find bayonist Stas Venglevski, who had these wonderful pieces that were just right on with what we were trying to find for Mudi. We tried to give every character their own theme... Ironically enough, Christy, Shalom Harlow's character who plays the cat girl, her music was all performed by this performer Andre Katz, who's last name was actually spelled K-a-t-z [the name of the play Christy is in], which was unintentional. It just happened to work out that way.

Adam: Conrad Winslow is another cat in Florida who...

Aaron: Yeah, Conrad Winslow, his band is Dodger, he collaborated with Nathan Bond of Band Marino for some of the pieces in the movie as well.

Besides your brother in Band Marino, there's a number of other Nee's in the credits too right?

Aaron: We're all over the place. We're like a virus!

Adam: The thing is, Aaron is married to somebody [Anne Marie Nee] that he met in film school and she was invaluable to helping with the film. She had a lot of jobs. She was amazing. The rest of the deal is that, there are nine kids in our family, so we do sort of like sweat–shop slave labor! We're kind of evil people, but hey, if you've got a big family, use them!

What was the most challenging aspect of the film?

Aaron: It would change from moment to moment. My car got towed a couple of times, ticketed quite a few times. When everybody is multitasking, you're trying to cram as much stuff into a day as possible, and you've got to try to get your car out of where ever it is that it's been taken—out of state, possibly in a trash compactor, based on the threatening tone of the person that you're able to get on the phone—Those types of things, when everybody is multitasking to the enth degree, that's where all the little things that come up can be even greater challenges.

Adam: I feel like a lot of it comes down to having money. This is a film where you could say, "it was this or that." But if we had money, you would have your trucks and your trailers and all that stuff. When your entire film crew is packing everything into the director's car and the producer's car... stuff can happen. We also had an actress that got sick a couple days before shooting...

That happened in the middle of shooting?

Adam: Yeah she was two days away from having to shoot. We were shooting all the stuff with Nana and the old man when we got the phone call. I've always felt guilty to the actress who played Nana, because we weren't able to talk to her much while there downtime, because as soon as we'd call "cut" or wrap out a scene, we would be jumping on the phone trying to find a new actor for this one part.

Aaron: The other thing, maybe not entirely the most unexpected challenge, but the challenge that you don't tend to think of in the process, is all the legal ins and outs we had to deal with. The amount of time that I had to spend, finding an attorney and working with the attorney and going back and forth with different people's managers and agents and their lawyers... there's just so much business and red tape. As a matter of fact, it reminds me of, at South by Southwest, that trailer that they would put before every movie that ends with saying, "there are no rules to filmmaking"... every time I saw that I thought, "Tell that to my attorney!"

Was it difficult working with your brother on your first feature?

Aaron: I'm going to answer for both of us... No. That's actually one of the wonderful advantages, at least on my end, is that, right away I've got an actor who I respect a great deal and who's extremely responsive and extremely adaptable. It's not very difficult for me to be shooting a scene and then just step around from behind the camera and say," a little bit of this and a little bit of that is going on here," and right away, Adam knows what to do.

Adam: I think what it is, is that Aaron always just says, "a little bit of this, a little bit of that," and so I go, "ok dude," and just change it however I feel like, but he thinks he's directing me! It's a modern way to direct where he just says this one phrase that's like his mantra. "Little bit of this, little bit of that," but it works.

Another part of the film that was great was the V.O.. You really felt like you were inside Calvin's head. Was a lot of that scripted or playing around during recording?

Aaron: One of the things that we kept trying to be very careful about with the voice over that we were writing is that, we didn't want it to be expositional or at the very least not explicitly expositional. But instead it's more subtle, it's coloring Calvin's character more than it is telling you what's going on in the story. After shooting it, we did do some rewriting of the voice over... because some of the stuff that we shot wasn't really working out, which resulted in the expositional burden of those scenes being shifted to the voice over. Then, we re-shot that stuff and the voice over got freed up again and was able to go back to not being explicitly expositional and instead be more stream of consciousness, adding this extra layer of color to Calvin's character.

What would you say are some of your influences as filmmakers?

Aaron: While this movie is not a French new wave film, there was a strong sense that this story called for a similar spirit behind it. We really appreciated the way somebody like Traffaut would just take you through a city... you just get to see a city with this colorful character. That kind of a tradition of filmmaking was definitely an element that was influencing us.

As far as maybe like a more contemporary filmmaker, Wong Kar Wai was another person who Adam and I both saw as a stylistic and methodological influence. We knew that we were going to have to be improvisational in a lot of ways. I hadn't even seen any of our locations before we were actually shooting... I was working on another project right up to when I came out to New York and started production. So we had to be able to get in there and immediately explore and exploit the strengths and weaknesses of a location. So there was a kind of looseness, but not carelessness. We'd get to these locations and be adaptable, and improvisational, trying to take full advantage of all the objects around us that would allow an interesting shot.

So what's next for the film and for you two?

Adam: With the film, we're going to just keep doing festivals. Keep doing the circuit and when that's done, the idea was to do a couple of distributor screenings.

Aaron: As it stands right now, we've been refraining from passing any copies along to any distributors. I know there are different schools of thought on how to your distribution, but the way that we have been approaching this is to wait until we've played around some more and gotten for ourselves, and the move, a background of people's responses. Which so far have been very positive and so I think that will put us in a better position when we actually do begin talking with distributors.

Adam: As far as what we do next. Aaron and I have been talking about it a lot. It's really going to come down to us choosing because we have a lot of stuff we're talking about and a lot of ideas. We just have to sit down and figure out what we want to do next. So with that it's hard to say but I will say that we are pushing to do something soon. Hopefully go on to production on something next year.

That's an interesting strategy you mentioned about the distributors. So have you been getting distributor responses and you've been telling them your not ready yet?

Adam: You get those emails of like, "we'd love to see your film. We heard about this or that," Where as if you send a move to one distributor and they don't like it, then the rest of the distributors know that. And I think you kind of shoot yourself in the foot by just showing it to one. Whereas if you fill up a room with 15 different companies or what have you and they're all watching at the same time, they're kind of glancing over at each other to go, "is he enjoying this? Do they like that? Ok, maybe I should... ok, alright maybe we should make a deal."

I think Aaron and I are both aware of the possibility this film may not sell until we make another movie. We don't know. Just the nature of the business where it is right now and independent film, it is very possible that this film will either go for a very low price or not at all for a while. But then again it could be something completely different. We're just going to try to play it smart, see what happens and keep moving forward with what we want to do next.

What kind of advice would you give to new filmmakers?

Aaron: I would say that the two most important things are: One, don't be careless about anything. Treat everything like it's something very important, something special. Every dimension of your film take seriously. And then the other thing, which is just more—a much broader more general philosophy of filmmaking is: I'm a firm believer in constantly asking yourself the question why. Why is this story going in the direction it is? Why am I even telling this story? Why are we doing it this way? Why are they wearing this? Why is this the color scheme? It's asking yourself that question that pushes you to explore more deeply what this story really is, and it helps you weed things out that are getting in the way of what's really at the heart of what you're trying to communicate with your film.

Adam: I guess on a more general level I would just say, work. Work hard and all the time. If you've got talent, I think you'll get people to see your stuff. If you work your ass off all the time... you will get your stuff seen.