5 Questions with Horatio Baltz
Taking over the streets of NYC in style, the group of young bike riders in “Bam & Rawls Grab a Slice” dodge traffic and shut down tunnels in search of a cheap slice of pizza. We spoke with director Horatio Baltz about how he captured it all, how he found and worked with his cast, and what’s next for him…
1) How did this project originate?
I would see these roving groups of bike riders in various neighborhoods in New York — sometimes a dozen of them would be ripping wheelies down Broadway through Times Square, sometimes down Sixth Avenue in the Village. I took some photographs of some of the kids in Soho, and there was just something about the "fuck it all" attitude that I loved about these kids. They were all young, from New York, had so much energy, and were seemingly fearless. I started following a few of them on Instagram and had this idea of trying to do a sort of short western with them. I knew I wanted to do something that was partly scripted, partly improvised, but true to their lives.
2) So how did you end up getting in touch with about a film?
Rawls (the quiet one) hit me up on Instagram after seeing a photo I posted of another bike rider. We met up and took some photos together, then some video, then we set up some time where we could try to shoot some scripted sequences. Bam and Rawls ride with a crew called Self Made Ryderz, so they pretty much just put a call out and whoever wanted to show up to the shoot did.
3) I love how natural and off-the-cuff everything feels. That’s not easy to capture. Any secrets how you captured?
I think putting in the time with Rawls helped earn the trust with Bam and the other riders. I met Bam the day of the shoot, but I know Rawls had shown him some of the test footage and photographs we had taken and thought they looked cool. We all met the morning of the shoot and I gave them both a run down of what I wanted to get — scenes of them riding, but also scenes of them shooting the shit. Before we shot anything I asked them some general questions about what it was like during their ride outs, particularly what they ate. They mentioned that their food of choice during rideouts were dollar slices, and I knew that was the film. There are so many pizza spots of varying qualities and prices in the city, and anyone who has lived in New York for even a few months can argue passionately about the ones they love and the ones they hate. From there it was just putting them in these scenarios and letting them just do them. For the scene on the West Side Highway my prompt was something along the lines of "Okay, for this scene, you've been riding all day, and you're just talking about your pizza spots." I got really lucky with Bam because he's a great talker and he has a natural humor to him which I thought paired nicely with Rawls' quieter and more reserved demeanor. I guess one technique that I used was letting them sit on the lulls. Whenever there would be a natural break in the conversation, I would keep the camera running and just let the lull sit. People generally want to fill awkward silences so they'd continue talking, and I think that led to the conversation feeling more natural and less "directed".
4) How long did it take, filming and editing. Did you have specific goals or expectations in mind of what you were trying to achieve with it?
I shot with Rawls for 3 or 4 one hour sessions which laid the ground work for setting up the main shoot with Bam and Rawls together. The shots with the large group of riders was from an rideout that I went to where hundreds of these riders met up in the Bronx and all rode down the length of Manhattan. At one point, hundreds of riders overtook the Major Deegan Expressway which shut down traffic. News and police helicopters were circling above us, and when we got to Harlem police were already beginning to rope off streets. I shot with Bam and Rawls together for half a day, which I knew had to be a story and dialogue heavy day. The major issue was shooting — I built this rig for my bike that I mounted the camera on. It was basically a spring loaded counterbalance that helped dampen the camera shake and looked like one section of a steadicam arm. All of the riding footage was shot from a bike on a 5D Mark II or a C100. Editing took a few months which included the time I needed to step away from the project and do other things. Originally the film was just Bam & Rawls talking, but I decided to include the big rideout footage and the solo Rawls footage in a title sequence to really amp up the western feel.
5) What else you working on at the moment?
I have a narrative short called "King Wah (I Think I Love You)" that just premiered at Slamdance. It's about a romantic encounter in a Chinese takeout restaurant. I just relocated to Los Angeles and am writing a narrative short about a young Pedro Infante who's struggling to tell the joke "The Aristocrats" and I'm toying with another narrative/documentary hybrid short about ballroom dancing Vietnamese refugees in Westminster, California.
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