Brian Slattery Photo
Titania Galliher, who plays Frankie in the film Northern Shade — written and directed by Chris Rucinski and currently shooting in New Haven — stood at the edge of the water in Fair Haven Monday afternoon, overlooking the Quinnipiac River. The scene was simple: Galliher was to drive up to the shoreline in her car, get out, take a look around, and then head down to the water. She did it once, getting out, taking a glance, then heading where she needed to go.
“Cut!” said Rucinski, standing next to the camera. “We’re going to do it again.”
“Do you want something different for options?” Galliher asked.
“Nope — I liked your moment on the log. I liked it all,” Rucinski said. They shot it again, fast, but this time toward the end of the shoot Rucisnki had an idea, a small detail. “Can you wave to that boat?” he said.
Northern Shade tells the story of Justin (Jesse Gavin), an Army veteran in his mid-30s who, at the beginning of the movie, is living on a boat docked in the Quinnipiac Marina. His younger brother goes missing in the state’s Quiet Corner, and in the search for him, Justin discovers that his brother has joined an extremist militia. Getting Justin out of that militia, however, will require Justin to confront his own past and his family’s. Can he do it?
Rucinski.
Rucinski, 34, grew up in Branford. After college he got a job as a video editor for the New England Patriots. When the 2007 recession hit, the Patriots organization laid off about 300 people and cut his hours down to two days a week. “I figured there’s no better or worse time to move to L.A.,” Rucinski said. He got a break from film editor Michael McCusker, who gave Rucinski a “small job for a small movie” — Hesher, starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt — that let him handle assistant editor duties.
“I kind of proved myself on that movie,” Rucinski said, and “my boss ended up bringing me onto a lot of other movies after that.” He worked on Captain America: The First Avenger, Get On Up (the biopic about James Brown), and a Jack Reacher movie, among several others. He worked as a director on three short films, four music videos, and a PSA for the ACLU. Northern Shade, he said, “is my first feature.”
When the pandemic began, Rucinski returned from L.A. to Branford to be with his family. He had a couple drafts of the screenplay written before the pandemic started, especially the parts of the movie where Justin’s brother gets involved in the militia.
“I feel like there are so many different aspects of what militias are, and they’re not really explained too well,” Rucinski said. He has friends who are Army veterans — they served in Afghanistan — and he relied on “their understanding of what it means to join one — when it is a true militia, and not just a hate group,” like the Proud Boys or other groups involved in the boogaloo movement. Part of the movie hinges on “what it means to be in a militia and trying to reconcile that with what we’re seeing now.”
He learned from his friends that “when guys are in the Army, especially Afghanistan … there is always the need and desire to carry on that brotherhood” after their service is over. “As a vet you always wonder if you did enough, if you put in enough time, for your country, for yourself, for your brothers in arms.” Many vets “want to become part of something stateside,” which often means the National Guard or the VA. “There’s this joke of, ‘yeah, we can get a militia going back home,’ but that’s if there’s a zombie apocalypse,” he said.
Meanwhile, in looking at the current militia movement, he said, “what happened? Most of them aren’t vets, but they want to be, and it’s a different culture than what you’d expect with a bunch of vets.”
In contrasting Justin’s experience with that of his brother’s, the movie is able to explore issues of PTSD and combat trauma. But the overall theme, Rucinski said, is “brotherhood and loyalty — not just with your buddies in the service, but with a blood relative who took a different path and blames you for a lot of choices, and has hurt you. How far are you willing to go to be true to him?” For Justin, there are “elements of regret and being haunted.”
And there is Frankie (Titania Galliher), who, at the beginning of the movie, “discovers the brother’s truck upstate — it’s been burned, torched, and abandoned.” She “discovers it was registered to Justin” and tracks him down at the marina to tell him what happened, kicking off the events of the movie. “The truck is the opening shot of the movie and bridges everyone together,” Rucinski said. The truck detonation, he said, will be a “controlled burn at the Stony Creek Quarry.” After filming at the marina, the crew will go to Voluntown for a few days, then back to California for a few scenes.
All of this, of course, is partially about contending with the Covid-19 pandemic — both in the story itself and the making of the movie. In Branford, “I realized that I should be rewrite it to be set during Covid,” Rucinski said. If he was filming in it, after all, why not set the story in the present as well? He rewrote bar and restaurant scenes to instead involve one or two people, in some cases three or four.
“I like the anxious tone of what that brings to the story,” he said. Setting the story during the pandemic also makes it easier to do under the restrictions governing film shoots. Everyone can be wearing masks. “One thing I like as an editor is that if I need to change a line, I can. When the character has a mask on, you can make them say whatever you want.”
“I want to make this movie,” he continued. “There’s not really going to be a better time to make it.” He noted that “actors are happy to be working on a movie. No one’s working — it’s tough.” The same goes for film crews. “One of the reasons I came back when I did is that I knew I wasn’t going to have another editing job until at least next March. So I’ll probably just edit this movie.”
About making films during and about the pandemic, “I don’t see why more movies aren’t doing it,” Rucinski said. “People need to wake up to the fact that it’s going to be a while.” Rucinski himself is assuming the virus isn’t going to “miraculously go away by the spring.”
Rucinski is also very thankful to Lisa Fitch, who owns the Quinnipiac River Marina, and Steve Streeter of Streets Boathouse Smokehouse, for the use of the space; Streets is also feeding cast and crew for two days while they shoot. Two of the actors are living on boats on the docks and using the showers at the marina, “which is huge for us,” Rucinski said. “It helps them stay in character.”
“It’s pretty exciting stuff,” said Fitch. She connected with the crew of Northern Shade through a friend of a friend. “They said they needed a small, family-run marina,” Fitch said. Hers fit the bill. She has run the marina and the connected bait and tackle shop there since 2007.
“I live here, but I sleep somewhere else,” she said. She said she has enjoyed watching the film come together. “It’s a different kind of business to observe from another angle,” she said, noting how “it goes quick, then slow, with quite a lot of repetition.” She approves of the production’s strict safety restrictions. Crew must wear masks at all times, along with the actors. Whenever possible, the crew observe a gap of 10 feet between them. And everyone got tested before participating in the shoot. She also noted that it was fun, though in some ways not so out of the ordinary.
“My day is always different,” Fitch said. “It’s never the same in a marina.”
In addition, Streeter has a speaking part in the film, as the person running the dock when Frankie approaches. In the scene, he asks Frankie who she’s looking for. When she tells him, Streeter gets to refer to him derisively as a “gashole,” and then gives her the combination to the gate so she can go out on the dock and meet who she’s looking for.
They rehearsed the scene before shooting it. “Be a little more wary of her,” Rucinski said to Streeter. “You haven’t seen her.” Streeter nodded. They did the scene several more times to get the footage they needed. They then did it again, this time with the camera on Streeter and Rucinski standing in for Galliher, coaching Streeter through a few different readings of his line. Streeter gave Rucinski what he wanted in the performance, and Rucinski declared the scene finished.
Streeter.
“That was it? I’m in the movies?” Streeter said. He joked with a friend watching the scene that he would be available for autographs later.
Meanwhile, Galliher was chatting with a marina patron with a small white poodle who had been on the dock while the crew was shooting and stuck around to observe them at work.
“What’s the name of the movie?” he asked.
“Northern Shade,” Galliher said. “Your dog is adorable,” she added.