Blog > Title: Skin & Bone

I recently had the opportunity to interview indie director, writer, and actor, Phil Magcalas about his most recent film, Skin and Bone. You might be wondering based on the title if it’s is somehow related to Elijah Wyman’s song from Butterfly Needles with the same name. Indeed, it is! Most of the music in the film is by Elijah. It’s also a pretty awesome movie. Check out the trailer here:

What is Skin and Bone all about?

Skin and Bone is a film which takes place over one day in a cardiac catheterization unit - the type of place where people with heart attacks and congenital heart defects go to have their hearts patched up and their arteries opened.  It centers around the variety of people (not just doctors and nurses, but the patients themselves, techs and family members) who come together, from completely different situations, for one collective purpose - to focus their attentions on the care of people who are ill.

What inspired you to tackle such a dark subject after the much lighter subject matter of “Quarter Life Crisis”?

I guess I didn’t really venture to make something that was “dark,” per se.  I spent four years working in a cardiac catheterization unit, and I just found the situations which took place absolutely fascinating - so more than anything else, I was trying to really depict situations honestly.  Things like House and ER are fine, but there is so much dramatically interesting when you take a look at what happens every day in real actual normal hospitals.  The people who work in health care are just ordinary people, so there’s a lot behind the scenes which gets pushed aside, but it’s still there.  So, this movie is really an homage to the drama inherent in the situations which happen in real life, and I’d say the subject matter is just us trying to present you with relatively true-to-life experiences.  For me, this nature of healthcare is uniting, and I think it comes across as a commonality that the characters share as well.I think that also, no matter what you set out to make, the film you end up with relies a great deal on what your audience takes from it.  I think we’ve managed to leave certain aspects of the film open for interpretation - and I like the idea that what people get out of it depends on how they approach it.  “The Quarter-Life Crisis,” our first film, was a comedy with a lot more dramatic elements than we had expected.  I feel like “Skin and Bone” is a drama, and ended up with a lot more comedic elements than I expected.  We had one screening at the Rainier Independent Film Festival in Washington, where it played after a pretty bleak disturbing film - and following that, “Skin and Bone” might as well have been a Marx Brothers movie - the audience picked up on every comedic thing I put in it.  So it’s really subjective, and I like that.

What was the most challenging part of filming the movie?

Making this movie presented a number of challenges.  I’m notoriously bad at naming characters - if you know me, and a character shares a name with you, then that character probably was named directly after you.  Skin and Bone was difficult in this respect, because there are so very many characters.  If you look at our credit page or our imdb site, you’ll see that we have about 35 or so cast members listed.  The vast majority of these characters have at least some lines.  So, getting that many people together for so many scenes which had dozens of cast members, especially when you can’t pay anyone, is incredibly difficult.  We only had about 14 shooting days total, but they were spread over the course of the better part of a year, just because scheduling was such a problem.

Luckily for us, we had an incredible cast, many of whom helped behind the camera as well, and all the creative people who collaborates on this project were just unbelievably gracious with their time and talent.  People stuck with us, and trusted that we were trying to make something worthwhile.  We’ve gotten a lot of great feedback from people who have been able to identify with the ideas that this movie addresses, and that is due in a huge part to people like our cast, crew, and the awesome musicians, who supplied music that every reviewer has made note of, and who helped us achieve the appropriate atmosphere for “Skin and Bone.”

What are your next steps for getting the word out?

Well, on some good advice, we’re starting up an email list (drop us a line at macproductionsinc (at) gmail (dot) com if you’re interested!) and we’re hoping to get it out to one or two more festivals.  The big thing we’re going for is good ole fashioned word of mouth, so if you get the chance to check our work out, please do!  We have a trailer on our site at http://www.milkandcookieproductions.com/skinandbone.html and there are dvd’s available there.  A good portion of every dvd sale goes to Partners In Health’s work in Haiti.

Side note: Check them out at http://www.standwithhaiti.org and if you really want to read one of the best books on humanity and medicine ever, check out “Mountains Beyond Mountains” by Tracy Kidder.

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