Broken by gambling debts and unwilling to face a pregnant girlfriend, friends Kevin and Greg enter a scheme to con an aging gangster.  But instead of a feeble old man, they meet a hardened thug with ice in his veins.  Along the way, their fears and ambitions become an hallucinogenic dreamscape of grungy DV footage and hastily-scribbled drawings, until reality become indistinguishable from fantasy.

Sounds like a simple premise, doesn't it?  But then I thought to myself, "If big-time Hollywood directors are purposefully putting lens flares, overexposed windows, and shaky handheld cameras into their movies, why can't I put in EVERYTHING ELSE?"

So when it came to SLEEPY, I crammed in every form of cinematic experimentation I could think of.   Black-and-white, color, sepia, nightvision, plus every filter I could get my hands on.  Scenes are tinted blue, scenes are tinted green, scenes are tinted red, and sometimes they change in the middle.  

Long shots of trees.  Music played backwards.  I added scratches and cranked up the contrast and purposefully overexposed light sources.  I threw in hand-drawn pictures for scenes we couldn't film.

We didn't limit ourselves just to flashbacks, no, we had nightmare sequences, fantasies, dying visions.  EVERY scene could have been a dream.  EVERY scene was from a subjective viewpoint.  Dreams within dreams, fantasies within fantasies, even a drawing of a character drawing.  

I fell in love with video images so smeary and unclear that they bordered on abstract art.  I fell in love with putting old phonograph noises behind everything because I loved the idea of old memories looking like old movies and sounding like old records.  

I think there are only two real conversations between actors in the course of the whole film.  Thank God I eventually decided to tell everything in chronological order.

We shot on weekends whenever we could for weeks, then months, then years.  To complicate matters, while we were waiting for the right location, equipment, and cast members to be available at once, I came up with all new sequences and shot them myself.  The movie kept evolving, and each time it evolved, new holes appeared, and each time new holes appeared, I dreamed up crazy ways to plug them.

The backbone of the story is a good one and the protagonist does grow between the end and the beginning.  But my refusal to follow ANY cinematic convention makes that growth a little unclear.  The resulting film, I think, does hold together.  It is just very, very opaque.

Needless to say, NONE of this stuff is what gets your movie into a film festival.  Still, I can look back at SLEEPY as my sketchbook of cinematic invention.  It blends some lovely, evocative images with creepy music, and the result is fantastically moody.  I'll be forever grateful to everyone who helped, and I can't apologize enough to them about what a nightmare I must have been to be around.

The biggest lesson I learned making SLEEPY is that film festivals don't want experiments.  They want you to prove you know how to tell a story.  Until you're established, audiences will always assume your "experiments" are "mistakes."

-Peter Kovic, July 2010

Steven Michael (Producer, "Greg") went to junior high and high school with me and is a graduate of the film school at the University of Texas, Austin.   Along with Matthew Hersch and Lee Andrews, he was inexhaustible in providing technical assistance for SLEEPY and let me edit a lot of it on the computer at his house.  He's also the primary subject of my documentary The First Day of Shooting.  His younger brother Scott Michael ("Cooper") is a cop in real life; many people say he's the best part of SLEEPY.

Nathan Satterlee (Additional Writing, Musical Arranger) went to high school with me and is a graduate of the Moores School of Music at the University of Houston, where he studied applied composition and jazz performance.  Together we adapted all the Bach, Debussy, Vivaldi, etc., that you hear in SLEEPY.  He knew what I meant when I told him I wanted the music to sound like "a hundred-year-old recording of a robot."  He's big into watching movies, and it's too bad he doesn't have a film criticism website anymore, and he helped give shape to SLEEPY's final cut.

Lee Andrews (Additional Writing, Technical Supervision) is also a friend from junior high and high school.  He's devoted his career to making computers go and wrote the scenes of Kevin and Greg doing IT work.  He operates a popular website satirizing techno-corporate life, which mentioning by name might get him in trouble.  While I had to cut the scene where he plays the ex-boyfriend of Kevin's girlfriend, his wife's voice can be heard as one of the computer users harassing Kevin and Greg.