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26-year-old Miami wunderkind Lee Cipolla called The Juice from Los Angeles, where he recently sold two of his independently made films to Grindstone Entertainment, with DVD distribution by Lionsgate Home Entertainment. One of the films, Know thy Enemy, has been a hit in Blockbusters and Best Buys from coast to coast since its release in May; the other, Harder they Fall, hits stores today. The lovely and talented Cipolla was game for a little Q&A.
What were you like in high school in Miami?
I went to Krop, the magnet school for performing arts in Aventura. I went there in the inaugural year, 1999 – 2000, and was in the first class that graduated from there. I started out in theatre and wrote a one-act play based on an experience I had with my best friend, hanging out one day. He’s black and there was some sort of robbery a couple blocks down. The cops arrested him — it was complete racial profiling; he was taken into jail for the night. I was really affected by the experience and writing the play was the first time I could express my frustration through writing. Andrea Kidd was my theatre teacher – she had the play produced, and it won a bunch of awards — that compelled me to want to do more and write more. Senior year I wrote couple plays and it turned out the film department wanted to produce them as short films. Long story short, I stepped in as the director at the last second. [From making that,] I got a small scholarship from the National Foundation for the Arts and from there went on to UCF.
Tell me about the movie you made.
It was a short called Taken Away. To make a movie takes money — you need equipment, you need to lock down locations. We were all poor and had no money. My two friends were martial artists. So we decided to make this action movie with a plot — about a kid who won this tournament but he cheated against his opponent, a poor kid from Calle Ocho. That kid sees them later and they duke it out on the street. We shot it with a friend’s DV handheld camera. We used my parents’ camera. When we had to light the boxing ring, we went to Family Dollar and for five dollars bought these field lights. Field Light Films — that’s the name of my company now. That film was more of an experiment. I didn’t have the visualization of a movie. But it won a bunch of film fests — close to 15 film festivals — in Phoenix, the Hamptons, Palm Beach … we were collecting a lot of awards! That was back in ’02. Anthony Hopkins, Brett Ratner and Edward Norton were at the Palm Beach International Film Festival, at this banquet where they screened all the winners. I met them all. Anthony Hopkins was like, “You did the martial arts film, with the guys fighting! That was great!”
(More interview after the jump…. Trailer for movie below)
