Completion Date: June, 2007

Format: HD

Directors: Marcus Cohlan and Madeline Merritt

Logline: A meta-campy thriller about a one-night stand gone wrong.

Director Statement

Fast As You Can is film that challenges our expectations of conventional Hollywood narrative moviemaking. In directing this film, we sought to constantly toy with the audience's perceptions of hunter versus hunted, but never losing sight of the meta campy tone that we were setting for the film.

In putting together this film we auditioned over 50 actors, in and around Chicago and we shot the film downtown at a Chicago Penthouse Apartment, 345 North La Salle Drive. The entire process was extraordinarily time consuming and intricate, with each step of the way presenting new challenges and obstacles.

Production Notes

"The Race"

(Song by The Dig at the End of the Film) The Race is the song that you will hear at the end of the film, an original song composed by New York City rock band, The Dig.

The song brings back a memory of one of the biggest obstacles that occurred on set, which was loading all of that heavy, expensive, and bulky equipment into that fancy apartment building (dolly tracks, jib arms, and cstands).

We had a time crunch. The freight elevator of the apartment building was only open from 2pm-5pm, and was very strict and closed immediately at 5pm. We were only allowed to start checking out equipment from Northwestern's equipment cage, 45 minutes away from the apartment at 2pm. We had to not only get everything out of the cage almost an hour away from our shooting location, but get all of the equipment up into the apartment space, in a window of only 3 hours. Very strict time constraints.

I remember having to hustle so quickly, I was sweating, and illegally drive the large 16 foot truck down lakeshore drive. I risked getting a ticket, but the tradeoff was avoiding 94 Interstate which undoubtedly would not have allowed us to make the time deadline with such heavy traffic. It was the scariest thing I've ever done in my life, but God was on my side and I did not get pulled over.

That's what I think of when I think of the song at the end of the movie, "The Race".


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