In Paris in the 1960s, filmmakers who had little money took their hand-held cameras to the streets to produce works based on the craft of acting and filming, not a high budget. Filmmaker Sage Bannick drew his inspiration from this motion-picture era, the French New Wave, for his detective movie “Just Hustle,” which he will present at Bijou Art Cinemas from Feb. 16 through Feb. 20.
Instead of the streets of Paris, Bannick used the streets of downtown Los Angeles as the scenery
for his movie about a young private detective who gets caught in a messy situation involving a college gambling ring and a football championship. Filming began in 2003 when Bannick and his filmmaking friend Ari Bernstein discovered they had saved enough leftover film from their projects in graduate school to make a feature-length film. All they
needed was the money to make it happen. Luckily, they were friends of football player Benji Olson, who had just signed a contract with the
Tennessee Titans and invested $15,000 for the duo’s project.
They wrote the script in six weeks and filmed the picture in 40 days.
“When you get the money for
an indie film, you have to get up and going,” Bannick said.
Bannick said the filming process was a challenge because they filmed on test strips, which required them to reload their cameras after filming three minutes. Shooting
also took place without sound, which filmmakers and actors added later. Bannick and Bernstein
increased their budget by raising
money from friends and family.
“Nothing is harder than what
we did,” Bannick said. “We
started with a $15,000 budget, and that’s like a catering budget for the cast of ‘CSI.’”
The film stars Samia Doumit of “The Hot Chick,” Efrin Ramirez of “Napoleon Dynamite” and Marissa Tait of “The Bold and the Beautiful.” Bannick said he was able to use
Hollywood actors because in show business, actors help each other whenever possible.
“I’ve been an actor for years, and actors develop tight relationships with each other,” he said. “A lot of the actors came in just to help us out, to see friends succeed and to look out for new parts. It’s such a hard business to break into, and we help each other out whenever we can.”
Bernstein said the actors were able to play enjoyable roles, tackle a challenge and communicate closely with everyone who worked on the film.
“All the actors had tons of fun and got to play characters they wanted to,” he said. “They had to nail it in two or three takes because as soon as the sun set, the day was over, so there was a lot of pressure on them. And there wasn’t a bunch of crew around, so there was lots of communication, and they liked that.”
Bannick added that he wants to represent many ethnicities in his films and emphasize racial relations.
“I want to heighten the relationships between different races,”
he said. “I’m interested in how
people relate to each other. In ‘Just Hustle,’ I have every region and
ethnicity represented, and that’s rare for Hollywood, which is very cookie-cutter. We want as much
diversity as possible.”
Bijou Art Cinemas manager Louise Thomas said independent filmmakers often produce successful works even on a tight budget.
“It seems as though with tech-
nology as accessible as it is, folks can express their creativity without spending too much money,” Thomas said. “People can come up with great stuff. I think the filmmakers are so excited that they can do all the legwork and get people in. (Bijou Art Cinemas) is the vehicle for it.”

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