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Press Release : Los Angeles Premier of INDIGO, the Movie : JANUARY 8TH, 2004
http://www.goodworksonearth.org/indigo-the-movie-los-angeles-screening.html
 

This is a portion of the Magical Blend Interview with the Director of INDIGO, the Movie,
for their September 2003 issue.

Subject: Indigo Insights: An Interview with Stephen Simon
   Date:  Fri, 5 Sep 2003 04:29:40 -0700
   From:  noreply@indigo
     To:    Good Works On Earth
*****
INDIGO -Indigo Insights : An Interview with Stephen Simon
**

What do you do when the dazzle of Hollywood no longer interests you?

When you have spent a quarter century producing mainstream films and
helping to launch star-studded careers, yet you see the industry
shrinking away from your own growing vision of what movie making could
be?  When mega budget films that please everyone - yet transform no one -
have left you wondering why the kind of stories that really matter are
going untold?

    If you are producer Stephen Simon, you pack up and leave town.
You head to Ashland, Oregon, a growing spiritual oasis of the Pacific
Northwest (count the likes of Neale Donald Walsh, James Twyman, and
Jean Houston as your neighbors) and start over.  You let the ocean of
your life wash away the beautiful sandcastles of yesterday and begin
building again.

    Recently, Magical Blend Magazine spent two days on the set of
Indigo, Stephen's directorial debut about a psychic child and her
ability to heal even the deepest of family wounds.  From the first
moments, when Stephen came out to welcome us with smiling eyes and a
warm handshake, it was clear this was not the movie set of your
stereotypical imaginings.  The more we talked to the crew, most of
which were working at either 10% of their usual rates or as self-
supporting volunteers, the more it became clear what we were
witnessing.  This was more than the making of a spiritual film. This
was the spiritual making of a film.

    As you might expect, we had lots of questions...

    MB: How did you get involved in this movie?

    SS:  Jimmy Twyman had an idea that he wanted to do a movie
about the Indigo children phenomena.  He came to talk to me, since we
both live in Ashland and he's been a big fan of Somewhere In Time and
What Dreams May Come. So we sat down and talked about it, and he worked
out a story.  It went into limbo for a little while, but then we had a
key conversation, and from there the story developed very quickly.  As
it evolved, it became clear the grandfather of the story would be a
perfect role for Neale Donald Walsch, who is a dear friend of both Jimmy
and mine.  And it became very apparent to me that there was a potential
in this movie to do something really beautiful and spiritual about the
emotional healing of the wounds of a family through the catalyst of
this nine-year-old Indigo child.

    MB:  What kind of teaching potential do you think this film has?

    SS:  I hope that it doesn't teach anybody anything, because
entertainment is not supposed to be for teaching.  Entertainment is
supposed to be for entertaining people, and hopefully for inspiring
and empowering people.  I think people actually resent it if they go to
a movie and they feel like they are being taught a lesson.  So it is
very important that if you have spiritual messages to deliver in
movies, that they be done in subtext.
    This is a very, very powerful story and a surprising story.  We
have a lot of twists and turns.  The performances are extraordinary.
It's very eerie in places, it's very funny in places, it's very
touching and moving.  What we really hope is that people walk out
having felt entertained, and when they start talking about the movie
then they can start talking about the various issues.

MB:  You've been in the industry for a long time, and you know what
sells and what moves people.  How is this opportunity different from
what you have already done?

SS:  This is totally different.  First of all, it's my first movie as a
director.  And it's the most fun I've ever had in my life.  Because we
are working on a $500,000 budget, which is much smaller than any budget
I've ever worked on before, it provides a lot of fun challenges on how
you accomplish things.  And because we are dealing with a cast of 35
speaking roles, 90% of whom have never been in a film before, it is
really an interesting challenge and it feels like a family.

    This also provides a lot of opportunity for me, because the
passion of my life is Spiritual Cinema.  I decided a year and half ago
to leave Los Angeles, to come to a different place to help birth a new
kind of entertainment where we don't have to pull back, where we don't
have to homogenize, where we don't have to dumb things down.  Where I
don't have a studio saying 'Well, but some people in Missouri might not
understand this so you have to make it clear for everybody.'  We're not
going to do that.

    It's also an opportunity to start the process of having film
making return to what it used to be forty or fifty years ago, when the
script and the story were king.  Because that is what, for me,
Spiritual Cinema is and should be.  It is the modern day equivalent of
a shaman sitting around a campfire passing down the myths of a culture
to an enrapt audience listening to this wonderful story.  That is what
film making used to be, it is what film making should be, and it is
what this kind of film making will be again.

    I love working with actors who are movie stars, and I've worked
with Tom Cruise, Christopher Reeve, Robin Williams - some great people.
But film making on the modern level today, studio film making, has
really gone berserk. The average film today costs $90 million to produce
and market.  It's really become ridiculous the prices people are
getting.  And what it does, when you make a movie that large, is that
it puts you under pressure to make it accessible to everyone.

    The films I am the most proud of, Somewhere in Time and What
Dreams May Come, are movies that, in general, people really either
loved or hated.  There was really nothing in between.  I think if you
are pushing the envelope, when you are doing things that are new and
different, that's the response you want.  I would much rather have
someone love something or really, really actively dislike it than walk
out of it saying 'Well, it was okay'.  I think that's going happen with
Indigo.  I think people will really connect with it or they won't, and
that's okay.  That's fine.

MB: You've had a lot of contact with extraordinary children.  What do
you find most inspiring about them?

SS:  I'll tell you what I've found the most inspiring and the most
fun.  We've had open auditions for every role, with 650 people I think
that showed up, we probably read 150 kids, including a hundred who
either were Indigo children or thought they were, or their parents
thought they were.  And the girl that got the part was from a very
traditional Christian family.  That to me is what spirituality is all
about.  It is a wide open, broad umbrella that embraces everybody's
belief system.  For Megan, our 9-year-old star, this is a performance,
and that''s great, that''s exactly how it should be.  Again, we are not
trying to teach people anything, we are trying to entertain them.  And
Megan was by far the best person that tested for this role.  As soon as
I saw her, I thought of  one of the first movies I worked on, The
Goodbye Girl, with a young girl named Quinn Cummings who got an Academy
Award nomination for that movie.

MB:  What are some of the personal sacrifices you have made, if any, to
make this move in your career?

SS:  I don''t think there are any.  I think sacrifices are for martyrs.
I made life choices that have been extraordinarily powerful and
wonderful for me.   I had twenty-five great years in the mainstream film
industry and it was great fun.   I had a hand in making twenty-five
movies, either as a producer or as an executive, most of which I am
very proud of, some of them didn''t turn out as great as I would have
liked. That part of my career was wonderful, until it wasn''t.  It
really became apparent to me after What Dreams May Come, that I was so
proud of, that took me twenty years to get made, that was such an
extraordinary experience in my life, that I only wanted to make those
kinds of movies for the rest of my life.

*To read more of this interview, look for an upcoming article on Stephen
Simon's life and work in Magical Blend Magazine at a newsstand near
you, or check in with http://www.magicalblend.com/  
Last check, link not working, so we delinked it.
********
Copyright 2003 Indigo The Movie

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