J Paul Johnson
Gabriel Mayo is a fan of one-location movies, and one of his most significant cinematic experiences was watching Mike Nichols’ Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? when in high school. It’s a film that always resonated with him and influenced him in the making of his first feature film, A Weird Kind of Beautiful. Under the influence of stress and alcohol, a gathering of friends turns sour when secrets come to light. Mayo’s film may feature a cast of ne’er-do-well twentysomethings instead of a pair of academics and their spouses, but it’s no less explosive when the revelations flow as freely as the drink that fuels them.
It was, in fact, the pandemic and its extreme isolation that prompted Mayo’s script: it was a time of contemplation about friendships, secrets, and regrets, and those made it from his keyboard to the film, shot in a single location with a cast of just five actors, some of them with very little experience, but all of them with serious chops and a willingness to tackle A Weird Kind of Beautiful‘s darkest themes and most confrontational moments.
Born in Lima, Peru, and later a resident of Miami and Los Angeles, Mayo studied music at Berklee College of Music, and Film & Creative Writing at the University of Miami. As a writer, he worked for directors Ricardo de Montreuil and Alejandro Heiber on various projects. His script for “Eon” placed Top 3 in the Final Draft Screenplay Competition; his short films have played in various festivals; and his video work for The Players’ Tribune has appeared on national TV on FOX Sports. He recently spoke with Film Obsessive’s J Paul Johnson about A Weird Kind of Beautiful. The transcript following the video has been edited for space and clarity.
Film Obsessive: Gabriel, welcome to Film Obsessive, and thank you for taking the time to speak with us today. So glad you could join us, and I’m wondering if I could leave it to you to tell our audience a little bit about what your film A Weird Kind of Beautiful is and does.
Gabriel Mayo: Hi, Paul, Thank you for having me. A Weird Kind of Beautiful is a drama/dark comedy about a group of friends in their mid-20s. They’re f*ck-ups, they work dead end jobs. All they do is, you know, they hang out. They smoke, they do drugs, and a friend of theirs has died from an overdose, and they’re going to get together after the funeral to hang out. But they don’t have the means to pay for the services. So one of the friends has the idea to reach out to an old friend of theirs that right after high school, he goes to them and disappeared, and they don’t know why. So they reach out to this friend, Eric to see if he’s able to help them out to pay for David’s headstone. And when Eric shows up, he shows up with his fiancée.
And the movie takes place over the course of a night. It was written almost like a play, so it’s all through dialogue in one location. And it’s about secrets, the things that we say that we keep from each other and the consequences of those secrets.
You know, your characters are, if I may quote you, fairly impressive f*ckups. But they are all entirely relatable characters. And I think the notion of having friendships come and go and end quickly and quietly and feelings of betrayal are ones that really any audience member will be able to connect with.
Yeah. I mean, one of the things that was definitely one of the themes that I wanted to explore. It doesn’t matter that it happens to this particular cohort of people. It’s something that we all experience one way or another, through our lives with our friends. You know, many times, friendships end, there’s disappointments, there are betrayals, sometimes just things end over time, and we don’t talk to each other anymore. And that was something that I was looking to explore a little bit with this movie, even though the characters are who they are.
Can I ask you about the origins of the script? Did you start, essentially, with a kind of a conceit here, like you wanted to do a one-location script, or did you work more from a character or a conflict? Where did the seed come to you for this?
It was twofold. I think originally, I wrote it during the pandemic, and I was ready to make my first feature, and I wanted to write something that I would be able to produce myself, something that I would be able to raise the money and make for cheap. So thinking about that and also with the pandemic, thinking of something that I could choose if the pandemic were to continue. If the quarantine were to continue for another year, could I still make this movie? So given those parameters, this is what I came up with, you know. It was something just put a group of actors in one location, outdoors. Now let me try to figure out how to make a movie out of that.
I’m going to come back to that in just a second and ask if there were other films that you look to perhaps as influences. There were a couple that occurred to me that I might be willing to share.
I’m looking forward to hearing this!
Well, ok, so I thought of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? for one.
That was my big one!
And The Big Chill, actually, as another. Kind of a different socioeconomic stratum. But essentially the same conceit with a group of friends gathering in bereavement and with conflict—but no dancing!
So actually, The Big Chill was not one of those influences. I hadn’t seen that movie until after I wrote the script and somebody that read the script was like, Oh, did you see The Big Chill, blah, blah? I was like, Oh, no, I’ve never seen it. So then I went to check it out. But Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, for sure I saw that movie in high school. And I always loved it. And Yeah, I’ve seen it way too many times, and Edward Albee, the playwright who wrote it, is my favorite playwright, and I’ve read everything he’s written. So that was definitely a huge influence.
Then there were a few other ones. Richard Linklater and his movies as well. He’s a big one for me, especially. He has a couple of movies. Not many people have seen one is called Tape. It’s also based on a play. It takes place in a motel room. It’s also, I think 85 minutes, something like that, just in a motel room, three actors. That’s it. And that one I saw in college, and also it made a big impression on me. I like the way. It really hooked me and I was in the story, and you know, he was able to shoot it in a style that helped you tell the story without you getting bored, without just doing an over the shoulder and another over the shoulder back and forth for an hour and a half.
And initially, another movie that It wasn’t much of an influence in terms of the writing style or it was more of an influence in terms of where the characters came from, was the movie Kids, the Harmony Corine/Larry Clark movie. That movie also when I saw it, I was right right out of high school, and it really shocked me and it stayed with me. And when I was trying to figure out, you know, when I had these parameters, and I was trying to figure out, okay, what movie can I make? And I was thinking of certain people in Miami that I knew and I originally thought, Well, maybe I can get them to be in this movie, and I’ll just shoot it myself with a DV cam. So so it’s easy and affordable to make. So all those things were sort of like percolating in my head, and then it just kind of funneled into this.
So it is shot in just one location, an exterior. But it’s not at all uncomplicated. Am I right there? You’ve got the complications of weather in doing an exterior shoot. You’ve got the complications for your cast, you know, some of whom are asked to go to some pretty dark places with their characters. And you’ve got the complication that you mentioned a second ago of making the cinematography do more than just over-the-shoulder shot or a typical actors-on-the-stage proscenium shot.
Right. Yeah, those were challenges when making a movie of this type. With the camera, that’s something that you definitely have to think about and figure out how it is. You are going to shoot it so that you don’t get that sort of like repetitive and boring shots and one of the things that I remember telling my DP initially was, just make sure that we don’t repeat any angle. Make sure we don’t repeat any shot as we move along because we split the movie. Since there are no scenes, really, it’s all continuous. We kind of split it ourselves at certain points, and there is like section one, section two, section three, and we had, I think eight, nine different sections. And we try to shift and change what the camera was doing throughout all those eight sections.
And and as for the actors, we I knew we had to rehearse it like a play because we had very little time to shoot it. We initially had like nine days, but we ended up shooting also only in about 7.5 because of many problems that we had with the production. We had a tropical storm. A bunch of stuff happened. So we had to shoot really fast. I knew we had to rehearse it. But I mean, even with movies like the Richard Linklater movies or Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Mike Nichols, You know, you’re talking about two of the best directors in history, two directors I admire greatly, and they also have to do two, three weeks of rehearsal with some of the best actors to grace us onscreen. So, you know, I couldn’t do it without rehearsals, either. And we rehearsed for about two weeks and we were pretty much there. It was very helpful and that really helped the actors know exactly what they needed to do, so they were able to really execute when when the camera was on.
And you said you were shooting like during COVID, or was that pre-production during COVID? Were those restrictions in place then when we when you were shooting finally?
No, we I wrote it during COVID. But by the time we got to shoot it, I think it was 2022, when we started shooting, and then we had some reshoots. We shot in 2021, had some reshoots in ’22. Initially, we were going to have actors that were part of SAG (Screen Actors Guild). So with SAG, if we would have gone that route, we would have gotten they made you get a what do you call it, like a COVID compliance coordinator, a person that’s in charge of COVID and COVID testing, which would have raised your budget for such a small film. So luckily we didn’t need to do that. So we just did COVID testing. By then it was pretty much over.
And then, you mentioned a tropical storm as well! And I’m interested even in what it takes to make your film look like it’s shot kind of all in one evening progressing, just in terms of, you know, light, wind, other dynamics of weather when it’s actually being shot over seven or eight days.
It was tough. We had a great great production designer named Hans Lau. I have to give him props because he really worked this ass off and he was in charge of production design and also continuity. And he was you know he was wearing many different hats like you have to do when you’re in a production of this size. And you know he made sure that everything looked the same.
We had a tropical storm and we had to start the movie late, and in fact, the evening when we had to start shooting, it was delayed because of the storm and the whole set was wet. So we had to decide whether to shoot it with the set wet and then wet it basically every evening before shooting or dry it and then hope that we wouldn’t have any more rain for the rest of the shoot. And, I decided that we were going to dry it and hope that we weren’t going to get any more rain and we actually did get more rain. We had I think on the fifth or sixth night, we got halfway through the production. Our lights were blown out because it started raining and the lights were on, and we had to shut down production for the rest of the day and go rent some more lights the following evening or the following day.
But yeah, Hans and the team made it work, and they were able to dry things and make sure everything looked exactly the same.
They really did, and congratulations to them on that. And I also am guessing that you want to give props to your cast as well. There are five principal cast members: Brittney Rae, Mia Challis, Savanah Joeckel, Harpoon Ellis, and Cruxell Maxwell. Four of them, I think are on screen for 95 to 100% of the film. And they each, I think, have their own kind of moment really in the film. You know, the first part of it is dominated a little bit more by one character than a little bit later by another, but they all have their opportunities to shine in A Weird Kind of Beautiful.
Yeah, they all get their moment to shine, which was great. I made it initially very hard for me as a director casting the movie because I really had to cast excellent actors for the role, there couldn’t be a weak part. That was very tough, but I was really lucky to find all of them, and they all did great. And I mean, yeah, they were amazing. All the performances. And like you said, there were even some surprises along the way, because even though we rehearsed it a certain way, during rehearsals? Several of them didn’t go to that dark place that, you know, they needed to go. And honestly, you know, it was my first movie. It was my first time working with them. A part of me wasn’t sure whether we were able to get there, but we did and more. And, you know, what they gave me was even better than I thought it would be.
They were great. Were any of them trained in the theater or do all of them come to your film through their work in television and film?
Yeah, surprisingly, there I think the only one that has a little theater training was Crux (Maxell) He plays Eric. I think he studied theater in New York for a little bit. I don’t know about the rest of them. For example, Harpoon (Ellis) who plays Ivan, a character I think everybody ends up loving by the end of the movie, at least I know I do—he has no training whatsoever. He’s just a natural. He works making pizzas at Papa John’s.
Wow. He can really go for it!
Yeah, you know, he’s—I mean, they all are—in this case, I’m just pointing him out because I was just so surprised as he’s never done any stage work. I mean, he’s done a few short films and sketches and stuff like that, but nothing like this. None of them had done anything anything like this. So it was quite the process to get us there, but yeah, they were great.
Well, congratulations to you and to each of those cast members for their excellent work in the film. I really appreciate their effort. And I recognize that parts of that script will be a challenge for people, but it looks like it’s one that all of the cast are willing to embrace. So, Gabriel, what’s your background? You are from Lima, Peru, and then studied in the US?
That’s correct. So I was born in Lima. I was there until I was 14, almost 15 years old. Then I moved to Miami with my family. I went to high school in Miami, and then college and I just stayed in the States. After college, I went back to Peru for a little bit, you know, shot a short film over there, then I came back.
And had you always had these aspirations to be a filmmaker?
No, not really. Initially I always wanted to be in the arts. I knew I wanted to create, and, you know, I think, like, the first thing I wanted to be as a kid was a painter, and I liked drawing. But I know I started playing guitar at a young age, and I wanted to write scores for film. And out of high school, I initially went to Berklee College of Music to study music. And I liked writing, and I like comedy, I like sitcoms, but I never really thought writing was something that I could do, especially in English because it wasn’t my first language. But I liked it.
And when I was studying music at Berklee, just for some reason, there was like a switch, and over the course of a couple of years, I just started writing more and more and more and playing music less and less. And I also kind of fell in love with movies more so at the end of high school first year of college. And that’s sort of when I started to really get into it and become a little bit of a cinephile, and decide that I wanted to write and make films.
And where and when do you expect audiences will be able to see A Weird Kind of Beautiful?
Hopefully soon—we already started some applications into festivals. So we’re just waiting to hear back. I would assume either sometime this fall or in the winter or spring at the latest.
It’s an exciting film, Gabriel. I’m sure people when they do get an opportunity to see it at festivals are going to be wowed. They are going to be impressed, and they’re going to be taken to some dark and interesting places alongside your characters. Thanks so much for taking the time to speak with us at Film Obsessive, and I’ll just wish you and your film the very best as it hits that circuit.
Thank you so much, and thank you for having me.
