Gypsy’s music rocked the world until the alternative rock violin star inexplicably disappears. Soured by the industry’s commercialism, Gypsy (ANNUNZIATA GIANZERO) slips away with her husband, Lucian (ANDREW BORBA), a famous New Age composer, to the desolate environs of off-season Cape Cod.
Yet, even here, Gypsy cannot escape her talent and celebrity. Lucian’s arrogant exterior thinly masks an element of his professional jealousy, which threatens to destroy what little remains of their once vibrant marriage.
While Gypsy searches for personal and creative peace, the couple’s retreat is disrupted by the unexpected arrival of Lucian’s estranged brother, Jimmy (THOMAS JAY RYAN). Unbeknownst to them, Jimmy is silently tormented by his shattered past and has brutally killed his girlfriend.
As a retired local detective (DICK BAKALYAN) closes in on Jimmy, another dead body turns up in the local waters. Meanwhile, Jimmy is becoming increasingly captivated by Gypsy’s free-spirited nature, and as Lucian further alienates Gypsy, she is left in Jimmy’s more attentive company. When Jimmy and Gypsy become friends, this unlikely bond between a tormented murderer and a pure artist strains the delicate balance of nature into discord.

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ABOUT THE PRODUCTION


Invited to 27 film festivals and winner of ten festival grand prize awards (including Best Feature (3), Best Director, Best Screenplay (2), Best Actor (2), and Best Score), DISCHORD centers on the perilous relationship between a gypsy musician and a tormented killer.

Award-winning filmmaker Mark Wilkinson, who wrote, directed, edited and produced his first feature film, drew the initial inspiration from his fascination with character. "I wanted to write a character who struggled with how to be a good, honest artist," he explains. "We see the ‘good cop in a bad world’ story all the time, but for many of us, the artist’s struggle is a closer to our own experience." The question is explored through the character of Gypsy, DISCHORD’s female lead. Wilkinson explains, "I wanted to infuse the character with the makings of a great artist—to write someone passionate, spontaneous, free-spirited, untainted by ambition—and I began to see a parallel to the romantic notion of the gypsy lifestyle."

As portrayed by the delicately beautiful ANNUNZIATA GIANZERO, Gypsy is an alternative rock violinist who shuns the recording industry’s commercialism, but packs sold-out concert halls around the world with her blissful, unselfconscious expression.

"Like a great artist," Wilkinson says, "Gypsy is a prism who takes the world in and reflects it right back out through her work—a creative force untainted by ambition. Her journey is a metaphor for the artistic struggle. We all have somewhere in us a pure artist, someone not wrapped up in ego or distracted by fame or money, but someone who just loves to paint or to sing or to dance."

On the other end of the spectrum is DISCHORD’s Jimmy (THOMAS JAY RYAN), a deeply disturbed man who brutally murders his girlfriend early in the film. Jimmy was traumatized by a horrific childhood tragedy, which severely distorts the way he experiences and reacts to the world. His brother Lucian (ANDREW BORBA), a commercially successful New Age composer, wasn’t as badly damaged by the family tragedy. Charismatic and musically learned, Lucian sweeps Gypsy off her feet and into marriage. However, Lucian has his own deep-seated neuroses, says Wilkinson, who loosely based the brothers’ situation on his own family history.

"The inspiration comes from the story of my brother and me," says Wilkinson, "when we were separated as children. Our experiences growing up were very different. This story is about those two paths diverging—how one’s life could go awfully wrong if the chips fell against him."

"My parents were divorced when I was very young," he says. "No, I don’t go around killing people, but there was this event, which for me at the time was cataclysmic. In the film, I tried to depict what I felt like as a child going through it. Jimmy was just overwhelmed by the trauma of his childhood, and as a result, he gets lost in time, and sees images out of his childhood." Similarly, the DISCHORD goes back and forth in time, relaying those images and information to the audience.

At first, Wilkinson had no intention of placing Gypsy into Jimmy’s and Lucian’s dysfunctional world, but he became increasingly convinced of the situation’s dramatic possibilities. "It started out with the characters of Jimmy and Gypsy, but I never imagined they would be in the same film. Gradually, it occurred to me that they’d be good counterpoints to each other, and together they make up a powerful dynamic: that of Gypsy in harm’s way, and Jimmy’s dissolution into violence."

"I realized it would be a very dangerous environment for Gypsy because when you put healthy, functioning, happy people next to damaged, emotionally frustrated people, it’s not ordinarily the healthy who heal the sick people. The healthy people get pulled into the snake pit." Indeed, it is the mounting conflict between dark and light forces that fuels the searing tension in DISCHORD.

The film is shot largely in Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Wilkinson summered there while growing up in Cambridge and has long had a love for the stark beauty of the New England coast in winter. His depiction of silent desperation is captured in the blues and grays of Cape Cod at this time of year. It is beautiful, but in a soulful, desolate way and this visual serenity amplifies the discord between the peaceful milieu and the horrible murders which occur within it.

"There’s something incredibly moody about the beach in winter," he says. "We were also able to open up the frame. I love big films. I didn’t want to make a story about three couples shot entirely in an apartment or two and one restaurant. That kind of film is inevitably un-cinematic."

The Cape Cod location was also inexpensive, which was imperative since Wilkinson had less than $200,000 and 19 days to shoot his first feature. The challenge was heightened by the film’s complicated intertwining storylines of childhood family damage, professional jealousy and artistic inspiration. Moreover, Wilkinson was determined to shoot DISCHORD on film (35mm Kodak short ends, to be exact), a newly unpopular notion.
But the filmmaker had several key elements working in his favor: He filmed most of his interiors for free at his uncle’s house, Massachusetts doesn’t charge to film on state land, and Wilkinson secured a solid crew for a reasonable price because, he says, the risk of being snowed-out is so high that, "very few people want to take the gamble of shooting in Massachusetts in winter." The constant threat of stormy weather deters the best of them. The trick is not to lose too many days to poor conditions.

But, paralleling the underlying theme of the film, nature was on the production company’s side. While preparing to shoot the scene in which the two leads run along the beach (in winter coats), someone yelled, "Hey, look at that!" The crew turned to find a beautiful backdrop forming, a set no production designer could possibly orchestrate: porpoises were jumping in and out of the water behind the actors; then they’d turn around, swim in the other direction and resume their jumping, doing their best to lobby for their close-ups. Despite spending much of his youth on the Cape, Wilkinson himself had never seen porpoises in these waters. "Big-budget studio backing or not," he laughs, "you can’t buy that!"

With a mere eight shopping hours left before Christmas, the DISCHORD crew wrapped principal photography and breathed a sigh of relief. A light dusting of snow on the morning of the last day of shooting christened the Boston winter. Then as the DISCHORD trucks were packed up, just moments after Wilkinson yelled, "cut!" New England launched into its first full-fledged signature ice storm.

Wilkinson exercised restraint in his choice to deliberately not shoot the scene in which this victim is murdered, but to play it purely in sound effect over an entirely different scene. For the same reason, he shot Jimmy’s first murder scene largely from a distance and with muted dialog.

"With a low-budget film, you don’t have the money and you don’t have the time, so you have to do things differently and intelligently without sacrificing dramatic impact. There are a lot of movies with scenes where guys kill girls, and directors seem to up the violence ante every time. That was not the kind of movie we were making. We were making a thoughtful film and I wanted to go someplace different."

A small budget isn’t always a bad thing, adds Thomas Jay Ryan, describing how one very late night, around 3 a.m., Wilkinson asked Ryan if he had the energy left to shoot a demanding, emotionally intense monologue that precedes the film’s conclusion. The day’s scheduled work was done, but the lighting and other conditions were just right.

"Mark would have waited until the next day,’ Ryan says, "and I was tired and cold. But I said, ‘let’s do it, let’s just see.’ Well, we did, and it’s my favorite scene in the movie. There’s something on the other side of exhaustion that you often encounter in these small films. You’re forced to take all the energy you’ve got left and focus with extraordinary concentration that can produce extraordinary results."

Wilkinson also wanted to stay tightly focused on the meat of his film, the agitated psychological interplay among his three main characters. Yet to keep from creating a "navel-gazer," he made his film part thriller. Intense emotional confrontations alternate with action-oriented scenes of retired but restless detective Dunbarton (DICK BAKALYAN), hot on Jimmy’s trail.

"So hopefully every time the audience starts to get the slightest twinge of ‘OK, this is getting a little talky, a little indulgent,’ we get the hell out and we go back to the ticking clock," Wilkinson says.

Actor Bakalyan found a lot to like in Dunbarton, including a passion for sleuthing that even retirement couldn’t quash. "Not only that, but his family is the only real family unit in the film," he says. "He’s got a wife, dogs and kids. Everyone else is sort of like, disintegrated." Additionally, he remarks on an interesting metaphor. "This detective is like an old hunting dog. In the scene where his wife is feeding their two dogs, she makes him a lunch to go, too."

Wilkinson also sees Dunbarton, bent on preventing any more murders, as a persistent force for good. He describes the character as "nature’s antibody" to the traumatic event that mars Jimmy and Lucian’s lives.
This lyrical element is also evident in the character of the Beachcomber (RICK WESSLER), a mysterious yet benevolent figure who serves as Gypsy’s confidant and protector. When they meet on the sand, it is he who warns Gypsy about Jimmy.

"He’s the archetypal mentor," Wilkinson says, "Yet he is an enigma--is he there, is he not there, is he alive or dead, is he a ghost? It’s totally unclear and it’s meant to be unclear. What matters is his influence."

Music plays a central role in DISCHORD, and it is music that is the source of Gypsy’s easy brilliance, and Lucian’s frustration. "When I was young, I practiced piano and found I no talent for it at all," explains Wilkinson. "It’s simply beyond me. I don’t understand how music works. I’m completely in awe of how a musician can play and elicit such emotion. It’s magic, and it’s still a mystery to me."

And as a focal point, DISCHORD required a distinctive, intelligent composer. Fortunately, Wilkinson got a positive answer when he asked John McCarthy to compose the film’s original score. The director was worried that he couldn’t afford the kind of composer he felt the film needed, but knew McCarthy was his first choice the moment he heard his music. "I searched and searched. I was listening to a billion CDs. After the first 70 or so, I wondered if I’d even hear the difference. The minute I heard John’s CD, I knew he was the guy. I thought I’d have no chance to get him—but he liked the film, and he said he’d work it out."

"So much of the film music you hear these days is just kind of willy-nilly, nobody’s driving the train," Wilkinson says. "But John’s work is precise, in control and intelligent. And since most of the film concerns music, it was crucial to get his caliber of talent. I think his score is phenomenal."

For his part, McCarthy leapt at the chance to compose for a film with a musical theme. "As a composer, that meant that the score would be playing two roles, that of telling the story of the characters and also the score itself being the subtext of what it is to be a composer and a writer. The movie also had thriller and suspense aspects to it, which pushed the possibilities of what the music could be."

Meanwhile, a violin instructor had to be found for Gianzero, who had briefly played in the third grade, but not since. Petr Stverka, a gifted solo violinist and teacher from Czechoslovakia, filled that role perfectly and he worked with Gianzero for a year before the film went into production. Stverka, formerly a member of the Prague Chamber Orchestra, also composed the film’s Gypsy/Lucian theme song, which he describes as an echo of Gypsy’s melancholy. "When someone gives up their art it is quite melancholy&Mac226;" he says.

Stverka is frank about the challenge of learning to play the violin as an adult, but Gianzero’s patient diligence impressed him. "She didn’t get as frustrated as a lot of people and she has good rhythm and a good ear."

Gianzero had an equally positive experience collaborating with Stverka and continues to practice violin as a result. "When I saw his passion for the music, I knew that not only would he offer enormous technical knowledge, but that he would inform my character’s love of the violin."

Gianzero’s chief dramatic challenge was to avoid making Gypsy a doormat. "It was important that the audience didn’t associate purity and simplicity with weakness," she says, noting that Wilkinson didn’t create a spineless character to begin with. "Rather, he created a character with conflicting dimensions of vulnerability, strength and passion. In reading the script, all of Gypsy’s choices seemed realistic and personal to me. These stories and characters sometimes write themselves inside of you for many years. Then you come upon a script and say ‘That’s it! – That’s her—that’s the frustrated pure artist inside of me and I’m meant to play her!’ In any artistic field, there’s always an option to conform, but Gypsy doesn’t. She doesn’t sit in the recording studio and say, ‘You want a two-minute song and you want me to name it "Bubblegum Popsicle?" No problem.’ No, she just said, ‘this is not for me,’ and left. Instantly, I loved her."

Says Wilkinson, "Gypsy wasn’t written as the girl in distress but as a person with a special gift, and that the world would lose out on that special gift if she were hurt. She’s a person in peril, caught up in the dangerous world of Jimmy."

Borba, who acted in Wilkinson’s first short film, The Next Big Thing, likewise worked to portray a multidimensional character in Lucian, who alternately adores and detests Gypsy, conflicted with jealousy because of her greater fame and talent.

"Lucian has spent a great deal of time in his life building his career and his knowledge," Borba says. "He went to the best music schools and he has all of the theory in his head, so if you say his work is crap, he can tell you in fifteen different ways why you’re wrong. Of course, what he’s drifted away from is exactly what Gypsy represents, that pure life force. So I tried to show in him a sense of insecurity and fear and the positive human desire to connect with another person, hopefully to give another shade to a person who could otherwise be just an arrogant ass."

Ultimately, Wilkinson is satisfied with his film, that even with the daunting task of alternately donning his director’s, editor’s and producer’s hats, it turned out to be "very, very close to the film I wrote," he says.
"I hope that when people watch this movie they see and feel the Cape, that they really get a sense of place. I hope they don’t see Jimmy as a villain but as a tragic character—ultimately not redeemable, but still tragic. And most importantly, I hope in Gypsy they see that creative instinct in themselves that perhaps is getting trampled. I hope this film helps remind them how special it is."