They say a writer produces their best work when they are writing what they know – not necessary a topic they have researched but instead writing from the heart. That is certainly the case for American writer/director Mike Kravinsky and his new powerful film Nothing To Do. This film came from Kravinsky having to help his father in his last days.
HEAVY Mag was recently able to sit down with Kravinsky and talk about the events that led to the movie being made and what kind of journey the notion of making the film took him through.
“It is based on my personal experience looking after my father,” says Kravinsky as our conversation begins. “He was in a hospice at the end of his life… he died of old age at a 100 actually. But the experience for me was just so profound and stressful, I can’t even begin to describe the emotions that myself and my family felt while we were caring for me at the end. And obviously for my father, which he told us on several occasions, that he was just really glad that we were there to help guide him through the end and be there and care for him.”
“I found writing it quite easy,” he explains when I ask whether the fact that the story was so personal to him made the screenwriting process harder or easier for him. “I had written a previous film called Geographically Desirable and that was a rom-com… a very light film. We got distribution and then I was sitting down and thinking ‘what next,what do we do here?’ And I spent a couple of months just dealing with all these false starts of screenplay ideas and it was starting to get really frustrating. Then I was talking to my wife, who is the composer of the film actually, and she just said why don’t you write about the experiences with your Dad because for me it was just this profound experience to care for him at the end and to me it was just like a light switched on. I was able to knock out the first draft in less than a month, it was like a hundred and ten pages or something and then over the course of a year and like twenty-four drafts later we were ready to shoot the film.”
Nothing To Do is available on Amazon and Amazon Prime. It will also soon be coming to iTunes.
