Following the release of West of Her, writer/director Ethan Warren and emerging filmmaker Phil Bernstein got together to discuss the nitty-gritty technical details that go into putting together a microbudget independent road movie, from camera choice to sound pitfalls to unexpected VFX work, and beyond!

And then, it was the last day. And the last day was a big one. But after three weeks of full-throttle figure-it-out-as-we-go, high-wire don’t-look-down filmmaking, why should the last day be any different?

On Thursday, July 25, we woke up in Clinton, OK, and set off on our final big push, driving more than eight hours to Memphis, TN, where we were scheduled for a long night of filming. It was a routine we’d repeated for three weeks now—wake up, drive, shoot, sleep—but knowing this was the last time, there was a strange charge in the air. Were we really going to pull this off? Would we really stick the landing?

After five days in Arizona, shooting what amounted to about a third of the film—and a pretty intense, dramatic third at that—we loaded up on Tuesday morning for a West of Her first: today, we would just drive. We didn’t have time to do anything else.

Phoenix, AZ is not the world’s most thrilling city. But it had been over two weeks since we left Chicago. After that much time in the wide open spaces, Phoenix was as exciting and overwhelming as Manhattan.

Any road trip gets tough sooner or later. Even on a vacation with your oldest friends, you get tense and touchy from spending all that time together. And the West of Her shoot was no vacation; this was a work trip with brand new friends. So it was inevitable we’d hit our breaking point eventually. And, of course, we had been a shockingly lucky crew so far—nothing had really gone wrong. So it was probably inevitable, too, that we’d hit a huge problem eventually. But then, on our second break from production, both those things happened at once on a hot and empty patch of roadside in the middle of the Arizona desert.

Yesterday, we shot at Monument Valley. Today, we were shooting at the Grand goddamn Canyon. If you’re gonna make a sweeping, cross-country road trip epic, you might as well go all-out, right? But first, there was a tough choice to be made.

There were some jam-packed days on the West of Her shoot. There were some long nights. But July 19th put the rest of them to shame.

In late July, the average temperate in Ouray, CO tends to be in the low 60s. Meanwhile, at Four Corners—the spot where Colorado meets Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico—it can easily get up to the mid 90s. That is a hell of an adjustment to make in the course of a morning, even when you’re not rushing around to shoot the climactic scene of a scrappy little independent film. But it was an adjustment we had to make. We didn't have time to complain.

As a cinematographer, Cam didn’t have a long wish list when we started planning West of Her. For the most part, he was happy to follow the script I’d written and try to make it look as good as possible onscreen. But during preproduction, an issue cropped up. I’d written several very long dialogue scenes, and I’d set them all in the car as Dan and Jane drove. The way I figured it, you spend the majority of a road trip driving, and shooting the shit. It made sense to accurately reflect that. But in practice, both from a shooting and a viewing perspective, it was a nightmare, and once I stepped back just a bit, I realized that I would never want to watch ten minutes of two seated characters watching the road. And as we started brainstorming new locations to set these conversations, Cam revealed one deep desire: he wanted a bar.

Early on the morning of July 16th, we stood twelve-thousand feet above sea level, rolling green slopes and snow-capped peaks all around us. The air was so thin it was hard not to gasp as we filmed Ryan and Kelsey exchanging three brief lines: “Does it make you feel small?” “More than small.” “I was joking.” I still don’t quite know what those lines mean, but I know they’re essential to the arc of West of Her.

Back in the spring, when we planned the schedule, I didn’t see why would ever need something as silly as days off. We would all be having the time of our lives! It would hardly feel like work at all! Why would anyone want to stop? That’s right: I was almost one of history’s greatest monsters.

It was a bright Saturday morning in July. The sky was very blue and very, very big. All around us were grasslands and dirt cliffs. And I was standing on the site of one of my favorite computer games.

I did not know the Mount Rushmore National Memorial was so big. I swear, I didn’t. I’m innocent.

I scheduled the West of Her shoot to within an inch of our lives. There was no time for leisure and indecision. We had too many miles to drive, too many pages to shoot, and movies burn money faster than you’d ever imagine possible. But when I planned that schedule, I figured hey, it's a tightly scripted film, there's no need to leave room for experimentation. I knew what we needed.

The full weight of this huge, risky enterprise hit me square in the chest during the empty day we spent in Mitchell, SD. We didn’t have much on the agenda before our second night of shooting at the Corn Palace, so we had plenty of time to sit around and realize, oh, we really are hours away from anything resembling a city. And we’re just getting started.

I bit off more than anyone could chew when I planned the second day of production for West of Her. To begin with, we needed to cover more than 550 miles of travel, from Rockford, IL to Mitchell, SD, which would be a long day by any measure. But all those miles were just getting us to the main event: a night of shooting at the Corn Palace. The Corn Palace scene is long, the closest West of Her has to a thrilling set piece (Cam described it as the “James Bond opening” of the film), but even then, it was just a few minutes. How long could that take to shoot? Hell, at first I figured we could shoot the whole thing in one night, but Cam cautioned me to build in more time. Sure, I figured, can’t hurt, but it doesn’t seem necessary. That was before we arrived at the Corn Palace, and Adam casually said, “We’ll probably be here until sunrise.”

It was a bright July morning, and I was standing on a crowded street in uptown Chicago, across the way from the Green Mill Cocktail Lounge. I’d never been there before, but three years earlier, looking for a distinctive sidewalk to place my character on in a short story, I’d looked the bar up and chosen it. Now, I was across from that spot, with that character standing down the street, waiting for me to call “Action” and summon him to walk into the scene I’d dreamed up. The street was crowded, and we were just a few people with a camera—we weren’t running sound, and most of the crew was elsewhere—so you could easily have missed what was happening, missed the dreamy grin on my face, walked right by the guy having one of the best days of his entire life.

After two long days of driving, producer Dave, production assistant Devin, and I arrived in Chicago. It was July 6th, 2013, and the day after tomorrow, we would begin production on West of Her. The drive had been dominated by anxiety bordering on terror—I’d dreamed my whole life of this day, the day we started making my first feature film. And now here we were at the starting gate of production, where our crew would assemble from all over North America, and leave two days later for a three-week adventure across the United States, making what we hoped and believed would be great art. Or else, of course, making colossal mistakes that would end my career before it began. One or the other. There wasn’t much in between.

The month before we began shooting West of Her was the most panicked of my life. Suddenly, everything I’d told myself we’d have time for later needed to be done right now. And every time I thought I knew everything that should be on the to-do list, something else cropped up, items multiplying like hydras’ heads. So let’s take it item-by-item: