‘Bravado’ Filmmakers Reveal How They Made “Turducken Of A Movie’

It took a lot of bravado to pull off what the filmmakers and cast accomplish in the meta thriller titled… Bravado. It’s a film within a film, or in fact several versions of a film within a film.

At the West Coast premiere of the feature at Dances With Films: LA over the weekend, festival director Lindsey Smith-Sands called it a “turducken of a movie.”

The scenario is this: aspiring screenwriter Amy Erickson (Caitlin Morris) shows promise – her latest script earned her a fellowship — yet she’s anxiety-ridden and underconfident. At a screenwriting workshop, Patrick Lombardi (Luca Malacrino), a once-successful director who’s had a string of flops, gives a seminar or sorts and spots Amy’s talent. He offers to help her develop her script, a fresh take on the mafia genre, set in the UK. They arrange to meet for one-on-one sessions, but those encounters reveal a darker side to Patrick as he increasingly browbeats Amy into improving her screenplay.

Alex Hanno directed Bravado, which premiered at the Cleveland International Film Festival in April. He co-wrote the script with Malacrino, who stars in the film and serves as a producer along with Hanno, Apoorv Arora, Rebecca Hardy, and Dom Lenoir. The relationship between the borderline abusive Patrick and the neophyte Amy evokes Whiplash and that Damien Chazelle film’s contest of wills between a jazz bandleader and his gifted student.

“Before we did any actual scene work, we [Malacrino and Morris] did improvised work together with scenes that weren’t even in the script,” Malacrino explained at a Q&A after the Dances With Films screening. “So, Alex would direct us, we’d find a room, we booked it for two, three days, and we got to live in the character and do moments that weren’t there [in the screenplay]… For me personally, that helped massively just drop into the character.”

The mentor-mentee dynamic is just one layer of Bravado. The action cuts from the one-on-one meetings in Patrick’s office to a critical scene in the movie Amy has written (this is the film within a film). The audience gets to see the screenplay come to life and evolve under the mentor’s badgering. We see Amy’s original version, then a better subsequent version, then a still better version.

“His villainy,” Morris said of the Patrick character, “is complicated because he’s mostly right.”

The three versions of Amy’s mafioso scene were shot in Cardiff, Wales. Bravado hinges on whether viewers can truly see how the scene has improved because of Patrick’s relentless pressure on his mentee.

“The first [version of the] scene has to work on its own. It has to be good enough in terms of the structure of it… It has to be good because Amy has been accepted into a fellowship because of this script,” director Alex Hanno observed. “So, it has to stand on its own, but then you need to be able to one up it, right? So, the idea of, okay, let’s make it good, but cliche. And then the next version… it was like, okay, well that’s pretty good. What do we do to one up that? And I think we kind of said, let’s not actually one up that, let’s just pivot and do something unexpected with it so that obviously [audiences] can enjoy all three of them. But it was definitely a challenge because if each one doesn’t ramp up and prove to be better than the last, then the entire structure of the film falls apart.”

Malacrino not only plays the screenwriting mentor Patrick, but in the movie within the movie he portrays the mafioso Giovanni – in the second and third iterations of the scene. (Malacrino’s father, Giovanni Malacrino, plays the mafioso in the first version of the scene, gobbling steak in a restaurant as he confronts a woman undercover cop who has infiltrated his crew).

The versions of mafioso Giovanni that Malacrino plays – versions 2 and 3, if you’re counting – are quite distinct. They need to be, to show the progression of the screenplay Amy is revising.

“For me personally, the third mafia character works just a bit better than the second one. It’s because this guy can make bigger choices,” Malacrino observed. “Giovanni 3 can make almost any choice and get away with it and still feel authentic because that’s just who he is.”

For Morris, who “only” plays one character – the screenwriter – among her biggest acting challenges was filming the montage sequence showing Amy as she struggles to rework her screenplay based on Patrick’s endless “notes.”

“Montages are so fun to watch and so painful to do,” Morris noted mordantly. “Doing the montage stuff was so challenging because it was just an exercise in quick changes. I’d be like, ‘different T-shirt, do my eye bags worse, [fiddling with] fingers stuff.’ …It feels hard to root yourself as an actor when the moment is like five seconds, but it did need to escalate and I think a lot of that is in the edit and in the music making you feel the intensity while I just fake plug away at a laptop.”

Bravado includes interstitial moments where screenwriters discuss the agonies, and occasional satisfactions, of their craft.

“We always had a version of some direct-to-camera interview documentary-style thing,” Hanno said. “It evolved, like initially it was going to be just talking to people about their passions and then there was a version where Luca and I were going to be talking and we’re like, ‘Nah, let’s not do that.’ And then we landed on, we should be interviewing writers.”

“There’s a lot of inside baseball in here for sure,” Hanno said of the screenwriting travails elucidated in the direct-to-camera segments. “A ton of you in the audience are already laughing at very specific jokes, which we appreciate, but if it doesn’t translate and transcend that, then it doesn’t live, right? It’s not going to have a long life. And for us, what I think we wanted to really hammer down… is the idea of passion and the idea that if you have something that drives you and you wake up [every day] determined to do it, whether you’re getting paid or otherwise, this is a film that you can relate to.”