Lucas Mireles

“When you make a film you always submit to Sundance,” Lucas Mireles explains. Playtime (Spielzeit), written and directed by UCLA film student Mireles and produced by Ryan Slattery M.F.A. ’11, is screening at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival. The film was chosen in the international narrative short-film category from a record 3,592 total submissions. Admittance to Sundance is a dream for filmmakers across the globe, and it is an outstanding achievement for these two Bruins.

Playtime began when UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television chair Barbara Boyle selected Mireles and Slattery to represent UCLA in a project to study and honor German exile filmmakers of the 1930s. They were assigned to create a film that would pay homage to the iconic filmmaker Billy Wilder and his 1930 silent masterpiece People on Sunday.

To complete the project, Mireles and Slattery moved to Cologne – on the border between France and Germany – for two months, immersing themselves in the German language and culture. Most important to their success, however, was mastery of the pre-World War II, German style of filmmaking. Upon their arrival in Cologne both filmmakers devoted a week to review German cinematography.

Neither filmmaker had been to Germany before, nor did either of them speak any German. Nonetheless they decided to shoot the film in German with English subtitles and use a translator to help them with the German dialogue.

Slattery says that the process “taught us the crucial importance of collaboration in making any film. Establishing one collective overall creative vision with everyone working on the film is the most important thing.”

Mireles explains that the film is “a slice of life on a simple Sunday afternoon. There’s sex, reality, fun, conflict, and audiences can certainly dig deeper if they want. We just want audiences to see that it is a meditation on life and its honest actions.”

Slattery’s next film is a thesis project by Bobby Moresco, the co-writer of Crash with Paul Haggis. Slattery has an option on the screenplay currently. Mireles is working towards his directing degree at UCLA and is directing four different films. Both Slattery and Mireles had to raise their own funds to get to Sundance, while representing themselves, their film and UCLA in the best way possible.

“UCLA’s film school is the best film school in world,” says Mireles. “They let you create what you want and allow independence here. When we applied to Sundance, we wanted to tell a story that felt permanent and meaningful. UCLA let us do that.” Slattery adds, “It feels great to now be part of two elite clubs, the Sundance alumni and UCLA’s film school alumni.”