Domenic Porcari – Beyond the Lake

We had the opportunity to interview Domenic Porcari, the filmmaker of Beyond the Lake which is an official selection of the 12th annual Utah Film Festival. 

What was the inspiration to make Beyond the Lake?

Sometimes you find just the right show/movie/book at just the right time in your life.  For Beyond the Lake, I stumbled across an obscure Amazon original show called Patriot, which follows an intelligence officer who works to prevent a nuclearization of Iran by doing non-official cover work at an industrial piping firm in Wisconsin.  What gave the show its avant guard charm is that this intelligence officer writes hyper specific folk songs to help deal with the stress of his job, and he performs them throughout the show.  Not only was this format something I’d never seen before, but the show itself was not only a wildly fresh take on the “spy genre,” but somehow was also deeply personal and dramatic, communicating the pain of the character, pain I deeply resounded with, in such revolutionary and unique ways.  

Needless to say I was hooked, and for my first feature I wanted to make something as an homage to this show, both in terms of the musical format, and the themes and characters.

From idea to completion, how did this production change?  

I wrote the film in March of 2020 with plans to shoot it as a super low budget passion project with friends that July.  If only a global pandemic hadn’t gotten in the way.  We kept pushing the date back and back as the promised dates of “global reopening” kept coming and going.  As the weeks rolled by, cast and crew began falling off or moving on, unsure of what would happen with COVID. By the time we actually started shooting in a covid bubble in October, the entire cast and crew had turned over to someone new, with the exception of the lead actress.  

Four different actors went through the lead role of Joe Lakeman, the third gentlemen stepping off suddenly literally the day before our first shoot day.  (We pushed it back again)

But I’d say overall, the biggest change from start to finish was the tone.  The original concept of the film was definitely a lot darker than the final product, which had a good blend of heaviness and levity.  We shot a handful of scenes as a proof of concept in the late summer, and when you compare it to the same scenes in the final movie, you can see the difference.  It wasn’t so much that we just erased all of the drama, but rather we gave ourselves permission to laugh in the scenes, and find a nice blend of drama and comedy to keep it interesting.

What was the biggest challenge in getting Beyond the Lake made? 

Believe it or not, shooting during COVID was not the hardest part.  In many ways it actually made things easier.  When we lost our third lead actor, I was connected with Broadway Actor David Socolar, who couldn’t have been better for the film, and thanks to the pandemic and broadway being shut down, his schedule was totally free to shoot a month long feature on two weeks notice.

The hardest part of the production by far was the ending of the movie.  

As the summer progressed before the shoot, the script kept evolving, and the different people coming in and out of the lead role left their fingerprints on it.  We also improvised on set and did some rewrites during production.  But the final scene in the script did not change to reflect the evolution of the script, and was shot as such.  By the time we got to the edit, it became clear that the ending that was written and shot no longer fit the movie.  And with reshoots out of the question, I was left to spend an entire month in front of my desktop combing through 32 terabytes of footage trying to piece together a new ending with unused footage.  

I thought I was screwed, but believe it or not, I was somehow able to pull it off thanks to a chance encounter I’d had with a bagpipe player on our first shoot day.  It’s a story almost too wild to believe, especially because this new ending I was able to stitch together was far better than anything I could have written, it fit the movie perfectly.

What do you think is the most important takeaway from Beyond the Lake

I play a supporting character in the movie, and The biggest thematic takeaway actually ended up being a line that my character delivers in one of the penultimate scenes.  I tell the main character “sometimes good things fall apart so that better things can fall together.”  

Now having things fall apart never feels good, and no one in their right mind would ask for anything to fall apart, even with the promise of something better.  But it happened time and time again with us.  I’m not quite an “everything happens for a reason” person.  Chaos is real, and sometimes bad things just happen.  But getting to this point with this film has cemented in my soul that if you have the mental and emotional fortitude to keep hope, and keep working, if you keep aiming up and don’t succumb to the nihilistic voice inside you, you’ll find a way to turn a bad situation to your favor.  The universe won’t do it for you, but it will eventually give you the chance.

“Let us then be up in doing, with a heart for any fate,

Still achieving, still pursuing, learn to labor, and learn to wait.”

If you could have a do over with your film is there anything that you would do differently? If so, what would that be?

Being my first feature, there’s a laundry list of things I wish I’d done differently, more so off set than on.  Its really important for me to have my sets be places where people make memories and friends, where there’s joy in a job well done, and where all of the drama happens in front of the camera, not behind.  In a lot of ways, we accomplished that, we had some incredible laughs and memories.  But theres always room for improvement, and I learned a metric ton from this film about how to do that better.

What do you have next in the works?

My goal for my career is and always has been to dramatically redeem the Action genre.  To make action films that succeed dramatically and thematically as films, and also happen to have stellar action.  I’ve always believed that the best action movies are defined by the dramatic moment’s in between the action moreso than the action sequences themselves.

I made beyond the lake as a way to prove that I could make a movie that stood on its own two legs dramatically and thematically, so that when I made my next action project, It would be more that just fist fights and explosions, but something that people could connect to on a personal level.

That project is a series called Of Monsters and Men, a fantasy action series about misinformation, identity, and redemption.  The script for the pilot has gotten some incredible praise, and we just wrapped production on a proof of concept for it where we shot the first few scenes.  I’m going to spend the winter and spring doing post, and also having as many conversations as I can about how to get it picked up and developed.

You can get an intro to the series at seedandspark.com/fund/omam

How can we learn more about you and your projects?

I grew up homeschooled, so bragging about myself – excuse me, I mean promoting myself, has never been a strong suit of mine.  That said, you can find a lot of my narrative and commercial work at my website filmingdom.com.  And theres a lot of fun behind the scenes content on my instagram @filmingdom.

Also, we just released the official soundtrack album for the film that has all of the original songs written and performed for the movie!  You can find the “Beyond the Lake Official Soundtrack” anywhere you get your music!  Its a great way to get a sneak peak of the narrative and feel of the movie. (Stay is a particularly good one)