Kip (Robert Gomes) wishes he’d never left his apartment in Body/Antibody, an Obsessive Compulsive romance from directors Kerry Douglas Dye and Jordan Hoffman
A visually stunning low-budget movie is a rare find. A visually stunning low-budget movie with a compelling plot and terrific acting can be as difficult to come by as true love, or, say, a spacious rent-controlled apartment in uptown Manhattan.
In their new, beautifully shot film Body/Antibody, New York filmmakers Kerry Douglas Dye and Jordan Hoffman tackle issues of love, rent control and, to make matters even more complicated, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD), all on a truly independent budget. The film, which plays this week as part of the Calgary International Film Festival, follows the story of Kip (played by Robert Gomes), a chronic sufferer of OCD who has sequestered himself in a luxurious rent-controlled apartment recently inherited from his late grandmother. With the exception of a few short scenes, the entire movie is shot in the apartment with supporting characters (primarily a sexy temptress by the name of Celine) entering Kip’s world when he feels brave enough to let them in.
Hoffman, who produced the film and co-directed it with Dye (who also wrote the script) says that Kip’s story was largely born out of budget restraints. He and Dye had a couple of scripts that they were working on that needed more money to be properly produced. When the duo were offered a friend’s spacious, rent-controlled pad as a prospective set, they went to work developing a script that could use the apartment as its sole location. Dye has suffered from intense bouts of OCD himself, so he decided to use the disorder as a means of keeping Kip inside the apartment. Once the OCD was added to the mix, a plot began to bloom.
“We did let the realities of working low budget kind of dictate the story in that regard,” Hoffman says. “Obviously, Kerry’s own struggles with OCD were never quite as violent or sexy as Kip’s become, but people who work in psychiatrics and have seen the film have commented that the OCD scenes are really real. That’s because they essentially are. There’s a scene where Kip teaches Celine the proper way to wash — that comes directly from what I observed when Kerry was in the midst of his problems.”
While the apartment — furnished with Kip’s impeccably clean furniture, books and cleaning products — provides a beautiful backdrop to a story that takes a number of shocking and often funny twists and turns, it also presented some problems for Dye and Hoffman. The real-life tenants were desperately afraid of losing their rent-controlled haven, so the crew had to be painstakingly quiet, especially when moving equipment around. The filmmakers also had the unfortunate chore of filming over the course of 21 days during a particularly hot New York summer, which presented other unique problems.
“We shot in July during a horrible heat wave, and when you’re shooting low budget, you have to turn off all the air conditioners because you’re not on a sound stage, so the sound of the air conditioner will ruin the take,” Hoffman says. “You also have to unplug the refrigerator because the sound of the motor will be picked up by the microphones. So we couldn’t even have cold Gatorade, because the fridge was warm. We’d have to run down to the corner deli to get cold Gatorade, otherwise we would have all passed out. So, those are the little things that I do not miss. I hope that our next project will have a slightly bigger budget, so we won’t have to work under those conditions.”
With a few good showings at festivals already, Hoffman is hoping that he and Dye will garner enough clout from Body/Antibody’s good reviews to attract financial backers for future projects. For now, he’s proud of what they were able to achieve with such a small amount of cash. Body/Antibody is often paid one of the highest compliments a small independent film can win: even if it was shot on a shoestring budget, it looks like it was made with money. Hoffman admits that there isn’t much about the picture that he’d change even if he had the chance.
“If we’d had more dough, we might have had better props here and there, and more trick camera moves, but that’s part of life,” he says. “You can’t worry about the road not taken.”
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