Barry W. Levy & Helenna Santos Take Aim At The Multiverse With THE SHASTA TRIANGLE

Barry Levy’s female-driven cerebral sci-fi/horror movie The Shasta Triangle tells the often frightening story of a young woman who returns to her hometown to uncover the truth about her father’s disappearance. Deeply rooted in unexplained occurrences, conspiracy theories, and fringe science, the new movie The Shasta Triangle explores mystical and unsettling phenomena as it touches on themes of love, loss, friendship, and sacrifice.

Five exciting young actresses (Dani Lennon, Deborah Lee Smith, Madeline Merritt, Ayanna Berkshire and co-writer and co-producer Helenna Santos) play women drawn back together for an adventure that tests the strength of their bonds, and their understanding of the world. Deep in the woods, she and her childhood friends battle the ancient and terrifying forces controlling the town. The Shasta Triangle was written and co-produced by Levy and his filmmaking partner Santos. The two of them spoke exclusively to Film Inquiry about their new film, and the current world of low-budget, independent filmmaking.

Jim Dixon for Film Inquiry: I’ve seen The Shasta Triangle and I would like to thank you for not committing one of the most common cardinal sins in modern movies, which is in making the movie half an hour too long.

Helenna Santos: [laughs] We’re very cognizant of that.

Barry Levy: It doesn’t overstay its welcome.

Helenna Santos: Well, what’s interesting too, now, is that like length doesn’t matter as much anymore. When you’re not looking at broadcast or theatrical release and you’re making something for digital, there’s so many more avenues you can go.

That’s an interesting point, and actually, it’s a step back to the so-called Golden Days of Hollywood, which you’re both too young to remember—

Barry Levy: [interjecting] Might not be, actually—

Well, I know you were in a lot of stuff that I watched in the nineties, so alright, but I still think you’re probably younger than I am. But anyway, B-movies were typically only an hour back in the 30’s. So if you went to see a gangster movie with like Cagney or Edward G Robinson, the top billed, A-movie would be an hour and a half to two hours, but would often play with a B gangster movie that might run an hour to an hour and a half.

Barry Levy: Wow.

Helenna Santos: Interesting. Very cool.

And The Shasta Triangle runs an hour and 15 minutes, I think?

Helenna Santos: Yes, almost.

Story Conferencing on Road Trips

It’s a nice briskly paced movie, and I have to tell you, I love the premise. Who came up with the idea?

Barry Levy: We both did, actually. We have a habit, if we’re on a road trip, or if we’re on our way somewhere on a long drive, of knocking around ideas. And this is one of the ones that we knocked around that really stuck.

Helenna Santos: Well, we’re both such big sci-fi/paranormal lovers—that’s really what we enjoy the most watching ourselves, or talking about, or even looking into—Barry’s had so many weird, personal, paranormal experiences—

Barry Levy: Weird seems to be drawn to me for some reason—I don’t know why.

Helenna Santos: Yeah. It was fun to draw on all of that. So the genesis was—I don’t know how much you want to talk about filmmaking itself—

That’s fine—I love talking about filmmaking.

Creating Inside the Box

Helenna Santos: Yeah. well, I know Manon [Film Inquiry Editor in Chief Manon de Reeper] through lots of different female filmmaking circles, and I’ve written for Film Inquiry before. I actually did a couple of guest posts for my last feature. But we really wanted to do something that was in a genre we loved and we had a very short amount of time to shoot in a specific location. And so when we were thinking about the weird, paranormal kind of things that we wanted to explore, the fact that we only had this specific location really gave us a lot to lean on. People say that when you have a box, sometimes it’s easier to actually create within the box instead of having too many options.

Barry Levy: Like Haiku.

Oh, yes, absolutely—the first Saw movie.

Barry Levy: Oh, that’s true.

Helenna Santos: That’s true.

It started to occur to me partway through the movie that although we’re out here in the woods and the great outdoors and all, that this is almost a locked door mystery. It’s that we’re going to stay in this clearing for the most part, and it starts getting very creepy when you begin to wonder whether or not these young ladies are ever going to be able to get out of the clearing.

Barry Levy: Yeah, yeah, exactly. And who is who? Like is so-and-so really so-and-so, or is this a different version of so-and-so?

And that does get kind of mind-blowing. The first time we hear “I don’t think Alicia’s Alicia,” I’m like, Oh dear, that hadn’t occurred to me.

Magic Happens in the Woods

Barry Levy: And the other thing too is that we’re both highly over-educated. In theater and in Shakespearean times, all Shakespeare’s stories that are magical happened in the woods.

Good point.

Barry Levy: Midsummer Night’s—

Helenna Santos: —As You Like It—

Barry Levy: Whenever Shakespeare wanted to do something magical, he always took his stories into the forest. And we like that idea too.

I read a fair amount of medieval literature in my grad school days and actually 11th and 12th century writers were prone to the same thing. You open the movie with an epigram from Yeats, and you close it with Einstein, and although we don’t think of Einstein talking about magic, but it dovetails very neatly with the Yeats quote.

Barry Levy: I thought so too. Imagine if Einstein released the Theory of Relativity 100 years before he did, he would have been accused of sorcery. I mean the cool thing about science and science moving so fast right now is that what used to be magic is now just plain science.

Arthur C. Clarke said that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Barry Levy: I’ve heard that as well.

Multiverses and the Lure of the Paranormal

I love the multiverse concept, although that’s not a phrase I used to use a lot, but I do watch the CW, and I totally geeked out when I realized that Helenna had been on The Flash—

Helenna Santos: Aw, thanks! And Barry was just a guest star on Arrow—

Cool! I like that one, too.

Helenna Santos: It’s fun—we love that genre like, I love The Magicians, I love Supernatural. I was very glad to be on Supernatural—I just I freaked out. It’s we love that kind of style. So that’s really what we were going for—that like The Shasta Triangle could live somewhere like the CW, or like, how SYFY has rebranded itself and made itself super, super cool, when it used to just be kind of like, you know, people weren’t impressed with the Sci-Fi Channel, and then it became SYFY and started to make really cool content, and that’s sort of pocket we thought that this movie could live in.

So there’s a possibility then there’s a universe or a dimension out there somewhere where Trump isn’t president—

Barry Levy: [laughs] Yes.

Helenna Santos: [laughs] Let’s hope many!

We Have Seen the Enemy and (She) is Us

So why are the alternate versions of your main characters so hostile?

Helenna Santos: [fiendish chuckle]

Barry Levy: We left some questions unanswered. But I think, generally speaking, there’s sort of a need for them to have more, essentially, in much the same way that Alicia’s fatal mistake is that she goes that one step too far, because she wants to be rich and famous. And I think it’s just greed.

Helenna Santos: A big part of what we talked about was fear of the unknown in general, and how if we wanted to look thematically in a bigger perspective, that whatever is different, that we’re not familiar with or comfortable with—yeah, from a thematic level, is kind of like a metaphor for that—that makes sense—that we’re afraid of the other,

Barry Levy: Even when the other is looks exactly like us. [laughs]

Helenna Santos: The duality within ourselves.

At this point I do have to give a shout-out to your cast—they all did an excellent job of portraying the alternates as completely different people. Even though it’s the same actresses, the facial expressions, the body language, are so much more menacing and sinister that as soon as I looked at them, I was not surprised to see they were carrying guns.

Barry Levy: It’s like my favorite episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, where the episode starts in the current world and then they switch to another dimension where they’re at war.

Helenna Santos: From a psychological level, it’s just something that has always really fascinated us, especially as actors, when we’re dealing with the sidebar—but when you create a character and you’re looking at the dark and the light of each person, and where those things live in you, and who they are. Just as a human walking around in the world, we have things that we live with inside of us.

“The Weirdest Thing Happened…”

Barry Levy: I think that most of the actors would say, despite the fact that it was raining, that that was their favorite day. It was definitely my favorite day too.

Helenna Santos: Yeah, man, we contended with a lot of bad weather.

Barry Levy: The weirdest thing happened on that day, too.

Oh? Do tell—

Barry Levy: We’re halfway through the morning. And we knew this was a rain day, so we’d rearranged the schedule so we could shoot in this tree farm, because at least there’d be some cover. So we’re halfway through the morning, and we hear the sound, like not even a 16th of a mile away, and everyone stops and looks, and I ask the sound guy “Can you get that?” And he tried, but it’s raining, and the pitter-patter is all we can hear on the mic. But we all stood there for about 30 seconds, listening to it, but then we don’t have time, we have to get our day. So we didn’t go digging around to see where it was or where it was coming from. But on the last night, at the wrap party, we mentioned it to some of the locals, and they said, “Oh, yeah, we hear it all the time.” Which we didn’t realize when we went there to shoot. Well, that was creepy.

My science education is primarily from comic books, science fiction novels and Star Trek. I can talk a good fight, but when it comes to stuff that might involve actual math, it’s not happening. The Shasta Triangle does a convincing job of sounding very scientifically grounded, but how much of it really is grounded in real science?

Barry Levy: I’d say it’s about 50/50. There was a group called the Liga Group, a group that that discovered through some crazy experiment that gravitational waves hitting the Earth at different velocities or strengths can speed up and slow down time. So they proved that just when I was writing. The actual creation of the sound—no one really knows how that happens. I’ve heard it twice now in two completely different locations. I don’t know what it is—to me it sounds like the earth is mourning. But scientifically, I don’t know what the explanation is. But the theories that I found online were that these photon bands that come pouring out of the sun and make the aurora borealis—when they snap, they would produce some sort of a sound. So that’s what I went with. Everything that’s in there is based at least loosely on some current scientific theory. I really wanted to be a scientist when I was a kid, and that stayed with me until I got to my last year of high school, when I realized I really suck at math. I do a lot better at creative writing.

Just to make sure our readers have some understanding of what we’re talking about here, your main characters are a group of young women who are out in this forest clearing, investigating a phenomena related to the disappearance of one of the father of one of them. They encounter mysterious disruptions in the environment, preceded by a loud, physically painful sound. How was that sound effect created?

Barry Levy: Most of it was made. I used to work in radio back in the 80’s, when everything was on tape, and I became well-known at the radio stations I worked out for making original sounds by taking other sounds and just messing with them. So is some sort of an actual horn in there somewhere, but it’s been treated and messed with and combined with other sounds to the point where I think I got something that’s original, and then the boom of course. The boom I had to find somewhere else—those things are really hard to make legally. [laughs]

[laughs] Yeah, I can see where that’d be a problem. So if I have it right, you allude to like at least four different universes or planes of existence in the movie, but I suppose we should assume there might be even more than that.

Barry Levy: Yes, absolutely. Each one of those posts would connect to another series of posts with different symbols and realms on them. So in the gun fight scene, I think you can see at least three out of the four different signposts, and a couple of them are completely different. I think there’s another there’s a theta on one of the signs—I actually drew out a series of maps as to where these other map things would connect to. So essentially, it’s almost like a latticework that would allow you jump into various dimensions.

All Work and No Play…

I was fascinated the whole two notebook thing—and I’m not going to give that away for prospective viewers—but you get your camera pretty close to those two notebooks at times, so that we can actually see pretty clearly what’s written in them. Who wrote all that stuff down? I mean there’s a lot of there’s a lot of ink work in there.

Barry Levy: I know! I made them all by hand It took it took a couple of weeks steady work.

Helenna Santos: [laughs] The joys of independent filmmaking! Doing your own art direction.

Barry Levy: For copyright reasons, I couldn’t just take other people’s work or photographs and so I just redrew things, mathematical equations or not. I mean, they’re not copyrightable. You can you can put them in anything. E = mc² is E = mc². You don’t owe anyone rights for that. And all those mathematical tables, I actually ran little algorithms so that if you look at it and actually do the math, there is a series of spacings that gets closer and closer together. It drove me a little nuts. And then for the second one, each page had to be somewhat had to be somewhat similar, but had to be different as well. So

I noticed that, and thought, Wow, somebody actually had to sit down and do this.

Barry Levy: Yeah, it was fun though. But it was it was tedious,

Probably more fun than Kubrick’s secretary, who had to type hundreds of pages of “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” for The Shining.

Helenna Santos: No kidding.

Barry Levy: No scanners then—

Yeah, he didn’t want them to match, apparently. Some are single-spaced, some are double-spaced—You could have just typed one or two pages and Xeroxed them over and over, but apparently that wasn’t good enough.

Barry Levy: No, yeah, I can see that, the stories I’ve heard—

Helenna Santos: I’ve never heard that before, actually.

Remarkable, Diverse Cast of Young Women

So you have a you have a remarkable, diverse cast of young women carrying this movie onscreen. Where did you get them all? Of course, Helenna is one of them.

Helenna Santos: Honestly, they’re old friends. Ayanna Berkshire is the only one who I didn’t know prior to shooting. In the world of film, you use what you have and what’s right at your fingertips, and I am lucky enough to be surrounded by some incredibly talented women, not only as an actor or filmmaker, but in general in the industry. This is before #MeToo, before all of that happened, and it has gotten better, but it has been very rare to see a group of diverse, strong, complex women leading a movie like this. That was a very, very important thing to us from the get-go.

We had people in mind when we were coming up with the story, and Barry started writing the script, we had their strengths in mind for what we could do with the cast and the characters, and then we brought them all up from Los Angeles. We shot in Oregon just outside of Portland in an area called Scappoose. We brought up myself and the other three actresses from LA, and then Ayanna was in Portland—she was suggested to us by Jason Satterlund, who was one of the co-producers on the project—and it was his uncle’s property that we actually shot on for those 12 and a half days. Everybody did an incredible job. Barry’s script—the writing, the dialogue—is so science heavy—they really stepped up to the plate and did an incredible job. We’re so incredibly grateful to them. And yeah, it was fun to be able to do something super challenging. That is interesting and just different than is out there right now.

Barry Levy: And these five women brought a lot of surprises to the script too—it was remarkable to watch them work.

Expository dialogue can choke a movie like this to death, and it didn’t—you sidestep that nicely. And the characters had baggage they were carrying—they weren’t they weren’t cookie cutter characters—they had depth and believability, and I liked that.

Helenna Santos: Thank you. Yeah, it’s difficult when you do have that box that you’re confined to, and you want to tell a complex story, you do have to do a lot of exposition when it’s this intricate, even in the script itself and then on the day shooting and then in editing, what do you choose to put in? What do you choose to leave to the audience? That was a really interesting journey for us.

Barry Levy: And every character has to change, of course the more dramatically the better.

Barry, you edited the movie as well as directed it, and a lot of our readers really do appreciate hearing about craft. Talk a little bit if you would about the challenge of shooting a scene where a character runs off in what appears to be a straight line, and then comes right back to where they started from with no apparent seam.

Barry Levy: I gotta admit, I was sweating that a little bit. So first of all, we put a marker in. We had to get Dani Lennon who plays Paula, we had to get her hat off. And we’re, okay, this is a good place to do it. So that is going to be our point where we pivot. And I’m not kidding, like we all stood around during every break and in every setup the day before we were going to shoot that and everyone was going like “Okay, what about this?” Because it’s like, No, no, no, no, wait, wait, wait, wait—everybody was throwing out ideas. I kind of had an idea of how we do it. But I was thinking she was gonna like head into the woods and start running and we follow her running through the woods and then we come out the woods and then she’s back where she was and [director of photography] Rick Galli and [co-producer, assistant director, location manager, and visual effects creator] Jason [Satterlund] and [camera operator] John [K.D. Graham] all said, “No, I think we can do it in-camera, right here in the open, and if we can pull this off, it’ll be it’ll be awesome.” And that’s how it works.

We shot all of her tight stuff in the location where she was taking off from. I had to go back and steal a couple of looks from an earlier part of the scene where she looks back and forth, so that was a cheat that I managed to fix. And then we moved her all the way over to where she was going to run from, and then we shot all of that stuff again, with the hat coming off—we shot the hat coming off in the original location as well. And then we’re in the place where she’s running from.

The hat comes off—we shot it in two different ways—we didn’t end up using it, because we thought it actually works better without—but we had some pylons sitting there on sticks for one of the characters she was going to run by, and we green screened her with the turnaround, but it actually worked better without, and then they just took off from that spot and bolted. We had to paint out one little section where you could see the girls waiting around the branch of the trees. And then the amazing Lex Benedict just made it all work in post—she painted a few things out of here in there. And Rick Galli and John and I just ran as fast as we could, and could barely keep up to Dani. She took off like greased lightning. So we did, I think, four takes and then we had it.

That’s fabulous. Because that I mean, obviously you really need that to work for the whole conceit of the movie to work, I think and I think you pulled that off very neatly. Film Inquiry readers love finding out about that stuff.

Helenna Santos: We have so many little tidbits like that. When you have a tiny, tiny team making a movie, you really have to rely on all their brain power. To make things like that work and to execute them yeah, it’s pretty fascinating—watching the camera guys and Barry them tinker around and figure out how we’re going to do certain things was awesome.

Barry Levy: There was a lot of smoke coming out of people’s ears that day.

More joys of independent filmmaking?

Barry Levy: Yeah. For this movie we had enough money to shoot and that’s it. So we shot. And we worried about how we’re going to get the money for post and PR and everything else as we were in post.

Helenna Santos: And as you know, the PR and marketing part of it is so important. I know a lot of independent filmmakers forget that part.

The Cavalry isn’t Coming…

Bearing in mind what a tight shooting schedule you had, did you do a lot of previs for this, or did you more shoot from the hip on location when you got there?

Barry Levy: Yeah, well, like you know, like they say in the military, you know, your plan is really good until you actually get into the war. So yeah, I had shot-listed, I had storyboarded in horrible stick figures. Some of that stayed, but most of it we just had to change, because for one thing, the sun kept moving. The only stuff we shot from lights was the stuff at the end—we had a whole lighting panel, but we were moving so fast, and Rick was just so good with natural light that we just kept going.

Helenna Santos: And we were trying to get 11 to 13 pages a day.

Barry Levy: Oh, it was a monster page count per day.

Helenna Santos: We had two cameras going at the same time to get a wide and the close up, because when you have five characters who are all in almost every scene, getting all that coverage, and doing it quickly was imperative, so we didn’t lose the light. And luckily, the weather held off except for that one day.

Barry Levy: Yeah, some sleepless nights thinking about that. And the other thing is, I mean, I’ve been an actor, a TV actor, mainly for about 28, nearly 30 years. And I’ve shadowed when I’m on set—I sit as close to video village as I can, and I just watch what they’re doing. I watch how they block, I watch what they do when they have a scene where there’s not enough going on in the scene, so they have to just move people around to keep it interesting. And when you’re in one location, everything has to keep moving. You can’t be looking at the same set of trees for every setup, so we just kept moving around, and the sun kept moving us as well. And most of it worked. You know, pretty organically. I’d say there’s maybe about 10% of what I shot listed and storyboarded that we actually used, but it was there just in case.

That’s going to be reassuring to a lot of fledgling filmmakers. So what’s up next for the two of you?

Barry Levy: So we have two larger budget features ready to go. One is a heist movie and the other is a creature feature. Essentially, this movie is our calling card.

Helenna Santos: If you saw Mark Duplass in the South by Southwest speech, he talked about how the cavalry isn’t coming. We really knew that in order to make the bigger budget movies that we really want to make, we needed to do something on a micro-budget that could get some attention and showcase us as filmmakers—that we can do something and execute well. So it was important to us to start off with this film in that way, so that we can do those other two movies. We just didn’t want to wait for the gatekeepers, because everyone’s like “Why don’t you wait for more money, try to get more money,” and it’s like, well, we have a timeframe and an opportunity and we have the talent and the tenacity and passion.

So, we just really wanted to get it done and do it as best as we could, and not wait for gatekeepers, or anyone, to tell us that we can. I think that’s really important for independent filmmakers to know that you can go do it if you surround yourself with the right people, people who are on board for the ride and who have the ability. We were very lucky that everybody who worked on our team works at a very high level in the industry already. So they all they what they were doing, and they just came together to create this awesome little project. We really hope that the next thing we get to do is one of these bigger budget projects.

The Shasta Triangle is now available on all digital platforms.