Filmmaker Tom Quinn cares about how people get by, how they work hard to make life better, how it’s often a struggle to do that and how, in a state of quiet transcendence, life is born of those challenges. “I’m definitely interested in making working class films and basically being a working class filmmaker,” Quinn says. “It’s what I’ve always wanted, in the same way that my dad was a carpenter and a craftsperson but also made things that were artistic and beautiful.”

In the second part of our interview with the filmmaker, recently named one of Filmmaker Magazine’s 25 New Faces of Independent Film, we continue to explore the making of Quinn’s Slamdance lauded The New Year Parade. Over the course of three years, Quinn, along with everyman crew member Mark Doyle and a dedicated cast, rehearsed, improv’d, studied and finally lived inside the world of a family in the midst of breakdown.

Here Quinn speaks about shooting in Philadelphia, the growing film movement in the region and his hopes for the future of his work, Quinn saying, “Ideally it would be great if I could have a body of work that feels unified, even if it’s five or six low-budget films like this. I would feel really good if I could figure out a way to keep doing that.”

SM: There is one last character in the film that people speak about all the time, which is the landscape of South Philly. I love the anecdote about Joan Cassidy, whose house you shot in, telling you about the curtains and how the curtains always had to remain straight in the window. The interior of the house could be a disaster, but the curtains had to be straight so that the neighbors wouldn’t come out of their rowhouses to see what was happening. I love that idea of an area as a character, that people will come outside to smoke a cigarette when they hear a commotion at a neighbor’s house.

Shooting (in South Philly) wasn’t the initial plan; you’d been shooting out in the suburbs at first, right? What was it like then shooting in the city?

TQ: It’s funny. Like you said, at first we started shooting in the suburbs because we were all living out there, and I’m not really a city kid per se, so I didn’t know the area that well either. About as much as I knew about South Philly was from Rocky.

As we started shooting, we started to walk around the neighborhoods, and actually Two Street, which is Second Street, is where the majority of the Mummer’s clubs are, so they call that Mummer’s Row. So south of Washington all the way down, you have all the string band clubs and all the divisions, and a lot of times during the year they do smaller parades there. There’s a serenade for the winning string band, where all the bands go up Two Street and play for the winning club. There are a bunch of parades around Christmas—the Drunken Santa parade, things like that. I thought we’d go down to shoot those initially, and the neighbors would come out, their kids would be out and there’d be a kiddy pool full of beer in one corner. It had this amazing atmosphere that had a very old school, family neighborhood, working class feeling that you don’t really see a whole lot anymore. The people are very, very tight-knit.

South Philly is very diverse, but the areas we were shooting in are still mostly Italian and Irish working class. It’s interesting—on one side you have this highway, and then there’s the waterfront. So, you have all this great texture that’s down there.

I’ve never been stopped while shooting so many times just to make sure that I was legit by a neighbor. I’ve shot a lot of run-and-gun things in different areas, but there were so many times when people would come up to me just to see who I was, just to make sure I was okay and that I wasn’t a threat to the neighborhood. I think that speaks a lot to the kind of people that are there. Ten o’clock at night or 9 o’clock in the morning, people would come up to say, “Hey, saw you with a camera, just want to know what you’re doing,” because there are kids around and neighbors that everyone’s looking out for.

Also people were really friendly. Once they understood that they could trust you, they were very welcoming. That’s not just the Mummer’s guys; there were people like the Cassidys, who gave me the house. I first met the Cassidys shooting another film that’d I’d written, and it took place partly in Wildwood, NJ where my grandmother used to own a shorehouse. She dies in the 80s, and they bought the house. I really wanted to shoot there, and I’d never met them. I got in touch and said, “Hey, you don’t know me, but my grandmother used to own your house. I would really love to film there.” I came down here, met them for about ten minutes, they gave me the key and let me shoot for the entire week. That was it. They were just nice, welcoming people. They totally trusted me. All they wanted in exchange was two tickets for the premiere. So, when it came around to shooting this film, I knew they had the house in South Philly, and I was trying not to ask them for another favor, and we were looking and looking and looking and couldn’t find anything. Finally I asked them, and they offered to go down the shore for a week, which is about two hours away. Jack, who is the father of the family, offered to commute back to Philadelphia to work everyday for that week back and forth, two hours, while we shot in their house. I think that’s just the kind of people you find in South Philadelphia. If they know you’re good people, and you’re trying to do a good thing, they look out for you without asking for anything back, which, I think—not that’s it’s completely rare—is very specific to that neighborhood.

With the Mummer’s guys, it’s the same. When we went and shot with Quaker City’s club for that scene with Jack asking to join, we’d never met these guys, we walk in, there are seventy guys there on a Sunday afternoon, they don’t know who you are and whether they should be letting you in or not, we talked for a few minutes, I go out to get the tripod, I come back in, and they’re already giving Greg [Lyons, the lead actor] shots. We go downstairs to shoot, we come back up, we wrap; it was our last day of shooting, we thought, and Greg and I just sat and had beers with them for the next four or five hours. They just said, “Your our friends now. Anytime you’re down here, just come on in.”

SM: What did the Cassidys and the Mummer’s guys think of the film?

TQ: We were nervous to show the band at first just because we had to exaggerate their storyline. The band has actually done really well the last two years; they got third place two years in a row, which in South Philly is a big deal because the same two bands have had first and second place for probably the past fifteen years or so. So, being third place is really big for them. But, the year that we shot, 2005 was not such a great year, so it’s sort of a sore spot to begin with. We knew that, and they knew that. It was a joke, but you still never know because you’re exaggerating things. So if I shot four practices, and over the course of four practices, there were five mistakes, I had to cut them all back-to-back, so it looks like they’re having one really bad practice.

When we showed it, it was the most fun screening that we’ve had. We showed it at their clubhouse, which they just redid, and they have a big projector there. Mark and I went down. There were probably sixty guys there after practice, and it was the most interactive screening we’ve had. They were screaming back at the screen and cheering; they were really into it. Especially the fathers of the club came up to give us hugs afterwards and kind of had tears in their eyes. I think it meant a lot to them to have their tradition respected and to show how hard they work, to not make a joke of it, to try to do that with understanding of who they are.

The Cassidys saw it at the Philadelphia Film Festival, and they loved it as well. I think it was hard for them to watch because we had to make their house look a mess when usually their house is impeccable. I think that part was painful for them because we really had to make it look like it was falling apart as the year went along, getting messier and messier. But, they were great sports about it and just really supportive.

SM: Now the film you shot at the Cassidys shorehouse, was that Lusting for Dust Words? Was that the seven-year feature that got shelved?

TQ Yeah, Dust Words was a long process. I started it when I got out of undergrad, when I was 21, and had been writing it in college. Tobias Segal, who’s in The New Year Parade, was the lead in it, and we shot on and off for about five years. Then the editing went on for another couple of years. It was just a great learning process where we all had a blast and all learned how to make a feature film. At the same time our equipment wasn’t that great, and it was our first time doing it, so the final product, I think, it’s hard to watch it because by the time I was done I was 28; I was not the same person. None of us were the same person that we were seven years prior. It didn’t really feel like it reflected where we were at by the time we were finished. That was the frustrating part, which was a shame because for a first project, there’s a lot that I’m really proud of in it.

We showed it locally to family and friends, did a big screening and then that was sort of it. We shelved it after that point because I’d already started The New Year Parade…But, it was a great first process, overly ambitious, messy, all the things I think a first project should be. It was kind of film school after film school.

SM: What was the story about?

TQ: It was a similar family story. Tobe played a kid who was about seventeen whose mother had died when he was younger, his relationship with his father had soured, and he’d moved out and was living in this abandoned train yard for a few years. Then something happens, and he has to start reconnecting with his dad and his brother again. It had a lot of similar themes actually, and it’s funny in some ways how the narrative structure is also similar to The New Year Parade. It’s like a weird sister project that then disappeared.

SM:…In other interviews, you’ve talked about the excitement you feel about Philadelphia regional filmmaking right now. I was hoping we could touch on that.

TQ: I kind of love Philadelphia. For one, there are so many different types of stories that can be told around here. Half an hour outside the city it looks completely different than if you go an hour outside the city, which all turns into farm land. It spreads out from there. There are coalmining towns, all these different pockets that are really rich and full of all kinds of stories. On top of that, the Philadelphia Film Office has been really great to work with, and there are a lot of good people around. I’m at Temple [University] now, and the peer group there a good deal of them want to stay in Philly, which is really exciting because they’re making amazing work. We’re mostly making shorts right now, but there are at least two others working on feature narratives, there’s one other working on two feature docs. That could really pop nicely in the next couple of years. So, I’d love to stick around and be a part of that.

What’s nice is that over the last ten years, it’s been easier and easier to make lower budget films, and what lower budget means is change, so that instead of making a 35,000 dollar film, making a 700 dollar film. Because of that, the same thing that happened in independent music is now happening more and more in independent film, where you just have these regional pockets that develop on their own, people see them all at once and realize that this area has a voice.

Read the first part of the interview, and visit the film's site at www.thenewyearparade.com.