It’s Spring 2000, I’ve just graduated from film school. I’m sitting in front of my computer and I open a screenplay that I’d started working on just before graduation: Wholetrain. I didn’t really have time to work on it then, now I want to finish it and turn it into my first feature film. Reading the first scene, I pause and think to myself: ‘What a stupid idea, a fictional feature film about writing graffiti on trains. How the hell do you plan to get trains that you can paint on and have them rolling through the city? How do you plan to get shooting permission? Who will back this up in these times of strict anti-graffiti laws and zero tolerance strategies? And – most importantly – how will you pull this off without a significant budget?’ Thus begins this first-person account by director Florian Gaag, on how his film Whole Train got financed, produced and brought to the screen.
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Graffiti films have been given a bad name ever since some douchebag television executive at PBS’s WNET in NYC put the kibosh on the airing of a then-new documentary called Style Wars. Allegedly, this person lived in Westchester and was upset by the Graffiti he saw on his daily drive up Riverside Drive en route to the ‘burbs…Thus was the course of history temporarily altered, and the growth of one of the most important Art forms in the entire history of humankind (if importance is measured by global impact and rate of adoption) temporarily stunted. But Graffiti was too important — or, rather easily exploitable by decision makers in The Media — to ignore, and so a few odd narrative feature films got made, including, to reference two lesser-mentioned films, the semiotic nightmare Dreams Never Die (by way of uber-analysis: white writer rescues Puerto Rican girl from The Ghetto and her Puerto Rican drug-dealer boyfriend, after white writer’s African-American cop mentor is killed by one the drug dealer’s African-American teen-aged henchman, in the end White writer gets a job at ad agency that his policeman friend had arranged) and the backdoor Graff-film-of-sorts Turk 182 (Irish-American guy manages to get his tag TURK-182 up all over the city including on the diamond-vision screen at Yankee Stadium, to protest the city’s stiffing his drunk-but-still-a-hero firefighter brother out of workman’s comp), both of which were eminently disposable, though Trini Alvarado (also of the classic Stigwood gesture-of-communication take on New Wave New York, Times Square) — is lovely in Dreams Never Die. Irrespective of the dearth of worthy narrative features about Graffiti culture and history — which again, have taken a nice leap back into viewers’ (and hopefully more theater) screens with Whole Train – there have been many, many decent documentaries since Style Wars (please feel free to add to the films I’ve listed) and certainly more than a few graffiti video series, but simply put, Whole Train is long overdue.
When I got a screener of Whole Train almost a year ago and watched it, I knew it would be a kind of classic and a milestone for its respective generations, and certainly Europe. Granted, this film does cover much of the checklist of plot devices that characterize Graffiti film narratives, (I won’t give them all away) but it keeps its dignity well intact and delivers a very worthwhile look at the life of a crew in Germany, trying to keep it together while battling classic dilemmas: kids from early, rival crews, pig-headed patrols and yes, tragedy. Herewith, director Flrian Gaag’s account of his six-year odyssey to realize a vision.
It’s Spring 2000, I’ve just graduated from film school. I’m sitting in front of my computer and I open a screenplay that I’d started working on just before graduation: Wholetrain. I didn’t really have time to work on it then, now I want to finish it and turn it into my first feature film. Reading the first scene, I pause and think to myself: ‘What a stupid idea, a fictional feature film about writing graffiti on trains. How the hell do you plan to get trains that you can paint on and have them rolling through the city? How do you plan to get shooting permission? Who will back this up in these times of strict anti-graffiti laws and zero tolerance strategies? And – most importantly – how will you pull this off without a significant budget?’ Ever since I started writing graffiti in Germany, back in 1984, I was fascinated by the depiction of this culture on film. Like all first-generation writers from Europe, I was heavily influenced by films like Wild Style and Style Wars. There was, however, no serious fictional film dealing with graffiti writing, at least not one that I really liked. So with Wholetrain, I wanted to bridge this gap.
Remembering that, I left all pessimistic thoughts behind, sat down, finished the screenplay and sent it to the editorial department of a big German TV station (most films in Europe are being co-produced by TV since this is the only way to get the financing together). About a month later, I was contacted by one of the editors. He really liked the script, and was interested in collaborating. But, as I soon found out, he was the only one who would be interested for a very long time. Production companies shied away from supporting a project about a subject still regarded by many as controversial. The film funding institutes were very reserved, and didn’t want to get burned financing a film that might instigate youngsters to become “criminals”. So, after numerous unsuccessful attempts, I started working with fake screenplays that had a politically-correct ending. And that did the trick — at first.
It’s now 2002, and I had found a production company that was willing to co-produce Wholetrain. We arranged a meeting with the heads of the German railway company that’s responsible for the subway trains in most big cities. Even though I had written a particularly watered-down version of the screenplay, they were absolutely reluctant to work with us. They even threatened to inform all other European transportation companies about our endeavor, so the film would be blocked. And they did, because sure enough, we received mostly negative replies from then on –or we didn’t get a response at all. The only slightly positive feedback came from Budapest and Prague. We went there on location trips, but after they fully grasped what we were planning to do, they turned us down, too. Another year went by.
Now, the production company started to get nervous. They had already invested some money in the location trips and an executive producer, and they thought it was all a waste of time and effort. They were thinking about backing out of the project, and I was almost back where I had started. ‘This is ridiculous’, I thought. ‘You can do films about cruel warlords, bloodthirsty mercenaries and serial killers but you can’t do a film about people painting on trains? One millimeter of applied paint on public property scares society more than acts of random violence on screen?!…’Well, you’ll get this movie, if you want it or not.’
I sat down, reconsidered everything that we had tried so far, and remembered a letter from a friend who went to film school with me. He told me about going back to Warsaw, his hometown in Poland, so I contacted him and asked if he had any ideas who I could talk to about working with the Polish railway company. He sent me a link for a production company, I called them and we decided to join forces. Even if the Polish railway company had turned us down before, the Polish producers were optimistic. I was skeptical at first, but they knew just what to do and how to talk to the officials and everyone else. It is indeed a very special way of making deals in Poland…
It’s late 2003, and we’re finally able to start pre-production. Finding the right cast was especially important to me. I knew having professional actors for the main characters wouldn’t work. I wanted young guys, people you haven’t seen on screen too often, and who weren’t focused on techniques and methods they learned in acting school. I started doing street casting sessions, saw almost three thousand people, many graffiti writers, also. But except for Mike Adler (who plays David in the film) the actors I finally picked didn’t really have any prior graffiti experience. So we organized graffiti-writing workshops and they were coached by NEON and CIEL. They learned how to sketch, how to control the can, how to do tags and pieces. We even went to the yards with them so they would get a feeling for what it’s like in real life.
After the workshop, I did a month of rehearsals and got my director of photography in to shoot a complete run-through of the screenplay on video. This was especially helpful for the young actors; since it was their first feature-length film, it really helped them get used to the camera, and it took the pressure away. When we actually went out to shoot, all the scenes just had to be created from what we had prepared in the rehearsals.
The shoot started in 2004. We had just gotten the final O.K. for the shooting permit in Warsaw, which meant that now it would be getting a little tricky. We had to shoot a certain amount of the film in Munich, Germany, otherwise we would have lost the state funding. For all train-related scenes, we hat to go to Warsaw. Not only did we now have to split up the shoot, we also had to create the look of one single city from the very different cityscapes of Munich and Warsaw. Wholetrain was always supposed to be set in a fictional capital city, but I had planned to use little-known locations in Munich. Finding matching locations in these two cities in addition to creating urban scenery that would appear believable on-screen was quite a challenge.
The German part of the shoot went pretty smooth, and after we wrapped the whole team traveled to Warsaw. One of the first scenes we shot there was a graffiti-writing scene in one of the huge Polish train yards. It was almost too absurd. I spent a great deal of my youth sneaking into train yards, bombing the trains with paint and now…we’re here being guided by the officials of the railway company…It was weird, but also a very fulfilling moment since it took almost forever to get to this point.
In the middle of a scene our location manager came to tell me that he’d heard strange noises, and that he thought he saw someone sneaking around on the set. I didn’t want to interrupt the shoot, so I finished the scene and then, when we were moving to a different location and all the security and railway company people had gone, we found out who it was: a crew of Polish writers who wanted to bomb the train we had just painted for he movie. They told us how they entered the yard and slowly sneaked to the spot where the trains are parked. When they realized that there was a film shoot going on they couldn’t believe their eyes. And when one of our protagonists, wearing a mask, took up a spray can and started hitting the subway car with paint, it was just too much for them. They looked like they had seen a ghost.
Apart from some unfortunate incidents — one of the lighting trucks was stolen, and actor Mike Adler had an accident where he fell on the tracks with his hands landing right onto a broken bottle — we managed to deal with the huge workload and the long night shoots, and we finished everything on time. However, the most crucial scene was yet to be shot: the “wholetrain” rolling through the city. We had this one saved up for the last day since it was very demanding in terms of the logistics. We had exactly one run-through of the painted wholetrain, going from one side of the subway system to the other, and we planned to cover it with three cameras. So we had to figure out where to place the camera teams and when to move them from one spot to the other.
All throughout the shoot in Warsaw the weather was pretty bad, with grey skies and occasional rain, so I was worried that I might not get the panoramic shots of the wholetrain I had in mind. But just as we had set up everything for the first shot on top of a huge building, the clouds moved out, and the sun was shining. When we saw the wholetrain pulling into the station, the freshly painted burners were sparkling in the sunlight and I felt like every second that I invested in writing, preparing and making this film was well-spent.
Back in Munich, we started post-production: editing, mixing, making the music, etc. I had already made some layout-beats and now I added the final production-touches, so I could send them out to the artists. I wanted to work with, people who have either been active as graffiti-writers themselves — like Tame One from the Artifacts — or have connections to the culture, MCs like KRS-One, Planet Asia, Afu-Ra, O.C., Akrobatik, El Da Sensei, Grand Agent and Reef the Lost Cauze. I sent them clips that needed scoring, the beat I had produced and some thoughts and ideas I wanted them to reflect on in their lyrics, and we started recording. Producing these eleven tracks (plus some instrumentals) for the score and later the soundtrack album was almost like doing another film, in terms of the effort and time. The tracks were recorded in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, L.A. and Munich and I had to coordinate everything from Germany.
We turned into zombies, spending endless nights without sleep in the studio. Just when our mood was at an all-time low and we and weren’t sure if we’d be able to fix all problems in the remaining time, someone from the production company came over and told us, Wholetrain had just been invited to premiere at the Berlin International Film Festival…
February 2006, The Big Premiere. A truly great moment for us all. But our problems were only just starting. When the German distribution company that had picked up Wholetrain for theatrical distribution contacted the theatres to discuss the release, most theater owners refused to show Wholetrain. They didn’t want to have “this audience” in their theaters, and they were scared that their cinema halls might get wrecked by graffiti-writers. So we had to completely change our strategy and worked with smaller theaters. Their dedicated owners agreed to play the film for a while and to not throw it out after just a week. Now the Trojan iron horse was finally parked, and we could jump out at night to open the gates of the city wall…Making Wholetrain really was like a graffiti-bombing operation. And just like a graffiti piece on a subway car, the film is there, whether you like it or not.
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STORES WHERE YOU CAN BUY THE WHOLETRAIN DVD & ORIGINAL SOUNDTRACK
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JAPAN:
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GERMANY:
SWITZERLAND:
If you’re an indie record shop:
WHOESALE ORDERS
USA – Ryko / Ada – contact: michael.bassin@ada-music,com
- Fat Beats – contact: info@fatbeats.com
UK – Kudos – contact: info@kudosrecords.co.uk
FRANCE – La Baleine – contact: info@labaleine.com or triangularmgmt@gmail.com
JAPAN – Disk Union – contact: info@diskunion.co.jp
BENELUX – Rough Trade – contact: info@roughtrade.nl
SKANDINAVIA – Dokument Press – contact: info@dokument.org
GERMANY – Groove Attack – contact: info@grooveattack.com
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