When actor Greg Vrotsos was in his early 20s, George Gallo, the screenwriter best known for “Midnight Run,” asked him if he had ever seen a movie by John Cassavetes. “I said, ‘No,’” Vrotsos told IndieWire. “He said, ‘Your life is going to change.’”
Vrotsos watched Cassavetes’ 1970 drama “Husbands” and his life did change — he became obsessed with the writer, director, and actor’s entire oeuvre and way of working, and dreamed of making personal character studies like “Love Streams” and “A Woman Under the Influence” himself. Vrotsos spent the next 20 years building a successful career as an actor on series like “Orange Is the New Black” and “Mayans M.C.,” but the idea of working in the Cassavetes tradition never left him — and now he has finally done it.
The result is “Situations,” a film that follows Cassavetes’ example but goes far beyond imitation or homage, offering sharp, often hilarious insights into working and dating in Los Angeles. The story of a photographer (Vrotsos) trying to find personal and professional fulfillment after a breakup, it’s a film in which subtle gestures, witty dialogue, and restrained but expressive camerawork come together to construct a sweet, smart, and funny portrait of urban loneliness.
Vrotsos initially budgeted the film at $750,000, but quickly realized he would have to scale it back to make the movie outside the system. “I took two meetings with financiers and walked away from both of them knowing it would never get made going that route,” Vrotsos said. “People wanted to change the script, or weren’t even reading the script. I talked to the three other guys I was working with on it, and I said, ‘The only way we’re going to get this thing done is if we do it ourselves.’”
Vrotsos started building a team as though the money was there, and moved forward in the blind hope that everything would come together. “We started tweaking the script, we brought cast on board, we started looking at locations,” Vrotsos said. By the time Vrotsos had raised $90,000 — enough to get started, though the film ended up costing around $130,000 — he had his actors and shot lists and was ready to hit the ground running with a 10-person crew.
Stripping out every extraneous expense, Vrotsos picked a start date and just began shooting. “We didn’t want to lose the momentum,” Vrotsos said. “We didn’t want to wait for permission.”
Vrotsos pulled together the additional financing he needed during production, which led to some stressful moments — he’d be acting in a scene, not knowing whether the money would come through to keep shooting the following week — but also allowed Vrotsos to make the movie his way, without creative interference.
That meant that not only could Vrotsos make an almost entirely behavior-driven dramedy for adults, but he could also use the kind of film grammar he wanted; the movie largely eschews conventional coverage in favor of long takes that create a tactile relationship between the characters and their environments. “We wanted to pull the camera back a lot and let the shots breathe,” Vrotsos said, noting that letting the shots play out with minimal cutting helped convey the sense of loneliness he had been feeling in the city in recent years.
“Around the time [Daniel Hartigan and I] were writing it, I felt this energy leaving Los Angeles as a lot of production and business was going away,” Vrotsos said. “We wanted to capture this feeling of longing. Because everybody wants more here. But there’s so much beauty here, even if you don’t see it sometimes because you’re wrapped up in your own bullshit. The thing that I love about Los Angeles is that you can be having a terrible day, and all of a sudden, that sun starts to set, and you see the glow and the silhouettes of the palm trees, and it becomes just magical.”
That sense of visual magic is one reason “Situations” demands to be experienced in theaters, and thankfully, Vrotsos was able to join forces with a distributor — Utopia‘s boutique imprint Circle Collective — that came up with an unconventional way to make sure people see it that way. “This movie wasn’t made to be watched on your phone or your iPad,” Vrotsos said. “It’s meant to take you in on a big screen.” The fact that “Situations” is also a movie about the yearning for human connection only adds to the feeling that it should be seen in theaters as a communal experience.
To that end, Utopia has sent Vrotsos and the movie on a roadshow tour, with “Situations” playing in independent theaters worldwide, followed by in-person Q&As with Vrotsos. “I talked with [Utopia’s] Kyle Greenberg about the release, and he said, ‘Listen, if this thing goes on streaming, it’s going to get lost. How would you feel about taking it on the road and hitting as many independent theaters as we can?’” For devoted cinephile Vrotsos, it felt like the perfect way of coming up with “a punk rock release for a punk rock movie” — and a way for him to visit and learn about as many great indie theaters as he could.
“ There are so many beautiful independent cinemas out there,” Vrotsos said. “Some are family-owned, some have been revamped and revived, and to connect with these owners and get their stories is great.” Vrotsos also loves seeing how his movie changes depending on the venue and audience. “It looks different. It sounds different. The popcorn is different in all these theaters. It’s a great thing.”
The release strategy means Vrotsos will be on the road for six months or more, and he’s fine with that. “We don’t have a big marketing machine behind us, but we have control over it,” he said, noting that it brings him back to his hero John Cassavetes, who used to four-wall theaters to play his movies. “That’s inspiring to me, just the thought of going to these different theaters and connecting with people. I haven’t even had a streaming conversation yet. I don’t want to. Showing it in theaters, that’s the dream.”
For information on upcoming screenings of “Situations,” visit the movie’s Instagram profile.
