Desperate Measures, Behind the scenes with Boruch Perlowitz

fbi raid 2. barack hashem we finished this amazing journey called desperate measures and the final product bar hashem is amazing this journey was crazy we had the best cast and crew for this and we all turned into a beautiful family but let's go back to the beginning when this story all began it actually began in yeshiva smith i was sitting over there learning barbados and kathleen we're going through the suggest of anyone is allowed to save themselves with anything besides the shrimp of course and we're going through the studio over there whether or not you're allowed to steal fippy kuachna and [Music] you're allowed to steal from because again before doing anything ask your off you have to pay it back but you're allowed to steal and we were talking about we were going through the cigarette over there whether or not you're allowed to force a doctor to do a procedure in a case of picoaching fish and you have to paint his mambatala whatever it is but you could force a doctor so i remember going to my sherlock meshev and i said but wait even at gunpoint of course you know how to kill him but forcing means forcing and he said and then i said this would be kind of a crazy story for a movie and he actually said i was too young to remember but he said there was it's true story like that that happened and they actually made a film out of it and i said this would great make a great film i thought about a number of times but although all of my films all my productions are for entertainment purposes only i make them for entertainment that there should be good kosher high level entertainment for the firm community i always want that there should be a lesson in there something people can take out of it there should be a connection you should go after watching a film of mine and be like okay we just wasted two hours i want that there should be a lesson in there and i always felt that could be halal clea this is permitted but i always wanted that there should be something more i never felt if we just do a sad story that ends up being very violent with a lot of action i never felt that that's something that i want to produce some time later i moved back to america and i went into the field of working with teenagers backroom that are struggling we could say and in their lives i've seen so many struggles whether it's between a father and a son and then very often there's they're so not understood and they're so judged and there's always there's always something over there that they're going through be like our story over here where yankee's mother is in a psychiatri psychiatric facility be it somebody sick in the family be it some sort of trauma they're always so misunderstood and working with these bachram for a number of years i always wanted to make a film so that we can understand the struggles and we can understand that between a father and a son a parent and their child there is that true love but sometimes it's it's just covered up but at desperate times that's when you see the true love and i really wanted to make such a story and then it occurred to me if i take the story of desperate measures i already called the desperate measures way back then in my days of meristem if i take that story and instead of having it with your typical mainstream bucker father and son i would have that merge with the story of a struggling teen somebody that's going through real hardships in life that we could take a lesson out of it everybody from desperate measures took their own lesson out of it but we see that struggle and we see that connection we see that love we see to what measures the sun is going is going to go to help his father and we see how much love a father actually has to his son and and unfortunately it doesn't those two connections they don't always meet but when there's a real struggle that's when they meet and i decided we're gonna go ahead and we are going to make desperate measures now that we had the story in place it was time to get everything moving during the skull of a genius i had the most talented makeup artist out there mushy groomfeld and i realized that besides for doing makeup and being a very professional photographer he was extremely keen in art he was able to tell when something was pleasing to the eye he was able to tell how things looked aesthetically and he was extremely artsy soon after the skull of a genius i launched the jewish platform and i bought him on his producer and i decided over here for this film i'm not only going to bring him on board i'm going to bring him on board as producer and cinematographer so we started planning the film the first thing that i wanted is that we had to build the story in a way that people really understood the struggle both of the father that's trying to raise his son single-handedly with the struggles of today's days he's he has a son that looks different than most kids his age and that acts different and he he's not your typical kid you're not your typical from kid and he's even getting flack from it from the neighbors as we see the neighbor totally comes he knocks on the door he says the loud music and everything and we also see the struggle with the son he doesn't want to fight with the father when his father sends the kids out the other two kids uh jay and dovie yankee sends them we took it a little bit too far this time and you guys got to go home but he's trying to fit in so badly so the first thing that i did was we started working on the amazing cast that we have i met jose a couple years back we met in the camp we were schmoozing and he showed a real interest in acting and i kept up with him a couple of times throughout the years and i realized that he's super super super talented i'm not going to get much into your saves personal life but jose also had certain struggles as a teenager which he was able to relate to this story very very well i spoke to yosef's mother she's very very uh talented the famous malkie ginager and she was in to really coach jose throughout all this acting yosef himself is an amazing actor and we cast him he was our first pick and he did a phenomenal phenomenal job we'll get a little bit more to his acting it dropped later on in the behind the scenes he was perfect for the role and besides his acting he has a great voice and he sings that beautiful song i need you now which him and his mother composed of course we have to bring jacob burger on as the evil doctor now the reason that we made yaakov into a doctor from jalgawa is that the country that we have him from um [Music] i didn't want people looking at mainstream american doctors and being like they're money hungry or whatever even though during corona a lot of people lose trust in the medical system i didn't want it to be that way therefore we decided let's turn him into this evil doctor from some weird evil country where dark humor is a way of life so we cast the eckerberg we gave him that character the next big pic that we had to do was trying to find the perfect father we decided the perfect father we wanted somebody that's very hasidish to kind of really really contrast the father and son's way of lives i really wanted to contrast that and it's itsy did a superb job with that he's he's so perfect i know personally um he's that real real loving father but very hasidish and that's where we see that real conflict between the father and son the father is is you know calls the copays and everything and the sons with the big choke and we bring out that contrast they both did such a phenomenal job that when they have that scene of the hospital where matas wakes up right after the heart attack for the first time and yankee goes over to my auntie leans over to him and yankee is saying that he's going to change and it feels so bad they were both crying matas it's sig and yankee yosef gunner they were both crying the entire crew was some of us were actually crying we were all tearing up where she greenfield was even over there biting his finger you were able to hear a pin drop while we were filming that we all got goosebumps they did such a phenomenal job portraying their characters it's beautiful next we bought on salman burger salmon burger has been a good friend of mine for a long time he acted in the skull of a genius i brought him on over here for two huge reasons first thing is i put him on as the actor the chief of lakewood police um the not the chief the sergeant and he did a very very very good job over there zalman happens to be a firefighter so yeah i also brought him on as producer uh not as producer as production manager production manager and is he he had to make sure that everything is flying so let me explain to you we have mushi who's cinematographer he's the one actually holding the camera which takes a lot of talent i'm the director which means usually i'm looking into my monitor on the side over there making sure that everything that we see in the camera is the way i had planned it to be seen when i envisioned it in my head and then we have salman berger who is making sure that everything on set runs smoothly close up right now we're going to get the very close up scene close up yeah close close close scene you ready rolling camera sound speed okay scene 43a close-ups take three focus beautiful focus don't move around so much okay focus a drop a drop yeah perfect perfect don't move around just just do your lines without moving okay you hurt three two move uh moisture you drop more to thirds beautiful three two one action that's how you heard i want to say from you you move the drop any don't move your head back forth anyway your focus is perfect that means if you move you're going out of focus okay three two one get his eye on the on the corner perfect three two one action team 43 b close-ups take one starting over right no adjustments this is not possible it's not possible see can you see him out of the chat yeah you're going to say shut it so pan from each one to the next after you've got one you want any dialogue yeah it was that focus you can go from here to him two yeah look at him three two one action it's not possible you see wait a second a little bit wait for a second from when he says not possible wait for one second not too long just so you had a second register in your head no no so that we can move the camera three two one action it's not possible you see shut it one second your gun's blocking yourself back up and drop perfect three two one and action it's not possible you see shut it yeah you gotta wait that second okay okay three two one action it's that possible you see shut it beautiful cup [ __ ] someone burger who's making sure that everything on set runs smoothly from the actors having their costumes to being on time to making sure that our sets are booked and all of that zaman did an amazing job oftentimes coming to my house and saying like borrow let's go we gotta move already because i'm the kind of guy that's not always on time so salmon did a perfect job with that and of course a perfect job with this acting now let's get back to the story over here a little bit let's get back to the casting over here we have yankee and we kept them kind of in the center and then we have his two friends we have jay and we have dovie dovey is david and guys are extremely talented he was slowing in the skull of a genius and he's kind of that good friend we wanted to show the forces of good and the forces of evil uh i shouldn't say evil but the the the kind of it's a horror side within yankee and we decided that the best way to do that was to have his two friends divvy is the kid that says royal davening for you listen bro we're all the opening friend i'm saying yeah it means a lot and jay is the one that says um you want me to slash your uncle's tires jay is the one that says um uh guys it's literally the best thing that could happen to us we're free now which was not a good thing to say but we wanted to show the inner struggle that yankee is having in life and we portrayed that with his two friends over there jay which is a talmud in our yeshiva was he just graduated his learning and heritage role now um [Music] yitzy brodsky he's amazing schmack fun and he did an amazing job portraying jay as this wild crazy want to be left alone free it's all good kind of guy and he did an amazing job with that later on we had the uncle kerosene moscow it's the amazing garcia moskowitz uh garcia is just an all-around awesome awesome person i've worked with him numerous times and many projects and in this film i wanted to have an uncle a mean uncle and that's because so many times teens that are struggling have flack not only from their immediate family but oftentimes there's that uncle ah throw him out of the house i'm telling you he's going to be a bad influence and of course to each their own and everybody has to ask their role their das torah how to move ahead how if anybody's ever going through any power show with anybody but we wanted to portray that not only is yankee struggling with his own father he has his uncle that hates him over here and has no interest in him when he comes to tell him that he had a heart attack also he finally caused your father to have a heart attack and he even blames him for his mother going crazy so gareshi did an amazing job when we screened the movie on pesach gary she told me he got so much hate i just want to bring out a point we have we have like this we have yaakov is the sniper that actually shoots yankee we have shorty stamler he does an amazing job as tim cole the head of the fbi he tries he gives the order to kill yankee we have zalman burger who actually arrests yankee we have the uncle who gave yankee a thousand dollars here you go and not another word but there's nobody in the entire film that is as hated as uncle kayam um and we really wanted to portray that and gareshi although he's the nicest person in the world he did an amazing job portraying uncle ghayem as the mean and evil uncle now we had our cast we had tim cole who did an amazing job as the head of the fbi we had usher veter who did an amazing job as the nurse now people are asking why do you have a hasidic nurse what's going on over there first thing is yes there are many from people that are going for nursing today's days and there are many from nurses believe it or not but we wanted to show that there was this froome nurse that was going to go and help yankee escape from the hospital and we wanted to show that and we figured the best way to portray that would be by having actually a from high machete nurse and therefore we had nurse shmuley should have really been smelly but we have nurse shmuley who should we did a phenomenal job over there we move on to the sniper although it's a tiny part we have yaakov prupus who did a great job there with his toothpick as a sniper yaakov is the only one that has acted in every one of my films and the edge he was the terrorist right at the beginning would in the skull of a genius he was of course dr skolovsky and now he was the sniper we have so many more amazing cast and crew members that we actually recruited but let's for a second dive into production the first thing that we had to do was plan and plan and plan the second thing that we had to do though was how in the world are we getting a police department how are we getting a swat team how are we getting a hospital so we had lots and lots of meetings first they had a meeting with the lakewood police chief head of swat head of communications and i have to give a huge thank you to laser heisenfeld and bensi enzelbach for hooking that meeting up the lakewood police department came through huge giving me um police cars the swap vehicles tactical training and a bunch of other stuff for the film i do have to mention though all the people on camera are actually actors none of them are real cops of course we cannot get real cops cannot legally be in a film but the lakewood police department worked really really close with us to help us whatever is possible also a question a lot of people are asking were the uniforms real were the guns real the uniforms were real uniforms but they were not from the lakewood police department we got them from a uniform store the guns were not real guns you cannot run around with real guns this is new jersey not texas but they were real replicas they were real replica they were so crazy good that uh i had to actually bring them down to the lakewood police department to get approval to be able to use them and when i bought it down to the police station uh the captain actually came out and he looked at the guns and he said these are real guns and i was like no they're not and he he picked it up and he's like this is real and then i told him to take out the clip the magazine is like ah i see that it's actually not real and same went for that sniper rifle the barrett m82a so it's 3 25 am we got the props ready i almost got the sniper rifle there oh my gosh oh my gosh what's that real barrett n to sniper rifle the scope was over there his days initiate baskets we had people from the actual liquid swap on set with us they had to bring the swat truck and everything and the sniper for the liquid swat team said this is the exact gun that i have over here so there was a lot a lot of work that went into that tons of red tape negotiations and everything but hashem we were able to pull that off now we're in the middle of a pandemic how in the world are we getting a hospital so we actually got a full wing in kimball hospital used to be called kimball now it has a bunch of different names but in dr leibowitz's section over there and i have to give a huge thank you to dr leibowitz for letting us have a ring in the hospital during the pandemic and right on the other side of the door there were a lot of patients over there we are heading into the hospital for our shoot today we're all messed up because of corona yeah what have we got here we got what we got what do we got over here we are all walking into the hospital for a number of days they gave it to us and was crazy filming in the hospital was actually crazy now there was one problem the elevators that came up two of the elevators came right in the section that we were filming and one of the times that we actually had the guns out and everything the door of the elevator opened up and there were two people coming out and they didn't see the cameras and everything all they saw was a guy holding a gun to another guy and for a very short couple of seconds they kind of bugged out until we all came running like no no don't worry it is for a film but filming in the hospital was absolutely crazy take two three two one and action one second no no no i still see a shadow okay let's reset reset open the door again i want this to take a little bit longer i want it to be deeper out of the hallway where the shack started that was great we're going to do it one more time what's going on over here okay you'll see you're shutting the door a little bit longer because i want by the time you turn around to him i like that a lot okay you ready three two one and action you ready to roll okay three two one and action now now get inside come here one second come here come here why she that was great come and drive closer let's do this again start from where you turn around guys you got to be quiet over there it's time now come on make it faster go okay and then i want you to pan back to our space because we cannot pan um we cannot have them pulling it down because it doesn't actually fall down on action you put your hand with the right arm three go back in through three two one action um okay you're so good to come out yeah three two one action what was that what was happening what was that what was that no one's oh come on man come on i want you to the first thing that we did is we bought equipment lots of equipment the latest equipment that we could get our hands on because we wanted our film to be as professional as possible the next step was a very interesting step that we did we had many from eden playing characters as if they were not jewish for example mark uh which was played by the amazing aria mints who did a fabulous job we had yakov burger playing dr nimitsky we had zalman burger playing the chief of police and we had of course shorty stamler playing the part of tim cole i did not want to have from eden on set without yamakos we also didn't want that it should be cheesy where everybody's wearing caps or weird looking shape so what we did is we got custom made wigs okay so we have adi vince over here he's playing mark now true indoors there's attention to um not to wear a yarmulke or whatever but anyways over here we got a special custom toupee we got this custom-made it has material on the inside yeah so it's like a couple we got a custom-made to blend in exactly with us here and that's what we're gonna do wow it's a piece of material okay okay perfect we'll let you take this home audio when we're done oh yeah yeah and now we just comb it in wow and look at this look at this come on can i see a picture of it wow it looks good it looks amazing really it looks amazing all right perfect smoke effect there yeah we're going to mix them perfectly over here very perfectly very perfectly so we're not going to see on the video [Music] now those wigs look really really good and besides for the one time that it fell off of shorty's head while we were on set because it was extremely windy get some footage of him whatever you [Music] everybody had a good time with it the next thing that we did is we went ahead and we got neal neil is our sound person um very professional worked on many hollywood sets and neil was always there neil was a great asset other than getting crisp crystal clear sound for the entire movie he he's been on many really large sets so he was very informative he stood there with his boom for hours and hours and hours and it was just a lot of fun we're getting closer to production production is stressful it is fun it is tense and it's just straight out crazy from the time that um david anger sir won the lottery when i with uncle look right now and he just won 500 bucks um to the time that we got all the bloopers and every time kai and my brother that played hilariously the part of security guard production is amazing so let's start off with some of the craziest scenes that we've done the largest scene obviously we did was the one with the police and swat a scene like that first of all we have to get all the police equipment the vehicles the swat truck happens to be the swat truck i had to leave in the middle of filming with that because there was a swat emergency so we actually couldn't get all the ticks that we wanted to because in the middle the swat truck just had to leave there's a swat emergency going on so for every cup there is the shoes the boots the pants the uniform pants the shirts the badges for the sides the vest the wall key um there's the belt the tactical belt with the handcuffs there's so many details that go into every single little um actor i shouldn't say little actor but into every single part of the film to be able to sell it then they were of course getting the actors we had actors from all over we wanted the kind of cops that looked really cool that would look like they were doing their parts we had the cops that looked like the cops that eat their donuts um we had everything over there and when of course when it comes to the swat team we had to get helmets the real swap vests there was our real swap vests the patches that say swat the guns of course which we got boredom from california we had them shipped in because they're replica weapons now what we do is for the actual filming day we create a shot list exactly what we're going to shoot what we want to see so we'll have the wad of the police cars coming in first please comes out we see him running towards the hospital second please comes out everything in an exact detail sheet we had of course a nice amount of bloopers that day especially when one of the cops guns fell off while he was running to the hospital three you ready all right you're not walking into the hospital you're running into that thing all right three two one and action falls off don't you think he says all this stuff you're going to stand right there on the computer security footage the sniper is going to come in over your radio right say i have a shot now obviously filming the hospital was extremely difficult first of all corona in the middle of covert and we like to wear masks obviously get corona tested and everything beforehand but in general we were in a hospital um and although we had our own rooms so first thing is everything is kind of cramped in the hospital rooms and we had to bring in our lighting equipment and our sound equipment we had two camera operators we had moisture greenfield as the lead cinematographer and we bought on irejaimowitz as a secondary camera um [Music] also up until we actually start filming the actors practice almost completely on their own so what happens is once they come in we start to bounce over each other and then me as the director i know exactly what i want from them and i know how i want it to look in the camera so what happens is on set i'll end up telling many of the actors i want it like this i want it like that i'll go through with the cinematographer i want this kind of vibe so we'll end up doing all of that or have go ahead he needs to stay tonight tomorrow morning or have the hospital right then marcus is right i'm just right if you come up with the payments you're gonna say or come up say well after he says it will come with the paper he'll need to set the tree to cover the payment and then he says when do i say after he said what after he says or have i want more determination in your voice sickness you're safe you're safe um or have the surgery performed but something like that yo filming with a big mirror in the room so filming with the mirror in the room makes it again very difficult because we don't want to see any of the pretty large crew in the mirror but hashem those scenes over there were so powerful in the hospital and the connecting between matas and his son yankee is beautiful let's we really upped our game in professionalism and we implemented a certain style of filming for this film called shaky cam you'll see many of the scenes including the hatsuna scene where they're working on mates and scenes like any of the real intense action scenes whether it's when the fbi is running into the place or when he comes out when yankee comes out with the gun when he's jumping onto the train many of these scenes we did what we call shaky cam where we purposely shake the camera very very strong now it's done with a purpose we know exactly where to shake the camera what direction and exactly how to do it but the purpose of shaky chem is it makes the filming feel a lot more intense if you were at an action scene if you read out solo scene if you had a shooting you're running with somebody that's jumping on a train there would be a lot of shaking going on which we incorporated in the phone so instead of you standing on the side as an observer using shaky cam actually kind of goes and brings the audience into the film once production starts like i said previously it is crazy you never know what to expect we just had such an amazing cast and crew that it was always so much so much fun people like yaakov burger and mushi groomfeld together um with their just outright fun funniness together with heosave ginager's um dramatic personality which kind of bounced off of my well at times i i was just pressured because we got to get the set going on but at other times i just love having fun so we ended up with tons of bloopers there was there was one thing that sticks out of my mind when my brother caim who's the security guard in the film and he did an amazing job every time he ran in with his gun and his donut uh we originally we had him eat a donut as he ran in but we finished all the donuts by the time we got the good take every time he ran in joseph ginager found it extremely funny and jose fell down and started laughing and when them two were laughing what happened was that everybody else ended up laughing so we filmed that again and again and again three two one action kind of very intense everybody calm down no panic i've been trained for this all my life [Laughter] is oh are you [Laughter] waiting for this for three months four months since 10 o'clock in the morning [Music] we don't have that much people but we can award it okay i got my finger that didn't whatever it was beautiful though that's the most part of it [Laughter] let's continue let's continue this is great guys okay let's get back around the back like what do we have now it's time to release some hostages don't you think he says all this stuff you're gonna stand right there on the computer you have some security footage the sniper's gonna come in over your radio right see i haven't rolling 57 3 [Music] 37. 57 8 take 3. thank you all for watching and let me tell you a secret we're going to see you at desperate measures 2. you