THE SINGERS has just completed principal photography and Sue Bettmann, the writer and director, is looking remarkably relaxed. All the more impressive when one considers that just two days prior she was shooting final sequences up a mountain and dodging thunderstorms.  White Rock Mountain (3,194 ft) can be a challenge even without a Sony DSR 500 DVCAM in your knapsack. Not only did the crew (and the talent) haul themselves to the summit the old fashioned way (hand over hand) they managed to clear the hill fast enough to avoid the impending squall. Everyone got down safely.  And the camera stayed dry. 

“We needed a few extra Sherpas for that one,” Sue acknowledges bashfully.

I was interested in talking to Bettmann about THE SINGERS for a number of reasons.  First, it’s such a simple tale. Outwardly, nothing really happens. It’s a short story by Turgenev about a man who stumbles upon a singing competition between a young man and a much older man in a rural tavern and is somehow changed by the experience: a challenging enough subject for any filmmaker. Secondly,

I had spoken to Bettmann about the project several times and the conversation had not once touched upon money. Too often the conversation goes the other way. This is our budget – or projected budget – and here’s how we’re going to spend it. With THE SINGERS it was always the opposite.  It was not that the budget was unlimited - far from it, I knew the budget to be modest - but large or small the budget was never allowed to take centre stage. The focus was always on the story, how to tell it, how it would look and how it would sound. And thirdly, I kept running into people who were going to be in the darn thing – and I wanted to know how the team - including Director of Photographer Nora Jacobson, whose latest film NOTHING LIKE DREAMING (2004) was beginning to get noticed – had come together.

Bettmann is a relative newcomer to filmmaking. Her background is in theater, specifically giant puppet theater. She worked with the legendary Bread and Puppet Company when it was still in New York City. When Bread and Puppet went north, to answer the call of Goddard College, she went too. In due course she started her own puppet troop. That led in turn to the creation of The Battle of White Plains Theater Company in her adopted town of Middlesex, Vermont.

The first production was about the Battle of White Plains, when, as Bettmann puts it “George Washington stopped retreating to the north and started retreating to the west”.  Nora Jacobson made a documentary film about the production and the two became friends, working together, off and on, ever since.  Jacobson filmed parts of Bettmann’s first film BEYOND 88 KEYS. Bettmann acted as script supervisor on NOTHING LIKE DREAMING.

Nora Jacobson on the set of THE SINGERS in August 2005. Photo by Donald Rae.

BEYOND 88 KEYS (2004), made with the help of Vermont filmmaker Jeff Farber, was a study of the classical pianist and political activist, Michael Arnowitt. An accomplished debut, it did more than portray a virtuoso musician. It revealed the wit and wistfulness that lay within. A favorite with festival audiences BEYOND 88 KEYS went on to take the Goldstone Award, given each year by the Vermont Film Commission.

BEYOND 88 KEYS did not lack for ambition. Not content with following Arnowitt around Vermont, Bettmann and Farber sent a crew to Europe to cover recitals in Belgium and The Netherlands. I remembered that the images from these recitals had been some of the most delicate and beautiful in the film, with an almost painterly quality. When Bettmann explained that those scenes had been filmed by Jacobson, it conjured similar images from NOTHING LIKE DREAMING of faces emerging from deep shadow lit by the blaze of the fire organ: music of a very different kind but music all the same.

Winning the Goldstone – and the audience reaction in general - was a tremendous encouragement for Bettmann.  “All of a sudden people were coming up to me and asking what I was going to do next,” she recalls, “Pretty soon I realized I had better come up with an answer.”

There was a story by Turgenev that I read probably twenty five years ago and had always loved. It had all the elements – it was a narrative and it was simple. I didn’t have the money or the chops for a feature film. And it had music. I have always been interested in music. I started singing when I was one, piano when I was seven, and cello when I was nine. I’ve always composed music for theater”

But what really made the idea come alive was a chance encounter at the instigation of her daughter Sophie with some bluegrass musicians in a village nearby.

“It was in somebody’s garage - a group of people who get together each week. They just play together for four or five hours. It doesn’t matter who they are or what they do for a living.  There were lawyers and grease-monkeys, loggers and roofers, just everybody, playing music together. Watching them play I realized that the characters that Turgenev was writing about are people you still see in Vermont. The situations were the same. One of Turgenev’s amazing qualities is his universality. Those characters, those settings, are passed down, generation after generation, country to country, and they are alive and well right here in Vermont.” 

Writer and Director Sue Bettman on the set of THE SINGERS in August 2005. Photo by Donald Rae

Inspired by that evening, Bettmann immediately set to work on developing a screenplay, transforming Turgenev’s rough roads and awful ravines of Orlov to the roads and ravines of Vermont.

As she wrote, a cast started to emerge. 

A lot of literary people got attracted to this project. Jim Schley, a good poet and writer - he has such a beautiful way of speaking – heard about the project and expressed an interest in being the narrator. Chris Bohjalian suggested his daughter Grace to play one of the children and so on.”

For Bettmann this is one of the advantages of working in Vermont. “There are these networks in Vermont. I think people in Vermont don’t categorize themselves as much as they do – are required to do – elsewhere.”

Casting the central characters, the two singers, turned out to be surprisingly easy. Terry Wheeler sings in the same choir as Bettmann – Montpelier Community Gospel Choir.  Although not an actor he had exactly the right vocal qualities for the part of the older, accomplished singer. As for the young, innocent voice, she heard about a young man, about to graduate high school, who had sung at a funeral in the village. “When I heard Jordan Breakstone sing for the part of Billy Boy my jaw dropped.  I just couldn’t believe it.  He had such a sweet quality of voice.”

Additional roles were cast through Carter Thor Studios East, on the Center Road in Middlesex, where Bettmann had been taking acting classes and where she knew she could find “skilled actors with professional orientation who were looking for projects and willing to take direction.”

Eight months after the inception of the project, filming began.  A cast and crew with a common plan: to tell a story, make a film, and let the music sing. THE SINGERS is currently in post-production in Vermont.

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Donald Rae frequently follows the independent film scene in Vermont for IMAGINE. As Deputy Director of the Vermont Film Commission he has his fingers on the pulses of production in the state.