Landmine Goes Click starring Sterling Knight, Spencer Locke and Dean Geyer was produced and filmed in Georgia in 2014 by Sarke Studio Production. The story is about the American tourist vacationing in a mountainous region of European Georgia, who steps on a landmine. The movie has won Best Thriller Feature award at “Shriekfest”, Best movie award at Cinestrange, Audience Jury Award at Fantasporto and ten more awards.
Levan Bakhia: Casting of Landmine Goes Click happened over skype. It really makes it harder. I wish I was there in person, but today’s technologies give you all the tools you need. The fact that the actors performed so well confirms that theory. As for preparation, the actors had arrived to Georgia only a week before the shoots and we did rehearsals. I realized that we did not have more time to prepare for the roles, so I trusted actors professionalism and they have proved my expectations.
The best way to describe the experience of shooting is to check the playlist on our personal youtube channel, where we made episodes at every stage:
One of the most interesting and different aspect of this production was that we were pulling off very long takes. 70% of the shots are more than 5-6 minutes, sometimes we had to do it 5-6 times and it was not rehearsed, we were improvising.
I love working with actors, that is my favorite part of directing. So combining cinematography with acting was very special experience. Actors knew what their objectives were, and they were free to do what they wanted. I did not block their movements, I gave them total freedom.
It was a very unique experience for me working with cinematographer, Vigen Vartanov. I worked with him as with an actor. Instead of blocking the camera moves, I would give the same kind of objective to him as l gave to actors. He was performing together with actors, he did not know what would happen, he had to reflect on what was happening.
As for the script, the biggest part of it was improvised. We had a script and I would ask actors to run certain pages, but I wanted them not to stop until I would say so, then I would push them to the parts where they did not memorise the text and approximately 50% of the takes in final edit are those parts.
Landmine Goes Click falls under the genre of rape & revenge. This is exploitation genre. It exploits the desire of the audience to punish the villain for the sin he has committed. The audience is so drawn to this revenge, in movies like “I spit on your grave”, they enjoy horrible tortures performed on the screen. And I think this is not right. I wanted to slap the audience for that.