Filmmaker David Spaltro Talks About "Things I Don't Understand"

“Things I Don’t Understand” a drama that tells the story of a detached grad student who bonds with a terminally ill girl she’s interviewing for her thesis and a damaged bartender, while facing eviction from her home, won the best feature last September in the Laughlin International Film Festival in Nevada much to the delight of its writer/director David Spaltro.

The independent filmmaker shared the fact that he didn’t actually want to make the film until he was 24 years old although he remembers being inspired by the medium for the first time the summer of 1989 after viewing Tim Burton’s “Batman.” What finally drew him in was that filmmaking required the collaboration of several artists in order to create the project allowing him to work with a variety of people.

Spaltro came up with the scenes between the two women in the hospice in the movie during his junior year in college during the winter of 2003. He was thinking of ideas for a short to do for his senior thesis film. However, at that time it was just an excuse for two people to converse about life and death and didn’t have much of a story. Spaltro felt he was too inexperienced at the time to really develop the story so he put the pages away until after finishing his first feature “…Around”. He was feeling drained and began working on the old scenes as a writing exercise, but then discovered that he’d matured enough to find new story in his old ideas.

David explained that some of his challenges in making the film had to do with working on a budget and spending less time during the shoot in order to work out any kinks or problematic scenarios. The approximately one month shoot required pushing both cast and crew through some long and difficult days, but the family like environment and supportive environment helped them get the job done.

After spending considerable time on the film festival circuit and screening at several other events including Colorado’s Indie Spirit Film Festival and the Blue Whiskey Independent Film Festival Spaltro is currently working on negotiating a distribution deal for the film, which would make this special story available to even more audiences. For more information and updates check out the film's website at http://www.tidu-film.com.