Take Four

Director's Statement; I think the year was 1999. I was taking a class in Elizabethan Poetry. At some point during that semester I became enamored with a poem by Sir Philip Sydney entitled "Astrophil & Stella" (an elegant, if long, love letter composed of more than a hundred Petrarchan sonnets written in 1591). Being a writer myself, I could relate to the poet speaker's desire to find the right words--the exact words--to express himself. Needless to say, the poem stuck with me.? ? It might of been a year later, during the burgeoning revival of the techno/trance movement in the glitzy clubs and lounges of south Miami Beach, that, while driving in my car listening to the seventh track of a techno CD I had picked up at a local record store, the idea struck. In one of those moments of inspired creativity where two things with what seem like no relationship whatsoever, suddenly and serendipitously, blend together to give each other a resonance previously unrealized, I started reciting the words to the first sonnet of Sydney's poem, while I drove my car, listening to Frank T.R.A.X.'s "Nebuchan" on the car stereo. It fit. Perfectly. The swelling of strings and a crescendo of emotion tethered together by the rhythm of beat and language. Of course, later on, there would be adjustments and refinements and a multitude of entirely new ideas thrown into the mix, but, at that moment, "Take Four" was born. ? ? It'd take several years to see the film finished, and longer still to realize how much resonance that unlikely marriage of trance music and old English language, indeed, held. For the film would become a metaphor for the film-making process itself. The poem ceased being about finding the right words, and instead became about the struggle to get something done. The poem was now the fifth character and the unifying theme that ties Timmy and Punky and Kevin and Honey together even when each character's situation differed so much. ?

The sonnet became a mantra for the entire production. A roadmap for all we'd gone through and would go through still in our efforts to tell our story.

? "Take Four" is about perseverance and determination and drive. It's about wanting something badly and going after it until it's yours. Above all I hope, in its simplistic way, "Take Four" might bestow upon its audience the notion I discovered in the film upon making it; no matter how small or large the task at hand, don't stop till you get what you want.

Omar Chavez Jr. Writer/Director "Take Four"