All Eyes On: Matt Szewczyk

A haunting melody begins to play, and stoic scenes of rural Missouri flash by on-screen as the film "Leo" starts to roll.

"Leo" was the vision of senior Matt Szewczyk, and after a year in the making, it is ready for public viewing. Szewczyk, an English and philosophy major, originally came to Truman with thoughts of entering law school and getting into politics. He served as Student Senate President in 2007-2008. However, after working two summers in Washington, D.C., shooting commercials for the Center for American Progress, he redirected his goals toward a career in film.

"I realized that it was what I enjoyed getting up for in the morning," Szewczyk said.

"Leo," a 40-minute film, tells of two butchers stuck in a small town grocery store. The plot thickens when one butcher becomes infatuated with a grocery store regular. "Leo" premieres at 6:30 p.m. Saturday in Violette Hall 1000.

Szewczyk was inspired to make a movie because of a story a student in his creative writing class wrote.

"I was really excited about the story and wanted to produce it, and he kind of shot me down and said he didn't think that the story was ready to go to film," Szewczyk said. "I had been doing a little fundraising and planning already, and so he told me I should take whatever work [I] had already done and go write and shoot my own film, and I was like, 'All right, well I'll do that then.'"

Szewczyk used books to teach himself about the production process. He said "The Grammar of Film Language" by Daniel Arijon was by far the best book.

"It had these diagrams showing how to set up pretty much any shot you would ever want to do," Szewczyk said. "It is an incredible book because it is just like shot-by-shot camera movement, angles, everything, and it really conceptualizes it for conveying emotions and how to accomplish what you want with a camera."

Szewczyk funded more than half of "Leo's" budget by himself and then fundraised from family members and local business owners to obtain the rest. He said the University provided equipment such as lights and the camera, and the Filmmaker's Club provided all of the tape stock.

"What I paid for out of pocket was, I rented a 35 mm adapter, which basically attaches onto the front of the high-def camera and allows you to shoot through mountable lenses, which allowed us to have a lot of depth in the cinematography and the images, versus video where everything is very flat and 2-D," Szewczyk said.

Szewczyk held casting calls in various locations around Missouri to find actors to fill the roles in the film. They shot during the 2009 spring semester in a grocery store in Paris, Mo., as well as in a few locations around Kirksville. Most of the film's characters are younger because Szewczyk said he wanted to relate to a college-age audience.

"I wanted to tell a story that college students would also be interested in, and so our characters are young people, and they are dealing with issues that young people deal with," Szewczyk said. "I kind of drew a little bit from my love for philosophy and based it off of a thought experiment done by a French existentialist, Jean-Paul Sartre, that explores peoples' decision making and their value systems. In the end this movie is about what people value, what they dream about, and how far they'd go to pursue those dreams."

Although most of the characters auditioned for their roles, Szewczyk called in a favor from his fifth grade music teacher to fill the role of the grandmother, Mrs. Delphi.

"It was mostly out of necessity," Szewczyk said. "I was a big ham in my music class. I was in her children's theater, and I always volunteered to sing the solo in the school Christmas pageant, and so I called her up, and I was like, 'You know, Ms. Jacobs, you owe me a favor,' and she was really awesome about coming up for the filming."

After he graduates in December, Szewczyk has a job lined up to work on another movie in New York. He then hopes to attend film school to pursue a masters degree in Fine Arts. Szewczyk said he is planning on entering his film, "Leo," in a few film festivals to see how it does. He is premiering the film on campus in Violette Hall 1000 Nov. 14 at 6:30.

Senior Dwayne Riley co-stars in the film as Jeff, a horoscope obsessed grocery store manager whose ultimate dream is to end up on a game show. He auditioned for Szewczyk at Truman on the recommendation of a friend and was given the role.

"Szewczyk is one of the most driven people I know," Riley said. "He was great to work with, and because he was very particular and knew exactly what he wanted, he gave us good direction on set."

Truman alumnus Michael Huey also worked with Szewczyk on the film. Szewczyk contacted Huey last spring to compose the music for the film. Music professor Jesse Krebs recommended Huey to Szewczyk because he had done music for many of Truman's plays.

"I did a demo for him for a three-minute scene so he could see if my approach would work for what he was trying to accomplish," Huey said. "He approved it right away and only had some minor changes. I think he was so easy to work with because he was already pretty knowledgeable about film music and its function, which made things go a lot faster."