“I think the biggest discussion we had around the film was we were going to show it in.” He ended up placing it in the festival’s NEXT section.įollowing the film’s premiere at Sundance, most in Park City thought it didn’t have a chance to be released. “We all knew we wanted it in the festival,” said Groth. Three months later, Moore got a call from Sundance director of programming Trevor Groth saying the film was in. But Chung convinced him that this was a gamble they had to take. “To pull out of all these other festivals for this pipe dream of Sundance was really difficult,” Moore admitted. The film was selected, by Moore’s count, to as many as 25 lower-tier festivals around the world, as both Moore and Chung felt the film could never play at an American festival.īut after a chance encounter Chung had with Sundance senior programmer John Nein at a Film Independent event in August 2012, “Escape From Tomorrow” was suddenly on Sundance’s radar. Though most reports note that the editing process took place in South Korea, the only post-production work done there was visual effects, through connections the film’s producer/editor Soojin Chung had the bulk of the editing took place in a small production office in East L.A. Luckily that would not be the film’s fate.Įditing and special effects work consumed the next year. Graham concurred: “People were googling ‘fair use.’ I asked him if anyone is ever going to see this and he said he didn’t care if he drove around in a van and projected it on walls.” “I asked that question constantly,” said Roy Abramsohn, a veteran TV/theater actor who was cast in the Jim role. “But then he said, ‘We have no permits,’ so I thought it would be like a heist, which really caught my attention.” The day after meeting Moore, Graham was on a plane with him to Disney World.Īfter at least a half-dozen trips to the parks in 2010 to scout and then shoot the film-during which time Moore lost 47 pounds because he was so scared they were going to get caught, spent three-and-a-half hours on one ride to get a scene right and forced the whole production to flee the park when they were almost nabbed by security-Moore had completed what he set out to do: make a movie at the park. “My initial reaction was, ‘Who does he know that got him access to shoot something at Disney World? He’s someone’s kid or something,’” said Lucas Lee Graham, who met Moore for the first time in 2010 after answering his job posting on for a cinematographer. He eventually brought on a casting director, assistant director and eventually a cinematographer (the film’s final budget would be $650,000). Moore wove together a twisted tale that follows Jim, a family man who learns he’s been fired from his job on the final day of vacation at Disney World, leading to a downward spiral filled with hallucinations and an obsession over two teenage French girls.ĭescribing the film as an “experiment,” Moore said he suffered a breakdown after attempting to make the movie with his friends and no resources. A struggling screenwriter in L.A., Moore’s career frustrations led him in 2009 to begin jotting down ideas for a movie set in Disney World that mixed Disney urban legends (ride fatalities, the delicious turkey legs sold throughout the park that, according to one myth, are actually Emu meat), with memories of the heavy-drinking antics of his father.
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