Randall Good
"Hannah Can't Swim"
hannah2.jpg - 186637 Bytes Infatuated with a stranger on a train, Hannah writes anonymous letters arranging a rendezvous on her isolated island.

Director’s bio

Randall Good recently graduated with a BFA from the Rochester Institute of Technology School of Film and Animation in Rochester, New York, USA. His previous work, Shower, is a digital video narrative that has screened at a handful of festivals in the USA. He is the recipient of a 2001 Princess Grace Film Honorarium and wants to make films for the rest of his life.

hannah1.jpg - 117208 Bytes

Production notes

Hannah Can’t Swim was shot in three separate locations. The island sequences were filmed in September of 2001 in 2 consecutive extended weekends on a small, rocky island that is called Little Rabbit and is owned by friends of actress Tamara Luzeckyj. It sits in the middle of the St. Lawrence River, part of New York State's Thousand Island Region. All the crew members were film students in Rochester and many skipped classes and jobs to travel 3 hours to the rugged location. The set doubled as living quarters, and most of the crew curled up in sleeping bags either in the cottage or outside under the stars. There was very little separation between work and down-time, but it was great to go for a cool swim between scene setups. The crew was pushed so hard that if it hadn't been for the beauty of the location, I suspect they might have mutinied. Halfway through the first weekend, our DAT audio recorder stopped working when a bit of black smoke wafted out of the cassette deck. Sound recordist Matt Taylor had the thankless duty of driving 3 hours each way to get a replacement from the school while the rest of the crew grabbed some MOS shots.

The train sequences were filmed on a stationary train at Armory Square Station in Syracuse, New York. Filming of these scenes commenced in mid-December of 2001, a few months after the island shooting. It took two cold, yet (thankfully) snowless nights of shooting to complete the scenes. The train car in which we wanted to shoot most of the scenes was not heated, so the extras were not happy. They got back at us by eating all of our food. The most arduous part of this shoot was that we couldn't afford to board anyone in Syracuse, so we had to caravan everyone one hour's drive each way for both nights.

The apartment sequences were filmed in a friend's apartment in Rochester over New Year's break in 2001/2002. Shooting took two nights. The DP, Nathan Nadell, and I came back on the third day to pack up the equipment. I had a nagging feeling that we should have gotten more pickup shots. We had used all our film, but Nadell dug through his truck and found a 100-foot roll of the exact stock we needed. A number of the shots we grabbed that evening made it into the film.