This film had its own unique challenges. From the outside, the film looks like a lighthearted romantic comedy. However, it is actually a film about the unending struggles we face as humans trying to find a partner. When the crew was asked to describe the film, they called it the most “emotionally expensive” film they worked on. The film portrays the struggles of people loving one another, along with the emotional baggage that sometimes comes with the relationship.
Like so many other films, the main character is also trying to understand the meaning of love. The love is messy and there is also a sense of confusion that comes along with trying to get back a sense of lost confidence.
While on the outside it seems like a story of lost love trying to love again, it is much deeper. The protagonist is an adult. He is a man who seems to understand complicated emotions, and relationships, and is also for the most part, self-aware. But, as the story progresses, it becomes clear that this man has been avoiding the truth. The relationships that he enters are not as complicated as they may seem. They are in fact, mirrors. He is trying to define himself, and with every intimate relationship he enters, he is in fact, avoiding the truth. The relationships that he enters are not as complicated as they may seem. They are in fact, mirrors.
Infallibly, circumstances were intertwined as the characters were struggling with specific, personal identity issues intertwined with not wanting to people to misunderstand them, while the cast were also acting out unseen personal conflicts as well.
When finances become the enemy.
What most spectators do not know is that Three Ways was one, if not twice close to being stopped completely due to issues with funding. Previously, the group had received funding but then one of the primary sponsors withdrew from the sponsorship due to being concerned about the film’s potential as an investment.
For almost two additional months, the project was devoid of progress. Crew members had already bound themselves to the project but were not getting paid. Contracts were being frozen. Gaps in time that were opened in the project were being lost to location scouting. At one time, a producer stated, “We were filming scenes on hope, prayer, and borrowed time.”
Because the budget had to be shifted. To balance the budget, members of the cast had to do the roles of the crew as well. They had to hold boom mics, reposition lights, and build small pieces of set decor. One cast member recalled later, “There were so many days that I would be in a scene with an argument, then transition to the next with a crying scene, followed by1 a couch that I had to help move.”
That exhaustion was clearly the film was this close to being finished is probable shaped the film’s authenticity. The tiredness you sometimes see in the characters’ eyes was not for the sake of the film, nor was it the acting. It was being exhausted from the world outside the film.
Health Scares That Become Part of the Emotional Fabric
Midway through filming one of the leads suffered a serious health problem: a respiratory condition due to long, poorly ventilated, indoor shooting days. Production came to a standstill for almost a week while they recuperated.
Yet instead of hiding how this made the production fragile, the director decided to embrace it. The actor’s soft breaths, slower pacing, and occasional incongruity were fully embraced in the final cut. This choice endows the character emotional arc considerable vulnerability, and this rawness would later be a point of praise for the character’s final performance.
On another crew related health scare, a camera operator worked through chronic back pain. Due to scarcity of funds, the team could neither afford to hire assistance, nor draft crew mates to help, so they improvised. The operator often used rolling office chairs, and employed furniture for makeshift dolly systems. Many of the film’s low-angle shots, originally conferred validation, came from these shooting unrelated innovations.
Personal Lives Cracking Under Pressure
Three Ways allowed cast members to film, while several of them silently coped with emotional breakdowns, divorces, and various family issues. One supporting actress noted how she shot a key argument scene on the same day she learned of a personal betrayal, which later produced a crisis, in her real life.
The character in the scene confronts the protagonist: “I’m tired of being the only one trying,” and trembles. What the audience does not see is the grief and anxiety that come through, neither in a subtle manner nor in a detached fashion.
The personal struggles of the director was also a factor. A close relative, who was subsequently hospitalized, afflicted the family. Nights would be spent in the hospitals and mornings on the shooting set. The resulting emotional exhaustion was channeled into the general tonality of the film, most especially into the moments where the challenge of keeping a relationship intact while everything else collapses, loss, and the void of fear are experienced.
To that end, the director remarked, “I wasn’t just shooting a movie about messy relationships. I was living in the middle of mine.”
Controversies and Creative Clashes
No film dealing with intimacy is not mired in controversy. Some early viewers and members of the industry dealing with the film have felt that dealing with issues of sexual identity and non-conventional relationships has been too bold.
Arguments during the film’s production have been described as polarized, with a faction of the producers advocating for a “safer” version and a faction of the writers insisting on preserving the rawness of the film.
Set disagreements can be productive; however, clashes on the set of “Three Ways” were the antithesis of productive tempers. Perhaps the largest of the disagreements occurred one afternoon, resulting in a stoppage of filming. According to reports, an actor and the film’s director disagreed on how to portray the mental state of the character in one particular scene, an actor’s guess of the scene’s emotional content suggesting it was too “neat.” The scene was revised in twenty minutes and filmed, in time to be one of the most beautifully wrought representations of an emotional episode in the film. The scene in the film was a nexus of critical reception.
The real clashes were a catalyst to the real conflicts in the film.
The emotional as crescendos shaped real life pain.
A central character in the film senses the spark of grief in every character, every actor; it was grief that authentically shaped the performances. The film editing team is aware of, and appears to have done a satisfactory job in capturing, the defined grief.
The scene takes place right after a grueling fifteen hour work day that nearly exhausted the crew to the point of walking out. During filming, the actor did not pause during a scene when the character speaks the words, “I don’t know how to stop wanting things that hurt me.” The scene is an emotional breakdown that the actor did not rehearse, one in which the director kept the cameras rolling, editing team, most likely, to be aware of the actor’s pain.
The unscripted parts of the movie also included the silent scenes, which involved the characters in the movie sitting in silence and contemplating decisions for moments at a time, which included waiting for the actors to take genuine breaths.
The film’s design was at the intersection of fact and fiction.
The unsaid truth
Three Ways was the product of a shoestring budget combined with an extraordinary amount of stress and emotional turmoil. For some reason, that possibly explains why the film feels so alive. Just like the relationships in the film, it’s flawed, alive, and made with great sacrifices.
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