I had a 1-on-1 sit-down with Chris Gorak on Tuesday regarding his directorial debut, Right at Your Door, a two-hander of claustrophobic paranoia starring Rory Cochrane and Mary McCormack. Since Gorak’s background in art direction and production design had placed him on plenty of big-budget film sets before, I figured he’d have a unique point-of-view on the difficulties of production, and maybe a leg up on other first-time directors. With that in mind, I asked him if he still had any “oh-shit” moments during production, a cramped 20-day shoot.
Gorak’s answer was telling. It wasn’t the production itself that stressed him out; it was a pre-production wrinkle that kept him on his toes. “There was Rory’s character, Mary’s character, and then
the third main character that I didn’t realize until I was in it was the house.
And so the hardest thing to do was cast the house,” says Gorak. “The script is written and you
cast your actors to it, but how do I cast a house, because I can’t build a
stage set. Usually on a bigger film you’d build a set to fit the story — like, here’s
the hallway, and this is where he’s going to enter. But here I was searching,
combing the hills of
looking for the perfect house with view of downtown, and finding someone who
wanted production at their home. And then I would go scene by scene if I felt
right, then I would sit there… it was this exhaustive process and we didn’t
lock the house location until two weeks before we were shooting. So that was a
little hairy.