The story behind the making of I Love You, Apple, I Love You, Orange is a long one, so I’ll try to sum it up as best I can. The inspiration for the film came from a short story that I wrote a long time ago about a talking studio apartment. I later adapted that story into a short screenplay for a film class at NYU and only started to expand it into a feature a few years later after we moved to the Pacific Northwest. The final script
took one year to write, featured an entirely different cast of characters and plot, and looked nothing like the original story.
We now had a script but no money to make it into a film. Uncertain how a pair of first-time filmmakers would pull off such a daunting project, we made the commitment to make the movie by any means possible. So we cast ourselves, Lori and me, and the voice talents of our good friends, Stefan Griswold and Victoria Blake. We had another year of preparation (rehearsals, dance lessons, and storyboarding) before we finally began shooting.
Never in our wildest dreams could we have ever imagined just how demanding, both physically and emotionally, it would be to make this film. As we were always working regular day jobs, writing, shooting, animating, and editing were performed in the evenings during the workweek and all day on the weekends. Lori and I made up the entire production crew (a microphone fastened to a light bulb pole precariously balanced on a light stand, counterweighted by Lori’s purse, served as our sound man). Day in and day out, we worked long hours filming with little sleep and little down time to eat a proper meal or attend to household chores. We were single-minded in our determination to complete the film, and somehow (I have no idea how) we made it through and finished filming.
After principal photography and most of the editing was done, it was time to work on the music. David R. Lorentz tackled the awesome task of scoring the film, initially, without the aid of any visual references from the actual movie. We would just have long weekly phone conversations about music and then he would email me these incredible and heartbreaking musical pieces. Jamie Cooper also generously contributed beautiful instrumental music to the film, and a year later we had our score.
I Love You, Apple, I Love You, Orange took eight years to make, occupied my every waking moment (it still does), and, quite frankly, saved my life. A personal journey told from the perspective of one lonely young woman struggling to learn how to live and love, the film mixes live action with stop-motion animation of actual fruit, vegetables, and one glazed ham that turned very bad and very smelly.
The film was made with love in Oregon, Washington, and Michigan.
– Horam Kim for the I Love You, Apple, I Love You, Orange team
