Matt Porterfield Wraps Up His Latest Film

This week, Matt Porterfield, a Baltimore-based film auteur, is in Ocean City, wrapping up shooting his latest film, I Used To Be Darker.  Porterfield, 33, has directed two major films: Putty Hill, which came out last year, and Hamilton, which came out in 2006.

“There’s a lot of pressure for this week’s shoot,” said Porterfield, “because the Ocean City scenes are the first 10 minutes of the film, so they have to be really, really good.”

I Used To Be Darker was Matt’s first experience getting the entire production budget for a film before it was done shooting. He did it through a Kickstarter campaign. “This is my most successful experience financing a film,” Porterfield said, “because we had no money at the start, and Kickstarter got us everything we needed in very short time.”

For his last film, Putty Hill, a much smaller budget ended up being a limitation; Porterfield used a documentary-style, open-ended interview technique where actors were given license to free-associate, and the script was more of an outline.

I Used To Be Darker, Porterfield said, deserved much more scripting. “This was a project, in contrast, that felt like it needed to be fully fleshed out on paper before we could present it to anyone.” Porterfield collaborated with his partner Amy Belk on the script. Belk has a background in writing short fiction, which he said brought a lot of craft and emotion to the table. 

Porterfield said he feels great about his progress so far. He imagines it will screen at festivals next summer and fall. “Putty Hill happened so fast,” he said. “We’d just finished shooting in August, and we edited the whole thing together for the festival deadlines in October and November. In this case, this film doesn’t deserve to be put together as quickly.”

The story of I Used To Be Darker is about two parents who just divorced, their daughter, who just went off to college at NYU (Porterfield’s alma mater), and their niece, who lives in Ocean City and is recovering from losing her job and getting pregnant by an absent lover. Porterfield said the characters have a lot of room to draw from real life. For example, both parents are real-life musicians (Ned Oldham, musician and brother of singer-songwriter Will Oldham, plays the father), and the daughter and cousin are real-life close friends. Porterfield and Belk have both experienced divorce, and Porterfield said this was a major influence in writing the screenplay.

Porterfield is also fond of incorporating childhood locations into his films. He incorporates Baltimore’s Hamilton neighborhood into this film, as well as his high school, Park School in Brooklandville. He tried to find an affluent household for the father’s house, and chose one off of Coldspring Lane, close to Loyola. Porterfield also looks back fondly on going to Ocean City as a young boy.

He said he’s hoping, after the film is done, to start a production company and begin shooting a film every two years, the next of which he hopes to be an adaptation of Ivan Turgenev’s novella First Love.