A man stops to walk on a desolate road. In doing so he will be thrust into the light but not without passing through the darkness.
When watching films you start coming across storylines that are very similar, and often comes with you saying ‘I’ve seen this a thousand times’. This is the truth even more so in short films, where filmmakers often get their inspirations from specific feature films, and transpire the ideology to their films. But then you get films like ‘Thunder’. Where the plot storyline might be something you’ve already heard, in a different time or format, but the cinematic experience you gather from it is a completely unique one. That goes to say what we truly believe in: It’s not about the plot, it’s about how the plot is told.
This film has many themes running through it. Love and loss are the primary emotions I felt when writing. It is a true reflection of where I was at that stage of my life. I ended up writing parts of myself into the film, the parts I wanted to improve on. And I really wanted to utilize fantasy and drama to create a cinematic blend of imagery and sounds to demonstrate my vision.
Amaro’s film is a euphoria of emotions bottled within 6 minutes, and the simple premise was brought forward by showing these emotions through an incredible complete mix of imagery and sound.
Thunder was shot in two parts, the first during the summer of 2014. There was drama at every turn. We didn’t have the locations confirmed nor half the crew. Yet somehow it all came together. We couldn’t finish the other half of the film because we didn’t have the main location, a desolate road. When we wrapped the first part, my grip, Luca Salomez told me of an abandoned road. And there it was, one hour south of Paris in Ablis, France.
We shot the second part of the film three months later. It’s funny, because this film jumps around in time a lot. Having three months allowed us to go from summer to fall, which ultimately added more value to the film. We could see the leaves had changed and the temperature dropped. Those two days were extremely rigorous on set. Yet I don’t think we could have had better luck for shooting outdoors on a low budget. We had a perfect sunrise the first day, as written in the script. It even rained when it called for. And finally we had that magical sunset that I saw for the ending.
