Trap

DIANE CHEKLICH
(producer)

Producer Diane Cheklich thanks Ross Perot for launching her film career. It was the late 1990’s and she was working as an information technology consultant for Perot’s company. They offered her a mentorship as a “promising female leader,” and she picked someone in the world of television. When she expressed her interest in filmmaking, he gave her the name of a cinematographer and told her to go make a short film. She did, had a blast and knew she had to find more space in her life for filmmaking. Making movies quickly became her film school, and she already has a half dozen shorts and documentaries to her credit (including the award winning experimental, Late), most of which have landed slots in film festivals around the country.

Diane’s first paying gig was with Jeff Daniel’s production company, which was making Super Sucker. Perot’s company offered her $600 a day; Daniel’s offered her $600 a week. She took Sucker and never looked back. Years later, producer Marty Shea had her read a script called TRAP by a local filmmaker named James Bonner, and Diane had the same reaction: she grabbed TRAP and never looked back. She liked how the story plays out in a near-vacuum, with nothing to distract the characters. This enhances the film’s theme of “how the real and the surreal can get mixed up together in the lives of everyday people” – and invites the audience to become voyeurs.

TRAP is Diane’s first experience producing a film, and it has so thus far lived up to her expectations as a producer: they finished on time and on budget – despite the usual roller coaster of independent film production. Or, as Diane puts it, “We had our share of screw-ups, crabs and catfights, but nobody died. At the end of the day, they all dug in and made it happen.” Of writer/director Jim Bonner, she says, “I respect his knowledge of film, and he is very deliberate in applying that knowledge to his own work. He knows what makes a good movie.”

Possessed with a vibrant filmmaker’s voice, Jim’s the sort of director Diane could see working with again and again, hopefully still in Michigan. “Our film community is not huge, but it has a lot of heart.” And with its position in the top five markets for commercial production, Detroit has all the support services a budding filmmaker could want. However, as there is no state-sponsored economic incentive to bring in productions from Hollywood, Diane believes they “will have to bootstrap the industry here by making successful homegrown films.” Consider TRAP her first contribution. Her second (and directorial debut), OFFSHORE, just wrapped its Mumbai leg of production and will finish shooting and post in Detroit in December of ‘05.