Official Selection ROTTERDAM INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL
WINNER, 'Director's Choice,' ANN ARBOR FILM FESTIVAL
“An extremely intriguing first feature by filmmakers Rick Schmidt and Wayne Wang. Beautifully shot in the Mendocino, California landscape, the film flows back and forth between the fiction of the script and the half-submerged reality of the actual writing of the script.”
— Marc Weiss, BLEECKER CINEMA, NYC
A MAN, A WOMAN, AND A KILLER is the story of a small-time gangster (DICK RICHARDSON) writing his journal in a Mendocino, California, farmhouse, as he awaits a hit man who is coming to kill him. In this first part of a trilogy, realities continue to shift between the story, and the actual making of the film, as seen through unscripted scenes, real-life narrations by lead actors, and the real relationship that developed on the set between Richardson and the actress (CAROLYN ZAREMBA) who played his girlfriend. A bumbling, local librarian (Ed Nylund) is mistaken for the "killer" and plays along with the game.
“A MAN, A WOMAN, AND A KILLER is a tragic epic, a love story, a documentary about drug addicts, a comedy, a portrait, a commentary and a tapestry. Mostly, however, it’s a film about violence. Not Peckinpah spleen-punching violence or Coppola bleeding-horse’s-heads violence —by comparison these are cartoons, embarrassingly vapid, self indulgent and boring.”
— Linda Taylor
“For lovers of weird movies, independent director Rick Schmidt is the king. A MAN, A WOMAN, AND A KILLER is one of the weirdest films you’ll see this or any other year.”
— Robert W. Butler Entertainment Editor, KANSAS CITY STAR
“If someone asked me, in conversation, what I thought of A MAN, A WOMAN, AND A KILLER” I’d say it was interesting and stop at that. I’d be afraid of shortchanging the film by describing it too much. For one thing, it is in part a film about the making of the film. This is an idea that has endless appeal for young filmmakers who are obsessed with what they call “process” — that is, the hardware of their craft. By calling attention to the artfice of the film, they are aiming to seem artless. But artlessness is artifice, too, so the technique defeats itself. For another, the film uses English subtitles at certain moments to ‘translate’ its English dialogue, a technique I dreaded when I read the publicity material because it seems just too cute. But because of these devices, rather than in spite of them, A MAN, A WOMAN, AND A KILLER works in a way that makes it one of the most absorbing films I’ve seen of what is generally called the independent filmmaking movement. Actress Carolyn Zaremba in particular, singing a tearful rendition of 'Bye, Bye, Blackbird," gives a performance that is of the First Rank.”
— Jerry Oster, NY DAILY NEWS
"Thirty-five-plus years after his 1975 feature filmmaking debut, American Independent Rick Schmidt remains a free-wheeling derring-do filmmaker holding fast to the notion that people's real lives are more truly dramatic, hilarious, exciting and as exasperating as those manufactured by Hollywood's minions. Most everyone falls in and out of love, rejects and gets rejected, contends with failure and success, hatred, ambition, the death of loved ones...It's all there.
To capture real life on film, Schmidt fashions a creative weave out of the threads of narrative, documentary, and docu-drama film forms. His actors draw on their own experience enabling him to create a unique blend of fact and fiction. In the end, Schmidt makes art and life intermingle and imitate each other.
Aware that the American Dream factory financiers would never fund his films, Schmidt, undeterred, remains the maven of low, low-budget feature filmmaking."
– Vic Skolnick, CINEMA ARTS CENTRE, Huntington, NY
