Webster University - location: St. Louis, MO.

Cody Stokes wins Princess Grace Award

Last year Cody Stokes, an undergraduate at Webster University in St. Louis, won a grant from the Princess Grace Foundation to shoot one of the countless screenplays he's dreamed up over the course of his 22 years. This time, the project quickly escalated beyond film, though. Although the script was about a guy dying in the back seat of a taxicab in St. Louis, Stokes hoped to use the grant money to teach at an under-funded film school in Accra, the capital of Ghana. Along with teaching classes, he would give his West African students the opportunity to crew and act in his film.

Photo by: Natalee Cayton

From the outset every part of the plan went wrong. The equipment didn't arrive. The school officials wouldn't let him teach. Trying to get his film off the ground, he maxed out his credit cards. And in a plot twist worthy of Warner Herzog, one of his favorite directors, he got caught up in a riot and was held at gunpoint.

"It was absolutely awful," Stokes recalls. "I loved every minute of it."

The film, titled "The Loneliest Place on Earth," did eventually get shot. In fact, it got shot twice -- once in Ghana and once back at home in St. Louis. Due to the lack of equipment and recourses, Stokes scrambled to procure video equipment and local actors, who evoked his English-language script in the local dialect.

Although Stokes managed to finish production, he later learned when trying to transfer the tapes from PAL to NTSC that one of the video cameras had uncalibrated playheads and the tape from that camera couldn't be played on any other camera than the one he originally shot on. Due to this and the fact that he had proposed in his grant statement to shoot on film, Stokes re-shot the entire film in mid-February of this year. This time he was able to use a 16MM camera and KODAK VISION2 500T 7218 film stock. He pushed the 500 ASA stock to 1000 for the low-light setting, since the film was shot at night. Kodak was also his stock of choice for the previous three projects he did at Webster.

"The Loneliest Place on Earth" was originally conceived to reflect the city he was raised in. "My time in St. Louis is coming to an end," Stokes reflects, referring to his plans to attend the International Film School in Paris. "When I was growing up I always thought about leaving, going somewhere hip like New York or LA. But one night I was walking around downtown St. Louis, and I was just really struck by the scene. Instead of thousands of people, there was emptiness, like a ghost town. It really felt like the loneliest place on earth."

When the opportunity arose to go to Ghana, Stokes decided his script could easily be transplanted to Accra. The film centers around an interaction between a dying man and a taxi driver. As the driver takes the injured man on an enlivening tour of the city, the latter comes to see the place with new eyes and to experience a shared moment with the driver. "That's something I deal with a lot in my films," Stokes says. "The little moments in life people all too often pass over, and the way that others can open our eyes to the beauty we don't take the time to see."

Along with Werner Herzog, whose spontaneity and intensity greatly appeal to Stokes, Wes Anderson and Krzysztof Kieslowski are also key influences, as both have an acute eye for detail. Stokes was particularly struck by a scene in Kieslowski's film Blue when a woman sitting at a cafe dips a sugar cube in a cup of coffee and lets the coffee slowly seep in. "You know, I've heard people say Kieslowski had a PA practice that for a week, testing all different kinds of sugar cubes, searching for the exact right way to shoot that shot. I really admire that kind of patience and devotion," Stokes says.

Photo by: Natalee Cayton

Numerous scenes from Stokes' own films strive to evoke the power of small moments. In "Simply, Simply," Stokes' first movie shot on film, there is a scene when a group of boys looks through a toymaker's window as the toymaker puts on a marionette show. "The children believe they have caught him unaware," Stokes explains, "but when he turns his head and nods slightly, it's clear he knows they're there and that he's doing it for them. These are the kinds of moments I'm drawn to in life. Just a little gesture, nothing too dramatic. Just a moment of human warmth."

While Stokes admires Wes Anderson for his reverence for small details, he believes Anderson and other modern directors too often focus on one style. "I think you always want the freedom to do something different and totally unexpected," Stokes says. "I have such diverse ideas in my head, and I want to be able to make horror films, dramas, children's movies, anything. I don't ever want to be boxed in."

Stokes' first interest in film showed itself as early as pre-school. At night he would hide GI Joe figures under his pillow so he could create grand war epics while his parents slept. "I was in love with those stories," he says. "And I just had this need to share them with someone else." At night he had prolonged and vivid dreams that would work their way into his scripts. One of the films he shot at Webster was based on a dream. The dream was about a girl who gets so bored that she sews herself into a wall. Due to the difficulty of building a set for such a surreal moment, however, Stokes opted to have the girl sew herself into a couch.

Early on Stokes wrote scripts without the use of any camera, though eventually his aunt allowed him to use her video recorder, with which he made his first films in stop-motion. Making these early films forced him to develop an ingenuity in bringing his grand cinematic visions to life. "To be successful making indie films -- those without a big budget I mean -- you really have to be aggressive, to know that no doesn't really mean no. There was never a moment I felt hopeless about a scene, felt there wasn't some way to fix the problem."

Stokes' so-called big break came in 2001 when he put together a video ad for a Tommy Hilfiger contest and won. The topic was, "What does America mean to you?" and the entry date just happened to be September 11. The tragedy of that day brought the competition to national attention. "It was a really big deal," Stokes recalls. "I even had to give a press conference." With the $10,000 prize money, he bought his first camera, a Canon Gl-1 mini-DV recorder and shot his first film "The Mix Up". Since then he has traded it in, acquiring two 16MM cameras, a Bolex and an Eclaire NPR.

Stokes was prepared to head off to the International Film School in Paris next fall, but instead deferred his enrollment for a year to travel to Rwanda were he is working with an NGO named the Tiziano Project on a documentary about the Gacaca Courts of Rwanda. "This was important to me because I saw it as an opportunity to do what I didn't get to in Ghana. I am teaching local Rwandans videography and they are working with me to shoot this film." In addition to this Stokes has a grab bag of ideas for future projects. Before he even arrives in Paris he is planning to shoot another short, his first film on 35mm, and a feature. Both films are in preproduction.

Stokes is also in the process of finishing a screenplay for a feature called "Wish Me Well," centered around a girl who is alienated from the world by her ability to hear other people's wishes. Stokes plans to shoot the movie after finishing the masters program. He is also preparing to shoot a series of three modern Westerns.

Among Stokes' influences, his parents figure large, particularly as they have been unfailingly accepting of their eldest son's grand aspirations. "My parents were the most important support for me," Stokes remembers, "but they would show it by making sure I learned how to do things for myself, to not depend on them or anyone. And this happened from when I was a young kid. We weren't allowed to watch TV much, and we didn't have Nintendo. I always had to make things up for myself."

His mother was also closely involved in her son's film career, and to this day is perhaps the single person who best understands his aesthetic. "The other day I was talking to my mom, and I was really surprised when she said to me, 'I had a Cody moment.' What she meant was, she had seen a homeless man with two hooks for hands, and he was picking flowers out of someone's garden. He was lying them down one by one on the ground because he couldn't grab them all.

"She knew that was exactly the kind of scene I would love. I'm the kind of person, I focus on little scenes like that, scenes that cause you to look closer at life. I love going to new places, meeting different people. I pick up hitchhikers and take them to the next town just to hear their stories. I love getting into situations that make you stop what you're doing for a moment to see and hear what's really going on."