The character of the Dude played by Jeff Bridges in the Cohen Brothers' The Big Lebowski turned out to be a fortuitous reference point for our Pablo character in the Pablo movie script: both are characters in sync with their times and comfortable wherever they go. Both are simple men and ardent members of the marijuana club... Pablo has been good friends with Jeff Bridges for many years, and we decided to ask Jeff to be the narrator of our film. And guess what?
He said yes.
When we got to the studio, Jeff got instantly behind the vision of the film and lent his warm touch to the production.
So the guy gets awards everywhere, he parties hard on the sixties, the whole thing is animated and he's full of famous friends, but what is the story about?
By this time I had researched Pablo Ferro enough to proclaim myself an expert in the field. I had been the documenting his life for over two years, scanned over fourteen hundred pictures and interviewed more than forty of his friends and associates, including an ex-lover who found me online and opened up a whole different (and darker) side to this "two-girl kind of guy..."
But this of course didn't make the story telling easy. Too much information can make telling a story more difficult than not having much to go on. Maybe a writing partner would be in order...
My producing partner Jeremy found the talented Neil Katcher, a writer and co-creator of the terrificly original Mortified franchise. Together and over several months, we labored exhaustively to boil down the story to a reasonable running time. Out came several drafts of the script, making use of the "Who is Pablo Ferro?"
question to punctuate different beats of the story.
We came up with a sort of comedy of errors with a Big Lebowski-like type character who dances through life without too much of a plan for the future, mostly just concerned with living for the day and making his amazing art. A crazy and reckless way to go perhaps - but pretty compelling.
