PRODUCTION IN ST.PETERSBURG.

A couple days after the funeral, his wife Tonneke let me know that she still wanted to pursue the project. Their sons David and Esli Bijker, who have experience in television with documentairies and drama, agreed with this and got involved in the production. Esli Bijker was the 2nd unit DP. David J. Bijker became the production coordinator.
Late November, we and the Bijker brothers left for St. Petersburg. Amy Segal was already there. She had prepared locations etc. and got us in touch with St. Petersburg production company Globus films.
They told us that our schedules were too ambitious. Many locations, for almost free in a very short time, seemed unrealistic. We had to use all our negotiating skills, earned during all these years of making documentaries under similar conditions, with even smaller budgets. We would also be dependent on weather conditions, and willingness of the local police (and Mafia). Again we crossed our fingers.
The highlight of these days was the arrival of the actors: David Arquette, Tim Blake Nelson, Emily Mortimer and Larry Pine. Everybody arrived on schedule. We shared rented apartments with the crew in the center of the city. The actors stayed at the Sheraton Hotel.
It had already become clear that, surrounded by such a great cast and crew, this should become less of a 'documentary' and more of a film.
The documentary aspect was retained in having changed the character of Angela Beck (Emily Mortimer) from a newspaper correspondent to a TV reporter. On the days that she wasn't scheduled to shoot in St. Petersburg, she was roaming around the city to make a real documentary featuring actual tour clients and would-be brides. Her cameraman, also featured in the film, is Dutch cameraman and documentary maker Esli Bijker, also one of the producers on A Foreign Affair. Their documentary featuring actual tour clients is woven through the film.
Thanks to our inventive and very flexible DP David Mullen, the schedule worked great, and so did working with real 'sets' and 'real' extras. The crew also liked working with the Russian beauties as extras; over the course of the production, we ran into several of them in the hallways of our apartments.
The farm portion of the film was shot in and around Nuevo Casas Grandes, Mexico during the last week of February 2002. The interior of the Adams' brothers' house was filmed inside the house of American immigrants. This family was part of a Mormon group who left Utah over a 100 years ago to start a colony in Mexico, but they have retained a distinct American identity. The house we filmed in belonged to a lady in her 80's who had lived there all her life, and who now shared it with one of her grown children. The moment we walked in there, we realized this should be the Adams kitchen. It wouldn't even need set dressing.
The outside of the farm was filmed on a remote Mennonite colony, about one hour North in a valley dotted with Mennonite farms.

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