Hartford has inspired a flurry of indie filmmaking lately. In recent months we’ve seen the release of the insurance company heist drama “Midas” by Hartford native T.J. Noel-Sullivan, the biopic “The Featherweight” about Connecticut boxing legend Willie Pep and a feature film based on the locally made short film “Ricky” is in the works. But the newly released hitman drama “Cyclus” may have the weirdest Hartford inspiration of all.
Harry Dinitz and Tyler Arnott (no relation to the writer of this article) went to high school together in New York City. They went off to different colleges but both decided to take a gap year at the same time last year.
“It was nice being home for the summer, but we both wanted to get out,” Dinitz explained. “We were going through a phase of contact sports, so we looked up places in New England where there were a lot of fight gyms. There were a bunch in Hartford, and it was a lot cheaper there than in New York City.
“Tyler has his own business,” Dinitz added. “We booked a B&B, but the Wi-Fi was essentially useless for Tyler’s business. We’d booked the B&B for two months so it was a chaotic first seven to 10 days. We didn’t know what to do with our time if Tyler couldn’t work, so we made a movie.”
That’s it. Dinitz and Arnott were stuck in Hartford and didn’t know what else to do, so they wrote, cast and shot an hour-long crime thriller. And “Cyclus” plays up Hartford as a great location for mob hits and random street violence.
The teens had a made some short films when they were in high school — their five-minute “Inescapable” is on YouTube — and weren’t fazed by the prospect of filming a thriller in a strange city with no notice. They sat right down and scripted “Cyclus” in about a week.
“Now we had to look for actors,” Dinitz said. “I went around Hartford to all the schools. We found Ethan Garcia (listed in the credits as “Unknown Man”) at the Hartt School. We looked at Trinity. John Potvin we found through Backstage,” the online film industry resource. Potvin, a Boston-based actor who has also made his own short films, plays the key role of Michael, a hitman who remembers the names of everyone he has ever killed and is considering getting out of the business. The two other main roles are played by Arnott and Dinitz. The men who play gangsters in a final showdown between Arnott’s character Jake (who believes his father has been killed by Michael) and Michael’s employer The Boss (Dinitz) were found at the fight gym that brought the filmmakers to Hartford in the first place.
“Cyclus” was shot almost entirely in Hartford and surrounding towns. Locations included a Motel 6, a warehouse in the Parkville neighorhood, Pennwood State Park in Bloomfield and a diner in Wethersfield. The dizzying opening scene was shot in West Hartford.
The fly-by-night production led to some amusing mishaps. On the first night of shooting, Arnott and Dinitz realized the camera they had brought from New York was unusable. They rushed to a Best Buy to get the right camera, and when a worker there told them they wouldn’t be able to get what they needed until the following morning, they convinced the worker to go home and get his own camera and join them on the shoot.
This all happened almost exactly a year ago. Then there was some additional filming to do, a lot of editing, the creation of promotional materials and more.
“We’d shot a film,” Dinitz said. “We might as well take it as far as possible. We applied to some film festivals.”
They’re also looking for a distributor. Nearly any deal they make for “Cyclus” would recoup the few thousand dollars they spent to make it.
The only place to find “Cyclus” right now is as a rental or purchase on Amazon Prime Video . If the film gets a distributor, Dinitz would like to hold a screening in Hartford.
The film’s lack of a real budget and its on-the-fly production schedule definitely show in the finished product, but the film has a lot going for it, with some strikingly creative framing shots and simple but effective camera moves. “Cyclus” has the tension of raw live theater, the actors throwing themselves into their roles with a reckless, violent energy.
In a lengthy emailed memoir about his experiences making “Cyclus,” Arnott wrote: “We had a vague idea of just how hard it would be to do something so absurdly ambitious as to write, direct, produce and shoot a feature-length movie while also needing to act in it because of time and budget constraints. The more we thought about it, the less it seemed attainable, but then we stopped thinking.
“We noticed that these actors hardly cared that we were 19 or that we had little past experience when they saw the script,” he wrote. “Apparently everyone was yearning to work on something in the crime/thriller genre. This made us realize that the most crucial part of the process is actually entirely free: Writing a compelling script. After attracting some nearby actors, we assembled a lean team that were just as passionate as us, but because we still had to compensate them, we shortened the shoot to only one week. …
“In the end, we treated this as if we were professionals who knew what we were doing and it paid off! From beginning to end, this was the craziest experience that we’ve ever had, truly something we’ll cherish forever.“
The filmmakers, both of whom are now 20, have Hartford to thank for their impromptu project.
“It’s a really good setting for a crime film,” Dinitz said. “Fall and winter were coming as we shot. We made the best of it. We made the best of Hartford. The story came to us because we were there. The city definitely has a hitman vibe.
“This was a real hit-and-run thing. All we had was us and the City of Hartford.”
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