Behind the scenes with writer/director Dale Fabrigar

Dale Fabrigar is a director and producer, known for Lonely Boy (2013), Break: The Musical (2016) and Area 407 (2012). His most recent project is co-writing and directing “D-Railed”, which is currently on the film festival circuit and has won many awards including five Platinum awards from the International Independent Film Awards in the following categories: Concept, Costumes, Sound Design/Editing, Cinematography and Directing. It has been nominated for Best Practical FX at the PDXtreme film festival in January.

In his own words, being the primary writer and director, he’s “…the guy with the big target on his back at the moment. We’re lucky that this has been picked up to go in different places and we’re excited about that because the reality is you never know. You do a film and you just don’t know if it’s going to go to VOD or DVD!”

So what was it about D-Railed that was appealing to you?

The idea. Suzanne wanted a story about passengers that get on a train and have to survive a derailment. But that was it. That wasn’t enough for me. But what is it that’s going to appeal to me as a storyteller? And I think that’s what it was. It was the heart of the story. And once I keyed in on trains I did all this research throughout history. I looked through historical crashes and derailments and really fell in love with the history of trains. And what actually happened historically to d-railed trains were very close to what we tried to depict in our film. And, of course, I love working with Suzanne! (De Laurentiis, Producer)

What were some of the challenges:

Making the monster. Due to budget, it originally looked like we were going to have gloves and maybe a mask. I was at a festival in Arkansas and I was really stressed, thinking we’re not going to do this movie if that’s what it’s going to be, but I knew there was a solution and I said that I’m going to do everything I can and I googled all these effects guys, mask people, creature designers and I luckily found this one guy who loved the idea and asked me to send sketches and he was able to do it within budget and time frame. He really kicked butt for us! I also wish we had more time to shoot, but we only had six days in LA and six in Philadelphia…. But the biggest challenge was the budget. We had to pull off the essence and the vision of the story within the parameters of the budget.