Tyler Taormina's Ham on Rye is showing exclusively on MUBI starting January 11, 2021 in the Debuts series.
Ham on Rye was born from a joke that a friend made in passing, something about how people go to delicatessens to hookup. My eyes went wide, and I fell very much in love with the idea. At 25 years old, I was quite confused and dejected, and there was something so tender and absurd about this joke that struck a chord in me. I said right then and there that I had to make a movie about this place. Nobody had warned me about what it’s like to first realize that your childhood is dead and gone, that you’ve crossed a threshold of no return. I had yearned to cross this barrier throughout my youth, and the scent of romance was my ticket out. I was always dreaming of it. Then suddenly, the heartbreak I experienced in losing this time of purity… oh no! I had to do something. The energy gained from this shock had to go somewhere.
From that moment on, I lived in that delicatessen every day when I’d close my eyes. The images that first came to my mind were of teenagers in outdated formalwear, biting into sandwiches, and sneaking glances at one another—so tender and absurd! Then, from these images unfurled a world of subconscious joys and fears, all of which you can see in the film. I told my close friends—with whom I partner in Omnes Films, a Los Angeles-based film collective—that it was time to produce our first feature-length film. It was a frightening proposition for us all. We’d never taken this step even though we’d been making films since we were kids. The team is composed of brilliant minds and best friends. Without these few (who are basically all credited as producers), this film would have been either impossible to make or barely half as good. When I shared the script with the Omnes team, they instantly understood the vision. I had only produced one short film and a handful of miscellaneous projects before preparing this one. We only had a tiny portion of what’s normally considered a micro-budget, having tried and failed at crowdfunding and only raising three thousand dollars. After seven months of rigorous preproduction, we embarked on a sixteen-day shoot, which corralled over one hundred people in the cast and around sixty locations. It went smoothly and was very fun. We were always laughing and listening to super loud music during setups and sometimes during takes. I was mostly the set-DJ and would try to find the perfect songs to energize the space as needed. I probably spent way too many hours making playlists for different shoot days and each day had a specific song marked on the call sheet.
Ham on Rye is an ecosystem film where there are no extras. The camera, like some curious animal, wants to learn of every face and object that occupies the environment. Gradually and collectively, these disparate pieces communicate an emotional experience, and perhaps something to gather about a milieu. This approach to filmmaking is important to me because ecosystem films tend to have a very specific and sacred relationship with both space and time. The first images of my film are of a group of people trying to light a firework. When a fuse begins to burn our awareness of time becomes instantly heightened. When the firework explodes, the movie is over.
Ham was made with much love and levity and I hope you can feel that when you watch this movie. Making this film felt right through and through, and it managed to bring an entire community of people together. I appreciate its shape, its rhythms, and of course, all those wonderful faces so full of life.