Page 72 - AVN October 2019

“I’ve been to group …
you end up bonding very
quickly. You start spilling
these deep, dark secrets
that you don’t normally tell
people. ”
In Armstrong’s new narrative feature, Lost Love, death is the starting point.
Beth (Drake) is mourning the loss of her husband, Eric (Ryan Driller, pictured
above with Drake). The setting is a funeral—but the person being put to rest
is not the only one who is deceased, and part of the experience is figuring
out who’s still among the living.
Drake is on set today to do a dialogue scene with Jessie Lee, who plays
Celice; it’s the lead-in to a girl/girl scene they shot a couple days ago
(pictured above). It’s the eighth day of production, and there’s also one more
sex scene to shoot today. Then, she says, “We’re doing one more day just
for some exteriors. … It definitely adds production value. So nine days total.”
Drake shares a detail about the art
direction: a certain color will appear
in the frame whenever there’s a dead
character present. “We did that really
deliberately,” she says, ticking off the
list of items: mock soda cans, snacks,
beach trunks, a towel, flowers. She
expects that some viewers will be
able to figure out what’s happening,
but hopefully they will open up to the
characters’ emotions and get into the
moody story. “It’s creepy. It’s really
creepy,” she says. “We went even
darker.”
Aside from its paranormal premise,
there’s something else that sets Lost
Love apart. Her character tells the story
in voice-over, interspersed by sessions
with a grief counselor. “I don’t know
that I’ve ever done a movie that had
group therapy sessions in it,” Drake
said. Armstrong wrote the script, but
Drake contributed the dialogue for the
counselor, played by Frank Bukkwyd.
(“He was fantastic—he was so spot
on.”)
“There’s a lot of death in the movie—
there’s a lot of symbolism in the movie,”
Drake says. “Each time a person tells a
story about someone passing away, it
was based on a real person. … Everyone
cried in this movie.”
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