Prince Shakur and Julian Foglietti find life in ‘Before I Die’

Julian Foglietti isn’t prone to half measures. 

When the Columbus expat, who relocated to Brooklyn, New York three or four years ago, first took up photography, for example, he got rid of all of his musical instruments, worried they might distract his attentions from the craft at hand. “I was like, ‘I’m going to do nothing but photography. I need to work with every magazine in the city. I need to get on every shoot I can,’’” said Foglietti, joined by Prince Shakur for a late April interview.

When Foglietti eventually turned an eye toward filmmaking a couple of years back, he adopted a similar attitude, shoving aside the photo equipment he had amassed and hatching an ambitious plan to create a new short film every month.

The first short, which Foglietti wrote over a weekend and then filmed in his NYC apartment, centered on a lightly fictionalized phone call between the director and his parents in which he informed them of his intentions to sell off all of his photography equipment and pursue movies. “It was completely preposterous,” Foglietti said. “But it’s also sort of what I did, because I sold half my photo equipment to fund my initial films.”

As Foglietti began to establish a sense of footing, he connected with Shakur, a writer and activist now living in Columbus with whom he first bonded when the two were living in New York, the pair emerging with the short film “Before I Die,” which will screen during a local shorts block at the Drexel Theatre at 7 p.m. on Thursday, May 1. The block is part of the Cinema Columbus Film Festival, which runs Wednesday through Sunday, April 30 through May 4. (A full lineup of films and venues can be found here.)

In brainstorming a concept for the film, the Foglietti and Shakur bonded over early mumblecore movies (a genre defined by its subtle, character-driven plotlines) and the Richard Linklater “Before” trilogy, Shakur developing a screenplay focused on an evolving late-night conversation between two friends, one of whom is hours from what is positioned as a potentially life-or-death medical procedure.

“Looking back at this film, I think it just has a few different beats that I love in stories,” said Prince, who makes his on-screen debut portraying Dom, who ducks phone calls from his mom while knocking back a few drinks with a lifelong buddy on the eve of surgery. “I love really intimate conversations. I love a climate that involves some kind of confrontation and catharsis. I love moments in films where people read letters to other people; I’m thinking ‘My Girl’ where [Anna Chlumsky] reads her poem to the class. And I definitely like stories about men or boys coming together to reach a new place. … As a writer, I’m interested in those moments where consciousness breaks down, or where there’s a tear in the veil.”

In staging the short, Foglietti said he leaned heavily on his early experience in theater, particularly when it came to things such as blocking, setting the pace of the action, and particularly the actors’ line delivery. “We spent a lot of time figuring out the beats of emphasis on certain words, because I feel like the dialogue Prince wrote really reads like a poem, so it needed to be delivered in this way that spoke to the musicality of it. And then with the framing, it was thinking about these wider shots … and how the characters meander through space. I’m not a fan of cutting in film. I really love the ability to let the audience sit with the moment, to sit with the pause.”

Initially envisioned as a small production, the number of crew members ballooned in the weeks leading up to the April 2023 Columbus shoot, with producer Eli Hiller suggesting the two work with director of photography Noah Higgins, who subsequently invited a handful of his friends to contribute. “And it got to a point where I was in LA visiting a friend and I got a text that was like, ‘We have a 30-person crew now,’” Foglietti said, and laughed. “And then we had to think about things like catering and film permits, because we were having to tap into city power. … So it went from zero to 100 pretty quick.”

Onscreen, however, the two maintained the sense of intimacy with which the project first developed, the camera following the two friends as they sit in conversation and walk to and from a bodega – a night the characters have undoubtedly lived out together dozens of times before but which gains fresh urgency given the weight of the moment.

These tensions gradually bubble to the fore, with everyday conversations (the two briefly debate what one might call the opposite of a life-changing event) giving way to the kinds of deeper excavations that both Shakur and Folgliette said men tend to not engage in with the necessary frequency. 

“Here are these two characters who are deeply aware of one another, but they’re also reading each other in ways they can’t admit,” said Shakur, who sees the camaraderie and sense of adventure shared by the characters reflected in his friendship with Foglietti. (The two have already discussed potential future collaborations ranging from a full-length expansion of “Before I Die” to a theatrical version of Shakur’s memoir, When They Tell You to Be Good.) “And so, if we’re looking at it on a gender or masculinity level, how can men practice being more honest with each other? How can a life event force you to that moment? And I think this story is trying to get to a lot of those things.”

“I think guys tend to hold each other at a weird distance, where it’s like, ‘Did you see the sports game this weekend?’ and meanwhile one of you is crying in the corner because your grandma just died and nobody is going to talk about it,” Foglietti said. “Hug each other, curl up with each other, deal with life. It’s fucking rough out there.”