Director Makes Douglaston, Little Neck Her Movie Set

For Little Neck’s Elana Mugdan, northeast Queens is all about location, location, location.

Mugdan, 22, shot her first feature film, “Director’s Cut,” in the streets and homes of Douglaston and Little Neck as well as in several Long Island and Manhattan locales in February 2010.

The filmmaker, who is now sending out her movie to film festivals and seeking a distributor, said her hometown provided a perfect location for her cinematic debut.

“If you’re looking for something to stand in for the suburbs of any random place, Queens is the place to be,” she said. “If you drive 10 minutes in one direction, you can make it look like any part of New York City. If you drive the other direction, you’re in Long Island and there are mansions and lakes. I know all the good locations.”

“Director’s Cut” is autobiographical and draws upon the films that Mugdan made as a child with a home video camera.

“My aspirations were a bit too ambitious,” she said of the movies she made in her youth. “I made a trilogy from the time I was 15 to 18 years old. It was about dragons, wizards, mermaids and magical powers. Director’s Cut’ is a story of a young woman who is a film school and law school dropout. She decides to make a movie, which is in the same vein as my early films. It has pirate queens and cannibals. But they can’t make the film because they have no money. My film chronicles her misadventures.”

Mugdan wrote the screenplay for the film in August 2009 and shot it with a miniscule budget in winter 2010, wrapping up principal photography by May.

She premiered the picture in December at the Hollywood Reel Independent Film Festival and will next screen it at the Litchfield Hills Film Festival in Connecticut.

The movie has been submitted to a total 50 festivals around the nation.

“If we can get any kind of distribution deal, we’d be thrilled,” she said. “Right now, it’s unrealistic to expect that kind of thing. We’re looking for exposure.”

Mugdan raised money for the film after finishing up college in Maine in just three years. Family and friends donated to the production, but much of its funding came out of the filmmaker’s own pocket.

The film’s cast and crew were mostly discovered online at sites such as Craigslist. During filming, Mugdan would edit footage at night that her crew had shot earlier in the day.

“I would edit the scenes on the day we shot them, which I think was good because I would have scenes to show the cast and crew the next day,” she said.

Mugdan has now created her own company, Shivnath Productions, and plans to shoot her next film, a short horror film titled “Amygdala,” around Douglaston and Little Neck in upcoming months.

This week, the filmmaker was hired to act as New York unit director for a London-based comedy, “How To Stop Being A Loser.”

Mugdan said she plans on remaining a New York-based filmmaker, whether it’s her own films or other directors’ movies on which she is working.

“For me, it’s about being on set and doing what I love,” she said. “I want to practice my passion. I cannot see myself doing anything else.”

Watch the trailer for "Director's Cut" here.