What would it be like to watch your senior year of high school on the big screen? Well, that’s the experience Eric Chavez has had of late as the documentary about his teenage self — "Unfinished Work" — premiered at the Phoenix Film Festival.
In it, we watch a teenage Chavez navigate his final year of high school at Metro Arts High School in downtown Phoenix, get a big part in the school play and make an album. We also see the whole Chavez family continue to grapple with the loss of his 2-year-old brother, Romeo.
"I didn't believe what happened had happened, even though I was the one I saw. But I was maybe 30 feet away from where my younger brother was," Chavez said. "And I could see him walking. And I see the car start to move. And I get stuck."
The film was made by one of his high school teachers, filmmaker Stephanie Lucas. But, she didn’t end up just following Eric throughout his senior year. In the end, "Unfinished Work" documents 12 years of Chavez’s life. Today, he’s nearly 30.
The Show spoke with both Lucas and Chavez about the film, its impact and why Lucas wanted to make it to begin with.
Full conversation
STEPHANIE LUCAS: You know, I'd go to work, and I would see these wonderful scenes play out in my classroom all the time. And I would just think, oh, my gosh, this could be a really beautiful observational film to watch these students. And so, I was thinking about this particular year that was coming up.
I knew we were doing “The Tempest.” I had seen Eric sort of challenge himself in different ways, visual arts. And, you know, he was he's a great writer. We don't even get into that. He's a great actor. He has this beautiful voice. And so I knew if he if he auditioned for “The Tempest,” he'd have an excellent chance of being Prospero or Caliban.
And that would be a very challenging role for him. And he would be also, you know, tackling a lot of things his senior year because he knew it was like his, you know, last year at this arts high school. And so that was kind of the jumping off point.
LAUREN GILGER: Yeah.
LUCAS: I also knew him really well. I knew that he had challenges in his life and his history and you know, so there was like a lot that I thought would be mined in this story, basically.
GILGER: Yeah, yeah. How did you feel about it, Eric? I mean, you were young at the time, but did you like the idea of someone following you around with cameras?
ERIC CHAVEZ: Yeah, I was a little egotistical art school student who thought the only things I wanted to be when I was growing up was a scientist and a rock star. Those were the only two sort of possibilities for myself.
GILGER: That's it, yeah.
CHAVEZ: And You know, I threw myself at every project at any time, any short film needed a body, they would come to me. And I was always willing to be in everything, anything and everything. And so Stephanie comes to me being like, I'm going to film you.
And at that point, this is three years of whatever. I will sign up for whatever. I have rockstar aspirations. I'm willing to be on camera, sign me up. And I didn't even really, I did not think about it. Really at all. Genuinely. I just was just game. I was game for anything then.
And I think that I think that's what attracted people to me at the time. And any, it was just Eric is down.
GILGER: What about your family though? Because this involved a lot of them.
CHAVEZ: I think at first it was a lot more. focused on me, and so it was a bit of an easier pitch that it was like, it's just me at school in my senior year, and they're gonna film me, they're gonna film a little bit at home, but it's mostly gonna be about me doing projects at school, and just how my senior year plays out.
GILGER: “The Tempest,” all this stuff, yeah.
CHAVEZ: Yeah, and so I think just as it went on, at times it was a bit contentious. It got, I think like anything I do, it sort of, it spirals a little bit out of control, but eventually it sticks the landing and it got away from us, I think, a little bit there.
GILGER: As stories tend to do, yeah.
CHAVEZ: Yeah, but I think it's just that like, I mean, at the time, I didn't know myself as a person. I didn't know who I was. I'm barely sort of coming into myself as a person and I, you know, I think the documentary, just in conjunction with my own life, it was a lot of discovery in myself and in the film and this sort of thing of like me connecting all the dots of my own life.
Yeah, it was a lot for everybody.
GILGER: Yeah. So I want to pause here and talk about one of the catalyzing events in the film that kind of underlies a lot of it, which is really difficult, which was the loss of your 2-year-old at the time brother, Romeo, right?
Like, I mean, he was just tiny. He was run over. It was an accident. You were there. You saw it. Just talk a little bit about the impact of that on you at the time when this started filming and and and how maybe it's shaped your life since.
CHAVEZ: I think very this sort of like wild child, loose cannon, big persona was born from me running away from my own feelings. And like I was constantly trying to like remember him, but every time that I would remember him, because I'd never confronted my feelings about the trauma, like the trauma and the traumatic event, it would conflate with this like horrible thing.
And I would, I was having like severe PTSD like shutdowns and I'd sometimes go into like a literal ball and just like shut down for days at a time. And it took a lot of time and, sitting with myself and self-destruction and building myself back up to confront that event with myself.
GILGER: Yeah. Stephanie, as the filmmaker, you're watching Eric deal with this and his family, and you're, you know, I'm sure there for some of those tough moments, right? Like, for this kid.
How did it look to you? Like, how did you watch him progress maybe over the course of the very long time that you shot this?
LUCAS: I mean, the biggest takeaways that Eric has given us is that he's somebody who, like, has explored a lot of ways to navigate this path, right? So, you know, he writes albums, he, you know, found time with friends. He has tried all kinds of different therapy. He's been in therapy as a child.
And you know, but he's constantly evolving. And I think we all are. And I think that is one takeaway that I have seen. And it's called “Unfinished Work” because we're all in that world of being unfinished. And like just seeing how, as he has gotten older, how much more? Because he was articulate as a high school student, and that has only gotten deeper, you know, as now he's on the doorstep of 30.
GILGER: Yeah. So, right, like, this was a 12-year process. I wonder for each of you, how did you know when you were done? Like, how did you find that ending? Was there an ending?
CHAVEZ: No, no, no. So how we sat and we did like a recorded session and I was supposed to read like a couple of just bits of voiceover. But I think I eventually, as I do, started talking a lot. I start talking about life and time and you can't fight and this whole thing.
And apparently that was this sort of like to them, this like, oh, we, that's the thing. That's the thing. And like, I left that, I left that session like, I wonder what else we have to film. I wonder what else we have to do. I wonder what else there is. I wonder what else, what more is there?
Because really it was like, I mean, at a certain point with it, and I mean, with just myself, it was like, I'm. I wanted to find the button on my life of like, what is the project that defines my life? And if it defines my life, it'll define this documentary.
And so I made three musical albums. I traveled and did all sorts of stuff. And I was throwing stuff at the wall, just trying to find this definitive thing that would define me and would give them a button to end it on. And then it turned out to just be this stream of consciousness philosophizing.
GILGER: This moment.
CHAVEZ: It just kind of, it makes so much sense.
LUCAS: We were like just re-recording little tracks of voiceover that just, we just needed, you know, we didn't get a good recording of it the first time. And then he, you know, just started talking to us about like something that he thought about that one of his teachers from high school had said to him, and he said it so poetically, that it was a moment where I felt like, OK, we can put the cameras down now. Yeah.
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