Even with written consent from the property owners and prior notification given to the local dispatch operator, police officers would regularly interrupt shooting to inquire about what was going on. "The problem with shooting a no-budget feature on location is the simple fact that you're not on a set,” Jackson says. “You're also not 'on location' in the same respect that bigger budget films are where there's a crew, lights, and equipment. You're just in some public place where people think you're really arguing or fighting. They don't know what's going on. They might not even see the camera. They just see two people fighting. So they're calling the cops. Cops are coming and talking to us. We talked to so many cops! The biggest issue is that we had to deal with people who didn't know what was going on. People hassling us, bothering us, people driving past, things like that."

While much of the location work for JAMES O'BARR'S THE CROW was done on a shoot and run basis, there were scenes that required more than one day at a particular location. The most often visited site was a stretch of country road where the murder of Eric and Shelly was to have taken place.

"During that scene, we never had more than one actor there at the same time," Ullman explains. "I had to shoot most of that scene one-on-one with whichever actor I could get on a given evening, and bring them together later in the editing. It was sort of tricky, but it worked out well in the finished product.

"When Matt and I were shooting my part of that scene (you know, where Eric has been shot in the head and he's just lying, bleeding, on the road,) people were stopping their cars to see if I was all right. Matt would just flash the camera and wave them past."

Another frequented location was a condemned house, on the edge of town that was used by the filmmakers for the exteriors of Eric & Shelly's abandoned home. In the book, before offing the last few gang members responsible for his fiancée’s death, Eric sets fire to the remnants of their home, burning with it all that remained of his former life. When Ullman discovered, through a friend involved in the fire department, that a local house was to be burned down for practice, he seized upon the opportunity to incorporate it in the movie.

In order to firmly establish the building as the doomed lovers’ abode, exterior shots of the house were filmed prior to its burning, as well a scene in which Ullman enters through the basement and begins climbing the stairwell to the attic. This scene had to be shot, not only at night, in a removed and unlit portion of land, but in the rain. This put a damper on Ullman's plan to light the action with the headlights of his car.

“We needed light and there was no light at all. So I drove my car around back with hopes of using the headlights for our lighting. But because it was raining, which it needed to be in the scene, the car got stuck in the mud.  The sequence also called for me to fall in a nearby creek and subsequently shed my wet burial clothes. So it’s forty degrees outside, and I’m wet and half-naked, trying to push my car out of the mud! We ended up walking home, completely covered in mud, and having to get the car towed. But, if you discount the tow fee, that location and its on-camera demolition were one hundred percent free.”

That was not the first time Ullman finished a night’s work covered in mud. For the movie’s opening scene, in which his character rises from the grave, he had to be buried alive. “We dug a big hole,” Jackson says “but not quite big enough for him to lay in without crunching himself up into some sort of ball. Then we actually buried him in the dirt with sort of a mock, half-coffin lid over top of him. He did have a snorkel at some point so that he could breathe a little bit of air, which I would plug up from time to time to piss him off. We actually pulled it off, surprisingly well, just by burying him with that lid over top of him and showing it from the right angles.”

JAMES O'BARR'S THE CROW shot for five months in 1994, before closing down due to lack of participation. “There’s a great big massacre at the end of the book,” Jackson said “where all the remaining bad guys come to confront Eric and he kills all of them except for T-Bird. And we were going to film as much of this as we could.” Ullman handed out thirty-five fliers inviting people to come be part of the scene, which was to take place behind their high school on a Saturday night. Of the thirty-five, thirty of the people said they’d be there. Only one showed up.

"Perhaps the most evident disadvantage of using friends in the movie was their lack of commitment to the project," Ullman said. “We had that scene all worked out. And when such a magnitude of people didn’t show up for something that we’d put so much planning into, we just decided to hang it up.”

“I could understand people not wanting to do it,” said Jackson. “But the fact that they told us they would. They said ‘Ok, I’ll be there at this time,’ and they just wouldn’t, for no good reason. It happened every other night throughout the making of the movie, but when it came down to that big night it was so bad that it was almost worth quitting for.”

Production closed down for two months to give the filmmakers a much-needed break from the stress of such a demanding project. When principal photography resumed in January of 1995 it was with a renewed sense of purpose and dedication to completing the movie. “We shot for six more months and wrapped on the one-year anniversary of our first day of shooting,” Ullman said. “I then spent the remainder of summer editing between two VCRs, and that fall we held a cast-screening and made the movie available to our high school, which consisted of about 300 people.”

“We made a bunch of 8 ½ by 11 posters and put them up all over the school,” Jackson recalls. “A lot of people who bought it were friends of ours who were probably in the movie at some point in time or knew we were doing it and wanted to see how it turned out.  Other people saw the posters and got interested, they’d talked to people who talked to us about it, and they’d decide to buy one. I think we sold them for $5.00 apiece, and, amazingly enough, fifty people bought our movie.”

In the months that followed Ullman became increasingly dissatisfied with their finished product. “I started to dislike a lot of things here and there and I watched it a bunch of times, making extensive notes on what I wanted to be cut out, re-shot, or added. And, at my behest, in January or February of ‘96, we again resumed production.”

This decision, largely Ullman’s, was met with disinterest on Jackson’s part. “I was satisfied with the first version. I thought we did an excellent job. It was better than most could do. It was better than I thought it would be. We had music, it was shot well, in black and white; which was kind of different… I was impressed with it and surprised that Dave wanted to actually go back and fix it. So I remained involved, but not nearly as much as before. I just gradually did less and less. I no longer had the time or interest. I was done with it, ready for something else, a change.”

Ullman, however, was determined to re-shape their movie into something bigger, better, and more in-step with O’Barr’s original vision. Though it would ultimately take him two more years of shooting, researching, and editing to complete JAMES O’BARR’S THE CROW, he remained focussed and inspired. “It became my baby. I saw something in it or felt there were enough good things about it to warrant its completion. I had higher and higher aspirations for how good I wanted it to be. I approached it one scene at a time, one shot at a time and one element at a time to ensure that the finished piece was the best work that my limited capabilities and resources could yield.

“I had never before considered myself a patient person. But I think I learned a measure of patience doing this. I gained the ability to look beyond just the here-and-now and to say ‘Well maybe I can’t film this tomorrow or the next week, but sometime, somehow, I can get this and get it good or I can do it again and get it better and ultimately get what I want’.”