Being an intern for anything, whether it is for the television industry or as a right hand of God, really is a tough job with a lousy salary. Some of those jobs relate to those fields how? Tasks like driving around clients, picking up lunch for people that haven’t thrown money in, and endless coffee trips really do not constitute “real world” skills, do they? Not only are you wasting money purchasing those items, but you aren’t getting a pay check in return either. Oh, but it is about the contacts you meet right? Right.
Needless to say, “A Friendly Negotiation” is an interesting little film about an intern for God and his quest is to try and convince Lucifer that a newly appointed dead man really belongs in Heaven. God claims that while the populace in Hell grows stronger and stronger everyday, Heaven is having a bit of an acceptance problem. People of Earth easily break the rules of sin, so God must find the littlest of things that a person may have done right in their lives in order to bring back the masses in Heaven.
The stage play feel of the script, as well as the acting talent from everyone involved, are key in making this film work as well as it does. That isn’t to say that the direction doesn’t deserve some notice as well. While Gabriel (the intern) spends the whole film running back and forth from God’s office to Satan’s and back again, the two worlds are given such a distinct feel with a really simplistic camera technique. The scenes in Hell are given a red-ish tint and Heaven gets a blue tint. Since both locales are similar, and God and Lucifer are played by the same actor, this method really captures how well such a simple application can work to a filmmaker’s advantage.
