Imperfections is an independent film that boasts a number of admirable qualities: an original heist story shot on a small budget, an authentic Chicago setting (viewers may recognize local haunts Lost Lake, the Hideout, and the Jewelers Row stretch of Wabash), and a 31-year-old female protagonist.
The mother’s boyfriend (Ed Begley Jr.), a diamond importer on Jewelers Row, offers the daughter a job as a runner—a position typically given to pretty, inconspicuously dressed women whom no one would suspect of carrying precious stones in their pockets.
Singer comes from a show-business family. His late mother, Maureen Brookman, was a prominent agent at Stewart Talent at Chicago, and he and Jonathan were child actors. “Jon was in a couple of movies,” Singer says. “I got a couple of callbacks for Kramer vs. Kramer and then didn’t get it. I did commercials, catalog shoots, and stuff like that.”
Singer and his crew, including director of photography Andrew Wehde (the Netflix comedy special Bo Burnham: Make Happy), shot Imperfections during 18 days in Chicago last summer. “That meant shooting eight or nine pages a day a lot of the time,” Singer says, “and these were very dialogue-heavy scenes. So it required long takes and a lot of planning on my part, and getting actors who were able to go for three or four minutes at a time without needing to call for a line. And it came together.”
