Stefan Schaefer on writing & directing "Confess"

Confess is a political story about Terell, a young man who uses video confessions first to avenge wrongs in his own life … and then moves to gathering confessions for all of society’s sins. It is a movie about the power of both film and technology, an illustration of Marsahll McLuhan's famous assertion that the medium is the message.

For me, the most important lesson to take away from Confess is writer/director Stefan Schaefer’s willingness to use a variety of resources – the Fifth Night public reading series, a workshop at The Hamptons Screenwriting Conference, mentors and friends – to shape the strongest script possible for his low-budget directing debut.

What was your filmmaking experience before starting Confess?

In 1996 I started working in film and founded a company. Our primary focus has been short documentary work for non-profits. We’ve also done some commercial work and some music videos. That gave me a lot of production experience, but I'd also studied theater and writing prior to that. So I actually came to the company with more experience in writing than production.

I wrote my first screenplay in 1995, and of course like most first-timers I thought, "Oh, this won't be so hard." I'd read a bunch of screenplays and thought I had a decent understanding of structure and how to subvert structure.

I wrote three, maybe four screenplays before Confess, and none of them have been produced and they were basically an exercise on how to create a compelling story.

How did you come up with Confess?

In about 1999, I read this article in The New York Times about these young hackers who were being hired by security firms and the government to counter-hack and protect corporate and government assets. I thought it would be an interesting documentary to pursue. I started meeting with them, and they were all really reluctant to be interviewed and to go on tape. So I thought this was a great world, but it was hard to get access to it. 

At the same time I was reading about the revolutionary impulses happening in Southern Mexico and about Subcomandante Marcos, this charismatic revolutionary figure down there. He was using the media in an interesting way, writing these weekly treatises to the newspapers in Mexico City, and he became this underground media figure and revolutionary. And I got to thinking, what could an anti-corporate, anti-establishment quasi-revolutionary movement look like in the U.S.? 

These two influences led me to the idea that one of the few viable options for voicing political dissent and undermining government and corporate agendas is via the Internet.

So I began sketching out a story about an ex-hacker who begins a series of abductions and forced confessions which, when he broadcasts video clips of them via the Internet, gives him a mythic status among those who are disaffected, disillusioned, angry at the status quo. I talked to people about it and there seemed to be interest.

When you started, were you thinking you would direct it?

No, I didn't necessarily think I would direct it. Then the more I invested in it and thought about it, and felt strongly attached to it, the more I thought I could direct it. Then, when I thought of it in that way, I thought it would probably be relatively low-budget.

More and more people at that point were beginning to do DV features. And I'd shot so much documentary stuff in digital formats that I felt very comfortable doing that.

What process did you go through writing the script?

This was a script that helped me come up with the way I write now. I gave myself deadlines that I wanted to meet; I wanted to get a first draft done in X amount of weeks. So I would try to write every morning, five days a week at least.

It doesn't have to be that way. Things have evolved; I have a kid now. Now I go to a writing space, the Brooklyn Writing Space, that's the most productive place for me to be. It's a 24-hour access carrel situation, with no Internet access. I just find that without the distraction of a phone or checking e-mails or going on-line to do research and ending up deep in some Internet tangent, it helps me focus. 

I also used an outline/step sheet structure with Confess as we did revisions. I did a lot of drafts of this script. And I would go back to the Step Sheet and try to re-organize things. 

Did you start with an outline?

Yeah, in a basic way. Now I would have made it much more detailed than I did at that point. I think this was the first project where I actually did use an outline.

How did you get into the Fifth Night reading series?

I submitted it, randomly. They had an on-line submission and I sent it in, and like most of these things you submit to, after months you think it's just fallen into an abyss. But then I got a call from Alex, who runs it, and she was enthusiastic about it. So I was lucky enough to do it.

What were some of the benefits of having that reading?

I think it was a mile marker along the way toward production. There were two or three hundred people there, so I got a lot of feedback just in terms of the script, but also working with actors even just for an afternoon and hearing their feedback helped me decide that I definitely wanted to direct it.

And it also made the relationship with the producers more concrete. They saw real potential, they saw that people were interested in it. 

It was painful; there were moments where I remember standing up in the balcony watching and I just thought, "Oh my god, some of these scenes are just deadly." I wanted to hurl myself from the balcony.

So you saw some immediate changes you wanted to make while watching the reading?

Oh, yeah. And also having people react to it, laughing where you didn't think there should be a laugh, or just noticing people not being so engaged or really being engaged. I saw a lot of potential to make cuts, where scenes dragged on too long, the point was made, or ways that I could just jump right into a scene as opposed dragging it out as I had.

You also had a workshop for the script at the Hamptons Screenwriting Conference. How did that come about?

Going to The Hamptons came out of the Fifth Night reading. They were interested in projects that involved technology and so they asked me to submit it and I guess it fit into that category. 

They gave the script to two mentors, and I spent a full afternoon with Larry Lasker (War Games, Sneakers), talking about it. He'd read it in advance and gave me feedback. He helped me a lot with the structure of it, but he also said, "Up the stakes. Have him target higher-profile people."

What was interesting was that I saw parallels in the feedback I was getting, and they came from people from different backgrounds. I figured if these people who are much more experienced are seeing similar possibilities and problems, then I have to suck it up and realize that I need to look at it again. 

This was also true when we had a rough cut put together and started showing it to people. My feeling is that if three-quarters of the people are having a problem with a scene, then you've got to look at it.

At what point did you decide to use narration in the movie?

I had it in the earlier drafts, and then when we went into production we weren't totally committed to it. And then as we saw the cut coming together, we decided that we should bring it back in. So it was something that was there early on, and then pulled out in some of the middle drafts, and now it's back in there. I'm not in love with narration as a device, but people seemed to like it in this project.

Did you do any re-writing once your cast was in place?

Minor re-writing. More of the re-writing took place in post-production than on set. 

There was one scene that I'd rehearsed a couple of times, and in the rehearsals it just didn't seem to be working so well. It was the first scene where Terell and Greg re-meet each other. The actor who played Greg, in particular, wasn't happy with the climax of the scene. So I listened to that and wrote another version and we all felt that it worked a little better. 

So that was something that we rehearsed and then the day before we shot it I gave them the changes. It wasn't in the moment of actually shooting. There is some ad libbing in the movie, but by and large it was shot the way it was written.

At what point in the process did you decide to open the movie with the flash forward of the senator's kidnapping?

That was in post. That was driven by the whole idea of editing and re-editing, and the idea that it's kind of an edited universe and that Terell is editing what people are saying to make a point. We thought that would be an underlying idea while people are watching this movie.

That was one of the first structural changes that we made in post. We screened it for a few other filmmakers and that was an idea we had after hearing their comments, and we decided we'd try it. And we liked it.

What other structural changes did you make in post?

There were some second and third act scenes that we cut, sub-plots. They worked, the actors were good and the production value was good, but for the sake of moving the story forward and wanting to move toward the climax and resolution, they just seemed extraneous. It was hard for me, but in hindsight where I have a little better perspective, I feel like we made the right choices in terms of those scenes.

We had always scheduled in a couple days to do some pick-ups and re-shoots, and so that scene with Eugene Byrd and Melissa Leo on the pier, that was something that I wrote during post-production and had them come back. 

Jonathan Stern is a pretty experienced producer and he budgeted that we would have two extra days to do some pick-ups around the city but then also maybe do some re-shoots. So we were fortunate enough to have Eugene and Melissa come back and shoot that. I think it helps the emotional arc of the story.

How did you blow up the Hummer?

Digitally. We rented a Hummer and did it just with on-set camera movement and special effects -- and not holding on it too long! One of the investors said, "Couldn't we just see a little bit more of that?" And I said, "Yeah, if you want to pony up another fifty grand."

Were there any movies that inspired Confess?

For this movie we were thinking about, in terms of the building sense of paranoia and the camera angles and the surveillance motif, The Conversation.  That's one that we returned to the most in our discussions. 

But I also looked at a lot of tech movies, to see what I wanted to do and what not to do. Movies like pI thought were interesting. Then there were movies where I didn't want to go in that direction, like Hackers.

I wanted to have the technology be central to the story, but also not date it too immediately. In writing it, and then in shooting it, I tried to be aware of that.

One movie I talked about a fair amount with my DP, even though I'm not sure anybody would talk about these two movies in the same breath, was Amores Perros, just in terms of the chaos in the city and stuff always crossing the frame. That was something I was trying to build in a little bit.

What did you learn from writing Confess that you'll take to future projects?

I find that the more I write, and the more I write in a collaborative way -- working with producers -- the less angry I get when I hear criticism. That's just the evolution of it all. You get so attached to something, and it's great to be able to step back and hear comments and not see it as an attack. 

I don't know if it came specifically out of doing this project, but I feel like the more scripts I write, the better I am at hearing people and assessing whether I'm holding onto something for emotional reasons or whether it serves the story.

I learned the value in having mentors look at it or having a staged reading of it. It's interesting, this script has opened up a lot of things for me. People like this script and I got several jobs out of it, just the screenplay.

What's the best advice you've ever received about writing?

Keep doing it, very consistently, over and over. I think I've written fourteen screenplays, and most of them will never be produced. But I learned something from every one of them. 

Confess was interesting because it was a nod in the direction of a thriller, but it also had character evolution and arcs as a central part of the story; it wasn't so plot-driven. So trying to find that balance was a challenge. And it was also fun and exciting to see what I could take from a genre film but also have it be a political movie. 

Another part of the writing process was trying not to hit people over the head with the idea, and having it be something that people could have an emotional connection to and care about the character and want to go on a journey with this person.

In the earlier drafts, Terell had a political agenda from the first moment we met him. And now in the movie he's, in some ways, apolitical at the beginning of the movie. He's acting out of anger and spite, and the Ali Larter character helps shape and harness his anger into a political agenda that he then doesn't want to be part of at a certain point.  

That's very different from what it was originally, where he was this political guy who wanted to make a statement. I'm interested in political movies, but it's always a dance not to be too on the nose.

About how many drafts to you think you went through to create that balance?

Probably about fifteen, at least.

Do you have any advice for someone starting a low-budget script?

In hindsight, I'd say that I should have done a story about four people in a farmhouse. One location. But I think it's pretty dependent on where people are and what they're familiar with. The digital formats are enabling people to do so much now. 

We shot Confess in sixteen days and we had about thirty locations and a huge cast. And that was a lot to manage as a first-time director. I guess I'd recommend scaling it back a little bit. On the other hand, I think there are plenty of cases of really inventive ways of using the technology and shooting something cheap. 

I would encourage people not to worry so much about the budget. Write the script, get your ideas down, and then you can always tweak it. You can always change the location of a scene, you can always tone down the more expensive aspects of the script. I think it's pretty common that someone imagines it will be a five million dollar movie, and then all of a sudden two years later they get $500,000 or $300,000 and they're shooting it HD or in DV. 

It works differently, but it still works.

Dying to make a feature? Learn from the pros!

"We never put out an actual textbook for the Corman School of Filmmaking, but if we did, it would be Fast, Cheap and Under Control." 
Roger Corman, Producer

★★★★★

It’s like taking a Master Class in moviemaking…all in one book!

• Jonathan Demme: The value of cameos

• John Sayles: Writing to your resources

• Peter Bogdanovich: Long, continuous takes

• John Cassavetes: Re-Shoots

• Steven Soderbergh: Rehearsals

• George Romero: Casting

• Kevin Smith: Skipping film school

• Jon Favreau: Creating an emotional connection

• Richard Linklater: Poverty breeds creativity

• David Lynch: Kill your darlings

• Ron Howard: Pre-production planning

• John Carpenter: Going low-tech

• Robert Rodriguez: Sound thinking

And more!

Write Your Screenplay with the Help of Top Screenwriters!

It’s like taking a Master Class in screenwriting … all in one book!

Discover the pitfalls of writing to fit a budget from screenwriters who have successfully navigated these waters already. Learn from their mistakes and improve your script with their expert advice.

"I wish I'd read this book before I made Re-Animator."
Stuart Gordon, Director, Re-Animator, Castle Freak, From Beyond

John Gaspard has directed half a dozen low-budget features, as well as written for TV, movies, novels and the stage.

The book covers (among other topics):

• Academy-Award Winner Dan Futterman (“Capote”) on writing real stories

• Tom DiCillio (“Living In Oblivion”) on turning a short into a feature

• Kasi Lemmons (“Eve’s Bayou”) on writing for a different time period

• George Romero (“Martin”) on writing horror on a budget

• Rebecca Miller (“Personal Velocity”) on adapting short stories

• Stuart Gordon (“Re-Animator”) on adaptations

• Academy-Award Nominee Whit Stillman (“Metropolitan”) on cheap ways to make it look expensive

• Miranda July (“Me and You and Everyone We Know”) on making your writing spontaneous

• Alex Cox (“Repo Man”) on scaling the script to meet a budget

• Joan Micklin Silver (“Hester Street”) on writing history on a budget

• Bob Clark (“Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things”) on mixing humor and horror

• Amy Holden Jones (“Love Letters”) on writing romance on a budget

• Henry Jaglom (“Venice/Venice”) on mixing improvisation with scripting

• L.M. Kit Carson (“Paris, Texas”) on re-writing while shooting

• Academy-Award Winner Kenneth Lonergan (“You Can Count on Me”) on script editing

• Roger Nygard (“Suckers”) on mixing genres

This is the book for anyone who’s serious about writing a screenplay that can get produced! 

Roger Nygard on “Suckers"

Suckers provides an inside look at just how much car salesman take advantage of their customers. Written by director Roger Nygard and stand-up comic (and former car salesman) Joe Yanetty, the story takes us inside four consecutive Saturdays at a Los Angeles car dealership, as Bobby Deluca (Louis Mandylor) learns the ropes from Sales Manager Reggie (Daniel Benzali).

Nygard and Yanetty based their screenplay on Yanetty's actual experiences as a car salesman, proving yet again that truth is, indeed, stranger (and often funnier) than fiction.

(Be aware that this interview contains spoilers about key plot points.)

What was going on with you before Suckers?

ROGER: I'd been jumping back and forth between narratives and documentaries. I had just finished my first documentary, Trekkies, and was looking for another narrative. I find that they both inform each other, and I've learned and brought techniques from one genre into the other. So Suckers has a very real feel, like you're right there -- almost a pseudo-documentary style in the way it was shot.

That’s true, although it doesn’t look like one of those shakey-cam, fake documentaries that have become so popular lately.

ROGER: I really can't stand that "shakey camera on purpose" style in shows like ER, because a documentary cameraman tries to hold the camera steady and he doesn't shake it on purpose. A good handheld camera provides a little movement and a little energy to the shot without being obnoxious about it.

At that time I had made three movies. My first film was a one-man show, High Strung, a one-room comedy, written by and starring Steve Odenkirk. We made that film for about $350,000. Then my second film was a two million dollar action picture, Back To Back, for a company called Overseas Film Group. Their films are primarily foreign-sales driven.

I remember seeing Back To Back. There was, to put it mildly, a lot of action.

ROGER: You've got to have five action set pieces, that's the rule for those sorts of movies. That's what's expected from the foreign buyers to make their foreign sales. We had at least five; we might have had six. But five is the minimum requirement.

The third movie was Trekkies, my first documentary, about Star Trek fans.

In doing Suckers, I was coming off of those three films, which were all very different and driving my agents crazy, because they didn't know what I was. Am I the documentary guy, am I the action guy, am I the comedy guy? So Suckers was a new thing, a sort of grisly dramatic comedy, I guess, with some action.

Where did the idea for Suckers come from?

ROGER: My friend, Joe Yannetty, had written a one-man show about his experiences selling cars. I read portions of that and he told me some of the stories, and I said, "You've got to make a movie about this. These stories are incredible." So that's where it started.

Joe and I worked together writing the script, based on his experiences, which is a process for me as a screenwriter that works best. I almost always work with a writing partner. The reason is that I grew up in Minnesota with a pretty average background. I went to college, then moved to California to seek my fortune in the film business. I never got a job as a CIA agent, never went into the Marines, never became a fireman or a cop, didn't go on the road and get arrested or sell cars. You can't write about life experiences that you haven't personally lived, unless you research them extensively or partner up with someone who has lived those experiences.

My writing style is that I tend to write with people who have had interesting life experiences, but don't necessarily have the desire or the fortitude or the persistence to bring it to the screen.

Most screenwriters hate it when someone comes up to them and says, "My life would make a great movie," but it sounds like, depending on the person, you might sit down and talk to them.

ROGER: That's how I operate. I think everybody has one good screenplay in them, based on their own life. 

Your own life is often the first and best place to start for a screenwriter, because that's what you know -- as long as you're willing to rip open your soul. You have to bare yourself to the world in order to write something that other people will be interested in reading and possibly make into a movie.

It's not easy. It's hard. You've got to write things that you wouldn't even tell your shrink. Those are the screenplays that really stand out.

So when I say that everybody has one good screenplay in them, it's if they're willing to bare their soul and write about those skeletons in the closet, those experiences.

How did you and Joe work together?

ROGER: Joe and I sat in a room and would brainstorm. The brainstorming sessions would generally follow the format of me asking Joe questions and getting him to tell stories. I would write them down or tape them until we had all these anecdotes. 

I took all the anecdotes and boiled each one down to one sentence, and put them on note cards and laid them all out on the floor. We'd look at them on the floor and start moving them around until we had an order that we liked. 

You could do the same thing in a computer -- just type slug lines and create what's known as a "beat sheet," which is a list of story beats. And you can move them around, up and down, until you have a sequence of plot points. 

How did you come up with the idea of setting the story on four consecutive Saturdays?

ROGER: That was because that's how the car business runs. Every Saturday there's a sales meeting. It's an inspirational meeting, a motivational meeting. It's a time for everybody to gauge where they are against everyone else, because there's always that competitive aspect. 

So we broke it down that way because the industry we were writing about breaks itself down monthly and weekly. Every month they start over and the cycle begins again. The framework suggested itself to us because the arena we were writing about was based on a monthly structure.

How nervous were you about setting your whole first act at that first sales meeting?

ROGER: You know, we broke a lot of structural rules with Suckers. And in hindsight, there is a lot I would do differently, having learned what I've learned since then and having seen how that experiment worked, where it worked and where it failed.

Part of the excitement of filmmaking is taking chances. Sometimes you're going to fail spectacularly. And we took a big chance structuring the first act that way. But I don't think it was the biggest chance we took.

What was the biggest chance?

ROGER: The biggest chance in the script was doing a genre shift from the second to the third act, which many people found disconcerting. Audiences are not used to -- and don't like it -- when you shift from one genre to another in a movie. 

Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez did it in From Dusk 'Til Dawn. It starts out as kind of a crime caper/road chase movie and then shifts into a monster movie, which threw a lot of people. I think that film was less successful than it might have been because people just don't like genre shifts. They want to know what the genre is from the beginning of the movie, what's the level of reality of the story, and then you have to stick to it.

If you don't stick to one genre, then you're either taking a chance or doing an art film. 

Did you consider other possible climaxes and endings?

ROGER: I wish we had considered more, but as soon as we unearthed that story, it felt right to us. Again, looking back, yeah, I think we could have finished the movie just as engagingly and kept it in the car sales realm, without having to go into the crime and drug-trafficking realm.

But then you would have lost the opportunity to have virtually all of the film's characters shoot each other simultaneously in a very small room.

ROGER: Yes, and we would have lost my favorite line of the movie: "You're so beyond fucked, you couldn't catch a bus back to fucked." 

You kind of fall in love with some things, but in the editing room you spend time killing your babies. That's the term for it. Sometimes you have to cut out the things you're in love with for the good of the whole.

What did you do at the writing stage to keep the shooting budget down?

ROGER: There are a lot of things you have to consider when writing a low-budget script, because these are key considerations when the film is made. First of all, fewer locations, and secondly, fewer characters.

Every time you have a new location, it's a company move, which is very costly. And every new character is somebody who gets a residual check when the movie is released and airing in ancillary markets.

We had a pretty large cast in Suckers. I think we had 30-odd characters, which is a lot. The majority of our budget went to pay their SAG minimum wages. That's why you see a lot of movies with three or four characters in contained locations.

A first-time or novice screenwriter will write scripts that take place all over the world with hundreds of characters and it's just not realistic unless it's a $100 million-dollar blockbuster.

The more you keep budget in mind when you're writing a script, the more likely it is that that script can be made. You don't want your creativity to be restrained, but then as you're refining and re-writing you need to consider options like combining characters. Sometimes there's no reason to have this other character -- give all those lines to one of your leads, because the more lines your lead character has, the more castable it will be.

In hindsight, what other things would you have done differently?

ROGER: Besides being more wary of doing a genre shift, I think I would have stuck to a more traditional structure for the beginning. It's really tempting to try to invent a new genre and to write something that's never been written and break all the rules, but the problem is that audiences don't want that. They have either become accustomed to -- or it's just innate in storytelling and human enjoyment of storytelling -- to like a three act structure and what you might call the conventions of screenwriting.

That's why Syd Field's book, Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting and Robert McKee's book, Story: Substance, Structure, Style and The Principles of Screenwriting, are valuable, because they explore and lay out for you the conventions of screenwriting. 

And I think they're right, because if you're going to build a house, you can't invent a whole new framework and foundation. You really have to follow the fundamentals of building the foundation and framework, and then you can get creative with the cosmetic look of the house. That's where you get creative, but you have to learn the fundamentals and follow them if you want to be a successful screenwriter. 

There are art films and part of the job of an art film is to teach us about the rules by violating the rules. But don't expect to make a living being an artist. There are a lot of starving artists out there.

Have you bought a car since you made Suckers?

ROGER: Yeah, and Joe came with me. It was fun. Everything was exactly as expected. They never stop negotiating until you get up to leave. You have to get up to leave and go out the door and then they'll say, "Wait, wait!" Or they'll let you leave and then they'll call on the phone. Until they are certain you're done, they will keep negotiating with you.

What was the biggest lesson you took away from Suckers?

ROGER: The biggest one we already discussed, which is not to violate the rules so dramatically, which we did with the genre shift. That was my biggest lesson.

The corollary was to keep writing, always be writing. Like ABC from Glengarry Glen Ross -- ABC, Always Be Closing. ABW -- Always Be Writing.

The script I'm working on right now is something where I hatched the idea for it about three or four years ago, but I didn't know what to do with it. And it took three or four years of gestating within my brain before it started to form into a shape. It was an idea I told to one of my writing partners and he really sparked to it and so it moved itself to the top of the pile.

That's why you need to have a lot of ideas and a lot of projects and a lot of things going, because I think your subconscious is working on these projects at different paces. The more you've got going, the more likely one of them is going to sprout.

Were you still writing while editing?

ROGER: Editing is the final re-write of the script. You're always re-writing and moving sentences around, sometimes words and sometimes just syllables within words. You pluck and replace. You can get actors to pronounce things differently by moving their syllables around, and it's all toward getting the most expedient way to say something. Good writing is saying something as concisely as possible.

I worked for two years writing and editing promos for TNT and that was a great exercise, because it taught me to be as concise as possible. When you have a thirty-second or fifteen-second spot and you've got to tell a whole story, you're forced to think economically. 

A writer should think economically while writing a screenplay. Even though you have ninety minutes, you should treat every second of those ninety minutes just as judiciously as if you were doing a thirty-second commercial. 

Show it, don't say it, whenever you can.

Start every scene as late as possible. 

Cut out the walks. Nobody wants to watch somebody walk from one door to the other in a movie. You cut that stuff out, because there's no information there. 

If there's no information that informs the story in a shot or a line of dialogue, it has to go. Unless it's hilariously funny. That's my exception. If something's really engaging or funny, it can stay, even if it doesn't move the story forward.

What movies have inspired you?

ROGER: There are so many. Terms of Endearment I think is one of the greatest movies of all time, because it is a gut-wrenching drama and a hilarious comedy, all at once. It's so successful in both realms. It's a movie that amazes me. Real life is funny, real life involves drama and funny moments, and so I think those two coexist well when done well.

Evil Dead, Part II, which I think is the Citizen Kane of its decade because Sam Raimi invented a style of filmmaking that no one had done before. Now you see it all the time. Orson Welles invented a lot of shots and filmmaking styles that you didn't see before Citizen Kane, and so did Sam Raimi with Evil Dead, Part II.

The Hunger, similarly, introduced a new form of editing to movies. It was Tony Scott's first film and he was coming from commercials, so he was bringing that sensibility to moviemaking. He used flash forwards and flashbacks and fractured time structures, and that's where my introduction to fractured time structure in editing came from.

Dawn of the Dead was a very influential movie. George Romero is my hero; he influenced me greatly with that movie. It's so funny and such great social commentary as well as being brilliantly gory.

Any advice to screenwriters who are starting a low-budget project?

ROGER: The most important thing in any movie is that you make the audience feel something. They have to laugh or cry. Or both, preferably, like in Terms of Endearment. If the movie doesn't do that at some point, it's not going to succeed to nearly the same degree that a movie can succeed with an audience when it's done well. 

That's the most important thing: your work has to touch people in some way. And how do you know it does that? Because it has to touch you, first, when you're creating it and writing it. 

That's why if you bare your soul and write about those things in your life that make you cry when you think about them, because they're so painful or so funny or both, then you know that if you feel that way, an audience will feel that way.

Dying to make a feature? Learn from the pros!

"We never put out an actual textbook for the Corman School of Filmmaking, but if we did, it would be Fast, Cheap and Under Control." 
Roger Corman, Producer

★★★★★

It’s like taking a Master Class in moviemaking…all in one book!

• Jonathan Demme: The value of cameos

• John Sayles: Writing to your resources

• Peter Bogdanovich: Long, continuous takes

• John Cassavetes: Re-Shoots

• Steven Soderbergh: Rehearsals

• George Romero: Casting

• Kevin Smith: Skipping film school

• Jon Favreau: Creating an emotional connection

• Richard Linklater: Poverty breeds creativity

• David Lynch: Kill your darlings

• Ron Howard: Pre-production planning

• John Carpenter: Going low-tech

• Robert Rodriguez: Sound thinking

And more!

Write Your Screenplay with the Help of Top Screenwriters!

It’s like taking a Master Class in screenwriting … all in one book!

Discover the pitfalls of writing to fit a budget from screenwriters who have successfully navigated these waters already. Learn from their mistakes and improve your script with their expert advice.

"I wish I'd read this book before I made Re-Animator."
Stuart Gordon, Director, Re-Animator, Castle Freak, From Beyond

John Gaspard has directed half a dozen low-budget features, as well as written for TV, movies, novels and the stage.

The book covers (among other topics):

• Academy-Award Winner Dan Futterman (“Capote”) on writing real stories

• Tom DiCillio (“Living In Oblivion”) on turning a short into a feature

• Kasi Lemmons (“Eve’s Bayou”) on writing for a different time period

• George Romero (“Martin”) on writing horror on a budget

• Rebecca Miller (“Personal Velocity”) on adapting short stories

• Stuart Gordon (“Re-Animator”) on adaptations

• Academy-Award Nominee Whit Stillman (“Metropolitan”) on cheap ways to make it look expensive

• Miranda July (“Me and You and Everyone We Know”) on making your writing spontaneous

• Alex Cox (“Repo Man”) on scaling the script to meet a budget

• Joan Micklin Silver (“Hester Street”) on writing history on a budget

• Bob Clark (“Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things”) on mixing humor and horror

• Amy Holden Jones (“Love Letters”) on writing romance on a budget

• Henry Jaglom (“Venice/Venice”) on mixing improvisation with scripting

• L.M. Kit Carson (“Paris, Texas”) on re-writing while shooting

• Academy-Award Winner Kenneth Lonergan (“You Can Count on Me”) on script editing

• Roger Nygard (“Suckers”) on mixing genres

This is the book for anyone who’s serious about writing a screenplay that can get produced! 

Edie Falco on "Judy Berlin"

What the biggest difference between doing The Sopranos and doing an independent film?

EDIE: The budget on one episode of The Sopranos is higher than all the movies I've done, combined.

I know Eric Mendelsohn is a long-time friend. At what point in his process does he start to involve you?

EDIE: Usually he'll wait until a script is finished and then give it to me to read, which is what he did [with Judy Berlin]. After I read it and told him how much I loved it, he said “I would love for you to play the part of Judy.” I was flabbergasted, because he had not said a word to me about it.

I've read everything he's ever done and given my feedback, so I assumed that that's what this was.

What’s the advantage of doing a film like this with a long-time friend?

EDIE: A lot of the films I've done I've done with friends and family. The advantage is you go in there feeling no obligation to prove yourself. You're assuming that these people know who you are, at least socially if not more than that. There's a camaraderie and a trust that is inherent in just all of you being there together. I know they trust me and I trust them. It gets that all out of the way so we can get down to the work.

I know Eric kept you and Barbara Barrie (who plays Judy’s mother) apart before you shot your first scene together. Did that help?

EDIE: It sure did. Although I thought it was just a matter of scheduling. I thought, 'All right, I won't meet her until the day we shoot.' That's the way these things are. I think in retrospect it did help.

She was a woman around whom I was unfamiliar. You hold your body differently; eye contact is different than with someone that you're comfortable around. I think physically the relationship that Judy and her mother had sort of mirrored that of strangers. In that regard, the subconscious stuff that was already taking place probably only fed what was happening in the script. And I imagine that was his intent.

Is your preparation any different when you know you're going into a lowbudget project?

EDIE: No, not at all. Really nothing about my preparation or involvement is any different on anything I do. The only thing that varies is, if I read something and I like it, I'll do it. If I read something and I don't like it, I won't. Once I've decided I'm doing something, I approach everything exactly the same, whether it's a play or a movie or a low-budget movie or a big budget movie. It's irrelevant.

How is working on a low-budget movie different?

EDIE: You get a lot of directors who are nervous, and they don't trust themselves or they don't trust the process. So, they might end up doing a lot more takes than they need, as if the actor is an infinite source of these things. Because at a certain point I know I'm not doing work that I'm proud of anymore, I'm just exhausted. And they are just too afraid to say, 'Okay, let's move on.' And so you'll do another four, five takes, and I start thinking, 'Oh, this is not what I meant to do, this is not the take I want.' So that's a little rough.

But once you start doing things where they put you in a nice trailer, and you've got people running around and taking care of you, when you all of a sudden have to change clothes in the back of a Chevy again, you think, 'You know, this does kind of stink, come to think of it. I would prefer to be in a trailer right now.' 

So, I don’t know if I've been a little bit spoiled by some of the bigger budget stuff. And you realize there's a reason you're taken care of, because you want to show up and do the best you can each time you're out there. It does help to be rested and warm and all that stuff.

There are so many advantages to working on a low-budget project. I feel a totally comfortable with the idea of trying something and having it not work. I feel a sense of freedom to just go for it, because money is not at the forefront of everything that goes on in these things. You don't have a producer standing over you saying, 'We gotta make the day!' Everybody's just flying by the seat of their pants and I feel a sense of freedom that I don't when money is being talked about. 

Also, on a big-budget thing, there are a zillion people working on it. Oftentimes nobody knows who anybody else is and they don't necessarily care about their job, they're just trying to get enough days so they can become an AD. 

On these low-budget things, everybody's there because they want to be. They know the director, they love the work of the director, they're a friend and he needed a helping hand. You know you're not going to make money and you know it's going to be hard work and you're there because you love it. And that is infused in every moment you spend on the set of a low-budget movie. It's been my experience that nothing but good stuff will come out of that.

Judy Berlin has a really exceptional cast – Barbara Barrie, Bob Dishy, Madeline Kahn, Anne Meara, Julie Kavner. Was that intimidating at all?

EDIE: No. At a certain point, if you've dealt with a bunch of these people, you realize that they really are just people. And when it comes down to who's talented and who's nice, that's all I'm really impressed by these days.

Barbara Barrie was, I'm sure, thrilled to get a script that was so good. Doesn't matter what the budget is. You see this big budget stuff that's being made, and you read the script and you're thinking, 'How did this happen to this industry?' 

So you read a good script -- and my experience is, I don't care who's doing it, where it's being done, but I'd give my right arm to be involved in it. As far as I'm concerned, the most valued commodity in this industry is good writing. I was not at all surprised that he got the cast he did. 

I was really sick for a good part of that shoot. We did mostly night shoots, because of the eclipse stuff, and I had a stomach virus. And I thought to myself, 'There's no way I can do this. There's just no way." And there was. I showed up and I felt sick and I was somehow able to get through the days. I was pleased to see that I can show up for stuff even when I think I can't.  

Dying to make a feature? Learn from the pros!

"We never put out an actual textbook for the Corman School of Filmmaking, but if we did, it would be Fast, Cheap and Under Control." 
Roger Corman, Producer

★★★★★

It’s like taking a Master Class in moviemaking…all in one book!

• Jonathan Demme: The value of cameos

• John Sayles: Writing to your resources

• Peter Bogdanovich: Long, continuous takes

• John Cassavetes: Re-Shoots

• Steven Soderbergh: Rehearsals

• George Romero: Casting

• Kevin Smith: Skipping film school

• Jon Favreau: Creating an emotional connection

• Richard Linklater: Poverty breeds creativity

• David Lynch: Kill your darlings

• Ron Howard: Pre-production planning

• John Carpenter: Going low-tech

• Robert Rodriguez: Sound thinking

And more!

Write Your Screenplay with the Help of Top Screenwriters!

It’s like taking a Master Class in screenwriting … all in one book!

Discover the pitfalls of writing to fit a budget from screenwriters who have successfully navigated these waters already. Learn from their mistakes and improve your script with their expert advice.

"I wish I'd read this book before I made Re-Animator."
Stuart Gordon, Director, Re-Animator, Castle Freak, From Beyond

John Gaspard has directed half a dozen low-budget features, as well as written for TV, movies, novels and the stage.

The book covers (among other topics):

• Academy-Award Winner Dan Futterman (“Capote”) on writing real stories

• Tom DiCillio (“Living In Oblivion”) on turning a short into a feature

• Kasi Lemmons (“Eve’s Bayou”) on writing for a different time period

• George Romero (“Martin”) on writing horror on a budget

• Rebecca Miller (“Personal Velocity”) on adapting short stories

• Stuart Gordon (“Re-Animator”) on adaptations

• Academy-Award Nominee Whit Stillman (“Metropolitan”) on cheap ways to make it look expensive

• Miranda July (“Me and You and Everyone We Know”) on making your writing spontaneous

• Alex Cox (“Repo Man”) on scaling the script to meet a budget

• Joan Micklin Silver (“Hester Street”) on writing history on a budget

• Bob Clark (“Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things”) on mixing humor and horror

• Amy Holden Jones (“Love Letters”) on writing romance on a budget

• Henry Jaglom (“Venice/Venice”) on mixing improvisation with scripting

• L.M. Kit Carson (“Paris, Texas”) on re-writing while shooting

• Academy-Award Winner Kenneth Lonergan (“You Can Count on Me”) on script editing

• Roger Nygard (“Suckers”) on mixing genres

This is the book for anyone who’s serious about writing a screenplay that can get produced! 

Amy Scott on "Hal" (The Hal Ashby Documentary)

First, I want to say thank you for making the movie and thank you for making such a great movie because he totally deserved it. I would always wonder why of all the directors of the 70s and 80s, he was never really heralded the way he should have been. I think part of it has to do with that he had no discernible style. So, you couldn't really pick him for something. But before we dive into that, tell me a little bit about your background before you made Hal?

Amy Scott: Well, I'm from Oklahoma. I moved to Chicago, out of college and in college, we studied a lot of, I had a great professor at ODU at the University of Oklahoma. I don't think he's there anymore. But he really hipped us to the coolest documentaries. I had no idea that you could be a documentary filmmaker, like from Chris Marker to the 7-Up series to Hands on a Hard Body. It was just a really great, great, well-rounded Film and Media Program.

Anyway, I moved to Chicago. I wanted to be a director and a DP, but I fell down, I had gotten a job at the University of Chicago. I think I faked my way into it. I was supposed to start on a Monday, and I fell on the ice and broke my arm on a Friday. So I was like, “I can't shoot. I can't film. I can't use my arm to film and hold the camera. I need to learn how to edit. So I learned how to edit with my right hand, and I loved it. And then I just did that for like 10 years. Well, I mean, I still do it. But it was like this accidental career path.

You're an accidental editor.

Amy Scott: An accidental editor. That became something that later, I just valued as such an important skill set. I use it now. I have wonderful editors that I work with. But we speak the same language. And I think with the story structure, that you have an eye for things in the edit bay and now it really, really helps my ability to break down a three-act structure or figure out where the narrative arc is, and things like that. I think would have taken me a lot longer, had I not fallen and broken my arm.

It was sort of a similar path for Hal Ashby, starting in editing.

Amy Scott: Totally. I loved his films and then when I read Nick Dawson's book, and I started to learn more about him, I really, really connected with him. Because of things that he would say about filmmaking and editing and being in the edit bay and being obsessed with every frame. I felt like, being seen and heard. Like, “Oh, this is how I feel about it, too. I don't feel like such a freak of nature, and lots of people feel this way.” I really connected with Hal and he didn't make The Landlord I believe until he was 40 years old.

He was up there.

Amy Scott: Yeah, up there.

For a first-time filmmaker, that's a late start.

Amy Scott: And that was about the same age that I made the Hal movie.

What was your first experience with a Hal Ashby movie?

Amy Scott: The first film that I saw that I can remember was with my friend Jason in college. I was watching Truffaut and Cassavetes and so I thought that I had a very well-rounded understanding of the new Hollywood. And my friend Jason said, “Have you ever seen Harold and Maude?” I had no idea what he was talking about. He was a couple years older, and he was like, “Oh, honey, you're gonna skip school today. We're gonna watch it.” And I swear to God, we watched it. I couldn't believe what it was. I couldn't believe I'd never seen it. It somehow gone past me.

As soon as it was over, I was like, “Stop. Start it again.” We have to rewatch it. We where there for like eight hours, watching it on a loop. David Russell compares it to The Catcher in the Rye as a sort of like rite of passage for people at that age. It hit me right straight through the heart. And then from there, I think I saw The Landlord, someone had screen of The Landlord in Oklahoma City. And I was like, oh my god, this is incredible.

I live in Minneapolis, where Harold and Maude ran at The Westgate theater for two and a half years. I saw the movie quite a bit there. And then, because I was in a film program, and knew someone who knew the film critic for the local paper, when Ruth and Bud came to town for the two-year anniversary, he sorts of dragged me along with him. So, I had dinner with Bud Cort and hung out a little bit with Ruth Gordon. I made a little documentary on Super 8mm of my perspective on their experiences.  I was 15 years old or something and although I knew their itinerary, I couldn't drive. And so I would go to the TV station and shoot some stuff there with them and then they were on to something else. I had to hop on a bus to keep up with them.

Amy Scott: That's incredible.

Yes, my only regret was on that when I had dinner with Bud that I didn't ask better questions. I was sort of starstruck and there's a lot of question. I would ask him now—that I've tried to ask him—but you know, he's not too communicative.

Amy Scott: Yeah. That's incredible that you that you have that footage and I would love to see it.

It was really, really fun and interesting. Ruth Gordon was very much Ruth Gordon, very much Maude. She didn't suffer fools. So, you've seen Harold and Maude, seen The Landlord. At what point did you decide that a documentary had to be made?

Amy Scott: Well, okay, I was pregnant with my first child, and was finishing up Nick Dawson's book on Hal, you know, on Hal’s life. And I thought, I just couldn't believe there was a documentary. But this is before the market became oversaturated with a story about everyone's life. At the time, I just thought, oh my gosh, there's so much here. This guy, his films should be really celebrated. And he should be more known and revered in the canon of American 70s New Hollywood, because he's so influential.

And that's why it was important that we include David O Russell and Adam McKay, and Allison Anders, Judd Apatow. They could draw a direct connections, like the film family tree. When you see the wide shots in Harold and Maude, you think of Wes Anderson. Or, you know, the music, you think of David O Russell. I mean, his influence was everywhere. I started to connect the dots and I thought, oh, my gosh, we've got to, we've got to make a film here.

But I'd never done anything like that. I had directed smaller documentaries. I tried to make a film about this band called The Red Crayola and that was a hilarious attempt on my part. To try to chase them around the globe and on no money. That was my only experience outside of editing. So, fortunately, I had hooked up with my producing partners that I still work with now. I just met them at the time and they hired me to edit some cat food commercials. So it was editing Friskies or Purina, I don't know what it was. It was just looking at cats all day.

And I was about to give birth but I was working trying to lock down the rights And the rights came through one afternoon and I just pulled them (the producers) in and I was like, let's do this together. We didn't know what the hell we were doing, but it was so great and so fun. We approached it, like, all hands-on deck, and we were a little family making this thing. So, that spirit has continued, thank goodness, because of what we put into the Ashby movie.

What do you think were his unique qualities as a director?

Amy Scott: Gosh, so much. I just think he really had an eye. He could see stories. You said something earlier, that all of his films are not the same and therefore it's hard to go, oh, he's this style of filmmaker. But the thing that they all have in common is that he has a very real and raw approach at looking at humanity. Sort of holding the mirror up and showing us who we are, with all of our faults and complexities and layers of contradictions and failures. So he's able to see that and find the stories of humanity. And that's the connective tissue for me. He also had a sick musical taste; I mean, he sort of found Cat Stevens. The soundtrack to Shampoo—I think that's why it's not in wide release right now, as I can’t imagine having to license Hendrix and Janis and the Beach Boys, you know?

That's true. But I'll also say he had the wisdom to let Paul Simon do the small musical things he did in Shampoo, which are just as powerful or if not more powerful.

Amy Scott: So, powerful. So much restraint. Incredibly powerful. I feel like Hal, because he was not—from all of our research and talking to everyone and girlfriends and collaborators—he wasn't a dictatorial director. He didn't lay down mandates. He was really open to hearing from everybody and making it feel like it was a democratic scene and everyone has an equal voice. If you had an idea, speak up.

But at the end of the day, he was like, okay, here's the vision. And once he had that vision, I think that's where he really got into problems with the studio system. Because that was such a different time. The studio guys thought that they were also the director, that they were also the auteur. I cannot imagine a world where you throw your entire life into making a film and then a studio head comes along and tries to seize it from you. I mean, that would give me cancer, you know, from the stress. I can't imagine.

It certainly didn't match with his personality at all.

Amy Scott: No, not at all. What I thought was so fascinating was how open he was to ideas. I love that about him and it resonates in my microscopic ways of connecting to that now. Man, every time it pops up, I'm like, I feel this little Hal Ashby devil angel on my shoulders.

Yes, but it's odd. Because it's not like they didn't know what they were getting. It's not like he hid that part of his personality. You would know, immediately from meeting him that...

Amy Scott: Yeah.

With Harold and Maude, it was just a weird perfect storm of a crazy executive like Robert Evans saying yes to all these weird things. And then the marketing team at Gulf and Western/Paramount going, “we have no idea what to do.” You know, I had the Harold and Maude poster hanging for years. And it's the most obvious example of a studio that cannot figure out how to market a movie. The Harold and Maude different color name thing. It's just so obviously they didn't know what do.

Amy Scott: I know I love when Judd Apatow was talking about that. That's really funny.

So, what was the biggest thing that surprised you as you learned more about Hal?

Amy Scott: What surprised me was that side of his temperament. He did look like this peace love guy.  He was an attractive man but, you know, this long hair and long beard and so cool and I had a really myopic like view of what I thought his personality was. I thought he was a super mellow guy. And then I got in and started reading the letters. My producer, Brian would read the letters in his voice as a temp track that we would use that to edit to cut the film. And we were rolling, dying, laughing, like falling down, like, oh, my God, I cannot believe that Hal would write some of this shit to the head of Paramount or whoever. It was like, wow, this guy is not at all who I thought. These were fiery missives that he was shooting off into space.

It wasn't like just getting mad and writing an email. I mean, he had to sit on a typewriter.

Amy Scott: Typewriter and they were very, very long. I mean, the sections that we used in the film, were obviously heavily cut. We couldn't show like six pages of vitriol. The best part about the vitriol though, he wasn’t just vomiting, anger. It was a very poetic. He had a very poetic way of weaving together his frustration and expletives in a way that I just loved.

And then we turned the papers over to Ben Foster. That's why we wanted him to narrate—be the voice of Hal—because he's always struck me as an artist that totally gets it. Not a studio guy and he was all over it. He was right. You can really identify with this sort of, you're either with us or against us artists versus, the David and Goliath. So, that was most fascinating to me.

I knew—because of the book, because Nick did such a great job—I knew Hal’s story. Leaving his child, leaving Leigh. It's one thing to read about it in a book and it's a completely different thing to go meet that person, to sit with her. She's since become a dear friend to me. I feel like she'd never really spoken about that, about her dad and that time of her of her life. I think revisiting trauma on that level, and working through a lot of those emotions with her, was really heavy and not what I intended. When I set out to make the film, I was thinking about the films of Hal Ashby. I didn't think it would get as heavy as it did. I'm glad that we went there and that she took us with her. I feel really, really thankful. I think she got a lot out of it. We certainly did.

It really did show you just how complicated he was, the reality of his life, when you see the child. And she was so eloquent on screen.

Amy Scott: So great. He had some generational trauma too and then you put it all together, and you're like, okay, well, this is somebody that's really adept at looking deep into the human condition. He’d been through a lot. He'd made a lot of mistakes and he's been through a lot. So, of course, this checks out. And he's just so talented and creative, that he can make these films that are this really accurate, fun and funny and sad and tragic and beautiful portrayals of humanity.

Well, let's just if we can't dive into a couple of my favorites just to see if anything you walked away with.

Obviously, Harold and Maude hold a special place in my heart. I've just loved reading Nick’s book and reading and hearing in your film and in listening to commentaries about what Hal did to wrestle Harold and Maude into the movie that it is. I forget who it was on one of the commentaries who said there were so many long speeches by Maude that you just ended up hating her. And Hal’s editor's ability to go and just trim it and trim it and trim it. I compare what he did there to what Colin Higgins went on to do when he directed and he simply didn't have it. He had the writing skill, obviously, and the directing skills. He didn't have that editor’s eye. I don't think there's a Colin Higgins movie made that couldn't be 20 minutes shorter. If Hal had gone into Foul Play and edited it down, it would have been a much stronger comedy. 9 to 5 would have been 20 minutes shorter. Probably a little stronger. Anyway, you don't recognize that. It's all hidden. It's the edit. You don't know what he threw away and that's the beauty of Harold and Maude: within this larger piece he found that movie and found the right way to express it. So, what did you learn about that movie that might have surprised you?

Amy Scott: Everything surprise me about it. You know, we were never able to get Bud Cort. You know Bud Curt, he's so special and so elusive and we thought we thought we were gonna get him a couple times and then it was just a real difficult thing.

But you have him from the memorial service, and that's a great thing.

Amy Scott: Oh, yeah. Anytime he's on camera, he's bewitching. He's incredible. So we went again with the letters. I just didn't realize that Bud and Hal we're so close. I mean, obviously, they were close. But they were very tight. They had a real father son, sort of bond.

Charles Mulvehill, the producer, also talked about how difficult it was to make the film. I didn't know that Charles ended up marrying one of the women that is on the dating service that Harold's mom tries to set up. That was interesting, too. It's hard for me, to tell you the truth. We did so much research on all the films, so there's little bits and pieces of all.

Jumping away from Harold and Maude—just because my brain is disorganized—Diane Schroeder was with Hal for a number of years and she's in the film. She was sort of a researcher archivists, she wore many hats. I did not realize that on Being There, she really needed to nail down what was on the television Chauncey Gardiner learned everything from TV, so it was really important what was on it. When he's flipping, it's not random. She and Hal would take VHS tapes in or I guess it would have been Beta at the time, whatever the fidelity was, but they would record hundreds of hours of TV and watch it. She got all these TV Guides from that year, 1981. But what was a three year’s span, she had all the TV Guides.

She had everything figured out. It was like creating the character of Chauncey Gardiner, with Hal and then Peter Sellars got involved, and he had certain thoughts about it, too. I was just so blown away by the fact that that much care and effort and painstaking detail would go into it. When you see it on screen, it's definitely a masterpiece because of those things. Just the defness of editing, of leaving things out, is what makes it good. That is such a such a really hyper detailed behind the scenes thing to know that. When we were going through his storage space. I remember asking Diane, why are there boxes and boxes and boxes of TV. She said, “oh, yeah, that's Chancy Gardener's.” I said, I cannot believe you guys saved this. Really funny.

It's interesting because they would have done all that in post now. And they had to get that all figured out, before they were shooting it. That’s a lot of pre-production.

Amy Scott: Oh, an immense amount of pre-production. Hal set up an edit bay in his bedroom. It’s the definition of insanity. I had that going on at one point in my life and it's not good. It's not good thing to roll over and it's like right there like right next to pillows staring at you. You need some distance.

When I saw Being There for the first time for some reason I was in Los Angeles/ I saw it and of course loved it. And then came back to Minneapolis and someone had seen it and said, “don't you love the outtakes?” And I said, “What outtakes?” They said, “over the end credits, all those outtakes with Peter Sellars.” And I said, “there were no outtakes.” In the version in LA, they didn't do that.

Amy Scott: I wanted to add this, but we just ran out of time. We found all these Western Union telegrams that Peter Sellars wrote to Hal, just pissed, just livid, furious about that. He said, “You broke the spell. You broke the spell. God dammit, you broke the spell.” He was so pissed that they included those outtakes and I agree with them.

It’s not a real normal Hal move, is it?

Amy Scott: No, it's honestly the first time that I'd ever seen blooper outtakes in a film like that. That’s such an interesting 80s style, shenanigans and whatnot. But, yeah, no, you want them to walk out on the water after watching him dip umbrella in the water and think about that for the rest of your life.

Exactly. I think they left it out of the LA version for Academy purposes, thinking that would help with the awards. But then years later to look at the DVD and see the alternate ending and go, well, that’s terrible. I'm glad you guys figured that out. And then apparently, was it on the third take that somebody said, he should put his umbrella down into the water?

Amy Scott: That's so smart.

It's so smart. Alright. Shampoo is another favorite.  I'm curious what you learned about that one, because you had three very strong personalities making that movie with Robert Towne on one side and Warren Beatty on the other and Hal in the middle. It's amazing that it came out as well as it did. Somehow Hal wrangled it and did what he did. What did you learn there that sort of surprised you?

Amy Scott:  Well, that aspect is what we wanted to really investigate. Because Hal had a pretty singular vision. Hal as a director—at that stage—was becoming a very important filmmaker. So, then how do you balance the styles of Robert Towne and Warren Beatty? These guys are colossal figures in Hollywood, Alpha dogs. I wish that we could have sat with Warren. It was not for lack of trying. I think a lot of these guys that we couldn't get, it's like, yeah, that's what makes him so cool.

Bruce Dern. I was trying to chase down Bruce Dern at the Chase Bank, and he got up one day and I was just like, I knew, let it go.

But Shampoo, everything we learned, we put in the film. Robert Towne talked to us. And then there was the audio commentary that Hal had from his AFI seminars. Caleb Deschanel spoke pretty eloquently about it being like watching a ping pong match going back and forth between Robert and Warren about what the direction should be. And then the director sitting in a chair probably smoking a joint, waiting for them to finish. It seems like they might have needed a sort of mediator type presence to guide the ship, like have a soft hand with it, you know?

You can't have three alphas in the room at the same time. Nothing would get done. You need a neutralizing force and it seems like that's what Hal was it. He just had a really great taste, you know? My favorite element of that movie—besides Julie Christie's backless dress—would be Jack Warden. Anytime Jack Warden comes on screen, I'm like, just want to hang with him for another half hour. I can just watch that man piddle around and be funny.

I remember reading an interview with Richard Dreyfus after Duddy Kravitz came out, in which he was blasting the director, saying that they ruined Jack Warden’s performance in post-production. And Jack Warden is amazing in Duddy Kravitz. I don't know what they he thinks they did to it, because he's just fantastic.

Amy Scott: He must have just been astronomically amazing and funny, which is what I imagined he's was like.

I took away two things from Shampoo. One was—having seen Harold and Maude as often as I did—recognizing that the sound effects of the policeman's motorcycle as being the same one as George's motorcycle as he's going up the Hollywood Hills. Exact same ones.

But the last shot as he's looking down on Julie Christie's house and the use of high-angle shot, it is one of the saddest things I've ever seen. It's just a guy standing on an empty lot looking down onto the houses below, but it's … I don't know. Given the guys he was dealing with, I don't know how he made that into a Hal Ashby movie, but he did.

Amy Scott: He did. Well, it seems like it's moments like that yeah, there's so much melancholy loaded into that moment. Because George is such an interesting character. Now, I'm realizing that you and I have just blown, we've just spoiled the ending shots of both Being There and Shampoo.

Anybody listening to this who hasn't seen those movies deserves to be spoiled.

Amy Scott: Get on the boat. But yeah, that always got me. I think it's all of those really like, foggy misty Mulholland Drive shot of George on his motorcycle, anytime he's alone. Because he crams his life so full of women to try to fill the hole or the void or whatever he's got going on that's missing in his life. And he's just trying to shove it full of women. So, when he's alone, and he has nothing and no one you're like, oh, my God, this is the saddest thing I've ever seen.

It really is. I don't know. Maybe you can fill me in on this. I remember reading somewhere that the scene—his last scene with Goldie Hawn—they went back and they reshot it because somebody said he's standing. He should be sitting. And I'm always interested in directors who hear that and are willing to go back and do it.

The other example is Donald Sutherland in Ordinary People in his last scene. Telling Redford, “I did it wrong. I should be done crying. I was crying when I should have been done crying.” and they went back and reshot. His portion of it is no longer crying because the director went, you're right. And that simple notion of Warren Beatty should be sitting down, and she should be standing over him.

Amy Scott: She's got the power.

Yes. But I'm not sure a lot of directors would have said yes to that. Like, “We don't need to go back and do that. We're overscheduled we got other stuff to do …”

Amy Scott: Oh, I don't think Hal cared about the schedule at all. Everything that I read or, you know, even Jeff Bridges talked about, like them being over budget and he's like, “you know, all right, let's figure out a creative solution to this. It's going to take as long as it's going to take.” He never seemed to really get riled onset or let those sorts of parameters hold all the power and guide the filmmaking. He was in complete control of that.

Having that sort of attitude about things, that just spreads to the whole set. That spreads everywhere and makes it easier for everybody to work.

Amy Scott: It does.

Let's do one last one. Coming Home is interesting for me because I had friends who ran a movie theater here in town. It was just a couple of running it and I would come by from time to time if they were busy. I’d go up and run the projector for them. They had one of those flat plate systems, so you only had to turn the projector on. It wasn't that big a deal. But you know, I was young and it's like okay, now I'm going to turn the house lights down … I got to see the first five minutes of Coming Home a lot. Probably more than I saw the rest of the movie. Was there anything you learned about the making of that film that surprised you?

Amy Scott: Yeah, I didn't realize how hard it was to get that film made. Jane Fonda is the one that's really responsible for Coming Home even existing. Nancy Dowd had a book and Jane really fought hard to get it made. By the time it got to Hal, it was different, there was a number of rewrites. And it obviously had to be cut down significantly.

I never think—it's never my go-to—to think that one of the actors is the one responsible. Usually it comes to you in a different way, and especially if he's working with Robert Towne and the like. But I thought that was really cool and really interesting that Jane spoke about showing what our veterans were going through. This wasn't new, because you had like The Deer Hunter would have been the comparable. And that's a wildly different take on what coming home from the Vietnam War was like. But also, the woman's journey in that film, and the sexuality of all of that was just like, wow. Only Jane Fonda can speak about it eloquently as Jane Fonda does.

I also didn't realize— when we were sitting with John Voigt—that he was really method in the way that he didn't get out of his chair, I mean, for days on end. Going into crafty in the chair, learning how to do go up ramps and play basketball and all the things that you see was because he wouldn't get out of the chair, which was wonderful.

I really enjoyed talking with Jeff Wexler, and Haskell. That interview that we did with Haskell, I'm so thankful for because, you know, Haskell passed away, not that long after we film. That was one of his last interviews. So, it was really special. He came to the set and Haskell is like, a film God to me and my team. For me, I lived in Chicago so Medium Cool, was one of the coolest things ever. Meeting him and talking with him was so interesting.

I loved hearing about the opening. You can just tell it’s Haskell Wexler. You know it's a Hal Ashby film, but the way it starts and having seen Medium Cool, and going into that opening scene, where the all the vets are non-professional actors. They were actual vets that had come home and those were their true real stories. Now we would say it's sort of hybrid documentary and scripted, but it was like a really early use of that kind of style. And that's what made it feel so real and then you start in with the Rolling Stones, it's just such a masterly, powerful film.

I'm always curious about that sort of thing where he has a lot of footage and he's creating the movie out of it and what would Hal Ashby be like today? How different would his life be if he had everything at his fingertips and it’s not hanging out a pin over in a bin and he had to remember where everything was? I don't know if that would have been any made any difference at all?

Amy Scott: He was an early pioneer of digital editing. He was building his giant rigs and was convincing everyone that digital is the way to go. Which is so cool and so mind blowing. But I think it was born out of a place of independent film, of democratizing the access and taking the power away from the studios. And knowing that you could do this cheaply in your home. It was so actually tragic to learn that. What could he have done? Because his output was just, he put out so much so many great movies. So, what could he have done if the infrastructure was even more accessible and sped up technologically?

Imagine an 8-part streaming series directed by Hal Ashby, what would that be?

Amy Scott: Just be incredible. Well, I know that he was wanting to work. He had so many films that we found. And we found script after script. One of them, I was so, “damn, that would have been cool,” was The Hawkline Monster. A Richard Brautigan science fiction Western novel. It's so trippy and so cool. I feel like every couple of years, I hear about some directors says, “we got the rights, we're gonna make it.” And I'm like, when are they gonna make it? It's so long.

And imagine what his version of Tootsie would have been.

Amy Scott: Oh, I know. Yeah. No joke.

Just seeing those test shots. Wow.

Amy Scott: I know, it would have been a different film.

I read a quote somewhere that one of the producers or maybe it was Sydney Pollack, who said, they took the script to Elaine May. And she said, “yeah, it just needs…” And then she listed like five things: He needs a roommate that he can talk to …  the girl on the TV show, she needs a father, so he can become involved with him … there also has to be a co-worker who is interested in him as a woman … the director needs to be an ass, he should probably be dating the woman. It was like five different things. She said the script is fine, but you need these five things. So, what did they have? She just listed the whole movie.

Amy Scott: Right. Well, we're talking about Elaine May. She’s someone that needs a film.

She does. And why aren’t you doing that?

Amy Scott: Listen, I'm telling you. I've tried. This is another one that I've tried for years. You know, here’s a real shocker: It's hard to get a film about a female filmmaker funded. It's a hard sell.

She probably wouldn't want to do it anyway

Amy Scott: She's so cool. My approach has always been that she has so much to teach us still. So, I would love to get her hot takes on all those films. A New Leaf. I mean, the stories behind that thing getting made.

Like the uncut version of A New Leaf.

Amy Scott: Exactly. I want to hear it from her. So, yeah, that's high up on my list. I really, really want to make one with Elaine.

Was there anyone else you really wanted to get to? You mentioned Warren didn't want to talk to you. Anybody else?

Amy Scott: I would have loved Julie Christie or, you know, more women would have been great. Bruce Dern was so great and so funny and I’d seen him a number of times. I saw he was at a screening of one of his movies. He talked for like, an hour and a half before they even screened the film. He was whip smart in his memories. I was so upset that we couldn't work it out because I knew that he would be incredible.

Just his knowledge of movie industry, having been in it so long.

Amy Scott: My gosh, yeah.

He even worked with Bette Davis.

Amy Scott: Yeah, he's national treasure. Exactly. I was just staring at a poster. I have framed poster of Family Plot in my kitchen.

That's the movie that was going to make him a star, according to Hitchcock. It still has one of the greatest closing shots of all time. I think I read that Barbara Harris improvised the wink, and that's another person who you should make a documentary about.

Amy Scott: Oh my gosh. Barbara Harris is something. Do you remember what was the film that she was in with? Dustin Hoffman and Dr. Hook scored it. It's a really long title.

Who Is Harry Kellerman And Why Is He Saying These Terrible Things About Me?

Amy Scott: That is such a phenomenal Barbara Harris performance. I mean, Dustin Hoffman is incredible. He's always great. But Barbara Harris really shines and I guess I'm like, that's who she was. Yeah, I think she was difficult. Well, I don't know, difficult.

She had stuff she was dealing with.

Amy Scott: She had issues and Hal had to deal with those on Second Hand Hearts too.

From a production standpoint, people are interested in hearing what your Indiegogo process was Any tips you'd have for someone who wants to fund their film via Indiegogo?

Amy Scott: Oh, boy. Well, that was a different time, because I really don't know how films are funded at the moment. This came out five years ago, but it took us like six years to make. So, during in that time, you could at least raise enough capital to get through production.

The Indiegogo campaign enabled it so that we could even make the movie, because everything past that point, nobody ever got paid at all. But at least that way, we could buy film stock and pay the camera operators and our DPs and stuff. So, that was hugely important.

At the time, I remember thinking like, oh, no, how are we ever going to get anybody to because you had to make these—I don't know if this is still the case—but you had to make these commercials for your project or like a trailer to get people's attention. And you had to be all over Facebook and crap like that. So, I was like, oh, no, how am I going to make a thing that shows that Hal Ashby's important to people that want to give money?

A friend somehow knew John C. Reilly and mentioned it to him. It was like, we just need a celebrity to come in for like, you know, half a day or one hour. And he said, I'll come on down and do that. And he came. I couldn't believe it. The generosity of this man. He didn't know us at all. But he knew and loved the films of Hal Ashby and wanted to give back and pay it forward.

So, he came down and because of him, we have a really funny, awesome little commercial trailer.  I have no idea where that thing even is. I'd love to see it because I had to do it with him, which was terrifying, because I am not a front of camera person. I didn’t know what to say. And he said, All you have to do is ask for money. I'll all do the rest of the talking.

I remember seeing it.

Amy Scott: It’s been stripped from Indiegogo which probably means that we used a song that we weren't able to. That was back in the early days of crowdfunding, where you could just take images or songs and  I'm sure I used the music of Cat Stevens, and then, loaded up with a bunch of photos that we never paid for.

Well, that brings up a question of how did you get all the rights to the stuff you got for the finished movie? Was that a huge part of your budget?

Amy Scott: No. The most expensive thing always to this day is music. Music is going to get you. Outside of that, thank goodness, there's this little thing called fair use now, which wasn't the case in documentary filmmaking for a very long time. But now you can fair use certain elements, photographs, or news clips, video clips, anything that sort of supports your thesis that you're making about your subject and supports your storyline falls under the category of fair use.

So, I think what our money did pay for is the fair use attorneys that that really go over your product. They went over out fine cut, because we couldn't afford to pay for multiple lawyers to look at it. So you give them a fine cut, you hold your breath and hope that they say, oh, you know, you only have to take out a couple things. And you're like, oh, thank God. Okay, and then you change it.

I believe, because we never had any money, that we submitted to Sundance and got in on a wing and a prayer. And then had, you know, two weeks to turn the film around and get it, finished. I remember we were like, you know, pulling all these all nighters, trying to change the notes that the legal said XY and Z was not fair use and trying to swap out music with our composer. It was a wild, wild run.

Isn’t that always the way? You work on it for six years and then suddenly you have two weeks to finish it.

Amy Scott: That's how it shook out for us. It was like really, really pretty funny, because you're going on a leisurely pace until you're not. And then it's like, alright, it's real now. I thought for years, I think my friends and casual acquaintances thought that I've lost my mind. Because every year, I'd see people that I would see occasionally and they're like, hey, how's it going? What are you working on? I'm like, I'm just working on this Ashby's movie. And they were like, year after year, like damn. She's like, we need to reel her in and we need to throw her a lifeline. No, really, I really, really am. So, it was pretty funny. We were. We did it.

People have no idea how long these things take.

Amy Scott: It's unfunded. But you know, then we got lucky after that, because we nearly killed ourselves on Hal. Then we kind of fell into the era of streaming deals and streamers. And then people were like, oh, we want to make biopics and we want to give you money to make a biopic. And that was truly our first rodeo. We're like, oh, my gosh, what? This is incredible. We can get paid for this.

Now that's falling away. This streaming industry is, you know, collapsing in on itself as it should, because there's no curation anymore. And it's like, let's return to form a little bit here, guys. So, we're just riding the wave. I say it's like we're riding trying to learn how to ride a mechanical bull this industry. I’m a tomboy. So, every local Oklahomans is up for the ride.

Let me ask you one last question. I'll let you go then. So, as a filmmaker, what did you learn doing a deep dive into the work of this director and editor and you are a director and editor? So, that's sort of a scary thing to do anyway, to be the person who's going to edit Hal Ashby. What did you learn in the process that you can still take away today?

Amy Scott: Well, listen, we joke about it all the time. My producer, Brian Morrow and I are constantly going, oh, what would Hal do? Everything that he stood for, as a filmmaker. The film will tell you what to do. Get in there, be obsessed be the film, all of those things.

I get this man because I feel the same way. So, when we like took a real bath in Hal Ashby's words for years, that sort of that shapes the rest of your life as a filmmaker. You're not like a casual filmmaker after going through like the Ashby's carwash. That stuff's sticks.

But I'm proud. I'm proud that that we pulled it off. I'm proud that we were able to make the movie. Somebody would have done it, because Hal is too great and too good, and he just has deserved it for so long.

The only thing that we've ever wanted was that we wanted people to go back and watch his films, or to watch him for the first time if they had never seen him. And then to take his creative spirit forward. Be in love with the thing that you make. It’s your lifeforce.

So, otherwise, what is it all for, you know? So, yeah, that's what I got from him.

Dying to make a feature? Learn from the pros!

"We never put out an actual textbook for the Corman School of Filmmaking, but if we did, it would be Fast, Cheap and Under Control." 
Roger Corman, Producer

★★★★★

It’s like taking a Master Class in moviemaking…all in one book!

• Jonathan Demme: The value of cameos

• John Sayles: Writing to your resources

• Peter Bogdanovich: Long, continuous takes

• John Cassavetes: Re-Shoots

• Steven Soderbergh: Rehearsals

• George Romero: Casting

• Kevin Smith: Skipping film school

• Jon Favreau: Creating an emotional connection

• Richard Linklater: Poverty breeds creativity

• David Lynch: Kill your darlings

• Ron Howard: Pre-production planning

• John Carpenter: Going low-tech

• Robert Rodriguez: Sound thinking

And more!

Write Your Screenplay with the Help of Top Screenwriters!

It’s like taking a Master Class in screenwriting … all in one book!

Discover the pitfalls of writing to fit a budget from screenwriters who have successfully navigated these waters already. Learn from their mistakes and improve your script with their expert advice.

"I wish I'd read this book before I made Re-Animator."
Stuart Gordon, Director, Re-Animator, Castle Freak, From Beyond

John Gaspard has directed half a dozen low-budget features, as well as written for TV, movies, novels and the stage.

The book covers (among other topics):

• Academy-Award Winner Dan Futterman (“Capote”) on writing real stories

• Tom DiCillio (“Living In Oblivion”) on turning a short into a feature

• Kasi Lemmons (“Eve’s Bayou”) on writing for a different time period

• George Romero (“Martin”) on writing horror on a budget

• Rebecca Miller (“Personal Velocity”) on adapting short stories

• Stuart Gordon (“Re-Animator”) on adaptations

• Academy-Award Nominee Whit Stillman (“Metropolitan”) on cheap ways to make it look expensive

• Miranda July (“Me and You and Everyone We Know”) on making your writing spontaneous

• Alex Cox (“Repo Man”) on scaling the script to meet a budget

• Joan Micklin Silver (“Hester Street”) on writing history on a budget

• Bob Clark (“Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things”) on mixing humor and horror

• Amy Holden Jones (“Love Letters”) on writing romance on a budget

• Henry Jaglom (“Venice/Venice”) on mixing improvisation with scripting

• L.M. Kit Carson (“Paris, Texas”) on re-writing while shooting

• Academy-Award Winner Kenneth Lonergan (“You Can Count on Me”) on script editing

• Roger Nygard (“Suckers”) on mixing genres

This is the book for anyone who’s serious about writing a screenplay that can get produced! 

Russell Emanuel on "Occupants"

What was your filmmaking background before making "Occupants"?

RUSSELL: “Occupants” is my fourth feature film.  I started making films in 2002 with “Her Knight” and “Girl with Gun” after studying cinema at the University of Southern California and taking UCLA Extension courses.  There, I met my filmmaking partner Emile Haris whom we have worked on all my films since then.  

Because of the success of “Girl with Gun”, which got into numerous festivals including San Diego Comic-con, it got the attention of my future producer Howard Nash who had put together a feature film script called “P.J.” which had John Heard and Robert Picardo already attached.

Since then, we worked on the features “Chasing the Green” starring Jeremy London, Ryan Hurst, William Devane, Robert Picardo, “The Legends of Nethiah” starring Robert Picardo, Jeremiah Sayys, Jared Young, “Occupants” starring Briana White, Michael Pugliese, and Robert Picardo, and most recently “The Assassin’s Apprentice” starring Tarah Paige, Marina Sirtis, and Robert Picardo, which we shot in early December 2016.

How did you get connected to Julia Camara's script and what was the process for getting the script ready to shoot?

RUSSELL: It was the producer Howard Nash who optioned her script in February 2014.  He then showed me the script and I was immediately hooked.  The process involved getting the funds which we successfully raised on the crowdfunding site Indiegogo (106% raised).  

Once that happened, we cast the film and hired the crew and turned Julia’s wonderful script into a shooting script based on the location we found.

What was your casting process, and did you change the script to match your final cast?

RUSSELL: The casting process involved holding auditions for the main role of Annie Curtis – we had 24 actresses whom we auditioned alongside our lead actor Michael Pugliese (who played Neil Curtis, the husband of Annie).  Also, there was our Director of Photography, the aforementioned Emile Haris.  Once Michael and Emile and I discussed whom we liked, we called back five actresses and picked Briana White who was a perfect fit for the role.

And yes, one role we changed to reflect the actual cast – that was the role of Dr. Alan Peterson of the Peterson Research Institute, played by Robert Picardo (the role was originally for a woman, but was changed because of Julia’s love of “Star Trek” and the fact that Howard and I have worked with Robert before on four projects).

What type of camera(s) did you use and what did you love (and hate) about it?

RUSSELL: We used the Canon 7D and HVX200 cameras.  I loved how they were able to get us the vibrant colors we needed in the film.  I really enjoyed shooting with these cameras, even though it was 2K and not 4K.

Did the movie change much in the editing, and if so, why did you make the changes?

RUSSELL: The movie did change during the editing and that was to reflect some videos that Robert Picardo’s character sent to Annie and Neil Curtis to show they aren’t the only ones experiencing the parallel universe phenomena that was seen in the film.  

Originally in the script, it just mentioned “some video.” So, during post-production, we actually created an official Peterson Research Institute video with actor Chris Winters as the representative and shooting various people around the world who recorded their sightings.  You can actually see them at this site: http://www.pri-research.info/

Can you talk about your distribution plan for recouping costs?

RUSSELL: We got distribution through ITN Distribution headed by Stuart Alson who is busy going to various markets including Berlinale and selling the film.  In order for him to be able to do that, we got the film into thirty-plus film festivals all over the United States, Canada, and Russia.  

We also won awards such as the “Best Sci-Fi Feature” award at Shriekfest, one of the top horror festivals in the United States, seven awards at the Dazed 4 Horror Film Festival, and just last week the “Best Director” and “Audience Choice” award at the SoCal Film Festival. To date, we won 19 awards and have been nominated for 12 more.

What was the smartest thing you did during production? The dumbest?

RUSSELL: The smartest thing we did during production was finding our location through Air Bnb. This was a suggestion by the producer Howard Nash and I was so relieved when we found the house we shot at.  Since we technically “owned” the place for 12 days, I was able to stay there for the duration of the shoot. We were also able to leave the equipment there for each of the days, which helped with set-up times.  It made for an efficient 10-day shoot.

The dumbest thing was not getting a professional hair-dye job for our lead actress Briana White when she transformed from real Annie Curtis to parallel Annie Curtis on Day 8.  It took our makeup artist Alisha Baijounas 3 tries because the over-the-counter hair dye job turned our actresses’ hair from blonde to gray (and not brunette as we wanted).  We ended up using a permanent dye and paying for her to turn it back to blonde after production wrapped.  Basically, we tried to save money but ended up spending way more.

And, finally, what did you learn from making this feature that you will take to other projects?

RUSSELL: Always have a preparation day that helps with setting up equipment and production design and giving the actors a chance to see the set during pre-production so they can prepare for their roles.  I was glad we were able to do this and it helped tremendously.

Dying to make a feature? Learn from the pros!

"We never put out an actual textbook for the Corman School of Filmmaking, but if we did, it would be Fast, Cheap and Under Control." 
Roger Corman, Producer

★★★★★

It’s like taking a Master Class in moviemaking…all in one book!

• Jonathan Demme: The value of cameos

• John Sayles: Writing to your resources

• Peter Bogdanovich: Long, continuous takes

• John Cassavetes: Re-Shoots

• Steven Soderbergh: Rehearsals

• George Romero: Casting

• Kevin Smith: Skipping film school

• Jon Favreau: Creating an emotional connection

• Richard Linklater: Poverty breeds creativity

• David Lynch: Kill your darlings

• Ron Howard: Pre-production planning

• John Carpenter: Going low-tech

• Robert Rodriguez: Sound thinking

And more!

Write Your Screenplay with the Help of Top Screenwriters!

It’s like taking a Master Class in screenwriting … all in one book!

Discover the pitfalls of writing to fit a budget from screenwriters who have successfully navigated these waters already. Learn from their mistakes and improve your script with their expert advice.

"I wish I'd read this book before I made Re-Animator."
Stuart Gordon, Director, Re-Animator, Castle Freak, From Beyond

John Gaspard has directed half a dozen low-budget features, as well as written for TV, movies, novels and the stage.

The book covers (among other topics):

• Academy-Award Winner Dan Futterman (“Capote”) on writing real stories

• Tom DiCillio (“Living In Oblivion”) on turning a short into a feature

• Kasi Lemmons (“Eve’s Bayou”) on writing for a different time period

• George Romero (“Martin”) on writing horror on a budget

• Rebecca Miller (“Personal Velocity”) on adapting short stories

• Stuart Gordon (“Re-Animator”) on adaptations

• Academy-Award Nominee Whit Stillman (“Metropolitan”) on cheap ways to make it look expensive

• Miranda July (“Me and You and Everyone We Know”) on making your writing spontaneous

• Alex Cox (“Repo Man”) on scaling the script to meet a budget

• Joan Micklin Silver (“Hester Street”) on writing history on a budget

• Bob Clark (“Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things”) on mixing humor and horror

• Amy Holden Jones (“Love Letters”) on writing romance on a budget

• Henry Jaglom (“Venice/Venice”) on mixing improvisation with scripting

• L.M. Kit Carson (“Paris, Texas”) on re-writing while shooting

• Academy-Award Winner Kenneth Lonergan (“You Can Count on Me”) on script editing

• Roger Nygard (“Suckers”) on mixing genres

This is the book for anyone who’s serious about writing a screenplay that can get produced! 

Ali Selim on "Sweet Land"

The purpose of these interviews is to help demystify the filmmaking process ... 

ALI SELIM: First, let me tell you, I can't help you de-mystify it. It's the most mysterious thing I've ever done, still to this day. 

Had you ever written a screenplay before this? 

ALI SELIM: No. I dabbled. I took a screenwriting class from Tom Pope in 1984, and I churned out something to get a grade. I can't even remember what it was. Then we had this idea when I was at Departure Films in 1989 that we were going to try and make a movie and I think I cranked something out then as well. But again, I don't even remember what it was. I just didn't know any better. I thought you slap some words on a page, got the camera out and that was that.  

This was really my first effort at telling a story that was structured and constructed. But had I put words on a page before? Yeah. Had I ever done anything seriously or taken myself seriously? I think this was the first time. 

Did you think about budget at all while you were writing Sweet Land? 

ALI SELIM: No, I guess I didn't. If I had thought about that, I think the script would look very different. No, I just let it rip and left it up to (producer) Jim Bigham to make it happen. He was great. He's an old friend and he really connected with the script for a lot of reasons. He wasn't just a Line Producer, he was a guy who really wanted to see it made.  

He was the one guy who would go through the script with me and say, "If we get rid of this, it will make that better." He was great about hanging on to the parts of the story that would drive it forward, and yet getting rid of the things that were a little too big. He was more budget conscious, and that caused me to re-write, I guess, but while I was writing I didn't really think about it. 

Was there anything you were sorry to lose because of budget restraints? 

ALI SELIM: There was nothing I was sorry to lose. I learned a lot from Jim Bigham about how to be efficient, not how to be cheap or just say no -- let's be efficient and talk about what the story is. When you don't have millions and millions of dollars and tons of days, I think you just naturally give up some of those shots that you would see in King Kong, which are great -- those big, wide street scenes of New York -- but I don't know that we need them in a film like this.  

There were a lot of those little things along the way where, if we'd had the money, yeah, we'd get the train pulling away from the station as she was walking away, but you don't necessarily need it. 

Did you re-write it at all after it was cast, to fit the actors you cast? 

ALI SELIM: A little bit. I think I did a lot of re-writing for Ned Beatty, who was interested and willing to be a little more terse and mean. The character wasn't originally that way, and I like what he brought to it. And so I re-wrote a lot of his dialogue to reflect that. 

I re-wrote Frandsen, too. My grandparents had a friend like that character, an immigrant living hand to mouth on a farm in Minnesota, and yet he was more influenced by what he heard of vaudeville and what he saw at the movies than what his real life was. It took Alan (Cumming) a little while, but when he got that, we re-wrote Frandsen to make him more fun in that way. 

Do you think you wrote it any differently because you knew you would be directing it? 

ALI SELIM: I don't think so. I don't know what writing another kind of script is like, so I don't know if I adapted this to the fact that I was going to be directing. 

I do know that my writing is vastly more sparse or suggestive than most screenwriters. My Assistant Director was pulling his hair out, saying "It's not in the script, it's not in the script!" And I think, actually, that's what attracted the actors to it. It doesn't have the kind of screen direction that says, "She raises her left hand and puts it on the cool granite counter." There's none of that in there. It's more just a kind of rumbling suggestion, and I think the actors really seemed to appreciate that, because they all talked about not only the sparseness of the dialogue, which is as sparse as the script. 

I'm writing another script now and I'm finding that it really isn't just the taciturn Scandinavian farmers that caused me to write that way, it's really more my writing style. 

Are there any lessons from Sweet Land that you'll take to future projects? 

ALI SELIM: I think I learned some lessons about dialogue -- how much actors really bring to the show. We did a couple rehearsal readings in Montevideo, once all the actors arrived. And immediately following those readings, I think I went through and cut about half of the dialogue. Just watching their faces, I thought, Boy, they don't even need to memorize this stuff in Norwegian or German or whatever it is, they just need to act and look and work between the lines.  

And then when we started editing, I bet we lost another half of what was left. And I'm finding that it's really helpful in writing the next script. Write it for the actor, don't write it for the producer who's reading it. 

Dying to make a feature? Learn from the pros!

"We never put out an actual textbook for the Corman School of Filmmaking, but if we did, it would be Fast, Cheap and Under Control." 
Roger Corman, Producer

★★★★★

It’s like taking a Master Class in moviemaking…all in one book!

• Jonathan Demme: The value of cameos

• John Sayles: Writing to your resources

• Peter Bogdanovich: Long, continuous takes

• John Cassavetes: Re-Shoots

• Steven Soderbergh: Rehearsals

• George Romero: Casting

• Kevin Smith: Skipping film school

• Jon Favreau: Creating an emotional connection

• Richard Linklater: Poverty breeds creativity

• David Lynch: Kill your darlings

• Ron Howard: Pre-production planning

• John Carpenter: Going low-tech

• Robert Rodriguez: Sound thinking

And more!

Write Your Screenplay with the Help of Top Screenwriters!

It’s like taking a Master Class in screenwriting … all in one book!

Discover the pitfalls of writing to fit a budget from screenwriters who have successfully navigated these waters already. Learn from their mistakes and improve your script with their expert advice.

"I wish I'd read this book before I made Re-Animator."
Stuart Gordon, Director, Re-Animator, Castle Freak, From Beyond

John Gaspard has directed half a dozen low-budget features, as well as written for TV, movies, novels and the stage.

The book covers (among other topics):

• Academy-Award Winner Dan Futterman (“Capote”) on writing real stories

• Tom DiCillio (“Living In Oblivion”) on turning a short into a feature

• Kasi Lemmons (“Eve’s Bayou”) on writing for a different time period

• George Romero (“Martin”) on writing horror on a budget

• Rebecca Miller (“Personal Velocity”) on adapting short stories

• Stuart Gordon (“Re-Animator”) on adaptations

• Academy-Award Nominee Whit Stillman (“Metropolitan”) on cheap ways to make it look expensive

• Miranda July (“Me and You and Everyone We Know”) on making your writing spontaneous

• Alex Cox (“Repo Man”) on scaling the script to meet a budget

• Joan Micklin Silver (“Hester Street”) on writing history on a budget

• Bob Clark (“Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things”) on mixing humor and horror

• Amy Holden Jones (“Love Letters”) on writing romance on a budget

• Henry Jaglom (“Venice/Venice”) on mixing improvisation with scripting

• L.M. Kit Carson (“Paris, Texas”) on re-writing while shooting

• Academy-Award Winner Kenneth Lonergan (“You Can Count on Me”) on script editing

• Roger Nygard (“Suckers”) on mixing genres

This is the book for anyone who’s serious about writing a screenplay that can get produced! 

Writer/Director Whit Stillman on “Metropolitan”

Whit Stillman's Metropolitan exists in a timeless New York past brimming with debutant balls and ultra-classy cocktail parties. His clever examination of this universe is set primarily at after-parties, allowing him to comment on the upper class without going to the expense of recreating their soirées.

This true comedy of manners, based on Stillman's own experience of skirting the upper crust, put him on the map as a filmmaker to watch and resulted in a well-deserved Academy Award nomination for his literate and witty screenplay.

What was going on in your life and your career before Metropolitan?

WHIT: I was in transition. I had a journalism job; it was for a publication where they overpaid us a bit and they went out of business. So I was left in 1980 with some savings and I wanted to get into the film business. 

On a trip to Spain, I read a Variety special issue on the Spanish film industry, which showed that there were opportunities to sell Spanish films in the United States. I met a few Spanish filmmakers on my trip, talked to them about the opportunities to sell their films in the United States, and I ended up within a year being a sales agent for a lot of really good Spanish films.

So I did that from 1980 until 1983 and that was when it really starting paying off, in the sense that one of the filmmakers, Fernando Colomo, came to New York to make his own film, Skyline, and I helped him on it. It was made for nothing, with a four-person crew and one comic actor brought over from Spain. 

We re-enacted Fernando Colomo's real experiences in New York, so I was in the film in an analogous role to my real role with Fernando. The film turned out really well, it was in the New Directors series at the Museum of Modern Art and got a release and good reviews and did really well in Spain.

That same summer, another filmmaker I was representing, Fernando Trueba, who did the film Belle Epoque that later won the Oscar, made his second film, and I was hired to play the Stupid American, an annoying character. I was in Madrid quite a bit that summer -- since I was an unimportant guy they could schedule around me -- so I had long weeks of waiting. With the per diems, I made more money than I think I ever did as a foreign sales agent for Spanish films. It was right before that shoot that I started to write the script for Barcelona. And I realized, as time went on, it was too big and ambitious a project to do first. 

In the summer of 1984 I had an idea of a film I could do cheaply, which was Metropolitan. So I put aside the work I'd done on Barcelona and started working on that. Also, I had to take over a family business -- an uncle's illustration agency, representing artists and illustrators in New York -- and that became my day job. That anchored me to Manhattan and I started thinking of this Manhattan idea for a cheap film that would look good.

From childhood I remembered a production of Shaw's Don Juan in Hell, which all took place in one room and I thought that this was, theoretically, a film that could be shot in a room. You'd just have people all dressed up in some fancy room and there it is.

Of course, in writing the script it went different places, but that was the premise.

Were you drawing on your own experience to create those characters and those situations?

WHIT: I was, but it was long enough ago that it was shrouded in the mists of time. But the idea of the group was sort of based on a group, the rat pack was based on the rat pack, there was a funny, snobbish character who was like the Chris Eigeman character, Nick Smith. But really it was fictional, it was all made up. There were some people who were sort of like someone or other, but it had to be created anew and that's what always takes me a long time.

You've coined the phrase "social pornography" to describe the movie. Can you define what you mean by that?

WHIT: What I mean by that is that it's a taboo to talk about this kind of society in the United States; it's not supposed to exist. And there's a feeling of disgust and excitement in talking about the idea of Americans who camouflage themselves as upper middle class but really think of themselves as upper class.

On the surface, the idea doesn’t really lend itself to a low-budget treatment: a lot of characters, a lot of short scenes, a lot of locations -- some of them high-end -- and plus it's a quasi-period piece. Did you consider any of those issues while you were writing?

WHIT: Well, I remembered how cheap it was for me to go to those parties. It didn't cost me a dime, it was the least expensive part of my life. And so I thought, in a way, the film could be done the same way. If people donated tuxedos and a location, it would look rich but it's not. 

I knew that for a very minimal amount of money you could get permits to shoot on the streets of New York, so you had a beautiful set for free. And moving around doesn't really cost that much. In a way, it's more expensive to stay in one place, because you really need to lock down the location and not have a chance of losing it.

One of our rules was that we wouldn't shoot in any apartment where we couldn't finish the scene in that day, because we assumed we'd be kicked out of the place. The lengthier apartment sequences were actually done in townhouses faked to look like apartment buildings.

One of the eureka moments for deciding to do the project, if I can use that term, was the director of one of the Spanish films I sold was talking about the actual cash budget for the film he had done was $50,000. And at that time I knew that -- if we bought our rental apartment at an insider price, held it for a year and later resold it -- theoretically we could make $50,000 on our apartment. That number encouraged me, because I knew I could write a script for that money. To finish it, I'd need other people's money, but I could start it with my own.

What was your writing process like on Metropolitan?

WHIT: I actually dreaded the thought of writing alone. I had written short stories and gotten some good reaction; I'd been commissioned by Harpers to write a story and people like them. Tom Wolfe was quoted as liking one of the stories. But I hated the solitary writing process. 

So I actually started writing Metropolitan with a college friend -- not exactly a college friend, a fellow who hung around college without actually going there. We sat around, talking about ideas, for about three hours and I realized that wasn't going to work. And so I went and wrote the script.

It was good because I had this interesting job that was sort of challenging, representing artists, and I liked the vicarious work of being an agent for people whose work I liked. It was a social job, where you had lunch with people and saw a lot of people and it was a good day job while I was writing the script. It meant that I could take two weeks without writing anything and then I'd get in an intense mode, then I'd have vacation where I'd expect to write all the time but instead I'd get excited about another topic and write a stupid article for a newspaper. It allowed time to pass and let me reconsider what I was doing. 

At a certain point I decided that the Tom Townsend character really wasn't sympathetic, because he was in love with the girl he shouldn't have been in love with and he ignored the girl he should have liked, and that really the sympathetic character was the Audrey Rouget character and the film should be about her. I tried to make the film about her, but I realized that too much is involved in the Tom Townsend character, I'd done too much of that and was too attached to it. So I gave up making it explicitly Audrey's film, but a lot of what remains having tried to make it Audrey's film is still in the movie.

And then I thought the important thing in film is how you end it. So the challenging thing was where was all of this going to go? And so I started writing the end of the movie. I had a process where I had the first three-fifths of the movie and the last fifth of the movie and I had to attach them at some point. For me, it was like the transcontinental railway and finding where would the golden spike be to attach these two ends of the narrative.

How did you do that?

WHIT: I can't remember exactly, but there was a year where the tracks would never quite sync up. It ended up working.

How was that process different from how you work now on studio projects?

WHIT: I think it was good writing a film that wasn't in the development process, because I'm not sure it's very helpful having a lot of voices in on the creation of a script. I think they try to smooth things and homogenize things and explain things. It's better making it a kind of goofy voyage and ride, when you have to just be honest with yourself about what you're doing and where your mistakes are and what isn't working.

On Metropolitan, I found the least helpful comments were from people who thought they were in the film business. Unsuccessful screenwriter friends, who were very, very critical of certain things, while my sociology professor/godfather was very, very supportive and loved the things that the screenwriter friends said were breaking the rules.

Do you remember what their criticisms were?

WHIT: I remember I had this long monologue that the Chris Eigeman character recites about this girl, Polly Perkins. It went on for pages and pages. My screenwriter friend was indignant about how terrible that was and my sociology professor/godfather thought it was a wonderful story. 

What I found when we shot the film was that there were long speeches that didn't work, but they were the sociological speeches by the Charlie character, played by Taylor Nichols. If it was a very long sociological speech, we really had to fight hard to whittle those down and make them pertinent, while the long narrative about Polly Perkins, although it's just one guy talking, actually works perfectly fine. It's a story. People are interested in hearing a story. And film is so wonderful in the sense that you can have people's reaction.

How long was the whole writing process and how long were the gaps where you just let it gestate?

WHIT: I would say the gaps would be a month or two. It was slightly more than a four-year process. I started in the middle of the summer of 1984. I finished four years later in August of 1988 and went out to try to find people to produce or invest in the film. I think I did another draft where I cut things, to try to make it more production friendly. But the actors had already seen the older script, so often we'd restore stuff.

How long was the script?

WHIT: It was very, very long. 

Also, I didn’t really get into film formatting too much; I didn't really see the point of centering the dialogue, because my computer skills in those days weren't so good as to have to re-tab all that. I remember a woman at the Tisch School refusing to help us with casting because it wasn't in proper screenplay format, therefore we weren't serious.

That's why I don't take people very seriously when they criticize a script for being too long. I don't think we cut any scenes but one -- it's a very brief phone conversation between Tom Townsend and his father, and it came off as mawkish. The line producer, Brian Breenbaum, made a very funny, cutting remark about it: He said, "Put it in an envelope and mail it to your father." 

The other cutting we did was cutting within scenes, to try to whittle things down and pick up the pace. And of course we cut out all the improv stuff. We came up with some jokes that we thought were funny on set and we ended up cutting them out.

Did the actors have any problems with the long speeches and the heightened language?

WHIT: Nope. It's good for them, I think. I think it's good for actors to have a lot of words to say, they seem to like it.

Did you do any readings of the script before you finished it?

WHIT: There was a casting reading of it -- after we had done most of the casting we had a read-through.

It was odd, because I had had the Charlie character have something of a stutter in the script. And then I thought, "This is too hard. We've got so many hard things to do, let's not have another hard thing with a guy stuttering through all this dialogue." And I thought it might sound fake, someone acting a stutter.

And then, in the read through, Taylor stuttered a couple of times, and there was one moment when it was a little bit too much. And I stopped the reading and said, "Actually, the idea of this character is he should stutter, so if you can do that, it's great." Taylor completely dominates his stammer, he can do a flawless performance. But he did have a stammer in childhood, and he brought it out for that part. I found it fantastic; somehow a stammer is like when an actor eats. Eating and food and business of that kind in a film is usually wonderful, people are relaxed. And the stammer was kind of the same, it made things really real and unrehearsed.

One of the great things about the script was that these characters are very likeable, even at those times when they may not be behaving in a likeable manner. Was that planned?

WHIT: That was the intention. I think we give them their problems. They do have that reality in their sad sack qualities and a lot of it is the success of the performance by the actor. It's a thing I've noticed: Some actors can do a technically perfect performance of scripted lines, but there can be a warmth that's lacking, a human quality, that takes away from what's intended. In this case, our cast delivered the warmth. 

Did you write with any actors in mind?

WHIT: Yeah. I wrote with Audrey Hepburn in mind. The Audrey character is Audrey Hepburn. I did not write with known actors in mind. I knew that known actors wouldn't do it. It didn't occur to me which known actors would do it; only actors from the past -- like Audrey Hepburn -- who is the aunt of the actual Sally Fowler.

Although it's a talky film, you also made good use of just showing us things, without commenting on them. For example, when Tom Townsend finds his childhood toys have been thrown out by his father. We never see him come back for the toys, but they simply show up in his room in later scenes. Those scenes could have been painful to watch …

WHIT: It was painful to watch; we actually cut some stuff out there. We had a mawkish scene, going back to the box. We shot it and cut it out.

Why did you choose to set the movie in a sort of timeless past?

Well, in my head it was in the past and I couldn't afford to set it in a specific past. So I had to just try to do the best we could for a past identity to the film by trying to exclude what we could exclude and include what we could include, without stating anything too explicitly.

Did that choice help during production?

WHIT: It didn't hurt us. It was helpful for production because we weren't specifically doing period, so that freed people up not to go crazy with things. It was the guiding principal to make it seem past.

How would you define the theme of Metropolitan?

WHIT: I can't nail down themes. It gets me in trouble now when people ask me about my new script. Unfortunately, I answer when I should say, "Well, I don't know. Draw your own conclusions."

How did you know when you were done with the script?

WHIT: That's odd. It happened faster than I thought -- that sounds funny for a four-year project! I thought it was interminable, I thought it would never end. And suddenly it seemed like, whoa, we're ending. This is it. This is the film. And so it was a bit of a surprise.

I find that generally happens in an interminable scriptwriting process suddenly you're close to the end or at the end before you even thought it was possible.

What's your writing schedule?

WHIT: Well, it changed completely from the Metropolitan period to subsequently, because at the time of Metropolitan I had a day job, and so I would have dinner and I'd go back to writing after dinner. So I was drinking coffee late at night and often I would be at the computer at 1:00 am, really dreamy and half-awake and my mind wandering into dreams and I'd usually keep at it until 2:00. So it was a very strange process writing from 11:00 pm until 2:00.

Was there anything you learned writing Metropolitan that you still use today?

WHIT: Pretty much everything. I changed the time of day, but everything else is pretty much the same as that process. I still don't use the screenwriting programs and cheat a little bit on the formatting, so it doesn't look as long. 

What was it like to get an Academy Award nomination for Metropolitan?

WHIT: I have to confess that I was always terribly, terribly anti-Academy Awards -- until I got nominated for one. But as a want-to-be or not-yet-successful filmmaker, there's something terribly disheartening about that spectacle. But then you're nominated and -- it's great, even losing. 

Virtually the entire cast came and, with Line Producer Brian Greenbaum as ring-leader, we had a blast. But after I quickly reverted to anti-Oscars mode (the exception being 1995, when Mira Sorvino won hers and a lot of films I loved were nominated).

So many interesting, likable and sometimes great films are getting no -- or next to no -- coverage on their theatrical release, while madly-expensive campaigns and over-the-top coverage is devoted to a handful of films (and not normally the ones I'd most like). It just seems to get more and more extreme and disconnected from the honest pleasure of going to the movies and discovering ones you like.  

I now get a sort of early winter depression from the screeners Academy members are sent. You feel obliged to watch a lot of them, but very often they are not the films you'd ever go to see on your own and you end up seeing so many images you wish you never knew about.  I can't believe that so many intelligent film journalists get caught up in covering this horse race -- which must lead to an abdication of coverage for many untrumpeted releases.

The modern age's motto in the arts seems to be: "More recognition, less achievement." So many of the great cinema milestones date from the thirty years before there were film festivals or highly-touted awards (such as the Oscars at their start). It'd be fascinating to see what a three-year awards and festivals hiatus might be like. Or at least to stop, or sharply tone down, the campaigning for awards.

Did you use any tools to get yourself up to speed as a screenwriter?

WHIT: It was terribly helpful that I found a version of The Big Chill screenplay, in screenplay format. One publisher had the wise idea of issuing a screenplay-size edition of various screenplays, including The Big Chill. I used that to crib format from, to try to get close to film format. And it was actually a good script to have around, because it's an ensemble piece. And the She's Gotta Have It production book that Spike Lee did was very helpful.

And there's a book called The Craft of the Screenwriter by John Brady which has interviews with people like Ernest Lehman and Paul Shrader. I found that a very helpful book. I thought it was terrific. 

Dying to make a feature? Learn from the pros!

"We never put out an actual textbook for the Corman School of Filmmaking, but if we did, it would be Fast, Cheap and Under Control." 
Roger Corman, Producer

★★★★★

It’s like taking a Master Class in moviemaking…all in one book!

• Jonathan Demme: The value of cameos

• John Sayles: Writing to your resources

• Peter Bogdanovich: Long, continuous takes

• John Cassavetes: Re-Shoots

• Steven Soderbergh: Rehearsals

• George Romero: Casting

• Kevin Smith: Skipping film school

• Jon Favreau: Creating an emotional connection

• Richard Linklater: Poverty breeds creativity

• David Lynch: Kill your darlings

• Ron Howard: Pre-production planning

• John Carpenter: Going low-tech

• Robert Rodriguez: Sound thinking

And more!

Write Your Screenplay with the Help of Top Screenwriters!

It’s like taking a Master Class in screenwriting … all in one book!

Discover the pitfalls of writing to fit a budget from screenwriters who have successfully navigated these waters already. Learn from their mistakes and improve your script with their expert advice.

"I wish I'd read this book before I made Re-Animator."
Stuart Gordon, Director, Re-Animator, Castle Freak, From Beyond

John Gaspard has directed half a dozen low-budget features, as well as written for TV, movies, novels and the stage.

The book covers (among other topics):

• Academy-Award Winner Dan Futterman (“Capote”) on writing real stories

• Tom DiCillio (“Living In Oblivion”) on turning a short into a feature

• Kasi Lemmons (“Eve’s Bayou”) on writing for a different time period

• George Romero (“Martin”) on writing horror on a budget

• Rebecca Miller (“Personal Velocity”) on adapting short stories

• Stuart Gordon (“Re-Animator”) on adaptations

• Academy-Award Nominee Whit Stillman (“Metropolitan”) on cheap ways to make it look expensive

• Miranda July (“Me and You and Everyone We Know”) on making your writing spontaneous

• Alex Cox (“Repo Man”) on scaling the script to meet a budget

• Joan Micklin Silver (“Hester Street”) on writing history on a budget

• Bob Clark (“Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things”) on mixing humor and horror

• Amy Holden Jones (“Love Letters”) on writing romance on a budget

• Henry Jaglom (“Venice/Venice”) on mixing improvisation with scripting

• L.M. Kit Carson (“Paris, Texas”) on re-writing while shooting

• Academy-Award Winner Kenneth Lonergan (“You Can Count on Me”) on script editing

• Roger Nygard (“Suckers”) on mixing genres

This is the book for anyone who’s serious about writing a screenplay that can get produced! 

Raymond Guarnieri on "Buffalo Boys"

What was your filmmaking background before making "Buffalo Boys"?

RAYMOND: I started out in the industry as a professional actor. After I graduated from The American Academy of Dramatic Arts—New York, I was hired to work on two-major projects, “Rendezvous Point” by Korean Director D.K. Lee, which won Best Picture at the CUNY AIRR Film Festival, and “Payin’ The Price,” which won Best Picture at the HBO Martha’s Vinyard Film Festival. I was very observant during the production of these projects, and became more and more interested the overall process of filmmaking.  

Shortly afterward, I met with fellow actors Matt Tester and Mckenzie Trent and we formed Better StirFry Productions in hopes of making shorts that we could use to pad our acting reels. But once I got behind the camera and started shooting my own scripts, I realized I was exactly where I was supposed to be in life.

Where did the idea come from and what was the writing process like with your co-writers?

RAYMOND: In 2009, a friend of mine (the young man on whom the main character of Buffalo Boys is based), passed away. This was around the same time that The Better StirFry Team and I had completed a few successful short films and we were looking for new material. I was deeply moved by the story of my friend’s life, and everyone agreed that it would make a fantastic movie.

I researched by interviewing the young man’s family and friends before writing the first draft of the script. It was pretty awful the first time around. But we all still agreed that the story was good if we could just get the script right, so Mckenzie and I teamed up and developed it over the next eight months. About nine or ten drafts in, we solicited the help of my novelist girlfriend, Elana Lott, and she helped polish the script up until we began production.

Writing is one of the most challenging parts of the process. I believe that it’s where most filmmakers go wrong. When you start- there’s nothing but a blank page. When you turn on a camera with the lens cap off, there’s always something happening in front of it already. If you don’t have a great script, you’re just practicing. Mckenzie and I fought a lot during the process. It was a battle. But I wouldn’t do it again any other way, because what we came out with I’m truly proud of. 

What was your Kickstarter experience like for raising pre-pro funds? 

RAYMOND: We knew from the beginning that we were going to need to be modest, so we only asked for a $1,250 goal to get us through pre-pro. We ended up raising $6,000. Most of this came from family and friends. It was humbling. It gave us the momentum and confidence we needed to go out and raise more from private investors until we reached our final production budget.

What's the upside and downside of using a crowd-funding source?

RAYMOND: Kickstarter is great, and running a campaign is a full-time job. We’ve just launched a new Kickstarter where we’re offering tickets to the World Premiere in NYC, as well as copies of the DVD, all so that we can raise the necessary funds to send the movie to film festivals worldwide.

The upside is that you have the opportunity to not only raise money on a platform that gives you added legitimacy, but to promote your project to the general public as well. The downside is that these platforms are film saturated. This also has a lot to do with the digital filmmaking boom. Everyone and their mother has a DSLR nowadays. It’s exciting because it democratizes filmmaking and gives great artists the opportunity to produce works, they never would have been able to ten years ago.

But it’s also terrible because you see a lot of poorly thought-out projects appearing on places like Kickstarter. But in the end people will know the difference when they watch your video and read your story. It’s just frustrating because when some people hear that you’ve got a Kickstarter going, they roll their eyes and remember the fifty other people with mediocre ideas that told them that today.

What kind of camera did you use to shoot the movie -- and what did you love about it and hate about it?

RAYMOND: We used a two-camera setup with the Canon 5D MKII and 5D MKIII. We are the instant gratification generation. I’ve only ever shot on film once. (If there are any filmmakers with 20+ years of experience reading this, I’m sorry for the heart attack). It’s tough for me to think of anything I don’t like about DSLR filmmaking. It’s fast, cheap, you have instant playback, and with proper color correction and post-production techniques you can end up with very, very beautiful pictures- on TV/Computer screens, but also even small cinema screens. If we had shot Buffalo Boys on super 16mm we’d have spent something like $300,000 on film stock and development alone. That’s 100 times our entire budget.

You wore a lot of hats on this project -- director, writer, producer, actor. What's the upside and the downside of working that way?

RAYMOND: I feel like all indie filmmakers end up doing this. It just comes down to the fact that you don’t have money to hire people so you end up doing multiple jobs. In my case it’s a little different- the story was very personal to me, so I was one of the screenwriters, and I’m a professionally-trained & experienced actor, so I wanted to continue doing that because I love it.

The upside for me is that I not only got to oversee the project as a Director, but I got to participate more specifically in other ways that I love.

The downside is probably the lack of sleep and toll it takes on your body after a year or two of working on a project. We held the wrap party at my house outside of Buffalo and after I made a little speech and thanked everybody- I snuck upstairs and slept for about a week.

What was the smartest thing you did during production? The dumbest?

RAYMOND: This is a tough question.

I suppose the smartest thing I did was in pre-pro and not production, and that was making sure we had a solid game plan. Production was really a process of just making sure we stuck to that plan while still getting everything we needed creatively.

But I’d say that asking for resources (for free or for very little) whether it be locations, equipment, crew, etc., was the smartest thing I did. Some people have a tendency to not ask for things at the crucial moment.

One of the biggest things I learned is that if you have a good idea and charisma, people will believe in you and want to support you in any way they can. That’s not to say you should ever take advantage of that- but you should have the confidence to ask for the things you need to make your project come to life. The worst thing that can happen is that people will say no.

The dumbest thing I did happened on the 3rd or 4th last day of production. I was recently awarded The Colin Powell Fellowship for Leadership and Public Service and had to attend an all-day seminar in NYC the day after we wrapped production. I forgot to pack a suit for this and went one morning before call time to the mall to pick one out.

But it turned out that the whole process took forever and even though I was rushing through it, I caused us to be almost two hours late into the schedule. My AD, Tom Quigly was NOT happy about this. We ended up catching up throughout the day, and I learned two important lessons: don’t try to buy a suit in 30 minutes and DON’T piss off your AD by making stupid mistakes.

What's your game plan for distribution of "Buffalo Boys" and recouping your costs?

RAYMOND: In the end, we just want people to see the film. If that means going to film festivals and no distribution deal then so be it. But I really believe that this film is well written, produced, and acted enough to receive at least some kind of DVD or Netflix distribution.

I’m not going to delude myself- I know that the chances of a first-time filmmaker getting a distribution deal are slim, but that doesn’t mean we’re not going to try. As of right now, we’re pretty under the radar so we’re trying to get some press and film festival screenings to establish credibility. Once people in the industry have had a chance to see the film is when we’ll see where we might end up.

And, finally, what did you learn from making the film that you have taken to other projects?

RAYMOND: I haven’t really had the chance to move on to the next big thing yet. Buffalo Boys is still a full-time job for me. But like I said before- asking for help is a big thing I learned. That, and really take the time to make sure your story is not only well-written, but that is says something (artistically) that you want to say as an individual.

In the case of Buffalo Boys, it’s that the consequences of your actions are much more far reaching than you ever might have thought. And don’t ever forget to treat each member of your production team like the invaluable gear in the machine that they are- from extras to PA’s and your DP.

Keep your team happy and the energy on set positive and clear and everything will go much smoother and you’ll get exactly what you need to make a great movie.

Dying to make a feature? Learn from the pros!

"We never put out an actual textbook for the Corman School of Filmmaking, but if we did, it would be Fast, Cheap and Under Control." 
Roger Corman, Producer

★★★★★

It’s like taking a Master Class in moviemaking…all in one book!

• Jonathan Demme: The value of cameos

• John Sayles: Writing to your resources

• Peter Bogdanovich: Long, continuous takes

• John Cassavetes: Re-Shoots

• Steven Soderbergh: Rehearsals

• George Romero: Casting

• Kevin Smith: Skipping film school

• Jon Favreau: Creating an emotional connection

• Richard Linklater: Poverty breeds creativity

• David Lynch: Kill your darlings

• Ron Howard: Pre-production planning

• John Carpenter: Going low-tech

• Robert Rodriguez: Sound thinking

And more!

Write Your Screenplay with the Help of Top Screenwriters!

It’s like taking a Master Class in screenwriting … all in one book!

Discover the pitfalls of writing to fit a budget from screenwriters who have successfully navigated these waters already. Learn from their mistakes and improve your script with their expert advice.

"I wish I'd read this book before I made Re-Animator."
Stuart Gordon, Director, Re-Animator, Castle Freak, From Beyond

John Gaspard has directed half a dozen low-budget features, as well as written for TV, movies, novels and the stage.

The book covers (among other topics):

• Academy-Award Winner Dan Futterman (“Capote”) on writing real stories

• Tom DiCillio (“Living In Oblivion”) on turning a short into a feature

• Kasi Lemmons (“Eve’s Bayou”) on writing for a different time period

• George Romero (“Martin”) on writing horror on a budget

• Rebecca Miller (“Personal Velocity”) on adapting short stories

• Stuart Gordon (“Re-Animator”) on adaptations

• Academy-Award Nominee Whit Stillman (“Metropolitan”) on cheap ways to make it look expensive

• Miranda July (“Me and You and Everyone We Know”) on making your writing spontaneous

• Alex Cox (“Repo Man”) on scaling the script to meet a budget

• Joan Micklin Silver (“Hester Street”) on writing history on a budget

• Bob Clark (“Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things”) on mixing humor and horror

• Amy Holden Jones (“Love Letters”) on writing romance on a budget

• Henry Jaglom (“Venice/Venice”) on mixing improvisation with scripting

• L.M. Kit Carson (“Paris, Texas”) on re-writing while shooting

• Academy-Award Winner Kenneth Lonergan (“You Can Count on Me”) on script editing

• Roger Nygard (“Suckers”) on mixing genres

This is the book for anyone who’s serious about writing a screenplay that can get produced!

Barbara Steele on "Caged Heat"

How did you meet Jonathan Demme?

BARBARA STEELE: That was just an amazing, bizarre moment in time. I was walking down Sunset Boulevard. It was around Christmas time. Nobody walks in LA anyway, so it was kind of a feat to be walking anywhere. 

This vast blue car with fins from another era pulled up and out jumps this guy with this really radiant smile and says, ''Barbara Steele! Barbara Steele!' 

And I say, 'Hello? Yes?' And he says, 'I'm about to make a movie, I've been looking for you everywhere, would you consider doing it? We start shooting in three days! Please say yes, please say yes!'  And that was Caged Heat.

Is there a difference between low-budget filmmaking in Europe and low-budget filmmaking in the U.S.?

BARBARA STEELE: It was slightly different doing low-budget movies in Italy as opposed to doing them here, because in Italy there is an attendant melodrama to everything. So the crew and everybody actually adores low-budget movies, on one level -- not in terms of their salaries but in terms of the drama of it all.

The downside is that you're having close-ups after 18 hours of work, and the lighting suffers because the lighting cameraman is doing a huge amount of set-ups in a very short amount of time.

Do you like working that way?

BARBARA STEELE: I actually like the condensed, slightly frantic energy that goes into a low-budget film, rather than something that is more elongated and slower. 

Everybody is in it together, in a Dog Day Afternoon kind of way. And I like that. You feel like a family in this rush, and you’ve got to get it done, and it's like you're all pushing at it together. You don't have time to worry about your make-up, you're just in there, and I like that. I think it's really great; I must sound demented, but I actually like it.

But, of course, it depends on the material. If you're making a film where the subject matter is extremely intimate and private, you need much more time. But the low-budget films that I have done were basically melodramas.

What was it like working with Demme?

BARBARA STEELE: I think that he was very smart and very hip and very attuned to that moment in time. He always wore these fantastic, fabulous shirts.

Demme was a very unthreatening, very charming, very upbeat person. I'm sure all actors have loved working with him.

I think the most important thing is that the actors feel really safe and comfortable. You can only be as good as you dare to be bad. And if the actor is spooked or apprehensive, they'll just freeze. 

So the whole thing is for the actor to feel loved, really, and appreciated. Because it's a very vulnerable thing, to get into inside of somebody's face when it's blown up to the size of a vast fireplace or something.

You're pretty evil in the film. Do you enjoy playing evil characters?

BARBARA STEELE: I'm always invariably cast to play these villainesses. Unfortunately, I never got to play the great iconic villains, like Lady Macbeth or Medea. I would have loved to get my teeth into something really grand and deep.

I think certain actors have marquee value in certain films. With me, I got stuck in the whole horror genre, and so everyone needed to see me in that light, until I did these other little off-beat movies, which of course nobody ever sees. Like Young Torless, a Volker Schlöndorff film, where I was not a villainess, and is actually one of my preferred movies.

I don't know, I appear to be an archetypal villainess.

Dying to make a feature? Learn from the pros!

"We never put out an actual textbook for the Corman School of Filmmaking, but if we did, it would be Fast, Cheap and Under Control." 
Roger Corman, Producer

★★★★★

It’s like taking a Master Class in moviemaking…all in one book!

• Jonathan Demme: The value of cameos

• John Sayles: Writing to your resources

• Peter Bogdanovich: Long, continuous takes

• John Cassavetes: Re-Shoots

• Steven Soderbergh: Rehearsals

• George Romero: Casting

• Kevin Smith: Skipping film school

• Jon Favreau: Creating an emotional connection

• Richard Linklater: Poverty breeds creativity

• David Lynch: Kill your darlings

• Ron Howard: Pre-production planning

• John Carpenter: Going low-tech

• Robert Rodriguez: Sound thinking

And more!

Write Your Screenplay with the Help of Top Screenwriters!

It’s like taking a Master Class in screenwriting … all in one book!

Discover the pitfalls of writing to fit a budget from screenwriters who have successfully navigated these waters already. Learn from their mistakes and improve your script with their expert advice.

"I wish I'd read this book before I made Re-Animator."
Stuart Gordon, Director, Re-Animator, Castle Freak, From Beyond

John Gaspard has directed half a dozen low-budget features, as well as written for TV, movies, novels and the stage.

The book covers (among other topics):

• Academy-Award Winner Dan Futterman (“Capote”) on writing real stories

• Tom DiCillio (“Living In Oblivion”) on turning a short into a feature

• Kasi Lemmons (“Eve’s Bayou”) on writing for a different time period

• George Romero (“Martin”) on writing horror on a budget

• Rebecca Miller (“Personal Velocity”) on adapting short stories

• Stuart Gordon (“Re-Animator”) on adaptations

• Academy-Award Nominee Whit Stillman (“Metropolitan”) on cheap ways to make it look expensive

• Miranda July (“Me and You and Everyone We Know”) on making your writing spontaneous

• Alex Cox (“Repo Man”) on scaling the script to meet a budget

• Joan Micklin Silver (“Hester Street”) on writing history on a budget

• Bob Clark (“Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things”) on mixing humor and horror

• Amy Holden Jones (“Love Letters”) on writing romance on a budget

• Henry Jaglom (“Venice/Venice”) on mixing improvisation with scripting

• L.M. Kit Carson (“Paris, Texas”) on re-writing while shooting

• Academy-Award Winner Kenneth Lonergan (“You Can Count on Me”) on script editing

• Roger Nygard (“Suckers”) on mixing genres

This is the book for anyone who’s serious about writing a screenplay that can get produced! 

Nelson Cheng on “The Magic Life”

What was your filmmaking background before setting out to make "The Magic Life"?

NELSON: I had just produced my first web series (The Consultants) -- so my background was pretty light. However, after the rush and angst of learning everything that you do the first time you produce something, I realized that I both had a decent amount of film equipment (or knowledge of) and connections to cinematographers and other film professionals that my mind started expanding in terms of the types of projects I could do. A documentary seemed daunting but feasible.

Where did the idea come from and what was your process for determining the film's subjects? 

NELSON: At the time, I was a member of the Magic Castle -- it's sort of the home / clubhouse for magician's all around the world and as a consequence, I got to know a lot of magicians.

A story I often heard was something along the lines of that these magicians would meet someone, and that person would inevitably ask what they did. They would say they're a magician and the person would say something like, "Oh that's fantastic! That's great!" Then there would be this pause and they would be asked, "So what is it you actually do?" The original conceit was a documentary looking at "the business side of being a magician" -- this profession that people couldn't even conceive of as being a profession. 

In terms of determining the film's subjects -- initially, I just started filming magicians. I would then ask those magicians if they knew anyone else I should talk to and one magician led to another until I reached Dale Salwak -- a significant character in the film who runs the Chavez Studio of Magic.

At the time, one of his students was Yang Yang, one of the film's main subjects. He had a certain joie de vivre that I responded to and we filmed a lot of Yang Yang and originally built much of the film around him. However, after sharing some early footage with a very important contributor -- Penelope Falk (who won the editing prize at Sundance for "Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work") -- Penny just thought we needed more and asked who else I had / knew.

The first two names I mentioned were Matthew Noah Falk (I described him as a 20-something living a block from the Magic Castle and performing for tips on Hollywood Boulevard) and Michael Friedland (I described him as an NYU MBA graduate, successful in business, and just moved to L.A. to pursue a career in magic.) She said, "Those two sound interesting. I would go film them." So we did. 

Can you talk about how you raised your budget and your financial plan for recouping your costs? 

NELSON: This project was self-financed. It's never cheap making films, but certainly the production costs of a documentary can be kept quite manageable. For me, at least, it's post and then festival / marketing related expenses which proved to be the majority of expenses.

Regarding a financial plan for recouping costs -- I think the strong likelihood is I won't recoup the costs. Statistically, there are just very few docs that recoup their costs. The sale prices and other revenue simply aren't high enough. That being said, and I'm certainly not alone among filmmakers who feel this way, but simply hearing from and interacting with people who respond to and with whom this film resonates with has made it all worthwhile. 

What camera(s) did you use and what did you love and hate about it? 

NELSON: We used a number of different cameras. We primarily shot on the HVX-200 but also used the AF-100, the 7D, and -- believe it or not -- there's some footage from the Flip HD. I was pretty stunned that the Flip HD could hold up when blown up to a theater-size screen. It's not ideal, but usable.

Also, a lot of those shots we simply would not have gotten or would've had a lot of trouble getting if we didn't have such a small / convenient camera available. The HVX-200 is a good camera -- it's a real workhorse. The main drawback for me is that it's not that good in low light conditions.

Also, no interchangeable lenses and the offloading of footage is a little cumbersome. The AF-100 (at the time I had only rented the camera -- now I own one), I think, is better than the HVX in every way. Bigger chip size, very good in low light conditions, interchangeable lenses, shoots to CF, etc. It's really terrific -- if I did another doc, I would primarily use the AF-100. The 7D (and 5D Mark II) are really difficult cameras to use for shooting docs. Much harder to manage because you'll want to record sound to something like the Zoom H4n and the camera has that automatic shutoff thing after 10 min, etc. It's just not designed for docs -- the workflow is quite messy.

The Flip HD -- I certainly can think of improvements. Would love even higher picture quality (terrible in low light conditions) and just an overall upgrade in terms of its audio which can be quite bad -- but it's hard to beat its portability. I usually had a couple of Flip cams lying around just to take something spur of the moment.

How long did shooting take and did your vision for the movie change much during the shooting and editing process?

NELSON: We shot for about a year and a half. The vision changed quite a bit, frankly. I started off wanting to make something probably a lot more analytical -- investigating the business side of being a magician.  

Over time, it evolved into something -- for me at least, that was much more visceral -- following the stories of three fairly different individuals as they try and turn their passion into their career. What was great about how it evolved was that it both gave a framework with which to look at the larger world of magic (talking to builders of magic, world champions of magic, famous magicians, etc.) but also asked questions along the lines of why some people make it and some don't -- how much of it is talent vs. attitude vs. perspective vs. support system, etc.

What was the smartest thing you did during production? The dumbest?

NELSON: The two smartest things were getting more experienced people involved and to just start filming. Re: getting more experienced people involved -- as an example, I met Seth Keal -- one of the producers on "Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work" after one of their Sundance screenings. I just loved that film and frankly, started randomly talking to him. He's a magician himself, became interested in the project, and offered to help.

In addition to literally sharing all the details of what they shot "Joan" on (literally sending me links to the various pieces of equipment on B&H), he also introduced me to Penny Falk -- their editor.

As I mentioned earlier, Penny was instrumental in helping guide and shape the film from some of its earliest stages and introduced me to our wonderful editor, Erik Dugger, with whom she had previously co-edited a film. Penny felt that Erik's sensibility would both work well for this film and also that he and I would work well together -- and she was absolutely right. 

The reason I also mention to just start filming was that I think it would been easy for me to sort of sit in stagnation -- especially because I didn't have any experience. So I could hang out for a long time paralyzed by fear of not knowing what I was doing, or that I was making a mistake, or even being afraid of what other people might say.  

What was good about filming immediately was that one thing always led to another and, frankly, you start seeing problems and solving them -- especially when you get people involved.  

As a minor example, there's a scene in the film where one of our characters, Yang Yang, meets Lance Burton. I remember looking at the footage and just thinking it was a bit dark -- I mentioned this to Seth and he immediately told me, "Oh, buy an onboard light." That solved it. So sometimes it was small things and other times it was big things -- but by doing, we could get to fixing issues quickly rather than planning ourselves into oblivion.

The dumbest thing, and I'm not trying to be clever with this answer -- but it's the same two things, but on the flip side. I wish I got even more people involved. I'm certainly more secure and knowledgeable now in terms of what I know I can do and what I don't -- but at the time, everything was just such a mystery to me and I didn't always feel comfortable reaching out for help.

Or even knowing who to go to. I've thought about this in the context of when I was a product manager. When I worked as a PM, I liked to gather as much information as possible -- at times, I would literally read every customer service email for the products I worked on. The vast majority of information I came across was not actionable -- but some percentage was and all of it helped shape my view of the product.

So someone might have a thought on a particular sequence or music cue or even a magician that could strength a storyline -- all of it helps contribute to making an even stronger film and so I would've liked to have really pushed myself more in that aspect.

Re: filming right away -- I think it's always a fine balance between preparation and just doing it. I know people on the extremes -- those that plan so much they never do anything and those that do things too soon and could benefit from even a modicum of planning. I recently read an interview with David France, whose documentary, "How to Survive a Plague" is Oscar-nominated for Best Documentary this year.

In it, he mentions that in preparation for making the doc (he was a first time filmmaker), he watched a documentary every day, for two years. What fantastic preparation. So that's a great lesson for me -- do but always push yourself in terms of how much you can prepare. 

What has been the reaction to the movie by its subjects?

NELSON: I would say surprisingly good. Positive feedback from all of them and a number of subjects have appeared with us for various Q&As and the like. I only use the word surprisingly because being in a documentary is quite an intimate experience -- and we get to see many of our subjects in fairly substantive / private moments, so you never know how someone will react when they see it in that format.

I think one of the pieces of feedback that I've felt most proud of is when subjects or their friends say something along the lines of, "That's you." -- which I interpret as us having really captured the spirit and essence of who they are and those circumstances.  

And, finally, what did you learn from making the film that you have taken to other projects?

NELSON: I found making a film to be a fairly complete and fascinating process. I mentioned earlier that I used to work as a product manager -- as great and challenging of a job as that is, it's very different in the sense that there's a lot of visible and invisible institutional support / structure.

That's something that was quite apparent when I started making this film -- there's no structure around you. Everything has to be built from the ground up -- from the nuts and bolts logistics to the network you invariably need. I think the biggest thing I learned was that anything -- whether it's something completely brand new or a close variant of something you've previously done -- there's just a process and a way things are done or could be done.

It's learning those things and just incrementally learning, getting better, and moving forward. Not to be paralyzed by the enormity of it all. There may be 1000 things you don't know at the start, but if you learn 3 of them every day -- you'll get there in a year. 

Dying to make a feature? Learn from the pros!

"We never put out an actual textbook for the Corman School of Filmmaking, but if we did, it would be Fast, Cheap and Under Control." 
Roger Corman, Producer

★★★★★

It’s like taking a Master Class in moviemaking…all in one book!

• Jonathan Demme: The value of cameos

• John Sayles: Writing to your resources

• Peter Bogdanovich: Long, continuous takes

• John Cassavetes: Re-Shoots

• Steven Soderbergh: Rehearsals

• George Romero: Casting

• Kevin Smith: Skipping film school

• Jon Favreau: Creating an emotional connection

• Richard Linklater: Poverty breeds creativity

• David Lynch: Kill your darlings

• Ron Howard: Pre-production planning

• John Carpenter: Going low-tech

• Robert Rodriguez: Sound thinking

And more!

Write Your Screenplay with the Help of Top Screenwriters!

It’s like taking a Master Class in screenwriting … all in one book!

Discover the pitfalls of writing to fit a budget from screenwriters who have successfully navigated these waters already. Learn from their mistakes and improve your script with their expert advice.

"I wish I'd read this book before I made Re-Animator."
Stuart Gordon, Director, Re-Animator, Castle Freak, From Beyond

John Gaspard has directed half a dozen low-budget features, as well as written for TV, movies, novels and the stage.

The book covers (among other topics):

• Academy-Award Winner Dan Futterman (“Capote”) on writing real stories

• Tom DiCillio (“Living In Oblivion”) on turning a short into a feature

• Kasi Lemmons (“Eve’s Bayou”) on writing for a different time period

• George Romero (“Martin”) on writing horror on a budget

• Rebecca Miller (“Personal Velocity”) on adapting short stories

• Stuart Gordon (“Re-Animator”) on adaptations

• Academy-Award Nominee Whit Stillman (“Metropolitan”) on cheap ways to make it look expensive

• Miranda July (“Me and You and Everyone We Know”) on making your writing spontaneous

• Alex Cox (“Repo Man”) on scaling the script to meet a budget

• Joan Micklin Silver (“Hester Street”) on writing history on a budget

• Bob Clark (“Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things”) on mixing humor and horror

• Amy Holden Jones (“Love Letters”) on writing romance on a budget

• Henry Jaglom (“Venice/Venice”) on mixing improvisation with scripting

• L.M. Kit Carson (“Paris, Texas”) on re-writing while shooting

• Academy-Award Winner Kenneth Lonergan (“You Can Count on Me”) on script editing

• Roger Nygard (“Suckers”) on mixing genres

This is the book for anyone who’s serious about writing a screenplay that can get produced! 

Podcast: Jonathan Lynn on "Clue" and "My Cousin Vinny"

This week on the blog, a special podcast interview with director Jonathan Lynn on the making of “Clue” and “My Cousin Vinny.”

Kathleen Behun on "21 Days"

What was your filmmaking background before making "21 Days"?

KATHLEEN: I had written and directed three dramatic short films prior to 21 Days which had garnered a fair amount of acclaim on the festival circuit. I also had written several feature spec scripts that had won a number of screenwriting awards; one of which was optioned by Academy Award-winning producer, Irwin Winkler

But before I was a filmmaker, I had been an actress.  And I’ve always told people that Acting taught me how to direct; Directing taught me how to act; Writing made me better at both, but that reading, being a voracious reader, was the foundation of all of these disciplines. There’s something about reading- novels and short stories especially- which feeds the imagination and creativity in ways than any other art form.  In fact, when James Dean first burst onto the scene in the 1950’s, he once was interviewed and asked what he attributed his talent to as an actor, and he replied simply, “Reading.
Where did the idea come from and what was the process for writing the script and getting the script ready to shoot?

KATHLEEN: The idea for the film was first born out of frustration. I had another feature spec script, a supernatural thriller, which for five years had been financed on five different occasions with financing falling through each time for a myriad of reasons.

I realized the years were passing and I still hadn’t directed my first feature, so I decided to take matters into my own hands and write another script that was low budget enough I could self finance, yet commercial enough to attract studios and distributors. Even though I had made my name in the indie world as a filmmaker of dramatic short films, I was being encouraged by my agent at the time and various producers, to channel my energies into more genre-oriented material for my first feature. This was actually an easy transition for me as I had long been interested in the classic genre films such as, The Exorcist and The Omen, as well as Gore Verbinski’s version of The Ring.

21 Days was actually inspired by all of the paranormal investigator shows that had become popular on television, especially those where a group of investigators lock themselves inside a house for one night to capture on film the supernatural phenomena which occurs. I then thought, one night locked inside a haunted location would be scary, but something longer such as, 21 days, would be terrifying.

I also became intrigued by a few true stories I had read about where people had abandoned their home with all their belongings behind, even letting their home fall into foreclosure, because they were too terrified to live there any longer because of the paranormal events that were occurring. Can you imagine? A place that haunted where you’re willing to leave behind everything and lose your home to foreclosure because you can no longer bear to stay in the home?  These were some of the stories that served as inspiration for my film, as well as the notion that it’s not the house that’s haunted or evil, but rather the land it sits on.

I wrote the script in about a month and then took another two to three months to polish it, all the while searching for film locations. It took me a total of five months of traversing Southern California to find the right house for the film. Because to me, the house is the main character in the film, and until I found the right house, I was unwilling to begin filming.  And I was fortunate enough to find that perfect house.
What was your casting process, and did you change the script to match your final cast?

KATHLEEN: The entire casting process took us three months.  I hired Luis Robledo, who’s an actor, filmmaker and founder of Actor’s Gym, to be the casting director. He did an absolutely amazing job finding the perfect actors for the film. 

We received a staggering 6,000 submissions to fill only 20 roles in the film. And for a micro budgeted feature which paid little money, that’s pretty stunning. It just shows how many actors in Los Angeles want to work.

Once the film was cast, I didn’t change the script to fit the cast, but prior to shooting, I did instruct the actors to memorize their lines, yet be open and prepared to improvise.  

Since the film is found footage, the actors needed at times to make their lines their own in order for it to feel more “real” and off the cuff. I also firmly believe that a large part of the director’s job is selecting the right actors for the film; and once that’s been accomplished, you don’t have to “direct” them as much.

The actors were hired for the roles because they deeply understood their respective characters.
Can you talk about your distribution plan for recouping costs?

KATHLEEN: In order to recoup our costs for the film, which fortunately were minimal by independent film standards, we selected Galen Christy of High Octane Pictures to serve as our sales agent. To date, the U.S. and Canadian rights to the film have been acquired by Gravitas Ventures who will be releasing the film on VOD in April 2017, and later, on DVD.

Other territories that have sold are Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, Luxembourg and Taiwan. And we’re currently in negotiations to sell the film to a number of other distributors from other countries.
Did the movie change much in the editing, and if so, why did you make the changes?

KATHLEEN: For the most part, the final edited version of the film is very true to the script.  I had the good fortune of securing seasoned horror editor, John Quinn (The Grudge 3), to work on the final cut of the film. He really taught me an enormous amount of how by using fewer cuts, you heighten tension and suspense in a film. He did an amazing job of going through 24 hours of footage and paring it down to 89 minutes. His eye for how to cut a scene is just brilliant.

The one change he did make that was different than the script was by having the final scene of the film play over the credits and it works much better than how I initially wrote and envisioned it. I’ll definitely be using him to cut my next film.
And, finally, what did you learn from making this feature that you will take to other projects?
KATHLEEN: Trust your instincts.  Prior to shooting, and even on set, there are many people who want to offer their opinion on how best a scene should be shot/played, etc or even how the overall film should be.  

Yet at the end of the day, you need to make the decision and trust your own gut instinct for what’s best for your film. Most especially in the independent film world where the director/filmmaker has that sort of freedom to make those decisions and is not beholden to a studio.  

Why do you make films? What do you aim to do when you set out to make a film? To express the inexpressible... As a filmmaker, or any artist, the goal is to convey some deeper truth; a silent mystery, that ultimately cannot be articulated or even clearly defined, but yet, somehow, through the magical moving image of film, we can come close...

Dying to make a feature? Learn from the pros!

"We never put out an actual textbook for the Corman School of Filmmaking, but if we did, it would be Fast, Cheap and Under Control." 
Roger Corman, Producer

★★★★★

It’s like taking a Master Class in moviemaking…all in one book!

• Jonathan Demme: The value of cameos

• John Sayles: Writing to your resources

• Peter Bogdanovich: Long, continuous takes

• John Cassavetes: Re-Shoots

• Steven Soderbergh: Rehearsals

• George Romero: Casting

• Kevin Smith: Skipping film school

• Jon Favreau: Creating an emotional connection

• Richard Linklater: Poverty breeds creativity

• David Lynch: Kill your darlings

• Ron Howard: Pre-production planning

• John Carpenter: Going low-tech

• Robert Rodriguez: Sound thinking

And more!

Write Your Screenplay with the Help of Top Screenwriters!

It’s like taking a Master Class in screenwriting … all in one book!

Discover the pitfalls of writing to fit a budget from screenwriters who have successfully navigated these waters already. Learn from their mistakes and improve your script with their expert advice.

"I wish I'd read this book before I made Re-Animator."
Stuart Gordon, Director, Re-Animator, Castle Freak, From Beyond

John Gaspard has directed half a dozen low-budget features, as well as written for TV, movies, novels and the stage.

The book covers (among other topics):

• Academy-Award Winner Dan Futterman (“Capote”) on writing real stories

• Tom DiCillio (“Living In Oblivion”) on turning a short into a feature

• Kasi Lemmons (“Eve’s Bayou”) on writing for a different time period

• George Romero (“Martin”) on writing horror on a budget

• Rebecca Miller (“Personal Velocity”) on adapting short stories

• Stuart Gordon (“Re-Animator”) on adaptations

• Academy-Award Nominee Whit Stillman (“Metropolitan”) on cheap ways to make it look expensive

• Miranda July (“Me and You and Everyone We Know”) on making your writing spontaneous

• Alex Cox (“Repo Man”) on scaling the script to meet a budget

• Joan Micklin Silver (“Hester Street”) on writing history on a budget

• Bob Clark (“Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things”) on mixing humor and horror

• Amy Holden Jones (“Love Letters”) on writing romance on a budget

• Henry Jaglom (“Venice/Venice”) on mixing improvisation with scripting

• L.M. Kit Carson (“Paris, Texas”) on re-writing while shooting

• Academy-Award Winner Kenneth Lonergan (“You Can Count on Me”) on script editing

• Roger Nygard (“Suckers”) on mixing genres

This is the book for anyone who’s serious about writing a screenplay that can get produced! 

The Making of "Patti Rocks" (An Oral History)

In 1987, the film “Patti Rocks” was produced in Minnesota. In 2004, I chatted with three of the people who instrumental in getting it made: Director and co-writer David Burton Morris; producer, DP and editor Greg Cummins, and actor and co-writer John Jenkins.

Patti Rocks is a sequel of sorts to your earlier film, Loose Ends. How did that first film come about?

DAVID BURTON MORRIS (Director, Co-Writer): I saw Memories of Underdevelopment, a Cuban Film, at the Walker Art Center, and I rushed home to my wife, Victoria, and I said, 'You know, we can make a movie really cheap. I just saw this great movie, it was black and white. If we can scrape together $20,000, we can make a movie.' 

And so we did. She wrote it. And it shot for two weeks. Loose Ends was sort of a calling card. We went to 20-25 film festivals, didn't win anything really, but Roger Ebert discovered us and Vincent Canby and Andrew Sarris and we got all these great notices.

However, it was nearly twelve years before the sequel, right?

MORRIS: We finally got enough money, in the early 80s, to do a movie called Purple Haze, and that did very well. It won Sundance, and that was our first real movie. It was 35mm, color, we had an actual shooting schedule and a budget. And that did very well. And we looked like we were on our way.  

I then, subsequently, got fired from two studio pictures and was very unhappy—we're now talking mid-80s—and I was thinking about quitting, I was thinking about getting out of the business because I was really unhappy. And I thought back to the only time I had a really good time making a movie, which was on my first film, Loose Ends. And I thought, maybe I should think about writing something for those guys and making it back in Minnesota and sort of re-creating my enthusiasm for making movies.

Hence the title in the credits, '12 years later.' A lot of people don't get that, but when it screened at Sundance they showed them both, which was nice, so that people could watch the first one and then pick up with the same two guys 12 years later.

CUMMINS (Producer, DP, Editor): When Patti Rocks came about, David had moved to Los Angeles and was working out there, doing the Hollywood thing, and he met Gwen Field. Gwen was taking her daughter to the same day care that David was taking his daughter to, and they got to know each other, and David pitched the idea of Patti Rocks to her. 

How did the script come together? I know you started with improvisations …

MORRIS: We did a lot of just riffs on sex. We had another movie in mind. And I had all these long cassette tapes filled with (Chris) Mulkey and (John) Jenkins riffing on women, and I thought, this is interesting. Somehow I got the idea of putting them in the car, driving all night to see Patti to talk her into having an abortion. I did a first draft and I'd give it to them and we'd tinker with it and do some more improvs. Jenkins lived in Chicago, so we flew there a couple times and did some more improvs, and then I'd type that up.

JOHN JENKINS (Actor, Co-Writer): It started with some general conversations about what we might do, and then we started to improv a little bit. David then took that and began to craft a plotline for this. 

Then after we had that in place, we got back together again and we spent some more time improvising the script. And so the script really came out of those improvisations that Chris and Karen (Landry) and I did. 

Then David would edit that and cut and paste and re-arrange. He might add some other dialogue on top of that, but most of it came out of those improvs. 

Where did the title come from?

MORRIS: The way I got the title was interesting. I was at the Chicago Film Festival, on a panel. I was at dinner with a group of people from the festival and this woman was sitting next to me. I said, 'What do you do?' She said, 'I sing in a band.' I said, 'What's the name of the band?' She said, 'Patti Rocks.' 

And I said, 'Oh, that's a really good title.'

How did you get the film financed?

MORRIS: I'd known Sam Grogg, because he was head of the USA Film Festival in Dallas. And he'd started a film company called Film Dallas. So I gave him the script and said, 'What do you think?' He said, 'We'll make it.' 

It was the easiest thing I've ever done. I wrote it and within a month they'd given me $400,000 to make this movie.

He had very few notes. He just said, 'They have to get out of the car midway through the movie.' I said, 'What do you want them to do? See a flying saucer?' He said, 'I don't know, you'll think of something.'

Did the script change much besides that before you shot?

MORRIS: My wife, Victoria, helped a lot on the third act. She said, 'The Patti character has got to be a strong, liberated, likeable woman.' So I took those notes and did a re-write on it, and Karen Landry brought a lot of insight into the character.

I wrote it for the summer, because Mulkey's running around in his underwear. But we couldn't get it all together, and we got the money in November, and I said, 'We're going to make the movie. We've got the money, we're going.' 

And it actually turned into a more interesting film, just because of the look of the snow and Mulkey running around in his underwear in 23 degrees below zero.

I thought, two guys in a car? How expensive can that be? But, because of the cold, it was brutal. I mean, it was just really brutal—cameras freezing and all of us crammed in, in snow parkas, in the back seat, shooting at night in the middle of the winter. It was insane.

CUMMINS: In theory, David was right, it was a very simple idea: two guys in a car. But add in the car, add in winter, add in nights …

One of the great things in the movie is how you capture just how cold a Minnesota winter can be. You can really feel it while watching the movie.

JENKINS: The weather was unbelievable, especially when we were shooting the sequence where they get out of the car. It must have been thirty below when we were shooting that scene.

CUMMINS: We shot Loose Ends in the summer, in July, and it was one of those horribly hot summers. Basically, it was heat and sweat and working really hard and rigging lights in Midway Chevy’s repair department when it was 100 degrees out.  

And then we turned to Patti Rocks and it's just the opposite. We were shooting in December, and it was the coldest December on record. We were on the camera car with 60 degree below zero wind chills.

JENKINS: We were in this trailer and we would come out; we could only shoot this stuff for four or five minutes at a time before the fear of frostbite or hypothermia would come up. Chris was in great shape and even at that it was brutal. When it came to looking cold, no sensory work was required.

CUMMINS: The camera got so cold most of the time that it was squeaking. When it dropped below 20 below, the camera ran fine but there was this high-pitched squeak every few seconds. We couldn't figure out what it was for the life of us. It would go away when we'd take the camera into the trailer, and then we'd go back to the car and it would do it again. It was just the cold.

MORRIS: The lesson from Patti Rocks was, when you get the money, make the movie, regardless of what season it is.

The film is a three-hander, but we spend so much time in the car that it also feels like a character in the story.

CUMMINS: While scouting locations, there was a car for sale. So, we stopped right there and bought the car—it was for sale on the side of the road. Without thinking about anything. How would this car rig, what does it sound like? It was the perfect car for the character, but not the perfect car to shoot in.

It was a two-door. We loaded the camera in the car, we had David and myself and the sound man all rammed in the backseat, depending on where we would rig the camera for the shot. It was long before video assist, so we had to be in the car, seeing what was going on, in order to see the performance.

Did you ever consider just using process shots, instead of shooting while driving?

CUMMINS: I didn't want to do process, I felt it would cheapen the film to do process all the time. But I don't think any of us really realized how difficult all the shots were going to be.

Before we shot the film, we knew that the car was a character in the film. The car was as important, in some ways, as Billy and Eddie. And so we planned out a myriad of placements for the camera—we could put the camera here on the front of the hood, to the right of the hood, to the left of the hood, and so on. 

And then what I did was work through that process from the beginning of the film through the end. None of the camera placements really repeat. They move and they evolve. And so the car changes with each story they tell, and it becomes more intimate. And it becomes really intimate before they arrive at Patti's apartment. 

We worked very hard to keep that part of the cinematography alive. It was very hard to do, and very confusing. We shot a lot of stuff that didn't get into the film, stories that didn't quite work as well as other stuff. Keeping track of camera placement became very complex, especially with a small crew. We had one person on continuity, who basically couldn't be in the car. How do they do their job? It's a big challenge, so continuity fell to David and myself, really.

Shooting in a car, a black car, with black upholstery, in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of the night, with minimal equipment, in the cold, was brutal. Absolutely brutal.

So not only were you shooting in the cold, in a car not designed for shooting, but you were also shooting at night …

CUMMINS: It was a road film, but when we started out, we didn't know it was going to be a nighttime road film. Which made it even more difficult.

We wanted to play it almost real time—they left in the afternoon, they got together, they had a couple of beers and they took off and night fell. In the winter, night falls around here at about 4:30 in the afternoon. And so they drove all night to get to her apartment, and they get there sometime in the middle of the night and leave the next day at dawn—it's all in one day.

Life would have been easier if they'd started with breakfast, then driven down and gotten there about four in the afternoon—that would have been wonderful.

From an acting technique point of view, how did you recreate what you had done in the improvisations while shooting?

JENKINS: It's an interesting problem, to use improv to create a script, and then to go back and play it. It's a funny thing. When you're improvising the thing, you're so involved in the problem and the words just flow out. 

But when you go back to do it again, you've forgotten a lot of that structure or the dynamic that allowed those words to flow. So you're left with a script and you know it's yours, but it's hollowed out. You've forgotten the context a little bit. 

It's almost easier to take somebody else's words and to slip on your imagination and work with that, then to go back and do your own stuff. I found that to be a little difficult.

I had to do all the actorly stuff and fill it out, sensory work and subtext to try to get back to that improv state that had been so easy. It was just odd. You would think that it would just be a piece of cake, the easiest thing to do, and I found it perplexingly difficult.

The film became somewhat controversial, due to its language. Were you aware that might be an issue while you were shooting?

CUMMINS: Oh, absolutely. We set out to do that. 

The thinking was, these are two guys and this is the way guys talk. If you put two kind of raunchy guys together, this is how they talk. There's nothing unreal about this. And essentially that's what we wanted to do: present two guys who are completely uninhibited and unobserved, talking in the way that we felt some people do. Sam Grogg felt the language was its strong point, that's what the film was about. 

MORRIS: I thought it was risky, in terms of the subject matter. I didn't know until after it was done how people would react to the language in the picture. The ratings board first gave us an X for language, and that had never happened before. I guess I was just so used to it. Not that I talk that way, but certainly I hear that. I was kind of surprised by the reaction.

JENKINS: I didn't think it would be controversial. It wasn't violent, there wasn't any hard porn. It's odd about it now, but we got in trouble for the language. You listen to HBO, and you listen to something like Deadwood, and it seems odd to me. But that was a vastly different time, in terms of what kind of language you could use in a film.

MORRIS: When I first started putting this together, I thought people are either going to love or hate this. I had no idea it was going to divide audiences. And it did. People loved the movie or hated the movie. More people loved it, thank god, than hated it.

JENKINS: That was just the way we talked, but in an exaggerated way. It seemed appropriate to these two guys and the way they would talk. It felt true to us.

MORRIS: At the very few personal appearances I made before the movie, I'd say, 'Some of you people might get uncomfortable during the first two acts of this movie. Just wait, okay?'

CUMMINS: When we screened the answer print for the first time, in California, all of a sudden Sam Grogg, who was with FilmDallas, brought five or six people into the screening room. He wanted them to see it, but we hadn't even seen the film yet. But we really couldn't turn him down, so we watched the film, and afterwards Sam says to them, 'See what you can do for a half a buck?' They were his next round of directors, and he was pressuring them to keep their budgets low.

MORRIS: We had a lot of screenings in Los Angeles before it opened up, and it was sort of a word-of-mouth hit, as far as people going to these screenings. Sean Penn, Madonna were there. I just hate watching my films with audiences. It makes me uncomfortable. So I never went to these screenings.

In addition to the language, the film also includes a sex scene. How was that handled?

JENKINS: It was difficult to do. I'm doing a love scene with my best friend's wife—my real best friend's wife. It was potentially explosive. I thought we handled that part of it well. We got to the point where both Karen and I felt comfortable to do the scene. I thought we were able to finesse it all right.

CUMMINS: There was a level of trust in the sex scene. This is Chris's wife, who's making love with John Jenkins. This is a difficult scene. It's difficult to have your wife in a nude scene, it's difficult to be in the same film with your wife in a nude scene, it's difficult to have your wife making love to your friend as a character, but he's a real-life friend. 

We created a lot of really difficult situations that we were able to get through because of that trust that we had with each other.

What did you learn while making Patti Rocks that you still use today?

JENKINS: Work with people that you know and trust. I know that's hard to do. A lot of this work is going to be like blind dates with strangers to put these things together. I was fortunate to be able to work with people I loved and trusted. If possible, for your first steps out, to do it in a way that you were protected in that way would be great. Look for that.

CUMMINS: One of the best decisions I made as producer was insisting upon getting the best people, friends who were really capable, and to stand up for them.

Film is a collaborative art, there's no question. Everybody says that. You can't really do it by yourself, you really need other people, other expertise, other views, other opinions. You need people in the process. And the closer you are to those people, the less explaining you have to do, the more intuitive working relationship you can have, the faster you're going to be able to work, the better off you're going to be.

The most important thing that I say to everybody is that you have to listen. You have to listen to other people, because they're telling you something. 

Everybody really has something to give, and it seems like too often we're not listening to those voices. 

If you can sit and hear people, and be quiet, I think you'll learn a lot. You take in a lot just by being there, rather than trying to dominate everything.

Dying to make a feature? Learn from the pros!

"We never put out an actual textbook for the Corman School of Filmmaking, but if we did, it would be Fast, Cheap and Under Control." 
Roger Corman, Producer

★★★★★

It’s like taking a Master Class in moviemaking…all in one book!

• Jonathan Demme: The value of cameos

• John Sayles: Writing to your resources

• Peter Bogdanovich: Long, continuous takes

• John Cassavetes: Re-Shoots

• Steven Soderbergh: Rehearsals

• George Romero: Casting

• Kevin Smith: Skipping film school

• Jon Favreau: Creating an emotional connection

• Richard Linklater: Poverty breeds creativity

• David Lynch: Kill your darlings

• Ron Howard: Pre-production planning

• John Carpenter: Going low-tech

• Robert Rodriguez: Sound thinking

And more!

Write Your Screenplay with the Help of Top Screenwriters!

It’s like taking a Master Class in screenwriting … all in one book!

Discover the pitfalls of writing to fit a budget from screenwriters who have successfully navigated these waters already. Learn from their mistakes and improve your script with their expert advice.

"I wish I'd read this book before I made Re-Animator."
Stuart Gordon, Director, Re-Animator, Castle Freak, From Beyond

John Gaspard has directed half a dozen low-budget features, as well as written for TV, movies, novels and the stage.

The book covers (among other topics):

• Academy-Award Winner Dan Futterman (“Capote”) on writing real stories

• Tom DiCillio (“Living In Oblivion”) on turning a short into a feature

• Kasi Lemmons (“Eve’s Bayou”) on writing for a different time period

• George Romero (“Martin”) on writing horror on a budget

• Rebecca Miller (“Personal Velocity”) on adapting short stories

• Stuart Gordon (“Re-Animator”) on adaptations

• Academy-Award Nominee Whit Stillman (“Metropolitan”) on cheap ways to make it look expensive

• Miranda July (“Me and You and Everyone We Know”) on making your writing spontaneous

• Alex Cox (“Repo Man”) on scaling the script to meet a budget

• Joan Micklin Silver (“Hester Street”) on writing history on a budget

• Bob Clark (“Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things”) on mixing humor and horror

• Amy Holden Jones (“Love Letters”) on writing romance on a budget

• Henry Jaglom (“Venice/Venice”) on mixing improvisation with scripting

• L.M. Kit Carson (“Paris, Texas”) on re-writing while shooting

• Academy-Award Winner Kenneth Lonergan (“You Can Count on Me”) on script editing

• Roger Nygard (“Suckers”) on mixing genres

This is the book for anyone who’s serious about writing a screenplay that can get produced! 

JT O'Neal on "Au Pair, Kansas" (aka, “The Soccer Nanny”)

What was your filmmaking background before setting out to make "Au Pair, Kansas"?

JT: I graduated with a degree in history of art from Kansas University, though did my junior year "abroad" at USC film school, but returned to Kansas to complete pre-med. Then I got an MD from Kansas, an MPH (masters of public health) from Harvard, then eventually an MFA (masters of fine arts) in screenwriting from UCLA in 2004.  Au Pair, Kansas was the last script I wrote while in grad school at UCLA (which, by the way, is an absolutely amazing place to learn about screenwriting.  

NYU's okay for directing, USC's okay for producing, but UCLA ROCKS for screenwriting.)  I made 5 short films while living in LA (one cost less than $10, and played at about 25 festivals around the world.)  Luckily I made the major mistakes on the shorts, so I didn't really screw anything up on the feature.

Where did the idea come from and what was your writing process?

JT: One of my scripts was a finalist in the screenplay competition at Cinequest Film Festival in San Jose, CA, and I attended the festival in 2004.  The opening night feature, United, was about this funny Norwegian soccer player dreaming of turning pro. The star, Havard Lilleheie, was in attendance, and I met him at the opening night party, and invited him to lunch the next day.  He was such a great screen presence, I knew I had to do a project for him.  

So before the luncheon meeting, I tried to figure out how I could come up with an idea for Havard to star in a movie.  How could I get a Norwegian soccer player to the US?  Why not make him a male au pair, that teaches the kids soccer. Why a male au pair?  Maybe the father died and the family needed a father figure.  And that's what I pitched to him. He said something like "yah, sure you will write me a movie" and just smiled.  

I returned to UCLA the next week, pitched this idea about a Norwegian soccer playing coming to a small town in Kansas to be a male au pair and help a recently widowed woman raise her two sons. The class (and teacher) just looked at me like what planet were you from. Ten weeks later I had the first draft.  

Then I moved back home to Kansas to make regionally based movies, spent a week in Oslo rewriting with Havard, then rewrote again, then the script placed as a semi-finalist at the Austin Film Festival screenplay competition, and that got buzz enough to get some investors interested, and I shot the movie.  

Can you talk about how you raised your budget and your financial plan for recouping your costs? 

JT: I raised $200K from private investors.  You never know who will invest in your movie.  I was in this antique shop (knick knacks, not really antiques) in Lindsborg, Kansas, a great little Swedish town in central Kansas, and this elderly man overhead me talking about location scouting for a potential movie.  I sent him a copy of the script.  He loved it.  Said he'd invest a small amount.  

Two years later he contacts me and says he really wants to see this movie made, and writes a check for $100K.  Within two weeks I found the rest of the money, and two months later we were shooting the movie in Lindsborg (and my Angel investor, Ron, had a supporting part in the movie.)  I have no idea if I'll get money back on the movie.  

At this point, I have an international distribution deal (TV and dvd), but the distributor has to sell about $125K before the company sees anything back.  Probably won't see anything from international sales.  I'm currently working on some domestic deals.  Theatrical way too expensive.  

I had great interest for theatrical distribution in Germany (the acquisitions person for the top art cinema chain there loved AU PAIR, KANSAS, but deliverables, including dubbing and 35mm and high def prints, etc, would have been $100K.  Not going to happen, and it didn't.)  Who knew making the movie was the easiest part of the whole process.  

It took me three times as long to get the deliverables together for distribution than to actually shoot the movie (which we did in 18 days.) 

What camera did you use and what did you love and hate about it?

JT: I used a Red One (it was hot shit back in Dec 2008.)  I loved it.  Amazing camera (even with the older chip.)  I can't imagine how good the new smaller Reds are.  

Why did the movie's title change and what was the thinking behind that?

JT: For international distribution I decided to change the title of the movie from Au Pair, Kansas to The Soccer Nanny.  It's just too hard to translate a French term into other languages, and very few people understood what it meant.  Even in the US, lots of people (well, from the midwest at least) didn't know what an au pair was.  

The Soccer Nanny just sounds fun (and it's actually a family movie.)  If the main character had been playing football or basketball (American football that is), the movie would not have been picked up for international distribution.  It's much better marketing internationally, to have soccer in the title, than either Kansas or au pair.  

What was the smartest thing you did during production? The dumbest?

JT: The smartest thing I learned was to get the best actors you can.  I was initially going to use all local talent in Kansas. Then a friend from London (great indie screenwriter and director Sean McConville), said it's too good of script, get it to a casting director in Hollywood, there are all sorts of great actresses over 40 who would love the part.  

So I did, and got the script to a casting director he used on his move The Deadline (one of Brittany Murphy's last movies--she was a mess on set, but that's another story), and the casting director (Cathy Henderson Martin, who is fantastic, by the way) liked the script and got it to Traci Lords' manager, who loved the script, and got it to Traci, who loved the script, and she signed on.  

Then with Traci attached, all sorts of other actors (including the amazing Spencer Daniels, who played the young Benjamin Button) signed on.  I cannot believe what experienced actors bring to their parts.  I can still watch the movie and be surprised. Traci is one of the most professional actresses I've ever seen (I didn't realize how truly amazing she was until editing, when my editor and I discovered that she matched perfectly on all continuity issues, sipping tea, turning head, standing up, looking, etc.  This is a true professional.  

I've spent a lot of time on regular Hollywood movies--my best friend, Peter James, is an A league Hollywood cinematographer, and I take my vacations and sit in his DP's chair on movies. The only actress I've seen that hit marks better than Traci was Kathy Bates. I cannot express how professional and wonderful Traci was on set and in the movie.)  

The dumbest thing I did was hire an immigration lawyer from NYC who said she knew how to get work visas through for actors. Nine months after I started, and one day before shooting was to start, I finally got the US to issue a work permit so Havard could come from Norway to star in the movie.  We had to delay his fist scene by a day, since he arrived later than planned.  

A few days before we were to start filming, I didn't know if I'd get my lead actor.  It was a nightmare.  I should have just used someone experienced in LA (but I was living in NY at the time.)  It cost me more than twice as much for the work permit and fees than Havard got paid to act in the movie! 

And, finally, what did you learn from making the film that you have taken to other projects?

JT: I learned that I loved making a movie (writing and directing) and hated producing.  They are totally different things.  I'll never make another movie without an experienced producer to help.  The best thing you can do as a director is find a great producer.  It's over four year since shooting, and I'm still (today, in fact) working with the accountant to do taxes for 2012 so I can get statements to the investors.  NIGHTMARE.  

On the other hand, I probably shouldn't complain, as at least I got the movie made, and it has some type of distribution deal, and people have actually liked the movie.  Oh, I forgot about that, I LOVE the movie (of course, I'm biased), and I had the pleasure of making the movie I wanted to make, how I wanted to make it.  

Lastly, I paid for all cost overages (I call it UBO, United Bank of O'Neal), and I'll probably never see any of that money back (I could have bought two new Lexus cars, or five houses in Detroit).  But I got it done.  

I may never make another movie, but the proudest I've ever been was hearing that's a wrap called out and the cast and crew cheering.  

The main lesson I want to take to other projects: Don't use your own money to make your movie!  

Dying to make a feature? Learn from the pros!

"We never put out an actual textbook for the Corman School of Filmmaking, but if we did, it would be Fast, Cheap and Under Control." 
Roger Corman, Producer

★★★★★

It’s like taking a Master Class in moviemaking…all in one book!

• Jonathan Demme: The value of cameos

• John Sayles: Writing to your resources

• Peter Bogdanovich: Long, continuous takes

• John Cassavetes: Re-Shoots

• Steven Soderbergh: Rehearsals

• George Romero: Casting

• Kevin Smith: Skipping film school

• Jon Favreau: Creating an emotional connection

• Richard Linklater: Poverty breeds creativity

• David Lynch: Kill your darlings

• Ron Howard: Pre-production planning

• John Carpenter: Going low-tech

• Robert Rodriguez: Sound thinking

And more!

Write Your Screenplay with the Help of Top Screenwriters!

It’s like taking a Master Class in screenwriting … all in one book!

Discover the pitfalls of writing to fit a budget from screenwriters who have successfully navigated these waters already. Learn from their mistakes and improve your script with their expert advice.

"I wish I'd read this book before I made Re-Animator."
Stuart Gordon, Director, Re-Animator, Castle Freak, From Beyond

John Gaspard has directed half a dozen low-budget features, as well as written for TV, movies, novels and the stage.

The book covers (among other topics):

• Academy-Award Winner Dan Futterman (“Capote”) on writing real stories

• Tom DiCillio (“Living In Oblivion”) on turning a short into a feature

• Kasi Lemmons (“Eve’s Bayou”) on writing for a different time period

• George Romero (“Martin”) on writing horror on a budget

• Rebecca Miller (“Personal Velocity”) on adapting short stories

• Stuart Gordon (“Re-Animator”) on adaptations

• Academy-Award Nominee Whit Stillman (“Metropolitan”) on cheap ways to make it look expensive

• Miranda July (“Me and You and Everyone We Know”) on making your writing spontaneous

• Alex Cox (“Repo Man”) on scaling the script to meet a budget

• Joan Micklin Silver (“Hester Street”) on writing history on a budget

• Bob Clark (“Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things”) on mixing humor and horror

• Amy Holden Jones (“Love Letters”) on writing romance on a budget

• Henry Jaglom (“Venice/Venice”) on mixing improvisation with scripting

• L.M. Kit Carson (“Paris, Texas”) on re-writing while shooting

• Academy-Award Winner Kenneth Lonergan (“You Can Count on Me”) on script editing

• Roger Nygard (“Suckers”) on mixing genres

This is the book for anyone who’s serious about writing a screenplay that can get produced! 

Dan Futterman on “Capote”

Although it ended up becoming an Oscar-winning film, Capote started out the way many independent films do: Someone gets an idea, writes a script, and then gathers his/her friends together to make a movie. 

First-time screenwriter Dan Futterman started that traditional process with a couple of distinct advantages: He chose a compelling subject matter (Truman Capote’s relationship with murderer Perry Smith while writing his classic In Cold Blood) and the friends he gathered to make the movie included his talented long-time pals director Bennett Miller and actor Philip Seymour Hoffman.

Where did the idea to write Capote come from?

DAN: I got interested in Truman Capote in sort of an oblique way, and it was almost incidental that it ended up being specifically about Truman Capote.

There was a book that my Mom, who's a shrink, gave me called The Journalist and The Murderer, by Janet Malcolm. It's about a case in California where a doctor named Jeffrey MacDonald was eventually convicted of killing his wife and children. Joe McGinniss was writing a book about him and eventually, when the book came out -- it was called Fatal Vision -- Jeffrey MacDonald sued Joe McGinniss for fraud and breach of contract.

Malcolm’s book is sort of a meditation on how could this happen? How could a convicted triple murderer sue the writer who's writing about his life? How could he convince himself that the writer was going to write something good about him? It dealt with the fact that the journalist is posing as a friend to get the subject to talk, and that the subject has hopes that he's going to be portrayed in a good light, and that the journalist is always playing off of that desire. The relationship is premised on a basic lie that's it's a natural relationship. It's not. It's a transactional relationship.

That seemed interesting to me, and had there not been a TV movie made about that incident, I might have written about that.

Some years later I picked it up again and read it -- it's a pretty short book and I recommend it -- and just on the heals of reading that I read Gerald Clarke's biography of Capote, called Capote, and there are two or three chapters that deal with the period in his life where he was writing In Cold Blood and his relationship with Perry Smith.

I wanted to write about that kind of relationship and deal with those kinds of questions. The fact that it was Truman Capote was an extremely lucky accident, because he's fascinating in so many ways and he's so verbal and also was a man who was struggling with some real demons, I think. That made the work I was doing that much more interesting and deeper.

Up until that point, you’d made your living as an actor. Where did the impulse to tackle a screenplay come from?

DAN: I'd written, as you do, bad poetry in high school and college. And I had written a short story or two. I'd always admired playwrights and screenwriters; it seemed to me like a real trick to get a story told primarily through dialogue. 

I thought about writing this as a play, initially, and then for some reason a screenplay felt more liberating. The play, I think, would have felt a little bit closed down and would really center too much on the discussions in the jail cell.

I always thought I wanted to write a screenplay, but I never wanted to do it just theoretically. I wanted to do it with a specific idea in mind that would really become something of an obsession, which is what this became. I almost felt like I would have been terribly disappointed with myself had I not done it. And feeling like I had to write this, or had to try to write this, was not a feeling I'd had before.

You had the distinct advantage, as a beginning writer, of being married to a working writer. How did she help you in this process?

DAN: Although it doesn't seem like there's a lot of plot in the movie -- it's about a guy writing a book about an event that already happened -- but it is quite plotty when you get down to it. And she was clear and strict with me, saying "If there are any scenes where people are just talking about something that you think is going to be interesting, cut it, because if it's not moving the plot forward it doesn't belong in the script." That was important to learn. And it was something that I had never considered.

I did an outline, somewhere between twenty and twenty-five pages with a paragraph for each scene, with dialogue suggestions. The script came out probably 80% tied to that outline.

Did you change the script after showing it to people?

DAN: Not right at the beginning. It kind of was what it was. It was long, almost 130 pages, a lot of dialogue, but you got a very strong sense of what the movie might be from it. 

We let it sit for a while. I know Bennett did a lot of thinking about it, as did Phil. And when we finally were getting to the point where it looked like we were actually going to get some financing for this, we got to work. 

Did you take any classes or read any books on screenwriting before you sat down and wrote the outline?

DAN: No, I didn't take any classes. I read the Robert McKee book (Story: Substance, Structure, Style and The Principles of Screenwriting) that I guess everybody reads, and I found that pretty helpful ---his clarity about story. I think that was an important lesson for me to learn over and over again, that story is primary. Clever dialogue is not what it's about. It's got to ride on the story, and then you can hang stuff off of that.

Then it was just a matter of trial and error. And the lucky fact of having a subject who has been quoted as having said a lot of funny things, of which I put as many as possible into the screenplay.

What were the upside and the downside of writing about a real person?

DAN: I always hated that moment in school when the teacher, I think inevitably a somewhat lazy teacher, would give the assignment, "Write a story about whatever you want," and I would just panic. My mind would just be a complete blank. But if I got a very specific assignment to write "Why does this character have to confront this thing in this story in Chapter Three," then I was off and running.

Rules are good for me. In that way, I think writing about a real person, knowing basically what the rules are -- you can take a little bit of license, but try to stick to the facts as much as humanly possible -- that felt liberating to me. It has a way of focusing my imagination, I guess, instead of feeling like anything goes and then I'm screwed.

I recently have had correspondence with Wallace Shawn, who is William Shawn's son. He and his brother are not terribly happy about the way William Shawn is portrayed in the film.

I knew that Capote had three different editors involved in the book. One was William Shawn of The New Yorker, one was Bennett Cerf at Random House, and then when Cerf retired, a guy named Joe Fox took over. That just seemed too confusing to present in a movie. We needed one editor and I choose that to be William Shawn, and he would do everything that all the other guys did as well. That upset Wallace and I feel badly about it.  If I were able to go back, I would try to solve it. 

What you encounter is that, even if the people have died, there is a moral debt owed to them in terms of trying to adhere as strictly as possible to the truth.  It's something I tried to be very conscious of, but in this particular case, I think I came up short.

Did you ever consider just fictionalizing the character's name, since he was already a composite of three people?

DAN: It didn't occur to me at the time that any of the things I had him doing could possibly be upsetting to anybody, but that was my own take and I see now why his sons are upset.  Looking back now, I would try to find a way to fix it.

Did you do any readings or workshop the script?

DAN: We did a table reading in New York with Phil and some actor friends of ours, just a few weeks before rehearsals started. The reading highlighted the problems that we had been kind of skating over, scenes where we thought, "Oh, I'll fix it later."  It focused our minds on actually fixing the problems.

Did you have much rehearsal?

DAN: We had a decent amount of rehearsal and I loved it. It was a terrific experience. 

Bennett and I had an important talk about how, mechanically, we were going to run rehearsals. The decision was that he, because he was directing the movie, he needed to develop rapport, relationship, trust with the actors without me around.

We were all up in Winnipeg and in the morning I would go sit with whomever was going to rehearse that day with Bennett and they would read through the scenes. We'd talk about any questions, and then I'd take off and go up to this little room I had and do re-writing from the day before that needed to be done, tweaks, whatever. Then I'd come back at the end of the day and we'd read it again. I think it worked enormously well. I think the actors came to really trust Bennett and it was just a better use of my time instead of just sitting and poking my nose into rehearsals, which would only have been disruptive.

Did any significant changes take place in editing?

DAN: There was a lot of streamlining of the movie. 

The first version that I saw was probably 20 minutes longer than the finished version. I'd never been through the process of seeing a movie that was so fat in that way. Bennett was feeling quite good about it and I think he could see where the target was. At that point I couldn't and it felt fat, it felt not terribly funny, sluggish, and I got kind of terrified at that point. 

It was just through months of carving it and carving it and carving it that it got to the place where it didn’t have anything extra in it -- and it only got to that place after a laborious process. Bennett and Chris Tellefsen, the editor, knew where they were headed, but it was a little bit difficult for me to see, so to my mind that transformation was enormous, although I don't think it was a tremendous surprise to them.

I saw, finally, a version that I felt really happy with. There was no sound work done on it, there were a couple of little things that needed to be fixed, and I thought, "I'm going to stop watching it now and I'm going to wait to see it all the way through with everything set, color-corrected and all the sound work done." I did that at the Telluride Film Festival, where it was properly projected and there was an audience, and that was a pretty thrilling moment.

What's the best advice you're ever received about writing?

DAN: I think it's got to be what I learned from my wife, that it's all about plot. It has got to move. You have to move through the scenes from one to the other. It's got to feel inexorable that this scene follows upon that scene. 

There's no point to moving around capriciously. You're only going to get lost and you're going to lose the audience. As many screenplays as I may write, I don't think I'll change my point of view about that.

What was the experience like to be nominated for an Academy Award?

DAN: I hope this doesn't come out the wrong way, but because the season is so long -- we'd been to Telluride, Toronto and the New York Film Festivals, and then we opened -- and the movie had gotten a great deal of good response, even before it opened, so we knew we had something that people were responding to. 

And then sometime in January they announce what's going to be nominated, and by that point you've been through so many different awards announcements -- the critics’ awards that have been handed out or nominees have been announced, Independent Spirit awards nominees were announced by then -- there starts to be a little list that people are saying, "These are the contenders." 

Unfortunately, it kind of ruins the experience, because I think that you start to develop expectations, because people are saying, "Oh, look, it's a real possibility," while all along you've been thinking, "Oh, come on, don't be ridiculous." It can't help but eat at you and so you think, "Well, that would be great, wouldn't it?" The fear of being disappointed almost replaces what should be simply shock and elation. And that's unfortunate.

However, having said that, the biggest reaction I had was looking at the list of people I'd been nominated with. I'd never understood before when people said that something like that could be humbling, but, at that point, I got it. And it was largely because Tony Kushner's name was on it, someone whose play I had been in -- Angels In America -- and someone whom I've admired for as long as I've been aware of his writing. To be included in a list with him was simply incredible.

So I had all those emotions at the same time.

It's a heady time, it’s fun. There was no expectation on my part that I would win, because Brokeback Mountain was such a big event. Larry McMurty and Diana Ossana wrote a great script and I think people felt that he was due and the script was great. So it was kind of a fun way to go into the Oscar season, which was that I had no expectations of winning but I was just going to enjoy it.

Any advice to someone starting a low-budget script?

DAN: I know that the premise of this book is about writing stuff that will fit into a certain budget, but I don't know that I would give that advice off the bat. I mean, look, obviously if you're writing scenes where spaceships get blown up, you know where you are. If you're even slightly aware that big things cost money, then you're not going to write things like that.

But to be thinking in that way, I feel, can also get you thinking like, "Well, how will critics respond to this? How will producers respond to this? How will ...?" And you cannot have that in your head while you're writing. You simply have to be thinking, "Do I like this? Do I believe it? Is it interesting to me? When I go back and read it, if I can be as objective as possible, is it exciting to me to read?"

If you're honest with yourself and have some sort of decent barometer for how things are playing, then you can't help but have the right reaction to it. That's the most important thing, to write something that is successful on the page. That sort of second-guessing, I think, is going to be defeatist. 

You already have enough voices in your head – and the superego perched on your shoulder, saying, "That's terrible, that's not good enough" -- so the fewer voices you can add to that chorus, the better.

Dying to make a feature? Learn from the pros!

"We never put out an actual textbook for the Corman School of Filmmaking, but if we did, it would be Fast, Cheap and Under Control." 
Roger Corman, Producer

★★★★★

It’s like taking a Master Class in moviemaking…all in one book!

• Jonathan Demme: The value of cameos

• John Sayles: Writing to your resources

• Peter Bogdanovich: Long, continuous takes

• John Cassavetes: Re-Shoots

• Steven Soderbergh: Rehearsals

• George Romero: Casting

• Kevin Smith: Skipping film school

• Jon Favreau: Creating an emotional connection

• Richard Linklater: Poverty breeds creativity

• David Lynch: Kill your darlings

• Ron Howard: Pre-production planning

• John Carpenter: Going low-tech

• Robert Rodriguez: Sound thinking

And more!

Write Your Screenplay with the Help of Top Screenwriters!

It’s like taking a Master Class in screenwriting … all in one book!

Discover the pitfalls of writing to fit a budget from screenwriters who have successfully navigated these waters already. Learn from their mistakes and improve your script with their expert advice.

"I wish I'd read this book before I made Re-Animator."
Stuart Gordon, Director, Re-Animator, Castle Freak, From Beyond

John Gaspard has directed half a dozen low-budget features, as well as written for TV, movies, novels and the stage.

The book covers (among other topics):

• Academy-Award Winner Dan Futterman (“Capote”) on writing real stories

• Tom DiCillio (“Living In Oblivion”) on turning a short into a feature

• Kasi Lemmons (“Eve’s Bayou”) on writing for a different time period

• George Romero (“Martin”) on writing horror on a budget

• Rebecca Miller (“Personal Velocity”) on adapting short stories

• Stuart Gordon (“Re-Animator”) on adaptations

• Academy-Award Nominee Whit Stillman (“Metropolitan”) on cheap ways to make it look expensive

• Miranda July (“Me and You and Everyone We Know”) on making your writing spontaneous

• Alex Cox (“Repo Man”) on scaling the script to meet a budget

• Joan Micklin Silver (“Hester Street”) on writing history on a budget

• Bob Clark (“Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things”) on mixing humor and horror

• Amy Holden Jones (“Love Letters”) on writing romance on a budget

• Henry Jaglom (“Venice/Venice”) on mixing improvisation with scripting

• L.M. Kit Carson (“Paris, Texas”) on re-writing while shooting

• Academy-Award Winner Kenneth Lonergan (“You Can Count on Me”) on script editing

• Roger Nygard (“Suckers”) on mixing genres

This is the book for anyone who’s serious about writing a screenplay that can get produced! 

Joshua Sanchez on “Four”

What was your filmmaking background before setting out to make "Four"?

JOSHUA: I went to film school at Columbia University in my early 20's. I've done a handful of short narrative and experimental films in and out of film school since then. Before this I was just a fan of movies and I made music videos and skate videos with my friends in Texas. I studied Radio-TV-Film as an Undergrad at UT-Austin, but didn't really specialize in making films. I just had a passion for it and started doing it.

What was your process for adapting the play and what challenges did you face?

JOSHUA: The main challenge was to try to preserve the essence of the play without the movie seeming too much like a filmed play. I wasn't interested in literally adapting the material, but rather to use the character dynamics and situation as a jumping off point to tell the story. I also wanted to preserve as much of the perspective and the wonderful language of Christopher Shinn and not lose his unique perspective on this story, that was coming from a place of youth and purity.

My process tends to be a bit scattered. I write in short but intense fits and starts, then put it down for awhile to get some perspective on it and test what I've written. It took me about a year, off and on, to adapt the play into what eventually became the shooting script, although the final film is somewhat different even from what we intended to shoot.

Essentially the Joe/Abigayle story is a bit more flushed out and the second half of the movie reveals more about what is going on in the inner lives of the characters than the play does, which I think is necessary for the story to work as a movie.

Can you talk about how you raised your budget and your financial plan for recouping your costs? 

JOSHUA: The producer Christine Giorgio and I raised the money together through private investors and through a few grants and a couple of small Kickstarter campaigns. Our plan is to release the movie in a small theatrical run next year and through digital and DVD then to go into some foreign markets. It didn't cost that much to make the film so I think we have a good chance of at least making our money back, but obviously it's such a challenging time for small American independent films.  

You also have to think about these things in terms of building a career. This is my first feature film and I think its gotten a solid response enough for me to be able to make my next film. It's good for everyone involved because they have something solid to show to keep working and building on what we've done here.

What camera did you use and what did you love and hate about it?

JOSHUA: We shot with the Arri Alexa. Mostly I loved it. I think it was the right camera for what we needed and I think the end result was far and away more compelling that I originally thought it was going to be. We shot with these vintage lenses called Super Baltars which were used a lot in the 70s. The two combine to make everything look very wet and milky, which I liked because we shot mostly everything at night so it creates a really neat effect.

You can also shoot on this 'log c' mode that gives you so much latitude in the coloring process. It looks sort of shitty while you're shooting it, almost like a film negative would look, but you can do so much with it in the end. 

I guess the downside of that camera is that we didn't shoot the full uncompressed format because you need this really expensive drive to do that with the Alexa. But the post was a breeze because you don't have to do all that lame processing that you have to do with the Red camera to work in Final Cut.

I'm not the most techy director, so for me it was mostly a really great experience.

Did the movie change much in the editing process, and if so, how?

JOSHUA: The essence of the play is definitely still there, but we did rearrange and cut some scenes that were really different from how I envisioned them in the script. If you watch the film, the scene where Abigayle sees her father in the car is kind of a hybrid of like four scenes put together and that's how it worked best in the film. Some scenes were totally cut out of the movie as well.

I really loved working with David Gutnik, the editor of FOUR. He's the first editor I've ever worked with that thinks like a writer. Both of us are really story oriented, so we weren't too precious about what to leave in and didn't feel so committed to the original text. It was more like 'if it works, it works'. 

What was the smartest thing you did during production? The dumbest?

JOSHUA: Probably the smartest and the dumbest thing I did were both the same...trusting and not trusting the actors. My main process in making film is always in the casting process first and foremost. If I can choose the right people to inhabit the role, then a lot of my work becomes just steering the ship so to speak.

For the most part, I did that with FOUR and it worked and that was the best thing I could have done to make the film good. But there were a few times when I was unable to provide the actors with the space enough to explore how to best do what they needed to do. 

The dumbest thing you can do as a director is always to give in to the pressure cooker situation of a film set and then pass that bad energy on to the actors. I regrettably did that a few times, but thankfully not too much for it to affect the over all work of the actors in the end.  

And, finally, what did you learn from making the film that you have taken to other projects?

JOSHUA: I think with every film I've made I've been able to take big lessons and pass them on to the next project. With this film I think that trusting my instincts will be the thing I take with me in the long run. Every time that I was pressured into something I didn't fully believe in, it turned out to be a mistake. Thankfully there was not anything major on that front, but still there were a few things I would have made different choices about. 

You should always trust your gut with creative decisions. After all, it's the director's job to protect the vision of the film and even if it makes people uncomfortable, the end result is always the thing that matters the most.

Dying to make a feature? Learn from the pros!

"We never put out an actual textbook for the Corman School of Filmmaking, but if we did, it would be Fast, Cheap and Under Control." 
Roger Corman, Producer

★★★★★

It’s like taking a Master Class in moviemaking…all in one book!

• Jonathan Demme: The value of cameos

• John Sayles: Writing to your resources

• Peter Bogdanovich: Long, continuous takes

• John Cassavetes: Re-Shoots

• Steven Soderbergh: Rehearsals

• George Romero: Casting

• Kevin Smith: Skipping film school

• Jon Favreau: Creating an emotional connection

• Richard Linklater: Poverty breeds creativity

• David Lynch: Kill your darlings

• Ron Howard: Pre-production planning

• John Carpenter: Going low-tech

• Robert Rodriguez: Sound thinking

And more!

Write Your Screenplay with the Help of Top Screenwriters!

It’s like taking a Master Class in screenwriting … all in one book!

Discover the pitfalls of writing to fit a budget from screenwriters who have successfully navigated these waters already. Learn from their mistakes and improve your script with their expert advice.

"I wish I'd read this book before I made Re-Animator."
Stuart Gordon, Director, Re-Animator, Castle Freak, From Beyond

John Gaspard has directed half a dozen low-budget features, as well as written for TV, movies, novels and the stage.

The book covers (among other topics):

• Academy-Award Winner Dan Futterman (“Capote”) on writing real stories

• Tom DiCillio (“Living In Oblivion”) on turning a short into a feature

• Kasi Lemmons (“Eve’s Bayou”) on writing for a different time period

• George Romero (“Martin”) on writing horror on a budget

• Rebecca Miller (“Personal Velocity”) on adapting short stories

• Stuart Gordon (“Re-Animator”) on adaptations

• Academy-Award Nominee Whit Stillman (“Metropolitan”) on cheap ways to make it look expensive

• Miranda July (“Me and You and Everyone We Know”) on making your writing spontaneous

• Alex Cox (“Repo Man”) on scaling the script to meet a budget

• Joan Micklin Silver (“Hester Street”) on writing history on a budget

• Bob Clark (“Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things”) on mixing humor and horror

• Amy Holden Jones (“Love Letters”) on writing romance on a budget

• Henry Jaglom (“Venice/Venice”) on mixing improvisation with scripting

• L.M. Kit Carson (“Paris, Texas”) on re-writing while shooting

• Academy-Award Winner Kenneth Lonergan (“You Can Count on Me”) on script editing

• Roger Nygard (“Suckers”) on mixing genres

This is the book for anyone who’s serious about writing a screenplay that can get produced! 

Bob Clark on “Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things

Few directors had a more successful, or eclectic, career than the late Bob Clark. And not many directors can claim as many classic motion pictures on their resumes: A classic holiday movie (A Christmas Story), a classic coming-of-age movie (Porky’s), a classic horror film (Black Christmas), and a classic Sherlock Holmes film combined with a classic Jack the Ripper film (Murder By Decree).

Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things may not be a classic contender, but it’s a clever little horror film that uses its resources wisely. A troupe of actors, led by their insane director (Alan Ormsby) arrive on a secluded island to re-enact a ritual that brings the dead back to life. Before you can say “Boo,” the dead begin to crawl out of their graves and carnage ensues.

What point were you at in your career before you started Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things?

BOB: I went to college at the University of Miami and I was in Theater. I had also worked in the Miami film industry in the late sixties. 

I was doing a play in Miami, A View from the Bridge, and this man named Bobby MacDonald came to me and said, "You're my director." I had actually worked on a couple of his schlock films, films that were done for $40,000 - 50,000.

I said, "Bob, what are you talking about? I don't know anything about films. I've been in some as an actor, but I don't know anything else." He said, "Don't worry about that, we have a great situation over in the Everglades, near Fort Myers."

So I got involved in writing and directing a movie called She Man, which was done by a guy named Charlie Broun. Charlie had a combination of a hydroponic tomato farm, a clothing factory and a movie studio, all in one. I went into the Everglades and wrote this thing called She Man. 

I knew nothing about movies, but they said, "Don't worry, we've got everybody. We've got a great cameraman," who turned out to be a World War II Nazi cameraman who had never shot a movie and knew nothing about it. The editor was a guy named Hack, from the Fort Myers local. But I did have a guy named Harry Anderson, who was a legitimate production manager who had done a few Hitchcock films. 

So I did She Man and it was dreadful beyond belief. At the same time we decided we would shoot The Emperor's New Clothes, back-to-back, so we shot that in Miami in a famous castle there, and actually got John Carradine to be in it and he was terrific.

So I did these two movies -- I don't think they exist anymore -- and I was determined after that that I would not work again until I understood what it was to make a movie. So, for the next four years I was a production manager and an AD, and I did every job, virtually, except cameraman. 

Then, in 1971, Gary and Ken Goch and I decided we'd get some money and we'd make a film. In those days, to start your career, you either made a horror film or you did porno, and I didn’t want to do porno, so we chose a horror film and we decided to do it in Miami. And that became Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things.

It was populated with my college buddies and chums and people we knew and we did if for $40,000. It was an homage to Night of the Living Dead, but more of a comic version, putting it on a bit. Actually, it wasn't really that much like Night of the Living Dead; we were just capitalizing on its success.

Where did the title come from?

BOB: I was just walking by a payphone in New York and stepped in to call somebody in town and it just hit me. Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things. I have no idea why it came into my head. 

Instead of calling the friend in New York, I called Bob Kilgore immediately and said, "Bob write this down: Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things." And he said, "Oh my god, what a great title. That's hysterical. We couldn't do better." And that's how Children was born -- by a little bolt out of the blue.

How did you make up the story?

BOB: It just came out of my consciousness somewhere. I took things that were familiar to me, like the theater group. 

I was well trained by that time to take advantage of every discipline that we could to maximize the kind of film we could make. I wrote it for the two main locations, the cemetery and the house, plus the location on the island that overlooks the city. We had three locations total. I was very careful about that, because we only had ten days – actually, ten nights.

The remote cabin was actually in Coral Gables, a friend's house. It was in the middle of the city, in a neighborhood, but we pulled it off pretty well.

What were some of the things you learned during those previous four years that helped on this production?

BOB: Control your locations, control the number of characters. We actually had quite a few characters, but that wasn't very costly for us. The movie is fairly ambitious in terms of its action.

But the key was continuity, not having to make any moves to other locations. But there's nothing complex about that: Just make sure you have one major location.

Did the fact that Alan Ormsby knew how to do make-up help in the decision to do a zombie movie?

BOB: To some extent, yes. Alan was extremely gifted and I knew he could pull it off, and in a way that was superior to our very low budget. So that was a factor. The make-ups were pretty darned good.

I completed the script and we had read-throughs; I'm sure I made some adjustments at that point.

How do you know when a script is done and ready?

BOB: You use your training and your gut instinct. You go back over it to be sure that the plot points are clear without being labored and that there's clarity and also excitement. 

That's basically what a screenplay is: a duel between clarity and pacing. No matter how complex it is, you need to understand what's going on, and then you need to have pace. And that can vary. Some films that aren't rapidly paced are still very engrossing. But those two factors, clarity and pacing, are the two critical factors.

I came from a classical background; I was a Shakespearean trained actor. I was a movie fan growing up, but not a movie fanatic. I liked movies but I wasn't obsessed with them. I didn't plan on going into theater. To be a novelist was my plan from the time I was nine years old. But the minute I got involved in films I knew that was where I would go.

Did your background as an actor help you in writing dialog and creating characters?

BOB: I think so. I'd done a number of classical plays and doing Arthur Miller doesn’t hurt anything at all. I'd done Tennessee Williams and Shakespeare, so you certainly gain something from that experience.

As a director, you’ve never shied away from doing different genres. In fact, that sort of your style – that you work well in any style.

BOB: I determined very early that I would be an eclectic director. If you want to be a darling of the critics, you're probably better off having a cohesive singularity to your vision, and some of our greatest directors do work that way, but I didn’t want to do that. 

I wanted to try all the forms and set out to do that. It's in my nature to be adventurous, I think, so I've been able to do, fortunately, virtually every genre. It was a conscious decision, made from the beginning.

I started out in horror films, and it took me three films to get away from horror, because I didn't have any intention of staying in it.

I intended to be eclectic, and I intended that the style be determined by the needs of the work. The other thing I wanted to do was to have a visual style that was fresh and an approach that gave the audience a deep involvement in the film, like they were part of the adventure. I'm very concerned about the look and the texture of my films. 

Even in my films that aren't necessarily designed to show off the beauty of the place, I'm still very conscious of my backgrounds and my textures; not so much that they overwhelm the audience, but that they feel part of the texture.

Are you surprised that Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things is still popular today?

BOB: Yes. I did a film called Now and Forever a few years back and we were on the festival circuit. I was at the Atlantic City Film Festival, and we won the festival and I won best director. I got up to give a speech and it wasn't a young, hip-appearing audience. The audience was young to middle age. 

I said to them, "I know I am identified with Hollywood films, but my first film was a little film shot in ten days, called Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things." And this crowd broke out into huge applause, all the young people, the middle-aged ones, they all knew the movie. That flabbergasted me. After speaking to them afterwards, indeed the film is, among filmmakers, pretty well-known.

Is there anything you learned on that movie that you still use today?

BOB: Sure. I learned that you want to change your backgrounds. I like to move my characters and move my camera; not obtrusively, but to identify the world that we're in and to identify the dynamics and the immediacy of the shot.

That's probably the one common element in my work is the tendency to move the camera a great deal. I mean, I'll do the classical over-the-shoulder close-up stuff when it's appropriate, when you're interested in seeing into the eyes of the people. But even then, we move the camera gently during close-ups.

What’s your best advice about writing?

BOB: Be truthful. Verisimilitude. You've got to find your reality, no matter how broad what you're doing is. If you're doing the Marx Brothers, it's wild, it's bizarre, but somewhere in there has to be some truth, no matter how outrageous or absurd or fantastical.  

Dying to make a feature? Learn from the pros!

"We never put out an actual textbook for the Corman School of Filmmaking, but if we did, it would be Fast, Cheap and Under Control." 
Roger Corman, Producer

★★★★★

It’s like taking a Master Class in moviemaking…all in one book!

• Jonathan Demme: The value of cameos

• John Sayles: Writing to your resources

• Peter Bogdanovich: Long, continuous takes

• John Cassavetes: Re-Shoots

• Steven Soderbergh: Rehearsals

• George Romero: Casting

• Kevin Smith: Skipping film school

• Jon Favreau: Creating an emotional connection

• Richard Linklater: Poverty breeds creativity

• David Lynch: Kill your darlings

• Ron Howard: Pre-production planning

• John Carpenter: Going low-tech

• Robert Rodriguez: Sound thinking

And more!

Write Your Screenplay with the Help of Top Screenwriters!

It’s like taking a Master Class in screenwriting … all in one book!

Discover the pitfalls of writing to fit a budget from screenwriters who have successfully navigated these waters already. Learn from their mistakes and improve your script with their expert advice.

"I wish I'd read this book before I made Re-Animator."
Stuart Gordon, Director, Re-Animator, Castle Freak, From Beyond

John Gaspard has directed half a dozen low-budget features, as well as written for TV, movies, novels and the stage.

The book covers (among other topics):

• Academy-Award Winner Dan Futterman (“Capote”) on writing real stories

• Tom DiCillio (“Living In Oblivion”) on turning a short into a feature

• Kasi Lemmons (“Eve’s Bayou”) on writing for a different time period

• George Romero (“Martin”) on writing horror on a budget

• Rebecca Miller (“Personal Velocity”) on adapting short stories

• Stuart Gordon (“Re-Animator”) on adaptations

• Academy-Award Nominee Whit Stillman (“Metropolitan”) on cheap ways to make it look expensive

• Miranda July (“Me and You and Everyone We Know”) on making your writing spontaneous

• Alex Cox (“Repo Man”) on scaling the script to meet a budget

• Joan Micklin Silver (“Hester Street”) on writing history on a budget

• Bob Clark (“Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things”) on mixing humor and horror

• Amy Holden Jones (“Love Letters”) on writing romance on a budget

• Henry Jaglom (“Venice/Venice”) on mixing improvisation with scripting

• L.M. Kit Carson (“Paris, Texas”) on re-writing while shooting

• Academy-Award Winner Kenneth Lonergan (“You Can Count on Me”) on script editing

• Roger Nygard (“Suckers”) on mixing genres

This is the book for anyone who’s serious about writing a screenplay that can get produced! 

Drew Cullingham on “Black Smoke Rising”

What was your filmmaking background before setting out to make "Black Smoke Rising"?

DREW: Black Smoke Rising is my third feature as writer/director/producer. The previous one was Monk3ys, an odd melange of Big Brother, SAW, some nasty whisky and the perennially funny situation of a grown man yet to have lost his virginity! It's a micro-budget containment thriller that riffs on the world of reality television, found footage movies and the sorry state of the film industry.  

It's also an experimental and weird entity that actually scooped the Raindance Festival award for best microbudget film.   

Before that was Umbrage: The First Vampire featuring Doug 'Pinhead' Bradley as an antiques dealer, stuck in the arse end of nowhere, who has to contend with demonic and vampiric grudges as well as the melodrama of his heavily pregnant wife and petulant step-daughter.  

Before that I cut my teeth on shorts, music promos, corporate crap and even some food television.

Before that I didn't know whether to be a writer, a photographer or a musician, and kind of thought that filmmaking was a good compromise!

What was the genesis of the project and what was the writing process like? 

DREW: This film really shouldn't be.  It just shouldn't. I lost my brother in 2010, so it was born from that loss. That grief.   

Monk3ys actually was a fresher wound, and has a lot of anger in it that came from that chapter of my life. Black Smoke Rising was written a little later, and was a cathartic experience to write, and to film.    

There's not a lot of biography in the film, but there is a lot of me.  I shouldn't admit that, but I can't help but be honest about it. As is often the case with me, the writing was not a tortuous process. The story here is fairly vanilla in terms of a hero's journey. The protagonist resists the call, then answers it, has help from a mentor or two along the way, and learns a lesson in the end. I wanted it to be a familiar structure and a positive message. It's a highly emotional journey and there are some particularly emotive scenes that had me pounding the keyboard through a haze of misty grief. I'm just thrilled that James Fisher did such a wonderful job of re-interpreting my personal rants!

Can you talk about how you raised your budget and your financial plan for recouping your costs? 

DREW: There's not a lot to talk about here.  

The film was shot on a shoestring by the small group of loyal and wonderful friends and brothers that I have in this crazy filmmaking trip. I'm so grateful to all of them, and thrilled that somehow I've elicited this kind of fraternity in such giving people.  

What few things we needed, in terms of subsistence, accommodation, insurance and so on - I paid for out of a small inheritance. As I said - in an ideal world this film would not exist - but it does because of the people around me and especially because of all that my brother gave to me - not just financially, but personally too.  

I could say that I just want people to see the film and to feel it.   If it makes a little money then great. In reality we are looking very seriously at how dead the DVD market is to films of this stature and looking to explore alternative means of distribution. The digital age is consuming us, not the other way around, so we need to be making our offerings as palatable as possible.

Why did you decide to shoot in black and white and what's the upside and downside of that choice?

DREW: Both myself and Glen Warrillow, the DOP on the film, are avid lovers of monochrome. There is just such simple beauty in seeing the full colour world in terms of tone rather than colour. I think it is a lost art, and that a lot of people just decolourise things and think that's enough. It's not. It's so liberating to get to the point where you 'see' in light and dark.   

Aside from that, there are a couple of reasons for the film being in black and white. First up I like the sense of 'vintage' that it brings.  I think it sits with the road trip, with the blues music, with a few noir sensibilities that I love.  

Also, the film is a study of grief.  It is a world without colour. Grief is such a powerful and horrible beast of an emotion that it can utterly consume you and affect every facet of the world and how you see what is around you. There is nothing else. It IS monochrome. 

Honestly, I don't see upsides or downsides to the choice. It is what it is. There are moments when I thought we'd inadvertently found some wonderful combinations of colour that nobody would ever see, accidents of production design, but that's hardly a downside. It really just affects the way you work. It affects the way you light scenes, especially when you start veering towards noir. We even created a gobo at one point, which is something rare these days, and a real staple of noir.

What camera did you use and what did you love and hate about it? 

DREW: We shot on the Panasonic LUMIX GH2. Everyone else seems to be shooting on Canon 5Ds these days, and I've done that too. Obviously here, we're talking about shooting microbudget stuff on DSLRs - which is so damn feasible now!  

I did a fair bit of research and testing and just didn't find the Canon to be what I wanted. The dynamic range of the GH2 suited me better, as did the clarity of the nice lenses that you can get for it. It renders blacks and highlights beautifully. Granted, it suffers a little more in the midrange when you blow it up, and perhaps the full frame and better sensor of the Canon can cope better here - but we were shooting black and white, with highs and lows. I had very little midrange to worry about, so I much preferred the definition that the GH2 gave me. 

I normally wouldn't propose shooting too much on DSLRs.  I think they just aren't suited for a lot of things. If you want a pull focus you need a hell of a rig, and by the time you add in a monitor, follow focus and all that you may as well use a full on camera. What I love about the GH2 for this kind of film, where I was more concerned with a beautiful photographic frame for the action to move within (as opposed to a constantly moving camera) is that (1) it takes such beautiful photographs, and (2) it is so compact and easy to get in places you just couldn't get a bigger camera, which affords you angles and opportunities you'd never otherwise get. 

Hate about it? Nothing. I knew its limitations. I wish the battery lasted better, and I wish now that they had a 3.5mm jack input for a shotgun mic, rather than an odd 2.5mm one.  But hey - you can't have everything, right?

Did the movie change much in the editing process, and if so, how?

DREW: Movies always change in the edit, and this one was no exception. There were bits that I knew would be MADE in the edit, bits that had no need for continuity of action but would be effectively a montage of soliloquy!    

Did it change profoundly? Not really. The first cut was mercifully way too long,  a relief since the script was actually on the short side. I'd shot way more than I needed, and was able to cut almost 20 minutes of stuff, some of that being bits of scenes and some being entire scenes.  I also moved a chunk from what was becoming an over long act one into the beginning of a slender act two and reshuffled a couple of things. Being a largely episodic piece this was relatively easy.   

The most important thing in any edit is good pacing, and having the ruthlessness to excise favoured segments in pursuit of that pace. Black Smoke Rising is a long way from an action thriller, but in some ways that makes the pacing even harder. It is a slow build of momentum that can only really be created in the edit, no matter what the script says!

What was the smartest thing you did during production? The dumbest?

DREW: Smart? I can't lay claim to anything of the sort! Haha.  

Ok... I think on any film set, especially micro-budget ones, there are moments where you just have to improvise. The shit will hit the fan at some point and the measure of the man is how swiftly and successfully you manage to integrate that shit into the seamless fabric of the story you are weaving. There's a scene in the film where the protagonist is contemplating an urn full of his brother's ashes, and wondering what size tupperware pot to decant him into for his trip, since the urn isn't really roadworthy. In the script he just chooses one, and next thing we see is him walking to the car with a pot full of ash.   

IN THE SCRIPT - when he returns from his trip without the ashes, the urn is on the kitchen counter where he left it.  IN THE FILM, he breaks the urn accidentally earlier on, and when he returns there is no urn (and instead one of my favourite shots where the entire frame is out of focus until he puts his hand where the urn should have been and his hand is suddenly sharp).   

This is because our esteemed DOP decided to smash the urn in an act of wanton clumsiness and I was faced with this horrible moment where I had to either (1) panic and lose the plot (2) freak out and try and get a matching prop (3) integrate the DOP's idiocy into a new story element and embrace the dark humour of it! I chose (3)!  OK - it wasn't that smart.  I tried to say I hadn't done much smart to begin with!

The dumbest? Without a doubt the dumbest thing I personally did was travel to the lake district in early October with just one pair of cheap crappy trainers. They got so wet after half a day of traipsing around the lakes that I was already getting tetchy. When, on a simple shot of a drive by somewhere in the Yorkshire Dales, I decided to inadvertently step knee deep into a camouflaged wet dyke (and I mean that literally!) that signalled the end for those shoes, and those socks. I proceeded to direct the rest of that day barefoot in the moors and dales of a flooded Yorkshire until a suitable shoe-equipped supermarket reared into view hours later.  Stupid!!

And, finally, what did you learn from making the film that you have taken to other projects?

DREW: Crikey. It's so hard to pinpoint this kind of thing. Everything is a learning curve. I've learned to consider what footwear is appropriate!   

As a director, every time you interact with an actor you learn a bit more about directing. You learn things that you can never really apply, but at the same time you are stockpiling experiences and ways NOT to deal with situations or people.  You learn constantly when it's best to trust your instincts.   You learn to trust other people.   That's a big one - part of the building of the team, of the family.  Learning the abilities, and limitations, of the people around you is very useful.  For me especially, as a weird kind of perfectionist (I think it's more that I'm a control freak than a perfectionist to be honest!), it is good to know that other people have your back and won't let you down when it matters.  

Mostly every time I get on set I re-learn everything, and I am reminded of why I do this. There is nothing quite like making movies...  

I used to think that filmmaking could never rival the thrill of being on stage and playing music to an audience. But it can.  I'd never show it, but I get palpitations when I know something special is happening on set, and it only adds to the thrill that there's a camera bearing witness to it rather than an audience.  Oddly enough it's a thrill that I can only imagine getting from filmmaking (as opposed to on stage).  

Dying to make a feature? Learn from the pros!

"We never put out an actual textbook for the Corman School of Filmmaking, but if we did, it would be Fast, Cheap and Under Control." 
Roger Corman, Producer

★★★★★

It’s like taking a Master Class in moviemaking…all in one book!

• Jonathan Demme: The value of cameos

• John Sayles: Writing to your resources

• Peter Bogdanovich: Long, continuous takes

• John Cassavetes: Re-Shoots

• Steven Soderbergh: Rehearsals

• George Romero: Casting

• Kevin Smith: Skipping film school

• Jon Favreau: Creating an emotional connection

• Richard Linklater: Poverty breeds creativity

• David Lynch: Kill your darlings

• Ron Howard: Pre-production planning

• John Carpenter: Going low-tech

• Robert Rodriguez: Sound thinking

And more!

Write Your Screenplay with the Help of Top Screenwriters!

It’s like taking a Master Class in screenwriting … all in one book!

Discover the pitfalls of writing to fit a budget from screenwriters who have successfully navigated these waters already. Learn from their mistakes and improve your script with their expert advice.

"I wish I'd read this book before I made Re-Animator."
Stuart Gordon, Director, Re-Animator, Castle Freak, From Beyond

John Gaspard has directed half a dozen low-budget features, as well as written for TV, movies, novels and the stage.

The book covers (among other topics):

• Academy-Award Winner Dan Futterman (“Capote”) on writing real stories

• Tom DiCillio (“Living In Oblivion”) on turning a short into a feature

• Kasi Lemmons (“Eve’s Bayou”) on writing for a different time period

• George Romero (“Martin”) on writing horror on a budget

• Rebecca Miller (“Personal Velocity”) on adapting short stories

• Stuart Gordon (“Re-Animator”) on adaptations

• Academy-Award Nominee Whit Stillman (“Metropolitan”) on cheap ways to make it look expensive

• Miranda July (“Me and You and Everyone We Know”) on making your writing spontaneous

• Alex Cox (“Repo Man”) on scaling the script to meet a budget

• Joan Micklin Silver (“Hester Street”) on writing history on a budget

• Bob Clark (“Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things”) on mixing humor and horror

• Amy Holden Jones (“Love Letters”) on writing romance on a budget

• Henry Jaglom (“Venice/Venice”) on mixing improvisation with scripting

• L.M. Kit Carson (“Paris, Texas”) on re-writing while shooting

• Academy-Award Winner Kenneth Lonergan (“You Can Count on Me”) on script editing

• Roger Nygard (“Suckers”) on mixing genres

This is the book for anyone who’s serious about writing a screenplay that can get produced! 

Director Alex Cox on “Repo Man”

Repo Man defies description, by design. It's a punk rock comedy, a retro-sci-fi flick, a buddy film, a social satire, and one of the best films to come out of the 1980s … or any other decade, actually.

Writer/director Alex Cox skillfully transcends genres as his aimless hero, Otto (Emilio Estevez) morphs from feckless punker to career repo man to intergalactic traveler, continually demonstrating the mantra of the trade: The life of a repo man is always intense.

What point were you at in your career before this project?

ALEX COX: I had written two scripts for money, one for United Artists and one for the director Adrian Lyne, and made a short film (40 minutes) at UCLA.

Where did the idea for Repo Man come from?

ALEX COX: Various sources. People I'd met in LA, a repo man with whom I rode around, punks from that scene.

Do you begin with story, character or theme?

ALEX COX: Urr... it depends on the project. If it's a bio-pic, it's the character.

In the case of Repo Man, probably theme: the imminence of nuclear war, the superficiality and stupidity of almost everything else. 

The theme for the film seems to hinge on "the lattice of coincidence." How important is having a theme before you start to write? 

ALEX COX: It depends on the project. Repo Man's theme probably changed when the ending was re-written near the end of the shoot and the destruction of LA replaced with the transcendental flying car.

How much research did you do and how did that help you write the script?

ALEX COX: Just riding around with a repo man, going to punk gigs, and a monthly subscription to The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

Did you outline the whole story before you started writing the script?

ALEX COX: No, I just started writing scenes and dialogue.

What's your writing process?

ALEX COX: Write until it's finished. Then re-write it. There were 14 drafts of Repo Man. The first one probably took a month or so. Some later ones just a few days.

Was it always planned to be a low-budget film?

ALEX COX: Yes, and much lower budget. Around $120K at one stage, of which $50K – our salaries – would have been deferred. 

I understand that there was talk at one time of doing Repo Man as a student film. Were you a student at the time, and how would you have pulled that off?

ALEX COX: (Producers Peter) McCarthy, (Jonathan) Wacks and I had all been UCLA students. We formed a company with the best of the UCLA critical studies profs, Bob Rosen ­– Edge City Productions – for the purpose of making features. The idea was that I would re-enroll to access the facilities, which I did. 

How did you connect with Executive Producer Michael Nesmith, and what attracted him to the film?

ALEX COX: We met him via another producer, Harry Gittes. Michael Nesmith liked motor-themed movies, comic books (the first four pages of the script were a comic) and had had some experience with repo men in his post-Monkees days.

Do you write with specific actors in mind?

ALEX COX: I thought about the guys in the band Fear for the four repo men. I didn't know them personally, but had formed an impression by seeing them on stage.

What's the value of going after "name" actors (like Emilio Estevez) for a low-budget movie and do you think it's worth the trouble?

ALEX COX: It gives confidence to the financiers. Without the financiers, no film. So in that sense it's certainly worth the trouble.

At a certain point, do you feel that as a writer you give up a character and the actor takes him over?

ALEX COX: Oh, yes. Because the writer has to think of twenty or thirty characters, and the director of many more things besides. The actor only needs to think about his/her part (we hope).

How did you come up with the idea to use all "generic" food?

ALEX COX: We couldn't get any product placement! Apart from Ralph's Supermarket, who gave us the generic stuff, and the Car Freshener Company.

Music plays such a large role in the film. Did you determine any of the music at the scripting stage?

ALEX COX: Only TV Party, which Otto sings on camera.

How do you know when a script is done?

ALEX COX: When they give you the money to shoot it.

Did you do readings before you shot? If so, did the script change due to the readings?

ALEX COX: I wrote a couple of audition pieces for the characters of Miller and Lite. The actors liked them, and both ended up being incorporated into the script. There was also one script reading prior to the shoot. 

Do you show drafts to people during the process?

ALEX COX: Of course – that's what they're for.  

How do you process and use feedback?

ALEX COX: Keep changing the script until it attracts the actors & the money. If it doesn't, after a certain amount of time, give up.

Do you ever put the script away for a while after finishing a draft?  

ALEX COX: Put it away if you don't like it or can't figure out a way to raise money for it. Once put away, rarely is it retrieved.

Did the story change during shooting or editing at all?

ALEX COX: Yes, especially with the ending, and with Dennis Dolan, our wise editor, and his input.

What's the value of being open to change during production?

ALEX COX: It depends on the project. If the script is perfect, it might be a big mistake.

What did you learn from working on that script that you still use today?

ALEX COX: Nothing that I learned writing or directing Repo Man was of any particular value. It is always the same struggle, always the same problems, always the same tedious and irritating search for money.

What's the best advice about writing that you've ever received?

ALEX COX: Set yourself a deadline and keep to it. Get to the end before you go back and start tweaking the beginning.

Any words of advice to a writer working on a low-budget script?

ALEX COX: Don't waste your money on screenwriting software. If you can't set two tabs and remember to capitalize character names, find an easier job -- actor, or producer.

With Otto you created an essentially passive main character – which screenwriting books and seminars tell us not to do. How did you make it work?

ALEX COX: Pay no attention to screenwriting books or seminars. They are as useless as screenwriting software and almost as damaging as 'professional script doctors.' 

Write what's on your mind. Otto had to be a blank page or he couldn't have made the transition from rebel to reactionary so effortlessly.

What's your darkest memory from Repo Man?

ALEX COX: It was a pretty happy experience. Miserable relations with my girlfriend, probably. Like everyone from UCLA, she too had aspirations to be a director.

What's your favorite memory of working on Repo Man?

ALEX COX: Sy Richardson! The best actor I have ever worked with and one of the finest people, too.

What movies have inspired you?

ALEX COX: Citizen Kane, Wages Of Fear, The Mattei Affair, Yojimbo, Deuxieme Souffle, Killer Of Sheep, Madadayo, The Wild Bunch, For A Few Dollars More, King Kong (original version).

Repo Man mixes a lot of genres and broke a lot of ground for filmmakers who came later. What's the value of mixing genres the way you did?

ALEX COX: It's more fun. But it tends to annoy critics, who pretend to enjoy it sometimes, but are deeply conservative in their wizened little hearts.

Dying to make a feature? Learn from the pros!

"We never put out an actual textbook for the Corman School of Filmmaking, but if we did, it would be Fast, Cheap and Under Control." 
Roger Corman, Producer

★★★★★

It’s like taking a Master Class in moviemaking…all in one book!

• Jonathan Demme: The value of cameos

• John Sayles: Writing to your resources

• Peter Bogdanovich: Long, continuous takes

• John Cassavetes: Re-Shoots

• Steven Soderbergh: Rehearsals

• George Romero: Casting

• Kevin Smith: Skipping film school

• Jon Favreau: Creating an emotional connection

• Richard Linklater: Poverty breeds creativity

• David Lynch: Kill your darlings

• Ron Howard: Pre-production planning

• John Carpenter: Going low-tech

• Robert Rodriguez: Sound thinking

And more!

Write Your Screenplay with the Help of Top Screenwriters!

It’s like taking a Master Class in screenwriting … all in one book!

Discover the pitfalls of writing to fit a budget from screenwriters who have successfully navigated these waters already. Learn from their mistakes and improve your script with their expert advice.

"I wish I'd read this book before I made Re-Animator."
Stuart Gordon, Director, Re-Animator, Castle Freak, From Beyond

John Gaspard has directed half a dozen low-budget features, as well as written for TV, movies, novels and the stage.

The book covers (among other topics):

• Academy-Award Winner Dan Futterman (“Capote”) on writing real stories

• Tom DiCillio (“Living In Oblivion”) on turning a short into a feature

• Kasi Lemmons (“Eve’s Bayou”) on writing for a different time period

• George Romero (“Martin”) on writing horror on a budget

• Rebecca Miller (“Personal Velocity”) on adapting short stories

• Stuart Gordon (“Re-Animator”) on adaptations

• Academy-Award Nominee Whit Stillman (“Metropolitan”) on cheap ways to make it look expensive

• Miranda July (“Me and You and Everyone We Know”) on making your writing spontaneous

• Alex Cox (“Repo Man”) on scaling the script to meet a budget

• Joan Micklin Silver (“Hester Street”) on writing history on a budget

• Bob Clark (“Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things”) on mixing humor and horror

• Amy Holden Jones (“Love Letters”) on writing romance on a budget

• Henry Jaglom (“Venice/Venice”) on mixing improvisation with scripting

• L.M. Kit Carson (“Paris, Texas”) on re-writing while shooting

• Academy-Award Winner Kenneth Lonergan (“You Can Count on Me”) on script editing

• Roger Nygard (“Suckers”) on mixing genres

This is the book for anyone who’s serious about writing a screenplay that can get produced! 

John McNaughton on writing & directing "Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer"

The phrase “not for the squeamish” may well have been invented for John McNaughton’s Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer. Although you’ll find it in the “horror” film section of the video store, it’s far more than a simple horror film. The film is a starkly realistic, almost documentary-style fictionalized look at a few days in the life of confessed serial killer Henry Lee Lucas.

McNaughton, who went on to direct in a number of different genres including the comic-drama Mad Dog and Glory starring Robert De Niro, Bill Murray, and Uma Thurman, drew on his roots producing documentaries to construct the film. But as he admits, it was co-writer Richard Fire’s keen understanding and use of the basics of dramatic construction that helped to make Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer the milestone that it has become.

What was going on in your life and career before Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer came along?

I had a long-standing dream of wanting to make a feature film, but I'd had to put that on hold because, being that I lived in Chicago and was not connected in any way to the mainstream industry, I really didn't know how I was ever going to achieve that dream.

I was working on these small documentary projects that were being distributed by a company in the South suburbs of Chicago, called MPI. I had worked in the commercial field in Chicago, but the first time I was ever on a feature film set I was the director.

Where did the idea for the story come from?

I had done this series of documentaries for MPI, called Dealers in Death, which were about American gangsters, primarily from the Prohibition era. We had scoured the archives for a lot of public domain photographs and footage, got Broderick Crawford to narrate it for us and made a little money on that project. 

I was going to produce and direct another documentary piece, based on professional wrestling, because I'd found someone who had a collection of wrestling footage from the 1950s and 1960s with Bobo Brazil and Killer Kowalski and Dick the Bruiser and Andre the Giant, from the period of wrestling before the WWF or the WWE.

MPI was owned by two brothers, Waleed and Malik Ali. I went out to meet Waleed to talk about doing these wrestling documentaries. When I got to their offices Waleed informed me that he had contacted the person who had the footage for sale. The person with the footage had quoted a price and when the Ali brothers approached him, saying, "Okay, we'll negotiate on that price," the guy realized that the brothers had money so he increased his price. The Ali brothers were not to be dealt with in that manner, so Waleed informed me, "Listen, we're not going to do business with this guy. He's a crook."

Early on in the video business -- and the brothers got in at the beginning -- the major studios weren't interested in video rights, because there just wasn't enough money involved. So they were selling off the rights to their films. A couple of companies, like Vestron and Pyramid, became wealthy for a short period of time, until the studios saw the potential in the video market and started creating their own video divisions. And then those companies went out of business.

But in the early days of video you could buy the video rights quite cheaply for low-budget horror films and since a lot of "B" horror titles hadn't been seen widely, they were very successful on video.  A "B" schlock horror film that people may not have been interested in going to the theater to see, they were more than happy to rent because they're a lot of fun.

So what was happening at this time was that those titles were becoming so popular that the rights acquisitions were becoming more and more expensive. And so Waleed had determined that it would make sense for them to fund a horror film and thereby own all rights in perpetuity, rather than just buying the video rights for a limited period of time. So he proposed to me that we should join forces and make a horror film.

I went in thinking I was going to be doing these documentaries and instead, it was the day that my dream came true, completely unexpectedly. I was kind of in shock. 

Down the hall was the office of an old friend of mine who I had grown up with, Gus Kavooras. Gus was always a collector of the strange and the arcane and the weird. I stopped in to see him and I was kind of in shock. I said, "Gus, Waleed just offered me $100,000 to make a horror movie. I have no idea what my subject will be." And he said, "Here, look at this." 

He took a videocassette off the shelf and popped it in the machine. It was a segment from the news magazine show, 20/20, and the segment was on Henry Lee Lucas and Ottis Elwood Toole, who were serial killers. The term "serial killer" was coined in 1983 by the FBI. In 1986 I had never heard the term before and this was something new to me, the idea that there were these random murderers going around. 

Most murders are committed by people previously acquainted to the victim. Husband kill wives, wives kill husbands, husbands kill wives' lovers, wives kill husbands' lovers. Most murderers are committed by people who are known by the victim. But this was a new trend in murder where there were these individuals who were just randomly murdering strangers. It was, indeed, very horrifying. There were some interviews with Henry and a lot of photographs. He was really a creepy character. And so that became the germ for the story.

Was the budget an issue while you developed the story?

The budget was written in stone. That was the mandate from Waleed, "Make me a horror film for $100,000." So the budget was always a consideration. 

How did you and co-writer Richard Fire work together?

I put together a set of 3x5 index cards delineating a scene structure, but I was not an experienced dramatist, screenwriter or otherwise. But I had the money, I had the mandate to make the picture, and we had our subject: the true story of Henry Lee Lucas. 

I had a friend, Steve Jones, and he was working as a director of animated commercials in Chicago, primarily doing Captain Crunch commercials. He was very well connected into the production community in Chicago and I was not. So I arranged with Steve to be the producer and I said to him, "I need a co-writer." 

There was a theater company in Chicago called The Organic Theater Company. The Organic was a really wild bunch of characters who had quite a bit of success in Chicago and were a really interesting theater company. One of the company members was Richard Fire, another was Tom Towles, who would play Otis. Other members of the company were Dennis Franz, Dennis Farina and Joe Mantegna. They had worked with David Mamet, they had produced Sexual Perversity in Chicago. 

They did a play called Warp that was kind of an outer space fantasy and Steve Jones had done a bunch of video projection for them and knew the group. Steve recommended Richard Fire. Richard and I met and talked about the project and I hired Richard.

What was your working process with Richard?

I would go every day to Richard's apartment and we would sit and he would type. We would knock ideas back and forth and then when we came to what we thought was something worthwhile, he would type it out.

What's so interesting about the script is that -- if you take out the violence -- it's a very traditional, well-structured story. We meet Henry, he meets his friend's sister and a romance starts and then there's a fight and then he and the sister leave together. It's almost like a classic 1950's Paddy Chayefsky television play.

I brought the exploitation elements to it and Richard brought traditional dramatic skills to it. We made a very good team, because had it been left to me it probably would have been tilted more toward pure exploitation. Whereas Richard humanized it. Paddy Chayefsky is a good example. On the DVD, Richard talks about the Aristotelian unity of time, place and action from classic dramatic writing. I think his presence certainly elevated the script.

Did you set out to make such a controversial movie?

I intended to make something very shocking. I remember, in my youth, pictures that sort of crossed the line. Back in those days there would be these incredibly lurid radio advertisements that if you listened to rock music on the radio a lot -- like most kids in my generation did -- they had these incredibly lurid campaigns for pictures like Last House on the Left and Night of the Living Dead and Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Those pictures were sort of watersheds, alongside pictures like The Wild Bunch. The Wild Bunch was incredibly shocking; up until then in a Western, if somebody got shot they fell down. There was no squib work, there was no spouting blood.

So our thought was, "Okay, we've got $100,000 and a chance to do a film and it's going to have to be a horror film, so let's make a horror film that is going to horrify." Richard Fire and I set ourselves a goal, and it was if we're charged with making a horror film, then a) Let's redefine the genre, and b) Let’s totally horrify the audience.

Like many things, the words "horror film" are like "liberal and conservative." The original meanings of the words have gotten lost. One would think that conservatives would be interested in conserving the environment, because the word comes from conservation. When you think of "horror film" now, it's a set of conventions and we meant to defy those conventions. The genre often includes monsters, creatures from outer space, ghosts, the supernatural or something beyond reality. But we didn't have a budget for any of that, so we set ourselves the goal of, "How can we most completely horrify an audience without using the traditional conventions?"

Was there any downside to ignoring the traditional conventions of the genre?

 Well, when we did the home invasion scene, it was a pretty creepy feeling after finishing that scene. A lot of the stuff -- fake blood and all that stuff -- there's a certain fun factor to doing it on the set. It's kind of silly, it's fake blood and rubber heads and all that kind of thing. But when we did that scene of the slaughter of the family it left a really strange atmosphere in the room. We did two takes. It was pretty horrific stuff and we didn't know how an audience was going to react to this.

Was the use of videotape in the home invasion scene an aesthetic choice or an economic choice?

Absolutely an aesthetic choice. The video image had an immediacy that the film image did not have, so when we had them tape that home invasion we very specifically chose to use video because it does have that immediacy and that reality. It lacks that distancing and softening that film gives. Also, having grown up watching the Vietnam war on television, even though those were 16mm film cameras, there was a quality to that hand-held footage that made it more real and more shocking.

Also I had read the book Red Dragon. In Henry Lee Lucas' case, they did not photograph or videotape their crimes. But in Red Dragon, Francis Dolarhyde worked in a film processing facility and he would go out and kill these people, photograph them, then come back and process the film. That book was a couple years old and by that time you could buy a decent home video camera, you didn't need to go through a lab. 

The use and intensity of violence, from the static images that open the movie to the crimes we ultimately see Henry and Otis commit, seems very planned and measured. Was that the case?

With violence and action, you have to keep topping yourself. If you go backwards, the audience is going to be disengaged. So the violence was doled out and increased as the story went along. 

How did you come up with the idea of opening the film on a series of tableaux of Henry’s recent crimes?

Richard and I were sitting in his apartment and we had various materials -- this was before the Internet -- and we were quite limited as to what we could come up with compared to today. But we did have that 20/20 documentary and it did have images. One of the famous images was of a young woman who was allegedly murdered by Henry. She was a Jane Doe who was never identified. She was left in a culvert somewhere and she was nude but for a pair of orange socks. And she was always referred to as Orange Socks because there was no other way to identify her. 

We were thinking, "What's our opening?" And we happened to be watching the 20/20 show and there was that photograph of Orange Socks, and Richard just went, "That's our opening." 

That was indeed our opening, although we didn't have orange socks, we used pink socks. Once we established that, we decided to do a series of them.

The audience can only take so much. You'll notice that one of the bloodless ways we had them kill people was to snap their necks, which is how he kills the woman and the young boy in the home invasion. There's no overt gore.

We were borrowing from the exploitation genre but to me the movie is a character study about people who did extremely horrific things. And there's the horror. Again, not from monsters from outer space.

In the case of stabbing Otis, he's such a heinous character that he deserves it. When we stabbed him in the eye with that rat-tail comb, you can't believe how much laughter there was on the set with that silly looking head and the blood. It was kind of fun.

Each individual can create in their imagination something more horrific than the graphic expression you may be able to come up with, especially on that kind of budget. A great way to put across scenes of great mayhem is to lead the audience up, step by step, so they can see what's about to happen. It's very clear that somebody's about to get killed. If you lead the audience, shot by shot and step by step up to the deed and make it very clear what's about to happen and then give them a couple frames and then cut away to some other thing, but continue it with the graphic sound, I think it can be much more horrific. Each individual will be left to complete the horror in their own mind, from their own library of personal horror. 

Again I have to credit Richard Fire for insisting that we make a serious drama rather than just a piece of pure exploitation. 

The visuals are very clever, like the use of the guitar case to signal that Henry has killed the hitchhiker. Or Otis' sister's suitcase, which is used for comic effect when we first see it and then has a far grimmer use at the end of the film.

We had a fair amount of time to work on that script, which you don't often get. In Hollywood they say, "Okay, the money's here, you've got this actor, let's go!" I just shot a segment for Masters of Horrorand normally they give you a seven-day prep, but since one of my days was Canadian Thanksgiving, I got a six-day prep. It's hard to iron out the details in that amount of time. 

Once you lay out your story and your script, then you start to see these connections that can be made to really strengthen that through-line, so everything connects in some way or another. If you have time, you can work on those details. If you don't, you just shoot the script and hope for the best.

Did you write with any specific actors in mind?

No. We had the Chicago theater community to draw from, which is pretty rich. A lot of young actors come to Chicago to learn their chops because there's a lot of Equity theater where you can actually make a living working in theater. Unlike Los Angeles, where most of it is non-Equity so you don't really get paid.

Chicago's a cheaper place to live, so a young actor can make their way with perhaps a bartending job or waitress job, and when they're working in theater they actually make enough money to pay their rent in the Bohemian neighborhoods of Chicago.

What was the refinement process on the script before you shot it?

The refinement process was mostly with the actors. There weren't that many people in my circle who had wide knowledge of production. Most of the experience in actual film production in Chicago was in commercials. Occasionally a movie came to town, but that was not the bread and butter of Chicago, it was commercial production. At the time Chicago was the number two market, after New York, for commercial production.

Our actors came out of theater, so the script refinement was done with the actors in rehearsal. Tom Towles came from the Organic Theater, where Richard Fire was a member and they'd known each other forever. And Tracy Arnold also came from the Organic, although Tracy was more of a new arrival, she had only been with the company for a year or two. Michael Rooker was just a lucky find.

How did you use the rehearsal process?

I've worked this way almost ever since, when I'm fortunate enough to get rehearsals. If I can get two weeks or at least ten days with them, I'll work with the actors myself for the first half of the rehearsal period. And then once we get the shape of the thing I've almost always brought the writer in, because the actors will want to make changes, like, "My character wouldn't use this word," "My character wouldn't say it this way," "I can't get my mouth around this phrase, it doesn't feel right to me."  

Once the actors take on those characters, they know them in deeper way often than the creators do. But if you just open the door and say, "Sure, go ahead, change it," you're going to have a disaster on your hands because then everything will start to change. But if you bring the writer in and if the actor tells the writer the line they'd like to change and their reasoning, then if you allow the writer to tailor the line, you still have the writer's voice but you also have the actor's notes. I think when you work that way you get roles that are like custom-tailored clothing. They're tailored to the particular actor and their personality and their needs and their interpretation.

On the first day of rehearsal, Richard told the actors, "Okay, I want you to go home and write a character bio, all the backstory, all the family history." Since Tracy and Tom were both part of the Organic Theater this was common to them, but to Michael it was sort of an affront. So Michael actually went home and, truth be told, while he was sitting on the toilet he dictated his backstory into a little portable tape recorder.

They each came back to rehearsals with these backstories and a certain amount of that information then got worked into the script for each character. It was a lesson to me that I carry because it was invaluable.

How have you used this technique since then?

Well, when you're working with Bob DeNiro, Bill Murray and Uma Thurman you don't necessarily send them home to write character bios. But you work with them in readings and discussions for four or five days. Then once you've really gotten the shape and everybody's in the same movie, then you bring the writer in and you use the writer to explain to them why things are the way they are. If they want dialogue changes, then you let the writer do it for them so that a voice is maintained rather than just throwing the doors open and letting everybody re-write your dialogue. You'll regret it if you do that.

Did you make any choices in the writing that you knew would save you money in shooting?

Well, a major one was setting it in Chicago. So far as anyone really knew, Henry Lee Lucas had never been near the city of Chicago. But there was no way we were going to go out on the road with a crew and house them and feed them.

What's the best advice you've ever received about screenwriting?

Probably, strangely enough, it was in Syd Fields' book. I had read other books on screenwriting and filmmaking that tended to take a more academic, ivory tower appraoch to the artistic principles involved. Syd Fields' book was just the nuts and bolts. 

"Know your ending" was one thing I got out of that book. I live back and forth between Chicago and Los Angeles and I love road trips. When I come out to do a project I'll drive out  and when the project is over I've drive home. It's a three-day drive and I think a lot and clear my head. It's like a chapter in my life is beginning and a chapter is ending. But I always know my destination. I know where I'm going, so I can plan my route. It's the same thing with a script. You need to know where the story's going. 

One of the principles that he laid out in his second book was the midpoint. The dramatic arc goes up and it comes down. It starts at the beginning, goes up to a peak, comes down to the ending. And the midpoint is the peak.

But most movies get in trouble in the middle. Establishing a midpoint for me was like knowing that I was going to drive from Los Angeles to Chicago, but I'm going to stop in Omaha. That was really an incredibly helpful idea, because after you leave the first act you're driving to the midpoint. You're going up. Now when I'm working on a script, once I've read it, I'll go to the last page and take the page number – let's say it's 120 pages – and I'll go look at what happened on page 60. I want to see if there's a key event that sort of divides the story in half.

In good screenplays, it may not be exactly on page 60. It may be between 58 and 63. But almost always in a good story you'll go back and find a key event that takes place that divides the story in half.

Dying to make a feature? Learn from the pros!

"We never put out an actual textbook for the Corman School of Filmmaking, but if we did, it would be Fast, Cheap and Under Control." 
Roger Corman, Producer

★★★★★

It’s like taking a Master Class in moviemaking…all in one book!

• Jonathan Demme: The value of cameos

• John Sayles: Writing to your resources

• Peter Bogdanovich: Long, continuous takes

• John Cassavetes: Re-Shoots

• Steven Soderbergh: Rehearsals

• George Romero: Casting

• Kevin Smith: Skipping film school

• Jon Favreau: Creating an emotional connection

• Richard Linklater: Poverty breeds creativity

• David Lynch: Kill your darlings

• Ron Howard: Pre-production planning

• John Carpenter: Going low-tech

• Robert Rodriguez: Sound thinking

And more!

Write Your Screenplay with the Help of Top Screenwriters!

It’s like taking a Master Class in screenwriting … all in one book!

Discover the pitfalls of writing to fit a budget from screenwriters who have successfully navigated these waters already. Learn from their mistakes and improve your script with their expert advice.

"I wish I'd read this book before I made Re-Animator."
Stuart Gordon, Director, Re-Animator, Castle Freak, From Beyond

John Gaspard has directed half a dozen low-budget features, as well as written for TV, movies, novels and the stage.

The book covers (among other topics):

• Academy-Award Winner Dan Futterman (“Capote”) on writing real stories

• Tom DiCillio (“Living In Oblivion”) on turning a short into a feature

• Kasi Lemmons (“Eve’s Bayou”) on writing for a different time period

• George Romero (“Martin”) on writing horror on a budget

• Rebecca Miller (“Personal Velocity”) on adapting short stories

• Stuart Gordon (“Re-Animator”) on adaptations

• Academy-Award Nominee Whit Stillman (“Metropolitan”) on cheap ways to make it look expensive

• Miranda July (“Me and You and Everyone We Know”) on making your writing spontaneous

• Alex Cox (“Repo Man”) on scaling the script to meet a budget

• Joan Micklin Silver (“Hester Street”) on writing history on a budget

• Bob Clark (“Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things”) on mixing humor and horror

• Amy Holden Jones (“Love Letters”) on writing romance on a budget

• Henry Jaglom (“Venice/Venice”) on mixing improvisation with scripting

• L.M. Kit Carson (“Paris, Texas”) on re-writing while shooting

• Academy-Award Winner Kenneth Lonergan (“You Can Count on Me”) on script editing

• Roger Nygard (“Suckers”) on mixing genres

This is the book for anyone who’s serious about writing a screenplay that can get produced!