Director Stuart Gordon on "Re-Animator"

Director/Writer Stuart Gordon came to an interesting realization a few years after the success of his first feature: He suddenly had a new middle name. Any time he was mentioned in print, his name now read “Stuart “Re-Animator Gordon." Be assured, there are worse fates in the film business.

 His new moniker came about simply because he (and his stellar team of actors and writers and creative folks) had taken the standard horror film and given it a much-needed jolt. 

Re-Animator, based on short stories by horror master H.P. Lovecraft, used all the standard elements of the horror film – mad scientist, pretty girl in distress, able lab assistant, lumbering monster/creature – and then gave the whole genre a surprising (and surprisingly funny) twist. 

What was going on in your career before Re-Animator came about?

 STUART GORDON: I was doing theater. I was the Artistic Director at the Organic Theater Company in Chicago. When I started working on Re-Animator, the original guy that I collaborated with was William Norris, who was an actor in our company and had written several of the plays that we had done.

Originally, we were going to do it as a limited series for television. That sounds kind of insane, but that was the plan. H.P. Lovecraft had serialized the Re-Animator stories, so there were six little stories. So our plan was to do six half-hour shows. Lovecraft's original stories are set in the past -- the first one takes place around the turn of the century, and then the episodes go through about a thirty-year period. So the first draft was set in period. 

We tried to sell that idea, based on the first episode, and had no luck. Then someone told us that half-hour shows were not really the way to go and that we should do an hour. So we went back and combined the first and the second story.

Around this point, Bill Norris was kind of losing faith in the process, so he dropped out and Dennis Paoli came in. When we wrote the second script, the hour-long version, someone again told us that setting it in period was making it a harder sell. It really should be set in the present day. So we shifted it into the present day, but were still unable to sell it.

At that point a friend introduced me to Brian Yuzna, who wanted to finance a feature. We showed him the hour version that we had developed and talked a little bit about how it could be expanded into a feature. We thought we could use the third story, and he said, "Why don't we use all six of them?" I said, "Well, what if we want to do a sequel?" And he said, "Let's just worry about doing as good a movie as we possibly can."

And that was the script that ended up becoming the film Re-Animator.

Why did you decide to work with the Lovecraft stories in the first place?

STUART GORDON: It began with a conversation I had with a friend. This was in the early 1980s and there were all these vampire and Dracula movies being made. I said, "I wish someone would make a Frankenstein movie," because I always liked Frankenstein better. This friend said, "Have you ever read Herbert West, Re-Animator by Lovecraft?" I had read a considerable amount of Lovecraft and I had never heard of this story. 

It piqued my curiosity so I started looking for it and found that it was out of print. I eventually ended up going to the Chicago Public Library and found that they had a copy of it in their special collection. I had to fill out a postcard requesting it. A few months later they sent me a note saying I could come to the library and read it there, but I would not be able to take it out of the library. When I got there, they handed me what was essentially a pulp magazine that contained the stories. The pages were literally crumbling as I was turning them, so I asked if I could photocopy it and they allowed me to do that. The stories had been out of print for many years.

Were the stories in the public domain?

STUART GORDON: They were. All of Lovecraft's work is now public domain. This was something we didn't know at the time. We believed that we had to get the rights through Arkham House, which was the publisher of the stories. 

What you usually do when you're working on something based on existing material, you do a copyright search, just to make sure that the people you're dealing with do indeed have the rights to it. We discovered that the material was public domain and that Arkham House did not have the rights. When we confronted them with this, this just sort of said, "Oh, well." They didn't argue about it at all. They knew that they had been trying to pull something. 

Was one of the attractions of the piece that it was in the public domain?

STUART GORDON: That made things a lot easier for us. We were prepared to pay something for the story. If they had asked for a lot of money, that would have been difficult, because our budget was small. Finding out that it was public domain was great, it was one less thing to worry about.

Once you decided to do it as a feature, what was the process for determining what elements you'd use from the six stories?

STUART GORDON: One of the things that emerged was that the whole story was being told by West's assistant, in the first person, describing what it was like working with West and so forth. We realized that this character was really key to telling the story, because all of the other people that you meet in the stories are these insane characters. This guy really is, in a sense, the audience who's witnessing all this stuff. 

We really got into the idea that we had to make this character very sympathetic and very normal. He would be like the audience, asking the questions that the audience wants to know and be someone that they could relate to. It also added a lot of contrast between this guy and all the eccentric types that populate the story.

In addition to reading through the stories, did you do any other research before you started writing?

STUART GORDON: I did. I went and visited some morgues, which was very helpful. I talked to several pathologists and even got thrown out of some places. I went to the University of Illinois pathology department and as soon as I told them I was working on a horror film, the professor started screaming at me to leave. They threw me out.

After this happened, I talked to a friend of mine who's a doctor, because I was kind of nervous about going to go to talk to more pathologists. I said, "Will they talk to me?" And he said, "Oh, yeah. They’re the loneliest people in the world. No one ever goes to the morgue." Not when they're conscious, anyway.

It turned out to be true -- the pathologists that I talked to were great. It started with a meeting with a guy named Dr. Stein who ran the Cook County morgue. He took me on a tour of the morgue that I'll never forget. At that point I had never really seen a dead body, other than someone at a funeral who had already been embalmed and made-up. The stench was just unbelievable. The bodies were just piled on top of each other on gurneys in these walk-in refrigerators. They didn't have those drawers like you see in movies; I've never seen that in any morgue. 

Stein had a very dark sense of humor, and I found out that this was pretty common with these pathologists. If you're going to do that job, you really have to maintain some kind of distance and keep a sense of humor about it all. That worked its way into the screenplay as well.

The attitude about the dead was really interesting. The idea is that a doctor, when you're alive, will do everything he can to keep you alive. But as soon as you're dead, you become toxic waste. You're garbage. You're not dealt with in a loving way at all. The corpses that we saw in the Cook County morgue were literally in garbage bags, black plastic garbage bags. The ones that had been in operations still had all the tubes and everything still in them. They didn't even bother to pull those things out. It was like, "Why bother?" 

It was an eye-opener and that also worked its way into the story. There's a sequence in Re-Animatorwhere he's trying to re-animate this corpse and it's not working. The assistant says, "We failed." And West says, "I didn't fail. He did." And then he smacks the corpse.

Why did you decide to do a horror film as your first film?

STUART GORDON: First of all, I like horror films. I've always liked them. But it was also because I was told by a friend that they were the easiest kinds of movies to find financing for. The wisdom, and I think it's still true, is that no matter how badly a horror film turns out, you can always sell it to somebody and the investors will get their money back. 

Did you bring any tricks from your theater background to help keep costs down?

STUART GORDON: I would say that 99% of the effects in the movie were done as live stage effects, what they call practical effects. They were the sorts of things that we could have done on-stage, to a large degree. I think there are only a couple of opticals in the whole movie. And this was before CGI or any of that.

I also rehearsed with the actors the same way I would when doing a play and that was very, very useful.

What’s the value of rehearsing?

STUART GORDON: The main reason you rehearse when you're doing a low-budget film is because you don't have a lot of time on the set to be talking about motivation while the whole crew is standing around waiting. So it's a way to work out a lot of stuff beforehand. 

But it was also good to hear the script read aloud. It amazes me that that is almost never done. We could see which lines sounded kind of clunky or other lines that weren't needed. In a couple of places we found dialogue that we really did need that was not in the script and we had to fill in some things. 

Can you think of any examples of dialogue you created in rehearsal to fill in a gap?

STUART GORDON: In the movie, West kills Dr. Hill who is trying to steal his secret of re-animation. He beheads him, and then he re-animates both the head and the headless body. They both come back to life and end up attacking West and stealing his serum. 

We had his assistant coming back and -- in the screenplay -- West didn't tell him any of the stuff that had gone on. The audience already knew this stuff, but the actor playing the assistant was asking, "How do I already know all this? Wouldn't I be asking him what happened?"

We didn't want to have a long scene where West tells us what we already know. And so it was one of those things where we had to find a way to explain it very quickly. So West says something like, "He wanted my serum. I had to kill him." And Cain, the assistant says, "He's dead?" And West says, "Not anymore." And that was it. That basically filled it in.

That's my favorite exchange in the film; it really encapsulates the tone of the movie.

STUART GORDON: There's always some key piece of information you always leave out in a script, too, I've noticed. Something you always take for granted and assume that it’s there, and then you realize that it isn't.

Did you screen other genre films before you started scripting?

STUART GORDON: I looked at a lot of films. Brian Yuzna sat me down and for weeks we screened every horror film that had been made in the 1980s, just to get an idea of what was out there and what had been done. 

One of the things that you have to do when you're making a horror film is that you have to somehow set it apart from the others. You have to go further or do something differently that really makes it unique. So it was important to see what else had been done and to get an idea where we could go, some uncharted territory that we could mine for the film.

With Re-Animator it really had to do with the sexual content. There were a lot of horror films out there, but most of them had the monster trying to devour the victim. That's a very typical thing. So the idea that the monster wants to have sex with the victim was something that was very seldom done. And if it was done, it was something that was very non-explicit. 

You found a way to make it explicit and at the same time different and amazing and something no one had ever seen before.

STUART GORDON: Yes, we set up that Dr. Hill was in lust with the Dean's daughter and he finally has her, but now he's a headless corpse. But he still wants to have his way with her, and the question was, how's he going to do this? 

I remember having discussions with Dennis about that. One night he called me up and said, "I've just written the world's first visual pun." It was the scene that everybody talked about in that movie, which was referred to as the "head gives head" scene.

How did you share the labor in the writing process?

STUART GORDON: Bill had written the piece as a period piece, but some of that language survived even into the modern versions of the script. It was almost Victorian language. West says things like, "That infernal beast," and things like that. No one uses a word like "infernal" anymore, but West does and it seemed right for him. Dennis modernized things a bit more. And the experiences that I had in the morgue worked their way into what became the final version of the script. 

How conscious were you of budget limitations as you were writing?

STUART GORDON: With low budget, it really has to be minimalist. You have to have as few sets and locations as possible and as few characters as possible. You really have to determine what's really essential and what do I really need to tell this story. If it isn't essential, it usually will get cut.

There are no night exteriors in the film, except for some establishing shots. Was that by design?

STUART GORDON: Shooting outside at night is a very expensive thing to do. If you're outside, you need to light it and that can become very pricey.

The establishing shots were done later, because after looking at the movie we realized that we needed to go outside some times. So we just added establishing shots of the buildings.

I remember you saying once that you never worried about what the critics would say about Re-Animator, because you always knew they would hate it.

STUART GORDON: That's true. I assumed that the critics would hate it and that the people I was really thinking about were the fans. I had seen all these other films and in my mind I knew that I had to outdo them -- somehow. But I just wrote off the critics. In a way, that was a very healthy thing, because if you're worrying about the critics it can paralyze you or you'll get too self-conscious about what you're doing. To just be able to ignore them completely was actually a very healthy thing.

Did you think about the special effects at all while you were writing?

STUART GORDON: One of the most difficult things was the idea that there's a character walking around carrying his head through half of the film. That was the major special effects problem. So I sat down pretty early on with the effects guys and we talked about different ways of creating that effect. I also ended up storyboarding those sequences, once I knew what the techniques would be and what approach we'd use for each shot. 

We used a variety of different gags. We resisted the idea of just having a guy with his shoulders built up, because what that does is make his arms look like he's a gorilla. So that was one technique we did not use.

The simplest technique we used was when we would shoot from the back. We would just have the guy who was playing the headless body lean his head forward and we had a fake neck stump on the back of his neck, and that was what you saw when it was shot from the back. You just had to make sure you didn't see his head at all. That way, we didn't have to do anything to his arms.

The one that was the most complicated was where we built an entire fake torso. That allowed the actor, David Gale, to stick his head through the torso and then the other actor could reach his hands around. That was the most complicated thing.

When it came time to cast the film, you didn't really follow Lovecraft's description of Herbert West.

STUART GORDON: West in the story is a blonde; Lovecraft refers to him as a towhead. But when Jeffrey Combs came in, he had the right attitude: a brilliant guy who is completely focused on only one thing and everything else is really not important to him. He captured that kind of drive. It was pretty clear from the first audition that this was Herbert West.

Was there anything you learned while working on that script that you took to future writing projects?

STUART GORDON: One of the things was that when you're working on a horror film, every single scene should have some tension in it. That was one of the things we really worked on with Re-Animator.  You really can't have any scenes with people just sort of sitting around and relaxed. You have to find the tension in each scene. There needs to be something scary about every single scene in the film, otherwise you're letting the audience off the hook. What you really want to do is to keep people on the edge of their seats all the way through.

Is that something you brought to the process from your work as a theater director?

STUART GORDON: It's funny, one of the things that I always did when I was staging a play was, I would very seldom have characters sit down. People sitting down and talking is, I think, one of the most boring things you can do. I would try to avoid that, because I felt that if you have the character sitting down, then the whole story sits down.

When I was doing theater, one of our patrons was an older woman and she would always bring her husband, who didn't really like theater very much. But she dragged him along to see our plays. He was notorious for falling asleep in the middle of the plays, and sometimes snoring. His name was Lester. So I was always, in the back of my mind, thinking "We've got to keep Lester awake. We have to have something going on every moment to keep Lester from falling asleep." And I think I'm still trying to keep Lester awake.

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

STUART GORDON: The best advice I ever got was don't censor yourself. That applies to horror films, but I think it applies to anything. If the idea seems like a strong idea, don't worry about what the ramifications are. Just go for it.

You should always use yourself as the test, the guinea pig, rather than thinking in terms of, "Well, marketing people say if I want to appeal to an audience of teenagers I should do this." That's a really good way to destroy  anything that's interesting. If it's something that you would like to see on-screen, then that's enough of a reason to put it in.

Also, although it's a cliché, they say that scripts are not written -- they're re-written. And scripts are not finished, they're abandoned. I think that's really true. You're going to end up doing many drafts of that script and really boiling it down to what's essential. Movies are really minimalist, I think. Every single line of dialogue, every single stage direction is going to be questioned at some point -- "Do we really need this?" So it's really a question of getting a sense of what you absolutely have to have and getting rid of everything that you don't.

One of the great things that Lovecraft said was "Never explain anything." I always thought that was a really good note, especially in horror films. It's really interesting when you look at a movie like The Ring, and then you look at the Japanese version of it, Ringu. Ringu is really spare and simple and they never explain anything. Whereas in the American version there's this tendency to want to explain everything -- to the point where you kind of take away all the magic. Lovecraft's precept is a pretty good one to follow.

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Magician and Filmmaker Lance Burton on his low-budget feature debut, “Billy Topit: Master Magician.”

John: I loved Billy Topit, both Jim and I did. I've made a number of low budget movies in my life, about a half dozen of them and the driving force behind them has almost always been, let's get together with some friends and make a movie. I got the sense that that was kind of part of the DNA of Billy Topit. Is that right?

Lance: Well, yes, I just have to correct you on one thing: Billy Topit was not a low budget movie. It was a nobudget movie. We literally just decided, you know what, I'm not going to spend any money. Everyone volunteered. So, if it ever makes any money, I'll go back and pay the actors.

John: Well, okay. But as someone who has done the same thing, I’ve done that a half dozen times with the no money. The results you got, given the no money status, were great. Your sound is exceptional. One of the things that's normally a big sign that it's a low budget movie is the sound is not good. It's a hard thing to get right and when you do get it right, it makes it sound like a big budget movie. The cinematography is terrific, the editing is fantastic. I don't know if you bought the music, or if someone did the music, but whatever it was it fit perfectly, and it just sailed along. So, for a movie that had no budget, you did an exceptional job of making a real movie.

Lance: Oh, thank you. You’re right, the sound is the one thing you really don't want to skimp on, because that's something you really can't fix in post a lot of the times. So, we did try to pay attention to the sound recording. As far as the music goes, some of the music was from my show that I already own. Some of the performance pieces, some of the music we use just for the movie, was rights free music that that I got from a company called Digital juice. They have all different sorts of music and it's searchable. So, you can find you know, rock and roll hard driving music, you can find, you know, instrumentals, you really have everything.

Then there was a couple of pieces that a friend of mine, who's a musician wrote and recorded for me. And one of the pieces in the film, my lead actress, Joelle Rigetti, she had actually recorded an album a couple of years ago and she gave me the album during the production. She said, “Hey, anything on here you want you're welcome to use.” And I listened to it and there was one track, I went, this is perfect for this one scene I have. It's that it's the scene where the whole cast is waking up on the second day, brushing their teeth and getting ready to go out. That's actually the lead actress singing.

John: The stuff you picked all really meshed well together.

Lance: Oh, thank you. It was during the post-production process when it really struck me—as we were editing and doing that—how much the music adds to a production, not just a live show. I already knew that for a live show. But as I was making the film, it really just struck me again, you know, wow, music really does add a whole new dimension to the movie or live show.

John: Yeah. So, where did the idea for the movie come from?

Lance: Well, I'll tell you exactly where it came from. When I was a kid, there was a television series on TV called The Magician starring Bill Bixby. It only lasted one season, because the network got a new president that came in and he just, you know, cancelled all his predecessors’ shows. But it actually did good in the ratings. But it only lasted 22 episodes.

The magic consultant on The Magician was Mark Wilson and so when I moved out west, I met Mark Wilson, and became friends with him. Then when I was shooting Knightrider, guess who they hired to provide all of the large illusions and props for the episode? Mark Wilson. He was sort of the magic advisor on that television show. So, Mark, and I got to hang out for seven days on the set as we were shooting. He's actually in the episode. You can see shots of him. He's sitting in the audience during one of the opening performances. In fact, I get him up on stage at one point as a volunteer. So, anyway, one day after filming, Mark and I are going out to dinner and we're in his car and we're driving along. And he says to me, “Lance, how do you like doing this work?” And I said, “What do you mean, Mark? You mean like this episode?” He says, “Yeah, how do you like, you know, acting on this, this TV show?”

And I said, “I'm having the time of my life. I get to do magic. I get to act. I get to work with a stuntman, and this is great.” And he says, “Well, you're doing a good job and you ought to think about doing more of this.” And I said, “More of this, so what do you mean?” He says, “You ought to start a notebook, start keeping some ideas of how you could incorporate your magic into a TV series or movie, you know, like with the Bill Bixby series.” And I thought, Oh, that's a good idea. So, I did, I started writing, every time I had an idea about how to use magic within the context of the drama series, or, you know, a story, I would write it down.

So, after a few years, I had all these sort of clever things that I came up with, to use magic and propelling the story forward, or to get out of this sticky situation or whatever. And every few years, I've pulled that out, and I'd go, “You know, I'm going to try and go pitch this,” and I would go to Los Angeles and set up some meetings. And I was trying to pitch to do a series every few years and we got close a couple of times, but we never were able to sell it. But the area I was working in was so similar to things that would pop up on my TV screen later. I kept thinking, “Man, I've got something here, I just need to, like any kind of magic trick, you know, I get it in my head and it's frustrating, I just I gotta get it out, I got to put it on the stage because it's like in my brain is like scratching the inside of my skull and it's really annoying.”

By that time, the technology had progressed to the point where we had these high-definition cameras that weren't, you know, astronomically expensive. And we had editing software so that somebody on their laptop could put out a professional looking product. So, I finally just said, hey, you know what, I'm gonna do this. And I called my buddy, Michael Goudeau and he came over and we fleshed out the story. And then we wrote the screenplay within, like two or three months. And then we eventually just started casting it and shot it. So, it all goes back to Bill Bixby and The Magician from 1973.

John: Well, most things do. Most things do go back that. Were you always planning on directing?

Lance: You know, directing and acting at the same time is really difficult. But I had been doing it all my life, you know, with my live show. And we started in on this thing and then at some point, I heard an interview with Barbra Streisand, and someone asked her that question, and they said, “Is it difficult to act and direct in the same production?” And she had a great response. She said, “No, it's easier that way. That's one less person I have to argue with.”

Jim: She's right. Absolutely right. So, talk a little bit about how the movie changed, you know, from your initial script and then through shooting and editing. Were there a lot of kind of, oh, let's do this. Oh, that didn't work.

Lance: I'll tell you what: when I first had the idea, I didn't have a real clear idea of the tone I wanted to take, you know? As far as it could have been a drama, it could have been a comedy or whatever. But I started chatting with my buddy, Michael Goudeau. Now, Michael worked in my show, as my special guest star. We've been friends for, you know, since the mid-80s and Michael said, this was his idea. So, I gave him credit.

He said, we should write this is a family film and I said, why is that? He says, because I have two small children and about two or three times a year, I have to take them to the movies and we have to pick a family film, and they're always horrible. That's why I'd like to see a good family film. Something good, we can take the kids to see. And I said okay, that's fine. You know, that fits. Magic's always been considered a good family entertainment.

So, we chose to write it as a family friendly movie, and as a comedy, but I give credit to Michael for that, and it didn't alter that much. Once we had the script completed, the idea was, you know, to keep to the script as close as we can within reason. Now, there were some scenes that were improvised and there were some things that I added during the course of the movie.

I'll tell you one thing that we added: the film starts with a dream sequence, with Billy floating a lady in the air. And then he wakes up in bed and you realize, oh, that was just a dream. He doesn't really have a big Las Vegas show. He's a birthday party magician and that was the first thing we shot.

So, as we were shooting, I read a book by Robert Rodriguez about his experience shooting El Mariachi. That was recommended to me by Rory Johnston, who played the bad guy in my movie. When I explained to Rory what we were going to do, he said, oh, you're doing like a no budget movie, like Robert Rodriguez. And I said, Who's Robert Rodriguez? He said, he is just a director, he started out by making this movie called El Mariachi. He had $7,000. That was it and he made a whole film.

And so, I bought the DVD to watch. I wanted to see what a $7,000 movie look like. And then I read his book and he had some really interesting advice and thoughts. He was talking about the power of three—which magicians will do also—where you have a callback, or something keeps popping back up, and it happens three times. In El Mariachi, there's like this sort of dream sequence. But it happens three times. And I started thinking, he's got a really good point there. So, I started thinking, where else could I insert, I need two more dream sequences? And I’ve got to find a place to insert them. So, we wrote two more dream sequences and found the right place to put them. And we shot that, but that kind of happened once we started once we started shooting.

Jim: You know, John, as he's mentioned, has shot some low budget movies here and there, populated largely by friends of John. And I get the sense that, in watching your movie, that these people are all your buddies, that they're all your pals, these are all your friends.

Lance: Oh, yeah, they're all my friends. The only time there were people in their movie, really, that I didn't know, like extras in the restaurant. We would just ask people, do you have any friends that you can come over and be background actors? And a lot of them are my friends. Like the birthday party scene: those kids are all kids of friends. Like, hey, if you got kids, bring them over to my stage manager's house.

John: It really looks like you guys are having fun throughout the whole movie. I don't mean to denigrate it in any way, but it's a really goofy movie. It is surprisingly silly in a really fun way.

Lance: It's a silly movie and a lot of that stuff is Michael Goudeau. Everybody loves Michael and loves his comedy and kids especially love him. So, that's we wanted to go for. For instance, when we were writing the date scene, you know, that was a silly scene and they were doing the game with the milk, the little milk containers. And Michael said, listen, when I take my kids to a movie, when it gets to the romantic the date scene, they are bored. They are like, oh, they're falling asleep going, oh, when is this over? So, let's beef this up with something silly. Hey, great. That sounds great. So, again, a lot of that stuff was just the purpose of the movie was to keep everybody's interest.

John: And that's probably something you've learned from being on stage forever, is feeling when the audience might be getting bored and being ahead of them.

Lance: Yeah, you don't want to get to that point. You want to keep it moving.

Jim: Your friend Michael is in the movie?

Lance: Yes, he is in the movie. He's one of the jugglers.

Jim: Okay. But the taller one or the shorter one?

Lance: The shorter one. He was my co-writer on the screenplay and also co-executive producer.

Jim: At the very end, in the credits, there's some very clever, funny, little teases about the possibility and it was sort of like, gosh, I hope there is a sequel. Is there talk of that--?

John: And I will say, I'm going to speak from my podcast partner here. We're standing by ready to help you if you want to do.

Jim: Absolutely. I’ll drop everything.

Lance: Billy Topit Part Two, The Empire Strikes Back. Billy Topit Part Two, the Search for Spock. I tell you, that was just me getting at the end of the editing process and doing the credits and it's just going out. This will be funny. Just me just making up silly stuff.

John: And the image of you doing that of sitting on a computer and editing, do you have the filmmaking bug now or you going to it doesn't have to be a sequel, Billy Topit, but...

Lance: I've enjoyed. Here's the thing that I enjoyed the most on the whole process was learning to edit. My good buddy Bob Massey was our photographer and our editor. But in the process of editing, I would go over to his house, and we would work on it and then he'd have to go do something. I was like, do we have to stop? And one day he said, you know, I can give you the software. I bought this and I can put it on two computers legally. So, if you want to, I'll show you how. I went, yeah.

So, I went out, I bought this and I put this stuff on, and I started to learn how to edit. Bob was there to help me, show me. I really loved it. I really, really loved the process.

And a lot of it is very similar to magic. I'll give you a good example of that: There's a scene at the end of the movie where they've opened the big show and I do the sawing a couple into eight pieces. So, we got the two, the boy and the girl and they get sawed apart and they come out of the boxes at the end. And the boys were in the girl’s clothes and they chase each other offstage. And then they run past the camera and then the second shot, you see them run into view in the wings. And then they have a scene in the wings.

Well, we shot the first part, with the doing the trick, and then running past the camera. We shot that at the Monte Carlo hotel in 2010. And the scene in the wings, we shot in 2013, on the other side of town at Rory Johnson's church that he went to. They allowed us to shoot there. So, the two scenes that are supposed to be at the same time were shot three years apart in different locations.

As we were shooting the first one, I knew in my mind what I wanted to do: I wanted him to run past the camera, and then I would pick it up. And the rest of the cast hadn't even been cast yet by the way. I didn't even know who the other actors were going to be. But I knew there was a scene over there. So, as they run past, I'll pick it up. Whenever we get to that three years later, we shoot the thing.

Now I'm editing it together. So, now I take the music from the first part of the shot, playing during the trick and the audience reaction. You get the audience applauding and cheering, and they run past the camera and we go to the second shot. But you still hear the audio, you still hear the music playing, and you hear me out on stage going thank you and the audience applauding. And so now when you put it all together, it's like it's seamless. No one knows that that scene was shot three years apart. It's like a magic trick. It's an illusion. There's a good example of how the sound helps enhance the illusion. And there are a few magic tricks that we do on stage where sound is a very big part of the illusion.

John: I don't know at what point in the process you read Robert Rodriguez’s book, but he based El Mariachi on what he had available. He wrote the script based on the town, the bar, the tortoise, the dog, all of that. You seem to have done a very similar thing, in that I'm guessing you already had some footage you on stage or was it a relatively easy thing to get. For an average person, that's a really hard thing to get.

Lance: Exactly. And I had to shoot all that before the show closed, because we were getting ready to close the show. So, we captured all of that all the stuff that had to be shot in the theatre, we captured that.

John: But for the average person writing a script, to write that in a scene, you can't shoot that. The lights alone in the ceiling are more than your budget.

Lance: And I was well aware that. I had this opportunity that we'd written it into the script and it's like, okay, I gotta shoot this now, because if I wait another two months, it's all going to be gone.

John: Exactly. And I felt the same with the scenes in the casino, which would be I think, normally a difficult thing to do. But you obviously had a relationship to make those happen.

Lance: The casino scenes, those were all shot afterwards. That was my buddy, John Woodrum, who owned this little casino called the Klondike. We wanted it to be a locals type Casino. I talked to a few of the casinos and some of them were like, yeah, we'd let you come in here and shoot, we have a coffee shop. How many days do you need it?

And I'm going to myself, I don't know how long this is going to take to shoot. I never shot a movie before. And then finally I went over to see my buddy, John and I said, John, I've got this movie I'm shooting, and some of the action takes place in the casino. And there's a coffee shop and you've got a coffee shop. What would you think about a shooting here? And he looks at me says yeah, whatever you want. Come on in. I'm like, what? Come on, anytime. That's like, Okay, I found this. I found our location.

John: You are a low-budget filmmaker at heart. You got all the tricks that are necessary to be good at this and you did it on your first movie. That's exceptional.

Lance: It was a fun process and it's not dissimilar to shooting a television special or a TV show, but it is a little different. There is obviously magic in it. But you know, there's also the whole second element of the story and doing the scene and the acting and getting all the actors on the same page.

John: And speaking of the actors, I was thrilled to see our friend Louie Anderson in there. He was a Twin Cities guy who I knew back when he was here and I had the good fortune of working with him a couple times in the corporate arena. And to see Johnny Thompson obviously having so much fun, it was just great. And then to see Mac kind of turn up. I don’t want to spoil it. But he does turn up

Lance: Mac turns up there near the end of the film. It was great fun, being able to work with Johnny. To be able to direct your mentor is a really special thing and that was just so much fun working with Johnny, and he was just so good in this role.

John: He was such a good actor, he really had that ability to turn it on.

Lance: And Pam too.

John: Oh, yeah, Pam was in there as well. It was just so much fun to see them just pop up like that.

Jim: A delight, the whole thing was from start to finish was a delight. I watched it by myself after my wife went to bed and I just was giggling through the whole thing.

Lance: Thank you. Here's my favorite story from the whole process. I had this idea to do the trick on the telephone, The Wizard, that that anybody that is amateur magician knows the trick. Well, when Michael and I were coming up with a storyline, I had this idea of using The Wizard as part of the kidnapping thing, to find out where the assistant was being held. In order to do that, of course, I had to show what The Wizard was.

The reason I wanted to include that was I wanted kids especially to be able to watch the movie and then after the movie, I wanted them to be able to perform The Wizard for their friends. After we had our premiere, my wardrobe lady from the Monte Carlo—and she also did wardrobe on the movie—she called me like a week later. Her stepdaughter, who was in junior high school at that time, the little girl had gone to school the next day and had performed The Wizard for her friends. And when I heard that, I was like, yes, touchdown.

John: Mission accomplished.

Lance: Mission accomplished. It's exactly what I wanted. I wanted kids to go and actually perform a magic trick for their friends.

Jim: But I really liked how you then turn it around and use it as a plot device.

Lance: It's integral to the story. Yes, and those are those are especially the kind of things I like with magic in movies or TV shows: where you can take something and bring it back in later as a practical device.

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! 

Tom DiCillo on writing/directing “Living In Oblivion”

You’re crossing a potentially deadly minefield when you attempt to take a short film and expand it into a feature. What was once sharp and clever can quickly turn repetitive and dull if you take a wrong step or make the wrong choices. 

Tom DiCillo successfully navigated that minefield when he turned his short, Living In Oblivion, into what is unquestionably one of the classic low-budget movies of all time. 

More importantly, he also took what at first appears to be a very narrow and “inside” story – about a director nearly losing his mind while shooting his movie – and turned it into a universal story about the creative process.

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

What was going on in your career before you made Living In Oblivion?

TOM DICILLO: My first feature was film called Johnny Suede, starring Brad Pitt. I busted my ass on that one for at least four years to get it made. The film never quite found an audience and the distribution of it was, frankly, really disappointing. It made making my second film really, really difficult. 

I had written a screenplay called Box of Moonlight and could not get the money for it. Years and years went by, two, three, four, five, and I just reached a point of such maniacal desperation that I said, "I have to do something, no matter what." It was out of that intense frustration that Living in Oblivionwas born.

It wasn't born out of, "Hey, I want to make a funny movie." It really came out of one of the most intense periods of anger and frustration in my career. And, ironically, it turned out to be the funniest movie I've ever made. I think in some way that is part of what makes my humor my humor: It’s humor based upon real, human intensity, desperation, and foolishness.

To use a screenwriting term, what was the inciting incident that kicked off the creation of Living In Oblivion?

TOM DICILLO: I was invited to the wedding of my wife's cousin. It was a three-day event and on the first night -- you have to understand, I was carrying with me four and a half years of frustration -- I had a martini. 

I had never had a martini before in my life. And I said, "Wow, if that's how you feel after one martini, let's have another one." So I had two. And I said, "This is just unbelievable." And I had three. Later I realized that I should never, ever, ever do that again.

But it was after the third martini that this guy came up to me, who I vaguely recognized from an acting class I had taken maybe four or five years earlier. And he says, "Oh, Tom, it's great to see you, man. You're so lucky, you made Johnny Suede, you made a movie. Lights, camera, action." 

And I just erupted at him. I said, "Shut the fuck up. Making a movie is one of the most tedious, frustrating, intense experiences I've ever had in my life. And not even just getting the money. What about when you're getting ready to do a shot and suddenly something screws up and the actor's moment that they've been working on for hours just disappears and you never get it back again?"

Well, that's where I had the first idea. I swear, right there at that moment, I thought, "You know, that could make a little fifteen-minute film. Just confront an actor with an endless number of disruptions and see what happens." And that's where the idea was born.  

That first half hour just kind of jumped out of me. I went home and wrote the first half-hour as it exists, word for word, frame for frame in the final version. 

So Living in Oblivion was essentially based on a single idea that then later, completely by accident, turned into a feature film. You never quite know how something is going to turn out, and that one for some reason just all came together. I'm very proud of that movie.

What happened after you wrote the short script?

TOM DICILLO: Catherine Keener was visiting us at that time and I gave her the script -- it was about 25 pages -- and I just heard her laughing in this back room that we have. She was just howling. 

She came out and said, "We have to do this." And I said, "Okay, let's do it. Even if we have to shoot it on Super 8, let's make this movie."

The next thing I know, her husband, Dermot, said he would like to put in some money if he could be in it. He originally wanted to play Nick Reve, the director, but I said I had someone a little older in mind, and he immediately said, "What about Steve Buscemi?" I said, "That's a fantastic idea. You can play Wolf, the cameraman." He said, "That's great."

It was like a bunch of kids putting on a show in the garage. Anybody who wanted to be in the movie, who had a little money, got a part. That is how I cast it, I am not kidding you. Sometimes you agonize about casting, over and over for months trying to figure out which actor to choose. In this case, I never thought about it for a second. Never. And look how amazing those actors were.

So we started shooting. We had a five-day shoot in New York City and we had about $37,000 that my wife helped raise and that everybody put it. The cast and crew were amazed at how well it was turning out. On the fourth day we realized that it was going to end and there was a kind of depression that settled in on the set. People said, "Tom, you should make a feature out of this." And I went, "How? How? How would I ever do that?"

But it turned out so well that I thought, I have to somehow find a way to take this magical accident and develop it.

What steps did you take to do that?

TOM DICILLO: After it was finished, I submitted it to the Cannes short film festival, I tried a number of things, and I realized that as a short it wasn't going to go anywhere. First of all, it was too long. It was just under a half an hour. 

So I began to think about what was developed in the first section, the first third of the film? What ideas were kind of lurking in the background? And one of the ideas was that there was a relationship developing between the director and his leading actress. Another thing that seemed to be developing was a relationship between the cameraman and the First AD. 

And I began thinking about, "What's the one fantasy that I've always thought about?" And that is having the lead actor and the director get into a fist-fight on the set. And so that's how I came up with the idea of Chad Palomino and how he disrupts the shoot -- this Hollywood guy entering this little, dusty world of Nick Reve's independent film and totally screwing it up. So I had Part Two.

So then I said, "Where the hell is it going to go from here?" 

And my wife, very astutely, said, "Listen, Part One is a dream. Part Two is a dream. Why don't you have Part Three be them making a dream sequence?" And I went, "Oh my God, that is so fantastic." Instantly, in an instant, I thought of Tito, the dwarf, erupting on set, "You stupid morons! Is that the only way you can make a dream sequence, by putting a dwarf in it?"

The two new segments evolve perfectly out of Part One. The movie never feels like a short with stuff added to turn it into a feature.

TOM DICILLO: I put so much work into that screenplay. I wanted no one to think that it was just a short with two other segments tacked on to it. I wanted it to feel like it was seamless. And it took a lot of work to make that progression, to make that movement happen in the screenplay.

It sounds like you really drew from personal experience to write the script.

TOM DICILLO: I've had a lot of experience of being on a number of sets. Even when I was going to film school, when you're on the set of a student film, it's just the most insane chaos that you can imagine. Even then I noticed that the drama that was happening just off the side of the camera was a million times more interesting than the stale scene that everybody was so intensely focused on. I noticed that even then. 

And I swear to God, the very first time that I experienced room tone, everybody standing there like these living statues in this forced silence, I said, "I'm going to put that in a movie one day. It's just so bizarre, I'm going to put that in a movie."

I've always been fascinated with the stuff that happens on the set. Not that I'm trying to say that just because it's a film set it’s interesting. I don't feel that. But I do feel like there's a real crazy drama that happens when you get a group of people trying to do a task together.

I'm in love with filmmaking, but at the same time I also have moments where I absolutely despise it. The medium itself seems designed to thwart you whenever you really want to try to do something. Just when you're about to get a shot, a light goes off or a train goes by, a car alarm goes off, something. Everything is so fragile in the business. So I wanted to take my rage out on that, because it can be so frustrating at times. It was so liberating and freeing to do that.

It must have been bizarre, making a good movie about a movie where everything is going wrong.

TOM DICILLO: I swear the first time I had the actor intentionally drop the microphone into the shot, they didn't want to do it. They didn't want to do it because everything that we've been taught is to keep the microphone out of the frame. Don't put it in. 

I wanted to try to really peel back that curtain about what it's like to be on the set and the real struggle, because I think that struggle is what is interesting to me -- the struggle to somehow capture something on film. 

I also wanted to show the director in a way that I had never seen portrayed. I was really concerned about that. Most of the time the independent director, and directors in general, are shown wearing leather jackets and smoking cigarettes, brooding in a corner with sunglasses. Most directors that I've ever seen on a set of any movie look so desperate, so frustrated, so neurotic. So I wanted to address that and still let the director have some sort of dignity. 

I think Nick Reve is not a total fool, but the struggles that he faces are really, I think, rather archetypical: How do you get what you want in a business that is all about pretension and ego? The way he has to deal with Chad Palomino is a monumental struggle. Here's a guy where all you really want to do is beat the shit out of him, but you can't. You have to say, "Oh, yeah, man, you did a great take. Great take."

Part One ended up being the idea of the technical desperation and screw-ups. Then I wanted to see what would happen if you drop emotional complications in and that served to be the core of the movement for Part Two. It's all about how emotional entanglements happening off the set can affect what's being captured on film. 

For Part Three, I really wanted to bring the director to the point where he gave up. After all this frustration, I realized he would really get to that point. To me it was interesting to drive him to that point where he could not proceed -- he really felt like he was failing and that he was not a director -- and to see what would happen to him, to see how he would respond.

One of the things that makes the script so strong is that all the obstacles that you put in Nick's way are real obstacles that you've experienced in that position.

TOM DICILLO: Whatever you write, you have to tap into something personal for yourself. I used to have an acting teacher who said to me, "If it ain't personal, it ain't no good." There's something to be said for that. 

But at the same time, I don't want to ever make it seem like when I write that it's just about me. I'm not interested in that. Even with my first film, Johnny Suede -- sure, I put a lot of myself into that character -- but I also was very clearly trying to find a way to make it more objective, more universal, something that other people could relate to.

I absolutely believe that if you can find a way to tap into something that's very personal and then make a creative leap from there, that's the best way to do it. Anger by itself is not enough. You have to have the creative imagination coming into play as well.

How helpful was it to have Part One all shot when trying to get the money for Part Two and Part Three?

TOM DICILLO: I took Part One all the way to the point of a finished print, with a mix, with titles, music, everything. I began screening that for people after I had written Part Two and Part Three, thinking that people wouldn't get a sense of what I was trying to do if they only read the screenplay. So therefore, having Part One all finished, I thought it would be perfect, because they can see exactly the characters, the actors, the humor, everything. 

Well, it didn't happen. I had several conversations with all of the independent companies, and they all passed on the movie at the script stage. Completely. I offered it to Miramax for nothing and they said no.

Did they give reasons why they were passing?

TOM DICILLO: They didn't get it. I'm not complaining, because I'm probably guilty of the same thing, but until something literally comes up and kicks you in the head and tells you what it is, no one knows anything. 

They looked at this movie and said, "Why? Why should we put money into this movie?" And it's just bizarre to me, because most of the most impressive films -- the ones that really have stuck in the minds and consciousness of audiences -- are the ones that are absolutely original and have never been made before. Even Star Wars, for God's sake. He couldn't make that movie for years.

So, what happened was, I had put my wife's cousin and her husband, Hillary and Michael, in Part One -- Hillary played the script supervisor and her husband Michael played Speedo, the sound man -- and at the last minute Hillary called me and said, "We'd like to put up the rest of the money and make the film as a feature." 

And so they put up almost $500,000 of their own money and we were able to go off on our own, once again, and make the film.

This may be an apocryphal story, but I have heard that at the same time they offered you the money, you were on the phone with someone who had the money but with whom you didn't want to work.

TOM DICILLO: Yes, exactly. He was being a real prick. He was this completely ego-driven guy. He was going to own everybody, he was going to tell everybody who to cast, all that stuff. Completely antithetical to the way the film had been created. 

I was just about to make my travel arrangements to go out to LA to sign the deal with him, when my Call Waiting clicked in and it was Hillary and Michael. They were so apologetic -- "Would you mind if we suggested putting up the money?" I said, "You've got to be kidding?!"

It was one of the most magical experiences, from beginning to end, really. 

In Part One, how did you work with Catherine on the different levels of her performance? How did you map out the range she had to go through, from being just okay to being really good?

TOM DICILLO: I was concerned about that. I actually numbered the takes; I think there's 12 takes. Number one, on the scale of one to ten, should be a seven. Number two should be a five. We did something like that, but eventually what it came down to the two of us deciding what the degree of distraction she was feeling at that time. That's basically how it came about. 

How much rehearsal did you have?

TOM DICILLO: None. Absolutely none. 

I don't like to rehearse, anyway. My style of working is to just talk to people, get the costumes correct, talk a little bit about the character, and then just find it as the camera is rolling. 

What was so fascinating to me was that none of these actors auditioned and they were almost instantaneously their parts. 

Many people think Living In Oblivion is completely improvised, but there's only one scene that was improvised. That's the scene where Steve erupts at the crew at the end of Part One. Everything else was completely scripted.

What's your favorite memory of working on Living In Oblivion?

TOM DICILLO: Oh, man, there are millions. I think I would have to say that it was the look on people's faces the first time Peter Dinklage, who plays Tito, erupted into his tirade against the director. 

Most of the crew that we hired had not read the script, because we weren't paying anybody. And so we were getting people working for free and they might work one or two days a week. And so this crew was just standing by the lights, doing whatever they were doing, and all of a sudden Peter Dinklage, during a take, says, "I'm sick of this crap." He just erupted and everybody just turned and looked with their jaws open. They thought he was really saying it.

Then the laughter that erupted when they realized that it was just part of the movie, it was a fantastic feeling. It made me really feel that I had stumbled upon something and it was working.

Were there any things you learned writing that script that you still use today?

TOM DICILLO: Yeah. I have a tendency, if I'm going to write a joke, I set it up with a one, two, three punch. But I realized that most of the time, when I get in the editing room, I usually only end up using the one or the two, never the one, two, three. That's kind of an interesting lesson to learn: if you're going to tell a joke, just tell the joke. Don't do three jokes.

I also learned the idea of setting in motion something that, once it's in motion it has a life of its own and people are really instantaneously eager to find out what's going to happen. That's a crucial thing. 

Many screenwriting teachers will say a screenplay is all about tension and conflict. And, in some ways, that absolutely true. But if that tension and conflict doesn't arouse enough interest to have people really want to know what's going to happen next, then you're screwed. I think Johnny Suedesuffered from that a bit. It was my first screenplay and there's very little real dramatic tension in it. 

I like the idea of setting something in motion -- like a cart rolling down a hill -- that once it's going, you can't stop it.

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

TOM DICILLO: The very first thing that comes to my mind is less about writing than it is about the creative process itself. 

It was an experience I had when I went to Sundance, to the Director's Lab with my first screenplay for Johnny Suede. I had worked very hard on it and had just come from a rather negative experience at NYU, when I was there getting my Master's degree in directing. It was a very destructive process at NYU in terms of how they would critique you. Even though I did very well there, I still was quite aware of just how destructive it was and I was gun shy of that stuff.

So when I went out to Sundance for the Director's Lab, some of the more traditional guys out there were Hollywood, conventional guys, and they started giving me notes about the script that really bothered me and which were, again, destructive.

And then I had a meeting with Buck Henry, who was one of the advisors. He'd read my script and he sat down and just looked at me -- this was the first time I'd met him -- and all he said was, "Hey man, you're on to something. Go for it."

Now that wasn't specific, but what it completely did was just open me up to the fact that whatever you're doing, if you're trying something, just try it. Just try it. Things don't have to be instantaneously perfect or whatever, but if you really are trying something, then trust it and just try it. 

And I would say that to any aspiring writer: It's a combination of confidence and innocence at the same time. You have to have both; you have to have absolute determination, but you have to be an innocent in the utmost sense of that word, where you are completely free and open to anything happening and that everything around you supports you and loves you, like the world of an infant.

Because if you don't have that, this world is so brutal to any sort of creative failure -- Arthur Miller wrote a beautiful essay about how American culture deals with failure -- and that's a struggle that we all face. Everybody faces it: giving yourself the creative and imaginative playground just to go ahead and try your idea for God's sake. Try 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! 

Nancy Savoca on “True Love”

How did you get interested in filmmaking

NANCY: My family says I started talking about it when I was really young, but I don't remember that. But I think it was in high school, during that last year when you can take whatever you want. I was taking things like Folk Poetry and Music Theory. And there was a History of the Movies class. That was the first time I understood what a director did. It was explained that there was actually one person who was in charge of putting all the different elements together in a film. 

And that was something that was really interesting, because I think in my teenage years I was really interested in the arts -- I loved music and I loved drawing and I loved watching actors perform. There were so many things that I loved, yet I didn't feel that I was particularly good at these things. But I was a great appreciator of good music and good performance and good photography -- I could appreciate it. 

So I realized, when I learned about filmmaking, that that's what a director does. They are the ones who say, "Oh, that's the piece of music we need to use," and "That's the take we need to print." Basically, we're there to cheerlead all these great artists and get their best work and put it all together. 

When I found out that's what it was, I was like, "Oh, sign me up! That sounds good. I can do that." I was about seventeen at the time.

So how did you make that happen?

NANCY: The thought was really scary, because I didn't have a clue on how to make that happen. I just knew that it sounded really good.

I didn't come from a background that had anything -- anything! -- to do with this business. My parents -- like most parents who have a kid who'd going to do something like this -- were horrified. They were scared for me. They just wanted me to get a good job at the post office.

There was no real plan. This was my last year in high school, so I went to the teacher and asked, "Where do I learn this?" And she said, "Well, there's NYU, but that's really expensive." And I said, "No, I can't do that." And so she said, "Well, there's Queen's College."

So I started at Queen's College and I took some courses. But they were the courses that every kid who was looking to goof off would take first, so I kept getting shut out of classes. Finally I met my husband, Rich, and he was going to NYU and he said "You should go here." So he started really helping me not be so fearful about stuff. He said, "Just do this, you'll figure it out." 

I was basically leaping into a void. There was no financial support, it wasn't coming from anywhere. So I just started doing it.

And at NYU I found, for the first time, a community of people who were doing the things that interested me.

I had gone to Queens College for two years, so when I went to NYU I was in my final two years, and film was all I did there. All I did was shoot. 

In order to enter the school, Haig Manoogian, who was running the program at that point, told me I needed to take this course called Sight and Sound. It was six of weeks of, I call it Basic Training, where you ate, slept, breathed, whatever, film. And you really couldn't do anything else, because that's all you had time to do.

The odd thing for me was that a week before I started that six weeks of basic training I got married. So here I am, this newlywed, having made a commitment to this person, and suddenly I was missing.

So Rich came looking for me and realized that I was having a really good time. As insane as it was, it was pretty amazing.

He was going to NYU for business. He used to show up just to help lug equipment around, but then he quickly realized that we were all flakey people and needed some kind of organization, which he was able to do. So he ended up doing things like production managing on student films, like mine in particular. Which was when we first started working together, which was really good. We just celebrated 28 years. But if we hadn't worked together, I don't think there's any way we could have survived, because we were coming from such different places.

We were out making our short films and the missing element always -- always! -- was how to manage time, so that we could get things done on time. No one really was teaching us that. We had a lot of enthusiasm and ideas, but we didn't have a lot of discipline. And Rich came along and he's very good at that. He'd say things like, "You know, if you shoot this first, you can actually do this all in one day if you switch the order of your locations." He actually should have been given credit as being one of our teachers, but he was our age.

How many people were in the class?

NANCY: Maybe twenty-five, twenty-eight people.

And how many were women?

NANCY: About four or five.

Talking about women in film, one of things that was sort of a blow to me, I was sitting in class one day with a teacher I really respected a lot. We were chatting about the great directors and the work they did and out of the blue (or, at least, it felt out of the blue), he said something like, "So the reason there are no women directors is that, basically, they get married and have kids." 

And I had gotten married a couple of weeks earlier. And when I made True Love, I had an 18-month old baby and was pregnant with my second child, so they do get married and have kids. Maybe.  

As a pregnant director, did you have trouble getting insurance for the production? 

NANCY: Yes we did. When we started Household Saints, Jonathan Demme was our executive producer and I think they had tried to make him the back-up director if anything happened to me. But they couldn't because at that time I wasn't union and he was DGA, so Rich was the back-up director. And all Rich kept saying to me was, "Don't fuck anything up. I don't want to be directing."

Let's back-up. What did you do when you got out of NYU?

NANCY: Right after film school was finished, we started writing True Love, that summer. I remember one of the things that sort of upset me were rules. Like people had these ideas, these rules. Like one person said to me that summer, "It's great that you're writing your first feature, but you usually have to direct two shorts to do a feature." And then somebody else said, "No, no, no, So-and-So just went out to LA. You have to get an agent and write two screenplays for other people, and then you get to direct your first feature."

And I thought, "Who made those rules? I've never heard of directors who follow these rules. Is someone making up new ones just so we can jump through hoops? This is stupid."

So Rich and I co-wrote True Love  in a couple weeks in a cabin in Vermont, which was so bizarre because we were writing about the Bronx and we were in the middle of nowhere in Vermont.

When we came out with it, basically nothing happened. We were showing it around; we didn't know. I didn't even have, at that time, the vocabulary to say this is an independent film or not an independent film. I just wanted to make this story because I hadn't seen it before. It was the old 'write what you know,' so I wrote what I knew, which was my experience, which happened to be right before we started film school: Which was that I got married, and that year that I got married, everybody in my neighborhood got married. So we went to a lot of weddings and witnessed a lot of the things that ended up in the script.

Basically it was just Rich and I writing down everything that we knew. We sent it out -- cable television was just starting up -- and we got the rejection letters. We were nobody, as they say in the Bronx.

So basically it was six years of trying this, that and the other thing. About every six to eight months we'd take the script out and polish it up. But for whatever reason, there was just nothing else I could think to do. I just knew that this was the story. Whether that was smart or not, I can't tell you. But it was six years.

During those six years we started working in film, in any capacity that we could. I started off as a production assistant for John Sayles and Maggie Renzi on Brother From Another Planet -- that was the first official film job I got after I got out of school.

For being the first person in my family -- and, for a long time, the only person in my family -- to get a college degree, I got to work for free on a movie. I think after I'd been there a couple weeks, they gave all of us who were volunteering a raise and we got five dollars a week, so we could take the subway to work, so we weren't actually out of pocket to work on the movie.

From there, what was fantastic -- and I say this to everybody who's looking to work in film -- do put yourself out there and just work on productions. Because that's where you're going to meet people. And sure enough, there's a very direct connection between the first job I ever had and my first film, which is John Sayles, who was one of our investors six years later.

Everybody's story is so different. Sometimes I hesitate, when we're in front of students or something, I say, "I'm going to tell you my story and you're going to think, 'Yeah, right, that will never happen to me.' And that's true, but you're going to have a different story."

But what does happen is that when you open yourself up and you let every single person on the planet know that you want to do this, and that you're going to do this, people start coming around out of curiosity or the people who are going to be drawn to you will start coming toward you because you're letting everyone know that you're ready to do this. And that's what I think started happening. 

But it took six years, and nobody likes to hear that. But in that time we honed our skills and we learned a lot about production so that by the time we made our movie, we had been on a lot of sets and worked in different capacities. I was a Production Coordinator, I was an Assistant Editor, for John Sayles I was at one point a Storyboard Artist, which was really fun because it was for Bruce Springsteen and I was such a fan.

So what was it that finally got True Love off the ground?

NANCY: John Sayles. 

What happened was I was sort of half-ass shooting this documentary that wasn't working. And one of my friends said, "What are you doing shooting a documentary? You have this script." And I said, "Yeah, but I need money to shoot that script and we don't have money." But it put this idea in my head and we decided to take what tiny little money we had to do the documentary and take that money -- which was basically all the savings we had at that time -- and do a ten-minute sample reel, which is sort of like a long version of a trailer.

So we put an ad in Backstage and did casting, found a crew that was mostly commercial people or people who had worked in independent films and were working a step below and wanted to step up. And since everyone was working at one level higher than normal, nobody needed to get paid, which was great, because everybody was doing it for their reel.

We shot over the course of a couple weekends, because everybody had day jobs. and then we thought, we should send this out instead of the script, because what we didn't know -- and I'm a Leo, so I think I'm great -- what we didn't know from my student films that did get good responses from people, that I could direct and I could grab an audience. And the script never shows that. It's like the difference between a map of Paris and Paris -- how can you explain? When you're writing a screenplay, you're basically being the best mapmaker you can be. But it's such a different animal to putting it on the screen.

So I knew by at least giving them a taste of what I could do with it, this material, that I could get more support.

So we shot this thing, we cut it, it looked great, the performances were great -- we got these great actors -- and we started sending it to all the people who had rejected the script, and we were universally rejected again. After spending all the money we had.

We were just depressed. And then we decided to do a screening in Manhattan and -- because, during those six years of working -- we had met so many people in the film business. So we just cast the net really wide and we invited everybody that we knew to invite everybody that they knew.

We had wine and cheese and ten minutes is painless. I don't know why, but people showed up. Diane Keaton showed up. I don't know why. But because it was New York and it was such a little closed community, for some reason, people showed up.

What happened after that was that I got a phone call from John Sayles and he said, "Look, if you want to do this movie down and dirty, guerilla style, I'll be your first investor."

We had also in those six years worked with Jonathan Demme. Kenny Utt, who was Jonathan's producer, said, "I'm going to be an investor." And he turned to Jonathan and said, "You better be an investor." And then Susan Seidelman was an investor. And so all of a sudden, something caught fire and I can't tell you what it is, and that's why when I tell this story people always roll their eyes and say, "That will never happen to me." No, it won't happen to you -- another story will happen to you.

But it can be that crazy.

So then we got all these -- we like to call them -- celebrity investors, and with a handful of celebrity investors we still needed more money, but these were names that we could use when we went to our friend who's mother's dentist wanted to invest in film. And he got to be an investor along with all these really great filmmakers.

So how did you feel on the first day of shooting True Love?

NANCY: Great. Nervous as hell. Ready to puke -- I couldn't tell if it was morning sickness. But nobody knew I was pregnant. Nobody knew because I found out two weeks before we started shooting and the one thing you don't want to tell everybody who'd investing in you on your first film is, "Oh, by the way, I'm pregnant."

I think today it might be a little easier. Or maybe not. Who knows. But I definitely knew to keep my mouth shut.

I was nervous on one level but also just like -- excited, but relieved. It was like, "Okay. Well here I am. Let's go." And it was that leap into the void of "Let's go. I don't know what's going to happen here, but I'm here. You're here. Let's go."

How did you find your cast?

NANCY: I knew exactly what I was looking for, and it was very difficult to find, interestingly enough for two reasons. One was that we didn't have the budget to go through the Screen Actors Guild. We couldn't afford to work with any sort of union, so most of the actors we were looking at were young actors who were somewhat inexperienced, but the ones who were really good had a theater background. Which was great and actually very helpful, because coincidentally they were coming in with the same background I had, which was theater acting classes.

The issue was finding experienced actors, and the problem was bigger with the older actors, because finding non-SAG actors of that age was very tricky. So we kept casting from the time that we did the ten-minute trailer until two years later, when we started shooting. We were always looking for actors. People used to make fun of me, saying, "Oh, you're still casting?"

With Annabella we were incredibly lucky, because she was one of the first people we saw from the Backstage ad we placed for the trailer. I saw her picture and said, "I hope she's good because she is right, she is who I'm looking for." And she walked in and read it and I thought, "Did she begin? Did someone tell her to start performing or is she just talking to me?" She was amazing. that started a relationship that lasted through the years and she was able to be in the film.

So she was around for two years and Ron Eldard we found I think two weeks before we started shooting. It was horrible. We could not find this guy.

And what was very interesting in True Love, because we weren't using SAG actors, all the actors we worked with -- with the exception of Annabella, who had done a TV movie -- no one had ever been in front of a camera before. And that's a big cast -- I forget how many people were in that movie, but it was a lot of people. 

And just about every other day -- sometimes it was every day -- we'd have a new actor working, and I kept wondering why things were taking so long. And then I remembered: "Oh, yeah, they've never been in front of a camera before!" And I'd have to go tell them, "You can walk from here to here, don't walk off camera, there's a light stand, don't do this, now deliver the line to his left shoulder." It was really about making people feel very comfortable so they could look like they weren't acting.

It's all about making them comfortable. Your job, especially if they're less experienced, they have to feel really good to let go and take a risk in their performance. 

Tell me about your experience at Sundance with True Love.

NANCY: It was pretty amazing but I wasn't there. I wasn't even there.

We finished editing the movie in late 1988. John Sayles said there was a festival we should look into, called the United States Film Festival in Park City. We did a temp mix on the soundtrack and sent it in and we go accepted.

The festival was the last week of January and my due date was the 27th of January, so I wasn't going to go. So one of the producers went, with my lawyer and the music supervisor.

I was at home and I started going into labor one evening. And the phone rings while I'm in labor. My husband picks it up and then he says, "Oh my God. Oh my God. I'll put Nancy on, but I'm not sure she can breath." 

So I take the phone and say, "What?" And everyone was screaming. It sounded like Beatlemania or something. Everyone was screaming. And someone was saying, "We won! We won!" And I said, "What?" And they said, "The film won!"

But I really didn't understand what had happened, because nobody could talk really, and also because I was hugging the wall and breathing. And so I said, "I have to hang up because this kid's going to be born." I hung up the phone and we went to the hospital.  

The next morning the baby was born. And the midwife said to me, "What happened to that little movie you were working on when you were pregnant?" And I turned to Rich and said, "Did we win something last night?"

We came home with my son a day later, and my house looked like a funeral. Everybody sent flowers. It was a small apartment and there were flowers everywhere. Disney sent a t-shirt for the baby that said, "My Mom is the world's greatest director." Every single major studio was acknowledging the award and the baby. 

I was flabbergasted because independent film, before that night, at Sundance, a new wave began for independent film. It was born in a different way that night. I didn't happen to be there, but I was a part of it. 

And that particular year, they changed the name from the US Film Festival to the Sundance Film Festival. I have a poster that says "True Love: Winner of the United States Film Festival," because MGM didn't realize that they had changed the name.

And that was the year that all the studio executives showed up. There had been rumblings; the year before a lot of great movies were there and they were saying, "Oh, I guess something's happening at Sundance, so we have to go." 

And that was the year that they all went. 

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! 

Jon Favreau on "Swingers"

After you'd written Swingers, why did you decide to try to make the film and not just sell the script?

JON: By keeping the script, you maintain control over every aspect of the movie.

Creativity, you're giving up final cut usually right off the bat. When you're making it yourself, it's up to you and only you what ends up in the movie and what compromises you want to make creatively. So, for some nominal fee, they're really getting a lot of leverage over you, both creatively and financially. 

A lot of changes were asked of me: changing certain characters to women, making the characters more likeable, changing things that interfered of what my vision for the piece was. 

In defense of those people, they're used to developing scripts, they're looking for clues in the material, they don't know what the overall vision of the piece is, so the best thing to do is to not take any of that upfront money.

Was Swingers based on reality?

JON: It wasn't a true story, but it was definitely based on people and places and inspired by events that I had experienced. 

When you write from that, you're incorporating a lot of things that are very real and well understood by you. And the script inherits a certain sincerity and a certain subconscious vision that you might not even be aware of when you're doing your first script, if it's a personal one. It becomes much more difficult later on to do that. 

But if you stick to things that you know and understand and people that you know, it allows a very true voice and you tend to come off as a better writer than really are, because you're incorporating so much of reality into your piece.

Did you write it for you and Vince Vaughn?

JON: I wrote things that I knew that they could do well. But at that time, Vince had not really played a character like the persona that was presented in Swingers, even though it was based very closely on him. The characters that he had played never really played into his rapid-fire delivery or his sense of humor. He was always playing it much more straight as an actor. I don't think he saw himself as a comic actor as much as a good-looking, leading man type.

So I was tapping into something I knew he could do, from knowing him so well, but I didn't really know whether or not he could deliver, because he hadn't done it before. It's good to have those touchstones.

What really got us there was that we had done so many staged readings of it, to try and raise money, that it served as almost a rehearsal period. So that by the time we got to the set, where we didn't have a lot of time and we were shooting a lot of pages a day, we had already gone through the material so much and had chemistry from our relationship in our personal life, and that certainly made things easier. There was no learning curve in the relationship by two actors that are cast opposite each other. Everybody already had a level of familiarity that helped to keep the process a little more streamlined.

When did you realize how much fun audiences would have with the phone message scene?

JON: Not on the set. The crew was not very entertained by it. We shot all the apartment stuff in a day and a half, so about a quarter of the movie was shot in a day and a half on paper. So that was one of those things that was crammed into a very crowded day at that location.

And there were concerns. Doug Liman (the director) was concerned that it was too many messages. But I felt pretty strongly about it, having read it in front of audiences live, at staged readings.

It wasn't until the whole movie was cut together and the significance of that moment, where it fell in the story, it was definitely a pivotal point in the film. And because you were so emotionally involved in that moment in the movie, the audience was engaged with the film. And had they not been engaged with the character, that scene would not have been as funny or as poignant. It was because of the work that had been done by everybody involved up until then that it was funny. 

Now I think people enjoy it alone, because they remember the movie. But had that just been done as a sketch, it might have been a clever thing, but I don't think it would have had the impact that it does in the context of the film.

It all goes to emotion. If you're emotionally engaged, everything is going to be funnier, more satisfying, scarier, everything. It's that emotional connection that you feel with these guys. And the reason you feel that is because the story was so personal and sincere, and that's a very hard thing to maintain as you do bigger and bigger movies. 

It's the one thing that you really have going for you in a small movie, that you're doing something that's so really and usually so personal that you have a level of emotional engagement that you will not get in a high-budget, high-concept 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 O'Bannon on "Dark Star"

How did the script come about?

DAN O’BANNON: John (Carpenter) and I were talking and he said he was going to do this graduate film project. I was very taken with it, and I started pitching ideas back at him. First thing you know, I was helping him make that film. At first he just wanted me to act in it, and I did that. But I was very excited about working on all aspects of the thing.

By the time we got through, the thing was about 50 minutes long. And when we took it to the USC Cinema department and started talking to them about taking it to festivals, we were told it was too long -- that it should have been 20 minutes long, and then they would have taken it around to festivals. But because it was 50 minutes long, they couldn't do anything with it. John and I were pretty upset about that, because it meant nobody would see it.

What did you do then?

DAN O’BANNON: A friend of ours said he would put $10,000 of his own money into it if we could expand it into a feature, and then we could try to get it distributed. It was a tough decision, because it was pretty tight at 50 minutes. Expanding it meant we were going to have to shoot a lot of scenes that were filler, and that would lessen the tightness of the story and make it into an episodic film.

Since they weren't going to take it around to the festivals, we were pretty much stuck. We only had one option--go ahead and shoot some extra scenes. It was kind of disappointing, because that meant we had to go from the most-impressive student film ever made to one of the cheapest features. It wasn't a question of choosing between two venues; there was only one venue offered.

We added a lot of stuff with me in it, because I was the most reliably available as an actor. And we added a lot of slapstick stuff, like the whole subplot about me chasing the alien balloon around, up and down shafts and things. All of that was done to pad.

How did the elevator scene come about?

DAN O’BANNON: We were talking about that old Harold Lloyd film, where he's climbing over a building and how funny and scary it is. We had this idea that we could do this funny thing with this creature going up and down in the elevator shaft. And then we had to figure out how to shoot it.

The first thing we thought was that we'd go find an elevator shaft somewhere, but that didn't get very far before we realized--never mind practical or impractical--it was dangerous. So we finally came up with, let's just do it on its side. What the hell. At least we can do it that way, and maybe if it's funny and exciting people won't care.

I ended up having an appendectomy right after I shot that scene. I just had that board down to my butt, and I had to keep my legs up, waving around in the air. Sometimes I think that I forced some food or something into my appendix from all that stress. I was 26 years old, and you really don't think what that sort of thing is going to do to you. You just have a good idea and you start to do it. And then you find out how hard it is. Today I wouldn't be able to do it all, even if I were willing to try, which I wouldn't be.

What's the biggest lesson you took away from Dark Star?

DAN O’BANNON: I learned all the wrong lessons on Dark Star. When I finally directed a movie for real, I thought I was supposed to do everything. And I ended up making everybody mad. I was over-prepared for directing and I was mis-directed by having gone to film school, and thought that the director was supposed to be an auteur and do everything himself. When I actually tried doing that in a real movie, I found that I couldn't get anything I wanted, because they would sabotage me.

It basically took me two pictures to learn an entirely different orientation toward directing. 

What I learned was very simple: A director doesn't make a movie. Everybody else makes the movie. That means the director doesn’t have to know how to do anything. All the director has to do is be there and stand there and make creative decisions if he feels like it. 

I had to swivel around 180 degrees and stop worrying about exactly how I wanted to get everything on the screen and start worrying about how to trick 300 people into doing it for me. 

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! 

Actress/Writer Susan Coyne on “Slings & Arrows"

How did Slings & Arrows come about?

SUSAN COYNE: Well, I hadn't really set out to be a writer. But, I hit my late thirties, and I had two children and I couldn't travel across the country in the same way. And, famously, the parts thin out a bit as you get older. So I sort of hit my mid-life crisis and thought, "I'm just going to sit down and start writing," without really knowing where it was going to lead me. And then I got hooked up with somebody who said, "You know, I have a friend who works at Stratford and loves hearing your stories. Would you like to come up with a proposal for a TV series about Stratford?"

So I said, "Sure. I can do that." And then I came up with the premise for the series, basically, although at that time it was a half-hour comedy. We shopped it around and we got wonderful producers, Rhombus Media, involved and they put me together with Mark McKinney of Kids in the Hall, which was really kind of brilliant. 

That was an interesting choice.

SUSAN COYNE: He was not the first person you'd think of pairing us with, but it was really great because Mark is so smart and really thinks outside the box constantly. He's worked a little bit in theater and so he knew something of this world as well. He said right away, "This isn't a half-hour, this is an hour, because there's too much good material here."

I think that was one of the most important things that happened, because we thought, “We're doing Shakespeare, we don't want this to be just punch lines and then cut to a commercial. We want to be brave about this and tackle what it's like to do these big plays.”

I'd never seen something like this done very well. I'd often seen actors made fun of, and it's easy. It's easy to satirize actors. I think we do it to a degree in the show. It's also easy to sentimentalize. But between those two extremes I've never seen anybody try to really show what it's like, and that in some ways it certainly matters to the people who do it and it might even mean something to those of us who watch. It might have some value, it might have some weight to it, it might not be a silly thing to do with your life. And that these people might have some passion that has some dignity to it.

Even as I say that I'm always cautious not to give it more weight than it's worth, but I think that when theater works well, everybody recognizes that there's something very powerful about it, transforming and ineffable and not silly at all. It's rare, but when you see it, there's nothing like it. You feel a little bit wrung out afterwards and your heart's beating faster and you feel chemically altered in some way. 

It's that we wanted to get at: What is that thing that happens and how do people achieve that? We wanted to show people the kinds of conversations that go on in rehearsals as well as how terrifying it is and the ridiculous things we do to get ourselves where we have to be. All of that.

I always think that when there's a great deal of passion, then there's got to be some kind of dramatic or comic story. Or both. 

How did Bob Martin get involved?

SUSAN COYNE: Bob was invited to join Mark and I after we had been wrestling with the series for a couple of years (in the midst of doing other projects- in my case, co-founding a theatre company and writing my first book).  Neither Mark nor I had written a TV series before, but Bob had.  His experience was the key to making us into a fully functioning writing team. 

When you started the project, did you think it would only be for one season?

SUSAN COYNE: Exactly. Mark and I worked for a couple of years, because we were both doing other things. And it took a long time to figure out how this was going to go. We had six episodes in mind, we knew the play was Hamlet, we came up with the idea of the ghost and that our character was going to be a sort of Hamlet figure who was haunted almost in the same way that I was haunted by my theater school teachers. The ones who said those wonderful things and those terrible things, and you're always trying to prove something to them even if they're dead.

It turns out that three is a good number for a writing team, because we could always gang up on the other person and persuade them. The three-legged writing team is quite stable, actually. If you can't quite see something, one of the other two can explain it to you. And also Bob had real experience writing television in a way that Mark and I didn't. And he also has an amazing comic sensibility and a really delightful wit. 

So when that came together the work started to go faster and we decided that six episodes would be really satisfying to tackle Hamlet. And that really was the plan until we finished it and watched it. The network said, would you like to go another year? And we looked at each other and I said, "Well, I think we should do a trilogy. If we're going to another one we should do three and we should do youth, middle-age and old age." That made sense to us and felt like it would be a satisfying arc.

We had the idea that, each season, we wanted to watch our characters through the filter of the play -- not in the way that you could draw straight lines between the stories and the play, but in a sort of general way being influenced by Shakespearean themes.

One of my favorite scenes in the series -- and one that really lays Shakespeare out and explains what's he's doing -- is the scene in the first season when the director, Geoffrey, explains to the actress playing Ophelia exactly what her "nonsense rhymes" actually mean. Did you find that there were scenes you created based on things you'd actually experienced?

SUSAN COYNE: There were. But some of them are so disguised that they take on a difference resonance. For example, Geoffrey reminds me of a director I worked with early on who directed me in The Glass Menagerie. He was a refugee from the Second World War, a Holocaust survivor. His family perished, and he escaped to Winnipeg. He talked to me about how theater had saved his life, and it meant so much to me, the way he talked about it. It was a life force for him.

I guess there's an element where I've worked with really great directors for whom theater has saved their life. And that passion for its humanity -- for the idea of theater being a place where we can be very human with each other -- is something that I've retained, and I always aspire to in the theater. The idea that it's about people communicating; there's no tricks, there's no cinema, it's just us. We're all in the same room breathing together, and if it all works out, we'll all end up having the same heart-rate at the end of the show. 

Were you saddled with handling the female point of view on the show and the female characters or was that shared?

SUSAN COYNE: Oh it was definitely shared. Martha Burns, who plays Ellen, is one of my closest friends. We've known each other a long time, we grew up in Winnipeg together, so I loved coming up with storylines for her, like Ellen getting audited. But we all wrote the Ellen character and we all wrote the Anna character.

I loved aspects of Anna, but the boys, actually, I think loved Anna even more. They loved putting her in these terrible situations. The scene where she had to have sex, Mark wanted it to be really explicit and hardcore, and I finally said, "Look, guys, it's me playing the part. So let's just re-think this, shall we?"

And that's when Bob said, "Well, we could do it in the dark." I said "That sounds very good."

Do you have any special or favorite moments from the series?

SUSAN COYNE: I loved everything to do with Bill Hutt in the third season. I was in a production of Lear with him, at Stratford in the young company, and he is a hero of mine. He's gone now, and his Lear was never filmed. So to get the little bit that we get of him, doing the great speeches, that I feel proudest of, actually. 

That is the most important thing to me about the series: that we got him. We always wanted him; we wanted him in the second season and he wasn't available. But we got him in the third season. And then within 18 months he had died. So it was amazing. He was such a wonderful guy and he threw himself into it. I loved that.

Other than that, there was a tiny moment, backstage in the second season, between Geoffrey and Ellen, where they're watching Romeo and Juliet. And Ellen says, "I hate this play." I must say, watching Romeo and Juliet as a middle-aged person, you watch it and you think, "I hate this play." I mean, I love it of course, but you're in such a different headspace from the first time you played it, you can't help thinking, "What, are you nuts?"

What did you take away from the Slings & Arrows experience?

SUSAN COYNE: I learned a lot from working with two other people whose sensibilities were similar to mine, but who also pushed me ways into places I otherwise never would have gone. Although we fought a lot at the beginning, we got into a place where it was much easier to say, "Here's a sketch of the scene, but you should write it because you have that voice down better." It became very respectful -- and although there were still fights, they were good fights; not pulling in different directions, but creative fights -- where you just knew that the other person, it was just their thing and they could write it better. And you knew that when it came time to take over another scene, they would say, "You should have a go at that."

I think that's hard to replicate, when you have developed a working relationship like that with people.

As for the acting, that was more intimidating. Film is socially so different from theater. You don't have an audience; the only person who's actually watching your performance is the director, because everyone else is watching other things, like how your scarf is tied. So I found that a bit intimidating. 

But there was a very collegial feeling, and we had so many theater actors coming onto the set, and so it felt much more about the work than it usually does. That was very freeing for me, because I've always felt that I'm very uptight on the set and never felt very free. And so to be with this wonderful team, on a series that you created yourself, playing this lovely character was wonderful. I adored playing Anna.

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

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! 

Mo Collins on “MadTV” and more …

How did you get started in comedy?

MO: I don't have schooling beyond doing the Dudley Riggs Brave New Workshop classes for improv. I got started by just doing it. You just start.

When I was in school I learned some improv, and then, when I had no idea what I was going to do with my life, I remembered loving improv. I saw an ad in City Pages for classes, took the classes and before I knew it an agent called and then there was a check in the mail and I thought, "Well, I guess this is what I do."

How did you like the classes?

MO: It was great, because I finally realized where I belonged, which was with fellow comedy people. I learned how to improv and how to write.

A lot people who start in improv say that it provides a bedrock of learning for the rest of their careers. Was that the case for you?

MO: Absolutely, because the biggest thing that's learned there is the work ethic, which is what has carried me through. You really had to work hard there. You had to. You worked really hard and were paid very little. A great lesson, especially if you're headed to Hollywood. 

But the work ethic was the biggest thing I learned at Dudley Riggs. So any other long day that came along later, I was used to it, because I started at Dudley at 20 and it's just in my blood that you do long days when you're working. But it's play, so you don't feel it.

And the Riggs experience also taught you how to write?

MO: It did some teaching of that, yes. I still hesitate to call myself any kind of a writer, but because I do improv, I am writing in mid air. But when you learn scene structure from improv -- beginning, middle and an end -- and character development, you kind of naturally get the writing skills that come along with it.

How did you use those skills once you left Riggs but before you moved to LA?

MO: Up there I was doing commercial work and industrial work and plays.

How would your improv skills come in handing while shooting an industrial video?

MO: Well, I was fearless. Improv is theater without a net, as we used to say, so anything else just seemed easy. And safe. Which isn't as fun. But when you have a sense of humor and go into these serious industrials that you're doing, to me it was just playing another comedy character, but playing it seriously.

The first thing I remember seeing you in was a part in a dinner theater mystery show ...

MO: Oh my gosh. Does that fall under acting or that waiting tables?

Then we cast you to play Lucille Ball in an industrial video. And even though you look nothing like her, you became Lucy.

MO: Because I understand what she's doing. It's funny, I just saw her show yesterday -- I hadn't watched Lucy in a while -- and as I was watching her I was noting to myself that I know exactly how she feels doing what she was doing. I understand how she got that performance. I totally got it. I could feel her rhythm and understand what she was doing. If that makes any sense at all.

I feel that I understand comedy so well; if there's something that I've studied in my years, it's comedy. I've been in all kinds of different groups of people who have a different comic tone, and I really do believe at this point that there's any camp of comedy that I could walk into and find my way.

I can feel it. I can feel what they're doing, even if it's not me or what I would naturally do.

As a for instances, I just did a pilot recently with David Cross and Bob Odenkirk. And they're a very different group. In fact, women aren't typically a part of that group. They're comedy nerds; they don't even know what to say to women. They don't. But I got in, because I knew how to make it safe for them to let me in and feel okay and not threatened. Not rock their boat but just come in and assimilate into what they're doing, because I understand their geek comedy. I can do it too. And I think it's just because, ultimately, I am a mocking bird. That's what I'm doing. I'm mimicking what they're doing and putting it into my body, my person, my mouth.

What made you decide to move to LA?

MO: I had a two year-old son. And I knew that Minneapolis was only going to allow me to do so well. I was doing okay, making a living, paying my mortgage, but that was going to continue on an even plane, instead of an upward climb. And I didn't want that. I knew that I could do more; I just knew it. And it wasn't going to happen in Minneapolis.

So what was your plan?

MO: To make it.

So like on the top of a piece of paper: "Day One: Make it."

MO: Yes, I'm going to go and I'm going to do this and it's going to work. And with in nine months I had Mad TV.

I knew I had something. So you just do it until you're seen. By the right person. And that's what happened.

I had done a play called Cabin Pressure, with a bunch of women from Minneapolis. We collaborated on this project, a really quirky comedy that we put together and put up on a stage out here. A casting director saw my character and she just jumped on board the Mo ship. She told the Mad TV casting people about me and I got the audition.

I knew, when the audition came, that I was going to get it.

How come?

MO: Because that's exactly what my resume is. It's exactly what I do. I was ready for it. Everything I had done had prepared me for that audition.

I knew, because I had taken a leap of faith, that I would be rewarded. You don't take such big leaps without rewards; I don't think the universe really works like that. I just knew it was going to work out.

It's funny, there were six auditions, and during the fifth one they sent me home early. And I thought it was a horrible mistake. I went home and I was crying and I thought, "They've made a terrible mistake. I'm going to get this. Somebody made a mistake. 

Why did they send you home?

MO: Because they already knew they were going to cast me and didn't want to waste any more of my time that day. But I just wanted to stay and play. I wanted to show them more: "I've got more!"

How did the first show feel?

MO: It was thrilling and terrifying, because television wasn't something I knew, at all. I didn't know how television worked; that wasn't something I had experience at from Minneapolis. Commercial work is not television.

Things like, when the first AD starts the countdown ("Five, four, three ...") and then he doesn't say "One." I didn't know that he was just being quiet. And I had the first line, the first entrance in my first scene, and I didn't know. Nobody told me how that works. 

I decided to fake it 'til I make it. And it worked out fine. But that was a learning process.

How were you used and how did you want to be used and how did you influence how you wanted to be used on the show?

MO: There's a lot of nuancing my position on Mad TV because there are politics involved and I'm a nice Minnesota girl and an easy doormat. I had to stand on my talent because I wasn't a squeaky wheel as far as saying "Use me more!" That kind of stuff. "How come she's got this and I don't?" I just wasn't that person. And I watched as that didn't work. I watched as the squeaky wheel got the oil and that was really hard for me.

This was where I started to see that Hollywood didn't always function through talent. That talent wasn't what always propelled one forward and upward. And that's a really, really tough lesson. And potentially fatal to a career. But I decided not to let it kill me.

I learned how to stand my ground enough, and stay nice at the same time. And I let my work ethic, my non-complaining, my always showing up with my work ready and my characters full-bored. I kept growing my arsenal of things I could do and add to the show. And I kept growing. And the audience started to pick up on that and writing into the show and saying, "She's good. More her." 

One of the things that sets you apart -- and above -- others in your field is your absolute commitment to each character you played. How did you build and grow that ability?

MO: I really love playing characters and taking them as far as I can. Really it's just a self-discovery that's happening within the performance. I'd get a script and there would be an image that would come to mind or a voice or something -- a character just starts. And by the time I'd chosen a wig or wardrobe or whatever, you're looking in the mirror and you see this character emerge. And that's fun. It's dress up. It's play time. And I'm just really good at playing. 

Did you ever get to a point where you thought, enough already, I've got no more characters in me?

MO: I did always try to do something, even if it was just for three lines in a scene, I would think, "I'm going to make a person here, that fits in this scene and serves this scene."

On one of my last shows there was this scene and I thought, "I'm just going to go at this completely differently. I'm not going to think about an internal person. I am just going to make one of the ugliest faces I can make, I'm going to throw on the ugliest wig that they have, and just do that." Because a lot of people come at characters from that external place; they'll throw on some character glasses or whatever. But for me, there's a person in there that I can kind of feel when I read a script.

But in this case I went at it completely externally. It was really fun, I was like a kid, just making faces with this wig on. And it turned out to be a really fun character that people loved. Her name was Carol Fitty and I did her for a game show sketch. And then when they invited me back, after I'd left the show, they had me do her again.

So even in my trying not to do a character, a person emerged, which is pretty funny. And it was really fun for me to go at it so differently.

Were you in a position to bring in ideas for characters and sketches?

MO: You had to. You had to every week. It was part of the job. You'd dip into the writers room, pitch ideas, talk about a character or a thought. You had to do that.

Did you like doing that?

MO: Yeah I did. It scared me a little bit, too, because I felt like, they're the writers and who am I?

But you'd been writing on your feet for years. Why would you find that intimidating?

MO: Because I'm also insecure and will over-think something when I'm not on a stage. So I'd think, "This will be funny. I'll take it in tomorrow." And then the insecurity goes, "That's not funny, they're not going to like it, they're not going to get it." Whereas, if I'm on a stage and I'm doing it in an improv sketch, I know I can make it work. It's different telling, I'm much better at showing. It can be intimidating.

At what point did you decide to leave the show?

MO: Six seasons felt just about right. And I think you should do something else before Hollywood thinks you can't do anything else. You can get really trapped in the sketch world and once you do sketch, they say, "Oh, you're a sketch actor. You're not an actor." Especially if you're a woman.

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! 

Rebecca Miller on Writing & Directing “Personal Velocity”

The movie Personal Velocity is actually three movies -- three individual stories about three very different women. Writer/director Rebecca Miller adapted the stories from her short story collection (also titled Personal Velocity), bringing the stories to life via a low-budget DV production.

The result is a movie as varied in its tone and emotions as the three primary characters whose stories it brings to life.

What was going on in your life before Personal Velocity?

REBECCA: I had basically given up, at least for the time being, the idea of making films, because it was so hard for me to get my films made at that point. I had made one film, called Angela, which had won the Filmmaker's Prize at Sundance. They've discontinued the Filmmaker's Prize; all the filmmakers voted on their favorite films in competition. 

Angela did well with some critics, but it didn't make money. It was a very uncommercial film. And then I had written The Ballad of Jack and Rose, which was something I would make later, and I wrote another film that collapsed in pre-production. So I had gotten to the point where I just felt like I didn't want to just wait and wait to make films. All I did all day was write these screenplays that nobody seemed to want. So I decided to write short stories.

I had a child ­– I was living in Europe at that time – so it was a perfect moment for me to do that. So I started writing these short stories and had a book of them.

My friend Gary Winick called me. He was making this series of films for the Independent Film Channel. He had come to them with this idea that he would make ten films a year for a million dollars, but what they ended up giving everybody was a $250,000 budget.

He asked did I have anything, did I want to make a film on mini-DV for that much money? None of the films that I had already written were really right for that, because I figured (and I was right about this), that you'd have to tailor a script for that medium and for that budget; you shouldn't just take one of your scripts and try and turn it into that kind of shoot.

I was sick of writing screenplays that no one was going to make, so I said, "If you want to look at the stories that I'm writing, I could maybe do something out of one of them." I gave him a few stories from the collection and he read them and he really liked them. He gave them to Caroline Kaplan, who was running InDigEnt with him, and they ended up green-lighting the film. It was also Gary's idea to use three stories and make a trilogy. When he said that my mind took off.

The thing that's great about Gary is that he really insisted that I feel completely free. At first I was sort of checking with him and saying, "I'm doing this, I'm doing that," and he was like, "Look, do whatever. The point is that we want to get filmmakers who have experience and who we believe in to feel free."

And so I wrote the script for Personal Velocity in about two months. It took me about two years to write the book. I knew what everybody in those stories was feeling and I knew the characters from top to bottom, so writing the screenplay was mostly about finding the form and the structure.

How did you decide which of the three stories to use?

REBECCA: I chose the ones that were the most dynamic in terms of action, where there was conflict that was externalized, because some of them were very interior. And also where I thought that there was a good clash. I thought there was a very good clash between Delia, which is a story about a working-class woman struggling with an abusive marriage, and Greta, which is about an upper-middle class woman struggling with the clash between her own ambition and a marriage which is feeling increasingly stultifying; finally her ambition propels her out of her own marriage. 

They both involve crisis, but of a different order. And then, class-wise, Paula is kind of a floater, because she's an artist, she's from that class. Although she doesn't really produce anything, she's in-between the two classes.

It was a little bit crazy. When Gary first read the screenplay, he said, "Well this is great, but how in God's name are you going to do this?," because there were many, many, many locations in the film, especially because Greta had so many flashbacks and so much going back and forth with the past that it was just insane. Ideally, when you make a film for $250,000 in 16 days, you're going to be in one room. We were all over the place.

The good news was that it was a kind of mosaic, so that you didn't really need the coherence from scene to scene. The coherence was something that really came with the editing, and then the whole thing was sewn together with voice-over and music. So although there were complete scenes that had a beginning, middle and end a lot of the time, there were also very tiny scenes that were very short and all pieces of a puzzle. 

How did you come up with the idea of using still images throughout the movie?

REBECCA: There were certain scenes that I wrote that the producer, Lemore Syvan, would look at and say, "We can't afford to shoot certain things." And that's where the idea of the stills came in. The stills turned out to be one of the things that distinguished the film and I think worked really nicely emotionally in the film. But the idea was born out of poverty.

Shooting MOS, without sound, is so much faster that we could just rip through those scenes. At first I thought we might shoot them as stills in the camera, but then I just decided to shoot and then pick the stills later, because it would give me more choices. 

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

REBECCA: I always knew I was going to. The narration was built into it. 

Early on Gary had said that he loved the way the narrator spoke in the stories and that it would be a pity to lose that. I also thought that with the three stories it would be a good way to link them together. It also gives you a lot more freedom, because we're jumping back and forth through time constantly. And the narration also carries a lot of the humor -- it's a sympathetic third voice. 

In the end there was a whole debate about whether or not to make it a male or female voice. I always knew that it was meant to be a male voice, but then there were some people who saw it and said, "You can't make it a male voice; it's about women." 

But I just ended up really liking the male voice, because I thought it differentiated itself from the other voices. Otherwise, it was just another woman's voice; it was like a soup of women's voices and I thought it was good to have the male voice. Also, I thought it was kind of optimistic to have a male voice. It seemed to be sympathetic and unjudgmental of these women while some of their struggles were against men. And it was my overriding view that it's very possible to have sympathetic males in your movies.

How did you come up with the idea of linking the three stories with the car accident and how did that decision help you?

REBECCA: That came fairly early on, because I realized that something had to unify these three stories and I liked the idea of them all happening at once. It also created a sense of mystery, so that by the time you get to Paula's story, you know that she's the person that everyone is looking for and wondering who she is. That was a device that I came up with fairly early on, because I didn't want to do an interweaving of the stories. I contemplated all sorts of things, including cutting back and forth, but I didn't really want to do that. I wanted to give each woman her complete story and to make them three portraits.

I called it Three Portraits because there was something kind of humble about calling them portraits, because mini-DV is a modest medium. We looked at a lot of other films that had been made on DV and we realized that the lens just don't work very well in wide shots, they kind of fall apart. Because of that, for the most part, there aren't that many wide shots in the film, because they tend to look really cheesy when you go wide. I ended up focusing on medium shots and close-ups and some really, really intense close-ups. 

So once you decided that the accident would link the stories, then Paula had to be the last of the three. What was your thought process on how to order the other two stories?

REBECCA: Actually, in the script Greta came first. And then, when we were cutting it, I realized that if you put Paula after Delia, Paula became unbearably sad. But if you start with Delia, and then go to Greta, where you're laughing within a few minutes, then Paula becomes lyrical instead of sad. So that's why I made that switch.

How did your background in acting help the writing process?

REBECCA: I think that acting was a very necessary step for me. I had a weird, long apprenticeship, in that I was a painter for quite a while and then at a certain point realized that I wanted to make films. I acted for about five years while I was writing my first screenplays and still painting for some of that time -- it was like a bridge. 

Without the acting I don't know that I would have been able to successfully make that leap -- when I was a painter, I was so far away from the mindset of being a filmmaker and being more sociable and being on a set where there are so many people. I just learned all sorts of things, just how it works, what a film set's like. 

One of the problems with being a director is that you never get to go on sets -- even if you go to film school, you don't usually get to be on sets when you're coming up. You learn when you get on your own set, but it was nice to just understand certain things, to have been around directors. For writing it probably helps, too. 

You're writing to shoot, and that's what's important to remember. And I really remembered it with Personal Velocity. That screenplay was really tailored, it was absolutely tailored to the medium. I don't think I even cut any scenes out; there was no waste in that thing. 

You shot what you wrote.

REBECCA: I shot what I wrote and I kept what I shot. Which is really unusual. Usually you end up realizing that there are internal repetitions that you didn't notice. But this was all done in a spirit of such economy, so I was very conscious of not wanting to shoot anything extra. 

We had no overtime, so we had to finish our days, and we had no extra days. So there was no leeway at all. If you weren't making your day, you had to start cutting scenes. There was one occasion where I did have to cut a scene, which was completely unnecessary. I think in the end I would have cut it anyway afterwards. 

How did you come up with the title?

REBECCA: Well it was really just a line that Greta's father says when everyone thought, "Oh, wow, she was such a loser and now look at her!" Everybody has their own personal velocity. He means that everybody succeeds at different rates or everybody comes into themselves at different rates. 

I thought it was a good title for everything because in a sense the whole movie is about these women and the question of being hurled through space by their own past and the accidents of fate. Like Paula and that stupid accident where she switches places with somebody and he gets killed. To what degree are we choosing our lives and to what degree is it something else? I think it's probably a cocktail of all those things, but that's what personal velocity means to me.

And speaking of the car accident, I thought that -- regardless of the budget -- it was conceived and executed beautifully. It never felt like, "We can't afford to show it." Instead, you found a way to do it in a way that was different, and better, than expected.

REBECCA: Thank you. I really love that whole sequence. It's one of these little moments -- these epiphanies -- where everything is being revealed. But you couldn't have had less: we just had two people, a shoe, and a flashing light to reflect in a puddle, and that's all we had. And the sound of a car crash. 

But the truth is, I think especially with sex and car crashes, we've all seen so much of it on the screen, so why even bother?

How do you know when a script is ready to be shot?

REBECCA: It's very hard to answer that question. 

I just made a film called The Ballad of Jack and Rose and that was a script I thought was ready and then I couldn't get the money together. Then I lived a little bit more, looked at it in a different way, wrote it a little bit more. 

Cut to nine years after I'd started writing it and by now it's really changed, because my point of view had changed so much. I'd become a parent and the script is partly about a parent, so now it was more about the parent as much as about the child. Now I feel like I waited the right amount of time, that script was finally ready. But had I gotten the money back all those years earlier, it probably would have been ready then. It just would have been a different film. 

I think that to a degree we just abandon things. I don't think anything is really ever really finished, ever really perfect. I wonder what filmmaker looks back and thinks, "Oh, yeah, that's perfect." Probably something's wrong with them if they do. 

Was there anything you learned while writing Personal Velocity that you still use today?

REBECCA: Yes: the idea of freedom. 

The whole point is to fool yourself into feeling completely free every time. And that becomes more difficult as people expect things from you. It's easier to write a screenplay when no one expects anything of you, because there's nothing to lose. As people start to expect something of you, it becomes more about fooling yourself into feeling completely free.

That was what made that experience so wonderful. But I would like to always have that, to remember that, to guard it and to cherish it. You need to feel free.

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

REBECCA: The best advice I ever received was from a screenwriter named Tom Cole. He read the first screenplay I ever wrote. It was never produced as a screenplay, but I did actually cannibalize it and use a lot of stuff for other things, which often happens to your first work. 

He said, "This is a very personal screenplay, it has your own stamp on it. Don't ever let people, with their advice, sand it down and make it smooth and turn it into something that could have been written by a lot of different people."

I think that's especially good advice because screenplays have no value unless they're produced. People give you a lot of advice, and a lot of that advice is just turning things into something average. That's fine if that’s what you're wanting to do. But if you're looking to create something that's really your own, then you have to keep what's unusual about it and what's even jarring about it.

One thing I would say, especially for people who are starting out -- this is a big piece of advice that I definitely learned from my first screenplay that was never produced -- which is to allow yourself to be humble enough to boil a screenplay down to what's most important. I think when you start out, you tend to try to write about a lot of different things and put a lot of themes into your script. A lot of themes can exist in a piece, in a subterranean way, but that doesn't mean that your story can't be simple.

For example, in Personal Velocity, as many things that are going on there, there are three very simple stories: A woman is escaping from an abusive marriage. A woman is propelled out of her own marriage by her ambition. A woman nearly gets killed in an accident and then tries to make sense of that accident by rescuing a hitchhiker. They're simple stories.

When I first started out, I wrote a screenplay that was so complicated -- it had everything I had ever thought of in it. There were these two little girls in it and they were the most real people in the screenplay. And my friend Michael Rohatyn, who is the guy who composes all the music for my movies, said, "Why don't you just write a movie about those two little girls?" 

And I ended up doing that and that was Angela. And I'm so glad that I did it. It was such good advice. Sometimes you just take the fingernail off the giant and the fingernail is your story.

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 Heckerling on “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” and “Clueless”

What was it that got you into filmmaking?

AMY: I’ve always loved movies, as a kid, forever. I’m watching one right now.

What are you watching?

AMY: Bye Bye Birdie.

When you first started wanting to make movies, what path was available to you?

AMY: I didn’t realize that there was a path. Then when I felt like I can’t NOT do this, I have to do it, there were film schools. But there were only a couple, a handful of them. There was UCLA, USC, the School of Visual Arts and NYU. And I had my heart set on NYU.

Why NYU?

AMY: Well, first of all, I couldn’t afford to pay tuition and pay to live somewhere. So that took care of California. The School of Visual Arts was a vocational school really, and I wanted to go to a university.

NYU was less connected to the show biz community than the California schools, but there was a gritty artiness to the movies they were trying to make and I appreciated that. It was a better fit for me, I was happy there.

What did you do after film school?

AMY: Well, I took my little movies and, even though they had won awards, I didn’t feel like I was going to go to a company making movies and say, “Look at this,” and then they would make my movies. So I said, “I need something better to show people.” At the time, there were fewer people involved in the industry and it was much tougher.

Now, with all the equipment people have, you can make a feature for no money and use that as a calling card. 

So I felt like I need a better calling card, so I went to The American Film Institute, where we could make much slicker, more professional-looking movies and have more access to the industry.

How tough was it to get into AFI then?

AMY: Everybody at NYU tried and only my cameraman and I got in.

What did you do at AFI?

AMY: Associates make videos, which I was not so happy with – I was a film lover. There was a big difference between what videos looked like and what films looked like.

And then your second year you can make a short film. So I made a short film and showed it to the studios. Actually, I had a screening at AFI and we sent invitations to agents and who ever you knew who knew somebody. And one of the people was David Gersch, from The Gersch Agency. He was a kid whose father had an agency.

So he showed it to some people, and I had a meeting at Warner Brothers. Then I pitched them something and they liked it, so then I was writing.

The thing that I wrote went into turnaround at Warner Brothers when they got new executives, and then it was at Universal, but it never got made there. Then it was at MGM and they were going to make it, when David Begelman was there, but then there was an actors’ strike. In the interim, they found a similar project with big stars attached, so they said that it was an act of god that they couldn’t do mine, force majeure.

It was an act of god that there was another similar script? 

AMY: That’s what they said. So we had worked all this time for nothing.

So what was your next move?

AMY: A guy I knew showed me a script. It was Fast Times At Ridgemont High. It was Art Linson. At Universal, I had an office next to him. He had shown me other scripts to see what I thought and we’d talk about stuff. And I thought that was what he was doing with this script, wanting to know what I thought of it.

And what did you think of it?

AMY: I thought that these kids – a couple of them have jobs at a strip of stores on the street in a small town and others didn’t have jobs – and I said, “What if you put it all in a mall?” Because the mall was like the soda shop of the 1980s. And then you’d have the people working there and the people coming there and you could have more people work – because I think kids should work.

So he said, “That’s great. What else?” And I said, “There’s all these funny things that different people do and then there’s this wacky guy Spicoli. Why don’t you give these things to him to do?”

How did you get the job directing Fast Times?

AMY: They called and said “Do you want to direct it?” I was thrilled – I really wanted to direct. And then I met Cameron (Crowe), who I loved. And then we were doing it. We started working on the script and he was awesome. He’s Cameron Crowe. He’s amazing.

Tell me how you went about casting the movie, because it’s brilliantly cast.

AMY: Well, thank you. One thing that always annoyed me about high school movies – although as I watch Bye, Bye Birdie it doesn’t seem to annoy me – was that I always felt that they were grown-ups dressed in high-top sneakers and that makes you a teenager.

I wanted to have real kids because the point of Fast Times was that things were too fast, they were too young for things that were happening. So they had to really look young. They couldn’t look like little grown-ups. They had to be children.

But then as we were going through the casting process, first of all you’re limited because they have to be over eighteen. And Art Linson said something pretty brilliant to me: “You won’t be unhappy if you just go with the talent. So if somebody looks ten years old and they’re eighteen, that’s great, but if they’re not talented, you’re not going to be happy. And if somebody is a genius actor – like Sean Penn and Forest Whitaker – you will be happy.” So I did what he said.

That movie was shot in 35 days, without a very long pre-production period and not a very long post. I mean, that was a cheap movie. It was a $5 million dollar, 35-day movie.

What was it like for you on your first day on the set?

AMY: It was terrifying because I had to shoot a car driving by and I didn’t know how big it should be. I knew where the camera should be, I just didn’t know how big the car should be, how fast it should go, how long I should follow it for. But then I shot that and we were just shooting. You know, like everything, the first step’s the hardest, even if the first step is nothing.

So what happened career-wise after Fast Times came out?

AMY: I had a lot of meetings with everybody who had a “virgin” script.

Was there something in particular you wanted to do?

AMY: I didn’t get to do something I wanted because I still felt like I had to do what they wanted – as far as scripts they wanted to make – otherwise it would take forever and it would never happen. But I definitely didn’t want to do another “girl loses her virginity” movie. There’s tons of those.

What led you to write Clueless?

I had written a movie called Rat Race, which was based on a French movie, Mon oncle d'Amérique. It was developed at Disney and they kept giving me notes that weren’t related to the story and I was miserable. And then, ultimately when they passed on it, they said “This is too smart.”

So I got depressed. And then I said, “You want stupid? I’ll show you fucking stupid like you’ve never seen.” Now ultimately that isn’t what I did, but it was a reaction.

I wound up going into Fox and they said writers keep coming in wanting to do movies about nerds, but that they wanted something about the in crowd. I said, “Okay, if I can make them idiots.” And they said, “We don’t care – we just want something about the in crowd.”

And then I thought, I want to do something about a really, really happy person. Someone who is the opposite of what I am. So I made this girl where if you yell at her, she just thinks it’s silly and she never gets hurt. And she’s always happy, no matter what’s happening. And then I thought, I wonder where she would fit? And then I remembered (Jane Austen’s) Emma and I re-read Emma. And I did a pilot and they said, “Nah.”

So I got a new agent and he read it and said, “This should be a movie.” And so he sold it as a movie.

How had you changed as a director between Fast Times and Clueless?

That’s so hard to say, because you’re not the same person on any level. The only thing I can tell you with assurance is how my face has changed.

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! 

Daniel Myrick on "The Blair Witch Project"

How did The Blair Witch Project come about?

DANIEL: Ed (Sanchez) and I were both fans of the In Search of … series, with the haunting Leonard Nimoy voice-over, and movies like Legend of Boggy Creek, which had a limited theatrical run for a while. 

There were all kinds of these UFO, Bigfoot faux documentaries television shows and features that kind of walked the line between fact and fiction. And we always found them very scary and haunting and they resonated with us. 

I think Blair Witch was born out of wanting to re-visit that and recreate that, on a more contemporary video language. So, we definitely used those films and television shows as our inspiration and tried to stick to what scared us as kids and put that into Blair Witch.

What was your guiding principle on the project?

DANIEL: Our logic was rooted in method acting. We took that theory and applied it to the whole filmmaking process. 

We hated a lot of traditional fake documentaries, because there was always some sign or red flag in them that would be a little telltale sign that it was scripted or faked in some way. The camera would happen to be in the right place at the right time too many times. A line of dialogue from a testimonial just sounded too scripted, too convenient.

So, our theory was: let's shoot this like a documentary as much as is humanly possible and set the stage for our actors to play in character their roles within this documentary, so hopefully when we come out the other end we have, effectively, a documentary. 

Without infusing our own subjectivity in the shooting process, I think we came away with what looked very natural and what looked like very unpredictable footage. 

Then we cut, from that footage, the story that ultimately became The Blair Witch Project. Not to say that this wasn't scripted and outlined; but the shooting process had to look like it was done like a documentary.

That was our theory, our logic behind it: not to become our own worst enemies and not become victim to our own narrative conceits by wanting to have the camera at the right place at the right time and stuff like that. 

Instead, allow that free flow and unpredictability and spontaneity to happen, and then you just get what you got. As a result, it came across as very authentic and very real, which we thought ultimately would lend to the horror.

But you did have to step in on a few occasions, in order to keep things on track, right?

DANIEL: We had to do that because we did have a narrative to follow. It was a balance that we were trying to strike, where you saw what you needed to see to propel the plot and the story, but where it didn't look contrived. 

And there certainly times when it did look contrived and that was part of the edit process, editing out all the moments and lines and camera angles that just didn't feel authentic. That was the first step of our process, cutting all that stuff out. 

But we had to re-set certain scenes just logistically. For example, when the kids were running out of the tent, we certainly didn't want them running into any low-hanging branches or anything like that. So, we had a whole path cut out. And so, logistically, that was set up in advance, so they knew where to run and exactly how to run out of the tent.

Same goes for the house at the end; that was a compilation of five or six takes, because the blocking that was required for them to go upstairs and back down was too complicated to just have it happen the first time. It's a credit to the actors, because they were seamless. We shot that house scene over two nights and it looks like it was done in just a few minutes.

Do you ever get tired talking about The Blair Witch Project?

DANIEL: No, I'm as fascinated by it as anybody else. 

Certainly, I'm very proud of Blair Witch and it's opened up a whole wealth of opportunities for us. But at the same time, it was like this science experiment that took on a life of its own. 

It's always interesting for me to hear other people's perspective on what happened and what their take was on it. It was this phenomenon that was greater than any of us had anticipated. For most of that ride, we were on the outside looking in like everybody else and were as fascinated by the evolution of the whole Blair phenomenon as anybody else was. 

We had an inside look at what was going on, but to this day I look back at the confluence of events and the timing and the Internet and the reality approach we took to this—how everything intersected—and what happens when that does. I find that fascinating to this day. 

I have people today still e-mailing me, convinced that Blair Witch is real and just refusing to accept the fact that it's not. They're the exception to the rule, but it is humbling to me to see how people can be convinced to believe certain things. Even when we were, all along the way, telling people exactly how we shot the movie. The intent of Blair Witch was not to be a hoax, but to feel real. But to this day people still think it was real.

It was a really polarizing film, from the moment it was released.

DANIEL: It definitely polarized audiences. There were people who were upset with the film for various reasons. One, they didn't understand what was going on. Why was Mike standing in the corner, or it was too shaky, or they were just unprepared for this kind of movie. 

The other extreme was people say it was the greatest thing ever made. 

My experience has been that movies that have a long-term effect on people have a tendency to polarize audiences. And it is a movie that disarms you. The minute you walk in and sit down and watch that opening title card go by and you know the people you're watching die in the end of the movie, it puts you ill at ease, because now you realize that anything can happen, that the hero is not going to live in the end, and all the traditional safety nets that you're accustomed to seeing in Hollywood filmmaking or television are gone. 

Some people are very comfortable and like that experience and like that challenge, and other people are very uncomfortable with that. We had people get really angry with us at the film; but I'll tell you one thing: the overwhelming majority were scared. And that's ultimately what we were going after.

What lessons did you take away from the experience?

DANIEL: There are lessons specific to the film industry and then there are overall life lessons that you learn. Things do change, dramatically. People all of a sudden want to do business with you and they want make movies with you, and you didn't know them from Adam the day before.

We had this three-picture deal, post-Blair Witch, with Artisan that we thought was our guarantee to making movies into the decades to come. And we found out that a lot of those so-called "three picture deals" are ways to just leverage you later down the road. You effectively sign off the rights to your next two movies, which are two of your pet projects, to the distributor and then they can, in turn, hold that as leverage to get you to do, or try to get you to do, Blair 2 for example.

That's a specific example of us learning a hard lesson where we signed off a couple of our best ideas because—in the heat of the moment—we thought our distributor was going to line them up and start making these movies with us. And then you come to find out that their primary interest was just making more Blair movies. And that wasn't where we wanted to go creatively at the time. 

With that kind of notoriety, it's very easy to lose your perspective on this business and on this industry because of the success and how big it became. And it was good for us to remind each other where we were just a few months prior to Blair Witch hitting it big and kind of keeping our feet on the ground. 

You have to take it all with a grain of salt. You really have to be happy and excited that you've reached a level of success that you've always dreamt about; but at the same time, remembering why you got into this business and remembering the kind of movies you wanted to make is very important as well. Because it's really easy to go down that road of all of a sudden people are sending you scripts and they want to pay you a lot of money to go do bad movies, just because they want to throw your name up on something.

For me, it's about common sense. We were offered several different movies, like Exorcist 4, I've forgotten the names of most of them. For better or worse—myself in particular—there's just a great reward in doing something that not everyone else is out doing. I certainly don't have anything against the Hollywood system. I grew up on Hollywood movies, and if I subscribe to any kind of filmmaking model, I think Soderbergh is a really good example of a filmmaker that can go out and make a Hollywood film or a larger-budget film, and then turns around and does something like Traffic or Full Frontal. And that's the kind of thing I want to emulate. 

It's too hard of a business, it's too hard of a process to go through and put your family through and put your wife through, if it isn't something you really believe in. There's nothing worse, I think, then seeing a filmmakers who's just miserable, with a lot of money at stake, having to take on a job or take on a film that they're really not passionate about, just to pay their huge mortgage.

There's a certain level of freedom that keeping things in perspective can give you. You can go into a meeting and say 'No' if you don't believe in the project. And I like having that freedom, I like having that autonomy.

Looking back, what do you think were some of the best decisions you made on the film?

DANIEL: The best decision we made in pre-production was the idea of using GPS systems. Those little GPS systems—which our producer, turned us on to because hunters use them—made it possible for us to shoot the movie the way we did. It allowed us to set up wait points throughout the woods so the actors could get from Point A to Point B without having to be guided or corralled by a crew. So it allowed them to be more in character throughout the whole process as well. 

We initially shot two phases of Blair Witch: one was kind of a framing device, which was more like a traditional documentary, where you had interviews. The best decision we made in post-production was to jettison that and stick with footage of the students.

Initially when we went out to shoot, we were only hoping to get fifteen or twenty minutes of the footage in the woods, never anticipating that we'd have enough to cut an entire feature. It was always to get just a handful of really good moments within the construct of the storyline. And then, much like The Legend of Boggy Creek or an In Search of…, have it sprinkled throughout what would be more of a traditional documentary. 

And when we came back with so much great footage, and because we had scripted our time out in the woods with a complete narrative arc, we came back to the edit and said to ourselves, 'You know, we have a movie in just this footage. It's a very risky movie, but we do have a movie.' 

So, Ed and I each did two different cuts on the film and it was a very tough decision for us to jettison that original concept for the film. And I credit Gregg (Hale) and Ed lobbying to do that. I was more resistant to jettisoning that stuff. But once we did, I was really glad that we decided to do that, because ultimately, that became the movie. 

We used what we called the Phase One footage, that traditional documentary footage, in the Sci-Fi channel special, which preceded the movie and which was, at the time, their highest-rated special. And we used a lot of that material on the website. 

So, you had this complimentary experience between the special on television, the website material, and the actual film itself to round out this whole experience on Blair Witch. You could choose to see any part of this experience at any time. Some people liked the idea of just going to the movie by itself and then checking out the website and the special. Other people opted to really dig into the mythology beforehand, so they knew more about what they were looking at on screen.

I think that was one of the most interesting aspects about Blair Witch, that it was more than just a film on screen. It was a whole kind of mythology and experience.

What was the test screening process like?

DANIEL: We screened a very long cut of the student's footage and it was set up like a very traditional test screening, where we called in all of our friends and their friends and who ever would give up a couple hours of their afternoon and come check out this film. 

We handed out questionnaires, about what they liked and didn't like. And from those questionnaires you can draw a consensus about what people are turned on and turned off by. And we had more than a few comments telling us, 'You know, this really is your movie. We don't really want to break away from the narrative story of what's going on here.' 

We were always really concerned about how much shaky-cam there was, whether or not audiences would endure that for a feature-length film. So, based on that consensus, Ed and I went back and did another cut, and went to great pains to cut out as much of that shakiness as was humanly possible. We thought that Blair Witch was probably destined for television or the Sci-Fi channel anyway, so on the small screen it wouldn't be as big a factor as it would on the big screen. Little did we know at the time.

And what was the best decision you made after the movie was finished?

DANIEL: I think the best decision we made after the movie was finished was coming to an agreement among ourselves that we want to market Blair Witch as a narrative film; that we weren't going to try to fool people into thinking it was real. 

And I think that decision—effectively letting the press in on what we were doing—really made them embrace the movie. 

But there was always that layer there, that if you were an audience member and went onto the web site or watched the film, we didn't have any spoilers. We didn't have anything on the web site or in the movie that gave it away. But we weren't going to play it up like a hoax.

I remember coming to that decision, because we were grappling with that. Even when we got accepted to Sundance, we were like, 'Well, how do we submit this? Do we submit it as a documentary, or do we submit it as a narrative film?'  We had that swimming around our heads for about five minutes, and then went, 'No, it's a narrative film. We've got to submit it into competition and see what happens.' And ultimately, we got into the midnight showing. 

But even after Artisan picked it up, there were discussions about whether we should play it up as 100% real or not. I think we came to the decision that we're treating this like a movie, and let the audience believe what they want to believe.

We empowered the press to say what they wanted to say, and it ended up really becoming something that they embraced. And the same thing with audience members that were in on it, that knew the film was fiction. I've heard endless stories about boyfriends taking girlfriends to the movie theater, or husbands taking wives or vice versa, where the one taking the other was in on it, had seen it before with a friend or something. I don't know how many repeat screenings we probably got because of that, but it really made Blair Witch a sense of discovery, rather than it being that you felt like you had the wool pulled over your eyes. 

If would have marginalized the film, I think, if it had come off as a hoax. It was a fine line to walk, because we felt that the realism of the film played to the horror, and that's what it was intended for, but we never wanted to marginalize it as a hoax. Otherwise, we would have alienated more people than the movie ultimately did.

That was the biggest thing I learned on Blair Witch: Allow the actors to do their thing. I think Hitchcock once said that 90% of direction is casting, so if you find really good, talented people, and take great pains to do that, and then let them do their thing on set, you'll come away with material that you couldn't possibly script. 

And that's what we applied to Blair Witch.

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 Odenkirk on directing “Melvin Goes to Dinner”

How did you get connected with this project, which started out as a four-person play called Phyro-Giants!?

BOB: I saw the play a couple times -- I think five, all told -- and I felt that if all I do is shoot this play in some form, then that would be worthy of the effort.  It was so well played, so well written, and the cast was so perfect. It was just worth shooting. And I thought I had an idea of how to shoot it and keep it lively, which was multiple, handheld cameras."

Are you happy with how that approach worked – shooting it simultaneously with five cameras?

BOB: I think the cameras moved far too much in the first half. There was a learning curve that our cameramen were on, and they had to move from the traditional, handheld, "Homicide" super swishy camera moves to a gentle, kind of float that I tried to get them to from the beginning. 

They only approximated that, and then got better at it as they gathered the rhythm of the dialogue and the tone of the piece. And since we shot that whole conversation in on night, there wasn’t time to re-shoot it once they figured it out. 

In an interesting way, that kind of works for us, because as the cameramen are finding the movie, you're finding the movie. So it worked okay.

Did you have to do a lot of directing with the actors?

BOB: I didn't have a lot of notes for the performers, they'd done it as a play for months, which is one of the reasons we kept that cast together and one of the reasons they're so good."

So they didn’t have any trouble bringing the performances down for the camera?

BOB: It's an intimate play. So even as a play they did it quietly.  I thought they were pitched just right, even with a camera two inches from their face.

How did you go about “opening it up” as it grew from being a stage play to becoming a movie?

BOB: I had some ideas on what I thought would help make it feel and work like a feature film. It's a very good performance piece for the stage, and one of the reasons it's so good is, it's very much alive every night that you do it. One night it could be a little more comic, another night it could be more dramatic. It all depends on the tone of performance and it depends on the audience and it depends on their interaction. That's what a great play does: it lives on stage every night, and it lives a little differently. 

When you're making a movie, you're committing to one performance. Unlike a play, where your eyes can move around and the energy can shift in this interplay between audience and performance, you're committing. You're saying to everybody, “Look at this person and look at this performance and this is the right performance.”

We used five cameras, so everybody is on camera at all times. And we tried to layer it so that you can follow everyone's performance throughout the movie, even though we commit to singles angles at any one time. When a person's talking and telling a story, we cut from them to watch the people listening, because the way that anyone of those persons stories is affecting the other people is the depth of the piece. 

When one person tells a story about infidelity, clearly there is an issue there with some of the other people, and you can read that, I think, subconsciously. And, if you watch the movie a second time, you can read it consciously. You can see people getting uncomfortable at certain topics, and now you know why. 

What was the thinking about focusing on Melvin as the center of the story, which isn’t how it works in the play.

BOB: I felt we needed to commit to one person's story a little and see them go at least in some way on a journey.  In the play, it's like the audience goes on a journey; they discover something they didn't know at the beginning. The excitement comes from their own journey of learning who these people are.

There had to be the feeling like somebody up there went somewhere, from the beginning of the movie to the end of the movie, otherwise it wouldn't be rewarding enough. So, we decided to concentrate on Melvin, who is the one character who is as clueless as the audience is to the true relationship of all these people. He's the last person of that group to learn what is really going on. So we asked ourselves, “How can he get something out of this conversation? How can he grow or change and make a different choice somewhere in here?” And at the very end of the movie, I think he does change a little. But I don't think he changes in an organic, traditional story structure way. I think that what he does is much more human and real and a little bit unexplained.

The change that he makes in, literally, the last few seconds of the movie, is really stunning.

BOB: To me, all the stuff that in that last moment, in the course of 20 seconds, that does give us a feeling of change and movement in a movie that's an hour and twenty minutes long and suddenly at the end there's this movement. And I think it makes the movie rewarding and it makes it feel more like a movie, even though it's the last 20 seconds, and it's earned, and even though it's not -- in an overt way -- in that dialogue, I think inherent in the story are all the elements that he needs to get his back up against the wall in that last moment.

That's why you write a movie. You write about the times when people grow and evolve. You don't write about the times when they don't. That's what we write about when we write anything. You write about times in people's lives, you write about dramatic times.

What were the advantages and disadvantages of using the original cast?

BOB: The disadvantage is that they're not name actors. Annabelle has done a couple of things, but in general they're not name actors, and as a result, that's why we didn't sell it, that's why it didn't go into theatrical release. I think the script is up to par, and it's interesting enough and it's certainly attractive enough and entertaining enough. But bookers and people who distribute, they need a poster, and they need a name for the poster, and we just didn't have it.

And if you’d had name actors?

BOB: There's no way you could have rehearsed it as much as this cast had rehearsed. This movie is all dialogue, it's all about feeling real, like you're really eavesdropping.

In addition to writing the script, and playing Melvin, Michael Blieden also edited the movie. How did you two work together?

BOB: To Michael's credit, he was extremely open to trying different things. I would say, 'Can we try it this way, can we try it that way,' and he would always give my notions a shot. And then we would come to some agreement. I was very much interested in having a collaboration on that film. 

Clearly, Michael wrote it, starred in it and edited it. But, whatever edit I asked, he would try, and that was hard for him sometimes. But overall he was happy with it and we both came to agreement on things. 

Sometimes I let him have something that he just wanted and that I didn't necessarily love. But, again, I wanted to make it a collaboration. I felt he'd certainly earned that with all that he'd done for that piece.

How did you get Michael Penn to do the music?

BOB: I know Michael Penn from around here in LA, he goes to a lot of comedy shows, he and Amy Mann, and I've gotten to know them from that. Michael's work is about a lot of things, but mostly I think it's about relationships and about telling the truth and about love and the challenges of relationships. That alone was a reason to pursue him, but also the fact that I knew him didn't hurt.

I think we gave Michael Penn two copies of the movie: One had the [scratch track] music we'd used, and one had no music. And in some cases, he used that music as a template, and in some cases he just ignored it and came up with his own angle.

How did you come up with the idea of bringing in some name people for cameos?

BOB: I knew that we weren't going to use any names in the leads. And I thought just having a few name people would help the movie, and I do think it did help. Now, some of the people, like Jack Black and Melora Walters, wouldn't let us put their name or their image on the poster, which is fine and understandable. The last thing I would want would be for it to be released as 'The Jack Black Movie.' People would hate me, Jack, and the asshole who made the poster.

I do think the cameos help. It helps people to consider the movie legitimate.

The thing I'm most happy about is that those people were right for their parts, they were funny and good in their parts, and they don't overshadow the movie. When the movie's over, you don't go, 'Wow, that was about Jack Black's scene.' Instead, you totally go, 'That was about this couple who are lying and this friend who's in a bad relationship and this girl's story about ghosts,' and about the ninth thing you mention is that Jack Black's in it. And that's perfect. Perfect.

You like Jack Black, and you like Maura Tierney, and you like Melora Walters, they're all good in their roles. David Cross is great. But none of them overshadows what the movie's about, none of them dislocates the core of the movie.

Shooting the cameos on different formats – where did that idea come from?

BOB: One of the things that I settled on quickly was that I would like everything that happens that day to be shot on the digital camera. And then I would like everything that happened a year before or ten years before to be shot in some other medium. It can be still film, it can be 16mm, it can be a different kind of video. In the case of the David Cross scene, we just put a very strong look on it. 

And then everything that happens that day -- where people are meeting and getting ready for the dinner and leaving the dinner -- all happens in this same media. That was our core concept.

The sequence using only still photos is great.

BOB: I really like the Houston piece, shot on still film, because it feels like a memory, it feels like just pieces that you remember, that you feel when you remember something. And it's beautiful, too. You can tell stories with stills, and I think it should be done a little more often. It can be beautiful and evocative.

One of the right decisions we made was we didn't worry about getting names into the movie. Where it was easy to do, we did it. But we just tried to get the right people in it. Ultimately, you're going to live with your film for a long, long time. And if it's well performed and everyone is aptly cast, that's all that's going to matter in the long run.

What did you learn, as a director, on this project?

BOB: You've got to be patient once you hit the set. You spend so much time preparing and hoping and working toward making a film. You can't get on the set and then hurry up and leave. When you get there, you've got to get everything you want as good as you can, and maybe a couple other things too. You're there, the actors are there, the lights are there, the cameras are there, the set is there. It's all there. It's not going to be there again tomorrow. You've got to get everything now, and you have to think of some new things."

When you're trying to be responsible, and you're making something low budget, you feel this responsibility to move along. And that's good and fine. But you also have to make the most of the opportunity when it's all there in front of you. You've got to get a new wind when you're out there on the set and try to see it as truthfully as you can and also be inventive and come to new ideas on the set and take the opportunity. If there's anything you think of that you think you ought to do, you've got to do it then.

Every time you approach a scene, get it the way you originally planned it. Go ahead and do all that stuff. But don't hesitate to hesitate and go, 'Okay, what else could happen here? What else is really going on?' 

And if there's anything that strikes you as needing to be there, see if you can get it. You're there. There's not going to be a better time to do it. 

So make use of that opportunity.

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! 

Neal Marshall Stevens on "A Sense of Dread"

Neal Marshall Stevens is a screenwriting force of nature, best known for his spine-tingling scripts that have continuously enthralled horror film aficionados. From his significant breakthrough with the chilling remake of "Thirteen Ghosts" to the psychologically-driven terror of "Hellraiser: Deader," Stevens has a knack for weaving tales that keep audiences on the edge of their seats. His work masterfully blends the macabre, suspense, and intricate character arcs, creating a cinematic experience that lingers long after the credits roll. Get ready to delve into the mind of the man who's been giving us goosebumps for years in this interview with John Gaspard and Brian Forrest.

JOHN:  Neal, you have a really long and storied history in the horror cinema. Can you remember the very first horror movie that had an impact on you?

NEAL: Well, actually, looking back, the first movie that scared the hell out of me wasn't a horror movie. It was actually a Disney movie called Johnny Tremaine. It was a kid's movie. And there was a scene in that movie, Johnny Tremaine was a kid during the Revolutionary War who knew Paul Revere, who, as you may remember, was a silversmith. And there's a scene in that movie, the British are coming and Paul Revere has got this urn of molten silver.

It gets knocked onto a table. Johnny Tremaine trips and puts his hand face up into the molten silver and fries his hand. And I'm sure I know I, every kid in the audience goes like (sound effect.)

But that's actually not the scariest part of the movie. Later on, surgeons are unwrapping his burnt hand, and they look down and they react in horror.

His fingers have healed together, stuck together. We don't see it and they say, “Oh, we're going to have to cut his fingers apart,” which also happens off screen. And again, in our imagination, imagining no anesthesia back then, it's a revolutionary war. So, poor Johnny Tremaine has to have his healed together fingers cut apart.

The memory of what that must be like has lasted. I must have been like five or six when I saw it. My parents dragged me to see Johnny Tremaine, it's a happy Disney movie. I'm 67 years old, so it's been over a half a century since I saw this movie and was appropriately traumatized by those images. So, Disney knew how to scare little kids. That's for sure. 

JOHN: He sure did. Wow. That's a horrible story.

NEAL: Yeah. As for official horror movies that scared the hell out of me, again, we used to watch Phantasmic Features on the TV in Boston. I remember a movie called Teenagers from Outer Space. They weren't actually teenagers. They were all in their thirties. But anyway, these invaders had a skeleton ray that as they would aim it at someone, it would flash and you're instantly reduced literally to a skeleton. And they were, they didn't care who, so as soon as they come out of their spaceship, there's a barking dog—bzzzt!—and the dog falls down, reduced to bones.

They didn't care. They would use it as a woman's climbing out of a swimming pool—bzzzt!—skeleton floating in the pool. The casualness with which completely innocent people are reduced to skeletons. Again, absolutely horrifying. Couldn’t have been much older than nine or ten when I watched this movie. But the fact that human flesh has reduced the skeletons, but also the casual innocence of which people are reduced to flesh is stripped off their bones. It's terrifying to me.

BRIAN: I wonder how you parlayed that early sense of, “Oh, I like horror movies” into, “I want to create horror as a genre. “

NEAL: Well, I was one of a whole generation of kids who got super eight cameras and made, you know, we made stop motion movies and made monster movies in their basements. Pursuant to that, I was writing scripts when I was 13 years old. I guess people now do it with phones. We didn't have cell phones back when I was a kid, but we had super eight cameras and then, you know, a little cartridge things that we'd slug in.

And so, I made tons of those little stop motion movies down in my basement.

BRIAN: Do you still have some of them? 

NEAL: I guess I may have them somewhere. I think I have an old creaky super eight projector somewhere. I don't think you can get a bulb for it anymore.

BRIAN:  I've got one up there. I wonder if it would work?

NEAL: Yeah. That's the big question. I wonder if it would work? Heaven only knows.

JOHN: But that's a great way to learn visual storytelling.

NEAL: Yeah. When I ultimately went to NYU grad film and, and all the films that we shot the first year were all silent. First silent film then silent with sound effects, but you weren't allowed to use sync sound until you got to second year, if you made it that far.

JOHN: Did you make it that far?

NEAL: Yes, I did. I actually graduated. Back at NYU, it was a very rough program at the time. They cut the student enrollment in half going from first to second year. So it was, it was a rough program back then.

JOHN:  That's brutal.

NEAL: Yeah.

JOHN: So, you leave film school with something under your arm that you've shot. Where does that lead you?

NEAL: It certainly didn't get me much in the way of employment at the time. I ended up going right back to NYU. I ran their equipment room of all things for something like six years. But during all those six years I was writing. They had like a computer that they used to turn out the schedules. And then when I weren't writing schedules, I was using that computer to write my screenplays using WordStar. If anyone remembers that old program. God, it was horrible, but it was free, because they had the equipment room.

And eventually I sent some stuff to Laurel Entertainment, which is the company that did Tales From the Dark Side. And they had an open submission program. If you signed a release form, you could send them stuff. And I'd gone in and I'd met Tom Allen, who was their senior story editor. I had a screenplay and I went in and talked about it. He liked it. It wasn't for them, but then he invited me to submit ideas for their new series, their follow-up series to Tales from the Dark Side, which is a thing called Monsters.

And I went in, and I pitched some ideas, and they bought one. And it turned out to be their premier episode of Monsters. And shortly after that, tragically, Tom Allen passed away. And the VP, Mitch Galen, invited me in and said, “Would you like to take over and be our senior story editor on Monsters and our other projects?”

And meanwhile, you know, for the second part of that whole series, I was still working in the equipment room at NYU and also working as a senior story editor on Monsters and being their creative consultant and reading hundreds of scripts for Laurel Entertainment. And then eventually I quit the equipment room, and I went and I worked for them full time and wrote a bunch of episodes for Monsters.

And I was a story editor on The Stand and The Langoliers— which wasn't so good—but on a bunch of other projects, it was just an enormous learning experience. And The Stand I think turned out really well. Other stuff, The Langoliers, did not work out really well. And a bunch of other projects that were not horror.

BRIAN: Why do you think some things, especially, let's talk about Stephen King, why do you think some of those things adapted well and some didn't?

NEAL: Well, The Langoliers was not, it wasn't that great. Wasn't that strong a project. And I think the idea, trying to make that and stretch that out into a mini-series. wasn't that strong. It wasn't that strong, the material wasn't really there. I think there are times when staying faithful to the material is the right approach. It certainly was the right approach with The Stand.

Working with The Langoliers, you know, there were certainly elements of The Langoliers that were strong. And other stuff that was really just so-so. And I think if you'd had the willingness to step aside and do something different with it, it would probably have ended up—especially because they were expanding it into a mini-series—being just devoted to the original material, I think, ended up with a product that was really thin. Plus, we had hired a special effects company that the Langoliers themselves were just horrible. It was really substandard, honestly. So, it did not work out very well.

BRIAN: I'm guessing with all these different projects you had to work on, you probably had to start dealing with types of horror and genres of horror that weren't in your comfort zone. Maybe not even what you wanted to do. What kind of learning curve was that for you?

NEAL: You end up having to deal with a lot of different kinds of horror, especially with, you know, working in Monsters, where you just were turning stuff out tremendously fast. But also, I grew up with a certain kind of horror.

I was never a huge fan of slasher stuff. I missed that whole era of horror.  Certain kinds of movies appealed to me. That particular kind of transgressive material never really clicked.

JOHN: Why do you think that is with you?

NEAL: Because this simple act of repetitive bloodletting, for me, it always felt thin. I mean, it's not that I objected to explicit violence or explicit gore. I mean, I think that Dawn of the Deadunquestionably is one of the most brilliant horror movies ever made. And there certainly, George Romero didn't pull back from explicit violence. Or a movie like Hellraiser, the same deal.

It's a question of how the filmmaker employs the use of graphic violence to elevate the material. What I've told people when you watch a movie like Dawn of the Dead, the first 10 or 15 minutes of that movie—which by the way, I saw when it virtually when it first came out and saw it in the theater—you had never seen anything like that opening scene in terms of graphic violence from being bitten and heads being blown off and all the rest. You were just put through the ringer, watching that opening. And after that opening, the movie was never that violent again. He never showed anything like that again.

And you didn't have to, because you—having seen that opening scene, you were—you were so blown out of your seats. You said, “I'm watching a movie where anything could happen to anyone.” And that was a kind of really intelligent and that kind of thoughtful use of violence is what George Romero was always able to do. It was understanding how graphic images can affect the psychology of the viewer.

JOHN:  Do you think it's also that with Romero's films, they're actually about something, whereas a slasher film is really just about a body count, but with Romero, he always had another thing going.

NEAL: Well, of course, I mean, no movie that isn't about anything is ever going to really, from my perspective, be worth watching. But I mean, even a movie like Hostel, which is exceptionally violent and harrowing, is certainly about something. And I think Eli Roth's movies, which get a really bad rap, are very much about something. He's got something to say with his depictions of violence and his images. Not necessarily to my taste. I certainly wouldn't say that he's not, he's making movies that are certainly about something. He's not a dumb filmmaker by any stretch of the imagination.

JOHN: So, you work on Monsters, and then what happens?

NEAL:  I worked on Monsters. I worked there for around six years, and then they were acquired by a big studio, and they were shut down. And so, I was out of work. I'd known a woman named Debbie Dion from Full Moon. I figured, well, I'll give that a shot. I'll call her up and see, maybe I could write for a Full Moon. And so, I gave her a shot. I, you know, reintroduced myself and said, you know, “I'm looking to see if I could get some job, maybe writing features for Full Moon Entertainment, Charlie Band's company.”

And they said, “Well, we pay around $3,000 for a feature.” And I said, “Well, I got paid more than that for writing an episode of Monsters. That doesn't seem like such a good deal.” And then my unemployment insurance ran out.

BRIAN: Suddenly it's a very good deal.

NEAL: Sounds like suddenly a very good deal. But, you know, I made it very clear that money buys one draft, and if you want to rewrite, you got to pay me again, because I knew what development was like, where they just expect draft after draft after draft, and I'd say, “I can't do that, that doesn't make any sense.”

And also, having worked for Monsters, I had learned to write really fast. I could write a pass on a Monsters episode in two days, so I knew that I could write fast, because these were 80-page scripts.

And so, I started writing for Full Moon, and over the course of like the next few years, I wrote something like... 50 or 60 features for Charlie Band. And a lot of them got made, because they're not wasting money on movies that don't get made. Tons of them got made.

And in the midst of doing that, I was, you know, whenever I got a break writing a full movie, I would write spec scripts, you know, in the hopes I could sell something of my own that wasn't for $3,000. I didn't have an agent at that point. I didn't have a manager at that point. And so, I'm not really good making cold calls to people. It's not my thing. I just like to sit, write my scripts.

I'd come home one day, and I saw my wife was on the phone having this long conversation with someone. When she was done, I said, “Well, who was that?” “Oh yeah. I called up to order something.” I said, “So she's really good at getting on the phone and talking to people and calling them.” And so, I convinced her to be my manager. So, she agreed. She changed, you know, she went out under her maiden name.

She managed to get an option on a science fiction script that I'd written that, I mean, it was ultimately bought. It was never made. And then I decided, you know what? Horror is really my bread and butter writing for Charlie Band. But I don't really have a horror spec. And most of what was out those days in horror didn't really scare me that much. I should really write a script that would scare me. So, I wrote a script called Deader, which I thought had all the stuff in it that I thought was really scary.

And Judy went out with that script, sent it to a bunch of people, sent it to some folks at Stan Winston's company, as they had a development deal. The producer that she talked to really liked it, asked if he could sort of slip it to some people. He did, he sent it to someone, a producer at Dimension, it's based in New York, and he really liked it. And they showed it to Bob Weinstein.

Bob Weinstein called us on Sunday. Am I half awake? Talk to Judy. Because they didn't know that Judy was my wife. He said, “This is the best goddamn script I've read. I'm like three quarters away. Come in on Monday and we'll talk about it.” So, we came in on Monday and they bought the script.

And of course, at that point, it sort of went all over town. And for a very short period of time, it was like the flavor of the month and everyone loved me. And I got myself an agent and got myself like three pictures. And as I was a really big, big to-do. From that, I also got 13 Ghosts.  I had like a really big opinion of myself after, after that sale.

JOHN: Has that been tempered since then?

NEAL: I kind of got the opinion that like, wow, selling scripts is easy. People wanted to hire me because that script was super hot and was all over town. I learned subsequently there are flavors in writers, and I was like that flavor of the month. That fades and then you have to really do a lot more work to get things sold. That was a hard lesson to learn. But I've managed to keep working over the years. I've written many scripts, sold some, and it's been a decent career.

BRIAN:  I was just wondering, you were having all the success writing screenplays, when did you decide to make a jump to writing a book?

NEAL: Over the last five or six years, I've been teaching. A woman that I knew from NYU, actually, Dorothy Rumpolsky had been instrumental in starting a screenwriting program at David Lynch Institute for Cinematic Studies. And she realized at one point that she had a number of students who wanted to work in a horror. She remembered me back from NYU many years ago. So, she got in touch with me and wanted to know if I was interested in mentoring those students. And I said, absolutely. I done some other online teaching at other places. And so, the way it works is, you fly out for an opening few days where you meet the students. And then you fly back to where you come from. They go back to where they come from. And it's all done remotely, the mentoring. And so, I've been doing that now for five or six years.

And during that kind of get together, you meet a bunch of guest lecturers and other teachers, other mentors. And a number of those people had written books for Michael Wiese productions. And, in the course of chatting, they suggested, well, you, you know, “You have a kind of encyclopedic knowledge of horror and horror cinema. That might be a good book for Michael Wiese. Give them a call and see if you can come up with a pitch and an interesting take on it.” And so I did, and I called them and they responded. And so we were off to the races.

JOHN: The book is really, maybe delightful is the wrong word, but it's a captivating book because as you read through it—you have outlined breaking down our different types of fears—you can immediately in your mind go, “Oh, that's what that movie was doing. Oh, that was that. That's what was happening there.” What was your research process like?

NEAL: I think that the research kind of developed over the decades as I studied what made movies scary and what was working, not only in the movies that I was watching, but in the movies that I was writing. I mean, in the same way that when you work as a screenwriter, it becomes almost second nature to try to figure out what was working and what wasn't.

Talking to fellow filmmakers and screenwriters, you have to say, “How many times do you watch a movie?” And a lot of times I will watch a movie 8, 10, 20 times. And there's a process that works when you watch a movie that many times, where you say “Certain things will work every time you watch a movie.”

In the same way that you can watch a comedy and you can laugh every single time as certain things comes up. And other times, you start seeing the nuts and bolts and say, “Well, this is always working and here they're just connecting stuff.” And you start saying, “Ah, I get it. I see what they're doing. I see how they're taking this piece that works and this other piece that works and they couldn't quite, they kind of, they found some connective tissue to stick it together. I see exactly what they're doing.”

And you start understanding—whether you're watching a comedy or you're watching a drama or you're watching a scary movie—they knew exactly how to make this thing scary. And this is how they're doing it. And they understood exactly how to make this thing scary. And it's like, ah, this is what they're using. Whether it is a spider crawling on someone, that's always going to work. Or, “Oh, I see, this is just a jump scare.” And the jump scare is, I understand, that's just, because a big bang, a loud noise, a hand reaching in from, that's just, that's always going to work. It's going to work no matter what. It's just a kind of placeholder scare, because they couldn't think of anything better.

And there are movies where it's just jump scares. And you can always use a jump scare. You can sneak up on a cat and jab it and it'll jump. It's an instinctive response. And if a movie is just relying on jump scares, you know it's because they don't have anything better. They haven't got any deeper than just having the phone ring and they turn up the soundtrack. You can always get an audience to jump by putting a loud sound on the soundtrack.

JOHN: Is there an example you can think of though, where there is a jump scare that you think is a genuinely good, effective jump scare?

NEAL: I can think of a movie that has two really excellent jump scares. John Carpenter's The Thing. When the doctor's giving the electric shock to the guy's  chest, and the chest opens and slams shut on his hand. Didn't expect it.

That's a super great jump scare. It is perfectly integrated into that scene. Everyone jumps, but it's also a brilliant continuation of that scene. Second jump scare, when MacReady is testing everyone's blood. And saying, “We're going to do you next,” puts the needle in, and that thing jumps out of the Petri dish.

Fantastic jump scare. We didn't see it coming. Everyone jumps. And it's again, it's perfectly integrated into that scene. So, two brilliant jump scares in what's already an incredibly brilliant movie.

BRIAN: I remember watching the commentary on Jaws and Spielberg said he got greedy with his jump scares. He had the moment towards the end of the film, you remember that Jaws comes out of the water while it's being chummed. And he said he got this great reaction from the audience, and he wanted one more. And he went back, and he added in the scene earlier where the corpse face comes through the hole. And he said he never got the audience to react as well to the shark after he added in that corpse face coming through the hole of the ship. And I wondered, do you think there's a point of diminishing returns with jump scares in one movie?

NEAL: I think there absolutely is. I mean—and I have no end of admiration for Jaws. I think it may be one of the most brilliant movies ever, and it certainly has stood the test of time.

JOHN: So, we've each come armed with some movies here that I thought it would be fun to talk about them with you, so that you could sort of delve into the different types of fear that are outlined in the book and we'll just sort of checkerboard back and forth here. I'm going to start with one of my favorite sense of dread movies, and that's Don't Look Now, with Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie, directed by Nick Roeg which I saw way too young. First R rated movie I saw. I remember I knew that it was supposed to be really scary, and I went with my older brother, and we were standing in line and the seven o'clock show was letting out. And I said to my brother, “Well, it can't be that scary. They're not saying anything.” Not realizing that they had all been stunned into silence about the last five minutes of that movie. So, what are your thoughts on Don't Look Now and where does that fit?

NEAL: When I talk about the sense of dread, which is what my book is about, it's the notion of those aspects of our lives that we think of as safe and secure and dependable and sacred being suddenly or unexpectedly penetrated by the unknown or the unnatural, the unexpected.

And you have to say, well, what are the things that we depend on? We depend on our homes. We depend on our families. And so that relationship of parent and child, what violates that? And the loss of a child, loss is already wrenching. And so, this sense of parents having lost a child, but then this notion that, well, maybe not, maybe the child is still out there somewhere, is so deeply disturbing. And so this weird, this quest, this pursuit in them. And meanwhile, in the background, you have the sense of a killer, of killings going on. This really disturbing notion of the woman's half decayed body being pulled out of the water is just as an image is—and again, the notion of human body being reduced to mere flesh—it’s deeply disturbing. And nakedness, coupled with decay, it's deeply disturbing. And all of this sort of happening in the background.

We don't quite know how these pieces connect. The notion that the search for the child and the notion that there's a killer on the loose. We know, because the nature of cinematic storytelling is telling us that somehow these things are going to connect, because, I mean, in the real world, there are countless thousands of things drifting around that don't necessarily hook up. But we know that one thing is going to collide with another. And so, there's this growing sense of profound unease, because we know, somehow, this child in this Red Riding Hood cape is wandering around, it's like, is this the child? Is the child going to become embroiled in this?

But what we don't, certainly don't expect is the ending that confronts us in the finale, which is so incredibly, the reversal is so terrifying and so hits us in the face of that sense of innocence—revealed in such a terrifying way—is the essence of dread. Where we expect to find innocence, we find a nightmare.

JOHN: What's great about what Nick Roeg did there was—if you read Daphne du Maurier's short story—he basically shot the last paragraph of that short story. Cinematically, he figured out the way that she's laying out what's going on with Donald Sutherland’s character at that moment. He figured out a way to make it cinematic. So, like you say, all the pieces suddenly fall into place in those last few seconds. And, like you said, we've been brought to this place, we had no idea that that's where it was going to turn. Neal, tell me about Enemy from Space, and what you like about that.

NEAL: Enemy from Space is the second of the three Quatermass movie, adaptations of the serial. It's in the same vein as Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and all these other movies about human beings who are being invaded and infested by alien forces.

In this case, over the past few years—but in the context of the story—there have been rains of these tiny little meteorites. Anyone who finds them, they crack open and what's inside infests human beings. And you can find these tiny little burn marks, these V shaped marks on them. And the parasites take them over and make them into these kind of human slaves. And the premise is they serve this larger being, this kind of group entity, and they proceed to start building these atmosphere plants, with the goal ultimately to turn the earth into a colony for these beings that come from outer space.

But the notion of these human beings, they have infiltrated our government, infiltrated our community, and they gradually take people over, scary enough. And they have built this enormous plant that looks, he says, this looks just like this proposed lunar base with these giant atmospheric domes. A group of people managed to infiltrate one of these bases and he looks inside, manages to get close enough to look inside one of these domes and inside are the parasites. When they're released, they grow together into this thing that looks like a giant blob. That's what it looks like outside of the human hosts.

And a bunch of these guys are trapped inside of the atmosphere of plant. And they realize this thing, they can't survive outside the human body. They need methane to breathe, because that's what their home planet is like.

“What we need to do is we need to pump oxygen into this dome to kill this thing. That'll destroy it.” And voices come over to say, “Look, this guy's crazy. There's nothing inside this dome. You send some representatives over, we'll show you anything you want.”

And Quatermass says, “You're crazy if you go over there, you're going to be infected. You're going to be taken over.” But they managed to divide, they send the guys over and Quatermass is pleading with them, “Listen, they're going to get on this speaker. They're going to tell you that everything is fine, but you can't listen. Don't listen to them, whatever you say.”

And then they hear this sound. This hideous sound of screaming coming down the pipes, the pipes that they've been sending oxygen down to the dome. They say, “What the hell is that? What's going on?” And then they look, they see the pressure has gone way up. There's something wrong. And the pipe is burst, the pipe that's sending oxygen to this dome. And they say, “What is it? What's happened?”

And they look and something is dripping down through the pipe. And they say, “What is it?” It's blood. They took the guys that they sent, and they pushed them into the pipe. They say those pipes have been blocked with human pulp in order to keep the oxygen from coming into the dome. That is one of the most, again, all you see is just these drops of blood coming out of the cracked pipe, but that has resonated as one of the most terrifying moments from any movie that I saw, again, as a little kid.

I've seen the movie recently and it's still incredibly terrifying. And again, the architecture of this web of pipes, the cold black and white architecture, is horrifyingly chilling. And the notion of human beings being reduced to mere flesh, being used as material for blocking a pipe. And the pipe's only like, it's like this big. So, you can imagine this person shoved into a pipe is hideous.

JOHN: It is available on YouTube if anybody wants to watch it after that. Brian, do you want to ask about folk horror?

BRIAN: Actually, I was going to jump ahead just because of what Neal was just talking about. I thought this would dovetail nicely into a question I had about a fear of contagion. And you can wrap body horror into this. Movies like The Thing or 28 Days Later, or probably The Quatermas Experiment as well. How does that fear of our own bodies being infected or watching another body change or be infected in unnatural ways? How does that—I don't want to use the word appeal—but how does that appeal to our sense of dread?

NEAL: Well, I think you also have to run back to one of the most common— whether it's psychological or physiological—which is obsessive compulsive disorder.

You say, well, what exactly is obsessive compulsive disorder? We have built in grooming behaviors, whether it's cleaning our hands, we clean our skin. That's wired into us. And when you turn the dial up too far, that turns into obsessive compulsive, obsessive hand cleaning or scratching, itching, hair pulling, all that stuff. It's wired in behavior, in the same way that dogs will scratch, we will scratch.

And so, all of that, we react to it in the same way that if you see a spot of dirt on someone's forehead, it's almost impossible to “Clean that thing off. Get rid of that thing.” I mean, we're built in a certain way to respond to distortions, infections, invasions, in the same way that if someone's eye is cocked to one side, we react to it. Someone's face is distorted. We react to it negatively. We have to work not to respond to it.

It may be a bug, but it may be a feature, because we are built to respond to a diseased or distorted members of our community. It's a survival trait. And so, in some ways, horror movies respond to that. Distorted human beings, Hunchback of Notre Dame or Igor or anyone else who are distorted, deformed, limbless creatures—Freaks—are employed in horror movies in a variety of different ways.

BRIAN: And it's a very different thing from seeing an arm chopped off versus seeing an arm with three hands that are all operating. Both of them is something happening to your body that you might revolt towards, but it's a very different reaction though, right?

NEAL: It is, but it's—in a sense—it's all variations of the same thing. There's a central human norm, and that which varies from the human norm beyond a certain point triggers a reaction that says, “That's not the way it's supposed to be.” And it's just, eyes are too close together, eyes are too far apart, eyes are too big, or there's an extra one. There's one missing. We recoil from it. We recoil from something that is too different, too far off the norm.

And of course, in strictly social terms, you can say, but why, why should we? We shouldn't really respond in that way to others who are too different. But we do respond that way, and it comes with the programming in a very real degree.

JOHN: How does that connect, then, to another movie on your list, The Island of Lost Souls, from 1932?

NEAL: I think it's central to that list. The notion of the difference between that which is human and that which is animal. And Moreau, who experiments with making animals into human beings, but not really. And the sort of terrifying revelation when our hero and the woman—who we know to be an animal woman, but she looks fundamentally human—escape out into the woods and come across the animal person village. And the realization to what extent Moreau has been experimenting. It's not just tens or dozens. The animal people just come flooding out of the woods. And it's just hundreds.

And the extent and the depth and the kind of nightmarish quality, they're all different. They're all horrible. And it's just like, what has Moreau been doing? He experiments with these animals, gets them to a certain state, and then he just discards them and moves on to something else. This utterly careless, sadistic god of this army of nightmares. And you sort of see when they do their, you know, “Are we not men?” And you just see row upon row upon row of these hideous nightmare faces. And you just say, “My God, what has this guy been doing for years? Just making these monsters.”

JOHN: It's a classically creepy movie. I do want to ask you about the classic ghost story movie, The Haunting, and what that says about our fears. If you can, maybe tie that into Ghostwatch, because there's a similar sort of thing going on there.

NEAL: They're both intriguing. They both are opening us up to this notion of unseen nightmare forces, especially the original Haunting, which shows us nothing. All you ever see: Doorknob turning. A face that may or may not be in the wall. This horribly loud banging on the door. A moment where someone thinks that her hand is being held, but there's no one there. It is simply this notion of a house that is born bad, but never really fully explained.

Again, you have this idea of the world itself that should be well behaved, that should be governed by comprehensible natural laws. But there's something deeper and darker and incapable of truly being understood, nevermind being controlled. And if you just prod it a little bit too much, you're going to open it up to forces that are utterly destructive and utterly malevolent.

And in both of these cases, you have this man of science and his team that are going to find out. “We're going to find out for sure whether there really are ghosts, whether there really is a supernatural, whether it really is life after death.  We're going to nail this down for science.” Yeah, don't do that. Don't do that. These are things that are, that are not meant to be explored, not meant to be examined. Go back.

BRIAN: I'm reminded of Van Helsing's sign off on the original Dracula, where he said, “Just remember, there really are such things in this world.”

NEAL: Yeah. Yeah. And, and the same thing is true in some ways on a much more terrifying scale with Ghostwatch, where it's just, it's this kind of, “It's all just fun and Halloween, we're going to explore this. It's the most haunted house in Britain.” And it's broadcasters whose faces everyone knew at the time, and they were playing themselves. Going to this haunted house where you had these poltergeist phenomena. And we're all going to, “We're going to do it live and call in with your own experiences about being haunted.” And it all just goes so horribly wrong.

JOHN: Now, Neal, I just watched that for the first time this week. Heard about it for years. I had no idea that those were real broadcasters. I thought they were really good actors. But to someone in Britain watching that, those are faces they saw all the time?

NEAL: Yeah. Those are real broadcasters. They had their own shows. They were real, the real deal.

JOHN: Wow. I highly recommend renting it because—it'll test your patience a little tiny bit, because it is quite banal for quite a while, as they lead you into it. But now this new bit of information that these are all faces that that audience who saw it, quote unquote, live that night, it's as terrifying as I imagined the Orson Welles’ War the Worlds would have been. Because it seems very real.

NEAL: And apparently the way they did it, is that there was a number you could call in. And if you called in that number, they would tell you, it's like, “Don't worry, this is all just a show.” But so many people were calling in, they couldn't get through.

BRIAN: This really is War of the Worlds.

NEAL: So, they never were able to get to that message that would tell them, don't worry, it's all just a show. So apparently it panicked the nation, because part of the premise was at a certain point, the ghost that was haunting the house got into the show. And so, the studio itself became haunted. It was really spectacularly well done.

JOHN: It is. It's great. Let's just sort of wrap up here real quick with Neal, if you have any advice for beginning screenwriter about how to best create a really powerful and effective horror screenplay, any little tips.

NEAL: Well, first of all, and I touched on this before, jump scares don't work on the page. You need the loud bang. You need the hand reaching in from the side. You describe that and it doesn't work. So, you have to rely on creating that sense of dread. And while writing screenplays, you have to keep things tight. The concept, the idea—in the same way comedy screenplays have to be funny—scary screenplays have to be scary. It has to be scary on the page. If it's not scary on the page, you're not going to sell the screenplay. And that’s the fundamental trick. You got to make it scary on the page.

JOHN: Excellent advice. All right, let's just quickly, each one of us, tell our listeners a recent favorite horror film that you've seen in the last couple years.

I'll start with you, Brian.

BRIAN: Just last night, I saw Haunting in Venice. And it worked because I had seen the other Kenneth Branagh/Agatha Christie adaptations, and I was very familiar with, and you know, you already know generally that kind of detective whodunit story: it's going to be very, you know, using logic and rationality.

And when they had this episode that was sort of a one off—sort of a departure from that usual way that mysteries are solved—it was very effective. I think if I'd seen it without having already watched a bunch of Agatha Christie adaptations, I would have said, “Oh, that's an okay Halloween movie.” But having seen those other ones, it was an excellent Halloween movie.

JOHN: Excellent. That's on my list. The movie I would recommend, which really surprised me, my wife literally dragged me to it because it was a French film called Final Cut, which is a French remake of a Japanese film called One Cut of the Dead. At about the 30-minute mark, I was ready to walk out, and I thought, why are we watching this? And then they took us on a ride for the next hour that, it's a really good ride. It's called Final Cut.

BRIAN: And this is not to be confused with the Robin Williams Final Cut from... ?

JOHN: Not to be confused with that, no. Or if you can go back to the original and watch the Japanese version. But what's great about the French version is they are literally remaking the Japanese version, to the point where they've made all the characters have Japanese names. Which the French people struggle with enormously. It's a highly effective film. Neal, how about you? Take us home.

NEAL: Okay. It's not a new movie, but I just saw it very recently. It is a Chilean stop motion animated film called The Wolf House. It describes the adventures of a young Chilean woman who escapes from a repressive German colony and ends up in this bizarre house in which she blends into the walls.

She's escaped with two pigs who grow up with her in this house, but again, nothing, no way in which I describe it is going to convey to you how deeply disturbing and chilling this movie is. It really is quite indescribably bizarre and disturbing and just well worth your time to watch. It's not quite like any other movie I've ever seen.

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! 

Steven Soderbergh on "sex, lies and videotape"

How did you approach the casting of this film?



STEVEN SODERBERGH: I think you have an idea, and you stick with that idea until you're confronted with the fact that there's something better than your idea. I think the smart play is to go with the better idea.



In the case of Andie, I was laboring under the illusion that she was not much more than a model and couldn't deliver what was required. Fortunately for me, she came in and proved me wrong. And I was happy to be proven wrong.



It happened to me the other day on a movie we're starting next month. It's a supporting role, and one of the people who came in was someone I know and who, on first blush, I would have said, 'No, I don't think he's really right for this.' Of all the people I was looking at, he was the one I would have potentially said, 'I know him and I think he's good, I just don't think he's right for this.' Sure enough, when I sat down and looked at what he did, I immediately said, 'Oh, that's the guy.'



What was it that made the difference?



STEVEN SODERBERGH: He did something that was different from what I'd seen him do, and different from what other people were choosing to do, and suddenly he seemed like the only guy who should be doing it. So you have to keep your prejudices in check.



I'm a big believer that you get the cast you're supposed to get. I've had people drop out, many, many, many times, and always, in retrospect, I felt they dropped out because I was supposed to get somebody better. That's just the way it works.



How do you rehearse?

STEVEN SODERBERGH: I used to really rehearse properly, until I realized that I was really using the rehearsal time to get a sense of them personally, and to see if I could in some efficient way unlock a method of communicating with them. And once I realized that, I started being much less formal about the time that we were spending together. And now it's become like a Fellini thing, where I just take them all out to dinner and get them juiced up and leave it at that.

On ["sex, lies and videotape"], I felt I had more time to do the work than I have had since on any movie. That was the only movie where I never once felt rushed and felt like I had all the time I needed to do the work on a given day. And every film since then, I've felt like I didn't have enough time.

You seem to love juggling a lot of projects at one time. Why is that?

STEVEN SODERBERGH: As my career has gone on, I've gotten more and more aggressive about keeping my plate full. I've got some things that I want to do, so many ideas that I'd like to pursue, that's it hard to find time to do all of them. I'm mystified by directors who say, 'I can't find anything I want to do.' I look around and I want to do everything. There are stories everywhere.

I guess it depends on what kind of film you want to make. I like all kinds of films, and so I'm casting a much wider net than some other directors. The algorithm, more often than not, is that a director has a certain aesthetic and he or she looks for material that will be well-served by that aesthetic. 

I'm just the opposite. I'm totally story-driven, and then I sit down and try to determine what aesthetic is going to work best for this story. So that gives me a lot more freedom.

Is there any downside to your job?

STEVEN SODERBERGH: It's the best job in the world, it really is. It's really difficult for me to find any downside to it. It's what I love to do. It's hard, but it's not like work to me. I jump out of bed, ready to go. It's pretty great.

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! 

Miranda July on “Me and You and Everyone We Know”

Miranda July’s Me and You and Everyone We Know is an intricate tapestry of interlocking stories about the different ways in which people create connections in the contemporary world. But don’t let that description scare you away. This is a funny and completely engaging movie that is far more sophisticated than it may first seem.

Although July stars in the film (in addition to writing and directing), the movie is a true ensemble, where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. With her script – her first attempt at a feature – she does an artful job of juggling multiple story lines and bringing them together in ways that seem, ultimately, inevitable but still always surprising.

What was going on in your career before you started Me and You and Everyone We Know?

MIRANDA JULY: The main thing I was doing was performing live, multimedia one-woman shows. I had a lot that were scripted and kind of dialogue heavy – I performed all the dialogue. And I had also made about six short movies, some with kids in them, and with me in almost all of them. The movies had gotten progressively longer and the live performances were feature length. 

Where did the idea for the script come from?

MIRANDA JULY: I had the idea for a while that I would eventually write a feature film and that I'd make it. I didn't really know anything about the industry, but I figured that if I'd made a half-hour movie I could make one that was an hour and a half.

The way that I write anything is pretty free-associative and magical. Usually I just start with a structure. The idea was to have these multiple story lines that converged in surprising ways. That structure gave me the freedom to write from where I was each day and add characters as I needed to.

Did you know where you were headed with the story and the characters when you started?

MIRANDA JULY: No, but I had a strong feeling, an emotional touchstone in me. That feeling was in me from the beginning and I knew when I would write a scene that would be filled with that feeling or when I would write a scene that was irrelevant to that feeling. 

For example, one day I wrote the scene that was eventually the ending -- the tapping the quarter thing -- but I wrote that probably a year before I actually finished writing the script, so it wasn't like I wrote chronologically or anything.

The feeling that you worked from to create the script -- would you consider that feeling the theme of the movie?

MIRANDA JULY: Well, a theme implies a kind of intellectual participation and for me it's important to not have my mind working in that way. When I write badly, it's because I'm thinking, "Oh, people are coming together and it's about connection." It has to come from a more unconscious or subconscious place than that for me. The themes come later, once you start talking to the press.

What is your writing process?

MIRANDA JULY: At the very beginning, I just sit down and write dialogue. Writing dialogue was very familiar to me, because I'd been doing that for performances for a long time. Then I act out the characters as I'm writing that dialogue. 

But I usually start with some really irrelevant detail, seemingly out of left field. Like, "I know she has a powder compact in this scene." So I'm starting with that, rather than starting with, "She needs to connect with this man." There's something about the irrelevance and the physicality of something like that. And often it’s humor that gets me into a scene, because I'm enjoying myself when I'm writing something funny. And in enjoying myself, just as hopefully the audience will, you kind of open up and then other stuff can come out, maybe deeper stuff.

So it's never starting with the big idea; it's always something physical or quite often something visual. For example, a little door peephole that a girl can open in the door. Sometimes I'll write a scene and I won't know until later why that little door will be opened. It seems very magical to me, like, “Oh, Richard knocks on the door because he's looking for his son,” but I actually already wrote a version with a girl opening a peephole, without any clear objective.

At what point do you start to connect these disparate scenes?

MIRANDA JULY: Pretty quickly there are characters. And characters have intentions, whether you're conscious of it or not and pretty quickly there's a set of problems. 

So then much of the scenes come out of trying to solve problems. Like, how can the audience be reminded that she's thinking about him? And that becomes the scene with the "Me" and "You" shoes. There's a certain point where there's just enough stuff where you establish problems and at that point you start solving problems.

Did you include incidents from your own life as you were creating the script?

MIRANDA JULY: Not in the way people think. Nothing in the movie happened to me. Some things happened to friends of mine. And if I did take things out of my life, they're really using very emotional things. For example, I did have a job where I had big magnets that I had to put on the sides of my car. Again, they're often physical things that end up holding a lot of power, because the door magnets leads to the job which leads to the relationship with the older man.

Did knowing that you would eventually play the lead in the film have any impact on how you wrote it?

MIRANDA JULY: I honestly didn't think about it that much as I was writing it -- it was kind of second nature that I would be in it. But I pushed to make that character a little more embarrassing than other characters. I often cringed at the things I was writing. You're already so vulnerable, so I sort of felt that this must be important if I'm cringing. So I guess she ended up being a receptacle for a lot of fear and embarrassment in the movie.

I feel that I am pretty hard on myself, except when I'm writing and creating work, so in that sense it's kind of a healing process. If I can put my most unlovable sides into it, then potentially I can heal those parts of myself.

Did you do any re-writing once you'd cast the film?

MIRANDA JULY: I had a reading early on, before I was really casting it, but I did find one actress, Natasha Slayton, who played Heather, the more dominant teen-age girl. I knew when I saw her audition for the reading that I would cast her in the movie. And seeing those lines actually said, I realized that the teenage girls were going to be pretty compelling and that my character was going to suffer for that -- or that was my fear, that I wouldn't be able to keep up with them or be as interesting. 

All the story lines are all competing and they all have to be as interesting as each other. There were actually at that point two female characters about the same age: there was my character and then there was a woman who had the romance with Richard, who worked at the make-up counter. I combined the two characters. I suddenly realized, "Oh, wait, if my character has the romance, then it's going to be a lot more interesting." That decision was made pretty late in the game. But that change stuck and it was really the last big change.

And that change all came about because you had a reading and heard the script out loud?

MIRANDA JULY: Yes, it came out of the pure fear of not being able to compete with a teenager. Which I think was a good instinct.

Did you re-shape the story at all in the editing?

MIRANDA JULY: Not dramatically. We lost one small character in the editing and there were some big chunks moved around. It all had to do with flow, so we just changed the order of a few things.

Do you think your background in live performance helped you as you refined and shaped the movie?

MIRANDA JULY: Yes. I have to say that my sense of timing is a lot of what I've got going for me. A live performance is deathly if you don't have timing, whether it's humor or something really sad. To feel like you have an audience with you and that you're moving out of things not too early, not too late -- that kind of thing turns out to be so crucial. You're imaging it when you're writing and then you're perfecting the reality of it when you're editing it.

It also helps to act it out. I acted the whole script out, every character, for my director of photography before we shot. I knew we weren't going to do storyboards and we had very little time. So I thought at least if we both know what emotionally is the core of each scene -- what we have to get -- I thought the best way to show that was to make him feel it. Of course, who knows? He may have just been humoring me during that three-day performance I subjected him to.

It took three days?

MIRANDA JULY: Yes, because we'd stop and talk about it and make sketches and then I'd move on. So, yeah. Three days.

The movie has a lot of great and original scenes, and I'm wondering where some of the ideas came from. For example, the scene where you're following the car that has the goldfish in a plastic bag on its roof. How did that scene come about?

MIRANDA JULY: That's a good screenwriting story, because originally -- the first time I wrote that scene -- it was just about the dialogue between my character and the older man. I was just writing some B-roll things that the man might see out the car window as they were talking. It was like, "A woman walking by with groceries, a kid with a goldfish in a bag," and some other things. Then later I was running some errands and I thought, "Wait, a kid with a goldfish? That is so dumb. That's so Disney. I can't believe that I wrote that. I'll have to take that out and put in something less cartoony." And I sat down to change it and I wrote that scene.

It just started taking over and instead of deleting it, the fish in the bag ended up on the car and I wrote exactly the scene that you see in the movie. And all this emotion that couldn't come out through the other characters came out through this ridiculous goldfish that I was going to delete.

It is just amazing how there is a lot of information in your "mistakes." Your mistakes are often your unconscious, trying to say, "Me, me! Look at this feeling!"

Did you have to alter the script based on the budget you raised? 

MIRANDA JULY: We were given less than a million dollars and we had a lot of locations. I now see that it was really well produced, it worked, but it was very ambitious. I remember an early draft actually had a blimp in it that fell. Luckily I cut that scene for dramatic reasons, not for budget.

 Really the goldfish / car chase scene was the only expensive scene, and it probably took a big portion of the whole budget. 

How did attending the Sundance Labs help you and the script?

MIRANDA JULY: I think the biggest way it helped was with confidence. I had all these professional writers and directors telling me that I had what it took. I'm a self-starting person, but it's easy to feel like you wouldn't belong in that industry. And it was certainly a real blessing to have the nicest people invite me in and that's what it was. 

You don't get financing or anything like that through the Lab, but I felt ready by the time I was done and had kind of a chip on my shoulder. Like, "Who's going to get the honor of financing my movie?" Not really, you're begging, but I had some pride and that was worth a lot.

In the Filmmaking Lab, they try to simulate what a shoot might be like. They actually have someone come in and cut you off at a certain time, because that happens on a real set. And so you have to make those decisions, like, "Shit, I can't get both scenes, which one can I lose?" and things like that. And it's grueling enough that it actually does sort of pre-brutalize you in a way that takes the edge off the real experience, so you're not in as much shock as you would be. 

How much did the script change as a result of your time at the Lab?

MIRANDA JULY: I don't think I made any changes based on notes that I got at the Lab. But I left the Lab with a crystal-clear sense of what wasn't working. That is to say, everyone's solutions were their solutions and I came up with other ones. 

That's the main thing, to really know what you have to fix. I had never heard of the three-act structure or all that film-writing stuff, but people were pretty respectful. They liked the script and a lot of the advisors had the attitude of, "I don't want to fuck too much with your process, because it seems to be working, but maybe you could think about this..."

Everyone's different. Some were like, "Here's what you've got to do. In the second act, she's going to run away." They'd give you these really specific notes and you're like, "Oh my god, this is a nightmare." But you learn a really great process for getting notes from producers: you learn how to distill what the problem is from the solution they're providing.

Did you learn anything working on this script that you'll take to future projects?

MIRANDA JULY: The thing that I most admire now about what I had then, writing my first screenplay, which is now something I'm trying to defend with my life, is the interior freedom. Not thinking about logistics or other movies or critics, all that stuff you think about once you've been through the mill. There are a lot of monsters you have to keep at bay. And so my job every day when I write is basically to find my way back to feeling totally free, like I could write anything at any moment. And realizing that it doesn't have to make sense, it doesn't have to be perfect, no one's looking at it, no one's judging it, no one can see into my computer right now. To me, that's the beginning and that's what you need. Once something takes root you have other issues.

If you feel like you're forcing yourself to write, then maybe it's a good time to take a walk around the neighborhood. And then the second you give up -- really give up -- that's when your insides allow you to change and have some new thoughts. 

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! 

Lesli Linka Glatter on “Twin Peaks,” “The West Wing” and more …

You didn't start out with a strong desire to be a filmmaker, right?

LESLI: No. But I was always a storyteller, just in a different medium. I've always wanted to tell stories and communicate in some sort of deep way, but it wasn't in film. That came later.

How did you start out as a dancer and then become a director? 

LESLI: I'm always fascinated by everyone's story and how they got into film, because no one seems to have the same story.

I was a modern dance choreographer -- I was a dancer and then a choreographer. Back when the American government actually sponsored the arts -- which is so long ago that most people who remember it are rolling on their walkers or breathing on oxygen -- I was sent to Asia to teach and choreograph and perform throughout the Far East.

I had spent five years in Europe -- in Paris and in London -- and I based out of New York. The I got this grant and went to Asia, studying classical Japanese theater and dance and teaching modern dance.

By chance, in a coffee shop, I met an older man who was in his late seventies when I first met him, and he became like my mentor or my Japanese father. I met him completely by chance -- which is one of the themes I keep getting pulled to in terms of storytelling -- and he turned out to be head of cultural affairs for the country. He spoke twelve languages, had been a Buddhist monk, had been the top foreign war correspondent, just an amazing man.

Eventually he told me a series of six stories. What they had in common was that they all happened on different Christmas Eves (even though he was Buddhist and not Christian), all during different wars, and all about human connection. When he told me these stories, I knew I had to pass them on and I knew it wasn't dance.

If I hadn't have met this old, Japanese guy in a coffee shop in Tokyo, I would never have become a film director.

You weren't kidding when you used the phrase, "by chance."

LESLI: Of course, I didn't immediately go out and direct. I thought, "Well, maybe it's a theater piece," because I had directed theater. Then I ended up meeting a filmmaker in Japan, named George Miller, who directed Road Warrior. Other than Australia, Japan was one of the first places that released Road Warrior. So if you were living in Japan, at that time, if you were a Westerner, you kind of ran into most of the Westerners around at some point.

I told George about my story and he said, "I think you have a film here." And I though, "Hmm, that's interesting."

Eventually I moved back to America and I ended up in Los Angeles. I was on the faculty of the California Institute of the Arts and these stories kept haunting me. Then I met someone who told me about the directing workshop for women at the American Film Institute (AFI), so I applied to that program. I got the application and realized that I was totally unqualified. It was set up for women in the film business who hadn't directed.

Well, I wasn't in the film business, I didn't know anybody in the film business. But I thought, "You know what? I'm going to apply anyway. The worst-case scenario is that it makes me put my ideas down on paper and make it really clear for me." 

So I did that and I got in. That year they let in a couple of women who were not film makers -- one theater director and myself as a choreographer.

What was your next step after your AFI experience?

LESLI: I had a very fortuitous situation. You make these little films for no money. And I didn't have parents who have money. I had no connections to the film business, so it wasn't like I could look to family and say, "Look, I need to make a film, could you help me out here?" I've always had to work to make a living. And I say that only because there are people who definitely don't have to. I've been surprised at how many people there are.

We'd sent the film off to all these festivals and to be considered for an Academy Award, which was like a dream you couldn't even imagine. But it actually got nominated. Even now I don't know how that happened. But it was one of three films that got nominated in the short film category. So all of a sudden I'm getting calls from agents. 

How did that feel?

LESLI: It was wild! It felt very surrealistic.

Actually, the very first job I did after my short film, my first professional job, was for a TV series that Steven Spielberg had, called Amazing Stories. That was like my film school. It was an extraordinary opportunity and he was beyond generous. I apprenticed with him and with Clint Eastwood. I followed him around on a couple of projects and it really taught me a lot about the process. 

So you were learning on Steven Spielberg's set?

LESLI: Yes. At AFI I had worked on about ten of the other women's films before I directed my own short film, because I didn't come from a film background I felt that I needed to understand what the process was. I mean, I looked at credits when I first started directing and I didn't know what a Key Grip did. I didn't know anything about film. So I did any job I could on the other women's films before I directed my film. I was the last one to shoot. And I very purposefully did that. Again, I think it comes from being a dancer, where you just can't cheat. So I felt like I needed to understand what the process was, as much as I could being a beginner.

When your film is nominated, you're kind of out there for that brief little period. You're an asparagus and it's asparagus season, but you know pretty soon it's going to be carrot season and nobody will want to hear about asparaguses anymore. That's just the reality.

But during that time I got a call from Spielberg and I thought it was one of my friends playing a joke. So I hung up. Thank goodness he called me back. So I went in and met with him. He said he was starting this show, Amazing Stories, and he asked if I wanted to direct one. And I was like, "Oh my God, of course, yes. That would be incredible. But I would like to apprentice with you before I do it." So that's what I did. And it was the best film school I could have imagined.

I did my first episode (I ended up doing three of them), which was my first day of shooting on a professional set. 

What did you shoot the first day?

LESLI: It was two hundred guys, in World War II, storming a beach in Italy. I think I had nine cameras and three Eyemos. That was my first day on a professional set.

How did you feel?

LESLI: I was terrified. I had a dream a couple of nights before, a stress dream, that you can't even imagine. It was one of those horrible things: You walk on the set and it's a crew you don't know and they're shooting a film you've never read, and the set was floor to ceiling pea-green sofas. It had nothing to do with the story I'd prepped. I was totally panicked.

I told Steven about it and he said, "You know, I have a dream like that before I start everything." And I thought, "Wow. Here's one of the great filmmakers of our time who's saying he has that fear too." He was great at saying and doing things like that.

Anyway, it was terrifying. All I could do to make myself feel better was to be as prepared as I could be. That's how I felt comfortable, because I felt I could do it by knowing what I wanted -- by having seen the film in my head. In the beginning, that was my security blanket.

So you made it through Amazing Stories. What happened next?

LESLI: The next big step for me, in terms of creative process, was working on David Lynch's TV series, Twin Peaks. I directed four episodes and that was another huge turning point for me.

There was a scene in the pilot for the show in which Michael Ontkean is talking to Kyle Macachlan. It's in a bank, in a room where you look at your safety deposit box. In the middle of the scene, on this table, is this moose head. They play the whole scene in this room and no one ever refers to the moose head. The scene is incredible.

So, when I got to know David, I went up to him and said, "How did you ever get the idea to put the moose head on the table?" He looked at me like I was kind of crazy, and he said, "It was there." And I said, "What do you mean it was there?" He said, "The set decorator was going to hang it on the wall," and David said to the decorator, "Leave the moose head."

Something just cracked open in my brain: "Be sure you're open to the moment. Be sure you see the moose head on the table. Don't try to control things so much that you're not open to what's happening in the moment."

That was a great lesson and a huge turning point for me.

From Steven I learned, "Do your homework and never pretend you know what you don't, because someone is going to be there who knows and you're going to get caught." Which was all about planning and control.

And from David I learned, "Yes, do all of that, but be sure you're open to the moment."

I have definitely had difficult people to deal with, people that I wouldn't work with again. But more often than not I've had really good experiences.

I think in general the crew wants you to be good. I don't think that they want you to be bad. I think they want to know that you're someone who has done their homework. As a director, we can't do it without the whole crew. It's a team sport. We need everyone.

I think when you go on the set, I don't think a crew immediately respects a guy just because he's a guy or disrespects a woman because she's a woman. I think they want some to know what they're doing. If you do, they'll be great. And if you're nice, they'll even be better.

If you do simple things, like at night go to the truck and thank everybody. Just common, human traits. I think if you treat people with respect and challenge them to do great work and thank them for the work that they do, they're going to be really great.

Have I met people who are really difficult and undermining? Absolutely. Absolutely. But I think part of the job is figuring out how to deal with them.

I tried to narrow down just one of the shows you've worked on. And since I'm such an Aaron Sorkin fan --

LESLI: Oh my God, so am I.

Then I hope you'll indulge me and talk about your experiences on both The West Wing and Studio 60.

LESLI: I think the reason The West Wing was amazing to do, on a directorial level, was because the producing director on the show -- Tommy Schlamme, a fantastic director and a wonderful person -- encouraged directors to come in and make it their movie.

There are many people who work in TV who want it to look like everybody else's show. But I really think the best shows do what Tommy did. To say to filmmakers, "Come in and make it your movie." And that's what he did.

That's very evident on that show. They're all different.

LESLI: They're all different. As a director, you were encouraged to do what you wanted to do. If you wanted to put five scenes together and do it as one shot, you could. It was great.

It was very intimidating the first time I got Aaron's script and I looked at the first scene I was going to be directing on my first day. It was a seven-page scene, with about ten or eleven characters, and the only stage direction was "He enters."

I just thought, "Oh my God." I had to read it about ten times to figure out what the scene was about: What's the subtext, what's the text, what's really going on underneath here.

It was thrilling and terrifying and exhilarating and amazing.

What is your preparation process like in a case like that? You get the script and then what?

LESLI: The first thing I do in any prep process is I start breaking the script down in terms of what is the theme? What is this really about? Once I figure out the theme, I start to figure out how I'm going to deal with it visually. But until I really know what it's about in a deep way, I can't even begin to figure that out.

How long does that take?

LESLI: That's ongoing. The first couple of days I focus on the script as much as I can. You're going to have to deal with production stuff no matter what. You have to start the casting process and have a concept meeting about if there have to be huge sets built. A lot of The West Wing episodes I did were really big, so there were tons of locations, so there was a lot of scouting. Plus, half of the show shoots in Washington, DC, so there were all sorts of production issues and decisions.  

Usually what I would do in terms of actual shot lists is that I would come in on the weekend. And I still do that, even though I'd love to have my weekends to myself. I find that during the week, with a TV pre-production schedule, I don't have time to do that. So, the weekends are my creative time.

If it takes place on a set, I'll go to the set. I'll walk around, I'll imagine the scene, I'll figure out the angles, I'll see the scene.

In the case of The West Wing, how much rehearsal time did you get with the actors?

LESLI: You only get it on the set. That was a show where they would rehearse a lot. This is unusual in TV. You'd get probably an hour. That is considered a long rehearsal. It's not like doing a film.

But then, these actors know the characters. So, you have to direct them in the scene, but they're not figuring out who their characters are. They're figuring what their behavior is. So that is a different process.

During post, how involved were you in the editing?

LESLI: Very involved. You have a certain amount of time, per the contract with the Directors Guild, to go in and edit. I didn't have my cuts changed very much. Ultimately, the final cut is Aaron's and Tommy's. When the buck stopped, it stopped with them. But they were respectful. I think they want you to come in having done it well, so that they don't have to re-do it.

This may be an ignorant question, but how do you get the show to the exact length required by the network?

LESLI: It's a bloody drag. A lot of the times, the scripts are too long. And if you have a story that's really great, some things are just going to have to go. I think it's horrible, but that's how it is. They're not going to change the time because of you, so you have to conform to what it has to be. It's really unfortunate.

At what point can you tell that you're going to be in trouble, length-wise?

LESLI: I can tell now by reading the script. I can read it and go, "Ah, this is way too long. We're going to be ten minutes over." Also, you don't have that much time to shoot.

One of the good things about directing TV is that you learn very clearly what the dollar scene is and what the five-cent scene is. You have to know what your important scene of the day is; if you're going to divide the day up, that's where you're going to want to spend the bulk of your time. And the scenes that aren't important you need to move through quickly. So, you have to find a way to shoot them that's going to tell the story. But if you have a very emotional scene that's the turning point of your story, that's where you want to be spending your time. It's not all equal. Directing TV really teaches you how to do that. Because you have to.

Let me ask about Studio 60, where one of the episodes you did (Nevada Day: Part One) was the first half of a two-part episode, where you didn't do the second half. How does that work?

LESLI: That's an interesting one. I've done that quite a bit and I've usually done it with directors that I know pretty well. I did that before with Chris Misiano on The West Wing as well. Chris and I know each other well and we're really good friends and connected. We talked a lot about the story together.

That was not so much the case on Studio 60. Scripts were coming in late and the second half of the script hadn't been written altogether. So we didn't have the luxury of that.

I knew what the ending was going to be, I knew where the story was going, it just hadn't been written yet.

What advice would you give to someone who's thinking about pursuing a directing career?

LESLI: Be sure you really want to do this. Follow your dreams. And listen -- but don't listen -- to how difficult it is. I think you have to put blinders on just proceed.

I think what's exciting about the time we're in right now is that people can pick up a camera and do it. I would advise doing that.

I think the Internet is amazing. I think the fact that you can get a camera and shoot 24p and do it for pennies with your friends -- I would say, absolutely, go for it. Go make your movie. If you want to direct, go direct.

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! 

L.M. Kit Carson on “David Holzman’s Diary"

How did you first connect with Jim McBride?

KIT: Jim and I met because we were both fans of a book by Walker Percy, called The Moviegoer. I was a student at the time, and he was sort of a student at the time in New York. We were put together by some friends of ours, because they knew that we both loved this book. In fact, we tried to make the movie of this book three or four times.

And then Jim and I put together a deal to do a book for the Museum of Modern Art. Willard Van Dyke, who was the head of the film department at the time, gave us his blessing to do a book on Cinema Verité. I had discovered in my senior year at NYU, trying to do a paper on Cinema Verité, that there was nothing, there were maybe two articles in some film quarterly magazine, about Cinema Verité. So I told this to Jim and we went and met with Willard and said 'There needs to be a book on Cinema Verité.' And he said, 'Great. Do it.' He took one look at us and thought we were nuts, but nuts in the right way.

I had worked at Drew Associates previous to this, as an assistant, assistant editor. Drew Associates was where Cinema Verité was founded in this country. So I knew about all these guys: the Maysles brothers worked there, Pennebaker and Leacock worked there at the time. And it was just an accident of fate that I had stumbled into this hot spot. 

We set about doing this book for the Museum of Modern Art, called The Truth on Film, and we did interviews with Pennebaker and Leacock and all the people at Drew Associates, and halfway through the book, Jim said to me, 'There is no truth on film. Once you put the camera there, everything changes.'

I've been fortunate in my life to work in party with geniuses, like Wim Wenders and Jim McBride.

How did David Holzman’s Diary come about?

KIT: Jim had conceived of this idea to do a film called David Holzman's Diary, which was, at the time he introduced it to me, a 12-page outline on David Holtzman, this guys who starts the movie by saying 'My life is all fucked up and I'm about to be drafted and I figure it's time for me to try to figure what's going on. And if I shoot everyday and look at the rushes of everyday, I can find the plot again, because I've lost the plot.

Now Jim had actually shot this film before, with Bob Lesser as David. Jim's car had been broken into and his camera equipment had been stolen and the film had been stolen. So all of a sudden, two events happen: Jim says there's no Cinema Verité and then Jim says come have dinner, I want you to audition for me, to play David Holzman, because I've shot the film and now I've lost it.

I did that, I auditioned, because he had this outline that you could improvise from. And he said, 'You're it. You can do it."

The interesting thing is that at the time I was also studying the roots of the English novel. And the roots of the English novel are these fake diaries, like Robinson Crusoe and Pamela. It was the first way they figured out to do long-form fiction, was to make diaries out of it. So that also informed what we were attempting to do, because a diary is something that feels like it's real time, but you know, if you think about it for two seconds, 'Oh, yeah, he's edited this together.' So it's not really happening in front of you. It's been examined and purposed, structurally, to be this way.

What was the shoot like?

KIT: On my Easter break from college in Texas, I came to New York. And since I didn't know how to do it any other way, I just became the character. I lived in the editing room, I slept in the closet, and I lost my girlfriend who at the time thought I was nuts -- just like Penny in the movie thinks I'm nuts. So it worked.

It was a set of genius decisions on McBride's part. We improvised as we went forward.

We did several days of improvising through the scenes, between McBride and myself, until he felt that we got the shape of the scene. And then when we would shoot, I told Jim that I was not going to rehearse. 'Just turn the camera on and I'm going to do it.' Because I didn't want to filter the improvisation any further. If I had rehearsed it before we turned the camera on, it would have turned it into self-conscious thought. And I wanted to keep it raw.

We were satisfied that we had the shape of the scene, built off of the 12-page outline. We knew the beginning, middle and end. But I said to Jim, 'I want to surprise you.' I had no idea what I was saying when I said that, but the idea was to keep that instant alive, the instant when anything can happen.

I like the idea of not filtering the moment, not knowing how I'm going to do.

So we shot maybe two or three takes each time. 

I came back from Texas and Jim had put the film together, sort of, and he had Thelma Schoonmaker come in and take a look, because Thelma was everybody's pal at that time. What Jim had done was take the worst takes of the two or three that we had made, because he felt that was more truthful to the character. And Thelma said, 'Fine, that may be more true, but it's horrible, so you have to use the best takes. Otherwise it's really painful if you don't use the best takes.'  

I understand his thought, that the bad takes make it seem more like a documentary. But Thelma talked him into using the best takes. 

What was the film’s budget?

KIT: The budget for the film was the advance, the $2,500 bucks that Willard Van Dyke had given us from the Museum of Modern Art, to do the book The Truth on Film. Willard was a little upset, until the film began to get all this notice at film festivals. At that point Willard acknowledged that the film worked and proposed that the Museum of Modern Art was now going to add it to its collection. So, he didn't get a book, but he got a movie.

What lessons did you take away from the experience?

KIT: The lesson I took away is that there is a lot of depth of thought required; you can't just do it off the top of your head. Jim had this brilliant idea. It came out of six months of experience interviewing a dozen documentary filmmaker to conclude that, 'No, wait a minute, this is not true. Therefore, let's expose it.' That was all Jim's energy. But it came from spending all that time thinking about it.

And from my angle, it came from studying the roots of the English novels, studying what documentary IS, so that you say, 'Oh, I know. It's an act of fiction.' It looks real, and you propose it stylistically as 'this happened, just now,' but it's actually been edited and pieced together.

What you try to achieve when you create any fiction is truth, a fictional truth that has the right ending.

With the movies I've made since that time, I've always tried to stay in touch with the job of telling the truth in your own way in this particular story. 

This movie was not an accident and it didn't happen easily. The fact that Jim had the film stolen out of the trunk of his car and that it was a bad version of this film, all that's part of the actual doingness.

I learned the truth of exposure in David Holzman’s Diary. And I've kept that as part of my story-telling muscle.

It was also shaped by what McBride did, by having Pepe, our friend have that scene where he said, 'Stop, turn off the camera, it's no longer a moral decision, it's an aesthetic decision.' 

He invented that scene with Pepe, and it was Pepe's true reaction to the footage that he'd seen. This is fake, it's not real.

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! 

Kenneth Lonergan on writing/directing “You Can Count on Me"

Kenneth Lonergan found success writing screenplays for Hollywood (Analyze This, The Adventures of Rocky & Bullwinkle, and Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York), but he finds satisfaction writing for the theater, where he is able to control what happens to his script.

He maintained that same level of control on his first film as writer/director, You Can Count on Me, which was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Screenplay, won the Sundance 2000 Grand Jury Prize and the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award, the New York Film Critics Circle, the Los Angeles Film Critics Circle, and Writers Guild of America and National Board of Review awards for Best Screenplay of 2001.

What was going on in your career before You Can Count on Me?

KENNETH: I was making a living writing screenplays, doing pretty well, but my main interest was playwriting, which I was doing mostly with the Naked Angels theater company. I had just had my first big break in playwriting, with my play This Is Our Youth. It was very well received, and it bumped me several levels up instantly, which is very unusual. So, I had just become an off-Broadway playwright with some cachet and I was already basically a Hollywood screenwriter of comedies. 

 Why do you use the label "screenwriter of comedies" and not just "screenwriter"?

KENNETH: Because I started out doing comedies and they don't let you do anything that you haven't already done. You send them five dramas and they'll say, "But these are plays." They can't extrapolate. It's like the Supreme Court. There has to be a very clear precedent, or you have no argument at all.

Where did the idea for You Can Count on Me come from?

KENNETH: It came from an assignment that my theater company had given. We were doing an evening of short plays based on the subject of faith and I was poking around for something to write on that topic. I had the idea of this brother and sister. I wrote a ten-minute scene with these characters, which basically was the first step in writing the screenplay. But whenever I say that, I then read that "He adapted it from his own play." But it was, honestly, twelve pages long and it was never meant to be a full-length play. As soon as I thought of it as a larger piece it was immediately a screenplay.

And that scene is still pretty much intact, right, as the first scene where Terry and Sammy meet in the restaurant?

KENNETH: It's that plus the scene at the end. Literally. Minus the note of hope that he expresses when he tries to tell her that he's not going back into the toilet, he actually liked being in Alaska and maybe there's something there for him. Some people have interpreted the movie as him going back into the depths, while other people have noticed that he actually is a tiny bit of a step up from where he started. 

What was it about those twelve pages that made you think you had the beginnings of a feature script?

KENNETH: I loved the characters a lot and I thought the scene was really very good. And when it was performed it was performed really nicely. I just thought there was something very moving about the situation. 

I guess I liked the idea of how crazy she was about him and the whole dynamic of her having more faith in him than he had in himself. Even though she's a little misguided about him, just liking him that much brought him up a little bit. And I liked the idea that they were at such cross-purposes, but also that they liked each other so much. 

Also the idea that they had had this shared tragedy. Her reaction was a sort of blind faith and his reaction was closer to mine, which is that it has no meaning but you have to piece together your own feelings about things like that, because none of the available systems really did it for him. 

I just liked that whole dynamic. I liked her taking care of him and him disappointing her -- all the dynamics between them. I just liked the people a lot.

What was the process of finding the rest of that story and getting to that ending point?

KENNETH: It was one of those rare, all-in-one flashes. I was watching a play which had a little kid in it. I was only partly enjoying the play, so my mind was wandering and I suddenly had the thought, "If she had a little boy who her brother got involved with and then disappointed and became a hazard to, that would be a terrible conflict for her." Immediately I saw a whole arc of a story based on that, which seemed to be very full. Shortly after that, everything else just kept kind of falling in place. 

Once you had the story, how did you proceed? Did you write an outline?

KENNETH: I almost never do an outline. I've done outlines for assignments and even then I think I've only done them twice. I have nothing against them, I just don't usually work that way. 

For You Can Count on Me, I split the lunch scene up, because I knew that the last part of the scene would be the last part of the movie.

I had, at one point, a whole different ending. Originally the last scene was going to be the scene with Sammy and the little boy at the kitchen table. But then, once it was all written, I realized that it should really end with the brother and the sister. So I made that adjustment.

Since you don’t do an outline, do you have other methods of gathering your thoughts before you write?

KENNETH: I take a lot of notes in my little notebook. I try to write down any thought I have about the movie or I'll write a little scrap of a scene in the notebook and I'll always refer back to that. So I ended up taking a lot of notes. 

Were you always planning on directing this script?

KENNETH: Yes. I wouldn't have written it if I wasn't planning to direct it.

Did that change the way you wrote it?

KENNETH: Completely. I had been aware of what professional screenwriting was like in Hollywood many years before I got into it. I got into it only to make money, because I knew there was no creative protection. 

This was the first screenplay that I ever wrote the way I would have written a play, meaning putting my heart and soul into it. Every other job I'd done, including the spec script for Analyze This, I definitely did as good a job as I could, but I wrote knowing that the script would be destroyed. I wouldn't have written You Can Count On Me if I'd known it would be destroyed. I wouldn't have written it if I wasn't planning to direct it and I knew the only way to protect it was to direct it.

I knew that if it was an independent movie that I would have a fairly good chance of controlling the material. I also knew that I wouldn't do it if I couldn't control the material. 

Did you think about budget concerns at all while you were writing?

KENNETH: No, I didn't. There's no call for anything expensive in the story anyway. I might have thought about it a little bit in the periphery of my mind, but not really. I knew it would be cheap.

Did you tweak the script after it was cast?

KENNETH: The only thing I changed in production was I did a little bit of cutting and re-wrote the last scene a little bit, because I felt it wasn't clear what Terry’s feeling was about going away. 

How do you know when a script is done?

KENNETH: It feels right. I always feel that the ending must be at least as good as the rest of the movie. If the ending isn't great, I feel like it's not a successful endeavor. And then if there's nothing else that I can work on and improve, then I basically leave it alone. You can always futz around with it, but unfortunately there's a certain point when I start rewriting it where I start making it worse. Thankfully, I think I've learned to identify that point and then I leave it alone.

How do you know when you’ve reached that point of diminishing returns?

KENNETH: When you get out of the groove of it, I really think it's dangerous to mess around with it too much. I tend to rewrite myself a lot as I'm going, but not endlessly. 

I find that a lot of writers are too ready to rewrite stuff, which is dangerous because they just get lost instantly. I know I do. New writers are way too eager to take other people's comments and show it to everyone and get all the feedback they can get. The feeding frenzy in the movie culture now -- which is to let everyone dive in and anyone can give notes -- I just find it repellant and very bad for the scripts and ultimately for the audience.

The other thing that writers can do is not be self-critical enough. I think you have to be very much on your own side but be very unflinching about noticing when something's no good. You have to be able to step away and step back, basically trusting your own opinion and hoping that if you like it somebody else will.

You Can Count on Me is a textbook example of writing scenes where we learn things about the characters through their actions and not just their words. How did you achieve that?

KENNETH: I always have the actors in mind and when I'm writing, I act out the scene, which includes the behavior. And if the behavior's covering it, then you don't need a line of dialogue. 

The reason that movies stink now is the fixation on everything being clear. Once the studio development people got the idea that they were going to get involved in the emotional lives of the characters is when things really turned to shit, because they have a terror that things won't be clear and they have a list of what every movie has to be about. 

I've never been involved in a movie -- except for Gangs of New York -- in which the comment did not come up at some point that "the character has to learn to believe in himself." Every movie has to be about somebody believing in himself and if it's not that, they have to learn that "it's the heart that you want to pay attention to, not the head." That's another one, which is basically the same thing.

These are people who insist that film is a visual medium, while pounding you to death to write this terrible dialogue which basically, in words, says every single thing that the actors should be doing. People just don't say what they mean all the time. 

Or they don’t say anything at all. I’m thinking of the scene in You Can Count on Me when Sammy is riding in the car with her on-again, off-again boyfriend. She has a moment where she looks at him and you can tell she’s completely reassessing the relationship, but not a word is spoken about it. 

KENNETH: It was very clear that he showed up, he's a good guy, she's been back and forth about him, he's very stoically driving her to get her fuck-up brother out of jail and she sits there and turns and looks at him very thoughtfully. So what are you going to think, except that she's re-evaluating him? Do you need her to say, "You know, Bob, thanks." That stinks.

Plus, she's not sure she wants to do anything about it. She's just re-evaluating. It's a private moment. Do I need to have her call her best-friend and say, "You know, I sat there looking at Bob and thinking, 'You know what ...'" Who needs it? Anybody would look at him and think that, but nobody would say that to him or make that call. And if they did, everyone would cringe with embarrassment. 

I wish writers would hold back a little more. You want to make sure that the audience knows what you need them to know at a certain point for the scene to have the effect that you want, but writers often write what they think should happen. If people would write more of what would happen and just see if it took care of itself, I think it would. 

You don't really need to know anything about the two characters in the lunch scene to have the scene be interesting, because there's so much evident tension. If this went on for a long time and I never gave you any information, that would seem like a bullshit trick eventually. It's a medium that's meant to be acted and not described and when you start saying the subtext, then there's nothing left to act.

Did you learn anything writing You Can Count on Me that you still use today?

KENNETH: Yes, but I didn't learn it enough. In editing the first cut, I thought every scene was very good but the whole thing dragged. The problem was that every scene had a beginning, a middle and an end. So I chopped the beginnings and, more particularly, the endings off every scene and suddenly the story propelled itself from one scene to the next much better. That's because it didn't have 200 little soft resolves. 

So I've been trying to think about writing in sequences instead of scenes, but the truth is I haven't really applied that, because it's very hard for me to judge that on the page. It's something I know can be dealt with in the editing, so I can't say I actually have the faith to write a really short scene.

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

KENNETH: I think it was from Gertrude Stein. I don't remember the quote exactly, but it's someone telling a younger writer who's worried their work is no good. The quote is, "It's not your business whether it's good or bad. Your job is to keep the channel open, because there's only one of you in all of time and if you don't say it, it will never be said. So keep the channel open." I think that is really very, very good advice, because a lot of people sit around fussing whether it's good or not and I personally think that's not really any of your business. It's not helpful.

Is there a real difference between writing for other people and writing for yourself?

KENNETH: Screenwriting for other people is completely different from screenwriting for yourself. I think writers can have more power than they think, if they're keeping it small, but they don't have any power in Hollywood no matter what and every bad thing I described will happen and does. That's all that happens. Occasionally there's an exception. 

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! 

Kasi Lemmons on writing and directing “Eve's Bayou"

As you watch this beautiful movie, it's occasionally hard to believe that Eve’s Bayou is a film from a first-time feature director working from her first solo screenplay. It’s an assured and ambitious and emotionally satisfying story of life in the South in the early sixties, following young Eve (Jurnee Smollett) during a life-defining summer. 

Writer/Director Kasi Lemmons (best-known to filmgoers as Ardelia in The Silence of the Lambs) deftly mixes Southern gentility, voodoo and magic, and a touch of Rashômon-style story-telling to present the sometimes-comic, sometimes-tragic events of that summer from a child’s unique perspective. 

What was going on in your life and your career before you came to write Eve's Bayou?

KASI LEMMONS: I had been an actor for a long time. I'd done a couple of plays with really good companies, Naked Angels and Steppenwolf, and then I went to film school. When I got out of film school, I had a short film that was festivaling around, called Fall from Grace. And then I did Silence of the Lambs and moved to Los Angeles. 

What I really wanted to do was to write the perfect role for myself. To write the perfect part. If you could write a perfect part for yourself, what would it be? So I wrote the character of Mozelle for me to play when I got a little bit older.

Also it was very much an experiment in a certain type of language and a certain writing style. It was very ambitious. I knew what I wanted to do, but it was more of an experiment. And then when I was finished with it, I showed it to Vondie Curtis-Hall, who was my boyfriend at the time, and he said, "You've got to show this to somebody else." He was the person who said, "You can't put it in a drawer. You have to show it to somebody."

Where did the idea for the story come from?

KASI LEMMONS: I remember the first time I told any story from Eve's Bayou was at an audition. The casting director didn't want to see a scene from the show. He wanted us to talk. So I started spinning Eve's Bayou stories. I talked about my aunt who had gotten married five times and all of her husbands had died. That was true. The more fantastical parts of the story are true.

I wrote that story down as a short story and I wrote some other short stories. One was about two little kids, a brother and sister, who go and look in their grandmother's room. It talks about all of her medicines and the way in which her room was very evocative. And then another was about Eve and Jean Paul Batiste and how a bayou came to be named after this slave who saved her master's life with voodoo and witch-doctoring. So I had all these stories, but they weren't really connected. There was some connection in my mind, but I hadn't found it yet. 

Then I invented the character of Louis Batiste for the stories to revolve around. Way before I wrote anything down I could tell you the entire story of Eve's Bayou, the entire thing complete with flashes of lightning. I could tell you the whole movie. I had it all in my head.

How long did it take you to get it out of your head and onto paper?

KASI LEMMONS: From the time I could tell it all the way through, maybe a year.

I was in therapy at the time and I was very conflicted about what to do with my life, how to approach the next step, the next phase of my life. My therapist said, "You really need to take this pilot season off, don't audition for anything and write that story that you keep telling me about." So basically, my therapist told me to stay home for a few months and write it down and that's what I did.

Were you thinking about budget at all while you wrote?

KASI LEMMONS: I wrote it as a literary experiment. So, I wasn't thinking about anything other than wanting to get this story down on paper. As a matter of fact, when I first started writing it, I thought it might be a book. And then I ended up writing it as a screenplay and I had the idea of playing the role of Mozelle. But I wasn't really sure if it was going to turn into a book or a screenplay or what was going to happen with it. I just let it come out. I wasn't thinking about budget and I wasn't thinking about directing it at all. 

Once you had a draft done, how did you get feedback?

KASI LEMMONS: I have a select group of people who read every script. There are about five of them. They are the most critical people I know. I process their comments carefully. They usually don't agree on many things, so I look for the things they all agree on. If five people tell you something is bothering them, then maybe you need to look at that. I take what somebody says and try to see what resonates with me or if they say something that I've been thinking already.

What was it that made you decide to direct it?

KASI LEMMONS: I took a bunch of meetings that were a little bit frightening to me. I started to realize that I'd written a very delicate piece of material that could be misinterpreted very easily. In fact, it was just as easy to misinterpret it as it was to interpret it the way I intended. I took some scary meetings where I thought, "Oh God, I'd rather keep it in the drawer than let people interpret it this way." 

My producer kept saying, "What's a sexy idea of a director? Who's sexy?" And I was thinking, "Who's sexy? Who's sexy?" Literally I woke up on my birthday and it was an epiphany. I was like, "You know what? I'm going to direct it."

After that moment I never vacillated. I went to the producer and said, "I went to film school. My short film did really well and I've decided I'm going to direct this." He almost fell off his chair. But he was very supportive. The first thing he said when he recovered from shock was that he wanted to produce a short film for me to see what I could do. Something with a 35mm camera, real crew, the whole thing. And that's what he did. My agent put up half the money and he put up the other half. It was really amazing.

Did you change the script at all once you locked in on a budget?

KASI LEMMONS: At first the Batiste house was reminiscent of my grandmother's house. It had an elevator that went up to the third floor. And the little marketplace/fair where they meet Elzora, the voodoo priestess, was a huge, traveling fair that had a Ferris wheel. I took that out. I took a lot out of it and made it much, much simpler.

Was there anything that you hated to lose?

KASI LEMMONS: There was nothing that I hated to lose until the edit and then I lost something I hated to lose. It was extremely painful. It was a character named Tomy.

A whole character got excised?

KASI LEMMONS: A whole character. He was a member of the family. It was actually a lot of work to cut him out. 

He was a great-uncle who lived in the house. I never explain exactly what's wrong with him, but he's mute. He was modeled after my great-uncle who had cerebral palsy. In the director's cut, he's in a wheelchair and he's actually sitting in the room when what happens between Louis and Cisely happens. So he knows the truth but he can't speak. He was the mute witness and to me it was very beautiful that there was a mute witness in Eve's Bayou. Even though Louis and Cisely remembered it differently, there was actually somebody who knew the truth. 

At the end of the movie, when you see the little girls and they do their scene and they're standing on the bayou, I cut to him on the porch in his wheelchair and he knows what happened. But he can't say.

You did a masterful job of cutting him out.

KASI LEMMONS: He's in the movie, but I would have to freeze frame and point him out to you. There are places where we didn't remove him but you just don't see it, your eye doesn't go there.

What drove the decision to cut this fairly major character out of the movie?

KASI LEMMONS: What drove it was notes from the producer, Mark Amin, who was running Trimark. He hated that character. He hated it from the beginning. It was one of those elephants in the room that doesn't go away. In Eve's Bayou the people are very conspicuously pretty and then there was this older, disfigured person. To me it was beautiful that there was this older, disfigured person who lived in the house, it wasn't just the beautiful people. It was a relative in the house and I thought it was very black and very Southern that there would be some relative that you had to take care of. 

He really didn't like the character and we went back and forth over it. Finally I lost him and it was very painful. My crew made t-shirts with an empty wheelchair that read, "Where's Tomy?" Tomy was my real great-uncle's name so it was a real big deal that we lost that character. But it was something that I had to do and honestly, I'm pretty sure I like the version without Tomy better. It took me a while to come to that point of view. I like my "director's cut" an awful lot, too. But probably the version without Tomy is my favorite.

Once you decided to direct it, did you ever consider also acting in it?

KASI LEMMONS: No. I find directing to be a very, very voyeuristic art form. Almost a perversion. You're really watching other people's intimate moments and trying to get those moments out of them. But I don't think there was ever a question of me wanting to be in it once I decided to direct it.

What was the benefit of your acting background when it came to writing the movie?

KASI LEMMONS: I think the characters are always talking to me. But I think writers are like that whether they're actors or not. Being an actor definitely helped me to hear the characters.

What was the benefit of your acting background when it came to directing the movie?

KASI LEMMONS: I didn't really think that much about it until I saw in the Electronic Press Kit that almost all of the actors said I was a good director because I was an actor. But I hadn't really thought about it until then.

I don't scream direction across the set. I'll go up and talk to an actor intimately. I would treat them the way I would like to be treated, in that it's always, always, always a private conversation so nobody can listen to me direct actors. 

Did you have much rehearsal time?

KASI LEMMONS: I did. I had about two weeks. I used it mostly with the little girls, not exclusively but almost exclusively. I thought that these two little girls have to carry a movie and it's a very complicated movie. Some of it I wondered, was it over their heads? Jurnee Smollett was a very contemporary little girl, so I had to take her back into the 1960s. How you stood and what I thought her body language would be and who I thought Eve was, where the boundaries between Eve and Jurnee were. She's so facile, within three days she was Eve.

Did you do any tweaking of the script in rehearsal?

KASI LEMMONS: No. I think I had gone through about eleven drafts by then, so I was pretty locked on the one that I liked.

Was it much of a struggle for you to get that tone you felt in the script up onto the screen?

KASI LEMMONS: Not really, once the actors nailed the language. The language to me, and I really haven't felt this way with other things that I've written, but the language in Eve's Bayou was like Shakespeare. That's because it started out as a language experiment, so I made them say it word for word. And the words were really important to me. So they had to say it as it was written. Once they nailed the language, that really helped them fall into the tone.

How tough was it for the actors to get that and make those speeches work? I'm thinking in particular of Mozelle's "Life is filled with good-byes, Eve" speech.

KASI LEMMONS: That's my favorite speech. Debbi Morgan's such a wonderful actress. She came in and her audition was wonderful. Wonderful. She really got it. And once she got the words exactly, like, "Well, you musta been thinking something right before you was thinking that, what led you to that particular thought?" Once you could nail the words and you're not improvising on the words, you're saying those exact words, the words help with the character. But she was so wonderful, she was wonderful from the beginning and she understood Mozelle. There was a part of her that was Mozelle.

Did you learn anything writing Eve's Bayou that you're still using today?

KASI LEMMONS: You know, there's an innocence when you write your first script. You don't know what the rules are. It's almost something that's really hard to reclaim. So that's what I'm always trying to get back to, that innocence, to try and be that pure. I don't know that I can ever do it again, but to try and remember to be that unleashed in a way.

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

KASI LEMMONS: I'm not sure who gave me this advice, but it's understanding that people usually don't say exactly what's on their mind. There's nothing more tiresome than a script where people say exactly what's on their mind all the time. It's just not the way people talk.

As an actor, you need subtext and intention. You know what the character wants from each scene and you think of them as if they were real people talking in your ear. 

What was the best part of your experience on Eve's Bayou?

KASI LEMMONS: The collaborating. I love collaborating. I like writing, too, but writing's really lonely. You're in a room and you're by yourself and your friends are all going out to lunch and you are stuck with your computer. Directing is a collaborative art. 

One of my favorite things is hiring brilliant people to work around you. And hopefully what you've written has inspired them to want to come work with you. It's like you are plugged into their genius. You're not just relying on yourself. It's not lonely; as a matter of fact, there's a feeling of security in that you've put together a team and they each know how to do their job and you can't live without them. I love collaborating. It's my favorite thing.  

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! 

Joan Micklin Silver on making “Hester Street"

Hester Street breaks many of the rules of low-budget filmmaking. It’s a period piece. It’s shot in black and white. And half the dialogue is in Yiddish.

However, as we know, rules are made to be broken. Joan Micklin Silver’s passion for the story Yekl, from Abrahma Cahan's novella, is evident in every frame of Hester Street, and her genius at casting (which would surface again in her next feature, Between The Lines), brought Carol Kane to national attention – and garnered her an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress.

At what point were you in your career before Hester Street came along?

JOAN MICKLIN SILVER: I had made some short films for an educational film company and had written a screenplay which was -- although much changed -- made in Hollywood. And I was looking for an opportunity to direct. I found that in that particular time -- we're talking about the early 70s -- the opportunities for women to direct were just nil, and while I could get work writing, I really wanted to be able to direct the work that I did.

How did you find Abraham Cahan’s novella and what attracted you to it?

JOAN MICKLIN SILVER: One of the films that I made for the educational film company was on immigration. I read just about everything I could find on immigration and one of the things that I read was the novella by Abraham Cahan called Yekl. 

I was really floundering around and wanting very much to make my own films. My husband, Ray, who was a real estate developer, told me that if I could do a film that would not cost very much, that he would try to raise money from some of the investors that he'd been going to for real estate deals. And that was how we did it.

Frankly I didn't think I'd ever get to make another film. I was pretty discouraged about it all. My family were immigrants and I wanted to make a movie that would count for them.

Was the story in the public domain at that point?

JOAN MICKLIN SILVER: Yes. And that was one of its attractions.

What challenges did you face in the adaptation?

JOAN MICKLIN SILVER: Well, the story itself is more the husband's story. I think what grabbed me about it was what happened to the wife. So it was really just telling the story from the point of view that interested me. The challenge of it, of course, was to try to make it authentic. 

I felt that because my father had told me so many stories about his life as an immigrant boy from Russia, I knew that language was a huge factor in getting along or not getting along. He told me stories of not quite knowing English and once leaving some money on a bus; he was a paperboy and he had made some collections and left the money by accident on the bus. He thinks people were trying to tell him and he didn't understand what they were saying. He got off the bus and then realized it -- things like that. Knowing the English language was extremely difficult.

And also both my parents were Yiddish speaking and I can remember dinners at our house with all sorts of relatives and wonderful stories being told and then punch lines coming out in Yiddish and my mother turning to us and saying, "You know, it doesn't quite translate." She would try to translate it, but never could quite do it. And I associated that language with something very rich and interesting and enjoyable. 

Were you worried about breaking some of the cardinal rules of low-budget filmmaking: You don't do period pieces, you don't do something that's half in English and half in Yiddish?

JOAN MICKLIN SILVER: I didn't know enough to know that I was breaking cardinal rules and that's the truth. I had to tell this story and I had to do what I could to tell it.

Was there anything in the adaptation that you really wished you could have included, but budget prevented it?

JOAN MICKLIN SILVER: There were many, many things. For example, just after we had made the movie, Godfather II came out. And in Godfather II there's a very long scene in Ellis Island in which there's an overhead traveling shot. The boy who will grow up to be Robert DeNiro is sitting on the bench and you see him in isolation, all by himself. It's just a stunning shot, and I remember that Ray and I saw it and were just pinching each other's arms in jealously.

When it came time to do Ellis Island, I had to do what I think just about all low-budget filmmakers do and that is that you make a part work for the whole. You have to ask yourself, "What’s the most important thing about this?" And I decided that it was the separation between the ones who were already there and the ones who had just arrived. Therefore, I thought if I could do some sort of a fence or something that would keep the two groups apart, that would help to say what I wanted to say. 

I remember that the fence cost about $800, which was a huge portion of our budget. I think it worked -- it isn't re-creating Ellis Island, which if I'd had a chance, of course I would have done. Those were the sorts of things that we did all the time.

What was your process for making the adaptation?

JOAN MICKLIN SILVER: I think I just read it more than a few times and then just thought about it. I like to do research and I was also looking though lots and lots of material. For instance, I went to the public library and there were a lot of files available about immigrant life in New York, with pictures. I went to the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, which had a lot of oral histories of immigrants. 

There also happened to be an exhibition of Roman Vishniac photographs around that time and although his photographs were not of the period -- they were about Polish immigrants between the wars -- still the Shtel life I'm sure was pretty similar. 

Did you use any of your family's immigrant experiences in writing the script?

JOAN MICKLIN SILVER: Immigrants fall into two groups: the kind that want to talk about it all the time and the kind that never talk about it because it was traumatic and they really want to make the adjustment and be Americans. 

My family was definitely the kind that talked about it all the time. I had heard so many stories about it all. I'd heard stories about people who came and people who left and people who went back and people who went crazy. I had a head full of all these sorts of stories, so I'm sure they fit into writing this screenplay.

Did the fact that you knew you wouldn't have much money to shoot this movie have any impact on you while you were writing the script?

JOAN MICKLIN SILVER: Constantly. I was constantly thinking, for example, about how I could do Ellis Island, things like that. It was one thing after another, just constantly trying to figure out how I could tell the story without having a budget that would have allowed me to tell the full story, where you could recreate the Lower East Side, like they did in Godfather II.

We used one street, Morton Street, and we could only shoot in one direction, because that direction faced Bleecker, where the streets formed a "T," so that you only had to create the look on Morton up toward Bleecker. 

If we faced the other way, it was Seventh Avenue and obviously we couldn't close Seventh Avenue, we didn't have that ability. In Godfather II, they had street after street, traveling shots that were gorgeous. So we just did what we could and everything was written and organized with that in mind. 

My own experience in writing low-budget films is that you often have to do a part of something; a part has to stand for something larger.

Did you always plan to shoot in black and white?

JOAN MICKLIN SILVER: No, I don't think I thought about it at all. But when I started doing the research and saw these pictures, particularly the photos by Louis Hine and Jacob Reis and some of the anonymous pictures I found in the Jewish file at the public library, it just seemed to me that it might be a wonderful way to tell it. And I happen to like black and white.

Were you worried about the balance of English and Yiddish in the script?

JOAN MICKLIN SILVER: I don't think I was thinking in those terms. I guess my own experience had been that actors have very good ears. I knew that even if the actors had to learn the Yiddish phonetically, they would do it. 

I was writing this screenplay for me to direct and I didn't think that I would be hiring too many actors who already knew Yiddish. I thought I'd be lucky if I hired some, but I didn't think all of them would. In the end, I did have a few that did, but many didn't. 

But that wasn't something that worried me, because my own experience with actors had been that they really have very good ears, they're terrific mimics. Actors can hear someone and mimic them the next moment.

What resources do you use to get feedback while you're writing?

JOAN MICKLIN SILVER: The feedback that I got was primarily from my husband. Usually you have to send the script to whoever the financial group is, but this was a group of investors that didn’t really need to see the screenplay. They were making small investments and it was not the sort of thing where they were going to be reading it.

I know I got lots of ideas when I started working with the actors. For instance, I think that two of my favorite lines in the script came from Doris Roberts, who plays the neighbor, Mrs. Kavarsky. These were expressions that her grandfather had said and she said to me, "Do you think these are good lines?" And I said, "Doris, they're fabulous. They're going right into the script."

One of them is, "You can't pee up my back and make me think it's rain," and the other one was, "With one tuchis you can't dance at two weddings." Old Yiddish expressions and they were wonderful and just perfect -- and, of course, she delivered them wonderfully.

Besides the addition of those lines, did the script change much once you started working with the actors?

JOAN MICKLIN SILVER: I was quite open to changing it, but it didn't change as much as I thought it would, mainly because, with the Yiddish and the English and the period, the actors didn't feel really comfortable doing improvisations. 

It did change somewhat when I was cutting it -- it followed the original story more closely. There was a longer section of the husband's life in New York before the wife came. When we did the rough cut, it was just clear that the real story started when the wife came and that the life of the husband could be established in fewer scenes. 

Two scenes really stand out for me and I'm not sure how you would have described them when you wrote them. The first is when Jacob finds out that his father has died and he goes home and tries to pray. You really get a sense that this is a guy who hasn't done this in a while.

JOAN MICKLIN SILVER: Well, he hadn’t done it, so that part wasn't hard. The actor wasn't trying to unlearn something or trying to show that he didn't know how to do something that he really knew how to do. He didn't know how to do the prayers.

And then there's a scene with Gitl and the boarder, Bernstein. We're not sure where the relationship is headed and as they sit at the table he reaches over and touches her garment. 

JOAN MICKLIN SILVER: That came from the actor. She was talking about her husband and not knowing where to turn. She sat down at the table across from Bernstein and he tried to reassure her and cover for her husband, although you could tell that he felt very sorry for her. 

We shot it a few times, and I just didn't feel like we had it; it needed something. It wasn't quite there. And I was sitting there, trying to think about what it was that would bring the scene more to life. At that moment the actor playing Bernstein reached over and touched her shawl. And I said, "That's it." 

It needed something to show that he had feelings for her, and it came from him -- it was not in the script but came from the actor.

It just proves that you don't always need dialogue to show the relationship between characters.

JOAN MICKLIN SILVER: That's very true. If you can get it that way, you've really got it. You get so many clues of people's behavior by watching them; we all do that, all the time. We do it with our politicians; it isn't just what they say, it’s how they are.

Did you have actors in mind while you were writing the screenplay?

JOAN MICKLIN SILVER: No. As a matter of fact, I was expecting to find someone who is like the Gitl in the story. She was described as dark and a little plump. So I thought I would find someone like that and that will be fine.

After I finished the script while Ray was raising the money for it, I saw a film with Carol Kane in it, a Canadian film called Wedding in White. I was just entranced by her, I just thought she had such a wonderful film presence. She had a certain Old World quality to her. 

We had a casting director and I told him I'd seen this young woman, but she seemed to be Canadian, and obviously with our low budget we couldn't afford to bring anybody in and put them up. And he said that as a matter of fact she lived across Central Park and she was a New Yorker and there wouldn't be any problem. She was the first one that we hired.

Was it difficult to put aside, as a writer, your vision of Gitl when, as the director, you found someone completely different than you had imagined?

JOAN MICKLIN SILVER: I think every writer/director does the same thing. You write to give yourself a blueprint for the film that you're going to make. Then you see what comes up and you try to leave yourself open to what the actors bring to it and what the weather brings and what the locations brings. You're happy because it isn't just you; everybody's taking this thing and adding to it, bringing more to it. And that was just fantastic.

In casting the Jacob character, I felt that I understood his problem and I understood what he was going through and I really like this character. But a number of the people who came and tried out wanted him to be more heroic and a little less harsh with her and a little less confused about his life. I had to reject those actors, because they didn't want to do the character as written, they wanted to do something else.

For Bernstein, the actor who was cast dropped out at the very last minute and I was quite stuck. It was one of the most devastating moments in the making of the film.

Ken Van Sickle, our cinematographer, said to me, "Well, what about Mel Howard?" And I said, "Mel Howard? Mel Howard came here for a crew job, he's not an actor." And Ken said, "Yes, but when he came you told me you liked the way he looked and you liked his eyes for Mr. Bernstein." 

I didn't even remember that I'd even said that. So I said, "Bring him in," and he came in, and of course he'd grown up in a Jewish family and spoke perfect Yiddish. He took direction wonderfully and gave a wonderful performance.

How did you get the scenes that needed to be in Yiddish translated into Yiddish?

JOAN MICKLIN SILVER: Michael Gorrin recorded the Yiddish for the actors and he did all the translations, except in those instances when the actor already knew Yiddish. The Rabbi, the guy who played the peddler, the man who played the scribe, they all spoke Yiddish and did their own translations.

What movies inspired you?

JOAN MICKLIN SILVER: I loved so many movies. I grew up in Omaha, Nebraska and in Omaha at the time I was growing up there wasn't any television. It didn't come until I was in high school. So the amusement of the day was to get on the streetcar and go downtown and pay thirty-five cents and see a double feature. You paid thirty-five cents until you were twelve, but everybody was twelve until they were about fifteen.

I still have a wealth of movie images in my mind from that, but there are a couple of movies that I remember very distinctly from seeing them as a kid. One was Shadow of a Doubt. I can see why I was so attracted to it: It's about a girl whose trusted uncle turns out to be a killer. This was not a threat from outside; this is a threat from within the family circle. 

I was very profoundly affected by that. I can remember in the scene where Joseph Cotton tries to push Teresa Wright out of the moving train, I can honestly remember still to this day how I felt: which theater it was, where I was sitting, where my mother was sitting, where my father was sitting. It was quite a strong childhood experience. I think I was only about seven or eight, but I really remember it to this day.

That has a certain power over you and makes you desire to re-create something like that.

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

JOAN MICKLIN SILVER: I don't think it's so much advice from another person. I think it's just the experience of looking at films. 

When I first started working in film -- this was pre-video -- we used to go to the Museum of Modern Art and sit in the basement and see films. I would say that was the thing that taught me the most, to see the great films and then to try to study the screenplays. Oftentimes those screenplays were available and I could buy them and study them and try to figure out why they worked. I think that was the kind of advice that was the best for me.

Did you learn anything while writing Hester Street that you took to future projects?

JOAN MICKLIN SILVER: You know, I think each one is so different. Certain things become a little bit easier, perhaps, but each one is so different and each one has such different requirements. 

I don't know how much one really teaches you for the next. Maybe it gives you confidence to think, "I did it before, maybe I can do it again." But I think each time you're walking off a cliff.

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!