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.
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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
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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
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