Stephen Belber on writing "Tape"

Three people in one room. 

That’s always been considered the perfect construct for a low-budget movie. However, to keep that interesting is a lot harder than it looks. 

Stephen Belber and Richard Linklater pull it off in Tape, primarily because they trusted the source material they were working with. Belber wrote from his gut when creating his characters and the ever-changing dynamic during their meeting in a slightly-seedy motel room keeps the story constantly evolving and involving.

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

Where were you in your career before you wrote the stage version of Tape?

I was not very far along. I had just quit my day-job to work on The Laramie Project. It was the year that we were researching the murder of Matthew Shepard. I was going out to Laramie every couple of months and then coming home. So I was just starting to get paid. I had been writing plays for a long time, I'd come out of the Playwright Fellowship program at Julliard, but I was sort of adrift and not sure. 

And then Tape came along. It was not one of the big plays I was planning on writing or was working on. It was something where two old friends of mine came along and they wanted to showcase themselves as actors in the New York theater world, and they said, “Can you write us something that can really show what we can do?" 

So I really wrote it for them. Then one of the actors was dating this girl, so I added her because it got boring with two guys after awhile. So it wasn't like, "I'm going to write this big play." I was just doing it because I liked these guys and I liked their work and it was fun.

We produced it ourselves way off-off-Broadway for a very low-budget. Eventually, a Broadway producer came down to see it, because it got a nice buzz, and he wanted to option it because he was looking for something to do with Ethan Hawk. 

He was going to do Albee's Zoo Story, and he was looking to couple it, because Zoo Story had first been coupled with a Becket one-act back when Albee first wrote it. So he was looking for a young, new writer to pair up with an older writer, which happened to Albee.

So we did a reading of it with Ethan and some other actors, and then it fell through because Edward Albee didn't want that to be the play to accompany his play. He ended up writing his own. But Ethan remembered it and when InDigEnt came to him, Ethan said, "How about this? It would be fun, quick and easy to shoot."

So he brought it to Rick Linklater. And Uma Thurman had been at that first reading that Ethan had done, so she was familiar with the play. It was all very lucky.

How did you generate the idea when your two friends said "write something for us"? You weren't thinking screenplay at that point, right?

I had written maybe one screenplay, for fun, at that point. So this was really something to get gritty -- it was the antithesis of what you'd think of as a movie. It was one room, a screwed-up, fucked-up relationship. 

I was thinking of something we could do low-budget, production-wise. We got together one afternoon, we tossed around a couple ideas. It could be in a motel room, they could be brothers, what is it? And then they went away and I worked on it for a couple weeks. And they came over for a reading, just in my living room. It was very subterranean and organic that way, which was nice. 

It was a good lesson for me as a writer, because I tend to think epically and think I'm going to write the Great American Play and I over-plan it and I don't let spontaneity in the process. And this was good to remind me to write from the hip a little more and write closer to home. These are the types of guys I'd grown up with and I know these types of situations. These are 28 year-old guys and this was something I was familiar with at the time.

Once you determined the location, how did you generate the story? It sounds like it came pretty quickly, if the two actors came back in two weeks for a reading.

I don't know why. It was right around the time that Bill Clinton was debating whether or not to apologize for slavery and I was fascinated with the idea of apology: When is it gratuitous and self-serving versus when is it genuine and important? And that was a question that was valid at the time for Clinton. So I think that was on my mind, those types of questions. 

And I wanted to write about people who were very close, so I based it on myself and another guy, the repartee that you have with your close friends. But I wanted to get to something darker beneath that and what happens when those types of competitive friendships get cross-referenced with intense issues, such as date rape.

Did you outline the story?

I don't know that I did. I certainly don't have lots of notes like I have for most of my plays. I must have realized, semi-early on in thinking about it, that there was going to be a dark secret and that the one guy was taping the other. I had no idea how it was going to end, and as I said, the girl was added on.

The play used to end when Robert Sean Leonard's character leaves the first time. And the play ended with her looking at him, like "You're an idiot." But I knew there was more there and after a public reading I went back in and said, "Well, what if he comes back and makes that effort to apologize?" But when writing it, I didn't think very far ahead in terms of what happens when a friend confronts another friend. 

What was your day-to-day writing process?

I guess I'm pretty intense when I come across an idea and I don't sort of do an hour a day. My wife is French and I remember trying to describe this idea: A comedy about date rape was how I was forming it at the time. And she sort of laughed me off and said I should come up with a different idea. But I was able to keep writing. I remember starting over at one point, fairly early on and scrapping what I had when I came up with the idea that she might show up. 

I was writing by hand at that time. I like to get really into it when I'm writing and get a first draft done as soon as possible, then go back in and work on it.

And you're able to do that even if you don't know exactly where you're going?

Yeah. I had, at the time, a philosophy that when you're dealing with those types of tight friendships, where you don't know yourself where the conversation is going, that it would be truer and more genuine to write within that vein and to have a general goalpost that you were headed for, but to let the turns happen. 

If you're writing quickly enough in your mind and keeping up with your pen, let those twists and turns come at you, almost as quickly as they're coming at the characters. At least for this type of play, where it's sort of down and dirty.

Were you hearing anyone when you wrote?

Yeah, I guess I was. I always hesitate to say this, because I'm not a date rapist, but it was myself and a very close friend of mine. 

I always felt in high school that I was a step behind him. He was more popular with the girls and everything, yet at this point in life he was not sure what he wanted to do and I was really going after what I wanted. And I love the dynamic of how those friendships can shift and change over the years. 

I actually wrote a whole second act to this play that takes place ten years after the event in the motel room. Things have changed, and actually Vince is married. They live a sort of antiquated, domestic life. And John has gone on to make really, quote-unquote, important documentaries. 

He comes back again, there's another pretense for a reunion of sorts, where things that were obviously left unsettled that night in the motel room pop back up. I never ended up doing it, because it felt excessive and a little redundant. 

But I do like the idea of thirty years of friendship and the turns that it takes, because the decisions that we make at 18 reverberate and cause different decisions at 28 and those reverberate and they make up our persona at age 38.

I thought it was interesting, character-wise, that Vince is so likeable, yet isn't really that nice of a guy; John is attempting to do the right thing, yet is really not all that likeable. How do you strike that balance in creating characters?

It's so easy to make them so unlikable that the whole's thing's dismissed and people are bored. And making unlikable people likeable in context is hard; I tried it in another piece and it doesn't always work. 

I think because I was basing it on a guy that I love -- the Vince character -- I felt that he was the most unconstrued character, in a good way. He was very organic and he came out of someone with whom I do have a complicated relationship, so it just felt easy that way, to depict him with all his flaws.

But I also just got lucky in that I happened to set it up so that we were rooting for this guy. He can snort all the coke that he wants and be as much of a jerk as he wants, but we're invariably rooting for him because he is a) trying to do the right thing and, b) his second motive is that he's doing this because he's in love and he's desperately in love, from the position of an underdog. And those are just traits that if you endow a character with them, you can get a lot of mileage of them.

But you weren't consciously considering that while you wrote it, were you?

No, I don't think I was. I would like to say I was, but I just happened to hit upon that dynamic. I don't think I even knew how much his real motive was that he was in love with her. I sort of realized that while I was writing it. I had this notion that he was trying to compel his friend to do the right thing and apologize. 

But because those two motives -- the desire to have Amy love him and the desire to make his friend do the right thing -- were so imbued in the same character, it made him someone we could all relate to, because we all have mixed desires. 

I think so often when you go to playwriting school they teach you about single intention, and certainly as an actor you can't play two intentions at once, and from moment to moment that's probably true. But I love trying to create characters who have these both genuinely deeply rooted intentions. It's great. Plus, he's a fun character to play.

Ethan Hawk, when he did the reading of the play, he played John. He was more of the good guy and that was more of his reputation up to then, playing that sort of higher than thou characters. I think he realized that he could stretch himself and show another side of himself, so when the movie came around, he very much wanted to play Vince, which I totally understand.

It's not just playwriting school that teaches that; screenwriting schools do the same thing, telling you to create characters who have one goal that they're going after. But in Tape, their goals shift constantly.

Yeah, exactly, and the responses of their opposite guy affect their next motives as well. 

And it's true, in screenwriting it's even more of a problem. They want heroes, and if not, they want anti-heroes, but less often do they want highly-flawed characters who are not self-aware and who are not clear in going after their intention. 

Were there other things you learned from having a reading of the play?

I went in there thinking I had a much clearer idea of what was going on. I really did want to talk about this notion of apology and the worthiness of apology. And when I came across the idea of not just bringing Amy into the room, but keeping her around and having John come back and her not allowing him to have that apology on the grounds that he wanted to have it on, I think I started to realize that the play is actually potentially more interesting than my psuedo-politically-correct take on it. It’s also about power and it's about gender wars in terms of power. But also the Rashômon element came in, in a way I had not preconceived. 

I thought I was just into this relationship between these two guys, having them sock it out, have a battle, and suddenly it became about who owned the past, who owns memories, and who owns apologies. 

If we're basing our personas on events that have formed us in the past and someone comes in and takes the rug out from underneath that memory, the way you've solidified that memory in your mind, you have to reevaluate not just the memory but everything henceforth. It plays a real mind game. 

I don't think I was really thinking about those things until I brought John back into the room on the second go-round and realized that it's not just about right and wrong, it's about who gets to do what when, on who's grounds. And also that memories are pliable. They're not set in stone.

When you were adapting it into a film script, was there ever any talk of "opening it up"?

There was briefly talk about it. That would be the first instinct for any filmmaker. 

That's the great thing about Linklater. We talked a little bit about opening it up, but his inclination was definitely not to, that it was going to be more interesting to keep it enclosed. The problem was how do you not repeat the theatrically that comes when you try to film a play, because so often it doesn't work. 

Because the DV cameras allowed you to go into a motel room or a soundstage that really felt like a motel room, he was going to be able to capture a cinematic way of telling the story. So, only very briefly did we talk about doing some exterior stuff, which made me delighted, because I was worried that they were going to ask me to write stuff that didn't fit this play. 

You did lose some of the timing that you get in the theatrical version, because you have two cameras that you're trying to edit together. The theater piece runs an hour ten, and this ran an hour twenty-five. They added fifteen minutes because there wasn't the overlap that you get in live theater. 

The trade-off for me, which was exquisite, was the sense of intimacy and a whole other layer of my writing, which is the silences between the words. We got to look into these guys' eyes and chart their reactions. 

So the reactions were not as quick as in the theater -- boom, boom, boom -- but we got to see them process the other person's line and then come up with a response, all within the veil of 'hey, buddy-buddy,' the quick cut down repartee that guys have. But we were able to even see within that and it became, for me, more interesting that way. 

You can get that in theater, but film, and especially a DV camera, can get in there in a way that an audience member, who's free to choose where to look in the theater, could never get that close. So, for me, it was a great lesson.

And to watch it with a crowd in a movie theater was a great learning experience. We're taught as screenwriters that audiences don't care about dialogue, that it's all about the visuals. But I felt that it was a nice synthesis of both, of them yearning for dialogue that they don't usually get in film. They were ready to listen to these people talk and with it they were getting the unspoken subtext very intently and clearly. 

In terms of losing text, there wasn't much. There's one long speech that Uma Thurman has that is not as long in the film, where she finally goes after John. That was the only thing that Rick Linklater cut, and we talked about it. It wasn't just him saying, 'I'm cutting this.' He explained what he thought and it made sense. It just felt very overly-written. It's about twice as long in the play and it's much more intense. But it's probably not realistic that she could come up with that in the moment.

In the film you can see, if you watch closely, it's cut off. They filmed the whole speech and so she didn't really land it in the way she might have, but she does a great job. I just think she did a great job in the movie, capturing the essence of that character.

What I love about the movie is that it raises more questions than it answers. Most movies aren't willing to do that.

Well, that's the golden rule, to tie it up and provide those answers. And even in playwriting, I think, it's a very fine line. Audiences will feel ripped off if you're intentionally ambiguous for the sake of it. If ambiguity serves a purpose, at the risk of sounding pretentious, it's to turn it around and challenge them to ask themselves, “What would I do in that situation? What have I done in past situations? And what have I done about those things?” That does seem to serve a purpose, and if nothing else the movie does poke it back at you. It's so pointed at a particular generation were the words "date rape" just became a phrase.

My wife translated it into French and there is no expression for date rape there in that country yet. And it's relatively new to America. So I think the people who respond to this movie are people who have grown up with those words.

So, in terms of adaptation, it sounds like you basically handed Linklater the script to the play and said "Have at it."

Yeah, he was great that way. It was the opposite of what you expect the Hollywood machine to do to your work. 

Basically, the put it in screenplay form. Robert Sean Leonard's character was originally Jewish; he makes a crack about being Jewish, but we didn't think we could pass off him as that. We also changed his name. There were also one or two cultural references which we thought would potentially date the film, so we cut a couple lines. One about David Hasselhoff.

Ethan improvised a dance bit that was from his high school days that he wanted to get in there. He put the word “fag” in at one point, which I was hesitant to do because I don't like it, but it was fine because guys like that say that word in that context.

Were you involved in the rehearsal process?

Yeah, again, I was really lucky. I was out of town, working on The Laramie Project. When I came back into town, they had rehearsed for about two days. They spent two weeks in a friend's apartment, just going through it. I came toward the end of the first week and it was amazing. It was like a theatrical experience. Ethan has a great theatrical background and Rick studied theater in college. 

They started with real, genuine table work, which is what you do the first two days of any play, sitting around and talking about intention and motive and all that stuff around a dining room table. I couldn't believe that they were doing it exactly the way I would want it to be done. It was lovely.

And when they started shooting, I showed up whenever I wanted to, it was great. They built the set on a soundstage and the set had a retractable roof, so when they wanted to get certain shots they could light it. But for the most part inside the room was a sound guy and Rick, holding one camera, and the DP holding a camera, and the actors and me. It was really nice.

So you didn't have to make any changes to fit the budget?

No. The film was shot so cheap. They rented a car, so that when you opened the motel room door you could see a parked car, that was the big luxury. And that wasn't even in the script.

Rick's company completely knows how to produce at that level when they need to, and InDigEnt was scrappy and just starting out. They hadn't yet had the success that they would have. So everyone was pitching in and calling in favors. It was sort of corny but nice.

When you finished the stage version, how did you know when the script was done?

We did this first reading where it ended abruptly and I felt it was too abrupt. I knew there was more. I was so interested in the female character and I was writing out of my element so much, so I remember calling up a lot of female friends and asking what they would do in that situation. I was really clueless about the feelings that the character would be going through.

I knew it wasn't finished after that first reading, but I didn't know if I should write a whole other act or add another twenty minutes. I remember it was my first case of real theatrical soul-searching, because I knew I had something that I really liked for once. There was a nice feeling in the room and the dialogue was rolling and the characters were knowable. 

So I went off for a while and I worked on that, and we did another reading, again in my living room. And that one felt like there was a nice resolution. I guess I just knew that it was finished.

Again, I don't trust myself, because subsequently we did it in a larger venue in New York. I wrote monologues and a prologue, as well as an epilogue that took place ten years later, with all the characters speaking to us from the future. We actually produced that in New York and most of the people who knew both productions said you don't need it and it ruins this nice little thing you have. I was, as a playwright, thinking I should be writing epic, three-act plays that deal with the world and time passing, but it did feel like this moment had come to a close where the play ends now.

In terms of going back and re-writing, I actually felt like I hit that one pretty smoothly. Once I got a take on the female character, that she was not necessarily going to play their games, that she was going to not cede the power to them, regardless of what happened. I don't think it's changed much since then. 

Little tiny things have changed, because the initial actress really was very helpful in charting it when we were first doing it. But in terms of structure, I never went back and excessively re-wrote it or changed it structurally. Of course, there wasn't that much structure to change.

Do you ever put a script in a drawer for a while?

Oh, absolutely. I have about twenty-five things in a drawer right now. 

I think if I had put Tape in a drawer at that point I would never have gone back, because it's not the heftiest play. But I know that it hit a chord with people, because it was compact. I always complain when I see plays that are successful that they aren't as deep and profound as they should be, but that's not what audiences necessarily want or connect to. It has a tightness that is very satisfying and a compactness -- at an hour twenty, it definitely had that.

Did you learn anything from this process that you've taken to other projects?

Yes. I think letting a degree of spontaneity into my writing, which was something that I had excised at Julliard. Learning to let spontaneity back in and knowing that that makes for better writing.

I learned that there is a market and an audience out there for dialogue-heavy films and character-driven films and that this fast give-and-take actually can work. Everyone says it's so theatrical that it doesn't work, but if you put it out there, an audience will follow it. It's not particularly complex. It's not Tom Stoppard. But we're used to it and we can be conditioned, as filmgoers, to follow and like it. Dialogue that's fun and appropriate to the contemporary world is something that audiences will respond to.

And I learned that drama doesn't come from just visuals. Drama comes from classic dramatic structure and shifts in emotions. 

I'm writing more and more studio stuff now and I literally do cling to that idea – and I'm sure that I'll get killed for it – but I cling to the idea that you can infuse that into even these big things that I'm trying to work on. 

Do you have any advice to writers working on a low-budget script?

They'll tell you not to worry about budget when you're writing, but I think if you really are intent on doing that, you can do both at the same time. You can find low-budget ways to tell the stories you want to tell.

In theater, the best things are the plays with no set. So you have to remind yourself that “I want to tell this story. I want to tell it the way I want to tell it,” but to know that if it's a period piece that takes place over forty years in five thousand locations, it's a problem. You can probably tell the same story in a different way. 

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

Write strong. There's so much prettiness and cleverness that we all strive for, but you should write for the heart more, which is different than saying write about what you know. Write to the gut.

With Tape, I guess I am most proud of the fact that it feels guttural, it feels like it's coming from a very true place. I'm sure people think there are too many plot twists and stuff, but basically these are people who are talking from their gut. And especially when it gets heated, they're talking on instinct and they're talking in the moment and there's nothing “writerly” about it at its best moments. 

And it's something that's so easy to forget, the better writer you become – because you do want to show that you're a good writer – is how to click back into that, write from the gut, write strong. At least in moments, to know that you can find that, access that, no matter what the situation, we can, as human beings, relate to it. Because that's why we all go to movies and theater: to see human beings. 

So if we just write to the human moments, those moments of human drama, that will pay off, because people connect to it.

Dying to make a feature? Learn from the pros!

When Fast, Cheap & Under Control first hit shelves in 2006, it became the underground handbook for a generation of indie filmmakers. Now, two decades on, this 20th Anniversary Special Edition proves the lessons inside aren't just timeless—they're more essential than ever.

What's changed? Technology. Platforms. Distribution.
What hasn't? The grit, ingenuity, and sheer determination it takes to make a great film with nothing but vision and hustle.

Inside, you'll find:

• Exclusive interviews with legends like Steven Soderbergh, Roger Corman, Jon Favreau, Henry Jaglom, Kasi Lemons, Dan O'Bannon, Bob Odenkirk and more

• Over 100 images bringing the stories to life

• 40+ links to trailers, scenes, and supplementary material—turning this book into an interactive master class

• Real-world case studies from 33 groundbreaking low-budget films—from Clerks and El Mariachi to The Blair Witch Project and sex, lies, and videotape

• Field-tested lessons from the author's own four features—proof that these principles work in the real world, on set, in the edit room, and on screen

Whether you're shooting on your phone or scraping together a micro-budget, this is your master class in turning limitations into strengths.

No film school required. Just this book. 

Roger Corman called it the textbook for his legendary filmmaking school. Now it's your turn to learn from the best.

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! 

Jim McBride on “David Holzman’s Diary

Do you think David Holzman’s Diary was the first fake documentary?

JIM: There was a film by Stanton Kaye. It was just a year or two before mine. It was called Georg. It wasn't a very famous film. It was a guy, standing in front of the camera, and it was very political. I don't remember too much about it. He blew himself up at the end, in front of the camera.

What was your inspiration for David Holzman’s Diary?

JIM: It was a combination of things. Michael Powel's Peeping Tom had a big impression on me. I saw it when it was banned in the United States; maybe it was banned everywhere, I don't know. On my first visit to California, a guy I knew got a hold of a print of it and showed it at midnight at a movie theater that no longer exists here. I was just knocked out by it. The whole idea of self-examination. 

Then, in addition to that, I was very interested in Cinema Verite. Kit Carson and I were going to write something for the Museum of Modern Art about Cinema Verite, and we interviewed all these filmmakers--like the Maysles brothers, Ricky Leacock, Pennebaker, even Andy Warhol--who were making films that purportedly were for the first time entering into real life and finding out the truth. 

People were really passionate about this idea that you could find the truth with this new, light-weight equipment and faster film stocks and synch sound--all the stuff that was very new in the sixties. So at that time I was very passionately interested in all of that, and at the same time I felt there was something wrong here. 

Did you set out with the goal of fooling the audience?

JIM: That certainly wasn't the idea. One wanted to make a movie that would be believable. Yes, on one level you wanted people to believe that it was real and to affected by it, but on the other hand, I didn't set out with the intention of fooling people. But just as with any film you make, you want people to suspend their disbelief, you want people to believe it.

I know that this film is an important film to a lot of people, and always, constantly surprised when people come up to me and say, 'I saw your film when I was in college.'  My own experience with the film is that it's never had any kind of commercial release, it's never shown in theater. It really only has a life at film festivals and colleges. So I'm always surprised that more than seven people have seen it.

I know that at a lot of early showings people walked out, but I think that was more from being bored than being fooled.

I guess a lot of people did believe it, but I think the more common reaction is to be caught up in it as it's going along, and then maybe be surprised when you see the credits at the end, but then feel that, 'Oh, that makes sense. It was worth the trip that it took me on.'

What was the process for making the movie?

JIM: This was actually the second go-round. In 1966 I was working at a company that sold land in Florida. And it did it through films. I was serving an apprenticeship there, learning to shoot, learning to edit, stuff like that. I got this idea for what was later to become David Holzman's Diary, and they let me borrow their equipment on weekends. 

We shot a bunch of stuff, all most all of it improvised--and not very well, I should add--and then as we were shooting, I got fired. So I packed it all up into a box and put it in the trunk of my car, and I went around looking for a cutting room that someone would lend me so I could put these pieces together. And when I finally did locate a cutting room a couple of weeks later, I went to the car and opened it up and discovered that someone had stolen the film. 

In those days, 16mm was associated with porn, so my guess is that's why somebody took it. They must have been terribly disappointed. And I was terribly disappointed myself, but as time went by, I was kind of relieved, because it really sucked. 

But somehow the experience of doing it made me realize how I should have done it differently.

Then, about a year later, I hooked up with these two guys, quite separately: Kit Carson and Michael Wadleigh, who was a cinematographer. It was actually Michael who encouraged me to try it again. 

I had been working with him as a soundman; he was a Verite cameraman and we did a lot of work and went to some interesting places. He was a very talented cinematographer. He sort of organized it all in a way: We'd do a job during the week, and then we'd keep the equipment over the weekend and turn it in on Monday morning. But over the weekend we would shoot stuff for David Holzman's Diary. We used short ends from jobs we'd been working on, and we'd actually send the stuff through the lab with stuff from the companies we were working for. So really it didn't cost anything and we did it in a gradual way, accumulated footage.

For those parts of the film that took place in his apartment--we really did it all in one long weekend, I think--we spent several days beforehand with just a tape recorder in a room. I would give him a sense of what I wanted to have happen in a given scene, and then he would put it into his own words, and then we'd listen to the tape and I'd say 'I like this, I don't like that, change this.' 

Later on in life we became collaborators on various screenplays, but this was our first collaboration.

It's a lot simpler when it's just one person talking into a microphone than two or three actors trying to do something dramatic together. It was very much controlled improvisation, and by the time we actually went to shoot the scene--although it wasn't written down--we all knew exactly what was going to happen. Because we didn't have a lot of film to fuck around with, so we had to get it on the first or second take. So it was pretty carefully rehearsed.

What’s the story behind the woman in the Thunderbird?

JIM: That pretty much happened, just as you see it on the screen, except that Kit choked and it was Michael Wadleigh who was asking most of the questions.  

We never bothered to get a release from her, of course. I didn't have any equipment of my own, but I had a friend who had a movie projector, so we would often go over to his house to screen dailies, without sound. 

A few weeks later, this friend who owned the projector called me up and said, 'I had this amazing experience last night. I met the woman, who was in your movie. I was walking along Broadway at two o'clock in the morning, and she pulled up in that Thunderbird and she threw open the passenger side door and patted on the seat. I recognized her and I hopped in.' So he went home with her and slept with her. And he said to me, 'I don't know if I slept with a man or a woman.'

Now cut to a couple years later than that, and we actually have a legitimate company that's interested in distributing the film. But, of course, they want releases on everything. So some guy from the company went out and found her and got a release from her. It turned out she was a transsexual who lived in the neighborhood, and she was happy to be on film and happy to sign a release.

Because we had no commercial ambitions for the film, we never worried about releases. So we felt quite comfortable filming on the streets. And I think some of the best material in the film, such as people sitting on benches and other kind of neighborhood stuff, that if we were making a film that we imaged would be released in theaters, we could never have shot that stuff, because there would be no way to get everybody's permission.

What was the best decision you made on the film?

JIM: It's hard to think of everything being intentional. Stuff kind of evolves. I guess having the idea was the best thing I ever did. The actual enacting of it I have to share blame or the credit with my collaborators, Michael and Kit. It really was a group effort in many ways.

I've actually written a script for a sequel to David Holzman's Diary, that I've been trying to raise money for. One of the producers was telling me recently that she felt there wasn't enough of David in the story. I was trying to take Pepe's advice and keep him off the screen. And she said, 'No, no, he's so charming, you have to get more of him on the screen.'

Dying to make a feature? Learn from the pros!

When Fast, Cheap & Under Control first hit shelves in 2006, it became the underground handbook for a generation of indie filmmakers. Now, two decades on, this 20th Anniversary Special Edition proves the lessons inside aren't just timeless—they're more essential than ever.

What's changed? Technology. Platforms. Distribution.
What hasn't? The grit, ingenuity, and sheer determination it takes to make a great film with nothing but vision and hustle.

Inside, you'll find:

• Exclusive interviews with legends like Steven Soderbergh, Roger Corman, Jon Favreau, Henry Jaglom, Kasi Lemons, Dan O'Bannon, Bob Odenkirk and more

• Over 100 images bringing the stories to life

• 40+ links to trailers, scenes, and supplementary material—turning this book into an interactive master class

• Real-world case studies from 33 groundbreaking low-budget films—from Clerks and El Mariachi to The Blair Witch Project and sex, lies, and videotape

• Field-tested lessons from the author's own four features—proof that these principles work in the real world, on set, in the edit room, and on screen

Whether you're shooting on your phone or scraping together a micro-budget, this is your master class in turning limitations into strengths.

No film school required. Just this book. 

Roger Corman called it the textbook for his legendary filmmaking school. Now it's your turn to learn from the best.

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! 

Richard Glatzer on writing/directing “Grief”

There’s a well-worn adage that says you should “write what you know.” That’s what the late Richard Glatzer did when he decided to make his first feature film. He took his experiences as a writer/producer of the TV show Divorce Court, and combined it with the loss he had recently suffered after the death of his partner.

The subsequent film – filled with such indie stalwarts as Craig Chester, Illeana Douglas, Alexis Arquette, Paul Bartel and Mary Woronov – is really a quintessential independent film: Funny, sad, personal and in its own way, universal. 

What was going on in your career before you wrote Grief?

RICHARD: I had sold some scripts to Disney and had written afternoon specials for ABC -- one of which actually got produced -- but mostly I found that I was making some money as a writer and getting very frustrated at never seeing any of my words come to life.  I basically had given up on the idea of doing anything in Hollywood; I was doing a nightclub one night a week and just goofing off, after having produced Divorce Court for a couple years.

Producer Ruth Charney suggested that we work on a movie together. I said I had no interest in doing anything unless it was a movie that we could make on as little money as anyone could make a movie. Otherwise it wasn’t going to get done. I had enough experience trying to get things done through more conventional channels. So, I thought if I conceive of a movie that’s basically one location, and think of it as an independent, independent, independent film, then maybe we can actually do it.

She suggested that I do something inspired by my experiences working on Divorce Court. I thought about it and thought I didn’t want to do some Soap Dish-y thing; that I wanted it to have other stuff going on. A lot of the film is autobiographical, and I had been dealing with my lover dying at the time I was working on that show. And I thought that would make it more interesting then if it were just some sort of satire of Divorce Court.

So then the idea of it began to take shape. To me, that became more interesting, if you limited it to one location. To conceive of a film from the outset as ultra-low budget is the way to do it.  You don’t start with a bigger idea and then whittle it down.

Let’s back up. How did you get into producing Divorce Court?

RICHARD: I sold these two scripts to Disney, when there was a different group of people in charge there. And then one of them ended up as the producer-story editor for Divorce Court. I was still living in New York at the time and thinking about going to LA. I spoke to the guy who had been the head of the studio and he said I should talk to this woman who’s over at Divorce Court and see if she can get me some work there.  And I thought, “Oh my god -- Divorce Court.” 

But it ended up being more regular employment and more fun than anything else I ever worked on. I thought I’d be there for a week and it ended up being five years. I ended up producing the thing.

Once you had the idea, how long did it take to write Grief?

RICHARD: I wrote it quickly; it was the easiest script I’ve written. I usually don’t keep journals, but I happened to write down in a little notebook the day that Ruth suggested thinking about this. It was the end of October in ‘91, and I had a draft of the script by early January ‘92; and I hadn’t even started thinking about it at the end of October, ‘91. So it was pretty fast.

How did you go about funding the movie?

RICHARD: I had about $20,000 saved and we raised another $20,000 from people who were willing to put up $5,000 investments -- none of which was easy. 

I think the gay content helped a little bit, that people felt that it was some sort of community function or something. But it also, obviously, limited the film in terms of people thinking they were ever going to see a lot of money coming back. Ruth put up $5,000. It was mostly little bits and pieces, mostly from friends.

We raised $40,000, and at the same time we were doing that, I put together my cast just by going to Sundance and seeing Craig Chester in Swoon and meeting people at parties or wherever.  

That’s where I met Illeana Douglas. Just as I was leaving -- I hadn’t even spoken to her, really -- and I got my coat and was on the way out the door, it suddenly clicked that she was perfect for Leslie. I just went up to her and said, “Hey, you wouldn’t by any chance do some low-budget, independent fag film, would you?”

And she said, “I bet you’re the kind of guy who loves Edgar Ulmer movies.” And I was a big Edgar Ulmer fan, so within a day or two she said, “I’ll do your movie,” as soon as I got her the script.

So I assembled the cast and felt like I had this really great group of people. We’d all been hoping to get more money than $40,000, but there was nothing coming. 

Did you write the script with particular actors in mind? 

RICHARD: No. Alexis Arquette and Jackie Beat I knew from this club I was doing; they both performed there. I was thinking of them as I was writing the script; not from the outset, but as I was writing it, I started to realize that I was hearing Jackie Beat saying these lines. 

So by the time I finished the script I definitely had them in mind for those two roles. But it wasn’t like from the beginning I was going to write a role for Jackie Beat or write a role for Alexis.  

How long did you shoot?

RICHARD: We shot for ten days. It was ten days for the bulk of the shooting and then we did an extra half day in the courtroom.  That was our big production value, which of course we made look like shit by deteriorating it. We shot it on film and it looked really good and then we went and shot it off a monitor.

At the time we didn’t know how it was going to work. And I thought if I shoot it on film, I have the option to use it on film and if I shoot it on video, then I’m stuck with video. It was basically a half day; we were out of there at three, three thirty. 

Did the script change much during shooting?

RICHARD: It was an ongoing process; I was always scrutinizing it and always fiddling with it. Then working with the actors was really helpful. 

We did have a week of rehearsal and that was really great and crucial, especially for doing a movie that fast -- and one like this, which was so character and performance oriented. I felt that was the highest value of the film, the quality group of people I put together and I wanted to make sure that the parts really came alive.

Did you change the script after the week of rehearsal?

RICHARD: There was a lot of re-writing in rehearsal and throughout the whole process -- in the editing room as well. The finished movie is maybe 75% of what was in the original script, but there are little things tweaked here and there.  

This was especially true of emotional stuff; you’d see it and think, "Wait a minute, there’s not enough here, it’s not sounding right." So I would scribble things down on slips of paper and hand them to them. Later I had to get a continuity script together for TV stations and I was like, “Oh my God, where did I put that scene?”

It’s not really like I threw the script out, it’s not that. It’s basically about three-fourths of what was in the script. It’s trying to make all of it right. It was just constantly fiddling with it.  

And I felt really good about that, because I think everyone’s hesitation about a writer-director is that you’re going to think that every word is sacrosanct. I felt like I was very able to put the writing behind me and just listen to it and watch it and see if it was working or not.

My actors were a really smart group of people, so I could trust them, if they said “Wait a minute” about their character.  Most of the time they were right and that was really good, because it was a great sounding board. Actors are always like that, but I think some actors are better able to see what’s missing or know when something’s not sounding right than other actors are. I credit them with a lot of that.

Then also, in the editing room, I thought, “Oh, everything’s fine,” and then you’d put it together and realize, “Wait a minute, there’s a beat missing here,” or you’ve got to move this thing before that thing or it doesn’t pay off. Just all that kind of stuff.   

So you were re-writing even while you were editing?

RICHARD: I shot the bulk of the movie in ten and a half days, but six months down the line -- after I had a rough cut of the movie -- I realized that there were some important emotional beats that were missing. So we went back and shot an extra day’s worth of stuff. 

These were pretty crucial scenes. There are other scenes they replaced. All the stuff that was taking place near the stage -- because we couldn’t have access to our original location again.  

The big scene where Jackie Beat talks about being fat and the scene where Illeana asks Craig to marry her, that was done somewhere else and we just made it look like it was part of the sound stage in that same building. 

There were things that were replaced by those scenes, but those new scenes were really crucial.

The Love Judge scenes were very funny. Did you ever intend to include more of them?

RICHARD: I wish I’d had money to really do the whole shooting of The Love Judge, rather than just do scenes from the episodes -- to actually see the judge carrying on, to see the actors have the scripts re-written under their noses, and all that kind of stuff. I thought that could have really been fun. 

But it just seemed like then we’d have to rent real video cameras and real lights and all that stuff that we didn’t have a budget for. That was the closest we could get to it.  

Since you lost your original set for the re-shoots, how did you come up with the idea to set the scenes backstage at the show?

RICHARD: It was just a way for us to make up for not being able to re-shoot in the original location. I don’t know if I would have even tried that if we’d had access to the original location. So it turned out to be a blessing that we didn’t have access to it, because it let us fake it. And all that set was, was a stage at this place called Lace, which is a performance art theater/gallery downtown. There was nothing there, it was this black, empty space. So we made it work.

Do you think there were any advantages to not having a larger budget?

RICHARD: I set out to make a movie in one location for financial reasons. I think the whole idea of grieving and the fact that Mark’s dealing with the death of his boyfriend, to me is so much more interesting indirectly and seen only in the office. 

I think if we’d had money to go shoot Mark crying at home, or something -- just because we maybe had the money, and you’d think, “Oh, we have to cover that” -- to me the movie gained its identity and meaning from giving him that sense of privacy and from being limited to the office. That was a budgetary limitation that ended up working in the movie’s favor.

Of course, it probably would have been distributed wider and seen as a more mainstream movie if we’d had more locations -- a lot of running around and all that stuff.

Did you write the scenes from The Love Judge for an existing set?

RICHARD: No. My producer, Yoram Mandel, made phone calls to see what he could get cheap. The people liked him over the phone; he explained how there was no money in this film, and they said “We’ll let you have the set for $500,” which by LA standards for a day is great. The only thing they said was that we had to go with their schedule and I never knew from one day to the next when it would be available.  

So we only had two days notice to get up there. I had Tim Roth and a couple other people who were going to do cameos in those scenes and they couldn’t because of the last-minute scheduling.  But I was thrilled that Paul Bartel and Mary Woronov were willing to do it.

How long did it take to finish the movie?

RICHARD: It took forever to post it. We didn’t have enough money; the $40,000 was to shoot it, but we didn’t have anything left to do any of the post. We were trying to raise money and trying to find freebie stuff. There was this UCLA student who had this KEM deck at home and she was synching dailies for us. She let us in there to cut some stuff.  

It’s so frustrating when you’ve got this in the can and you want to work on it and you can’t. It took us about a year to edit the thing, getting a few bucks here, a few bucks there and begging favors everywhere.  There was a post house near me, an editing facility that would let us go in there for free. They were sympathetic and trying to help us out.

And really the only reason it ever got finished was because Mark Finch, who was the head of the Gay & Lesbian Film Festival in San Francisco, saw a rough cut of the film and loved it and said he would give us the closing night if we could finish. So then it was this panic to finish it.

I put up more money -- fool that I was -- in order to finish it. No one was coming up with any money. I made him a personal guarantee that I was going to get the film done and we had two or three months and there was no money and so I finally just put the money up.

Did that festival help?

RICHARD: It was a partial success story.  It was a huge hit there and it was like a dream come true to be there. It’s a 1,500 seat theater and that town’s just insane. These people go there and they have these wild opinions -- they either love it or they hate it -- and luckily with me they loved it. They just decided very early on that they loved this movie and they were screaming and carrying on throughout the whole movie.  

Then we got a great review in Variety and all of a sudden all these festivals wanted the film and there was this big Hollywood producer who had to meet with me and who loved the film. It just felt like, oh, now everything’s happening.  

Festival-wise, the film did really, really well. It played everywhere. St. Petersburg, New Zealand, Jerusalem, just every corner of the globe I could think of, it’s been.

Most of the time I went with it; a lot of these people can’t afford to fly you all around. But I went to Australia with it and I went to Berlin with it and I went to Italy and London a whole bunch of times. I could have gone to Hong Kong if I wanted to pay half my airfare, but I said no. I also could have gone to Jerusalem and I stupidly didn’t. It was right when it was with all these Italian festivals and I would have had a day here and a day there and it just seemed like, what’s the point?

I traveled with the film for about a year and a half, which was fun.

How was your Sundance experience?

RICHARD: Not very good. The film had been to Toronto and to Vancouver and to the Gay & Lesbian Festival in San Francisco and in Los Angeles. Most Sundance films are pretty new to the public, so by the time the film got there, it was sort of considered old news. I heard that in the first half audiences were pretty good, but by the time the second half happened, it was all these Hollywoody people. And they’d literally walk out during the opening credits.  

I’ve talked to a lot of people who have had similar experiences. And then we didn’t win any prizes and however stupid that is, you still want it. And you have to keep reminding yourself that Sundance prizes don’t really mean a hell of a lot. It’s usually the audience award that seems to indicate something about any commercial success. But nothing else seems to indicate anything.

I guess for my film, Sundance wasn’t that important. I’ve seen my film with audiences, like in Germany where the film was not subtitled, where they loved the film. Or in Toronto, where the film went over really, really well. 

And then I was there at Sundance and it felt like a total bomb. The audience, those Hollywood people, were completely inattentive and didn’t get it and didn’t give a shit and it just felt really bad. 

That’s not the festival’s fault, but that’s who’s going there these days. And they go there wanting the new Tarantino or something. My film is very quiet and you have to pay some attention and stick with it. And I definitely don’t think Sundance is the place for a film where you have to stick with it. Because they just don’t; they get up and they leave after five minutes. So that wasn’t fun.

What have been the positive effects of writing and shooting Grief?

RICHARD: Creatively, it’s the most gratifying thing I’ve ever done. No question. And financially, not. If I had it to over again, I would absolutely do it.  

It’s been an amazing thing to me, just really amazing to think how many thousands of people have seen this thing around the world and that it’s really moved some people and really gotten to some people and that I’ve gotten to meet so many people, filmmakers, through this. 

I really feel that there’s this great community of independent filmmakers, which is so unlike the Hollywood community and which has a real integrity to it. I’m just amazed how open filmmakers are. I’ve met so many people -- and I hope I’m this way, too -- who really are encouraging with other independent filmmakers. There’s no sense of competition, there’s only support. That’s been fantastic.

What were the downsides?

RICHARD: The financial, really.  Because of the financial thing, at times I’ll get down. I’ll see a film like Go Fish, which I really enjoyed, but which to me was like, that film, there was such a hoopla over it, such a huge amount of money given to them and such huge distribution for it. And I would think, “Is my movie not as good as Go Fish and why can’t my movie get that kind of release?”  

And I get resentful -- not toward Rose, who’s great, and not because of the film, because I really enjoyed the film -- but because of that sense that the marketing thing, that this is the first hip lesbian movie and so it’s going to get this big send-off and my movie’s just not.  

I’ve always fought with myself not to be resentful over -- especially over films I like -- but still there is such a freaky quality to what’s hot and what’s not. It doesn’t have anything to do with the reviews, because my film was really well reviewed. It doesn’t have anything to do with anything but how we can market this film and we can’t market that film or somebody at one of the distribution companies suddenly gets really worked up over something or whatever.

It’s hard to be satisfied. At one point I would have been satisfied just to finish the film, because I thought we’d never get the money to finish the film and I thought, “Oh, if I can only finish it -- it doesn’t matter if it’s distributed, if only I can finish it.”  

Then you get it finished and then you see it received well, and then you’re like, “Oh, well now I want more and I want more and I want more.” And then you think of all the films, independent films, that never get finished or never get out there or get to two festivals and then they disappear. I was so much luckier than that. 

Mostly, I’m really grateful for the whole thing and feel like -- absolutely -- if I had it to do over again, I would do it over again, because it was a really great experience.

One last question: Am I nuts, or is the actor who plays The Love Judge doing an impression of Lionel Barrymore?

RICHARD: Yes, the Love Judge is doing Lionel Barrymore. You’re the only person who’s ever figured that out. 

The actor, Mickey Cottrell (the clean freak in My Own Private Idaho) loves to do shtick. That morning, when we were at the location of the courtroom scene and he’s getting dressed, he said, “You know, I do a really mean Lionel Barrymore.” I said, “Let me hear it.” And he did his Lionel Barrymore. And I said, “That’s perfect, just do that.”  

It was perfect, it was just what I wanted -- a curmudgeonly character. But no one else has picked up on it. That’s so funny. 

Dying to make a feature? Learn from the pros!

When Fast, Cheap & Under Control first hit shelves in 2006, it became the underground handbook for a generation of indie filmmakers. Now, two decades on, this 20th Anniversary Special Edition proves the lessons inside aren't just timeless—they're more essential than ever.

What's changed? Technology. Platforms. Distribution.
What hasn't? The grit, ingenuity, and sheer determination it takes to make a great film with nothing but vision and hustle.

Inside, you'll find:

• Exclusive interviews with legends like Steven Soderbergh, Roger Corman, Jon Favreau, Henry Jaglom, Kasi Lemons, Dan O'Bannon, Bob Odenkirk and more

• Over 100 images bringing the stories to life

• 40+ links to trailers, scenes, and supplementary material—turning this book into an interactive master class

• Real-world case studies from 33 groundbreaking low-budget films—from Clerks and El Mariachi to The Blair Witch Project and sex, lies, and videotape

• Field-tested lessons from the author's own four features—proof that these principles work in the real world, on set, in the edit room, and on screen

Whether you're shooting on your phone or scraping together a micro-budget, this is your master class in turning limitations into strengths.

No film school required. Just this book. 

Roger Corman called it the textbook for his legendary filmmaking school. Now it's your turn to learn from the best.

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! 

Dylan Kidd on writing & directing "Roger Dodger"

Roger Dodger is an example of how – sometimes – all the pieces just fall into place. Writer-Director Dylan Kidd recognized that he’d created a great character when he came up with Roger Swanson. 

Actor Campbell Scott obviously agreed and stepped up to the challenge, bringing an amazing cast – Isabella Rossellini, Jennifer Beals, Ben Shenkman, and Elizabeth Berkley – along with him. Roger Dodger proves that it’s always a good idea to carry your best script with you wherever you go, because you just never know who you’re going to run into.

Where were you in your career before Roger Dodger happened?

Nowhere, really. I had gone to NYU film school and graduated in 1991 and then most of the 90s was spent struggling to get any kind of entry into the industry. I loaded cameras for a couple of years; I worked in real estate for a couple of years. I made a short film in 1996, which was the first directing I had done since school, and that was a nice little thing to get my confidence up a little bit. I spent a couple years doing training videos for hair salons, industrial films, you name it. So really Roger Dodger was a very dramatic beginning to my career.

What the value of all those jobs when it came time to do your first feature?

At the time I was absolutely thrilled to have the work, and I still feel that any time you are -- and this is more from a directing standpoint than from a screenwriting standpoint -- any time I was on a set, calling "action" and "cut," it was an opportunity to learn. And it's always good to shoot and go into the editing room and slap your forehead and think, "I should have gotten that!" It's all part of the training.

And in terms of screenwriting, it's all just fuel for the fire. In the case of helping the script for Roger Dodger, I was just getting more angry and frustrated at not being able to break in, so I ended up putting all that anger into the mouth of the main character. 

In my case, it was a long struggle, but absolutely worth it. I don't know how to do anything else, so for me there was no option. 

How many scripts had you written before Roger Dodger?

I had written two other feature scripts and then one that had been sort of abandoned. So I guess, two and a half. 

One screenplay was based on my experiences in real estate. Although it was nice to get it out of my system, I think I was aware when it was done that the script really wasn't good enough to show anybody. 

The other one was a horror movie, an attempt to do something in a genre. It was fine, but wasn't anything that I was that excited about. Roger Dodger was the first time that when I finished a script, I was like, "Okay, I want to make this movie." 

What was it about the script that made you feel that this was the one?

Probably the quality of the writing, but also the fact that this was the first time that I felt like I had a character that an actor would want to play. For me, a big thing about writing something that could be done for no money was trying to write a role that was so good that we could attract a name actor to work for what turned out to be peanuts. 

That was a big part of my strategy: write something that somebody would walk through broken glass to play. Most of your expense in a movie is the above-the-line costs. It's difficult but possible to make a movie for a low-budget. What's really hard is getting someone that anyone's ever heard of into that movie.

Every time an actor wins an award for stepping outside of their comfort zone, like Halle Berry for Monster's Ball or Charlize Theron for Monster, I think it sends a message to other actors that sometimes you need to take a chance. If you're making $12 million a picture, you don't need the money. So why not take two weeks, go shoot a little indie, and maybe you'll get a statue? That was my theory, anyway.

Where did the idea for the story come from?

The real estate script I had written was big in scope and so, apart from the fact that I didn't think it was that strong, even if someone did fall in love with it, it was still a big movie. So the idea of Roger Dodger was to give myself the assignment of writing something that could be done for no money. That lent itself to a series of conversations and monologues. 

It started with the idea of a guy who feels like he can tell everyone else what they're thinking. It was based on a friend of mine, who in college had this strange ability to go up to strangers and take their psychology apart in minute detail. It struck me as disturbing but also very compelling.

I started with Roger. It ended up being a buddy movie, but his nephew didn't come in until later drafts. You go through a certain amount of time thinking, "Well, maybe this guy is compelling enough, maybe people will sit and watch a train wreck for an hour and a half." 

And then there was a point where I realized there has to be some foil, a character who we want to protect has to enter the movie. There has to be a reason for people to hang on and keep watching.

Did you have a theme in mind when you started?

I was interested in how somebody's work could bleed into their personal life. I feel that New York is very much a place where you can be so ambitious in your career that you end up translating those techniques into your personal life. 

I liked the idea of a guy who works in advertising and actually ends up bringing that kind of rhetoric into the singles arena. The idea that he's literally trying to sell himself as a product, by creating insecurity in other people.

But the nephew didn't show up in early drafts?

I think I had one breakthrough draft, which was the first time when the nephew, Nick, came in, where it felt like this was the structure of the movie. After that there were endless tweakings.

Campbell Scott was very helpful, too. We were lucky enough to be able to rehearse quite a bit before we shot and Campbell helped me cut a lot of dialog. Because as wordy as the film is, the script was even more so. 

Usually actors are begging for more lines, so if an actor is saying, "I think we can cut the scene here," their instincts are usually pretty right on. They're not going to tell you to cut a line unless there's a real reason for it. And Campbell is also a writer and a director, so he had a really strong sense.

Probably the most important draft of the script was created two weeks before shooting, going into rehearsal and realizing that a ten-page monologue was finished at page seven; that we didn't need to keep ranting for another three pages. We probably would have figured that out in editing, but it was great to not actually have to go shoot all that.

How did you come up with the title?

I honestly can't remember. I think I remembered hearing that as a nickname for Roger Staubach and I like titles that have an alliterative quality and stick in your head a little bit. 

I also thought of this character as somebody who is dodging a bit. This is a guy that the audience is sort of chasing through the movie. And so our visual approach was that this was a guy who always had a cloud of cigarette smoke or something obscuring him. You could never really get this guy to sit still. 

What is your writing process?

I used to hate writing, because I didn't feel I was any good at it. It was so hard, and it takes you a while to realize that it's hard for everybody. If you spend the first two weeks of a project staring at a page, you learn to forgive yourself a little bit and realize that that's part of the process. 

I seem to work best in the morning. Roger Dodger was written while I had a job, so I was mainly writing at night. But now, I feel like my best hours are probably 8:30 to noon. I have a really hard time being at the keyboard for more than three hours, at least in the beginning. 

To me, the hardest part by far is the beginning. That's the easiest time to get discouraged and give up. But I have an almost religious faith, based on the scripts I've written, where there is some point where you break through. 

So for me, the first couple of months is a lot of not writing: thinking, obsessing, thinking this is a disaster that is never going to happen. Then something clicks and you start to write and you realize that all that worrying was really part of the process.

But I've never been somebody who can get up and put in a nine-to-five day writing. I just can't do it. At the very end, when you're racing to the finish line, then I probably could. But up until that point, if I put in three to four hours, I consider that a good day.

You're the first person I've talked to who has used the words "faith" and "forgive" to describe the process of writing.

And I'm an atheist! 

I remember reading a great quote that Stephen Gaghan said about writing Syriana. He was describing what he goes through when he writes a script and at the end he talked about self-loathing and not being able to get out of bed. 

The beginning is hard. You're trying to make order out of chaos, and chaos doesn't want to be ordered. If you can just get through that hard part, the first draft, then I think you'll be rewarded for your perseverance.

Do you follow a three-act structure in your scripts?

I guess so, but without really thinking about it. I read the Syd Field book when I was at NYU, but I think, for me, things work internally. I can't even remember thinking about the act breaks when I wrote Roger Dodger. I just had the sense that we were at this stage of the story and this is what should happen. 

If you go to 5,000 movies in your life, then without even knowing it that structure is going to be in there when you're writing. I don't think it's a front brain thing; it just ends up being in there.

I feel like the last thing you want to do in a first draft is to be thinking about what page is the act break. I'm the exact opposite of someone who knows the ending before they begin. For me, the first draft is the “spill it” draft. And after that you can look at it and think, "Well, I have a 70-page first act, that probably can't work. 

But your first time through is when your unconscious is really trying to tell you what the movie wants to be. For me it's important to follow your bliss in that first draft, even if it ends up at 180 pages or you hate everything but ten percent of it. At least you've got that ten percent, which is ten more than a lot of people have.

So you don't subscribe to the "the first act needs to end on page 30" philosophy?

The first draft, because there was no Nick character, I think there was a point where I read a draft and I literally started to get fatigued around page 25.

Once I realized that we needed Nick, the original plan was to introduce him very early in the movie so you had some sense that it wasn't just going to be about Roger. Campbell's performance was so great that we decided to roll the dice and I said "I think we can hang with this guy for about 20 minutes." Then we have the kid show up in the office, and a few minutes to get to know the kid and see how they relate, and then the movie can kick in.

There's something to be said for trying to fit it into a structure that people who read scripts for a living recognize. But for me it's always been a little more organic than having file cards and saying, "By page 40 I need to be here." But everyone's different.

Although it's a buddy movie, it is all from Roger's point of view. Do you think that's a function of the character of Nick essentially being a late addition in the scripting process?

Part of what we discovered was that Roger is controlling the tempo of the movie and the subject matter of what's being talked about, but in some weird way, Nick comes in at a moment when we're really starting to figure out something about Roger. 

Even if the movie isn't told through Nick's point of view, there's some way that we're linked to Nick, in that we're sitting there listening to this guy go on and on, and there's an interesting split that happens. We're aware that, as responsible people watching the movie, we feel that this kid should get away from this guy, but he doesn't. 

So the more that Nick buys into everything that's being told to him and the more we realize that, "Wait, this is the last guy you want to be asking for advice," there's something interesting that happens. 

It's the classic Hitchcock situation, where you've told the audience that there's a bomb under the table -- you told the audience, "here's who Roger is." And then you introduce someone who doesn't know what we know. It creates suspense, because you want him to get away but you also want him to somehow redeem Roger.

That's absolutely right. And somehow we thought that would work better if you were introduced to Nick early, because we thought if you set up that collision course, people are really going to be on the edge of their seats. And then we discovered that it was actually better to have the first 20 minutes be all about Roger and then you have the kid show up. 

Under the guise of a talky, chamber piece, we're actually using every trick in the book to keep people in their seats -- it's a buddy movie, it's a Hitchcock movie, it's a sex movie. We were shameless in what we were doing. It's hard to have people just sitting and talking without there being serious subtext.

Were you writing to a particular budget?

No, but having a background in production was definitely a help. I had the understanding that if you could tell the movie in one night there would be only one wardrobe change. 

There are basic rules that are pretty commonsensical, like don't have a car chase, don't make it a period piece, keep your locations to a minimum. 

Also, a big thing for us was that we knew we were going to shoot with two cameras and that allows you to really burn through scenes more quickly. Basically, the whole second act of the movie is four people sitting at a banquette, having this extended conversation. We were able to shoot that entire thing in a day and a half because we were rolling two cameras.

There's a scene where Roger takes the kid out into the street; it's the first time where he's instructing the kid. It's a long, extended scene and even when it was written it was intended to be shot in one take. That was a 12-page scene that we shot in half a day. If you have two sequences like that, that's twenty percent of your movie that's shot in three days. 

Did knowing that you were writing for a small budget cramp your creativity in any way?

Not really. This was one of those movies that felt like it wanted to be tighter. There were earlier drafts that took place over a longer span of time and it just felt like it wanted to be as tight as possible. 

So there's nothing in the movie that I feel we would have done differently if we'd had more money, except for the luxury of being able to shoot more. But if somebody had said, "We love it, here's 2 million dollars," I wouldn't have written in some dream sequence of Roger when he was young. It just felt like it is what it is, that we were dropped into the middle of this guy's meltdown, and we hang on just to make sure that the kid's going to get out of there okay.

Did you write with specific actors in mind?

I didn't and I still don't. I have a hard time doing that, because I don't want to get too attached. I didn't have anybody in mind, so when we stumbled upon Campbell in this really crazy way, it was nice not to have some presupposed notion of it has to be this guy or that guy.

How did you get Campbell Scott?

My producer partner and I got to a stage where we realized, "we're not going to get this movie made in the standard fashion." It's like that New York thing, where nobody ever finds an apartment by actually going through the real estate listings. It's always somebody you know; there's always some backdoor.

So, really in a fit of insanity, thinking if I don't make this movie I'm going to go crazy, I started carrying the script with me every day. I thought, "Well, I live in New York, maybe I'll run into somebody." And that's how it happened -- two weeks after starting that routine of not leaving the house without the script, I walked into a café and there was Campbell.

I didn't realize that most people will not accept an unsolicited screenplay, because it opens you up to all kinds of potential litigation. But I was so clueless at that point.

Any advice to someone who wants to try the same thing when they spot the perfect actor or actress for their script?

The only advice that I have is to be really polite and make sure that you really do have a killer part to offer.

I'm not necessarily somebody who stalks people or is really aggressive or goes up to people, but I was so sure that this was a great role for somebody, I really believed. I might not have believed that the movie was going to work, but I knew this was a lot of meaty dialog for someone to perform. So I really believed that I wasn't wasting his time. If I wasn't sure, I would not have gone up to him. 

If you get to the stage where you feel like you have this great gift that you can give somebody, then it allows you to feel like you're not just disturbing this guy's lunch.

Did you do any re-writing to fit the cast?

Nothing to fit the cast. We were lucky. Basically every actor in the movie was our first choice, so there wasn't a whole lot of "Oh, this person can't handle this type of thing," or "This person is really good at this – we should add more." 

Fairly late in the game we added the epilogue where Roger goes back and sees Nick in Ohio. That was something that came from doing a reading. We did a reading where we found Jesse Eisenberg, who played Nick, and he was so good at the reading that we got really excited because we thought, okay, we actually have someone who can play this role. 

That reading was a huge epiphany, because we realized there was an actor who exists on planet Earth who could play this role. It really lit a fire under us, because we thought Jesse would grow a beard in a year and his voice is going to drop, or whatever, so we've got to move. 

It was sort of our "That's our Hitler!" moment from The Producers.

The other thing we learned from the reading was this huge sense of when the movie ended. The original ending had Roger putting Nick into a cab to the airport and you could just feel the air go out of the room, because the audience cared so much about Nick, because Jesse was so good. They wanted to know if he was going to be okay.

So it was combining that sense of wanting the narrative pleasure of following through and also, just for me, I really wanted to stick Roger in a cafeteria full of kids. I don't know why, it's such a guilty pleasure for me. The movie starts with Roger having lunch in this restaurant with all these adults and then by the end of the movie he's actually found his peer group.

So I think it was a combination of sensing that the audience would feel ripped off if the movie cut to black at that point and also having this visual of Campbell Scott bopping above all these other heads in the cafeteria.

Do you show drafts to friends or use readings to gauge how you're progressing?

I like readings. I'm not a fan of too much feedback. I'm stubborn that way. I like feedback, but for me the whole point of a reading is to sit in the room and you just know -- you just know if something's dead or if something's working. 

I do have people that I turn to and that I care about what they think. But my feeling is that, unless the comments match something I already felt in my gut anyway, or if every person has the same comment, then I know I have an issue. I generally have found that putting too much stock in feedback can get confusing, because people are going to have a hundred different opinions.

Is there anything in the movie that people tried to talk you out of that you're glad you stuck to your guns on?

I tend to be the opposite. I tend to be the guy that cuts too quickly. I loved when the Coen brothers released their Director's Cut of Blood Simple, and it was like eight minutes shorter or whatever. That would be me.

My experience has been that if I have a gut feeling, if I know something isn't working, I don't need to be told to take it out. And someone says it isn't working for them, but some gut things says I want to keep it in, I guess the reward I get for writing the script and putting myself through this is that I get to say, "No, I don't want to lose that." 

There has to be something in the script that gets you juiced, otherwise it's dead on arrival. I think you have to fight for that, even if you're not going to be the one directing it.

Did knowing that you were going to direct it change the way you wrote the script?

I don't think so. But I think that's probably why I say I don't enjoy writing. It's mainly because I love directing and I think of myself as a director. 

So the writing is this very necessary part, but it's not the fun part. For me it's less about hating writing and more about getting impatient, because I want to get to the point where I can go and start collaborating with others.

What is the most fun part?

I really like editing, which is very much like writing. It's just more fun, because you get very tangible results very quickly. 

For me, I enjoy the entire process, but I probably add the most value in the editing room. I think I'm fine as a director on the set, but I'm not some Ridley Scott genius who always knows where to put the camera, and I'm not John Cassavetes, where I would say the right thing to the actors. 

But the editing room is a place where my tenacity pays off, because I just keep working the footage and refuse to stop tweaking. I just find it really enjoyable, not walking away until a scene is as absolutely good as it can be.

There's a shot right near the end of the movie where Roger is sitting alone on his couch, smoking and thinking, and the smoke disappears in front of him, like a cloud of fog lifting. Was that in the script or a happy accident?

That's the one effect that was completely scripted. 

There was a deliberate structure, where the first image of Roger was of him expelling a plume of smoke. Then, we really labored over that last shot of him smoking. It's the only dolly shot in the film. Our poor cinematographer had to light it in a certain way, so that the smoke would read. 

I don't know if anybody even gets it, but I still get a kick out of it when I see it. "Oh, look, he's coming out of the fog." It was even written in the script that way, something like, "Roger exhales and then the smoke lifts … 

Although you created Roger, I'm sure there was a point where Campbell took him over and knew him better than you did. Do you remember when that point was?

Probably by lunch on the first day. 

I had a really interesting thing happen with Campbell. I think good film actors work really small. There's a great interview with John Travolta where he says he always has to remind directors that they might not see what he's doing on the set, but they'll see it on the screen. These guys are working at a level where the camera can almost read their minds.

My initial concept for Roger had been much more manic. But Campbell brought this total James Bond sophistication to it, where he's saying these horrible things but it's going down so smoothly. That was a total surprise to me and I had a panicked reaction. We talked and he said it's going to be fine. And I thought, I've cast this guy and he's great. Maybe this is not what I had in mind, but maybe that's the whole point. 

Since then I've learned that that moment of surprise is the very best feeling you can experience on the set. If you don't feel surprised, you're in trouble. The whole point is that you write a script and then the actors turn it into something so much better and richer and different than you ever thought. 

It wasn't until the end of the shoot that I realized how right Campbell's choice had been. The only way people would stand this guy was if he was kind of suave about it. If he had done what I had pictured in my head, the movie would have been a disaster. So that was a great lesson. 

I think I imagined the character as constantly pushing people away and what Campbell was doing was more of a push/pull thing, where he reels you in and then pushes you away. That's so much more interesting than what I had in mind. 

I don't think I'll ever make a movie that turned out so much better than I imagined. I thought the script was good, but the actors added so much. 

You were quoted once as saying you wanted every character in this movie, even if they only had one line, to be so well-drawn that they were worthy of their own movie. How do you go about doing that?

I think that's something that's easy to say, but in the end it comes down to the actors. It's very easy to say that you want people to feel that you could go off with any character, but unless it's Jennifer Beals who's riding off in that cab, maybe you're not really going to give a shit and you'll say, "I'll let her ride away."

I think it was more about just wanting to instill in the actors some sense that everyone is important, that there are no supporting characters. But I do believe that it's the responsibility of the writer to love every character equally. Once you start writing a character who is only there in order to fulfill some piece of plot machinery, then nobody is going to care about that person. 

I have this clear memory of being about twelve years old and going to a James Bond movie. There was a scene in the movie where the main henchman gets in a fight with an extra character in the movie -- some Secret Service guy we'd never seen. And it ends up being a really long fight. I remembered being so thrilled that this guy, who you'd think would be dispatched immediately, gets a nice scene. 

I always enjoy it when characters come in and you make a snap judgment about them and then they surprise you, either by claiming more of your attention than you thought or just being richer than you thought. 

It's our job to remind audiences that every character has something going on and everyone has a story to tell. It sound pretentious, but that's where our heads were at when we made the movie.

What did you learn writing Roger Dodger that you still use today on higher-budget projects?

The main thing that I learned from that script was that it was the first time ever when I was writing something that I thought, "This is good, this is working." 

My other scripts had been okay, competent, but the hair on the back of my neck didn't stand up. For me, the most important thing now is trying to make sure that I get as close as I can to that feeling. I never want to settle for, "Oh, this is okay." You want people to read it and get genuinely excited about it and want to shoot it.

You’ve got to get to a place where you are genuinely pumped with what you're doing. As hard as it is, you can't give up on a script until you've gotten to that place.

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

I have to say it was that Stephen Gaghan quote I mentioned earlier. That was the first time that it really hit home for me that it's hard for everybody and that 90 percent of writing might just be staring into space or reading a book and feeling like you're procrastinating.

Writing is so hard that I only want to do it if I'm absolutely dying to tell that story. My advice would be, particularly in the beginning, the only thing that is going to make your script jump off the page for a reader who's read a hundred scripts that day – the only thing that's going to make a difference – is that there's something about it that's getting you up each morning. Even if it's the least commercial idea in the world, I have to believe that somehow that passion translates to the page.

My experience with Roger Dodger was that I had written two other scripts that I thought were good, and then it wasn't until I wrote Roger Dodger that I realized that there's a difference between just "good" and "holy shit this is good." The industry is tough enough and competitive enough that if you're going to go out to somebody, whether it's an agent or an actor or you're going to submit it to a studio, it has to have that holy shit feeling.

Dying to make a feature? Learn from the pros!

When Fast, Cheap & Under Control first hit shelves in 2006, it became the underground handbook for a generation of indie filmmakers. Now, two decades on, this 20th Anniversary Special Edition proves the lessons inside aren't just timeless—they're more essential than ever.

What's changed? Technology. Platforms. Distribution.
What hasn't? The grit, ingenuity, and sheer determination it takes to make a great film with nothing but vision and hustle.

Inside, you'll find:

• Exclusive interviews with legends like Steven Soderbergh, Roger Corman, Jon Favreau, Henry Jaglom, Kasi Lemons, Dan O'Bannon, Bob Odenkirk and more

• Over 100 images bringing the stories to life

• 40+ links to trailers, scenes, and supplementary material—turning this book into an interactive master class

• Real-world case studies from 33 groundbreaking low-budget films—from Clerks and El Mariachi to The Blair Witch Project and sex, lies, and videotape

• Field-tested lessons from the author's own four features—proof that these principles work in the real world, on set, in the edit room, and on screen

Whether you're shooting on your phone or scraping together a micro-budget, this is your master class in turning limitations into strengths.

No film school required. Just this book. 

Roger Corman called it the textbook for his legendary filmmaking school. Now it's your turn to learn from the best.

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! 

Susan Seidelman on “Desperately Seeking Susan”

How did you get started in filmmaking?

SUSAN: When I started out, I thought I wanted to be a fashion designer. When I originally went to college, I went to a school in Philadelphia for design. Just on a whim I took a film appreciation course; this was in the mid-70s, and film schools were not nearly as popular as they are today. I liked watching movies and I got hooked on watching movies. 

And then I kept taking more and more film appreciation classes. They didn't have film equipment, and it was certainly before digital, so it wasn't like you could take your home video camera and make a movie. So I started to make radio plays, because they had a radio studio at the school. 

Little by little I realized that one of the things that I liked about film was that it combined a lot of the things I was interested in, like design, storytelling, music. And then on a whim I decided to apply to NYU film school. It was not that hard to get into film school back then, and so without ever having made a film (I sent them a design portfolio with the radio drama tapes I'd made), somehow I got accepted.

But once I started film school and got the chance to make my own little films and work on crews and play with the equipment, I realized that was not only something that I loved, but it was something that I found I was kind of good at, on the student level. I was nominated for a student Academy Award, so I was getting positive feedback from the little student films I was making and I was able to win some grants to continue to make longer and longer short films.

But I never really thought how I was going to have a career as a filmmaker. I wasn't very pragmatic in terms of having a long-term plan; I just was making these little films and they were winning some awards and I was getting money to make a longer film. So basically what happened was, after I graduated from film school, I stayed in touch with the people who I had worked with in film school. As my films were getting longer (from a twenty-minute film to a thirty-minute film to my last short film, which was forty-five-minutes), I figured, why not try to make an eighty or ninety-minute film?

So, using the same crew I had been working with earlier, we just did that. I don't even know how. It was just very naive; it was kind of like one of those Judy Garland/Mickey Rooney musicals: 'Hey, let's put on a show!'

My grandmother had passed away and I had a little bit of money, about $20,000. So I was going to make a feature film for $20,000. All the people who worked on it did it for a little bit of rent money and some food and deferred salaries that they thought they would never get. But that film turned out to be Smithereens, which was invited to the Cannes Film Festival, and that put me on a professional path.

But I never really planned it and I certainly didn't have any role models to speak of. I had heard of Ida Lupino but I didn't really know of her films. The only role models I did have were some European women, like Agnes Varda and Lina Wertmüller.

But in terms of American women, every once in a while I'd hear about one woman who made a film, but they were more one-off kind of things. But except for Ida Lupino and Dorthy Arzner from the very early days, I didn't know of any women who had a career as a film director and a body of work.

So instead of planning it, with one thing leading into the next, I sort of stumbled into making this feature film that got some attention and got picked up for distribution by New Line Cinema. It made some money and I was able to pay back the deferments to the cast and crew, who had never expected to make any money from this. The film got some good reviews and the next thing I knew I had an agent in Los Angeles who was sending me some scripts.

It sounds like your transition from making shorts to making a feature was pretty seamless and painless.

SUSAN: It really was, because the short films just kept getting longer. And I realized, after the forty-five-minute short, that it just seemed stupid to do a sixty-minute short; I just figured, why not make it eighty or whatever. And that became a feature.

Today young filmmakers are very savvy. They know how to get an agent, what's going on at the box office at any given moment. But back then it was pre-Internet and on TV there was no Entertainment Tonight, so people didn't really know -- or at least, I didn't really know -- that much about the business. And to some extent that was a blessing, because my efforts were totally uncalculated. I never thought, 'I'm going to make this film to get an agent.' I just made the film because it was a story I wanted to tell.

I never thought about how to get a distributor. My ignorance was, in a way, an asset, because I was just doing it for the passion of wanting to make this movie. Which is the best way to do it.

One of the problems I notice now, teaching at a pretty high-profile film school, is that the kids, because they are not naive, are already calculating to some extent how to make the movie that's going to get them the agent. Or what did what at the box office. Or this kind of movie does well and if I get this actor than I can do this. As opposed to just focusing on this is a story that I really want to tell and I think I'm going to tell it in a unique way.

How did you make the often treacherous transition from self-generating your material to looking at scripts submitted by studios?

SUSAN:  Smithereens went to the Cannes Film Festival in 1982. There were a few women who had made a one-off movie that had gotten some attention and then they made their next movie, a studio movie, that didn't work and then I never heard of them again. So I was aware of the fact that if your first movie is the movie you've been waiting your whole life to make, and you're doing it your way, that you want to make sure that the next movie you make -- when you suddenly have people looking over your shoulder and you have an outside producer who isn't your best friend from film school -- that you better make the right choices. Because it's so easy to get overwhelmed by the process. You better choose your material wisely.

So between 1982 and 1984 I had this agent and I was getting sent some scripts; a lot of them were dumb and some of them were things I just couldn't relate to. And then I read this script called Desperately Seeking Susan and it just spoke to me. 

The subject matter was a little bit about a world I knew, because it was set in downtown New York and that's where Smithereens was set. But it also had a bigger component, because it combined two worlds: it had this suburban housewife character and it had this downtown street character that was very similar to the kind of world I had dealt with in Smithereens. 

So it felt like the right organic step -- like going from longer shorts to a feature -- and I wasn't going far outside of the world I was interested in, but yet it was expanding that world a little bit. It was telling a more complicated story and it was a bigger budget, but it wasn't such a big budget that I didn't think I could handle it. 

And the other interesting thing about it was that the two producers who had sent me the script -- Midge Sanford and Sarah Pillsbury -- were first-time producers. So it was like I was the experienced one, because I had made a low-budget feature already. So I didn't feel like I was getting this big, heavy Hollywood producer looking over my shoulder who was going to intimidate me. It was two women that I liked and for who it was their first time, too.

Can you remember any of the scripts you were sent that you said "no" to?

SUSAN: I remember one script that I was sent that I think got made into a movie. I think a woman ended up directing and it's a movie that you probably would never remember. I think it was called The Joy of Sex. It was like a book title that they tried to turn into a movie but didn't. It didn't take off.

As a female director, the kinds of things I was sent were teen girl movies. There's nothing wrong with teen girl movies if they're interesting -- certainly Amy Heckerling did a very interesting one, Fast Times at Ridgemont High -- but the one I was getting sent weren't that good.

How involved were you in the casting of Desperately Seeking Susan?

SUSAN: I was pretty involved in the casting, but I wasn't involved in Rosanna Arquette. When Midge and Sarah brought me the script, Rosanna was already attached. She was a given. 

It took some time to get the movie financed, so we worked together on script revisions and meetings at studios trying to get it made for several months.

When we knew that the film was going to be green lit, at Orion, it was due to a woman who was in a senior position at Orion Pictures, Barbara Boyle. When she green lit the project, with Mike Medavoy, we started the casting. 

We had a casting office here in New York and because I'm a New Yorker I was somewhat familiar with the New York talent pool. I had heard of Madonna -- she actually lived a couple blocks from me in downtown Manhattan -- her career hadn't quite taken off yet, she had one single out that was getting some attention. So I knew of her as the up-and-coming singer who was a downtown New York personality.

Did you face any resistance to casting her?

SUSAN: No, because I was the one that brought them Madonna, they didn't bring me Madonna. They were the ones saying, 'I don't know if we can go with this person because I've never heard of her.' And I was the one saying, 'I think she's right for this character. Let me do a screen test.' And she was right for the character.

Did you feel intimidated at all once it became a studio picture?

SUSAN: No so much, because I really felt that this was the right movie for me. I've made movies that I'd say probably weren't the best movie for me. But in this film I just knew that world. I waited until I got the right subject matter. I grew up in the suburbs; I was a suburban girl. I could have been the Rosanna Arquette character. I had chosen to move to New York and live a different kind of life and so I related to the Madonna character. So for me it was the perfect blend of these two worlds I knew and I had a unique way of wanting to tell this story. And I think when you feel that you're in control of your vision, people can't really intimidate you that much, because it's your vision.

Somebody else could have made the film differently, but I felt like I knew how to make that version of the film.

There are probably many movies that I couldn't have made and I probably would have felt intimidated trying to direct because I was crossing into territory that other people might have been able to do much better or had done better. But because I think this movie was the right one for me, and I think because it was also characters that I knew and a studio executive couldn't tell be how to direct that character better, it gave me a certain amount of confidence.

Of course, technically, I had never worked with that size of a crew and those kinds of gaffers and grips and lighting and all that. But it was a fortuitous experience. I was surrounded by people who were artistically simpatico. I had supportive producers, Midge and Sarah who weren't heavy-handed. And I had a great DP, Ed Lachman, who was a New Yorker who had also come from an independent, European style of cinematography. He wasn't like a heavy, union guy. So we worked really well together; the way we thought about cinema was simpatico.

And the other department heads were first-timers. Like Santo Loquasto, who was the production designer and costume designer, had worked as a costume designer on Woody Allen's films, but this was the first time he was going to be doing both. 

It was a wonderful growing experience for a lot of people. The casting directors had cast theater stuff, but this was their first film.

What did you learn doing Desperately Seeking Susan that you were able to take to future projects?

SUSAN: Learning how to work with a crew. One of the things I realized is that it's a collaborative art form, so you're dealing with so many different people, all of whom have their own artistic vision. The director's job is to maintain a single, artistic vision by coordinating everyone else's. Everyone wants to give as much as they can, but it can become a real hodgepodge if there's not one, unifying way of looking at the film -- one unifying vision.

I watched movies where I felt that things were out of control because all the actors were doing something different and all trying to do something to the max and it really needed someone to say, 'No, don't do that. Yes, do that.' Learning how to modulate things, whether it's the performances or learning when to be flashy with the camera and when to be subtle. When to not move the camera and when to move it.

It's all about trying to maintain this one vision and that's what I started to see in Desperately Seeking Susan. I'm still learning, it's an ongoing process. But that's the skill that I realized that good directors have, being able to get what they need and incorporate other people's ideas; knowing how to use the best and politely (without hurting people's feelings) not use the stuff that you don't think works. 

Sometimes different directors find different ways of doing that. I've heard about or seen examples of male directors who seem to feel that they have to be like drill sergeants and Nazis to show that they're the boss. Scream and get into fistfights and do that macho tough thing.

Now, as a woman, that isn't a style that particularly works for me, and as a woman who's just a little over five feet, I knew that no one was going to be physically intimidated by me. So I had to find my own way and have found my own way over the years of getting what I needed in a different way.

As I get older, I change the way I get what I need. But certainly, for me, it had to be different than my impression of what a typical, Erich Von Stroheim or John Ford kind of macho male director is like on the set.

Do you think that some scripts were never sent to you, just because you're a woman?

SUSAN:  I don't know. The fact of the matter is, there aren't tons of great scripts out there. I think all directors, men and women, will say the same thing. There's not a lot of great scripts out there. You've really got to struggle to find the good ones. And sometimes you do the good ones, and sometimes you do the ones you hope will be good -- they're kind of okay and you hope you can turn it into something fantastic. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't.

Do you think it's easier for women today than when you started back with Smithereens?

SUSAN: Honestly, I don't. I want to be encouraging, but I want to be honest, too.

There are opportunities, but I think the opportunities are in new media. I think that, right now, the movie industry is going through a major change. The studios are all owned by huge, multi-national corporations. There are fewer studios. A lot of the studios from fifteen or even ten years ago have been gobbled up and turned into one big corporate thing. There's no longer a New Line, there's no longer an Orion, there's no longer a Tri-Star, there's no longer a Warner Independent. There are just a lot of companies that don't exist anymore. The big studios are making fewer movies, but they're trying to make movies that are bigger budgeted and have the potential to make hundreds of millions of dollars, not just a hundred million.

But where there are more opportunities, I think, is in the independent sector, but in that case it's women making their own opportunities. They're writing their own script, and then they're trying to get a cast attached, and then they're trying to go out and find the financing.

So what still excites you about making movies?

SUSAN: Telling stories, that's what excites me. Telling stories. And that's what excited me in the beginning. To me, characters and stories are the heart of what makes a movie great. And although I'm always impressed when I see movies that have amazing technology and amazing special effects, it's the more human aspect of it that really grabs me.

Dying to make a feature? Learn from the pros!

When Fast, Cheap & Under Control first hit shelves in 2006, it became the underground handbook for a generation of indie filmmakers. Now, two decades on, this 20th Anniversary Special Edition proves the lessons inside aren't just timeless—they're more essential than ever.

What's changed? Technology. Platforms. Distribution.
What hasn't? The grit, ingenuity, and sheer determination it takes to make a great film with nothing but vision and hustle.

Inside, you'll find:

• Exclusive interviews with legends like Steven Soderbergh, Roger Corman, Jon Favreau, Henry Jaglom, Kasi Lemons, Dan O'Bannon, Bob Odenkirk and more

• Over 100 images bringing the stories to life

• 40+ links to trailers, scenes, and supplementary material—turning this book into an interactive master class

• Real-world case studies from 33 groundbreaking low-budget films—from Clerks and El Mariachi to The Blair Witch Project and sex, lies, and videotape

• Field-tested lessons from the author's own four features—proof that these principles work in the real world, on set, in the edit room, and on screen

Whether you're shooting on your phone or scraping together a micro-budget, this is your master class in turning limitations into strengths.

No film school required. Just this book. 

Roger Corman called it the textbook for his legendary filmmaking school. Now it's your turn to learn from the best.

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 Noonan on “What Happened Was

Where did the idea for What Happened Was… come from?

TOM: I had never written a play. I'd written a lot of movies. So, when I originally wrote What Happened Was…, I was going to do it at the theater, but the intention was to do it as a film. I always thought of it as a screenplay, and because I'd never acted in something I'd directed, I thought, 'Well, if I do it on stage for a while, in front of an audience, I'll find out what the thing's about.' And, because I was acting in it, I wanted to make sure that we'd worked out all the acting parts before we shot it.

We did it for six weeks as a play. We rehearsed for a month and a half. And then, on the last night of performance in the theater, we took out all the chairs, and we shot the script in the theater -- I'd made the theater look like an apartment. Then, for the next six months after that, before we shot the film, we rehearsed pretty regularly. We rehearsed for eight or nine months before we shot, a couple times a week.

Most of the people on the crew, and the producers and everybody involved, had seen the play at least once, maybe sometimes more. And they were all involved in the shooting of the video of the play, and then involved in the rehearsals as we went along, so that by the time we shot, everybody in the crew knew the whole story. They knew what the scenes were about, where the camera moves were. We pre-shot the thing two or three times before we actually shot it on film.

That’s a lot of rehearsal.

TOM: My general rule is that either you rehearse a lot or you don't rehearse at all. If you rehearse the middle, you end up not being authentic and kind of looking like you are. 

When I finally shot the film, they would say, 'It's your close-up, Tom,' and I'd say, 'Okay,' and I'd just sit there and just talk. It wasn't like I was acting; I'd done it so often and what was going on seemed so real to me. I didn't have to worry about learning the words or learning the blocking or doing any of those things that you have to worry about when you're doing a film. It completely went away. It was just me, just being there. So it felt very real to me.

So not only did you come to the film well-rehearsed, you also were pretty well-versed in filmmaking as well by that point, right?

TOM: I'd made movies for 20 years before I made that film. I'd written scores for films, I'd produced films, I had directed TV, I'd directed plays, I'd been in -- at that point -- probably 30 movies and I'd edited a lot. I knew exactly where the cut points were.

I think I have some small amount of talent and I worked really hard for a very long time getting ready to make that movie. When I shot it, I knew exactly what it was going to look like and how it was going to feel, because we'd shot it already on video. So I was not too surprised when I cut it.

The movie is relatively simple when you first look at it, but it's actually got a lot of sophisticated stuff. The camera moves are all perfectly timed to counts. By the time we shot the film, everybody in the crew knew the count on every dolly move, on everything. It was very choreographed.

I took sounds from later in the film and placed them earlier in the film, underneath things. A lot of her story you've already heard by the time she tells it.

What was your budget?

TOM: The budget was $131,000. 

We shot it for $47,000, and then the processing and the editing and all the equipment and music rights and answer prints and inter-negative came to about $130,000. Of which I've never recovered a dime. I don't even get residuals. I made a bad deal. But it's okay; I loved making the movie and I never thought anybody would ever see.

What was bad about the deal?

TOM: When you sell a film to a distributor, there's a certain aspect of the agreement that's called the assumption agreement. It's where the distributor agrees to assume certain costs involved in the distribution of the film, one of which is the residuals for the actors. Otherwise, if I sell you the film for $75,000 and I pay the crew and I pay everybody back, and then you go out and sell the film everywhere, the more money you make selling the film, the more money the actors have to get paid as residuals. And, unless the distributor assumes that expense, I end up losing money in the end making the film. 

And when we made the agreement, I didn't know that and it was left out of the agreement, or somehow it didn't get signed, so I was left with the bill for the residuals. So besides not making any money, I lost some money on the film, paying myself.

I'd done this for a long time and I'd dealt with producers for a long time, and read contracts for a long time. But distribution's the creepiest part of making a movie, and there are so many ways you can get fucked in distribution. I had someone representing me, it wasn't just me, I had somebody who'd sold a lot of movies and they screwed up a little.

When it came time to distribute, I know you weren’t happy with the original video box cover.

TOM:  I had nothing to do with that. (Karen Sillas) took those pictures without letting me know that she had taken them, and I was not thrilled, to say the least. Because anybody buying the movie based on that picture is not going to like the movie; and all the people who would like the movie wouldn't get it because of that picture. It's stupid marketing.

Would you have made the movie differently if you’d had a larger budget?

TOM: You make the movie because you want to make the movie and make it as best you can with what you have. I'm cool making movies for whatever I have. 

I mean, if I had money, I'd use a crane shot, but if I don't, I don't. That part of moviemaking doesn't interest me a whole lot, the toys and doing fancy stuff. I'm a very visual person, but it's all related to the drama and not to showing off. The things that interest me are very simple human interactions.

There’s one moment in the film that really jumps out at you: a couple of cuts when your character, apparently, accidentally touches her in passing. It’s a striking moment, because suddenly this very languid movie does several cuts right in a row.

TOM: There are very few cuts in the film, so when you put a cut in like that, it's very powerful. I knew that was the case and I shot it with that intention of possibly cutting it in.

There's a moment when you're sitting down in a chair, from standing, at which point it's impossible for you to stand back up again. And I find that kind of moment very dramatic. 

What happened in that moment was I reached out to her with the intention to reassure her, because she seemed really nervous. And at that moment, she turned and I inadvertently touched her, not on her butt, but close, without meaning to, because I'd already started the motion and by the time she turned, it was too late to stop. When we did the play, we rehearsed that moment over and over and over again, for days, the timing of it. Because if I touch her too soon, there's no way that she can bend over; and if she bends over, and then I touch her butt, it looks stupid. It has to be perfect.

Have you ever locked your keys in the car and as you slammed the car door you see the keys on the dashboard but your arm keeps going because the signal hasn't gotten there yet? That's the moment I was trying to create. It happens all the time in life. 

I knew the wide shot wouldn't get it, and if I covered the whole thing close you wouldn't get it, so I decided to do this wide shot into an insert, to create this jarring, embarrassing moment. It took a lot, a lot of work, rehearsing for months to get it to seem real. And we would do that for hours on end, I'd reach and she'd turn, trying to make it seem believable. It's very difficult to do that and not make it look phony.

Tell me about the process of casting the movie and finding Karen Sillas.

TOM: Most people who read the script and who are friends of mine, well-known actors who will remain unmentioned, thought the script was stupid. Most of the people I really wanted to do it wouldn't do it and she was the only person who was any good who wanted to do it, basically. I'd written it for my wife who was busy and unavailable, and then I gave it to all these other people who said, 'I like you, but this script is about nothing.'

I'd written scripts for many years before I wrote that script, and I've sold a number of scripts to Hollywood, and I wrote for TV and I was a relatively skilled screenwriter, but I never felt I was really writing a reality that was familiar to me, that I felt was fun or interesting to look at. 

So when I wrote it, I really tried to not worry about what people traditionally worry about when they write a script. And when I gave it to people, if they didn't like it, fuck 'em, I don't care. I just liked it so much and thought it was so funny and had so much fun writing it, that I thought that eventually someone is going to get this. And if they don't, I don't care.

Almost not a word of it changed after our first rehearsal. I mean, even typographical errors that were in the script that I felt obliged to continue to say. Because that's just the way I am.

How did audiences react to it when you did it as a play?

TOM: People were very uncomfortable, because we were pretty good at acting it. Part of the problem, during the play, was that people got so uncomfortable -- because it was like being on a first date that was not going well -- that people really didn't want to be there. And part of what I would try to do during the play, and in the movie, was to not make people so uncomfortable that they didn't want to watch. I wanted it to be funny and make the characters engaging enough and compelling enough that you'd stay with the story even though it was painfully awkward.

There were times when I was doing the play when I could tell that the audience couldn't wait for it to be over, because they couldn't stand how awkward it was for the two of us. They just wanted me to leave and let this poor woman go to bed.

One of the great lessons I learned doing it was that the story of a movie does not have to depend on the story of the script.  What I mean is, there were nights when we would do the play when I could tell that the audience hated me. And there were other nights when I did the play when I could tell that the audience thought, 'Oh, this poor guy. He's being manipulated by this woman, who has invited him into her apartment on her birthday and is setting him up to be disappointed.' 

And other nights, again, people would go, 'This smarmy, condescending, asshole guy is just playing with her like a bug.' And it would change, night to night, and the story would be very different. I learned a lot doing the play in front of people, because that's something I wanted to have in the movie. At times you think, 'God, this guy is such a jerk,' and other times you think, 'God, why doesn't she give him a break?'

The narrative of that script can hold a lot of different interpretations and different stories, without giving away that he's the bad guy and she's good. It's really both all the time, which is what life's like.

What did you take away from making What Happened Was…?

TOM: The thing I learned making the film is that you have a huge advantage when you have no money, because when you have no money you have all the time in the world. The more money you have, the less time you have to make a film, because you've got to move or you're wasting money. 

So, if you're smart and you're talented and skillful and you manage your time well, you can actually do a whole lot better movie with very little money than you can with tons. Because once tons of money gets involved, you have millions of people trying to put their finger in the pie and tell you what to do and rush you along. And I never had that. 

I wrote this at the pace I wanted to, I shot it when I felt like it, and I edited it for as long as I wanted.

Movies don't have to cost a lot.

Dying to make a feature? Learn from the pros!

When Fast, Cheap & Under Control first hit shelves in 2006, it became the underground handbook for a generation of indie filmmakers. Now, two decades on, this 20th Anniversary Special Edition proves the lessons inside aren't just timeless—they're more essential than ever.

What's changed? Technology. Platforms. Distribution.
What hasn't? The grit, ingenuity, and sheer determination it takes to make a great film with nothing but vision and hustle.

Inside, you'll find:

• Exclusive interviews with legends like Steven Soderbergh, Roger Corman, Jon Favreau, Henry Jaglom, Kasi Lemons, Dan O'Bannon, Bob Odenkirk and more

• Over 100 images bringing the stories to life

• 40+ links to trailers, scenes, and supplementary material—turning this book into an interactive master class

• Real-world case studies from 33 groundbreaking low-budget films—from Clerks and El Mariachi to The Blair Witch Project and sex, lies, and videotape

• Field-tested lessons from the author's own four features—proof that these principles work in the real world, on set, in the edit room, and on screen

Whether you're shooting on your phone or scraping together a micro-budget, this is your master class in turning limitations into strengths.

No film school required. Just this book. 

Roger Corman called it the textbook for his legendary filmmaking school. Now it's your turn to learn from the best.

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! 

Mark Decena on “Dopamine”

What was your filmmaking history before making Dopamine?

MARK: I'd done a couple of shorts and the first one was in Sundance in 1993. I did another one in 1996. , and shortly after that Lynn Auerbach gave me a call and asked if I had any feature-length scripts. I, of course, didn't, but I said I'll definitely start working on one.

And she kept calling every three months or so ('How's the script going?') and I finally started to get afraid that she'd stop calling and so I really sat down with my writing partner at the time and we drafted a script, and then got into the Labs in 1998, which was a transformative experience.

What was that script?

MARK: It was a very different version of Dopamine. We had a meeting with one of our advisors, Peter Hedges, who wrote one of my favorite movies, What's Eating Gilbert Grape?, and he basically sat us down and said, 'Why do you need to tell this story?' 

He basically told us we'd written a clever script, but that you can't write a movie just because you want to be a screenwriter or you want to be a director. You have to have a need to tell a story. He gave us the parable of going into a dark tunnel and not being afraid about where you're going to come out. It really pushed us to go back and find the core of the story.

The genesis of the story for me was when we had our first child. It's different for guys; when a baby's first born, mothers bond immediately, but dads sort of take a while, because the kid just cries and eats and wants their mother.

But I remember the day when I fell in love with him and that chemical rush that I felt was very similar to when I fell in love with my wife. And that triggered this dialectic that I could see in a story, with one person believing that love is magical and unexplainable, and someone else who believes that it's physiological and chemical.

At the same time, every other week there seemed to be some article about how we were deconstructing our body and how we were attributing certain chemicals to this and that. Every February there's the article about why we fall in love. And they always mention Dopamine and all the chemical triggers.

That created the conflict for the two characters: one who believes that love is eternal and the other that love is conditional and physical.

What was production like?

MARK: Once you go into production, you start getting barraged with all these questions from the script supervisor and the art department. The reality hits you: 'Oh, my god! I wrote kids into this script? I wrote animals! I wrote computer animation!' That was the cold awakening, wondering what the hell I was doing with my first feature and have all that?

We were able to pull it off by hook and by crook, favors, knowing people who had an animation studio, kids that were in school, and just really good producers who were able to pull it off.

What was your budget?

MARK: Production budget was $900,000. Then we got into Sundance and realized the stakes were a lot higher in post. I think it's one thing to get a film accepted, and then to finish it is quite different. We had to throw some money at finishing the film. It ended up being just under a million.

Why did you decide to shoot digital?

MARK: I think the biggest reason for me to shoot digital was being a first-time director and not having to worry about burning film while you're trying to get a performance. I was able to run master shots and let the actors find their way, and let me find my way, and then pick off our coverage shots from that. It just allowed me that freedom to help the actors find their scene and let me focus on getting the performances.

How did you cast the film?

MARK: We did have the Advisory Committee at Sundance, so we called them and said, 'Do you know of any casting directors?' They recommended Gillian O'Neill. We were under the gun and we wanted to go for the Sundance Film Festival, and it was a late summer start. She said our best bet, with or budget, was to go after television actors who were off for the summer. And she was able to get the script out to Sabrina, who was very interested.

We had another actor lined up for the lead and he dropped out about a week before we started. And then she came up with John Livingston and said it was almost a blessing: he's great and looking for a good, meaty role. And he was great.

Was there time and money for rehearsal?

MARK: We had one week of rehearsal.

We started with a couple table reads, with the actors, to get a sense of how it was going to play. I spent most of the time with the leads. We did some improvs, kind of let them find the characters and play with the scenes. We were able to get onto one of our sets early, while they were building it, so we had that space to work in. We basically just had fun.

They say that 90% of directing is casting, and that definitely made my job easier. But the rehearsals let them get to know each other and get to know each other in character. And to be able to have that confidence about that character before you get on set. The set can be very distracting, very assaultive. I have the utmost respect for actors; I don' know how they do it.

What was the best decision you made on the movie?

MARK: The best decision I made was hiring the right people and let them do their job. Rob Humphreys, knowing I was a first time director, one of the things he set up for me was he would clear the set, I'd run the scene a few times. And then when we found it, he'd call the keys in and we'd run it again it and plan out our shot list. Even though we had a very specific shot list, he gave me the freedom to work with the actors and find it. And then he was able to help me plan out a spontaneous shot list.

Did you wait until after the shoot to start editing?

MARK: We were cutting as we were going. The editor was a day or two behind, because we had to send the tapes to Los Angles to get them down-converted. We saw a full assembly cut about three days after we finished shooting. It was insane.

We would shoot and I would come in at night and see the scenes. On the weekends, sometimes I would go out with Rob and some days he would just go out and grab B-roll of fog and the bay and a lot of the visual elements of the film.

What was the editing process like?

MARK: After the assemble cut was done, we realized we had to go back in and find the story, which is always disheartening. I think as a first-timer, you think, 'Well, I finished the script, and the script as it's shot is going to be great,' and then you realize that the story has to be brought out.

We ended up moving things around, opening with more of the flashback stuff between the father and the son and the mother issues, using that throughout as the voice of his conscience.

The opening scene was put into the middle of the film, which sounds really strange to script something and have the opening move to the middle of the movie, but it worked.

What did you take away from the entire experience?

MARK: It's important to be open to the storytelling process, which is completely collaborative in filmmaking.

You have to have blind faith that you're going to make it, almost a cunning naiveté. You know you're going to do it, and you don't know enough to know that it's really impossible. You have to be naïve, but you still have to be determined and almost cunning in a way to just know it's going to happen, regardless of all the things that fall in front of you, like money falling out at the last minute and actors dropping out.

You have to passionate about the material. It's got to be a story that you need to tell. A lot of artists have that drive. They don't paint because they want to; they paint because they have to. I was probably a little insane at the time, feeling I had to do this. The insanity is probably building again and I'll start another project.

Dying to make a feature? Learn from the pros!

When Fast, Cheap & Under Control first hit shelves in 2006, it became the underground handbook for a generation of indie filmmakers. Now, two decades on, this 20th Anniversary Special Edition proves the lessons inside aren't just timeless—they're more essential than ever.

What's changed? Technology. Platforms. Distribution.
What hasn't? The grit, ingenuity, and sheer determination it takes to make a great film with nothing but vision and hustle.

Inside, you'll find:

• Exclusive interviews with legends like Steven Soderbergh, Roger Corman, Jon Favreau, Henry Jaglom, Kasi Lemons, Dan O'Bannon, Bob Odenkirk and more

• Over 100 images bringing the stories to life

• 40+ links to trailers, scenes, and supplementary material—turning this book into an interactive master class

• Real-world case studies from 33 groundbreaking low-budget films—from Clerks and El Mariachi to The Blair Witch Project and sex, lies, and videotape

• Field-tested lessons from the author's own four features—proof that these principles work in the real world, on set, in the edit room, and on screen

Whether you're shooting on your phone or scraping together a micro-budget, this is your master class in turning limitations into strengths.

No film school required. Just this book. 

Roger Corman called it the textbook for his legendary filmmaking school. Now it's your turn to learn from the best.

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! 

William Greaves on “Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take

How did you get your start in filmmaking?

WILLIAM: I taught acting for quite a while in Canada, from the Actors Studio in New York. I went up to Canada and worked on the National Film Board of Canada, on the production staff. I also, concurrently, opened up a studio that was modeled on the New York Actor's Studio, and taught acting. 

One of my actors became very wealthy in the real estate business in Miami, Florida. He said, “Listen, you're a very talented fellow and you have a lot of ideas. You're just as good a director as anyone coming out of Hollywood. Why don't you do a feature?”

And I said, “These things cost money.” And he said, “What does it cost?” And I told him and he said, “Do it. I'll back it.” 

So I asked him what sort of subject he wanted me to concentrate on -- a whodunit or a romance, or what?

And he said, “Anything you like. Whatever you want to do, Bill, you do.”

So, with that blank check I reflected on a lot of things that that I had been thinking about over the years. One of them is the creative process, as it relates to the actor and the director. Having been a product of the Actor's Studio and Lee Strasberg, Kazan, Stanislavsky and those people, as well as having been involved in psycho drama, by way of J.L. Moreno, who was the pioneer of psycho drama, it came to me that it would be interesting to shoot a film that had some of these elements. 

I thought it would be interesting to do several screen tests and to look at the creative process that actors undergo, in conjunction with the director, to show their talents at the highest level.

So that was the beginning of Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One?

WILLIAM: That's how it all got started, initially, but then other elements came into play. For example, the Heisenberg Principal of Uncertainty, for which the analog to the electron microscope is the motion picture camera, which is looking down into the psyche and soul of the actor while the actor is performing, and often times it tends to stiffen and destroy the spontaneity and truthful feelings of the actor as the character they're trying to portray. I thought that would be an interesting element to think about, artistically, creatively.

One of the hallmarks of the Stanislavsky system is to try to be as honest in what you're doing, in performance, as possible. One of the things that kept bothering me about a lot of Hollywood movies was that the acting was very stiff and lacking in spontaneity. Having challenged myself as an actor to be more realistic in my acting -- and having looked at the work of people like Marlon Brando and Julie Harris -- people at the Actor's Studio whose work was very spontaneous. 

It came to me that this was a wonderful opportunity to test the limits of my credibility as a person in front of a camera, pursuing this particular screen test with these actors, but trying to not act for the camera.

Talk about your character, the director of the screen tests.

WILLIAM: One of the elements of my characterization was my inscrutability. Try and try as much as they could, they couldn't decode my motives. That was calculated to elicit a degree of tension and anger and anxiety in the crew. They couldn't decode my motives, and I didn't want them to decode my motives, because I wanted to see if it would be possible to generate as much conflict in front of the camera as possible.  Conflict being the hallmark of a really good drama.

I come from a wonderful high school here in New York, called Stuyvesant High School. That learning experience was very focused on science and the scientific method, and I've fallen in love with a lot of scientific principles, one of them was the Heisenberg Principal of Uncertainty. It seemed interesting to see how I could mix all of this.

I put all these ideas into a big pot and stirred these all of these diverse, disparate elements together and heated it up with conflict and served it up to the audience.

How much was the movie a product of its time?

WILLIAM: The sixties were a period of tremendous rebellion on the part of the youth of America, and I was in harmony with that kind of thinking. When one works at a place like the Actor's Studio, one becomes very critical of the work that is being done in front of the camera or on the stage. So I felt that it would be wonderful to apply Cinema Verité techniques to the spontaneity that the Stanislavskysystem encourages in the actor's work.

I was hoping to have any conflict to what I was doing played out in front of the camera by the crew challenging me in what I was doing or criticize me or whatever. But this did not happen until the last scene in the movie, of the crew on the grass, screaming and shouting and shrieking at me because I was doing a lot of what they considered to be bizarre and unorthodox things that were not in lock step with traditional Hollywood feature filmmaking.

You must have been surprised to learn that the crew shot footage of their own, of them talking about you and the way you were working.

WILLIAM: I didn't think that they were challenging me enough during the course of the shooting, but then they gave me the footage that they shot on their own. I didn't know that they had done this palace revolt, it was something that they surreptitiously stole away and did at the end of a day of shooting after I went home. 

They had this closet revolt and it was terribly exciting to me, because I was afraid that the film was not going to work out well, because it didn't have enough conflict. 

But when I saw this material I was just elated and I knew that we had a very good film on our hands -- something that would be very fresh and delight audiences, particularly those who were reasonably conversant with the filmmaking process.

Tell me about the title and what it means to you.

WILLIAM:  The title is, for me, a very attractive title. I tend to be in love with scientific thinking of one kind or another, and I came across a book called Inquiry Into Inquiries;: Essays In Social Theory, which was written by a very knowledgeable social scientist named Arthur Bentley. 

He conceived of the milieu that human beings find themselves as the symbiotaxiplasm. And this symbiotaxiplasm represents those events that transpire in the course of anyone's life that have an impact on the consciousness and the psyche of the average human being, and how that human being also controls or effects changes or has an impact on the environment. 

So there's a dialectic or a dialogue that goes on between the action and behavior and thinking of human beings as they move through the events in their lives. 

I had the arrogance, the temerity, to introduce the term 'psycho' in the middle of symbiotaxiplasm, making symbiopsychotaxiplasm.

Symbio represents the existence of similarities of one kind or another. Psycho is the mind. Taxi is how the mind reacts and responds to arrangement of reality. And Plasm being the human being. I'm over-simplifying it; you'll have to read the book yourself.

Dying to make a feature? Learn from the pros!

When Fast, Cheap & Under Control first hit shelves in 2006, it became the underground handbook for a generation of indie filmmakers. Now, two decades on, this 20th Anniversary Special Edition proves the lessons inside aren't just timeless—they're more essential than ever.

What's changed? Technology. Platforms. Distribution.
What hasn't? The grit, ingenuity, and sheer determination it takes to make a great film with nothing but vision and hustle.

Inside, you'll find:

• Exclusive interviews with legends like Steven Soderbergh, Roger Corman, Jon Favreau, Henry Jaglom, Kasi Lemons, Dan O'Bannon, Bob Odenkirk and more

• Over 100 images bringing the stories to life

• 40+ links to trailers, scenes, and supplementary material—turning this book into an interactive master class

• Real-world case studies from 33 groundbreaking low-budget films—from Clerks and El Mariachi to The Blair Witch Project and sex, lies, and videotape

• Field-tested lessons from the author's own four features—proof that these principles work in the real world, on set, in the edit room, and on screen

Whether you're shooting on your phone or scraping together a micro-budget, this is your master class in turning limitations into strengths.

No film school required. Just this book. 

Roger Corman called it the textbook for his legendary filmmaking school. Now it's your turn to learn from the best.

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! 

"Grand Theft Auto" — Roger Corman, Rance Howard and Nancy Morgan on the making of this low-budget classi]

Like many of the other top directors of his generation, Ron Howard’s directorial debut came via Roger Corman. Not only did Howard direct Grand Theft Auto, but he also starred in the film and co-wrote the script with his father, actor Rance Howard.

RANCE HOWARD: Ron had acted in (Corman’s) Eat My Dust, and it had been a huge success for Roger. He wanted to do another car chase/car crash film. Ron said, “I will do another movie for you, with one additional job added.” And Roger said, “What is that?” And Ron said, “I want to direct.” And Roger said, “Well, Ron, you always looked like a director to me.” 

How did you and Ron come up with the idea?

RANCE HOWARD: Roger already had the title. He had tested it. It was going to be called Grand Theft Auto, and it was about young people on the run. He said, “If you and your dad could come up with a story like that, we'd have a deal.” So, we sat down and put our heads together and started kicking ideas around. We did a treatment first; Roger read the treatment and loved it and we went right to script.

NANCY MORGAN: I was told that Roger had a certain formula that was applied to this type of picture.  There were a certain number of explosions that had to happen, there a certain number of recognizable names that had to be worked in.  There were elements that were almost like Julia Child's recipe for making money.  The bases were covered methodically.

RANCE HOWARD: I was fascinated with the demolition derby. At one time, Ron, Clint and I went to see a demolition derby, and it was just fascinating. At that time, I had considered writing a script about a demolition derby. Then with Grand Theft Auto, it just seemed perfect for the car to end up in a demolition derby.

NANCY MORGAN: Ron told me, during the shoot, that Roger had told him when he made this deal, "If you do a good job for me, you'll never have to work for me again."

One thing I’ve heard from many directors who’ve worked with you on their first films is that, before getting started, you take them out for what is called The Lunch. This is where you distill all the best advice about how to successfully execute a low-budget Corman film. What are the elements of that conversation?

ROGER CORMAN: It's too involved to get into here. But the most important thing that I point out over and over is preparation. On a ten-day shoot, or a 20-day shoot, you don't have time to create from scratch on the set. As a matter of fact, I don't think you should do that anyway. My number one rule is to work with your actors in advance, so you and the actors are agreed on at least the broad outline of the performance. Then to have sketched out, if not all of your shots, most of your shots, so you have a shot plan in advance.

How did you first hear about Grand Theft Auto?

NANCY MORGAN: My agents were contacted by Ron!  Can you imagine?  When he was casting for this role, he was looking for someone who, first and foremost, he didn't have to pay a lot.  It couldn't be a star—it had to be an unknown.  At the time, one of my first movie that I'd ever acted in—in fact, one of my first acting jobs ever, because I came to Hollywood untrained and unprepared—was a movie called Fraternity Row, with Paul Newman's son, Scott Newman, in his first and only picture.  And it was out in the theaters when Ron was casting, and he liked my performance in it and found my agent.

What was the audition process like?

NANCY MORGAN: Back then I used to say to myself, “There are a lot of people here who know a lot about acting, but all I really know is that you just have to pretend that it's happening.” And so, during the audition process, I did as close to what I felt a human being would do under the circumstances, and that was to say the lines like I meant them, and then when Ron was talking to me, react to what he was saying.  And that was about as much acting as I knew. Ron later said to me, “You know, I interviewed a couple hundred girls.  Did you ever wonder why you got it?  Because you were the only one who, when you weren't speaking, was still listening.” That was something that forever stuck with me as one of the things that was important and not everyone's top tool.

Once you had the script and cast in place, what was the next step?

RANCE HOWARD: I always knew that preparation and rehearsal are extremely important. But this experience drove that fact home and really solidified that. Preparation is really, really important. Pre-production, really being prepared.

ROGER CORMAN: I'm a strong believer in rehearsals and in pre-production and preparation. I want to be able to come onto the set and shoot. Ideally, everything is worked out in advance; practically, it never quite works that way. You always are faced with new problems, or maybe you get a better idea. But at least you have your framework before you shoot. If you don't have time for a full rehearsal, I like to have at least a reading with the actors, in which we read and maybe do some improvisations and do some loose rehearsals—not on the set—taking at least one day before shooting for that.

NANCY MORGAN: The cars rehearsed.  The stunts rehearsed.  And the explosions rehearsed.  We basically just had to know our lines and pretty much bring it to life.  We would run through the scene once or twice, but really rarely for the acting of it.  Ron knew what he was doing, so he didn't really need it.  

ROGER CORMAN: What I do, and what I tell my directors working with me, is that you waste a lot of time after you get a shot, where you're congratulating everybody, discussing the shot, and so forth. And that shot is already yesterday's news. You've got it. So, what I do is I say, “Cut, print, thank you.” Then maybe one sentence saying how good it was to the actors. And then, “The next shot is over here.” And we're on to the next shot.

With Ron’s focus on directing the movie, what was it like to act with him? 

NANCY MORGAN: Looking at the script, there appeared to be a thousand interchangeable scenes of Ron and me in the car, talking about this and that.  I understood enough about story to know that it had to build and climax and resolve.  And so the first thing I did with my script was to break it down into an outline and had an understanding of where Ron and I were in our relationship, from the first scene to the last. Ron, on several occasions—since he was in charge of the whole picture, directing everything—he realized that I had done this and that I was aware of where we were in the script at any given point in terms of his and my relationship.  He would sometimes say, “Where are we?” And I would say, “Well, this has happened, and this has happened, and this has happened, but this hasn't happened yet, so we do know about this, but we don't know about that.”  And he'd say, “Okay. Got it thanks.” My breaking it down was something that I could do that was helpful to him and that would orient him as to where we were in the scene, and then Ron just acts—he doesn't even to have to worry.

The production really was a family affair, wasn’t it?

RANCE HOWARD: I think any director likes to use people that he is familiar with and that he can trust and has confidence in. Both Clint and I fit nicely into those categories. And his mother, at that time, had been working quite a lot coordinating extras for other filmmakers. And so, she coordinated a lot of the extras for that film, in particular the senior citizens on the bus. Involving his mother, and his brother Clint—an excellent actor, and who was at that time, almost as big a name as Ron—in the film just made good sense.

NANCY MORGAN: The other thing I learned on that movie is that there's nothing like family to pull this together.  On this film, Cheryl did a lot of the cooking.  His mom was in it.  His brother was in it.  And Rance, of course, co-wrote it with Ron.  There was no partying for them.  You never found them in the bar, sitting around, schmoozing with people.  At night they were in their room, looking at dailies.  They were looking over every single moment of this and discussing it like you would discuss an art project.  They wanted it to be the best car picture it could be.  

Was there any improvisation on the film?

NANCY MORGAN: The only improvisation was our kiss.  Although it was written in the script, we didn't have a clue how to go about it.  And that was the time where the whole, entire family got involved. Cheryl was standing by the side, with lip gloss and breath spray. And Rance was coming up and whispering in my ear, “Just go for!  Go for it!”  Which was his only direction to me in the entire film.  So, it became my responsibility to just lunge for Ron and just, like, smack him.  With everyone in the whole family standing around.  That was probably the most improvised moment.

ROGER CORMAN: Be flexible. Even though you've done all your preparation, don't stick absolutely to the preparation if it doesn't seem to be working. Know that you've got the preparation, but situations change, so be prepared to change with the situations. 

RANCE HOWARD: You need to be tenacious; you need to stick to your guns, but at the same time, you have to be prepared to compromise and negotiate. That was really driven home to me, the importance of compromise. There are a lot of aspects of making a film where you can compromise. In some places, you can't. You need to know what compromises can be made and what compromises can't be made. Coming to that realization is important: understanding that you're not going to get everything you want, you're going to get part of what you want.

What was the preview process like?

ROGER CORMAN: I'm a firm believer in putting the film, at least one time, before an audience.

RANCE HOWARD: We had the film assembled as a rough cut. Roger started going through and taking all the humor out of it; he didn't realize that Ron and I had designed a comedy. So, we rented a screening room over at Warner Brothers and invited some people to come and see it, along with Roger. The crowd saw the humor and they absolutely roared. When it was over, he came over to us and said, “You guys have a funny movie here.” After that screening, when we proved that we had a comedy, we had one or two more test screenings before we locked it up. 

What was one of your biggest take-aways from the experience?

RANCE HOWARD: Stand up for what you believe in. For example, if we had allowed ourselves to be easily talked out of it being a comedy and cut it as a straight action picture. And filmmaking is a team effort, it's really teamwork. We happened to have a great team.

Dying to make a feature? Learn from the pros!

When Fast, Cheap & Under Control first hit shelves in 2006, it became the underground handbook for a generation of indie filmmakers. Now, two decades on, this 20th Anniversary Special Edition proves the lessons inside aren't just timeless—they're more essential than ever.

What's changed? Technology. Platforms. Distribution.
What hasn't? The grit, ingenuity, and sheer determination it takes to make a great film with nothing but vision and hustle.

Inside, you'll find:

• Exclusive interviews with legends like Steven Soderbergh, Roger Corman, Jon Favreau, Henry Jaglom, Kasi Lemons, Dan O'Bannon, Bob Odenkirk and more

• Over 100 images bringing the stories to life

• 40+ links to trailers, scenes, and supplementary material—turning this book into an interactive master class

• Real-world case studies from 33 groundbreaking low-budget films—from Clerks and El Mariachi to The Blair Witch Project and sex, lies, and videotape

• Field-tested lessons from the author's own four features—proof that these principles work in the real world, on set, in the edit room, and on screen

Whether you're shooting on your phone or scraping together a micro-budget, this is your master class in turning limitations into strengths.

No film school required. Just this book. 

Roger Corman called it the textbook for his legendary filmmaking school. Now it's your turn to learn from the best.

And more!

Write Your Screenplay with the Help of Top Screenwriters!

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

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

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

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

The book covers (among other topics):

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Roger Nygard (“Suckers”) on mixing genres

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

Director 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.

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! 

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! 

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! 

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! 

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!