"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! 

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! 

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! 

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! 

Stefan Schaefer on writing & directing "Confess"

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

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

What was your filmmaking experience before starting Confess?

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

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

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

How did you come up with Confess?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What process did you go through writing the script?

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

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

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

Did you start with an outline?

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

How did you get into the Fifth Night reading series?

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

What were some of the benefits of having that reading?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What other structural changes did you make in post?

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

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

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

How did you blow up the Hummer?

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

Were there any movies that inspired Confess?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Probably about fifteen, at least.

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

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

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

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

It works differently, but it still works.

Dying to make a feature? Learn from the pros!

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

★★★★★

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

• Jonathan Demme: The value of cameos

• John Sayles: Writing to your resources

• Peter Bogdanovich: Long, continuous takes

• John Cassavetes: Re-Shoots

• Steven Soderbergh: Rehearsals

• George Romero: Casting

• Kevin Smith: Skipping film school

• Jon Favreau: Creating an emotional connection

• Richard Linklater: Poverty breeds creativity

• David Lynch: Kill your darlings

• Ron Howard: Pre-production planning

• John Carpenter: Going low-tech

• Robert Rodriguez: Sound thinking

And more!

Write Your Screenplay with the Help of Top Screenwriters!

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

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

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

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

The book covers (among other topics):

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Roger Nygard (“Suckers”) on mixing genres

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

Roger Nygard on “Suckers"

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

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

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

What was going on with you before Suckers?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where did the idea for Suckers come from?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How did you and Joe work together?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What was the biggest chance?

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

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

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

Did you consider other possible climaxes and endings?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Have you bought a car since you made Suckers?

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

What was the biggest lesson you took away from Suckers?

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

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

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

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

Were you still writing while editing?

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

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

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

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

Start every scene as late as possible. 

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

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

What movies have inspired you?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dying to make a feature? Learn from the pros!

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

★★★★★

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

• Jonathan Demme: The value of cameos

• John Sayles: Writing to your resources

• Peter Bogdanovich: Long, continuous takes

• John Cassavetes: Re-Shoots

• Steven Soderbergh: Rehearsals

• George Romero: Casting

• Kevin Smith: Skipping film school

• Jon Favreau: Creating an emotional connection

• Richard Linklater: Poverty breeds creativity

• David Lynch: Kill your darlings

• Ron Howard: Pre-production planning

• John Carpenter: Going low-tech

• Robert Rodriguez: Sound thinking

And more!

Write Your Screenplay with the Help of Top Screenwriters!

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

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

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

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

The book covers (among other topics):

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Roger Nygard (“Suckers”) on mixing genres

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