How long was your shoot schedule for Lisa Picard is Famous?
GRIFFIN: Officially, I had about 20 days. The idea was always to shoot it with an actual documentary crew, thinking that that would be enough to carry me through. But feature films, even with the most independent and lowest of budgets, they can't help themselves from over-complicating things. If it's a movie, no matter how much it costs, it's still is a pack, it's a roving army--whether it's a platoon or a huge regiment—and you don't travel lightly.
I found that after the 20 days I could call up the DP and the actors, whoever I needed, and say 'Meet me on the corner, I need to grab something.'
Why did you decide to do the story as a fake documentary?
GRIFFIN: I love documentaries and I've always wanted to make a documentary. The actors who wrote the story, it was very much from their lives. So, I thought that by putting myself in the movie, I could take it out of a written script format. If I didn't know what I was going to say, the actors didn't know what I was going to say. So, it would automatically give it a heightened reality. And you get that look in the subject's eyes, a kind of darting around, wondering what the interviewer is going to say, this certain unease.
With movies I'd done before, everything was about preparation, so that there would be absolutely no mistakes, because mistakes would cost so much time and so much money. So, you plan everything, if you're really doing your job right, so you're not going to be felled by weather or any of the billions of things that can go wrong. You try to plug every hole before anything sets in.
With this movie, I approached it, before I started shooting, that it was about the lack of preparation, being open to accidents and disasters. It was so small that I thought this would be the fun thing to explore. So, if she's running to catch the train and she accidentally catches the train and I don't want her to catch the train, then we shoot her catching the train. If she doesn't catch the train, then we shoot that.
I found that when I was in the editing room, just like a documentary, they don't know how it's going to turn out. And neither did I. For example, with my character I had no idea when I started that I would be narrating the picture and playing such a role and taking their story of two desperate actors and making it all about me. I was very happy with that; it was a very organic shift and very accurate. We see many journalists make themselves more important than the story.
If there was a lot more money at stake and if there was a more oppressive financier, I might not have had the freedom to find the movie, let it reveal itself to me.
I recently interviewed LM Kit Carson about David Holzman’s Diary, arguably the first pseudo-documentary. Was that in your mind at all during the project?
GRIFFIN: I met Kit when I was about 13, through my aunt and uncle in Hollywood in the sixties. He was a very dashing and charismatic and a hippie for lack of a better word. I had never seen David Holtzman's Diary, but I'd heard the legend of David Holtzman's Diary.
About a month before shooting I ran into him and he said, 'What are you doing?" and I said, 'I'm doing this movie and it's about …' and I described the story and the desperation of it and I said how much fun it was to make a documentary. And he said, 'You should see David Holtzman's Diary. You should have me in it, talking about David Holtzman's Diary.' I looked at him and said, 'That's exactly what I should do.'
So I told him to sit in a coffee shop and someone would get in touch with him. And then I approached him with a camera crew. And he was just totally prepared.
What were the disadvantages of being an early-adopter of the digital format?
GRIFFIN: The disadvantages were that they weren't used to storing this much material. I also shot a lot of footage, I mean, a lot. Many many many hours, because I thought, 'well, hell, it's just tape, let's take advantage of the digital revolution here.' But, as with everything, there are pluses and minuses, because you have to download it and put it in a machine that can hold all this stuff.
So, because of all the footage I shot, it really was baptism by extreme fire.
Consequently, it crashed a lot. And it always seemed to crash right at a fix you were trying to make to see if it would work. It was very difficult, and we lost a few days. But it was a perfect trade, it was worth it in this case.
The other way of saying it is, nothing is free.
How did you get permission to use Wheat Chex in the film?
GRIFFIN: How did we get clearance? I have no idea. It just blows my mind. I will always eat Wheat Chex. I couldn't believe it. I kept saying to our producer, 'Are you sure they know about this?' They thought it was funny. Who would have thought the people at Wheat Chex would be so dry.
Were you ever worried about how small the budget was?
GRIFFIN: I wasn't daunted by how little money I had; I decided to make that part of the style. However, I didn't have that First Feature pressure where I felt I had a lot riding on it. For me, it was always an experiment and to have a lot of fun and rope in friends and call in favors and go to work in the morning and see how the day turns out. I'd been under so much more pressure before that this was just much more enjoyable to me.
Also, because it was a smaller budget movie, I insisted and got without any problem, final cut. Which was something I'd never had, true final cut. So I had the luxury of being able to listen to people's notes, with an open mind and learning from them, taking in what I needed without having to also have a political agenda on top of it and deal with other people's politics.
A director's job is to be the most prepared, and this was an exercise in leaving a real part of your creative process to being unprepared and open to accidents. And I was able to keep those 'let's see what happens' balls in the air for most of the picture.
When I first read what Nat and Laura wrote, it was just about 'I hope I get the job.'
I really wanted to put much more of a social spin on it, about how fucked up people get about fame. I thought that putting interviews in there--which we've all seen done quite effectively in Reds and When Harry Met Sally…--I just thought it needed a bigger perspective beyond their small world. And it would be great to have interviews with people who had dealt with fame in a very direct way, who really had been and had lost or were at the various points that these two kind of desperate characters were trying to be.
I do adore actors and I empathize with them greatly. I'm also very grateful that I don't have to just be an actor. In fact, I never could just be an actor. Even when I moved to New York I was lucky enough to also be able to produce movies.
A lot of my great friends are actors and I always wish the best for an actor when he comes in to read for me as a director. I really want them to do well and I want them to not feel like a piece of crap like I have felt so many when I was trying to get a job.
Every time you go in there, you have so much on the line, and actors go through that intense feeling--if they have a good agent and they go out and audition--they have that feeling three times a day.
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Jonathan Demme: The value of cameos
John Sayles: Writing to your resources
Peter Bogdanovich: Long, continuous takes
John Cassavetes: Re-Shoots
Steven Soderbergh: Rehearsals
George Romero: Casting
Kevin Smith: Skipping film school
Jon Favreau: Creating an emotional connection
Richard Linklater: Poverty breeds creativity
David Lynch: Kill your darlings
Ron Howard: Pre-production planning
John Carpenter: Going low-tech
Robert Rodriguez: Sound thinking
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Academy-Award Winner Dan Futterman (“Capote”) on writing real stories
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George Romero (“Martin”) on writing horror on a budget
Rebecca Miller (“Personal Velocity”) on adapting short stories
Stuart Gordon (“Re-Animator”) on adaptations
Academy-Award Nominee Whit Stillman (“Metropolitan”) on cheap ways to make it look expensive
Miranda July (“Me and You and Everyone We Know”) on making your writing spontaneous
Alex Cox (“Repo Man”) on scaling the script to meet a budget
Joan Micklin Silver (“Hester Street”) on writing history on a budget
Bob Clark (“Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things”) on mixing humor and horror
Amy Holden Jones (“Love Letters”) on writing romance on a budget
Henry Jaglom (“Venice/Venice”) on mixing improvisation with scripting
L.M. Kit Carson (“Paris, Texas”) on re-writing while shooting
Academy-Award Winner Kenneth Lonergan (“You Can Count on Me”) on script editing
Roger Nygard (“Suckers”) on mixing genres
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