Independent Ed – Summary and Notes
Independent Ed: Inside a Career of Big Dreams, Little Movies, and the Twelve Best Days of My Life – Summary and Notes
– Some good advice. He started out winning Sundance with his first film and ended up in a movie like Saving Private Ryan, so it’s hard to sympathize with the guy when talks about hardship. Humans always want more. The thing about those who start on top, they never get past that peak. He did give some good advice and he does love independent filmmaking more than Hollywood acting. After finishing my movie certain parts of this book are speaking to me more. Rereading my highlights as I post this.
I’ve always defined it as a film that is independent of outside influence. And that’s all I wanted. The goal has been to make films—my own films—on my terms, the way I have envisioned them, without any interference. And that last part is tough to pull off.
The result has been a labor filled with far more love than frustration, and far more a sense of accomplishment than defeat.
François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows.
Syd Field how-to is the bible for every aspiring screenwriter
“I can do this. This is what I should be doing.”
- Paddy Chayefsky’s 1955 award-winning movie Marty
- In 1989, Hal Hartley, a kid from Long Island, made The Unbelievable Truth for $75,000.
- Whit Stillman, another young filmmaker from New York, made Metropolitan for $225,000
- Nick Gomez’s Laws of Gravity, made for $35,000
“I have the VHS tape of your movie and it says this is a rough cut. Have you finished it yet?” “Yes, it’s finished,” I replied. I was lying. It wasn’t finished. “What’s the running time now?” he asked. In reality, it was two hours. “About ninety minutes,” I said. “What scenes did you cut out?” he asked. I mentioned a handful of scenes that I wanted to cut or thought could be cut. I also remembered what it cost to shoot those scenes he wanted to cut, not just the monetary cost but the begging and pleading and planning that went into every shooting day. But he persisted. “Look, if these scenes that are painful to cut are any good, you’ll put them in your next screenplay,” he said.
“I don’t know what is going to happen with The Brothers McMullen at Sundance. But I can tell you that the two weeks you’re there will be the hottest you will ever be in your career. You need to have another screenplay ready so that when you’re in a meeting and someone asks what you want to do next, you can put a screenplay down in front of them and say, ‘This is my next film.’ And it’s very likely, if things play out in your favor, that it will get green-lit right there.”
Then during the first scene, people laughed and continued to laugh. The movie was working, but I must have looked like a nervous wreck because an elderly woman sitting next to me grabbed my arm and said, “Relax, honey, they like it.”
They all handed me their business cards and later I took them back to New York and compared them against the rejection letters I had gotten for the film when I’d first sent it out. This was especially helpful when trying to decide which agent I would later sign with.
My advice to young filmmakers: Talk to people who have been through it. Ask questions. At the end of the day, you can make the decisions, but let those with a longer résumé help you figure out the answers or at least the best possibilities.
What I did know was this: I didn’t want to show up on a $20 million set and be overwhelmed. I didn’t want to be the phenom who was called up to the major leagues only to have everyone discover he couldn’t hit a curve.
A $3 million budget seemed within my realm. And really, it came down to wanting to avoid the pressure.
In order to grow, I knew I had to step out of my comfort zone. But I didn’t want to go so far that I couldn’t handle it.
Woody Allen does these great moving master shots in which he essentially has a two- or three-minute scene involving two or three people in a room. Rather than shooting it in the traditional manner—a wide shot, a medium shot, an over-the-shoulder shot, and then everyone’s respective close-up or single—Woody starts on a close-up of an actor and then, after that actor delivers the first line, he or she crosses the room and the camera moves with them, revealing the person they’re talking to.
At that point, it’s a medium two-shot.3 After four or five lines of dialogue, though, he has the other actor drive toward the camera and the camera tracks back with them until it’s a more typical master shot. Then you see the actors have changed places, the first one now standing in the background and the other one in the foreground, and the entire space is revealed. Then the actor in the background walks back into a nice over-the-shoulder, the two of them walk down the hallway, and it seamlessly melds into another two-shot.
I admired the way Woody used those moving masters because the scenes unfolded like a play. You are not manipulating the performance in the editing room; it’s all right there. What I really like is that the actors’ body language and movement, for example, when characters choose to walk toward or away from one another,… Some highlights have been hidden or truncated due to export limits.
She’s pressing him to come clean about the reasons their marriage is in trouble; he hasn’t shown any interest in having sex with her. As written, the scene is almost three pages long, and we shot it as one giant moving master where, in the end, he confesses that he’s in love with somebody else. That was one of the first times I was able to do something like that and at the end of the day.
I like another scene where we used the moving master. It’s with McGlone and John Mahoney on their back deck. It’s simple. It’s just a bunch of different framings, but it plays like a dance between the camera and the actors. I wanted to create a locked-in moment where they sit, talk, and move all in one shot. I have put those types of scenes in my movies ever since. For me, that’s when I feel I’m a filmmaker and not just a writer.
what I remember most is that the beginning of the movie wasn’t working. There were a number of redundancies. As a young screenwriter, I used to be guilty of playing the same beat over and over in an effort to inform the audience, and this was painfully obvious when I saw the first pass.
It was on She’s the One with my editor, Sue Graef, that I learned that the cutting of the film is actually your last rewrite of the script. A filmmaker learns how to tell a story on film in the editing room. We took a scene from the first ten minutes and moved it to around the thirty-minute mark, and we took a scene that came around that thirty-minute plot point and put it closer to the front. It was a simple flip-flop, but it worked-the scenes land nicely, as if they had been written that way.
Cutting the heads and tails off scenes was a real eye-opener…
Most times, the audience doesn’t need to see the actor enter the room, turn on the lights, sit down on the chair, pick up the phone, and make the call.
We discovered in the edit that by cutting the tail off one scene and cutting the head off the scene that followed it, we could create a similar effect. As the scenes played off each other, the characters seemed to answer one another even though their scenes were disconnected. It not only helped with the pacing but it also created a few punchlines that weren’t apparent in the screenplay.
We did test screenings in Philadelphia, Washington, DC, and Los Angeles. I found it a valuable learning experience. I was able to sit with an audience and see in real time where the movie worked, where we got laughs, and where we didn’t get laughs. Fortunately, those no-laugh moments were few.
The Last Picture Show, Tender Mercies, and Hud were three of my favorite films and still are.
The filmmakers Peter Bogdanovich, Bruce Beresford, and Martin Ritt embraced minimalist storytelling and restraint with their camera work.
I never considered myself an actor. I enjoyed acting in my own films, but I knew what went into those performances. I wrote toward what I thought were my strengths as an actor and I later massaged those performances in the editing room. In other words, I knew my limitations. After reading the script, I knew playing Sarge required some heavy lifting and I knew I was not quite ready for that, or even capable of it, back then. But I thought I could take on another part, that of PFC Reiben, the wiseass from Brooklyn. He was a sarcastic pain in the ass. “That I can do!” I told my agent. “Can you put me up for Reiben instead of Sarge?”
Creative work sometimes starts with imitation but finishes with inspiration.
Most directors would have stepped in after my first botched take, offered some notes, and inadvertently rattled my confidence. But that wasn’t Steven’s approach with us. He allowed us several takes to figure things out for ourselves. So much so that he didn’t provide any direction for almost two weeks. We did our scenes in two or three takes and then moved on. No feedback. Nothing. The cast figured he hated what we were doing and speculated which one of us would be fired first.
Finally, as week three got underway, Steven had us repeat a scene four or five times. After the fifth take, something more surprising happened. He gave us direction. Then we got a little more direction. Finally, after the eighth or ninth take, Steven was satisfied and we broke for lunch.
We were curious about why, after a couple of weeks of silence, he gave us direction. “Because today you didn’t know what the hell you were doing,” he replied as if it were obvious. He went on to say that he had cast all of us for specific reasons. In his mind, we were very much like the characters we were playing and he wanted to bring as much of that to the screen in as natural a manner as possible. To that end, he said, “I like to give my actors three takes to figure it out. If I step in after the first take and give you a note, especially with young actors, you’ll hear me rather than your own voice.
“That might rattle you, too. Hurt your confidence. Or cause you to question your choices. And who even gets it right on the first or second take? “So I’ll give you time to find it,” he continued. “Especially in an ensemble piece where you have four or five guys acting together. It’s going to take everyone a little time to find the beats and gel.” “When do you decide to step in?” I asked. “If I feel like you’re going in the wrong direction,” he said. “And then, only with a little note, as little as possible. I’d rather you guys find it.”
Like a lot of young filmmakers, I thought being a director meant you were always giving direction. This is not the case. It’s about knowing when to give direction.
However, here’s the thing about movies that seem to disappear without a trace. With hundreds of cable channels and Netflix and iTunes, these movies live on forever. Years later, I was working with Dustin Hoffman in a movie called Confidence, and he mentioned he just caught some movie of mine on late-night cable. He said it was terrific and he loved the acting, but he didn’t know the name of it.
What I soon discovered was that it takes these guys a long time to read scripts and make decisions. Avoid it at all costs if you can. Waiting six months for a movie star to read your script can suck the life out of you and kill the momentum of your fledging production. I read about other filmmakers who will spend years trying to get a movie made. Personally, I just don’t have that patience. No one movie is so important that I would be willing to go years without being behind the camera. It’s just too much fun making a movie, and I got into this business because I have a lot of stories to tell and, fortunately for me, a lot of little stories, and little stories don’t need movie stars.
He paraphrased Warren Beatty: You don’t need to make three movies a year. Just make sure the next one is a great one.
One of my criteria when looking at acting jobs was, I wanted to work with people I could learn from.
And who better to go to acting school with than De Niro?
As I waited in the back of the cab for John to call “action,” I asked myself what I was doing living in LA. I missed New York, my hometown, my muse. And as much as I loved getting to work with Bobby D, I missed being a filmmaker. I promised myself that as soon as 15 Minutes wrapped, I would move back home and make a movie.
I had made three movies of my own and knew both the difficulty and the importance of making a schedule and adhering to it. Steven flew through the scenes.
Ryan was scheduled to shoot for sixty-six days and we wrapped in fifty-nine. That does not happen. Ever. Movies go over schedule. Big movies like Ryan go way over schedule. Saving Private Ryan was the polar opposite of a small indie. Steven had re-created a French village on another continent; he had remade Normandy on a beach in County Wexford, Ireland; and then he had restaged the invasion with two thousand extras—and came in under schedule! I was beyond impressed.
I think a primary reason we were able to shoot so quickly was the style in which we were shooting. The film was shot with a lot of handheld camera work and available light. He was going for the grainy feel of period documentary footage, the kind the army itself took. Therefore, there was not a lot of downtime between shots and setups. No big lights to move. Just reposition the camera operator and call “action” again.
As I watched him employ this technique, I thought, “Wait a second. I make low-budget indie films. Why don’t I shoot an entire film like this?”
I had Aaron read that first draft of Sidewalks of New York. I explained that I wanted to make the film this year and that meant a low budget, a run-and-gun sensibility, and a short shooting schedule. More important, I did not want to get locked into the slog of chasing a movie star and trying to raise a ton of money.
the lower the budget, the more control I would have. The more control I had, the more freedom I would have to make the movie I envisioned.
In my rewrite, I cut all the expositional and setup scenes. I probably wouldn’t have been able to do that without the passage of time. But now, a few years after having written the script, I no longer had an immediate emotional connection to scenes; I had forgotten how much time I spent writing them. As writers will attest, it’s hard to delete a scene when you can still feel the pain of having said no to dinner invitations and weekend softball games.
It was a valuable lesson for me as a writer. I didn’t have to explain everything to the audience. They didn’t need twenty minutes of setup.
I could trust they would get all the necessary information if they hung with the movie. The script was cut down to include only the pulp.
Once I decided to embrace the pseudo-documentary style, I looked to Woody Allen’s Husbands and Wives to try and figure out what the rules of the universe were with this type of storytelling. More specifically, who were the camera crew and why were they filming these people? Where were they allowed to go?
So we developed a compromise, which we still use today. We pay a smaller fee, take a section of the location while the establishment stays open for business, and we shoot our scene.
Maybe the sound wouldn’t be perfect, but it sure would look great if we shot there. Besides, as a sound mixer friend of mine once said, “The sad reality of my job is that no one has ever walked out of a movie and said, ‘Damn, that movie sounded terrific.’” When you’re working with low budgets, you have to pick your battles.
We learned here that a great way of keeping a prized location is to make it easy for the owner to stay open, while we work with the constraints of our budget.
“If you were shooting a doc, you’d only have the one angle. So you jump-cut in and out of the one shot to lose the information the audience doesn’t need to know.”
“When you’re in the editing room, you need to listen to your film and not scream at your film. Meaning sometimes the movie you made is different from the movie you thought you were making.
After that first day, we stopped shooting traditional coverage and approached each scene as if we were a documentary crew, that is, shooting most scenes from one handheld camera angle. This enabled us to shoot lean and work quick, and when you’re trying to make a film in seventeen days, you need to do both.
When I make a film, no matter how it eventually turns out, during the process, I love the film. You have to. I think that’s true for nearly all filmmakers. You pour yourself into every scene, push yourself to solve countless problems, and as the film comes together in the editing room, with a definitive beginning, middle, and end, you say, “Huh,” with a note of surprise. “This works. I love it.” Love is blindness.
(obviously, I hadn’t yet learned the lesson from Ash Wednesday about being in every scene),
There are those movies like Dallas Buyers Club, which can take two decades to get made. That said, being on the offense and making a movie is our goal. We can always pull out that old script down the road and bring it into the marketplace with a rewrite or a new spin to make it feel fresh.
Like my experience working opposite De Niro in 15 Minutes, I used the opportunity to pick Hoffman’s brain. Any actor wants to get better at his or her craft, and I tried to use these opportunities as a chance to improve my game. If Saving Private Ryan was my graduate school for directing, then the same could be said of watching Dustin every day on the set of Confidence.
My team couldn’t be happier. They had been begging me to do this for a few years. Go try and be a movie star, they would argue. You can make your little indie movies when you’re old and fat and you’ve lost your hair.
I had a good time making the movie, working with these terrific actors, and living in a great European city for a couple of months. But something was missing. Maybe I just missed New York City, my home. But if I was being honest, what I really missed was being a filmmaker.
“Eddie, I just saw you in Confidence,” he said. “I want you to promise me one thing—that you’re not going to make any independent movies for the next five years. You need to go and be a movie star.” I didn’t know what to say. It was both a compliment and a critique of my career in the same breath. But you know what, I was up for being a movie star, and if that’s what Harvey thought, well, Harvey’s thoughts mattered to people in the business.
It was hard for me to get too upset. I’m a realist. Shit happens.
to be a movie star, you have to really want to be a movie star. You have to work at it. You should move to Los Angeles, and then you have to fight tooth and nail for those acting jobs. It’s very competitive at the top. But I never wanted to be Paul Newman, I wanted to be Woody Allen. I have always been more interested in stealing away to my trailer between scenes to work on a screenplay. That’s not the sign of the guy who loves acting; that’s the sign of the guy who loves writing.
So as I had done in the past, it was time to be in charge of my own destiny. That’s how I got into independent film in the first place. I suppose it’s the core trait for being independent.
As everyone knows, the quality roles for women over the age of forty are few and far between in Hollywood films, let alone for women in their late fifties. We made offers to two legends, Mia Farrow and Sally Field, who both signed on immediately. The great thing about casting two fantastic actresses like Mia and Sally is that they attracted other terrific actors.
On the sleeve was a patch that read FIVE IN FIVE, FIVE FILMS IN FIVE YEARS. I liked that. That had always been my dream, to make one movie a year like Woody Allen has done for the last forty years. I decided then that, like Spike and Woody, I was going to try and make a movie a year as a filmmaker. And that’s what I set out to do. I was going to make a movie that year, come hell or high water.
At the end of the day, that was the point—to do something I loved and make enough money to do it again. My twelve days.
Dogme 95 was a filmmaking style born of directors Lars Von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg and based on bare-bones, natural production values. The Celebration was shot with a Sony DCR-PC7E Handycam. Digital minicassettes replaced film.
Tadpole and Pieces of April were New York movies, and both were shot with a Panasonic 24p, one of the first digital cameras that provided a more filmic look.
I was more excited about getting to play with this new digital approach. I just wanted to get outside and make another movie. And that’s what we did.
We didn’t have trailers, hair and makeup, catering, or many of the other perks that are taken for granted on a traditional movie set. Everyone did everything; cast and crew alike lugged lights and equipment. It was a miserable, hard experience because of the weather. Put simply, we froze our asses off. However, I made sure lunch was first class. Every day, we picked the nicest restaurant near where we were shooting, ordered great bottles of wine, and sat together for two hours (we had heard that French movie crews did this) at one long table, eating, laughing, and talking about film.
As I began looking at dailies, I found that the digital camera didn’t impress me. Though I liked the way the small camera let us steal shots around Times Square and on subways without attracting any attention, the footage looked foggy and muddy. Digital cinema still had a long way to go, but that was the least of our problems.
As we put the movie together in postproduction, I discovered an issue with the tone. Looking for Kitty contained elements from two different types of movies. I wanted to walk the line between broad comedy and more realistic dramatic moments. The films that can execute that most honestly reflect everyday life. I felt I was able to achieve that balance in The Brothers McMullen, She’s the One, and, most successfully, Sidewalks of New York. It’s a tricky thing to pull off, which is why you don’t see it too often. There are dramas and there are comedies, but my favorite films have been those that manage to do both. I think back to that very first film I saw in my film appreciation class at SUNY Albany—Billy Wilder’s The Apartment. The screenplay and the performances of Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine, guided by Wilder’s direction, beautifully walked the line between comedy and drama. Looking for Kitty did not.
I know the reason the film ultimately didn’t work was that I went into production without a completed screenplay. Had we set out to make a comedy, maybe we could have gotten away with this more improvised approach, but the tone we were trying to achieve needed to be carefully calibrated; it isn’t achieved willy-nilly.
The best part of Looking for Kitty is evident in the credits. Listed there are the names of the crew I still work with today: My DP, Will Rexer, has shot every film I’ve made since.
By most standards, Looking for Kitty was a failure. At one point, I even told Aaron that we shouldn’t finish the film, just shelve it. I even regretted making the movie. But years later, after a great screening at the Toronto Film Festival of The Fitzgerald Family Christmas, a film we all collaborated on, I was reminded that Will Rexer, P. T. Walkley, Janet Gaynor, Mike Harrop, Aaron Lubin, and I all first worked together on Looking for Kitty. It’s then I realized that there are no mistakes. And there are no bad films. Making movies is a gift, it’s a joy. We laughed our asses off on the set of Kitty and we were still laughing our asses off that night eight years later. You’re not going to hear too many stories like that in the film business. There is a misguided notion that you must suffer for the work, but it doesn’t have to be that way. The work is hard, that’s true, but at the end of the day, you’re only making a movie. It’s a privilege to make a movie, and I never forget that.
A couple thoughts for the first-time filmmaker: If you allow yourself to get crippled by the possibility of failure, you’re going to rob yourself of a lot of great experiences. There are very few great films, but something great, be it a new actor relationship or learning a new technology, has always come from my experiences making films, even if the film itself was disappointing. Additionally, consider how you can empower people who are working for peanuts. Looking for Kitty lists eight people as producers or coproducers, including Aaron and myself. Why so many? We give out producer credits as perks to people who work mostly on the promise of a percentage of profits.
Everyone has skin in the game. Find skilled, talented people willing to share a vision and work shoulder to shoulder doing whatever it takes to make the film a go. It’s a collaborative business. If they help produce, make them producers.
I left the theater that night worried about the film’s prospects. I read the room and knew better than to trust the compliments I received after the lights went on. You have to be careful with festival screenings. They are the friendliest audiences you are going to find, and sometimes the laughter and applause aren’t an accurate read.
How do you deal with that? Fall in love with a new set of characters and a new screenplay. I found it’s always easier to deal with the disappointment of a bad review or a soft opening weekend at the box office when you’re already consumed with the new script you’re working on. When you are deep into the writing process, you start to see the movie in your head. When you can see the movie in your head, you want to see the movie on-screen. That’s where your focus goes. So I knew what I had to do. Start writing.
I never really stop writing. There is always an idea I’m working on; sometimes it’s just an outline or a handful of scenes. These ideas, whether they are fully fleshed out or just character sketches, float around in the back of your head and then one day jump into the forefront. You can’t shake the idea or the character. You’re on the subway, you’re at a bar, you’re having dinner with friends, and your thoughts are drawn back to the idea. At this point, I go into investigative mode. I start picking people’s brains. It may sound like casual conversation but I’m doing my research. I’m developing my characters’ backstory. I ask friends and family their opinion on whatever subject I’m exploring. I implore them to share stories from their own lives that I may be able to use as inspiration or in some cases steal, with their permission of course.
early drafts of my script were pretty good but fell apart in the third act, as happens with a lot of comedies. You have to go big and ridiculous at the end. I tried, but I quickly realized I didn’t know how to write that kind of comedy. It just isn’t my sensibility. I’d return to it one day when the inspiration struck, and that night at dinner with my wife, it did. I decided my rewrite would steer away from a mainstream comedy; I would try for a more honest representation of men in their mid-thirties struggling to mature. I looked to Fellini’s 1953 masterpiece I Vitelloni for inspiration. It’s the story of five carefree guys plotting and dreaming of life beyond their small Italian town.
Groomsmen was a $3 million movie, we never felt rushed or under the gun. We had all the toys a studio filmmaker would want at his disposal: Steadicams, cranes, and for our final shot on the Staten Island Ferry, a helicopter. These things don’t happen on a $3 million movie unless you have an excellent producer fighting for every last dollar. It’s a lesson she taught Aaron that we still refer to every time he and I review a production budget.
Aaron remembers calling to arrange a drum lesson for Jay Mohr because his character plays drums. The cost of the lesson was $75. Margot, overhearing the call, asked Aaron how we were going to pay for it. After all, she said, “It’s not in the budget.” Aaron responded, “But Jay’s character needs to know how to play drums.” Margot asked, “But how are we going to pay for it?” Aaron shrugged, thinking it would all “come out in the wash.” Margot and Aaron laughed. They both knew that on a movie, things don’t come out in the wash. Instead, you go over budget and over schedule. The harder job is finding that $75 from somewhere else. On every movie we’ve done with Margot, we’ve never gone a day over schedule or a dollar over budget.
The glaring problem was that Bauer Martinez had no experience in distributing a specialized movie (indies are considered specialized releases). Typically, these films are given a platform release, opening in NYC and LA and then expanding to other markets the following few weeks. A deft strategy is employed that usually involves working with key art house theater owners as well as the preeminent journalists who cover specialized movies. It’s important to get the right placement and press, while also applying the right amount of pressure with the key exhibitors to keep the movie playing.
Oscar-winning film and sound editor Walter Murch said it best: “You can always make a film somehow. You can beg, borrow, steal the equipment, use credit cards, use your friends’ goodwill, wheedle your way into this or that situation. The real problem is, how do you get people to see it once it is made?”
Hard work is required in this business, tenacity is a must, and talent will always help your cause. However, you’re not going to get anywhere without a little bit of good luck. I had been at it long enough to know that action was the answer.
Every film is its own mountain of challenges, an uphill climb full of exhilarating moments, self-doubt, hope, disappointment, hard work, laughs, mistakes, and even some triumphs. Such is this business.
You want to make movies. The desire and passion burns in your blood. You don’t have a choice. Making movies isn’t what you do, it’s who you are. But it’s just so hard to get them made, and then even harder to get them seen. If it’s too hard for you, you’re in the wrong business. If you like running into brick walls, stick with it. I knew if I wanted a second act for my career, I needed to be the architect of it, and that meant I needed to figure out a way to continue making movies.
Shooting a scene with a moving master is always a great challenge for both the cast and crew. For the cast, it’s more like performing onstage. Typically when shooting a film, if an actor forgets a line or isn’t happy with their performance, they know they’ll not only get another take but there will be other shots from various angles (e.g., medium shot, close-up, etc.) where that line will be covered. However, if you forget or flub a line when shooting a three-minute moving master, the entire take is no good.
The same holds true for the crew. These shots are carefully choreographed so that the character’s blocking (where/how the actor moves around a space) works for the camera’s position, angle, and focus. If the dolly or Steadicam accidentally bumps into a piece of furniture, or the boom microphone enters the shot, or the camera assistant loses focus because the actor doesn’t stop exactly where rehearsed, the shot is blown. Usually, these types of shots take a long time to set up and a long time to rehearse. But if you get it right once, you’re done with the scene.
I realized that when selling a film to the public, especially a small independent film, you not only need to sell the story, actors, and genre, but you also need a couple other related stories around the film to generate press.
There was also the story of the twenty-seven-year-old former Entertainment Tonight production assistant who lived in his car for a time and who made a feature-length movie at his parents’ house, which starred a bunch of no-name kids from New York, and hey, it was pretty good. It also took home the Grand Jury Prize at the Sundance Film Festival.
I’ve made it a habit to get those thoughts down then and there. Sometimes, it’s just a line of dialogue. Sometimes, it’s twenty pages. Again, if you’re overprecious about the process, the harder it is to get the work done.
Larry describes screenwriting as “far from being hard work, and might actually be considered to be a form of creative play.” It is.
“A relationship is like a shark. It has to constantly move forward or it dies. I think what we have on our hands is a dead shark.”
Part of the problem lay in the fact that the movies had much bigger budgets (each was budgeted at $25 million or more). There is a small pool of actors to draw from when you’re looking for that much money.
Aaron has reminded me on numerous occasions that we need to always have several irons in the fire, and we should pivot quickly to the project that is getting traction.
Soderbergh stated, “This is the camera I’ve been waiting for my whole career. Jaw-dropping imagery, recorded on board a camera light enough to hold in one hand.” Soderbergh has now moved onto the iPhone.
Rather than go out and do a typical camera test, I suggested we make a short film.
I played Lynch, Dara played the rival, and three hours later we had our foot chase in the can. No permits, no lights, no sound, no wardrobe, no hair, no makeup, no nothing. Then we ran back to my office, downloaded the footage onto our editing system, and watched. We were blown away.
This did not look like digital. The game had changed.
Here’s the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJDfa6xrEuI
How had I gone from winning at Sundance with McMullen, standing next to Steven Spielberg in Deauville, and co-starring with Dustin Hoffman and Robert De Niro to standing in an office, hat in hand, and listening to these B movie producers tell me how to make my movie? How the hell did this happen? Where was the mistake? Where was the fuckup? I’ve had some doozies but this was a new low.
“It’s about two percent moviemaking and ninety-eight percent hustling. It’s no way to spend a life.”
Ed Suggests to watch and learn from these movies
- Antonioni’s L’Avventura
- De Sica’s Terminal Station
- Truffaut’s The Man Who Loved Women
- Rohmer’s My Night at Maud’s
- Godard’s Contempt
- Bergman’s Smiles of a Summer Night,
- Scorsese’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore
- Cassavetes’s Husbands
- Spike Lee’s She’s Gotta Have It
- Everything Woody Allen.
Whether we shot eight or nine pages a day, these kids always knew their lines.
Just as we did on McMullen, we worked around our paying gigs, finding a day here or there when we were all available and could get together and shoot.
We worked eighteen-hour days and shot sixty-seven pages that week.
Marc and his team target tech bloggers, hip websites, tastemakers, and connectors to help create buzz on films lacking bigger marketing budgets and resources. This approach worked hand in hand with our digital distribution model. And like an entrepreneur, Marc agreed to work on the film for a percentage of the profits. Now, every year, we send him a check.
We even cut a series of trailers to look like trailers for classic foreign films like Antonioni’s L’Avventura and Bertolucci’s Contempt, which we called, “homage trailers,”
I had now learned that if you want to be an indie filmmaker, you have to be as creative in the release as you are in the making of the film so back to the basics and made a movie the way I had fifteen years earlier, with no money and no names.
In the one column, when you make a low budget film, the list of compromises includes
- I will not be working with movie stars.
- My camera department will have no toys (i.e., cranes, car rigs, Steadicams, dolly track, etc.).
- I will not get paid and neither will my crew.
- I will not work with a production designer or costume designer or location scout or script supervisor or hair and makeup departments (you get the idea).
- My movie will have no stunts.
- There will be no giant set pieces.
- No art can be created for the film.
- No transportation will be provided for the actors.
- There will be no trailers.
- There will be no money for locations, so we will need to beg friends and family.
- I will have no special effects.
- I will need to lug equipment and move furniture when needed.
- We will not have permits, so we will have to steal shots where we can.
- We will eat pizza most days for lunch.
In the other column, when someone writes you a check, the list of compromises includes:
- You will no longer have creative control.
- You will not be able to cast the people you want to cast.
- You may have to change your title. —You may have to change your music.
- You may have to make changes to the screenplay that you do not agree with.
- You may have to hire crew members you don’t care for.
- You may have to cast someone’s girlfriend.
When writing Newlyweds, I went on Twitter to cast a wider net. I asked my followers about the first big fight they had with their spouse after they were married.
We also decided to change from the Red One to the Canon 5D, an even smaller and less expensive camera. I wanted to make it easy to run downstairs and shoot with just a few minutes’ notice. Without lights. Without sound. We didn’t get permits or permission. People looked at us for a minute or two but then lost interest. So smaller was easier.
The great thing about making a movie on a DSLR is that even a novice photographer can capture a pretty great image, especially shooting daytime exteriors.
This gave me the opportunity to have several weeks in the editing room between shooting days. I was able to use that time to look at my footage and performances and rewrite according to what I liked or what wasn’t working. I’ve equated it to a painter looking at his first wash and then being able to sit back and look at his canvas for weeks before deciding what brushstrokes to apply next. This is a luxury of time that a filmmaker is rarely afforded. Typically on any movie set, the minute the check is signed and money is being spent, it is a mad dash to the finish line.
This is understandable, but it can also make for a frantic environment on set. There is usually someone standing behind the filmmaker, reminding him that he needs to “make the day.” If the filmmakers don’t make their day, they go over schedule and then over budget, which is obviously a legitimate concern for money people.
I had been giving my Twitter followers a day-by-day report on the progress of the film, and I could tell they were appreciative of the access. I then thought it would be cool to give someone in the Twitterverse an opportunity to design the movie’s poster. I tweeted the idea to my followers and was met with great enthusiasm.
We had so much fun with that contest that we also launched a song contest.
Because we had almost no marketing costs, high distribution fees, or manufacturing expenses, for example, film prints and DVDs, the film moved into the black within a few weeks after its release. Our little $9,000 film had turned into a genuine moneymaker for us, and we continue to see profits come in every year. There is no greater feeling.
After we recouped the $125,000 investment we made in Newlyweds, we were able to cut back-end checks to our crew.
He said, “McMullen is your most critically acclaimed film and She’s the One is your most successful. They’re both about Irish families.” In fifteen years, I had never gone back to the well. Tyler said, “You have an audience waiting for you to tell stories about Irish Americans. Take some advice from me; you need to superserve your niche. That’s what I do and if you do the same thing, I guarantee your fans—will love you for it.
I also called friends of mine on Long Island, describing the types of homes I envisioned, and we were able to find real lived-in locations. My good friend Tom Pecora proved to be an invaluable resource. We ended up shooting in his mother-in-law’s house, his sister’s house, and one of his childhood best friend’s homes.
And we kept our schedule to fifteen shooting days.
Like the first two films, we relied on friends to help identify some locations we could get for free. Since we were such a small crew, and had no plans to move things around, the homeowners were happy to have us.
Please don’t listen to the naysayers who complain that we have a glut of movies, that there are too many people making films. Has anyone ever complained about too many poems, songs, or paintings? Because of these technological advances, you are now no different from the kids who keep writing songs on their guitars until they figure out what makes a good song, or the painters who keep throwing colors up against the canvas until they realize their vision.
However, we all agreed that we were tired of using our own cars and clothes, asking actors to do their own hair and makeup, and begging friends to let us shoot in their apartments, homes, bars, restaurants, gyms, etc.
A successful meeting is about staying cool and focused, maintaining confidence and belief, and being thoroughly prepared. Also, never forget the importance of arriving on time.
When pitching projects, I typically speak for about fifteen minutes, introducing the idea, the characters, and then the story. If I am pitching a TV series as opposed to a movie, I also describe the pilot episode, future episodes, and the overall arc of the first season. At the end, I take questions.
we are a team that has made multiple micro- and low-budget movies. Given our indie background, we had a skill set that would serve us well on this shoot. We knew how to think on our feet, pivot in another direction when trouble came our way, and quickly reshuffle a schedule so we wouldn’t lose an hour of precious shooting time.
While it’s critical to find the right actor for a part, nothing slows down a production more than an actor who is difficult or, even worse, abusive to the crew and other cast mates. Put simply, we have a “no asshole policy” and that applies across the board to anyone on set. We make it a point to do our due diligence on the actors and make sure they cross the talent threshold but are also team players.
I made eleven movies in twenty years, and half were considered failures.
It’s not about the box office or the accolades or the money or any of the other perks; it’s about the process. The only thing that matters is the process.
“Like an old jazz artist, you own your tone. And they can’t take that away from you. If not for you, would we have seen this slice of life or gotten this point of view?”
“Make visible what, without you, might perhaps never be seen.”