Richard Glatzer on writing/directing “Grief”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How did you go about funding the movie?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Did you write the script with particular actors in mind? 

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

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

How long did you shoot?

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

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

Did the script change much during shooting?

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

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

Did you change the script after the week of rehearsal?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How long did it take to finish the movie?

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

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

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

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

Did that festival help?

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

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

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

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

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

How was your Sundance experience?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What were the downsides?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dying to make a feature? Learn from the pros!

"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! 

Dylan Kidd on writing & directing "Roger Dodger"

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

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

Where were you in your career before Roger Dodger happened?

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

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

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

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

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

How many scripts had you written before Roger Dodger?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where did the idea for the story come from?

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

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

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

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

Did you have a theme in mind when you started?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How did you come up with the title?

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

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

What is your writing process?

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

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

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

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

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

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

And I'm an atheist! 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Were you writing to a particular budget?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Did you write with specific actors in mind?

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

How did you get Campbell Scott?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is the most fun part?

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

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

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

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

That's the one effect that was completely scripted. 

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

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

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

Probably by lunch on the first day. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dying to make a feature? Learn from the pros!

"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! 

Susan Seidelman on “Desperately Seeking Susan”

How did you get started in filmmaking?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Did you face any resistance to casting her?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So what still excites you about making movies?

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

Dying to make a feature? Learn from the pros!

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

★★★★★

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

• Jonathan Demme: The value of cameos

• John Sayles: Writing to your resources

• Peter Bogdanovich: Long, continuous takes

• John Cassavetes: Re-Shoots

• Steven Soderbergh: Rehearsals

• George Romero: Casting

• Kevin Smith: Skipping film school

• Jon Favreau: Creating an emotional connection

• Richard Linklater: Poverty breeds creativity

• David Lynch: Kill your darlings

• Ron Howard: Pre-production planning

• John Carpenter: Going low-tech

• Robert Rodriguez: Sound thinking

And more!

Write Your Screenplay with the Help of Top Screenwriters!

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

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

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

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

The book covers (among other topics):

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Roger Nygard (“Suckers”) on mixing genres

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

Tom Noonan on “What Happened Was…”

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

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

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

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

That’s a lot of rehearsal.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What was your budget?

TOM: The budget was $131,000. 

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

What was bad about the deal?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Movies don't have to cost a lot.

Dying to make a feature? Learn from the pros!

"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! 

Joan Micklin Silver on “Hester Street”

Hester Street breaks many of the rules of low-budget filmmaking. It’s a period piece. It’s shot in black and white. And half the dialogue is in Yiddish.

However, as we know, rules are made to be broken. The late Joan Micklin Silver’s passion for the story Yekl, from Abrahma Cahan's novella, is evident in every frame of Hester Street, and her genius at casting (which would surface again in her next feature, Between The Lines), brought Carol Kane to national attention – and garnered her an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress.

At what point were you in your career before Hester Street came along?

JOAN MICKLIN SILVER: I had made some short films for an educational film company and had written a screenplay which was -- although much changed -- made in Hollywood. And I was looking for an opportunity to direct. I found that in that particular time -- we're talking about the early 70s -- the opportunities for women to direct were just nil, and while I could get work writing, I really wanted to be able to direct the work that I did.

How did you find Abraham Cahan’s novella and what attracted you to it?

JOAN MICKLIN SILVER: One of the films that I made for the educational film company was on immigration. I read just about everything I could find on immigration and one of the things that I read was the novella by Abraham Cahan called Yekl. 

I was really floundering around and wanting very much to make my own films. My husband, Ray, who was a real estate developer, told me that if I could do a film that would not cost very much, that he would try to raise money from some of the investors that he'd been going to for real estate deals. And that was how we did it.

Frankly I didn't think I'd ever get to make another film. I was pretty discouraged about it all. My family were immigrants and I wanted to make a movie that would count for them.

Was the story in the public domain at that point?

JOAN MICKLIN SILVER: Yes. And that was one of its attractions.

What challenges did you face in the adaptation?

JOAN MICKLIN SILVER: Well, the story itself is more the husband's story. I think what grabbed me about it was what happened to the wife. So it was really just telling the story from the point of view that interested me. The challenge of it, of course, was to try to make it authentic. 

I felt that because my father had told me so many stories about his life as an immigrant boy from Russia, I knew that language was a huge factor in getting along or not getting along. He told me stories of not quite knowing English and once leaving some money on a bus; he was a paperboy and he had made some collections and left the money by accident on the bus. He thinks people were trying to tell him and he didn't understand what they were saying. He got off the bus and then realized it -- things like that. Knowing the English language was extremely difficult.

And also both my parents were Yiddish speaking and I can remember dinners at our house with all sorts of relatives and wonderful stories being told and then punch lines coming out in Yiddish and my mother turning to us and saying, "You know, it doesn't quite translate." She would try to translate it, but never could quite do it. And I associated that language with something very rich and interesting and enjoyable. 

Were you worried about breaking some of the cardinal rules of low-budget filmmaking: You don't do period pieces, you don't do something that's half in English and half in Yiddish?

JOAN MICKLIN SILVER: I didn't know enough to know that I was breaking cardinal rules and that's the truth. I had to tell this story and I had to do what I could to tell it.

Was there anything in the adaptation that you really wished you could have included, but budget prevented it?

JOAN MICKLIN SILVER: There were many, many things. For example, just after we had made the movie, Godfather II came out. And in Godfather II there's a very long scene in Ellis Island in which there's an overhead traveling shot. The boy who will grow up to be Robert DeNiro is sitting on the bench and you see him in isolation, all by himself. It's just a stunning shot, and I remember that Ray and I saw it and were just pinching each other's arms in jealously.

When it came time to do Ellis Island, I had to do what I think just about all low-budget filmmakers do and that is that you make a part work for the whole. You have to ask yourself, "What’s the most important thing about this?" And I decided that it was the separation between the ones who were already there and the ones who had just arrived. Therefore, I thought if I could do some sort of a fence or something that would keep the two groups apart, that would help to say what I wanted to say. 

I remember that the fence cost about $800, which was a huge portion of our budget. I think it worked -- it isn't re-creating Ellis Island, which if I'd had a chance, of course I would have done. Those were the sorts of things that we did all the time.

What was your process for making the adaptation?

JOAN MICKLIN SILVER: I think I just read it more than a few times and then just thought about it. I like to do research and I was also looking though lots and lots of material. For instance, I went to the public library and there were a lot of files available about immigrant life in New York, with pictures. I went to the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, which had a lot of oral histories of immigrants. 

There also happened to be an exhibition of Roman Vishniac photographs around that time and although his photographs were not of the period -- they were about Polish immigrants between the wars -- still the Shtel life I'm sure was pretty similar. 

Did you use any of your family's immigrant experiences in writing the script?

JOAN MICKLIN SILVER: Immigrants fall into two groups: the kind that want to talk about it all the time and the kind that never talk about it because it was traumatic and they really want to make the adjustment and be Americans. 

My family was definitely the kind that talked about it all the time. I had heard so many stories about it all. I'd heard stories about people who came and people who left and people who went back and people who went crazy. I had a head full of all these sorts of stories, so I'm sure they fit into writing this screenplay.

Did the fact that you knew you wouldn't have much money to shoot this movie have any impact on you while you were writing the script?

JOAN MICKLIN SILVER: Constantly. I was constantly thinking, for example, about how I could do Ellis Island, things like that. It was one thing after another, just constantly trying to figure out how I could tell the story without having a budget that would have allowed me to tell the full story, where you could recreate the Lower East Side, like they did in Godfather II.

We used one street, Morton Street, and we could only shoot in one direction, because that direction faced Bleecker, where the streets formed a "T," so that you only had to create the look on Morton up toward Bleecker. 

If we faced the other way, it was Seventh Avenue and obviously we couldn't close Seventh Avenue, we didn't have that ability. In Godfather II, they had street after street, traveling shots that were gorgeous. So we just did what we could and everything was written and organized with that in mind. 

My own experience in writing low-budget films is that you often have to do a part of something; a part has to stand for something larger. 

Did you always plan to shoot in black and white?

JOAN MICKLIN SILVER: No, I don't think I thought about it at all. But when I started doing the research and saw these pictures, particularly the photos by Louis Hine and Jacob Reis and some of the anonymous pictures I found in the Jewish file at the public library, it just seemed to me that it might be a wonderful way to tell it. And I happen to like black and white.

Were you worried about the balance of English and Yiddish in the script?

JOAN MICKLIN SILVER: I don't think I was thinking in those terms. I guess my own experience had been that actors have very good ears. I knew that even if the actors had to learn the Yiddish phonetically, they would do it. 

I was writing this screenplay for me to direct and I didn't think that I would be hiring too many actors who already knew Yiddish. I thought I'd be lucky if I hired some, but I didn't think all of them would. In the end, I did have a few that did, but many didn't. 

But that wasn't something that worried me, because my own experience with actors had been that they really have very good ears, they're terrific mimics. Actors can hear someone and mimic them the next moment.

What resources do you use to get feedback while you're writing?

JOAN MICKLIN SILVER: The feedback that I got was primarily from my husband. Usually you have to send the script to whoever the financial group is, but this was a group of investors that didn’t really need to see the screenplay. They were making small investments and it was not the sort of thing where they were going to be reading it.

I know I got lots of ideas when I started working with the actors. For instance, I think that two of my favorite lines in the script came from Doris Roberts, who plays the neighbor, Mrs. Kavarsky. These were expressions that her grandfather had said and she said to me, "Do you think these are good lines?" And I said, "Doris, they're fabulous. They're going right into the script."

One of them is, "You can't pee up my back and make me think it's rain," and the other one was, "With one tuchis you can't dance at two weddings." Old Yiddish expressions and they were wonderful and just perfect -- and, of course, she delivered them wonderfully.

Besides the addition of those lines, did the script change much once you started working with the actors?

JOAN MICKLIN SILVER: I was quite open to changing it, but it didn't change as much as I thought it would, mainly because, with the Yiddish and the English and the period, the actors didn't feel really comfortable doing improvisations. 

It did change somewhat when I was cutting it -- it followed the original story more closely. There was a longer section of the husband's life in New York before the wife came. When we did the rough cut, it was just clear that the real story started when the wife came and that the life of the husband could be established in fewer scenes.

Two scenes really stand out for me and I'm not sure how you would have described them when you wrote them. The first is when Jacob finds out that his father has died and he goes home and tries to pray. You really get a sense that this is a guy who hasn't done this in a while.

JOAN MICKLIN SILVER: Well, he hadn’t done it, so that part wasn't hard. The actor wasn't trying to unlearn something or trying to show that he didn't know how to do something that he really knew how to do. He didn't know how to do the prayers.

And then there's a scene with Gitl and the boarder, Bernstein. We're not sure where the relationship is headed and as they sit at the table he reaches over and touches her garment. 

JOAN MICKLIN SILVER: That came from the actor. She was talking about her husband and not knowing where to turn. She sat down at the table across from Bernstein and he tried to reassure her and cover for her husband, although you could tell that he felt very sorry for her. 

We shot it a few times, and I just didn't feel like we had it; it needed something. It wasn't quite there. And I was sitting there, trying to think about what it was that would bring the scene more to life. At that moment the actor playing Bernstein reached over and touched her shawl. And I said, "That's it." 

It needed something to show that he had feelings for her, and it came from him -- it was not in the script but came from the actor.

It just proves that you don't always need dialogue to show the relationship between characters.

JOAN MICKLIN SILVER: That's very true. If you can get it that way, you've really got it. You get so many clues of people's behavior by watching them; we all do that, all the time. We do it with our politicians; it isn't just what they say, it’s how they are.

Did you have actors in mind while you were writing the screenplay?

JOAN MICKLIN SILVER: No. As a matter of fact, I was expecting to find someone who is like the Gitl in the story. She was described as dark and a little plump. So I thought I would find someone like that and that will be fine.

After I finished the script while Ray was raising the money for it, I saw a film with Carol Kane in it, a Canadian film called Wedding in White. I was just entranced by her, I just thought she had such a wonderful film presence. She had a certain Old World quality to her. 

We had a casting director and I told him I'd seen this young woman, but she seemed to be Canadian, and obviously with our low budget we couldn't afford to bring anybody in and put them up. And he said that as a matter of fact she lived across Central Park and she was a New Yorker and there wouldn't be any problem. She was the first one that we hired.

Was it difficult to put aside, as a writer, your vision of Gitl when, as the director, you found someone completely different than you had imagined?

JOAN MICKLIN SILVER: I think every writer/director does the same thing. You write to give yourself a blueprint for the film that you're going to make. Then you see what comes up and you try to leave yourself open to what the actors bring to it and what the weather brings and what the locations brings. You're happy because it isn't just you; everybody's taking this thing and adding to it, bringing more to it. And that was just fantastic.

In casting the Jacob character, I felt that I understood his problem and I understood what he was going through and I really like this character. But a number of the people who came and tried out wanted him to be more heroic and a little less harsh with her and a little less confused about his life. I had to reject those actors, because they didn't want to do the character as written, they wanted to do something else.

For Bernstein, the actor who was cast dropped out at the very last minute and I was quite stuck. It was one of the most devastating moments in the making of the film.

Ken Van Sickle, our cinematographer, said to me, "Well, what about Mel Howard?" And I said, "Mel Howard? Mel Howard came here for a crew job, he's not an actor." And Ken said, "Yes, but when he came you told me you liked the way he looked and you liked his eyes for Mr. Bernstein."

I didn't even remember that I'd even said that. So I said, "Bring him in," and he came in, and of course he'd grown up in a Jewish family and spoke perfect Yiddish. He took direction wonderfully and gave a wonderful performance.

How did you get the scenes that needed to be in Yiddish translated into Yiddish?

JOAN MICKLIN SILVER: Michael Gorrin recorded the Yiddish for the actors and he did all the translations, except in those instances when the actor already knew Yiddish. The Rabbi, the guy who played the peddler, the man who played the scribe, they all spoke Yiddish and did their own translations.

What movies inspired you?

JOAN MICKLIN SILVER: I loved so many movies. I grew up in Omaha, Nebraska and in Omaha at the time I was growing up there wasn't any television. It didn't come until I was in high school. So the amusement of the day was to get on the streetcar and go downtown and pay thirty-five cents and see a double feature. You paid thirty-five cents until you were twelve, but everybody was twelve until they were about fifteen.

I still have a wealth of movie images in my mind from that, but there are a couple of movies that I remember very distinctly from seeing them as a kid. One was Shadow of a Doubt. I can see why I was so attracted to it: It's about a girl whose trusted uncle turns out to be a killer. This was not a threat from outside; this is a threat from within the family circle. 

I was very profoundly affected by that. I can remember in the scene where Joseph Cotton tries to push Teresa Wright out of the moving train, I can honestly remember still to this day how I felt: which theater it was, where I was sitting, where my mother was sitting, where my father was sitting. It was quite a strong childhood experience. I think I was only about seven or eight, but I really remember it to this day.

That has a certain power over you and makes you desire to re-create something like that.

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

JOAN MICKLIN SILVER: I don't think it's so much advice from another person. I think it's just the experience of looking at films. 

When I first started working in film -- this was pre-video -- we used to go to the Museum of Modern Art and sit in the basement and see films. I would say that was the thing that taught me the most, to see the great films and then to try to study the screenplays. Oftentimes those screenplays were available and I could buy them and study them and try to figure out why they worked. I think that was the kind of advice that was the best for me.

Did you learn anything while writing Hester Street that you took to future projects?

JOAN MICKLIN SILVER: You know, I think each one is so different. Certain things become a little bit easier, perhaps, but each one is so different and each one has such different requirements. 

I don't know how much one really teaches you for the next. Maybe it gives you confidence to think, "I did it before, maybe I can do it again." But I think each time you're walking off a cliff.

CLICK HERE for more film interviews.

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! 

Edie Falco on “Judy Berlin”

What the biggest difference between doing The Sopranos and doing an independent film?

EDIE: The budget on one episode of The Sopranos is higher than all the movies I've done, combined.

I know Eric Mendelsohn is a long-time friend. At what point in his process does he start to involve you?

EDIE: Usually he'll wait until a script is finished and then give it to me to read, which is what he did [with Judy Berlin]. After I read it and told him how much I loved it, he said “I would love for you to play the part of Judy.” I was flabbergasted, because he had not said a word to me about it.

I've read everything he's ever done and given my feedback, so I assumed that that's what this was.

What’s the advantage of doing a film like this with a long-time friend?

EDIE: A lot of the films I've done I've done with friends and family. The advantage is you go in there feeling no obligation to prove yourself. You're assuming that these people know who you are, at least socially if not more than that. There's a camaraderie and a trust that is inherent in just all of you being there together. I know they trust me and I trust them. It gets that all out of the way so we can get down to the work.

I know Eric kept you and Barbara Barrie (who plays Judy’s mother) apart before you shot your first scene together. Did that help?

EDIE: It sure did. Although I thought it was just a matter of scheduling. I thought, 'All right, I won't meet her until the day we shoot.' That's the way these things are. I think in retrospect it did help.

She was a woman around whom I was unfamiliar. You hold your body differently; eye contact is different than with someone that you're comfortable around. I think physically the relationship that Judy and her mother had sort of mirrored that of strangers. In that regard, the subconscious stuff that was already taking place probably only fed what was happening in the script. And I imagine that was his intent.

Is your preparation any different when you know you're going into a lowbudget project?

EDIE: No, not at all. Really nothing about my preparation or involvement is any different on anything I do. The only thing that varies is, if I read something and I like it, I'll do it. If I read something and I don't like it, I won't. Once I've decided I'm doing something, I approach everything exactly the same, whether it's a play or a movie or a low-budget movie or a big budget movie. It's irrelevant.

How is working on a low-budget movie different?

EDIE: You get a lot of directors who are nervous, and they don't trust themselves or they don't trust the process. So, they might end up doing a lot more takes than they need, as if the actor is an infinite source of these things. Because at a certain point I know I'm not doing work that I'm proud of anymore, I'm just exhausted. And they are just too afraid to say, 'Okay, let's move on.' And so you'll do another four, five takes, and I start thinking, 'Oh, this is not what I meant to do, this is not the take I want.' So that's a little rough.

But once you start doing things where they put you in a nice trailer, and you've got people running around and taking care of you, when you all of a sudden have to change clothes in the back of a Chevy again, you think, 'You know, this does kind of stink, come to think of it. I would prefer to be in a trailer right now.' 

So, I don’t know if I've been a little bit spoiled by some of the bigger budget stuff. And you realize there's a reason you're taken care of, because you want to show up and do the best you can each time you're out there. It does help to be rested and warm and all that stuff.

There are so many advantages to working on a low-budget project. I feel a totally comfortable with the idea of trying something and having it not work. I feel a sense of freedom to just go for it, because money is not at the forefront of everything that goes on in these things. You don't have a producer standing over you saying, 'We gotta make the day!' Everybody's just flying by the seat of their pants and I feel a sense of freedom that I don't when money is being talked about. 

Also, on a big-budget thing, there are a zillion people working on it. Oftentimes nobody knows who anybody else is and they don't necessarily care about their job, they're just trying to get enough days so they can become an AD. 

On these low-budget things, everybody's there because they want to be. They know the director, they love the work of the director, they're a friend and he needed a helping hand. You know you're not going to make money and you know it's going to be hard work and you're there because you love it. And that is infused in every moment you spend on the set of a low-budget movie. It's been my experience that nothing but good stuff will come out of that.

Judy Berlin has a really exceptional cast – Barbara Barrie, Bob Dishy, Madeline Kahn, Anne Meara, Julie Kavner. Was that intimidating at all?

EDIE: No. At a certain point, if you've dealt with a bunch of these people, you realize that they really are just people. And when it comes down to who's talented and who's nice, that's all I'm really impressed by these days.

Barbara Barrie was, I'm sure, thrilled to get a script that was so good. Doesn't matter what the budget is. You see this big budget stuff that's being made, and you read the script and you're thinking, 'How did this happen to this industry?' 

So you read a good script -- and my experience is, I don't care who's doing it, where it's being done, but I'd give my right arm to be involved in it. As far as I'm concerned, the most valued commodity in this industry is good writing. I was not at all surprised that he got the cast he did. 

I was really sick for a good part of that shoot. We did mostly night shoots, because of the eclipse stuff, and I had a stomach virus. And I thought to myself, 'There's no way I can do this. There's just no way." And there was. I showed up and I felt sick and I was somehow able to get through the days. I was pleased to see that I can show up for stuff even when I think I can't.  

Find more Film Interviews HERE.

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!