The movie Personal Velocity is actually three movies -- three individual stories about three very different women. Writer/director Rebecca Miller adapted the stories from her short story collection (also titled Personal Velocity), bringing the stories to life via a low-budget DV production.
The result is a movie as varied in its tone and emotions as the three primary characters whose stories it brings to life.
What was going on in your life before Personal Velocity?
REBECCA: I had basically given up, at least for the time being, the idea of making films, because it was so hard for me to get my films made at that point. I had made one film, called Angela, which had won the Filmmaker's Prize at Sundance. They've discontinued the Filmmaker's Prize; all the filmmakers voted on their favorite films in competition.
Angela did well with some critics, but it didn't make money. It was a very uncommercial film. And then I had written The Ballad of Jack and Rose, which was something I would make later, and I wrote another film that collapsed in pre-production. So I had gotten to the point where I just felt like I didn't want to just wait and wait to make films. All I did all day was write these screenplays that nobody seemed to want. So I decided to write short stories.
I had a child – I was living in Europe at that time – so it was a perfect moment for me to do that. So I started writing these short stories and had a book of them.
My friend Gary Winick called me. He was making this series of films for the Independent Film Channel. He had come to them with this idea that he would make ten films a year for a million dollars, but what they ended up giving everybody was a $250,000 budget.
He asked did I have anything, did I want to make a film on mini-DV for that much money? None of the films that I had already written were really right for that, because I figured (and I was right about this), that you'd have to tailor a script for that medium and for that budget; you shouldn't just take one of your scripts and try and turn it into that kind of shoot.
I was sick of writing screenplays that no one was going to make, so I said, "If you want to look at the stories that I'm writing, I could maybe do something out of one of them." I gave him a few stories from the collection and he read them and he really liked them. He gave them to Caroline Kaplan, who was running InDigEnt with him, and they ended up green-lighting the film. It was also Gary's idea to use three stories and make a trilogy. When he said that my mind took off.
The thing that's great about Gary is that he really insisted that I feel completely free. At first I was sort of checking with him and saying, "I'm doing this, I'm doing that," and he was like, "Look, do whatever. The point is that we want to get filmmakers who have experience and who we believe in to feel free."
And so I wrote the script for Personal Velocity in about two months. It took me about two years to write the book. I knew what everybody in those stories was feeling and I knew the characters from top to bottom, so writing the screenplay was mostly about finding the form and the structure.
How did you decide which of the three stories to use?
REBECCA: I chose the ones that were the most dynamic in terms of action, where there was conflict that was externalized, because some of them were very interior. And also where I thought that there was a good clash. I thought there was a very good clash between Delia, which is a story about a working-class woman struggling with an abusive marriage, and Greta, which is about an upper-middle class woman struggling with the clash between her own ambition and a marriage which is feeling increasingly stultifying; finally her ambition propels her out of her own marriage.
They both involve crisis, but of a different order. And then, class-wise, Paula is kind of a floater, because she's an artist, she's from that class. Although she doesn't really produce anything, she's in-between the two classes.
It was a little bit crazy. When Gary first read the screenplay, he said, "Well this is great, but how in God's name are you going to do this?," because there were many, many, many locations in the film, especially because Greta had so many flashbacks and so much going back and forth with the past that it was just insane. Ideally, when you make a film for $250,000 in 16 days, you're going to be in one room. We were all over the place.
The good news was that it was a kind of mosaic, so that you didn't really need the coherence from scene to scene. The coherence was something that really came with the editing, and then the whole thing was sewn together with voice-over and music. So although there were complete scenes that had a beginning, middle and end a lot of the time, there were also very tiny scenes that were very short and all pieces of a puzzle.
How did you come up with the idea of using still images throughout the movie?
REBECCA: There were certain scenes that I wrote that the producer, Lemore Syvan, would look at and say, "We can't afford to shoot certain things." And that's where the idea of the stills came in. The stills turned out to be one of the things that distinguished the film and I think worked really nicely emotionally in the film. But the idea was born out of poverty.
Shooting MOS, without sound, is so much faster that we could just rip through those scenes. At first I thought we might shoot them as stills in the camera, but then I just decided to shoot and then pick the stills later, because it would give me more choices.
At what point in the process did you decide to use narration?
REBECCA: I always knew I was going to. The narration was built into it.
Early on Gary had said that he loved the way the narrator spoke in the stories and that it would be a pity to lose that. I also thought that with the three stories it would be a good way to link them together. It also gives you a lot more freedom, because we're jumping back and forth through time constantly. And the narration also carries a lot of the humor -- it's a sympathetic third voice.
In the end there was a whole debate about whether or not to make it a male or female voice. I always knew that it was meant to be a male voice, but then there were some people who saw it and said, "You can't make it a male voice; it's about women."
But I just ended up really liking the male voice, because I thought it differentiated itself from the other voices. Otherwise, it was just another woman's voice; it was like a soup of women's voices and I thought it was good to have the male voice. Also, I thought it was kind of optimistic to have a male voice. It seemed to be sympathetic and unjudgmental of these women while some of their struggles were against men. And it was my overriding view that it's very possible to have sympathetic males in your movies.
How did you come up with the idea of linking the three stories with the car accident and how did that decision help you?
REBECCA: That came fairly early on, because I realized that something had to unify these three stories and I liked the idea of them all happening at once. It also created a sense of mystery, so that by the time you get to Paula's story, you know that she's the person that everyone is looking for and wondering who she is. That was a device that I came up with fairly early on, because I didn't want to do an interweaving of the stories. I contemplated all sorts of things, including cutting back and forth, but I didn't really want to do that. I wanted to give each woman her complete story and to make them three portraits.
I called it Three Portraits because there was something kind of humble about calling them portraits, because mini-DV is a modest medium. We looked at a lot of other films that had been made on DV and we realized that the lens just don't work very well in wide shots, they kind of fall apart. Because of that, for the most part, there aren't that many wide shots in the film, because they tend to look really cheesy when you go wide. I ended up focusing on medium shots and close-ups and some really, really intense close-ups.
So once you decided that the accident would link the stories, then Paula had to be the last of the three. What was your thought process on how to order the other two stories?
REBECCA: Actually, in the script Greta came first. And then, when we were cutting it, I realized that if you put Paula after Delia, Paula became unbearably sad. But if you start with Delia, and then go to Greta, where you're laughing within a few minutes, then Paula becomes lyrical instead of sad. So that's why I made that switch.
How did your background in acting help the writing process?
REBECCA: I think that acting was a very necessary step for me. I had a weird, long apprenticeship, in that I was a painter for quite a while and then at a certain point realized that I wanted to make films. I acted for about five years while I was writing my first screenplays and still painting for some of that time -- it was like a bridge.
Without the acting I don't know that I would have been able to successfully make that leap -- when I was a painter, I was so far away from the mindset of being a filmmaker and being more sociable and being on a set where there are so many people. I just learned all sorts of things, just how it works, what a film set's like.
One of the problems with being a director is that you never get to go on sets -- even if you go to film school, you don't usually get to be on sets when you're coming up. You learn when you get on your own set, but it was nice to just understand certain things, to have been around directors. For writing it probably helps, too.
You're writing to shoot, and that's what's important to remember. And I really remembered it with Personal Velocity. That screenplay was really tailored, it was absolutely tailored to the medium. I don't think I even cut any scenes out; there was no waste in that thing.
You shot what you wrote.
REBECCA: I shot what I wrote and I kept what I shot. Which is really unusual. Usually you end up realizing that there are internal repetitions that you didn't notice. But this was all done in a spirit of such economy, so I was very conscious of not wanting to shoot anything extra.
We had no overtime, so we had to finish our days, and we had no extra days. So there was no leeway at all. If you weren't making your day, you had to start cutting scenes. There was one occasion where I did have to cut a scene, which was completely unnecessary. I think in the end I would have cut it anyway afterwards.
How did you come up with the title?
REBECCA: Well it was really just a line that Greta's father says when everyone thought, "Oh, wow, she was such a loser and now look at her!" Everybody has their own personal velocity. He means that everybody succeeds at different rates or everybody comes into themselves at different rates.
I thought it was a good title for everything because in a sense the whole movie is about these women and the question of being hurled through space by their own past and the accidents of fate. Like Paula and that stupid accident where she switches places with somebody and he gets killed. To what degree are we choosing our lives and to what degree is it something else? I think it's probably a cocktail of all those things, but that's what personal velocity means to me.
And speaking of the car accident, I thought that -- regardless of the budget -- it was conceived and executed beautifully. It never felt like, "We can't afford to show it." Instead, you found a way to do it in a way that was different, and better, than expected.
REBECCA: Thank you. I really love that whole sequence. It's one of these little moments -- these epiphanies -- where everything is being revealed. But you couldn't have had less: we just had two people, a shoe, and a flashing light to reflect in a puddle, and that's all we had. And the sound of a car crash.
But the truth is, I think especially with sex and car crashes, we've all seen so much of it on the screen, so why even bother?
How do you know when a script is ready to be shot?
REBECCA: It's very hard to answer that question.
I just made a film called The Ballad of Jack and Rose and that was a script I thought was ready and then I couldn't get the money together. Then I lived a little bit more, looked at it in a different way, wrote it a little bit more.
Cut to nine years after I'd started writing it and by now it's really changed, because my point of view had changed so much. I'd become a parent and the script is partly about a parent, so now it was more about the parent as much as about the child. Now I feel like I waited the right amount of time, that script was finally ready. But had I gotten the money back all those years earlier, it probably would have been ready then. It just would have been a different film.
I think that to a degree we just abandon things. I don't think anything is really ever really finished, ever really perfect. I wonder what filmmaker looks back and thinks, "Oh, yeah, that's perfect." Probably something's wrong with them if they do.
Was there anything you learned while writing Personal Velocity that you still use today?
REBECCA: Yes: the idea of freedom.
The whole point is to fool yourself into feeling completely free every time. And that becomes more difficult as people expect things from you. It's easier to write a screenplay when no one expects anything of you, because there's nothing to lose. As people start to expect something of you, it becomes more about fooling yourself into feeling completely free.
That was what made that experience so wonderful. But I would like to always have that, to remember that, to guard it and to cherish it. You need to feel free.
What's the best advice that you're ever received about writing?
REBECCA: The best advice I ever received was from a screenwriter named Tom Cole. He read the first screenplay I ever wrote. It was never produced as a screenplay, but I did actually cannibalize it and use a lot of stuff for other things, which often happens to your first work.
He said, "This is a very personal screenplay, it has your own stamp on it. Don't ever let people, with their advice, sand it down and make it smooth and turn it into something that could have been written by a lot of different people."
I think that's especially good advice because screenplays have no value unless they're produced. People give you a lot of advice, and a lot of that advice is just turning things into something average. That's fine if that’s what you're wanting to do. But if you're looking to create something that's really your own, then you have to keep what's unusual about it and what's even jarring about it.
One thing I would say, especially for people who are starting out -- this is a big piece of advice that I definitely learned from my first screenplay that was never produced -- which is to allow yourself to be humble enough to boil a screenplay down to what's most important. I think when you start out, you tend to try to write about a lot of different things and put a lot of themes into your script. A lot of themes can exist in a piece, in a subterranean way, but that doesn't mean that your story can't be simple.
For example, in Personal Velocity, as many things that are going on there, there are three very simple stories: A woman is escaping from an abusive marriage. A woman is propelled out of her own marriage by her ambition. A woman nearly gets killed in an accident and then tries to make sense of that accident by rescuing a hitchhiker. They're simple stories.
When I first started out, I wrote a screenplay that was so complicated -- it had everything I had ever thought of in it. There were these two little girls in it and they were the most real people in the screenplay. And my friend Michael Rohatyn, who is the guy who composes all the music for my movies, said, "Why don't you just write a movie about those two little girls?"
And I ended up doing that and that was Angela. And I'm so glad that I did it. It was such good advice. Sometimes you just take the fingernail off the giant and the fingernail is your story.
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Jonathan Demme: The value of cameos
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Kevin Smith: Skipping film school
Jon Favreau: Creating an emotional connection
Richard Linklater: Poverty breeds creativity
David Lynch: Kill your darlings
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Academy-Award Winner Dan Futterman (“Capote”) on writing real stories
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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
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