Suckers provides an inside look at just how much car salesman take advantage of their customers. Written by director Roger Nygard and stand-up comic (and former car salesman) Joe Yanetty, the story takes us inside four consecutive Saturdays at a Los Angeles car dealership, as Bobby Deluca (Louis Mandylor) learns the ropes from Sales Manager Reggie (Daniel Benzali).
Nygard and Yanetty based their screenplay on Yanetty's actual experiences as a car salesman, proving yet again that truth is, indeed, stranger (and often funnier) than fiction.
(Be aware that this interview contains spoilers about key plot points.)
What was going on with you before Suckers?
ROGER: I'd been jumping back and forth between narratives and documentaries. I had just finished my first documentary, Trekkies, and was looking for another narrative. I find that they both inform each other, and I've learned and brought techniques from one genre into the other. So Suckers has a very real feel, like you're right there -- almost a pseudo-documentary style in the way it was shot.
That’s true, although it doesn’t look like one of those shakey-cam, fake documentaries that have become so popular lately.
ROGER: I really can't stand that "shakey camera on purpose" style in shows like ER, because a documentary cameraman tries to hold the camera steady and he doesn't shake it on purpose. A good handheld camera provides a little movement and a little energy to the shot without being obnoxious about it.
At that time I had made three movies. My first film was a one-man show, High Strung, a one-room comedy, written by and starring Steve Odenkirk. We made that film for about $350,000. Then my second film was a two million dollar action picture, Back To Back, for a company called Overseas Film Group. Their films are primarily foreign-sales driven.
I remember seeing Back To Back. There was, to put it mildly, a lot of action.
ROGER: You've got to have five action set pieces, that's the rule for those sorts of movies. That's what's expected from the foreign buyers to make their foreign sales. We had at least five; we might have had six. But five is the minimum requirement.
The third movie was Trekkies, my first documentary, about Star Trek fans.
In doing Suckers, I was coming off of those three films, which were all very different and driving my agents crazy, because they didn't know what I was. Am I the documentary guy, am I the action guy, am I the comedy guy? So Suckers was a new thing, a sort of grisly dramatic comedy, I guess, with some action.
Where did the idea for Suckers come from?
ROGER: My friend, Joe Yannetty, had written a one-man show about his experiences selling cars. I read portions of that and he told me some of the stories, and I said, "You've got to make a movie about this. These stories are incredible." So that's where it started.
Joe and I worked together writing the script, based on his experiences, which is a process for me as a screenwriter that works best. I almost always work with a writing partner. The reason is that I grew up in Minnesota with a pretty average background. I went to college, then moved to California to seek my fortune in the film business. I never got a job as a CIA agent, never went into the Marines, never became a fireman or a cop, didn't go on the road and get arrested or sell cars. You can't write about life experiences that you haven't personally lived, unless you research them extensively or partner up with someone who has lived those experiences.
My writing style is that I tend to write with people who have had interesting life experiences, but don't necessarily have the desire or the fortitude or the persistence to bring it to the screen.
Most screenwriters hate it when someone comes up to them and says, "My life would make a great movie," but it sounds like, depending on the person, you might sit down and talk to them.
ROGER: That's how I operate. I think everybody has one good screenplay in them, based on their own life.
Your own life is often the first and best place to start for a screenwriter, because that's what you know -- as long as you're willing to rip open your soul. You have to bare yourself to the world in order to write something that other people will be interested in reading and possibly make into a movie.
It's not easy. It's hard. You've got to write things that you wouldn't even tell your shrink. Those are the screenplays that really stand out.
So when I say that everybody has one good screenplay in them, it's if they're willing to bare their soul and write about those skeletons in the closet, those experiences.
How did you and Joe work together?
ROGER: Joe and I sat in a room and would brainstorm. The brainstorming sessions would generally follow the format of me asking Joe questions and getting him to tell stories. I would write them down or tape them until we had all these anecdotes.
I took all the anecdotes and boiled each one down to one sentence, and put them on note cards and laid them all out on the floor. We'd look at them on the floor and start moving them around until we had an order that we liked.
You could do the same thing in a computer -- just type slug lines and create what's known as a "beat sheet," which is a list of story beats. And you can move them around, up and down, until you have a sequence of plot points.
How did you come up with the idea of setting the story on four consecutive Saturdays?
ROGER: That was because that's how the car business runs. Every Saturday there's a sales meeting. It's an inspirational meeting, a motivational meeting. It's a time for everybody to gauge where they are against everyone else, because there's always that competitive aspect.
So we broke it down that way because the industry we were writing about breaks itself down monthly and weekly. Every month they start over and the cycle begins again. The framework suggested itself to us because the arena we were writing about was based on a monthly structure.
How nervous were you about setting your whole first act at that first sales meeting?
ROGER: You know, we broke a lot of structural rules with Suckers. And in hindsight, there is a lot I would do differently, having learned what I've learned since then and having seen how that experiment worked, where it worked and where it failed.
Part of the excitement of filmmaking is taking chances. Sometimes you're going to fail spectacularly. And we took a big chance structuring the first act that way. But I don't think it was the biggest chance we took.
What was the biggest chance?
ROGER: The biggest chance in the script was doing a genre shift from the second to the third act, which many people found disconcerting. Audiences are not used to -- and don't like it -- when you shift from one genre to another in a movie.
Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez did it in From Dusk 'Til Dawn. It starts out as kind of a crime caper/road chase movie and then shifts into a monster movie, which threw a lot of people. I think that film was less successful than it might have been because people just don't like genre shifts. They want to know what the genre is from the beginning of the movie, what's the level of reality of the story, and then you have to stick to it.
If you don't stick to one genre, then you're either taking a chance or doing an art film.
Did you consider other possible climaxes and endings?
ROGER: I wish we had considered more, but as soon as we unearthed that story, it felt right to us. Again, looking back, yeah, I think we could have finished the movie just as engagingly and kept it in the car sales realm, without having to go into the crime and drug-trafficking realm.
But then you would have lost the opportunity to have virtually all of the film's characters shoot each other simultaneously in a very small room.
ROGER: Yes, and we would have lost my favorite line of the movie: "You're so beyond fucked, you couldn't catch a bus back to fucked."
You kind of fall in love with some things, but in the editing room you spend time killing your babies. That's the term for it. Sometimes you have to cut out the things you're in love with for the good of the whole.
What did you do at the writing stage to keep the shooting budget down?
ROGER: There are a lot of things you have to consider when writing a low-budget script, because these are key considerations when the film is made. First of all, fewer locations, and secondly, fewer characters.
Every time you have a new location, it's a company move, which is very costly. And every new character is somebody who gets a residual check when the movie is released and airing in ancillary markets.
We had a pretty large cast in Suckers. I think we had 30-odd characters, which is a lot. The majority of our budget went to pay their SAG minimum wages. That's why you see a lot of movies with three or four characters in contained locations.
A first-time or novice screenwriter will write scripts that take place all over the world with hundreds of characters and it's just not realistic unless it's a $100 million-dollar blockbuster.
The more you keep budget in mind when you're writing a script, the more likely it is that that script can be made. You don't want your creativity to be restrained, but then as you're refining and re-writing you need to consider options like combining characters. Sometimes there's no reason to have this other character -- give all those lines to one of your leads, because the more lines your lead character has, the more castable it will be.
In hindsight, what other things would you have done differently?
ROGER: Besides being more wary of doing a genre shift, I think I would have stuck to a more traditional structure for the beginning. It's really tempting to try to invent a new genre and to write something that's never been written and break all the rules, but the problem is that audiences don't want that. They have either become accustomed to -- or it's just innate in storytelling and human enjoyment of storytelling -- to like a three act structure and what you might call the conventions of screenwriting.
That's why Syd Field's book, Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting and Robert McKee's book, Story: Substance, Structure, Style and The Principles of Screenwriting, are valuable, because they explore and lay out for you the conventions of screenwriting.
And I think they're right, because if you're going to build a house, you can't invent a whole new framework and foundation. You really have to follow the fundamentals of building the foundation and framework, and then you can get creative with the cosmetic look of the house. That's where you get creative, but you have to learn the fundamentals and follow them if you want to be a successful screenwriter.
There are art films and part of the job of an art film is to teach us about the rules by violating the rules. But don't expect to make a living being an artist. There are a lot of starving artists out there.
Have you bought a car since you made Suckers?
ROGER: Yeah, and Joe came with me. It was fun. Everything was exactly as expected. They never stop negotiating until you get up to leave. You have to get up to leave and go out the door and then they'll say, "Wait, wait!" Or they'll let you leave and then they'll call on the phone. Until they are certain you're done, they will keep negotiating with you.
What was the biggest lesson you took away from Suckers?
ROGER: The biggest one we already discussed, which is not to violate the rules so dramatically, which we did with the genre shift. That was my biggest lesson.
The corollary was to keep writing, always be writing. Like ABC from Glengarry Glen Ross -- ABC, Always Be Closing. ABW -- Always Be Writing.
The script I'm working on right now is something where I hatched the idea for it about three or four years ago, but I didn't know what to do with it. And it took three or four years of gestating within my brain before it started to form into a shape. It was an idea I told to one of my writing partners and he really sparked to it and so it moved itself to the top of the pile.
That's why you need to have a lot of ideas and a lot of projects and a lot of things going, because I think your subconscious is working on these projects at different paces. The more you've got going, the more likely one of them is going to sprout.
Were you still writing while editing?
ROGER: Editing is the final re-write of the script. You're always re-writing and moving sentences around, sometimes words and sometimes just syllables within words. You pluck and replace. You can get actors to pronounce things differently by moving their syllables around, and it's all toward getting the most expedient way to say something. Good writing is saying something as concisely as possible.
I worked for two years writing and editing promos for TNT and that was a great exercise, because it taught me to be as concise as possible. When you have a thirty-second or fifteen-second spot and you've got to tell a whole story, you're forced to think economically.
A writer should think economically while writing a screenplay. Even though you have ninety minutes, you should treat every second of those ninety minutes just as judiciously as if you were doing a thirty-second commercial.
Show it, don't say it, whenever you can.
Start every scene as late as possible.
Cut out the walks. Nobody wants to watch somebody walk from one door to the other in a movie. You cut that stuff out, because there's no information there.
If there's no information that informs the story in a shot or a line of dialogue, it has to go. Unless it's hilariously funny. That's my exception. If something's really engaging or funny, it can stay, even if it doesn't move the story forward.
What movies have inspired you?
ROGER: There are so many. Terms of Endearment I think is one of the greatest movies of all time, because it is a gut-wrenching drama and a hilarious comedy, all at once. It's so successful in both realms. It's a movie that amazes me. Real life is funny, real life involves drama and funny moments, and so I think those two coexist well when done well.
Evil Dead, Part II, which I think is the Citizen Kane of its decade because Sam Raimi invented a style of filmmaking that no one had done before. Now you see it all the time. Orson Welles invented a lot of shots and filmmaking styles that you didn't see before Citizen Kane, and so did Sam Raimi with Evil Dead, Part II.
The Hunger, similarly, introduced a new form of editing to movies. It was Tony Scott's first film and he was coming from commercials, so he was bringing that sensibility to moviemaking. He used flash forwards and flashbacks and fractured time structures, and that's where my introduction to fractured time structure in editing came from.
Dawn of the Dead was a very influential movie. George Romero is my hero; he influenced me greatly with that movie. It's so funny and such great social commentary as well as being brilliantly gory.
Any advice to screenwriters who are starting a low-budget project?
ROGER: The most important thing in any movie is that you make the audience feel something. They have to laugh or cry. Or both, preferably, like in Terms of Endearment. If the movie doesn't do that at some point, it's not going to succeed to nearly the same degree that a movie can succeed with an audience when it's done well.
That's the most important thing: your work has to touch people in some way. And how do you know it does that? Because it has to touch you, first, when you're creating it and writing it.
That's why if you bare your soul and write about those things in your life that make you cry when you think about them, because they're so painful or so funny or both, then you know that if you feel that way, an audience will feel that way.
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Academy-Award Winner Kenneth Lonergan (“You Can Count on Me”) on script editing
Roger Nygard (“Suckers”) on mixing genres
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