Three people in one room.
That’s always been considered the perfect construct for a low-budget movie. However, to keep that interesting is a lot harder than it looks.
Stephen Belber and Richard Linklater pull it off in Tape, primarily because they trusted the source material they were working with. Belber wrote from his gut when creating his characters and the ever-changing dynamic during their meeting in a slightly-seedy motel room keeps the story constantly evolving and involving.
(Be aware that this interview contains spoilers about key plot points.)
Where were you in your career before you wrote the stage version of Tape?
I was not very far along. I had just quit my day-job to work on The Laramie Project. It was the year that we were researching the murder of Matthew Shepard. I was going out to Laramie every couple of months and then coming home. So I was just starting to get paid. I had been writing plays for a long time, I'd come out of the Playwright Fellowship program at Julliard, but I was sort of adrift and not sure.
And then Tape came along. It was not one of the big plays I was planning on writing or was working on. It was something where two old friends of mine came along and they wanted to showcase themselves as actors in the New York theater world, and they said, “Can you write us something that can really show what we can do?"
So I really wrote it for them. Then one of the actors was dating this girl, so I added her because it got boring with two guys after awhile. So it wasn't like, "I'm going to write this big play." I was just doing it because I liked these guys and I liked their work and it was fun.
We produced it ourselves way off-off-Broadway for a very low-budget. Eventually, a Broadway producer came down to see it, because it got a nice buzz, and he wanted to option it because he was looking for something to do with Ethan Hawk.
He was going to do Albee's Zoo Story, and he was looking to couple it, because Zoo Story had first been coupled with a Becket one-act back when Albee first wrote it. So he was looking for a young, new writer to pair up with an older writer, which happened to Albee.
So we did a reading of it with Ethan and some other actors, and then it fell through because Edward Albee didn't want that to be the play to accompany his play. He ended up writing his own. But Ethan remembered it and when InDigEnt came to him, Ethan said, "How about this? It would be fun, quick and easy to shoot."
So he brought it to Rick Linklater. And Uma Thurman had been at that first reading that Ethan had done, so she was familiar with the play. It was all very lucky.
How did you generate the idea when your two friends said "write something for us"? You weren't thinking screenplay at that point, right?
I had written maybe one screenplay, for fun, at that point. So this was really something to get gritty -- it was the antithesis of what you'd think of as a movie. It was one room, a screwed-up, fucked-up relationship.
I was thinking of something we could do low-budget, production-wise. We got together one afternoon, we tossed around a couple ideas. It could be in a motel room, they could be brothers, what is it? And then they went away and I worked on it for a couple weeks. And they came over for a reading, just in my living room. It was very subterranean and organic that way, which was nice.
It was a good lesson for me as a writer, because I tend to think epically and think I'm going to write the Great American Play and I over-plan it and I don't let spontaneity in the process. And this was good to remind me to write from the hip a little more and write closer to home. These are the types of guys I'd grown up with and I know these types of situations. These are 28 year-old guys and this was something I was familiar with at the time.
Once you determined the location, how did you generate the story? It sounds like it came pretty quickly, if the two actors came back in two weeks for a reading.
I don't know why. It was right around the time that Bill Clinton was debating whether or not to apologize for slavery and I was fascinated with the idea of apology: When is it gratuitous and self-serving versus when is it genuine and important? And that was a question that was valid at the time for Clinton. So I think that was on my mind, those types of questions.
And I wanted to write about people who were very close, so I based it on myself and another guy, the repartee that you have with your close friends. But I wanted to get to something darker beneath that and what happens when those types of competitive friendships get cross-referenced with intense issues, such as date rape.
Did you outline the story?
I don't know that I did. I certainly don't have lots of notes like I have for most of my plays. I must have realized, semi-early on in thinking about it, that there was going to be a dark secret and that the one guy was taping the other. I had no idea how it was going to end, and as I said, the girl was added on.
The play used to end when Robert Sean Leonard's character leaves the first time. And the play ended with her looking at him, like "You're an idiot." But I knew there was more there and after a public reading I went back in and said, "Well, what if he comes back and makes that effort to apologize?" But when writing it, I didn't think very far ahead in terms of what happens when a friend confronts another friend.
What was your day-to-day writing process?
I guess I'm pretty intense when I come across an idea and I don't sort of do an hour a day. My wife is French and I remember trying to describe this idea: A comedy about date rape was how I was forming it at the time. And she sort of laughed me off and said I should come up with a different idea. But I was able to keep writing. I remember starting over at one point, fairly early on and scrapping what I had when I came up with the idea that she might show up.
I was writing by hand at that time. I like to get really into it when I'm writing and get a first draft done as soon as possible, then go back in and work on it.
And you're able to do that even if you don't know exactly where you're going?
Yeah. I had, at the time, a philosophy that when you're dealing with those types of tight friendships, where you don't know yourself where the conversation is going, that it would be truer and more genuine to write within that vein and to have a general goalpost that you were headed for, but to let the turns happen.
If you're writing quickly enough in your mind and keeping up with your pen, let those twists and turns come at you, almost as quickly as they're coming at the characters. At least for this type of play, where it's sort of down and dirty.
Were you hearing anyone when you wrote?
Yeah, I guess I was. I always hesitate to say this, because I'm not a date rapist, but it was myself and a very close friend of mine.
I always felt in high school that I was a step behind him. He was more popular with the girls and everything, yet at this point in life he was not sure what he wanted to do and I was really going after what I wanted. And I love the dynamic of how those friendships can shift and change over the years.
I actually wrote a whole second act to this play that takes place ten years after the event in the motel room. Things have changed, and actually Vince is married. They live a sort of antiquated, domestic life. And John has gone on to make really, quote-unquote, important documentaries.
He comes back again, there's another pretense for a reunion of sorts, where things that were obviously left unsettled that night in the motel room pop back up. I never ended up doing it, because it felt excessive and a little redundant.
But I do like the idea of thirty years of friendship and the turns that it takes, because the decisions that we make at 18 reverberate and cause different decisions at 28 and those reverberate and they make up our persona at age 38.
I thought it was interesting, character-wise, that Vince is so likeable, yet isn't really that nice of a guy; John is attempting to do the right thing, yet is really not all that likeable. How do you strike that balance in creating characters?
It's so easy to make them so unlikable that the whole's thing's dismissed and people are bored. And making unlikable people likeable in context is hard; I tried it in another piece and it doesn't always work.
I think because I was basing it on a guy that I love -- the Vince character -- I felt that he was the most unconstrued character, in a good way. He was very organic and he came out of someone with whom I do have a complicated relationship, so it just felt easy that way, to depict him with all his flaws.
But I also just got lucky in that I happened to set it up so that we were rooting for this guy. He can snort all the coke that he wants and be as much of a jerk as he wants, but we're invariably rooting for him because he is a) trying to do the right thing and, b) his second motive is that he's doing this because he's in love and he's desperately in love, from the position of an underdog. And those are just traits that if you endow a character with them, you can get a lot of mileage of them.
But you weren't consciously considering that while you wrote it, were you?
No, I don't think I was. I would like to say I was, but I just happened to hit upon that dynamic. I don't think I even knew how much his real motive was that he was in love with her. I sort of realized that while I was writing it. I had this notion that he was trying to compel his friend to do the right thing and apologize.
But because those two motives -- the desire to have Amy love him and the desire to make his friend do the right thing -- were so imbued in the same character, it made him someone we could all relate to, because we all have mixed desires.
I think so often when you go to playwriting school they teach you about single intention, and certainly as an actor you can't play two intentions at once, and from moment to moment that's probably true. But I love trying to create characters who have these both genuinely deeply rooted intentions. It's great. Plus, he's a fun character to play.
Ethan Hawk, when he did the reading of the play, he played John. He was more of the good guy and that was more of his reputation up to then, playing that sort of higher than thou characters. I think he realized that he could stretch himself and show another side of himself, so when the movie came around, he very much wanted to play Vince, which I totally understand.
It's not just playwriting school that teaches that; screenwriting schools do the same thing, telling you to create characters who have one goal that they're going after. But in Tape, their goals shift constantly.
Yeah, exactly, and the responses of their opposite guy affect their next motives as well.
And it's true, in screenwriting it's even more of a problem. They want heroes, and if not, they want anti-heroes, but less often do they want highly-flawed characters who are not self-aware and who are not clear in going after their intention.
Were there other things you learned from having a reading of the play?
I went in there thinking I had a much clearer idea of what was going on. I really did want to talk about this notion of apology and the worthiness of apology. And when I came across the idea of not just bringing Amy into the room, but keeping her around and having John come back and her not allowing him to have that apology on the grounds that he wanted to have it on, I think I started to realize that the play is actually potentially more interesting than my psuedo-politically-correct take on it. It’s also about power and it's about gender wars in terms of power. But also the Rashômon element came in, in a way I had not preconceived.
I thought I was just into this relationship between these two guys, having them sock it out, have a battle, and suddenly it became about who owned the past, who owns memories, and who owns apologies.
If we're basing our personas on events that have formed us in the past and someone comes in and takes the rug out from underneath that memory, the way you've solidified that memory in your mind, you have to reevaluate not just the memory but everything henceforth. It plays a real mind game.
I don't think I was really thinking about those things until I brought John back into the room on the second go-round and realized that it's not just about right and wrong, it's about who gets to do what when, on who's grounds. And also that memories are pliable. They're not set in stone.
When you were adapting it into a film script, was there ever any talk of "opening it up"?
There was briefly talk about it. That would be the first instinct for any filmmaker.
That's the great thing about Linklater. We talked a little bit about opening it up, but his inclination was definitely not to, that it was going to be more interesting to keep it enclosed. The problem was how do you not repeat the theatrically that comes when you try to film a play, because so often it doesn't work.
Because the DV cameras allowed you to go into a motel room or a soundstage that really felt like a motel room, he was going to be able to capture a cinematic way of telling the story. So, only very briefly did we talk about doing some exterior stuff, which made me delighted, because I was worried that they were going to ask me to write stuff that didn't fit this play.
You did lose some of the timing that you get in the theatrical version, because you have two cameras that you're trying to edit together. The theater piece runs an hour ten, and this ran an hour twenty-five. They added fifteen minutes because there wasn't the overlap that you get in live theater.
The trade-off for me, which was exquisite, was the sense of intimacy and a whole other layer of my writing, which is the silences between the words. We got to look into these guys' eyes and chart their reactions.
So the reactions were not as quick as in the theater -- boom, boom, boom -- but we got to see them process the other person's line and then come up with a response, all within the veil of 'hey, buddy-buddy,' the quick cut down repartee that guys have. But we were able to even see within that and it became, for me, more interesting that way.
You can get that in theater, but film, and especially a DV camera, can get in there in a way that an audience member, who's free to choose where to look in the theater, could never get that close. So, for me, it was a great lesson.
And to watch it with a crowd in a movie theater was a great learning experience. We're taught as screenwriters that audiences don't care about dialogue, that it's all about the visuals. But I felt that it was a nice synthesis of both, of them yearning for dialogue that they don't usually get in film. They were ready to listen to these people talk and with it they were getting the unspoken subtext very intently and clearly.
In terms of losing text, there wasn't much. There's one long speech that Uma Thurman has that is not as long in the film, where she finally goes after John. That was the only thing that Rick Linklater cut, and we talked about it. It wasn't just him saying, 'I'm cutting this.' He explained what he thought and it made sense. It just felt very overly-written. It's about twice as long in the play and it's much more intense. But it's probably not realistic that she could come up with that in the moment.
In the film you can see, if you watch closely, it's cut off. They filmed the whole speech and so she didn't really land it in the way she might have, but she does a great job. I just think she did a great job in the movie, capturing the essence of that character.
What I love about the movie is that it raises more questions than it answers. Most movies aren't willing to do that.
Well, that's the golden rule, to tie it up and provide those answers. And even in playwriting, I think, it's a very fine line. Audiences will feel ripped off if you're intentionally ambiguous for the sake of it. If ambiguity serves a purpose, at the risk of sounding pretentious, it's to turn it around and challenge them to ask themselves, “What would I do in that situation? What have I done in past situations? And what have I done about those things?” That does seem to serve a purpose, and if nothing else the movie does poke it back at you. It's so pointed at a particular generation were the words "date rape" just became a phrase.
My wife translated it into French and there is no expression for date rape there in that country yet. And it's relatively new to America. So I think the people who respond to this movie are people who have grown up with those words.
So, in terms of adaptation, it sounds like you basically handed Linklater the script to the play and said "Have at it."
Yeah, he was great that way. It was the opposite of what you expect the Hollywood machine to do to your work.
Basically, the put it in screenplay form. Robert Sean Leonard's character was originally Jewish; he makes a crack about being Jewish, but we didn't think we could pass off him as that. We also changed his name. There were also one or two cultural references which we thought would potentially date the film, so we cut a couple lines. One about David Hasselhoff.
Ethan improvised a dance bit that was from his high school days that he wanted to get in there. He put the word “fag” in at one point, which I was hesitant to do because I don't like it, but it was fine because guys like that say that word in that context.
Were you involved in the rehearsal process?
Yeah, again, I was really lucky. I was out of town, working on The Laramie Project. When I came back into town, they had rehearsed for about two days. They spent two weeks in a friend's apartment, just going through it. I came toward the end of the first week and it was amazing. It was like a theatrical experience. Ethan has a great theatrical background and Rick studied theater in college.
They started with real, genuine table work, which is what you do the first two days of any play, sitting around and talking about intention and motive and all that stuff around a dining room table. I couldn't believe that they were doing it exactly the way I would want it to be done. It was lovely.
And when they started shooting, I showed up whenever I wanted to, it was great. They built the set on a soundstage and the set had a retractable roof, so when they wanted to get certain shots they could light it. But for the most part inside the room was a sound guy and Rick, holding one camera, and the DP holding a camera, and the actors and me. It was really nice.
So you didn't have to make any changes to fit the budget?
No. The film was shot so cheap. They rented a car, so that when you opened the motel room door you could see a parked car, that was the big luxury. And that wasn't even in the script.
Rick's company completely knows how to produce at that level when they need to, and InDigEnt was scrappy and just starting out. They hadn't yet had the success that they would have. So everyone was pitching in and calling in favors. It was sort of corny but nice.
When you finished the stage version, how did you know when the script was done?
We did this first reading where it ended abruptly and I felt it was too abrupt. I knew there was more. I was so interested in the female character and I was writing out of my element so much, so I remember calling up a lot of female friends and asking what they would do in that situation. I was really clueless about the feelings that the character would be going through.
I knew it wasn't finished after that first reading, but I didn't know if I should write a whole other act or add another twenty minutes. I remember it was my first case of real theatrical soul-searching, because I knew I had something that I really liked for once. There was a nice feeling in the room and the dialogue was rolling and the characters were knowable.
So I went off for a while and I worked on that, and we did another reading, again in my living room. And that one felt like there was a nice resolution. I guess I just knew that it was finished.
Again, I don't trust myself, because subsequently we did it in a larger venue in New York. I wrote monologues and a prologue, as well as an epilogue that took place ten years later, with all the characters speaking to us from the future. We actually produced that in New York and most of the people who knew both productions said you don't need it and it ruins this nice little thing you have. I was, as a playwright, thinking I should be writing epic, three-act plays that deal with the world and time passing, but it did feel like this moment had come to a close where the play ends now.
In terms of going back and re-writing, I actually felt like I hit that one pretty smoothly. Once I got a take on the female character, that she was not necessarily going to play their games, that she was going to not cede the power to them, regardless of what happened. I don't think it's changed much since then.
Little tiny things have changed, because the initial actress really was very helpful in charting it when we were first doing it. But in terms of structure, I never went back and excessively re-wrote it or changed it structurally. Of course, there wasn't that much structure to change.
Do you ever put a script in a drawer for a while?
Oh, absolutely. I have about twenty-five things in a drawer right now.
I think if I had put Tape in a drawer at that point I would never have gone back, because it's not the heftiest play. But I know that it hit a chord with people, because it was compact. I always complain when I see plays that are successful that they aren't as deep and profound as they should be, but that's not what audiences necessarily want or connect to. It has a tightness that is very satisfying and a compactness -- at an hour twenty, it definitely had that.
Did you learn anything from this process that you've taken to other projects?
Yes. I think letting a degree of spontaneity into my writing, which was something that I had excised at Julliard. Learning to let spontaneity back in and knowing that that makes for better writing.
I learned that there is a market and an audience out there for dialogue-heavy films and character-driven films and that this fast give-and-take actually can work. Everyone says it's so theatrical that it doesn't work, but if you put it out there, an audience will follow it. It's not particularly complex. It's not Tom Stoppard. But we're used to it and we can be conditioned, as filmgoers, to follow and like it. Dialogue that's fun and appropriate to the contemporary world is something that audiences will respond to.
And I learned that drama doesn't come from just visuals. Drama comes from classic dramatic structure and shifts in emotions.
I'm writing more and more studio stuff now and I literally do cling to that idea – and I'm sure that I'll get killed for it – but I cling to the idea that you can infuse that into even these big things that I'm trying to work on.
Do you have any advice to writers working on a low-budget script?
They'll tell you not to worry about budget when you're writing, but I think if you really are intent on doing that, you can do both at the same time. You can find low-budget ways to tell the stories you want to tell.
In theater, the best things are the plays with no set. So you have to remind yourself that “I want to tell this story. I want to tell it the way I want to tell it,” but to know that if it's a period piece that takes place over forty years in five thousand locations, it's a problem. You can probably tell the same story in a different way.
What’s the best advice on writing you've ever received?
Write strong. There's so much prettiness and cleverness that we all strive for, but you should write for the heart more, which is different than saying write about what you know. Write to the gut.
With Tape, I guess I am most proud of the fact that it feels guttural, it feels like it's coming from a very true place. I'm sure people think there are too many plot twists and stuff, but basically these are people who are talking from their gut. And especially when it gets heated, they're talking on instinct and they're talking in the moment and there's nothing “writerly” about it at its best moments.
And it's something that's so easy to forget, the better writer you become – because you do want to show that you're a good writer – is how to click back into that, write from the gut, write strong. At least in moments, to know that you can find that, access that, no matter what the situation, we can, as human beings, relate to it. Because that's why we all go to movies and theater: to see human beings.
So if we just write to the human moments, those moments of human drama, that will pay off, because people connect to it.
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