#ALLOWING THE LONG RUNNING COMEDIC SIDE CHARACTER TO FINALLY CHANGE AND EVOLVE IN HIS OWN RIGHT AS A MORE SERIOUS CHARACTER….

[kideternity]

I like generally all of the characters in tamers and I wanna specify here when talking about him I mean the tamers version explicitly but MAN do I not like Ryo. Fuck this kid bro

[shellyrobinson]

PRODUCTION

During pre-pro, we learned the hierarchy of the crew and looked at a chart of smiley faces who represented each member: the director was this suave, smirking mustached face and the writer was this neurotic, sweating, hot mess. I thought, I guess I’m both those people. I already knew myself as the sad crazy writer, waiting for disaster to strike. I didn’t know myself as a director, and I think there is a lot of truth in the imagery of those faces and what they represent: a director needs to have confidence, and doing it taught me to have a confidence I didn’t previously have—a confidence uncommon to writers, who are filled with self-loathing and self-doubt.

As the suave director, I was in a position of influence and power for the first time in my life. I didn’t really look at it that way most of the time, because all I thought about was the movie. It completely consumed my life. My only objective was delivering it from the page to the screen intact. Back in September, I wrote a script called Opening Night about two kids who go to a theater during a hurricane to see IT. It evolved into a movie about two characters, consumed by nostalgia for a time they never knew, who go to an old abandoned drive-in to see an 80s cult classic called Killer Clown Car.

Daryl Goldberg says in First-time Filmmaker F*#^-ups that “where many new filmmakers go wrong is naively thinking that what’s in their head or on the page will not, and/or should not, change…if you get yourself in a mindset that allows you and your movie to evolve and adapt to the many circumstances it will encounter, you will be in a position to make something far better than the movie you currently imagine” (2012).

This was a very wild ride for me from a writing perspective, because on any other project, I would sit down and know the arc from beginning to end, and my only goal would be delivering that from my mind to the page. This is the first experience I’ve had where the original idea in my mind bore so little relation to the end product, and that was considered a natural part of the process. It’s not from your mind to the page to someone else’s mind; it goes from the page to the camera to your audience’s eyes and ears—it’s an audio/visual medium, and that’s been the single biggest evolution for me: how do I translate this visually?

Sam Mendes said in his interview with Charlie Rose, 25 Ways to be a Better Director that you have to “have secret a way in [to your movie]. What is it about to you?” (2014). For me, it was nostalgia. I’ve had a hard time in my life adapting to the endless sea of changes that we consider progress. I hate the digital revolution. I benefit from it, but I hate it. How else could I have the opportunity to self-publish, shoot, and edit my own work—without Final Cut and streaming and prosumer cameras? But I remember the before and after; how on a regular basis, everything I knew would change and fall away. 

In my childhood home, we had a black and white TV with rabbit ears and a VCR I learned to program. I listened to the radio and my older sister had cassettes and a Walkman. Then we had a cable box with all the movie channels. I got a CDs and a Discman for Christmas. My photography class at school was manual on black and white film; my video production class used JVC camcorders. My photography class started getting rid of the film cameras and replacing them with digital. Some of the AV kids in the grade ahead of me went to film school and their class was the last to learn on film. I was furious, like I wanted to go to film school, not digital school! By the advent of DVDs and mp3s, I was suffused with hatred for technology. I didn’t want everything to change again. I couldn’t accept it. I listened to all my music on the Sony boombox my dad bought me in elementary school, the kind with a CD, radio, and cassette function. I hoarded my VHS collection. I became this weird Luddite, never leaving my room and composing all my work on a 1950s manual typewriter.

No one is more nostalgic for a time they never knew than me. I fell in love with the drive-in from the moment I saw it. There was nowhere else to film for me. I’d never been to a drive-in before, and watching a movie there took me back to the first movie I ever saw in a theater. It was that magical.

NIGHT 1: THE TICKET BOOTH

The week before our thesis shoot, I felt anxious and irritable. I was sleeping poorly and felt spread thin. I was going into a situation I’d never experienced before, and I had no idea how successful the venture would be. Succeed, and we’d prove that we could go ninety minutes away and still deliver a successful thesis film—more successful, for having dealt with the problems we faced and the obstacles we overcame. Fail, and we’d set a negative precedent for every cohort after us who pitched difficult locations.

It was probably the scariest for me in the sound stage, right before we left for Lakeland. It was cold, it was dark, and I felt like Frodo when he’s about to go up Mount Doom to drop the ring into the fires of Mordor. Van said something on the sound stage about how “we’ve never done something like this on a thesis,” when he was cautioning everyone not to forget anything, and the whole thing had the feel of a black ops special mission where we were about to dive in some unknown abyss.

The ticket booth was our first night of filming, when the main characters pull up to the window, have a dialogue with the ticket taker, then pull away. I was happy with my actors because I have a tendency to overwrite dialogue and they handled their lines well. I had this conversation with them during rehearsals, and I told them that if anything ever felt or sounded unnatural, it’s probably because it was, and they should change it. Things read differently on the page than they do spoken out loud and I don’t want to fall into that Kevin Smith thing where all my characters sound like me and are basically just a mouthpiece for my opinions.

We had one of those magical moments you can’t plan when we saw the length of Christmas lights running out behind the driver’s side. The way it was framed with the actors and the chicken hanging from the truck’s mirror was one of those shots I was just visually really happy with. It was originally just written as a “MS of Ben and Linden in the truck’s cab” and I didn’t know it could be that beautiful, for which I’m deeply grateful to my art team. Vic and Kristyan gave me exactly what I asked for in terms of production design and wardrobe, and it looked the way I imagined it.

NIGHT 2: THE BATHROOM

The second scene of the movie takes place entirely inside a bathroom, which made for extremely close quarters and was uncomfortable for everyone involved. The only people who fit in the bathroom were me, the actors, the boom op, and Joey, the second AC.

It worked well in the script for comedic effect but was a nightmare to film due to the confined space. We knew that going in, which was why Mike scheduled it for the second night when we’d have the most time. Once the tripod and camera were in the doorway, nobody in the bathroom—the actors, the 2nd AC, the boom op, or myself—could leave.

I had to rely on Ian to watch the monitor because I was effectively blind in the bathroom, but in many ways, I preferred it. I was always bummed I missed the boat shooting on film. It’s great that we have access to dailies and editing in the capacity that we do, but I also think it makes people lazy. I don’t like to get sucked into watching the monitor a hundred percent of the time if I can watch the actors and hear them directly, and I don’t like constantly running back and forth between them and a screen between takes. I need to see it, but I’d rather work out some kind of system where I’m watching the monitor for a later take, like the safety, rather than the initial ones, which is when I spend the most time working with them. I know I need to be mindful of the composition and how it’s ultimately going to look on the screen, but I also feel like being married to the monitor divorces people from the scene taking place. I’d like to work out a system where I can be aware of both.

In many ways, I preferred being in the bathroom because it enabled me to interact directly with the scene. There’s also something so unique and weird about the process of making a movie that puts you in these bizarre, abstract situations. I spent hours sitting on a sink while TJ wielded a giant microphone over the stall, where Ben and Sarah crouched on apple boxes, pretending to stand on a toilet.

It didn’t bother me being in the bathroom for that long, probably just for the simple reason that it was cold outside and warm in the bathroom. But I think it was more for the reason that I felt like I was literally inside the story world. I could still see the camera and the boom, but it was the closest I’ve ever gotten to my work, in a three-dimensional sense. That to me is what gives filmmaking a joy beyond any I’ve experienced writing: the possibility of living inside your work, of seeing it three-dimensionally brought to life, so tangible you can reach out and touch the characters, experience the setting in real life, see the symbols and themes as physical props in front of you. It’s escapism on a whole other level.

NIGHT 3: THE FIELD

This to me was more difficult than the bathroom because it contained what I felt were the most visually important shots of the movie: one where the Reaper slowly approaches the characters after appearing under the screen as the movie plays, and an OTS behind the two characters as they watch the film and the Reaper approaches from the distance.

We learned in pre-pro how deceptive it is when you’re only filming very little of the page versus a much longer portion of the script—the latter indicates a dialogue-heavy sequence which is comparatively easy to film and the former indicates it’s a time-consuming, action-heavy sequence.

The blocking was a nightmare. Trying to get them to react to the screen at the right moment and the Reaper approaching them simultaneously proved difficult because they were trying to mirror their earlier performance before Tyler was in the field with them. In hindsight, I can see now that we either should have shot this scene first that last night or had Tyler walk towards them in the earlier shots even when we were shooting the other direction and you couldn’t see him (or ideally both) in order to avoid their confusion, but hindsight’s 20/20 and it’s how I learned for the future to avoid these mistakes.

The scene resulted in the tangential thinking David Fincher warns about in Control in Directing: up until this point, the fact that the actors were film students themselves had been an advantage for me. They caught little things that we hadn’t and made suggestions based on their own experiences. It was Sarah’s idea to stand on an apple box in the bathroom to make it look like she was stepping down from the toilet. Once we got to the field, however, they bombarded me with questions about timing and continuity and editing rather than the mindless obedience I required of them in that moment. Finally I said, “I understand your concerns, but please try to put all of that out of your head and just think of two things: react to the screen, and react to Tyler when he hits the second rise. That’s it.”

It was hard on them because it was the coldest night we’d spent in Lakeland. I asked Vic to incorporate blankets, which are also fairly standard for drive-in attendance, into the production design so they wouldn’t be exposed the entire time. Sarah was a champ. She never expressed how cold she was even though she was wearing the least. She’d take these little micro naps in the green room and awaken instantaneously, refreshed and ready to go.

The male actors were starting to deterioriate. Ben had tried sleeping under the make-up table, but the sociable chatter of the hair/make-up/wardrobe team kept him awake and I came in to find Sarah micro-napping and Ben sitting in a camp chair, staring off at some point in the distance known only to him, eyes wide and unblinking.

“Hey, are you okay, man?” I asked. “Do you need some coffee or something?”

He looked at me, haunted. “I’m fine it’s just I tried to sleep earlier but everyone was talking and could you just excuse me for a moment I’m sorry—” he leapt to his feet and rushed from the room with a hand covering his face.

“What’s he doing?” I asked Alex, the make-up artist and his producer on June’s thesis. “Is he okay? What’s wrong with him?”

“He’s just cranky,” she said with the benevolent tolerance of a mom dealing with a fussy toddler. “I know my entire cohort’s moods so well at this point.”

“That’s going to come in handy for you later on,” I said.

Ben came back from the bathroom or wherever and stood in the middle of the green room, staring at the napkin dispenser, paralyzed and unblinking. Shit, he’s losing it, I thought. I also didn’t want to give him the opportunity to back out, so I walked past him quickly, patting him on the back saying “heymanyouokyougood? You’re doing great,” on my way out of the green room without giving him the opportunity to answer.

I already had a good idea of what the answer would be; regardless of his response, mine would be: “well, I’m gonna need you back in that field in five minutes, okay buddy?” I didn’t want to give him the opportunity to say no, so I didn’t say anything at all. I was overly solicitous of the actors at all times, except on the rare occasions they became agitated, at which point I became mysteriously unavailable so they had no choice but to either perform or make a scene in front of the entire crew. It probably felt like negligence to them but it worked really well for me: cruel, but effective.

After the weeks I spent making them brunch and asking their opinions, how are you feeling? do you need some coffee? do you have any questions? you’re doing a great job, I could see exactly when to let off and allow them to suffer a bit. Tyler was especially unhappy, for good reason: he had to traipse across a massive field, in clown shoes, in thirty degrees, half a dozen times.

If life in film school is a movie in and of itself, I can think of no greater climax to this experience than trying to get that last shot: the sun was coming up, the camera team was falling apart, the projectionist had to go to the bathroom, Tyler was screaming.

Ordinarily, on a thesis set, the instructors don’t intervene. Unless things have taken a swift and terrible nose dive and somebody’s about to drop the camera, the sign that your shoot is going well is when nobody has to say anything to you or correct what you’re doing.

In this instance, they intervened in a different way. The instructors became our deux ex machina. They could see we were struggling and stepped in to help us.

Eva was struggling to get the camera angle and the movement right and Ian was patiently coaching her. The sky was getting lighter and I was chewing my sleeve off mumbling fuck fuck fuck over and over again. I had to give Tyler an adjustment after he was already back under the screen. I ran across the field and ran back. I couldn’t breathe.

Dino told Ian he could operate the camera.

Ian looked at Dino like are you for real? Then he gently extracted Eva from the camera and took up her position. I was so winded I could barely talk, so when I called action, Tyler didn’t hear me. 

Van called it for me. We got the shot. It wasn’t the best it could have been; it wasn’t perfect. But we got it.

NIGHT 4: CANDYLAND

The coolest part about shooting at Candyland was that it felt like coming home. After three days in Lakeland, eating at a Cracker Barrel and living in a Holiday Inn, I was never happier to see Full Sail again.

Being on a soundstage where we were surrounded by resources gave me a much greater appreciation for working in a controlled environment. I appreciated it because it was easier, but after Lakeland, if I have the choice of shooting on location for the sake of what’s visually best for the movie and simulating it on a soundstage for the sake of ease, I’ll choose what’s best for the film every time. I like opposition and I like obstacles. It brings out the best in me. It brings out the fight, and that’s the only time I feel like I know myself. Still, it was a relief to come home.

It was the night I felt the most in control directing; I felt the knowledge I gained the previous three evenings coalesce. I made the decisions I needed to make to in order to get the shots required for a satisfying ending. I look at what we did now—going out to Lakeland to the drive-in and filming in three different spaces each night within that location, then going back to Full Sail for the final night to film two cars (swapping them out in between) with both casts, and I’m really proud of us and what we accomplished.

I finally found all my courage, it’s buried under the house.

References

Brand New. (2017). Can’t get it out. On Science Fiction [CD/vinyl/mp3]. Batavia, Illinois: Procrastinate! Music Traitors.

Film School Through Commentaries. (2013). David Fincher on control in directing. YouTube [Online video]. Retrieved from https://youtu.be/McqBmgGfy

Goldberg, D. (2012). First-time filmmaker f@#^-ups. Focal Press.

Rose, C. (2014). Sam Mendes: 25 ways to be a better director. YouTube [Online video]. Retrieved from https://youtu.be/fkqhXbrwP3M