{"product_id":"my-first-movie-isbn-9780142002209","title":"My First Movie","description":"\u003cb\u003eCandid interviews with leading filmmakers about their first films including Ang Lee, Pedro Almodovar, Oliver Stone, Allison Anders, The Coen Brothers, and others\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn these vivid and revealing interviews, a diverse collection of filmmakers talk in extraordinary detail and with amazing candor about making their first films. Each chapter focuses on a director's celebrated debut and tells the inside story of the film's creation. Along the way, every aspect of the movie industry is explored-from writing the script and raising the money to casting the actors and assembling the crew, from shooting and editing to selling the movie and screening it. These interviews are not only memoirs of particular movies; each one is also an emotional journey in which the director relives the pain and elation, the comedy and tragedy, of making a first feature film.\"Enthralling...full of inside information and sordid instructions.\" —\u003cb\u003eLos Angeles Times\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"A pleasure.\" —\u003cb\u003eVariety\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cb\u003eSTEPHEN LOWENSTEIN\u003c\/b\u003e is the editor of \u003ci\u003eMy First Movie\u003c\/i\u003e. He has worked on British television documentaries for Channek 4, ITV, and te BBC. He is the writer-director of two critically acclaimed short films and lives in London.Chapter 1\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJoel and Ethan Coen:\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eBlood Simple\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWere you always passionate about movies? Did you see lots of movies when\u003cbr\u003eyou were kids?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJC: We always went to a lot of movies. But when we were kids it was\u003cbr\u003ewatching movies on TV. I guess our earliest film education came from a guy\u003cbr\u003ecalled Mel Jazz who had a movie programme on during the days. He was an\u003cbr\u003eeclectic programmer. So we were exposed to a lot of strange things-through\u003cbr\u003ethe eclectic programming genius of Mel Jazz. Ethan once kidded that he had\u003cbr\u003ejust about the whole of the Joe Levine catalogue because he'd have \u003ci\u003e812\u003c\/i\u003e one\u003cbr\u003eday, you know, Fellini, \u003ci\u003eThe Nights of Cabiria\u003c\/i\u003e or something. And the next\u003cbr\u003eday he'd have Sons of Hercules. So it was a mixture of European art films\u003cbr\u003eand badly dubbed Italian muscle movies, essentially. I mean it was very\u003cbr\u003estrong in that area. He also liked a lot of the golden age of late fifties,\u003cbr\u003eearly sixties studio comedy product. Doris Day, Rock Hudson movies. I'll\u003cbr\u003eTake Sweden, you know. Bob Hope stuff.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eEC: Later, bad Bob Hope.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJC: A little later on there was a film society at the University of\u003cbr\u003eMinnesota that showed the kind of stuff that you wouldn't normally be\u003cbr\u003eexposed to: Godard, and the Marx brothers-who were both kind of hip at the\u003cbr\u003etime.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eEC: I guess that doesn't exist any more. But for a period people would show\u003cbr\u003eblack and white 16 mm prints on some crappy projector in a basement in the\u003cbr\u003euniversity building somewhere. I guess video ended that.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhen you saw movies did you think, 'I want to do that'? I mean, you started\u003cbr\u003emaking films when you were kids, didn't you?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eEC: Yeah. Super-8 things. But it didn't rise to the level of serious\u003cbr\u003eambition. It was another way of goofing off. I don't know when it got sort\u003cbr\u003eof serious for me. Certainly later than Joel, since he went to film school\u003cbr\u003eand I didn't. For me it was more an opportunity that presented itself\u003cbr\u003ethrough Joel's work than any long-harboured ambition I'd had.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJC: But these things are sometimes just pursuing what might be a casual\u003cbr\u003einterest in the path of least resistance. Even the decision to go to film\u003cbr\u003eschool. Something that strikes you at that moment as being a bit more\u003cbr\u003einteresting than something else. It's not as if you really know what you're\u003cbr\u003egoing to do with it. Or if you're going to do anything with it.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eEC: Yeah. There are other people you read about like Scorsese for whom it\u003cbr\u003eseemed like a religion from an early age. It certainly wasn't that with\u003cbr\u003eeither of us.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eCould you have imagined going off in a completely different direction?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eEC: I never seriously thought about any career so I couldn't honestly say.\u003cbr\u003eBut, yeah, I suppose it could have happened.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eCan you say a little about your experience of NYU film school?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJC: I think film schools are quite different now from when I went. First of\u003cbr\u003eall, a lot of people on the undergraduate programme weren't really that\u003cbr\u003einterested in movies. A lot of kids who had to go to college thought, this\u003cbr\u003emight be fun. I'll go to film school. You know, taking the path of least\u003cbr\u003eresistance. And it started that way for me. But it ended up being a fairly\u003cbr\u003einteresting place to be. If you took advantage of the school's resources,\u003cbr\u003ewhich were extremely limited but were at least something, you could go out\u003cbr\u003eand make little movies and sort of screw around with it without essentially\u003cbr\u003ehaving to pay for it beyond the tuition. I also met people there who we\u003cbr\u003eended up working with later.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhat kind of films did you make there?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJC: It was just an extension of what we were doing with Super-8 cameras\u003cbr\u003ewhen we were little kids. Just kind of screwing around. It was all pretty\u003cbr\u003ecrude. But even that stuff is kind of an interesting thing to have done.\u003cbr\u003eWhen you think about people who are making a first movie, it's a little bit\u003cbr\u003edifferent having had to look through the camera and frame a shot or imagine\u003cbr\u003ehow it's going to get cut together, than it is if you're coming to it from\u003cbr\u003ea completely different discipline like a writer, who's never even made a\u003cbr\u003eSuper-8 movie and is having to figure it out intellectually. So I think it\u003cbr\u003edoes have some value even if what you're doing is a very crude exercise.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhat happened once you got out of NYU?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJC: I started working as an assistant editor on low-budget splatter movies.\u003cbr\u003eEthan and I were both living in New York at that point and we started\u003cbr\u003ewriting together. We would get these writing jobs from producers who had\u003cbr\u003ethese low-budget movies and sometimes wanted stuff written or rewritten. We\u003cbr\u003egot some writing jobs together that way at that point and that led to us\u003cbr\u003ewriting something to do ourselves-which was \u003ci\u003eBlood Simple\u003c\/i\u003e.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHow did the idea of writing \u003ci\u003eBlood Simple\u003c\/i\u003e come about?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJC: We wrote a little thing for Frank LaLoggia, one of the directors I was\u003cbr\u003eworking for as an assistant editor; we wrote a screenplay with Sam Raimi.\u003cbr\u003eSo we just sat down and thought what kind of movie could we make that was\u003cbr\u003esort of producible on a really small budget like these horror movies, but\u003cbr\u003ethat isn't necessarily a horror film.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eEC: The inspiration was these movies that Joel had been working on which\u003cbr\u003ehad been done mostly by young people like us who didn't have any\u003cbr\u003ecredentials or credibility in the mainstream movie industry. But they'd\u003cbr\u003egone out and raised money underground for their little exploitation movies,\u003cbr\u003egot the movies made and subsequently wandered into the place where Joel was\u003cbr\u003eworking to have them cut. It was that evidence that it could be done that\u003cbr\u003eled us to try it ourselves: notably Sam's movie, \u003ci\u003eThe Evil Dead\u003c\/i\u003e, because Sam\u003cbr\u003ewas the most forthcoming in sharing all his experience with us.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eYou said you chose the particular kind of story because it was manageable\u003cbr\u003eat a certain budget. Was it also because you loved noir movies?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJC: On the one hand, we were both interested in and had read a lot of pulp\u003cbr\u003efiction like Cain and Hammett-and Cain especially when you think about\u003cbr\u003emovies that involve murder triangles. On the other hand, as Ethan said, the\u003cbr\u003esort of financial model for the film was also, to a certain extent, a\u003cbr\u003ecreative influence on it. So it was kind of a mix of those two things.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eEC: Also, there were a couple of notorious Texas domestic murder stories\u003cbr\u003ethat had just happened in the early eighties. I'm sure that figured.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDid you write from beginning to end, or did you write particular scenes\u003cbr\u003edown as they came to you?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJC: We start at the beginning and work through to the end. On \u003ci\u003eBlood Simple\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003ethat was definitely the case. It was just a scene by scene accretion,\u003cbr\u003ewasn't it?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eEC: Right. We don't outline and we don't really know where we're going. We\u003cbr\u003emight have some vague feeling that we're going to arrive at some point in\u003cbr\u003ethe future but it's the vaguest sort of feeling till we actually write\u003cbr\u003eourselves to that point.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBut \u003ci\u003eBlood Simple\u003c\/i\u003e's plot is so intricate, so exquisitely crafted. Is it\u003cbr\u003ereally just an organic process by which you arrive at such a complex\u003cbr\u003estructure?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJC: Yeah. Sometimes writing yourself into a corner means that there is no\u003cbr\u003eway out and you just have to bag the whole thing. But sometimes writing\u003cbr\u003eyourself into a corner means that you have to think of a way out of the\u003cbr\u003ecorner. If you read the whole thing, you might think 'Oh this is very\u003cbr\u003eintricately plotted out.' But just because, by putting yourself into a box\u003cbr\u003eyou figured a way out of the box, doesn't mean it was all premeditated.\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eBlood Simple\u003c\/i\u003e started something else that we've done pretty much on every\u003cbr\u003esubsequent movie, which was that we've always written parts for specific\u003cbr\u003eactors. And as we've made more and more movies and got to know more and\u003cbr\u003emore actors, they're frequently people we know personally from one place or\u003cbr\u003eanother or that we've worked with in the past. In \u003ci\u003eBlood Simple\u003c\/i\u003e, we wrote\u003cbr\u003ethe part that Emmet Walsh played for Emmet just because we knew his work.\u003cbr\u003eThe other parts were written without knowing who would play them.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhat's the starting point for a story like \u003ci\u003eBlood Simple\u003c\/i\u003e? Is it a situation,\u003cbr\u003ea kind of equation: a man wants his wife killed and gets killed himself? Or\u003cbr\u003ea character: a slippery private eye like the character played by M Emmet\u003cbr\u003eWalsh? Or is the dichotomy between plot and character a false one?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJC: It is, inasmuch as who does what to whom has to be consistent to some\u003cbr\u003esort of idea of who the characters are, even if they're rather crude. But\u003cbr\u003ein this one the balance probably tips more towards the story than the\u003cbr\u003echaracters. I guess this one was conceived more as a thriller. I remember\u003cbr\u003ethat it was an early idea in \u003ci\u003eBlood Simple\u003c\/i\u003e that someone would fake the\u003cbr\u003emurder, and then do another murder that made more sense. That was there as\u003cbr\u003ean equation, as you say, at some point fairly early in the writing-earlier\u003cbr\u003ethan the point that we got to that scene. Our initial thinking about it was\u003cbr\u003eprobably more about plot than about the people in it. But maybe it's just\u003cbr\u003esomething you just assume after the facts, since the characters in it now\u003cbr\u003eseem pretty crude.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhat were you doing while you were writing Blood Simple to make a living?\u003cbr\u003eAnd how long did it take to write?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eEC: I was working as a temporary clerical typist. It took a long time\u003cbr\u003ebecause it was an evening and weekend type proposition. Months.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhat did you do once you had a screenplay? You were still not 'the Coen\u003cbr\u003eBrothers' as you are today.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJC: Cro-Magnon Coen brothers dragging our knuckles across the floor!\u003cbr\u003e(Laughs.) We followed the example of Sam Raimi. Sam had done this trailer,\u003cbr\u003ealmost like a full-length version of \u003ci\u003eThe Evil Dead\u003c\/i\u003e, but on Super-8. He\u003cbr\u003eraised sixty or ninety thousand dollars that way, essentially by taking it\u003cbr\u003earound to people's homes to find investors. He financed the movie using a\u003cbr\u003ecommon thing that people making exploitation movies had used, which was a\u003cbr\u003elimited partnership. This was a business model taken from Broadway shows\u003cbr\u003ewhere the general partners were the people who were producing or making the\u003cbr\u003emovie and the limited partners were just individual investors who were\u003cbr\u003eputting in a certain amount of money and buying equity in the product. So,\u003cbr\u003eSam also told us how to set that up and we did that in conjunction with a\u003cbr\u003elawyer here and then went out and shot a two-minute trailer in 35 mm.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eCan you describe the trailer?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eEC: Well, it was rather abstract, as it had to be. We didn't have the\u003cbr\u003eactors: we didn't know who the actors would be, of course. Actually, what\u003cbr\u003ewe also borrowed from Sam and the other models was that it was presented\u003cbr\u003emore as an action-exploitation type movie than it ended up being, and in\u003cbr\u003efact than we knew it would be. It was pretty much of its time. In the early\u003cbr\u003eeighties there was a real vogue for these low-budget horror movies, some of\u003cbr\u003ewhich did really well commercially and made their investors lots of money.\u003cbr\u003eSo we were passing ourselves off as one of those-which to a certain extent\u003cbr\u003ewe were, of course; but to a certain extent we were not. And we just\u003cbr\u003eignored the respects in which we were different.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJC: The trailer emphasized the action, the blood and guts in the movie. It\u003cbr\u003ewas very short. We had a very effective soundtrack, which is very cheap to\u003cbr\u003edo. And we schlepped that around for about a year to people's homes and\u003cbr\u003eprojected it in their living rooms and then got them to give us money to\u003cbr\u003emake the movie.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eEC: The thing is when you're trying to attract someone who might invest,\u003cbr\u003eyou have this legal prospectus which is really dry. It's worse than\u003cbr\u003edry-it's a document that's basically warning them off the investment,\u003cbr\u003epresenting all the risks. You have to be able to show them something that's\u003cbr\u003ea little more intriguing than the legal document that they're eventually\u003cbr\u003egoing to have to sign. Which was Sam's rationale for doing his little\u003cbr\u003efeaturette.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJC: There were two or three people that we knew or who were connected to\u003cbr\u003eour family somehow. But beyond that, they were all people we'd never met\u003cbr\u003ebefore in our lives. If you call people up and you say, 'Can you give me\u003cbr\u003eten minutes so I can present an opportunity to invest in a movie?', they're\u003cbr\u003egoing to say, 'No, I don't need this', and hang up the phone. But it's\u003cbr\u003eslightly different if you call up and say, 'Can I come over and take ten\u003cbr\u003eminutes and show you a piece of film?' All of a sudden that intrigues them\u003cbr\u003eand gets your foot in the door. That's something Sam made us wise to which\u003cbr\u003ewas invaluable in terms of being able to raise the kind of money we were\u003cbr\u003etrying to raise, which was essentially much more money than Sam had. He'd\u003cbr\u003eraised about ninety grand initially and we were trying to raise a threshold\u003cbr\u003eof five hundred and fifty and up to seven hundred and fifty.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHow much did you raise?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eEC: Seven hundred and fifty ultimately. We started actually working on the\u003cbr\u003emovie once we'd raised the five hundred and fifty.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThis was all going on in New York?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJC: New York, Minneapolis and Texas.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBecause you were going to shoot in Texas?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJC: Right. And because we knew some people. I think there ended up being\u003cbr\u003eabout sixty-five investors in the movie, most of them in five- or\u003cbr\u003eten-thousand-dollar increments. I think sixty to seventy per cent of them\u003cbr\u003ewere from Minneapolis.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eEC: The good thing about Minneapolis is those horrible phone calls you have\u003cbr\u003eto make to people you don't know-you've just got their names from whoever.\u003cbr\u003eThey're too polite to hang up.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJC: That's absolutely true. In New York, they'd just go, 'Yeah, yeah', and\u003cbr\u003ehang up; because the dangerous thing with any salesman is to keep talking\u003cbr\u003eto them. (Laughs.)\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eEC: But people actually put up with us! We'd walk into their living room\u003cbr\u003ewith our projector and before they'd even offered us to sit down we'd be\u003cbr\u003elike finding the outlet, sticking the cord in, setting the projector up and\u003cbr\u003eopening up the screen. (Laughs.) There was one investor we went to and we\u003cbr\u003ehit his car, parking. And we had this big debate out on the driveway\u003cbr\u003ewhether we should tell him we hit his car before the sales pitch or after\u003cbr\u003ethe sales pitch. We decided that we wouldn't tell him until we showed him\u003cbr\u003ethe movie and made the sales pitch.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJC: Obviously he didn't end up investing in the movie!\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhat kind of people did end up investing in the movie?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJC: Not professional people, by and large. They weren't doctors and lawyers\u003cbr\u003eand dentists and that sort of thing. They were small business people,\u003cbr\u003eentrepreneurs who had started a small business themselves twenty years\u003cbr\u003eearlier with very little money and had made a lot of money doing it and\u003cbr\u003erelated to the entrepreneurial aspect of it. They liked the show business\u003cbr\u003ething but that was actually secondary. It was more that they related to the\u003cbr\u003eenterprise of just going out and trying to start a business that way. And\u003cbr\u003ethat's where most of the money came from. These people owned little\u003cbr\u003ebusinesses. You know-I've got a business that supplies hair driers to\u003cbr\u003ebeauty salons or I've got a scrap-metal yard or I've got fifteen bowling\u003cbr\u003ealleys or something like that. It's those kind of people.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eEC: Fargo was based around our fascination with the Minneapolis business\u003cbr\u003ecommunity.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJC: Right. It was raising money for Blood Simple that we met all these\u003cbr\u003ebusiness guys who could wear the suits, get bundled up in the park and slog\u003cbr\u003eout in the snow and meet us in these, like, coffee shops. We came back to\u003cbr\u003ethat whole thing in Fargo, the car salesman, the guy who owns the bowling\u003cbr\u003ealley, you know, whatever. That was very much part of it.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAnd your family helped you out?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eEC: They put in fifteen. I don't know why. I don't know why anyone did at\u003cbr\u003ethe end of the day.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDid the investors make their money back?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJC: Oh yeah. It took a while though.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eEC: In fact it took so long that they might have done almost as well\u003cbr\u003eputting the same amount of money in the bank and collecting bank interest.\u003cbr\u003eBut you know, they certainly did fine. And most of them were quite pleased\u003cbr\u003ebecause it is an interesting thing to follow if you're not in the movie\u003cbr\u003ebusiness.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDid you try to raise money from any distribution companies?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJC: We went to certain people after we'd raised a certain amount of money\u003cbr\u003ehoping to bring in a partner who could basically end the agony of having to\u003cbr\u003ego out and find all that money-because it just took for ever. Each time\u003cbr\u003ethey either wanted too much or it seemed they'd be interfering and\u003cbr\u003econtrolling and at the end of the day it would be better to struggle on and\u003cbr\u003econtrol it all ourselves than it would be to relinquish any control to\u003cbr\u003ethese groups. They all wanted to talk about the script. I'm sure they would\u003cbr\u003ehave taken us to the cleaners. Not that that was such an issue at that\u003cbr\u003epoint.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eEC: It would have been complicated since we already had investors who'd\u003cbr\u003esigned up under terms which forbade us being taken to the cleaners.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHow long did it take between finishing the script and raising the money?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJC: It must have been at least a year and half.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDid you ever think you weren't going to make it?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJC: Oh yeah. Until we had raised the threshold amount that we needed to\u003cbr\u003estart the production, neither of us thought that it was anything but a long\u003cbr\u003eshot, that we'd actually succeed in doing it. I think we thought there was\u003cbr\u003ea good chance it wouldn't work out.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDo you think first-time film-makers have to have a kind of crazy faith in\u003cbr\u003ewhat they're doing because if they looked rationally at the odds they'd\u003cbr\u003enever try?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJC: That's definitely true. All the things we didn't know are what enabled\u003cbr\u003eus to do it and be successful. If we knew what we know now or even what we\u003cbr\u003eknew when we finished the process we probably wouldn't have attempted to do\u003cbr\u003eit or at least attempted it that way. The odds of succeeding at it are very\u003cbr\u003eslim and the process is very difficult. That's why it's kind of hard to\u003cbr\u003erecommend it to people.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eEC: Right. There is something a little unhealthy about the monomaniacal\u003cbr\u003eframe of mind you have to put yourself in. Right after we got it done we\u003cbr\u003ekidded that the reason we got it done was because we got ourselves so\u003cbr\u003edeeply in debt that the only way to pay back the money was to make the\u003cbr\u003emovie.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJC: We ended up getting dangerously in debt just to live and to keep the\u003cbr\u003eoperation going. There was absolutely no way we could have made good on\u003cbr\u003ethat money without actually making the movie and have the movie make money\u003cbr\u003eand pay off. So it's all a little crazy. It's all something that's a lot\u003cbr\u003eeasier for people who were in our position than it is for people who are a\u003cbr\u003elittle bit older or have financial responsibilities. We didn't have kids.\u003cbr\u003eWe were just kids. We didn't have any commitments so we could gamble that\u003cbr\u003eway. People who are making a lot of money doing commercials or videos or\u003cbr\u003ethat sort of thing, a year or a year and a half into the process that we\u003cbr\u003ewent through, they're factoring in all the income they've lost, thinking\u003cbr\u003e'Jesus!' We weren't doing that.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eEC: It's an irony that even back then some of our peers were actually\u003cbr\u003emaking serious money at serious movie industry jobs. They wouldn't have\u003cbr\u003edone what we did because they did have something to lose. They would have\u003cbr\u003eto relinquish something in order to embark on something like that.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOnce you'd raised the money, how did you begin to prepare for the filming?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJC: The first thing we did was hire Mark Silverman who we'd gone to school\u003cbr\u003ewith and I'd been to NYU with.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eEC: Mark actually did have a little experience. He'd done a couple of\u003cbr\u003ereally low-budget horror movies.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhat was his role?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJC: He was the line-producer. And he was really the one who put the movie\u003cbr\u003etogether from a nuts and bolts point of view, who really helped us organize\u003cbr\u003eit at a professional level.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHow long was your shooting schedule?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eEC: It was October to November. Eight weeks, I guess.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThat sounds quite long for an independent movie. How did you manage that?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJC: We didn't pay anybody anything. Well, we paid them the minimum. That's\u003cbr\u003ethe one thing I always say when people ask about this type of thing: it\u003cbr\u003emakes more sense to find people who don't necessarily have the experience\u003cbr\u003edoing what you want to do, but who you think are ready to do it and shoot\u003cbr\u003efor longer, than it does trying to find some four thousand dollars a week\u003cbr\u003eDP who you think is going to save you time and allow you to shoot for a\u003cbr\u003eweek less. It doesn't work like that. That was something Mark helped us\u003cbr\u003eachieve and appreciate. That was the philosophy that he brought into the\u003cbr\u003emovie and it was really helpful for us. The other thing we did, which I\u003cbr\u003ethink in retrospect was really smart, was we gave ourselves a very long\u003cbr\u003epre-production, too. Because we were dealing with very limited resources we\u003cbr\u003egave ourselves a really exhaustive pre-production and that ended up paying\u003cbr\u003eoff.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eEC: Yeah, we storyboarded extensively, pretty much everything.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDid you work on that together?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJC: On \u003ci\u003eBlood Simple\u003c\/i\u003e we did it together and then we worked with some\u003cbr\u003estoryboard artists down in Texas.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHow did you end up working with Barry Sonnenfeld?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eEC: We met him through a mutual friend. He was in fact the person who\u003cbr\u003eintroduced us to Mark Silverman.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhat had he done at this time?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eEC: Odd things here and there. You know, 16 mm industrial type things. But\u003cbr\u003ehe hadn't shot a feature before. In fact I think he hadn't shot anything on\u003cbr\u003e35 mm before.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJC: There was almost nobody on \u003ci\u003eBlood Simple\u003c\/i\u003e, ourselves included obviously,\u003cbr\u003ewho had ever done a feature film before. Certainly not in the jobs that we\u003cbr\u003ehad hired them to do.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHow did you work with Barry in terms of the look of the film? I thought\u003cbr\u003esome of the scenes looked almost colour-coded. Blue when Marty is sitting\u003cbr\u003eout on the back step looking at the incinerator or when the private eye is\u003cbr\u003ebreaking into John's house; red for Marty's bar and back office.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJC: Some of these things were conscious. But you may be reading more\u003cbr\u003ecalculation into it than actually happened. As most of these things are, it\u003cbr\u003ewas half by calculation and design and half just because that's what there\u003cbr\u003eis. There was a conscious effort to make it crisp. Use hard sources and\u003cbr\u003emake it cold.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eEC: The thing you mention, looking at it again, I actually think we went\u003cbr\u003etoo far. We wouldn't have gone quite that far if we were doing it now. But\u003cbr\u003ethat probably came from talking to Barry about single light sources.\u003cbr\u003eThere's a blue bug zapper in that scene. There's a lot of neon in the bar.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHow did you go about finding your key locations?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJC: Some of the actual locations in the movie were places that we were\u003cbr\u003eaware of when we were writing the movie. Beyond that, I think we did it\u003cbr\u003ejust the way we normally do it. We hired a location manager who started\u003cbr\u003elooking for places and showed us different options when we went down there.\u003cbr\u003eI don't think it was any different in that respect from the other things\u003cbr\u003ewe've done subsequently.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eEC: It's funny you ask about that. Looking for locations is always weird.\u003cbr\u003eIt's always surprising how specific you can get in your descriptions of\u003cbr\u003ewhat you want and how you realize when you get shown things, how much\u003cbr\u003eyou've left out: what you really need. Everything superficially matches\u003cbr\u003ewhat you're asking for but it's all basically kind of wrong. It's funny.\u003cbr\u003eThat never changes.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJC: So at the end of the day, you have to find these places yourself or go\u003cbr\u003eout with whoever's looking.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eEC: We would frequently choose things out of ignorance. The house that we\u003cbr\u003eshot in, for instance, was so ridiculously small that when the AD came down\u003cbr\u003e-\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJC:-she told us we were crazy, that we'd never be able to get the crew in,\u003cbr\u003ethe lights and blah blah blah. It ended up actually working out okay but\u003cbr\u003eshe was right.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eEC: We really made life difficult for ourselves out of ignorance.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eI understand you had to vacate the bar at the weekend?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eEC: That's right. It was empty during the week, then the swingers came in\u003cbr\u003eat the weekend. They said, we got to keep it going at the weekend. So we\u003cbr\u003ehad to get out of there.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eLet's talk about the casting. What made you think of M Emmet Walsh for the\u003cbr\u003epart of the private eye? Did you know of him already?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJC: We hadn't met him. He was a Los Angeles guy. We knew him only from his\u003cbr\u003ework, notably from a movie he did called \u003ci\u003eStraight Time\u003c\/i\u003e in which he was\u003cbr\u003ereally good. It's an interesting movie in which Dustin Hoffman is a parolee\u003cbr\u003eand M Emmet is his parole officer. M Emmet's character was sort of sleazy.\u003cbr\u003eActually it was a more interesting character than what we came up with in\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eBlood Simple\u003c\/i\u003e inasmuch as it was more ambiguous. So, yeah, that was the\u003cbr\u003enotable thing that we'd seen him in. We had our casting director send him a\u003cbr\u003escript not in the expectation but in the hope that he'd be interested in it\u003cbr\u003eand he was. It was a pleasant surprise that he was interested in doing it.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhere did you actually meet him for the first time?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eEC: In Texas. We met him only when we were ready to shoot. He was the one\u003cbr\u003eperson we offered a part without an audition. All I remember is we didn't\u003cbr\u003eknow what the hell to call him! I mean, what the hell do you call him when\u003cbr\u003eyou meet him? 'M'?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWas he like the character he played?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJC: Emmet? No. He was a bit of a curmudgeon, certainly, but he didn't have\u003cbr\u003ethe sleaze that his character in the movie has.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eEC: His sort of curmudgeonliness is not a cloud on the set. As a matter of\u003cbr\u003efact it's the opposite.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJC: Emmet's kind of crusty.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eEC: He's kind of a coot.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJC: He's basically any noun or adjective that starts with a 'C'!\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eDid he ever give you a hard time?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eEC: Yes, but in a half-kidding but only half-kidding kind of way. He never\u003cbr\u003etried to intimidate or make us feel insecure because of our lack of\u003cbr\u003eexperience although he had by far the most experience of anyone on the set.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWhat about the rest of the casting? How did that go?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eEC: It was just the usual process of meeting actors. In our case, it was\u003cbr\u003ehere in New York, for the four main parts excluding Emmet. Actually, we met\u003cbr\u003eDan Hedaya, John Getz and Sam Mart fairly early on but hadn't met anyone we\u003cbr\u003ewere happy with for Fran's part until we met Fran. We met Holly Hunter and\u003cbr\u003eliked her but that quickly became academic. She wasn't available because\u003cbr\u003eshe was doing a play in New York.","brand":"Penguin Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46304829047013,"sku":"NP9780142002209","price":20.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780142002209.jpg?v=1767733276","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/my-first-movie-isbn-9780142002209","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}