Fast, Cheap & Written That Way: Top Screenwriters on Writing for Low-Budget Movies: Fast, Cheap Filmmaking Books, #2

INTRODUCTION

Screenwriting is easy.

At least, that’s the impression you’d come away with after reading many books and articles on low-budget filmmaking. In most you’ll find numerous instances of filmmakers talking about the arduous process of making the movie … but precious little on how the script was actually written.

I realized this sad fact when I was proofing the companion book to this one, Fast, Cheap & Under Control: Lessons Learned From the Greatest Low-Budget Movies of All Time. Among all the wonderful gems gathered in that book I realized that there was really very little on the actual screenwriting process. The closest we got to any meat were phrases like, The script just poured out of me or So I sat down with my writing partner and we drafted a script. There was very little real information about the actual experience of writing.

Now, I don't want to come off as some sort of writing bigot, but the problem with screenplays is that they all look alike. Spread the pages of an Academy Award-winning script on a table next to a properly formatted first draft by an ambitious neophyte and you’d be hard pressed to tell the difference. At least, at a glance. And therein lies the problem.

To many people, if it looks like a screenplay and it’s formatted like a screenplay … well, it must be ready to be shot. Such is the downfall of many an independent (and Hollywood) film.

The screenplay is arguably the most important element in the filmmaking process and yet it remains the most mysterious. Someone goes off into a small, dark room and then a few days (weeks, months) later they emerge with a finished, polished script, ready to be shot.

Which leads one to ask: What the heck happened in that room?

That, in a nutshell, is the goal of this book: To blow the doors off that room, peer over the writers' shoulders and crawl into their brains as they conceive, develop and refine the blueprint for their movies.

To that end, I spoke with twenty-three different screenwriters and got (not so surprisingly) twenty-three very different responses on how to go about writing a successful, low-budget screenplay.

A quick glance at the Table of Contents will demonstrate that I was able, with a lot of blood, sweat and e-mailing, to assemble interviews that cover the last forty years of filmmaking and touch on just about every style and genre of low-budget filmmaking. I hand-picked movies that I think made a difference at the time they came out and that still have a lot to teach us.

Each writer very kindly detailed the steps they went through in the process of writing their low-budget script. In each instance, we talked about where they were in their career before that script … how they conceived and developed the idea … how they did or didn't adapt their work to their intended budget ... and the impact that process has had on their subsequent work.

Interspersed with that chronology came their philosophy of screenwriting, and that’s where it really gets interesting. These folks have opinions about what works, what doesn’t, and what’s wrong with movies today. You won’t necessarily find agreement, or even consensus, on many points. But you will undoubtedly find a point of view that matches your own, along with some contrary ideas that are worth considering.

I've organized the interviews into like-minded genres, for easier reference, although to be fair, many of them span multiple topic headings. Henry Jaglom's Venice/Venice could easily move out of its current location (Chapter One: This is Your Life) and slide cleanly into Chapter Two: Keeping It Real or Chapter Six: Love Stories. The same is true of Roger Nygard's Suckers, which would be just as at home in Chapter One as in its current location, Chapter Five: Playing With Genres. And any of the screenplays deserve a place in Chapter Six: Original Visions. But since everything has to be somewhere, for better or worse this is where I've positioned these interviews.

Then, in the final chapter, I recap some of the key ideas that I took away from the interviews, providing my own (highly subjective) two cents on what I heard.

While I hope that you find much that inspires and motivates you in these conversations, never think for a moment that this project wasn’t born out of anything more than my own selfish desire to chat with these writers and somehow, via osmosis or proximity, become a better screenwriter in the process.

The simple truth is, these folks are great storytellers. It was terrific fun to sit back and listen to accounts of their low-budget high jinx.

[In the interest of full disclosure, I must confess that a few of the interviews (Eric Bogosian, Alex Cox and portions of the Whit Stillman and Ali Selim interviews) were conducted by e-mail. However, their story-telling prowess came through the digital ether loud and clear. And while I'm disclosing things, the interview with Richard Glatzer about Grief was done long before these other interviews – way back in 1995 – and portions of that interview appeared in my first book, Persistence of Vision. There. Got that off my chest. I feel much better now.]

I’ve always been a sucker for film books, and interview books in particular, so it’s been a special kick to put an interview book of my own together. As a youngster I devoured such classics of the genre as Joe Gelmis’ The Film Director as Superstar and John Brady’s The Craft of the Screenwriter.

And while we're on the subject of books worn out from constant re-reading, we can't forget William Bayer's Breaking Through, Selling Out, Dropping Dead (and Other Notes on Filmmaking), which every filmmaker should look through before starting a film, regardless of the film's length or budget.

It’s my fervent hope that some film geek not unlike my early self wears out this book like I wore out those books, and carries some of the ideas found within throughout his/her filmmaking career.

Happy reading. And, if this book serves its purpose, happier writing.

PART I

THIS IS YOUR LIFE

Finding inspiration from within your own life is a time-honored approach in low-budget filmmaking. While anyone can scribble down funny, sad and sexy moments from their life, the real trick is finding those events in your day-to-day existence that are truly universal.

None of the four films highlighted in the chapter would be correctly labeled biographies. But each was taken from the writer's life experience and then filtered through their dramatic sensibilities to create classic stories that connected with audiences around the world.

TOM DICILLO: LIVING IN OBLIVION

You’re crossing a potentially deadly minefield when you attempt to take a short film and expand it into a feature. What was once sharp and clever can quickly turn repetitive and dull if you take a wrong step or make the wrong choices. Tom DiCillo successfully navigated that minefield when he turned his short, Living In Oblivion, into what is unquestionably one of the classic low-budget movies of all time.

More importantly, he also took what at first appears to be a very narrow and inside story – about a director nearly losing his mind while shooting his movie – and turned it into a universal story about the creative process.

(Be aware that this interview contains spoilers about key plot points.)

What was going on in your career before you made Living In Oblivion?

TOM DiCILLO: My first feature was film called Johnny Suede, starring Brad Pitt. I busted my ass on that one for at least four years to get it made. The film never quite found an audience and the distribution of it was, frankly, really disappointing. It made making my second film really, really difficult.

I had written a screenplay called Box of Moonlight and could not get the money for it. Years and years went by, two, three, four, five, and I just reached a point of such maniacal desperation that I said, I have to do something, no matter what. It was out of that intense frustration that Living in Oblivion was born.

It wasn't born out of, Hey, I want to make a funny movie. It really came out of one of the most intense periods of anger and frustration in my career. And, ironically, it turned out to be the funniest movie I've ever made. I think in some way that is part of what makes my humor my humor: It’s humor based upon real, human intensity, desperation, and foolishness.

To use a screenwriting term, what was the inciting incident that kicked off the creation of Living In Oblivion?

TOM DiCILLO: I was invited to the wedding of my wife's cousin. It was a three-day event and on the first night -- you have to understand, I was carrying with me four and a half years of frustration -- I had a martini.

I had never had a martini before in my life. And I said, Wow, if that's how you feel after one martini, let's have another one. So I had two. And I said, This is just unbelievable. And I had three. Later I realized that I should never, ever, ever do that again.

But it was after the third martini that this guy came up to me, who I vaguely recognized from an acting class I had taken maybe four or five years earlier. And he says, "Oh, Tom, it's great to see you, man. You're so lucky, you made Johnny Suede, you made a movie. Lights, camera, action."

And I just erupted at him. I said, Shut the fuck up. Making a movie is one of the most tedious, frustrating, intense experiences I've ever had in my life. And not even just getting the money. What about when you're getting ready to do a shot and suddenly something screws up and the actor's moment that they've been working on for hours just disappears and you never get it back again?

Well, that's where I had the first idea. I swear, right there at that moment, I thought, You know, that could make a little fifteen-minute film. Just confront an actor with an endless number of disruptions and see what happens. And that's where the idea was born.

That first half hour just kind of jumped out of me. I went home and wrote the first half-hour as it exists, word for word, frame for frame in the final version.

So Living in Oblivion was essentially based on a single idea that then later, completely by accident, turned into a feature film. You never quite know how something is going to turn out, and that one for some reason just all came together. I'm very proud of that movie.

What happened after you wrote the short script?

TOM DiCILLO: Catherine Keener was visiting us at that time and I gave her the script -- it was about 25 pages -- and I just heard her laughing in this back room that we have. She was just howling.

She came out and said, We have to do this. And I said, Okay, let's do it. Even if we have to shoot it on Super 8, let's make this movie.

The next thing I know, her husband, Dermot, said he would like to put in some money if he could be in it. He originally wanted to play Nick Reve, the director, but I said I had someone a little older in mind, and he immediately said, What about Steve Buscemi? I said, That's a fantastic idea. You can play Wolf, the cameraman. He said, That's great.

It was like a bunch of kids putting on a show in the garage. Anybody who wanted to be in the movie, who had a little money, got a part. That is how I cast it, I am not kidding you. Sometimes you agonize about casting, over and over for months trying to figure out which actor to choose. In this case, I never thought about it for a second. Never. And look how amazing those actors were.

So we started shooting. We had a five-day shoot in New York City and we had about $37,000 that my wife helped raise and that everybody put it. The cast and crew were amazed at how well it was turning out. On the fourth day we realized that it was going to end and there was a kind of depression that settled in on the set. People said, Tom, you should make a feature out of this. And I went, How? How? How would I ever do that?

But it turned out so well that I thought, I have to somehow find a way to take this magical accident and develop it.

What steps did you take to do that?

TOM DiCILLO: After it was finished, I submitted it to the Cannes short film festival, I tried a number of things, and I realized that as a short it wasn't going to go anywhere. First of all, it was too long. It was just under a half an hour.

So I began to think about what was developed in the first section, the first third of the film? What ideas were kind of lurking in the background? And one of the ideas was that there was a relationship developing between the director and his leading actress. Another thing that seemed to be developing was a relationship between the cameraman and the First AD.

And I began thinking about, What's the one fantasy that I've always thought about? And that is having the lead actor and the director get into a fist-fight on the set. And so that's how I came up with the idea of Chad Palomino and how he disrupts the shoot -- this Hollywood guy entering this little, dusty world of Nick Reve's independent film and totally screwing it up. So I had Part Two.

So then I said, Where the hell is it going to go from here?

And my wife, very astutely, said, Listen, Part One is a dream. Part Two is a dream. Why don't you have Part Three be them making a dream sequence? And I went, Oh my God, that is so fantastic. Instantly, in an instant, I thought of Tito, the dwarf, erupting on set, You stupid morons! Is that the only way you can make a dream sequence, by putting a dwarf in it?

The two new segments evolve perfectly out of Part One. The movie never feels like a short with stuff added to turn it into a feature.

TOM DiCILLO: I put so much work into that screenplay. I wanted no one to think that it was just a short with two other segments tacked on to it. I wanted it to feel like it was seamless. And it took a lot of work to make that progression, to make that movement happen in the screenplay.

It sounds like you really drew from personal experience to write the script.

TOM DiCILLO: I've had a lot of experience of being on a number of sets. Even when I was going to film school, when you're on the set of a student film, it's just the most insane chaos that you can imagine. Even then I noticed that the drama that was happening just off the side of the camera was a million times more interesting than the stale scene that everybody was so intensely focused on. I noticed that even then.

And I swear to God, the very first time that I experienced room tone, everybody standing there like these living statues in this forced silence, I said, I'm going to put that in a movie one day. It's just so bizarre, I'm going to put that in a movie.

I've always been fascinated with the stuff that happens on the set. Not that I'm trying to say that just because it's a film set it’s interesting. I don't feel that. But I do feel like there's a real crazy drama that happens when you get a group of people trying to do a task together.

I'm in love with filmmaking, but at the same time I also have moments where I absolutely despise it. The medium itself seems designed to thwart you whenever you really want to try to do something. Just when you're about to get a shot, a light goes off or a train goes by, a car alarm goes off, something. Everything is so fragile in the business. So I wanted to take my rage out on that, because it can be so frustrating at times. It was so liberating and freeing to do that.

It must have been bizarre, making a good movie about a movie where everything is going wrong.

TOM DiCILLO: I swear the first time I had the actor intentionally drop the microphone into the shot, they didn't want to do it. They didn't want to do it because everything that we've been taught is to keep the microphone out of the frame. Don't put it in.

I wanted to try to really peel back that curtain about what it's like to be on the set and the real struggle, because I think that struggle is what is interesting to me -- the struggle to somehow capture something on film.

I also wanted to show the director in a way that I had never seen portrayed. I was really concerned about that. Most of the time the independent director, and directors in general, are shown wearing leather jackets and smoking cigarettes, brooding in a corner with sunglasses. Most directors that I've ever seen on a set of any movie look so desperate, so frustrated, so neurotic. So I wanted to address that and still let the director have some sort of dignity.

I think Nick Reve is not a total fool, but the struggles that he faces are really, I think, rather archetypical: How do you get what you want in a business that is all about pretension and ego? The way he has to deal with Chad Palomino is a monumental struggle. Here's a guy where all you really want to do is beat the shit out of him, but you can't. You have to say, Oh, yeah, man, you did a great take. Great take.

Part One ended up being the idea of the technical desperation and screw-ups. Then I wanted to see what would happen if you drop emotional complications in and that served to be the core of the movement for Part Two. It's all about how emotional entanglements happening off the set can affect what's being captured on film.

For Part Three, I really wanted to bring the director to the point where he gave up. After all this frustration, I realized he would really get to that point. To me it was interesting to drive him to that point where he could not proceed -- he really felt like he was failing and that he was not a director -- and to see what would happen to him, to see how he would respond.

One of the things that makes the script so strong is that all the obstacles that you put in Nick's way are real obstacles that you've experienced in that position.

TOM DiCILLO: Whatever you write, you have to tap into something personal for yourself. I used to have an acting teacher who said to me, If it ain't personal, it ain't no good. There's something to be said for that.

But at the same time, I don't want to ever make it seem like when I write that it's just about me. I'm not interested in that. Even with my first film, Johnny Suede -- sure, I put a lot of myself into that character -- but I also was very clearly trying to find a way to make it more objective, more universal, something that other people could relate to.

I absolutely believe that if you can find a way to tap into something that's very personal and then make a creative leap from there, that's the best way to do it. Anger by itself is not enough. You have to have the creative imagination coming into play as well.

How helpful was it to have Part One all shot when trying to get the money for Part Two and Part Three?

TOM DiCILLO: I took Part One all the way to the point of a finished print, with a mix, with titles, music, everything. I began screening that for people after I had written Part Two and Part Three, thinking that people wouldn't get a sense of what I was trying to do if they only read the screenplay. So therefore, having Part One all finished, I thought it would be perfect, because they can see exactly the characters, the actors, the humor, everything.

Well, it didn't happen. I had several conversations with all of the independent companies, and they all passed on the movie at the script stage. Completely. I offered it to Miramax for nothing and they said no.

Did they give reasons why they were passing?

TOM DiCILLO: They didn't get it. I'm not complaining, because I'm probably guilty of the same thing, but until something literally comes up and kicks you in the head and tells you what it is, no one knows anything.

They looked at this movie and said, Why? Why should we put money into this movie? And it's just bizarre to me, because most of the most impressive films -- the ones that really have stuck in the minds and consciousness of audiences -- are the ones that are absolutely original and have never been made before. Even Star Wars, for God's sake. He couldn't make that movie for years.

So, what happened was, I had put my wife's cousin and her husband, Hillary and Michael, in Part One -- Hillary played the script supervisor and her husband Michael played Speedo, the sound man -- and at the last minute Hillary called me and said, We'd like to put up the rest of the money and make the film as a feature.

And so they put up almost $500,000 of their own money and we were able to go off on our own, once again, and make the film.

This may be an apocryphal story, but I have heard that at the same time they offered you the money, you were on the phone with someone who had the money but with whom you didn't want to work.

TOM DiCILLO: Yes, exactly. He was being a real prick. He was this completely ego-driven guy. He was going to own everybody, he was going to tell everybody who to cast, all that stuff. Completely antithetical to the way the film had been created.

I was just about to make my travel arrangements to go out to LA to sign the deal with him, when my Call Waiting clicked in and it was Hillary and Michael. They were so apologetic -- Would you mind if we suggested putting up the money? I said, You've got to be kidding?!

It was one of the most magical experiences, from beginning to end, really.

In Part One, how did you work with Catherine on the different levels of her performance? How did you map out the range she had to go through, from being just okay to being really good?

TOM DiCILLO: I was concerned about that. I actually numbered the takes; I think there's 12 takes. Number one, on the scale of one to ten, should be a seven. Number two should be a five. We did something like that, but eventually what it came down to the two of us deciding what the degree of distraction she was feeling at that time. That's basically how it came about.

How much rehearsal did you have?

TOM DiCILLO: None. Absolutely none.

I don't like to rehearse, anyway. My style of working is to just talk to people, get the costumes correct, talk a little bit about the character, and then just find it as the camera is rolling.

What was so fascinating to me was that none of these actors auditioned and they were almost instantaneously their parts.

Many people think Living In Oblivion is completely improvised, but there's only one scene that was improvised. That's the scene where Steve erupts at the crew at the end of Part One. Everything else was completely scripted.

What's your favorite memory of working on Living In Oblivion?

TOM DiCILLO: Oh, man, there are millions. I think I would have to say that it was the look on people's faces the first time Peter Dinklage, who plays Tito, erupted into his tirade against the director.

Most of the crew that we hired had not read the script, because we weren't paying anybody. And so we were getting people working for free and they might work one or two days a week. And so this crew was just standing by the lights, doing whatever they were doing, and all of a sudden Peter Dinklage, during a take, says, I'm sick of this crap. He just erupted and everybody just turned and looked with their jaws open. They thought he was really saying it.

Then the laughter that erupted when they realized that it was just part of the movie, it was a fantastic feeling. It made me really feel that I had stumbled upon something and it was working.

Were there any things you learned writing that script that you still use today?

TOM DiCILLO: Yeah. I have a tendency, if I'm going to write a joke, I set it up with a one, two, three punch. But I realized that most of the time, when I get in the editing room, I usually only end up using the one or the two, never the one, two, three. That's kind of an interesting lesson to learn: if you're going to tell a joke, just tell the joke. Don't do three jokes.

I also learned the idea of setting in motion something that, once it's in motion it has a life of its own and people are really instantaneously eager to find out what's going to happen. That's a crucial thing.

Many screenwriting teachers will say a screenplay is all about tension and conflict. And, in some ways, that absolutely true. But if that tension and conflict doesn't arouse enough interest to have people really want to know what's going to happen next, then you're screwed. I think Johnny Suede suffered from that a bit. It was my first screenplay and there's very little real dramatic tension in it.

I like the idea of setting something in motion -- like a cart rolling down a hill -- that once it's going, you can't stop it.

How do you make that happen while you're writing the script?

TOM DiCILLO: If it keeps me excited, if I kind of surprise myself and go, Okay, what would be the conventional, expected way to do something? I stop and think, What if you just took a detour and went here? How the hell would you get out of that situation? I find that really exciting. It prompts me to think of unexpected things.

What's your writing process?

TOM DiCILLO: Usually when I sit down to write a script, the first three days is the hardest. Literally, going into the room, turning on the computer and starting.

Usually what I do is I compile a notebook of notes for months, sometimes years, in advance. I did notes for Living In Oblivion years in advance; same thing with Box of Moonlight.

Once I actually sit down and get through the first day, then I just can't wait to get into the room. What I do is I get up early in the morning, turn everything off, make sure nobody's here, and work solidly from about 9:30 until about three in the afternoon. I just love it. The concentration is fantastic. I love the discipline. Even sometimes, when it's not working, you just take a ten-minute break and come back.

I love writing. To me it's a magical part of this business. It's the one time when you can be free to go wherever you want to go. The actors do whatever you want them to do. You get whatever location you want.

Do you have any self-imposed rules, like a certain number of pages per day?

TOM DiCILLO: I try to give myself goals, definitely. Writing is a very tricky thing. You have to have discipline, but at the same time you have to keep yourself excited. That's the thing that I find for myself: If I'm not excited, I can feel it, so what I do is I stop. And I say, You have to get to a place, Tom, where you are re-excited about what you're doing. And when I am, the day goes by in about 20 seconds.

Sometimes you struggle with things