Written By January 2011 : Page 31
that happened to people. One of my favorite scenes is where Ben’s son is frightened. A father told me he didn’t want to worry chil-dren so he hadn’t told them [he’d been laid off]. And he went out to tell his son and it was very hard for him to say, “You know, son, I lost my job,” and the kid went, “That’s all? You lost your job?” Since I’d heard so many of their personal stories that were heart-felt, told to me oftentimes when they were crying or when they were really very emotional about what had happened, then to turn it into a caper at the end wasn’t going to work. So I probably did 10 or 12 drafts of that and then I kept trying to adjust it because I knew I couldn’t get the tone quite right. So 20 drafts, 30 drafts? I don’t know. How many times did you pitch this movie before it was set up? Warner Bros. wanted to do the original pitch right away. So it wasn’t difficult to set it up originally for the script. They weren’t paying me a lot of money. It wasn’t like I was writing something that they thought would be a huge blockbuster. That was right away but then the attempts to get it made after that, after Warners passed on it, I don’t know. Innumerable. There’s no place that I didn’t pitch it, I can tell you that, and a lot of places I was pitching it for so long that people would get fired and I’d pitch it to the next person and then they’d get fired and I’d pitch it to the next person. A lot of it in my case was trying to be true to the worlds that we were in and what I had seen in the research and scouting and in my own life. The smallest of incidents can actually tell a lot. And I do try to look for those. In the Sundance version we had a lot more of those, and there’s a point at which you feel the audience— it’s always just a feel thing—that the audience was ahead of you, and you go, Okay they get it, they get it, you can let up on it . I was trained originally a long, long time ago, when I went to college as a production design student in the theater, so I always come into things through visual images. And in my writing, too, I look for a story or a thing or a photograph or something that gets me started. A Corporate Merger Build It and They Will Come A lot of people believe this film can’t work in the cur-rent marketplace. There’s a general belief that peo-ple only want to be distracted. I would argue that during the Depression itself there were some really terrific films about more serious issues. I think the audience is more complex. Tonally, there’s always a lot of pressure to try and [realize] the four quadrant marketing. Are you only going to hit one quadrant? Are you going to hit two quadrants? What are the ages? We underestimate the audience all the time. A large audience is out there and people are look-ing for different kinds of experiences. But there’s a lot of homerun-ball analogies in the distribution world. A film meant to attract a certain amount of [older] audience is not going to be the film doing an extraordinary amount of money that puts a lot of easy cash into the company. Specialty divisions that the major studios started realized these are actually long-term businesses in which you make a lot of good pictures. Over time this is a profitable business, but it’s not one where you get March of the Penguins very often. So you’re con-stantly up against that. There are actors who want to do these [low-budget movies]. There are writers who want to do them, directors who want to. We have to keep figuring out ways to do them financially that make sense. We’ve all got pictures with terrific actors that now you can’t get made at $8 million and $10 mil-lion and $12 million budgets. But we have to stay in the market. I think that the audience is very bright, that they want different things. I don’t want to go to the same restaurant every night. This weekend I’ll take my daughter to see Harry Potter and I’ll see a comedy at Christmas time, but I also want to see a serious film and I want to see films that are thought provoking and I want to see films that just enter-tain me. We lose sight of that a bit in the market. We go around to the studios through the Writer’s Guild and try and make just that argument. They don’t always listen to us. But we do make the argument. —John Wells january 2011 WGA W Written By But that’s the whole trick of it. You want to beat the page. It’s not a filmed reading of your script; it’s the exploration of what’s living between the words, and obviously you nailed it. That leads me to my next question, which is: You are a TV legend. How would you compare the challenges of the feature world to your experience in TV? Doing the character-based things I’ve directed in television, and because I wasn’t trying to do any CGI, the experience on the set was very similar. And in fact on a lot of the television shows I’ve done I had more time than I did on the film, because we had a lot of locations moves. There was really no difference between when I was doing eight or nine pages a day on standing sets as to how much time I was having with the actors on two or three pages with a couple of company moves. But what was very different for me was, we’d do a beautiful master or a shot that seemed to be re-ally working, and I’d say, “Okay, let’s go in for the closeups.” And Roger would say, “You don’t need the closeups, it’s a big screen. They’ll see it, it’ll be fine.” • 31
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