NOTES FROM HOLLYWOOD: PART 5

Reflections on the Journey to Make a Feature Film

Aaron and Josh on set.

Last week we were out on a ranch at Allied Studios in Simi Valley for two days filming sequences the main character experiences in his head, either as dream or as memory of his experience of death. 40 crew, 4 actors, 3 box trucks, 1 stakebed (Art Director, Aaron Bautista, right), 2 trailers (costume/makeup and actor dressing rooms) and dozens of personal vehicles shlepped out to this remote ranch to capture some visual poetry.

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After our first week of finding our legs as a crew, in our second week we locked into a more productive rhythm that allowed us to achieve a fairly ambitious shot list. And the weather goddess smiled upon us.

We spent the rest of the week in a big house in Chatsworth, a suburb of LA, to film some family scenes. The week saw some very moving performances by our actors, some of whom were day-players who created a family connection with one another after only one day together. I was touched by how a small group of actors who’d never met before could become a family with very little rehearsal right before my eyes. Inspiring. And my wife, Sarana, visited set for a few days. (A highlight of the week!)
 
One of the things I had always heard about filmmaking but didn’t quite understand was the way text from the screenplay is routinely modified while shooting. Actors changing the script on-set? You’ve got to be kidding me. I come from the theatre, which is the playwright’s medium. Staying true to the playwright’s words is central to the craft of theatre. But film is the director’s medium, so they say, screenwriters be damned. (Writers roll your eyes, I know). So as the writer and director of this film, I guess I get to test each side of that equation. The writer in me can insist that an actor say the line as written. And the director can encourage the actor to “make it their own”. I did both this week.

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In in theatre, the process of developing a script is usually built around workshops where the playwright can work with actors over the course of a week or two or more to understand how dialogue is working, how the beats of the play are performing, how story structure is functioning, etc. Then the playwright goes back to the writing desk for another draft. This could then pave the way for rehearsals and proper production, during which more changes can still be made. This all serves the long process of getting to performance. Film cannot usually afford such time. I didn’t hear an actor read the text of my screenplay until the week before shooting. Some scenes I didn’t hear until the day of shooting.
 
Dylan has been an essential reader of more drafts of this screenplay over the past two years than I care to reveal. But suffice it to say, I would not have taken it as far as I have without his numerous notes sessions. Marcus Gardley, an old friend, playwright and screenwriter, whose plays I helped develop in my seat as director, has also been an essential reader on a number of drafts. But there is nothing like hearing the words you lay down on paper come out of the character's mouth, to understand how it’s working. So when Josh Close and I sat down, with Dylan, a week before we started shooting, it was to interrogate the text with pen in hand. Josh and I quickly developed a trustful partnership in testing the text and seeing where its strengths and weaknesses lay. If I can defend it, it stays. If I can't, it goes or turns into something else. 

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The screenplay is all the better for this work--work that continues on set, with tweaks and questions and experiments. There are also moments where I insist that we stick with the text as written. The family scenes we shot before the weekend made use of more on-the-fly rewrites that strengthened certain little moments, and helped the actors offer more honest performances. The performers have been leaning into the story and bringing the characters to life with their own essential collaborative contributions. (photo above of a "hostess tray" camera mount for a driving sequence). 
 
I realize now that I’ve been skirting around the narrative details of this film. Kind of intentionally. I don't want to give too much away. But I think I’ll give you a taste of the plot in the next burst of telling this tale. How do we get into the thorny topic of gun violence without being devise or didactic?

Stay tuned for the next installment...

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