|
|
|
|
 |
|||
|
|
||||
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
|
| ||||||||||||
|
| Tadpole Europe has its Dogme 95, the Danish founded
Manifesto of "back to the essentials" filmmaking grounded in "Ten
Vows of Chastity" and the freedom granted to filmmakers in the new
lightweight medium of Digital Video. Gary Winick is far more modest with his efforts
stateside. After quietly making a place for himself as a director in American
indies for the past decade (count Sweet Nothing and The Tic Code
among his intimate productions), he created the production company InDigEnt
(Independent Digital Entertainment) in partnership with Caroline Kaplan and
Jonathan Sehring of IFC Films and producer John Sloss). In a modern film industry challenged on one
side by hundreds of upstarts shooting their scrappy productions on suddenly
affordable DV cameras, and on the other by George Lucas pushing the technology
into unprecedented levels of clarity, polish, and Hollywood sheen, InDigEnt is
carving out a middle ground: interesting stories created on small budgets and
fast shoots enabled by DV. In its own way, InDigEnt may be just as influential
as Dogme 95 in practical terms. Their initial slate of ten films, co-produced by
collaboration of IFC Films, has attracted some serious talent both in front and
behind the camera (Campbell Scott’s Final with Denis Leary and Hope
Davis and Tape with Ethan Hawke and Uma Thurman among them). (Read more
about the company and the films at their website: http://www.indigent.net/)
After producing a handful of films for other directors he finally decided it was
time to make his own DV film. Tadpole, starring newcomer Aaron
Stanford as a fifteen year-old who returns home from boarding school for
Thanksgiving while nursing a crush on his stepmom (Sigourney Weaver), was all
the buzz at Sundance, where it earned him the Director’s Award and sparked a
bidding war that was won by Miramax. The film being seen in theaters around the
country, however, is not quite the same. Winick has juggled a few scenes, worked
on the color balance, and even shot new footage. Gary Winick and Aaron Stanford accompanied this
new version to Seattle, where they presented it to audiences at the Seattle
International Film Festival. Winick is as modest in person as you might expect
and I caught him relaxing in jeans, a rumpled shirt, and a half day’s growth.
Aaron Stanford, small boned with a wispy beard and comfortable dress, looks more
like the twenty-five-year-old actor he is than the "fifteen-year-old in a
forty-year-old’s boy" he plays in the movie. No longer gawky and
uncomfortable in his own skin, he’s an adult professional with a Hollywood
career taking off. Since finishing principle photography on Tadpole
he’s shot small roles in Woody Allen’s Hollywood Ending and Spike
Lee’s 25th Hour, and he starts shooting X-Men 2 this
summer. Interview veteran Winick's laid-back attitude takes all the tension out
of the interview. It feels less like an interview than a conversation. In between festival showings of their film they
took the time to sit down with me and talk about the film, InDigEnt, the nature
of working in DV, and the dangerous pleasure of letting John Ritter improvise
and leave his partner in a state of uncontrollable laughter. Sean Axmaker: A simple
description of the film makes it sound like a 1980s drive-in comedy. If you just
have the plot explained to you-- this kid is in love with his stepmom and loses
his virginity to his mom’s best friend--it sounds like a teen sex farce. But
it plays nothing like that. Gary Winick: My description
doesn’t give any of the film away but talks about the characters: he’s
unlike any other teenager and he’s wise beyond his years, he loves Voltaire,
setting up an interesting character as opposed to the plot. Aaron Stanford: It’s kind of a
drag because the punch of the whole film has been given away at this point. In
the very beginning, at the early screenings before the audiences had read
anything about it, it’s actually a surprise when you find out that his
stepmother is the one he’s pining after. They set that all up. They set it up
in the beginning and all of a sudden you realize "Oh, it’s her." And
everyone is just waiting for it to happen. GW:
It’s going to be in every review. AS: I’m not going to compare it
to The Crying Game, but the punch is given away. SA: What went through my mind as
I watched it, and I don’t want to make a direct comparison, but I was thinking
Dogme 95 and the Dogme style. Obviously you don’t hew to all those rules that
they’ve written in blood, but I think you’ve really captured the spirit of
what those guys say they keep trying to do with it. Use this lightweight video
camera to get at an intimacy, to get into characters, and to get away from the
visual gloss and safe stories of Hollywood. GW:
Obviously I’ve spoken a lot about this and I’ve been on a lot of forums on
DV(digital video) and the thing that I’ve taken from Dogme, and clearly this
is Celebration inspired, is truth of character and setting. All the other
rules means that you are not taking full advantage of your tools, although I
know they are breaking them and that’s part of the joke. But all the rules are
not taking advantage of what allows us to be able to use those and heighten
certain parts of the film that we need to heighten as storytellers on film, as a
director. So that’s really where I ended it because one of my big things at
InDigEnt was to get the best sound house, to get the best music supervisor, to
get the best video post house, to work on the picture and work on these films to
get them to look and sound the best they can in the theaters. But to shoot them
with these mini-DV cameras to create that truth of character and setting. SA:
Having worked in film and moving to DV, how does that change the way you’re
able to work with the cast and ensemble, in practical, physical terms? GW:
Practical terms is where it really pays off. The camera’s this big [uses his
hands to suggest something about the size of a football], the crew’s the size
as twelve, the camera can go as close as three feet away from your face and not
feel like it’s imposing like this big machine, which a 35mm camera is. The
tapes are ten dollars for forty minutes so we only have to slate once and we can
keep going, we use two cameras at all times, sometimes three cameras, so there
is that spontaneity. There is a lot of depth of field so the actors don’t
really have to follow the focus marks and all those technical things you do on
35mm films… AS:
Hardly any lighting set-ups. GW:
Hardly any lighting time and it’s so location friendly. So what’s great
about it is that I can shoot one side and then shoot the other without having to
rework and come back in an hour to do that, so you’re still in the scene for
the flip side [reverse shot]. AS:
We can get into places, like shooting the taxi-cab scenes. It would just be Gary
crouched up front with the camera. With a 35mm camera that would be next to
impossible. GW:
And you’d have to have a prop taxi and a process trailer and carry it around. AS:
We were just hailing cabs on the side of the road. SA:
(to Aaron) Was this the first time you worked in front of a camera? AS:
Yes, it is. Well, unless you count home videos I made with my friends when I was
thirteen. Not even commercials. This was my first time in front of a camera. SA:
How did you get involved with this? Was it open casting? AS:
I wouldn’t call it open casting, no. I had just graduated from Rutgers
University and I was freelancing with Endeavor and they just sent me on in --
this was probably one of the first ten auditions I went on. It was a brilliantly
written script, very clever and fast, and good dialogue and a part that I
figured I could do something good with and pull it off. I went and they liked
what I did and of course I didn’t have any credits to my name so they wanted
to make absolutely sure that I was the right one for it. They called me back
time and time and time again. I had a bunch of call backs and at the final
audition Sigourney was there in the room; she had partial casting approval.
There was good chemistry so I got it. SA:
(to Gary) Were you looking for a fifteen-year-old or had you cast your net out
for older actors? GW:
I was looking for someone who was fifteen, I was kind of adamant about it, and
of course I didn’t realize that a fifteen-year-old’s acting is not a
forty-year-old in a fifteen-year-old’s body, so of course I should have
someone who is older and wiser and looks 15, but I really wanted a
fifteen-year-old. I felt that was what was required, and also I had Robert Iler
who I cast in the part of Charlie and he really was fifteen so I had to have a
match. But the casting director said "You’re crazy, don’t worry,"
and they kept bringing people in and not telling me how old they were. And
finally they convinced me with a couple of people who, like Aaron, were in their
twenties but looked fifteen, so I was like "Okay, fine, I’m not even
going to ask how old they are, let’s just go." But the child labor laws.
I mean thank God I didn’t choose a fifteen-year-old because I wouldn’t have
been able to work them that hard. AS:
Oscar needs an edge to him, you need to see the old soul behind the eyes. So I
think you made the right call, Gary. You made the right decision to cast me.
[laughter] SA:
You were a very convincing fifteen year old. Walking in here I took one look and
thought "Oh my god." How old are you? AS:
I’m twenty-five now. When we shot that film I had just turned twenty-three. SA:
I know there’s always a lot of fudging going on, but that’s an amazing
amount of fudge. AS:
It’s movie magic, man. First of all you have to change your physicality. I
spoke in a bit of a higher register vocally. And they put me in a toggle coat
three sizes too big. That helps. GW:
Plus it also helps that you’re really immature. AS:
[laughs] Yeah, I’d say one of the biggest differences between the character
Oscar and myself is that I’m much more immature than Oscar, so it wasn’t
that tough to get [to] fifteen. SA:
Having worked on bigger sets, in front of bigger cameras, can you reflect back
on how it was working in on this film with the small crew and intimate
production. AS:
The set was really intimate. One of the great things about theater is that
you’re able to do things just in a line. If you do something on stage you play
the entire story out without stopping, you keep the momentum going. With
film--and this is true of DV to an extent too of course, but especially with
film--the set-ups take so long that once you’re in the middle of something you
have to stop and you get two hours of down time and you wait, and then have to
whip yourself back up to the state you were in when they stopped shooting.
It’s tough to do. In DV it’s much easier to keep that line going. You’re
working with a small cast in small spaces, it’s more comfortable and the set
is more intimate. GW:
You’re part of the set. Uma Thurman , who did Chelsea Walls and Richard
Linklater’s Tape with us (InDigEnt), said you really feel you’re on a
movie set when you’re making a movie because the lights are so hot and
they’re all around. You’re not in the context of the set, all around you is
the production. In DV you are really in the space. AS:
You really feel like you’re in the room, like you’re in someone’s living
room instead of standing against a backdrop. SA:
You say that you would hit the slate once and then roll. Did you work with the
script and improvise off it in the ensemble, or were you completely dedicated to
the words, or was there some kind of balance between the two? GW:
We’d do one slate and then we’d maybe run three or four takes from that. But
the script was really tight so maybe during the fourth or fifth time through
they change a word or two, but there are only a couple of improvs that I can
remember in the film. There were times when I would just leave the camera
rolling and the scene would keep rolling. So of course you had some actual
improvisations with people like John Ritter. AS:
He was the most prolific improviser on the entire set. Any scene that involved
John Ritter, there was always five minutes of improv added onto the end because
he would just start f*cking with me and we would just keep going back and forth. GW:
In the restaurant scene you can still hear me laughing during John Ritter’s
improv. I only hear it and no one else does, but it’s me laughing during the
scene when Oscar finds his moment alone with Eve. We started on John Ritter and
Bebe Neuwirth talking so that you knew they were involved in conversation, and
then we go to Aaron and Sigourney, which I did with a pan. So I said to John
"Just start talking about your book, just have a conversation," and of
course we did one take where he just kept on talking so I could just lay it in
over. It’s in the film, it’s a crime. AS:
He says something like: "My editor’s getting on me to cut this thing
down. The guy’s twenty-six years old, doesn’t know what he’s talking
about." "How long is your book?" "It’s 1,500 pages."
[they both start laughing, but Gary more, as if reliving the moment]. It’s
just really funny. GW:
You know what, you almost have to do it. Part of the DV thing is, because it
doesn’t really cost anything, I almost always like to do that just for the fun
of the crew because the crew really works so hard, and you want to have a laugh. AS:
And we would do stuff like see how long you could go without the other one
breaking. We were at a dinner table scene and were talking about my prep-school
teachers, and he improvved something about my history teacher, a night with
tequila, and a goat, and I just broke. The whole place went nuts. SA:
Did you workshop the script with your cast? GW:
No, the only workshop we did was basically rehearsals. Which was great because I
wanted rehearsals and I thought great, a fourteen-day shoot and two days of
rehearsals was fine. Sigourney wanted a week of rehearsals, which is basically
the same amount as her shooting; she shot for ten days. So having that seven-day
rehearsal was our workshop and we tried to approach it like theater: sit down,
talk through the characters and all that. But we were able to change some lines
and then with Sigourney we were able to go to the actual locations of her scenes
and I was able to get some blocking in my mind and get to know the space. But we
didn’t workshop it much. If we did do any workshopping it was rehearsals and a
little on the set when it didn’t feel right. SA:
Fourteen days is a brisk shoot. You pretty much have to hit the ground running. GW:
And within that fourteen days, which is one of the remarkable things about DV, I
reshot the cab scenes twice, I reshot the Central Park scene with Bebe, and
within the shoot I was able to rework other scenes, which was amazing. AS:
And since the shoot we did pick-up shoots. Up until five months ago we were
still doing pick-up shots. GW:
Five months ago? Up until a month ago. AS:
He’d just call me up. They had me keep the costume at my house and he’d call
me up whenever and say "Come on out, we’ll go out to a movie. Wear the
costume." And then we’ll have a couple of shots on the sidewalk of me
walking up and down. Because you can just do that, there’s no set-up,
there’s no nothing. SA:
Did you work the camera yourself much? GW:
I didn’t want to. Believe me, I’d love to not do that, but because of this
film I became pretty confidant with it. I did it not by choice, I had to. The
reshoots were easy because it was just me and Aaron so basically we’d just do
it until we get it right. If you think of a scene as a paragraph, I was just
redoing a word, dotting the i, underlining a word. So I was able to just work on
specific shots and I could do that myself, but if it was a complicated scene or
any kind of lighting involved, no. SA:
You have a story credit but not a screenplay credit. Did you hatch the story and
bring it to your screenwriters (Heather McGowan, and Niels Mueller)? GW:
No, it was me knowing that I get to direct one InDigEnt film out of the slate of
ten and not having a story I wanted to do. Niels, who writes all my stuff,
wanted to something again and I’d already given Heather the job to write this,
and they decided to collaborate together. They hadn’t even met each other but
they had read each other’s scripts and decided that talent should stick
together, and we went out to Long Island for a week at my Dad’s house. We
didn’t have a story, I just had an idea that I wanted to do a comedy, I wanted
to do it in New York in the world that I grew up in, I wanted to do a single
point-of-view thing, I wanted it to take place in short period of time, and I
wanted it to fit within my constraints. We just threw around ideas until all
three of us agreed, which is harder than having two people agree. And actually
it was really hard because sometimes two would agree and one disagree, and they
would try to overpower the other. AS:
Knives got pulled… GW:
It was ugly. So basically I just came back one day and said "Wait, what
about a kid coming home from boarding school, a fifteen-year-old having a crush
on his stepmom." And that’s all I had and they came up with scene ideas.
"Oh, what about a tennis scene, 40-15," which they were very proud of.
"What about a scene in the Plaza where all these women know that he’s the
one who…" and then we had four or five scenes and we say "Okay, now
let’s work on a plot." It was the character, it was 15-40, and then
Heather latched onto Voltaire. SA:
The restaurant scene is hilarious. Sorry to say it, but I think Bebe Neuwirth
steals that scene. AS:
It’s not like I haven’t heard it before, man. I think she’s great. SA:
And she does it mostly with her eyes. GW:
I gotta disagree. I think Ritter steals the restaurant scene. He’s got the
those uncomfortable coughs. AS:
He’s got the classic spit take. GW:
He’s got: "You’re acting very strange." He’s got all those
things. But then Sigourney has the best look in that scene when Bebe smiles
"Oscar and I both speak French." The way she looks at Aaron is
classic. SA:
It’s such a great ensemble in that scene. It’s like a classical screwball
moment where you’ve got four people all on their own trajectories, all criss-crossing
each other, and everyone plays it perfectly. It’s very funny and nicely timed. GW:
The star is the editing. It took a long time to shape that scene and it really
worked out. But when I first read that first draft, I knew. When we blocked it
out I knew what I was going to get. I remember reading it and laughing and
saying "This is funny." I had a huge responsibility right from the
start not to screw it up. But it was the hardest thing in the film because I had
the climax in the middle of the movie and where do you go from there? Every
scene from after the restaurant was changed in the edited version, in terms of
where it goes in the movie. There was something in the script that worked well
enough in the read-through so that actors really got their arcs and everything
worked. When we got in the editing room I guess it seemed that the arc didn’t
get pulled off, I couldn’t follow the journey of these characters anymore, so
I had to flip everything. I mean every scene got rearranged. It took so long to
find them. I also couldn’t free myself up to "Hey, wait a second. This is
a little novella. I can’t start rearranging scenes." In other movies you
can rearrange scenes because that’s what you do in the editing room but not
this because A goes to B, B goes to C, it’s such a simple thing. But yet I
wound up rearranging every scene that followed the restaurant scene. SA:
So you didn’t reshoot. GW:
I just rearranged. I think of it as a slight of hand, but I guess it’s
fulfilling and it works for people. I don’t know how it works but it does.
|
|
|
