What's It All About?

I feel that I am streamlining and strengthening the script in many ways. It's getting better. There's just one teensy weensy question I have.

What's it about?

The book it's based on is about stringing together some heavy-breathing sex scenes--lots of melting and thrusting--in a stitched-together mystery plot packed with aimless detours and suspense that never quite builds. It's vaguely about friendship and love but if you want to make a story about things like that you'd better have something new or at least powerful to say.

My first movie was about resistance fighters in a fascist America. So it was about freedom and the way like-minded souls find each other in adversity. That it wasn't a very good movie isn't the point. The point is that while I was out there making a not very good movie I at least knew what I was saying. And the loftiness of the theme got me an amazing name-brand cast.

My second movie was about vigilantism. It was a better movie than the first one partly because I really had something to say about the topic, which is that vigilantism may get a certain kind of crowd cheering for you but it doesn't do anybody you love any favors.

And what's this movie about? I just. Don't. Know.

P.S. Sarah Michelle Gellar passed! What a shocker! I had to grit my teeth and smile my way silently through the producers and casting directors being surprised and disappointed. Now we're out to--well, I won't say, because this one might happen (partly because we're offering in the area of a half million dollars) and I don't want to ruin the surprise.

Stuff I Really Shouldn't Say

When the producers of movie first sent me the book the movie is based on I read it in awe at how thin, contrived, repetitive and illogical it was. How inconsistent the characters were--how in some cases it would be hard to come up with a simple list of adjectives to describe them. How shoddy and undirected the plotting was. But I still couldn't quite say no. I hadn't directed a movie in eight years. Given the popularity of the book there was an enormous chance the movie would be made. When I called the producer the next day I said "It's the worst book I've ever read," to which she calmly replied "Well we'll move on then," to which I quickly said "No no no. I think I can do it. I think I can find something in there."

Not all leaps into the dark are brave. That one was made out of fear. Fear of not getting another directing gig. Fear of somebody else doing it and making it great.

I suffered through the adaptation. I couldn't make the ill fitting pieces work together. While all the time thinking: this woman is a mulitmillionaire, there are 65 MILLION COPIES OF HER BOOKS IN PRINT, and who the hell am I? I finally hammered out something that people seemed to respond to--mostly because I wrote the screen directions in between the dialogue so seductively that it all seemed more exciting than it was--and that got the greenlight.

Then, as I said, I read it through and saw that it was still the book I had started with. It's not about anything. Things don't flow with tension and drive from one thing to the next. So here I sit, late on a Chicago night, trying to make it something I love. I had a good day, thought I was getting somewhere, and now? I'm scared. Scared that I'll have a movie on my hands that I'm going to have to ask my friends and family not to watch. But it'll be out there... for all to see... for you guys to see!

I'm sane enough to know that I'm not really at the end of the story, as vividly as I may be able to conjure that end before me. The script is still in my hands. I can turn to God/higher power/muse/better self for inspiration in the night and go to sleep and wake up tomorrow morning and re-attack.

But still, for right now, I am scared.

Like the title of post says, I shouldn't have said all that. It's secret. It's the stuff you don't tell anybody.

But I guess you guys aren't just anybody.

Uh-Oh

Yesterday, on the plane to Chicago to visit my daughter before taking off for the whole summer to shoot the movie, I read the script for the first time since I finished it a couple of months ago. It's a good thing I wasn't sitting in an exit row because I would have opened the door and thrown myself out and who knows many people would have been sucked out along with me. The first act in particular really really sucks. Slow. Expository. Endless. Now I'm sitting in a big empty high-ceilinged classroom with arched gothic windows at the University of Chicago rolling up my sleeves, tearing it apart and hoping I can write something worth putting on film. Or, more important, worth watching on film.

Lord be with me.

Excuse me?

One of the roles in my movie is a psycho-alcoholic-white-trash North Carolina loser who beats his daughter half to death. The Germans who are partially financing the movie today announced that they were strongly suggesting that we hire, for that role...

...Hart Bochner.

You may remember Hart Bochner as the yuppie who collaborates with the bad guys in Die Hard. Hart Bochner is a very good actor who never fails, in every role he has ever played, to embody elegance, charm, wealth and urban sophistication. Whatever those Germans are smoking, I want some. And beyond that, in what universe does Hart Bochner, twenty years after an appealing supporting turn in Die Hard, attract any kind of audience to a film, in Germany or anywhere? "Oh, wow, Helga, we better turn on the TV tonight, Hart Bochner's on!"

!!?

In other casting news, the network has decreed that our first offer for the lead role must go out to...

...Sarah Michelle Geller.

That's right, the same Sarah Michelle Geller who earned possibly a hundred million dollars or more playing Buffy for nine years and picked up some more loose change in Cruel Intentions and I Know What You Did Last Summer and other feature films. Oh yeah she is definitely going to play Hart Bochner's daughter in my perfectly fine little cable movie for three hundred thousand bucks.

In the end, though, I strongly believe there is a God of Casting, who has always been with me on every movie I have ever made, and that in the end the right actors will fall out of the sky and onto my set.

Stay tuned.

A Director's Prayer

God, Higher Power, Force of Healing and Joy In The World, or whatever Your name may be:

Let me not approach this great opportunity with complaint, annoyance, agitation, doubt and that hideous general feeling that the whole situation isn't as good as it could or should be. Let me take joy in having an opportunity to move images, words, sounds, music and most of all people across a screen. Let me be grateful and have faith. I know that the last time I made a movie I really and truly felt Your presence with me in a very traditional big-guy-up-there-helping-me-out kind of way and I know that I can't grasp or believe in that now, but I also know that there's Something coursing through the Universe that can help lift me out of this weirdly grim state of mind I find myself in about the whole thing and I am looking to you, oh great something-that-courses-through-the-Universe to fill me with your Light.

Amen.

A New Turn of Events

Well I'm off to direct a cable movie. Off to Calgary, Alberta, to be precise. Is the movie set in the Rockies? No, actually, it's set in North Carolina. But, you know, global economics strikes again: it's cheaper to shoot up there. The budget is low but non insanely low, the script is okay but not great--wrote it myself, so I know. Am I nervous? Well, it's my third movie, so I know exactly how much there is to be nervous about. But I'm excited to. So now this is going to be a new kind of blog.

This is going to be a blog about directing a movie.

Casting started today. I got a list of the names of a hundred actresses for the lead role. The really really good ones, the ones you would slobber over, are all listed at the end under "not interested." But there are still some really good ones up front. Ones that frankly I could die happy having worked with. I know who I want. Now I wait to hear who the producers, the network, the studio and the foreign investors want. An offer goes out to one lucky actress this weekend. Wish me luck!

And stay tuned.