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BPS 319: Directing The Last Exorcism with Daniel Stamm · Bulletproof Screenwriting™ Podcast

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  You are listening to the IFH podcast Network. For more amazing filmmaking and screenwriting
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  podcasts, just go to IFH podcast network dot com. Welcome to the Bulletproof
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  Screenwriting Podcast, Episode number three nineteen. It is a miracle every time you
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  make a movie, and a bigger miracle if it turns out well. Mark
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  Forrester broadcasting from a dark, windowless room in Hollywood when we really should be
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  working on that next draft. It's the Bulletproof Screenwriting Podcast, showing you the
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  craft and business of screenwriting while teaching you how to make your screenplay bulletproof.
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  And here's your host, Alex Ferrari. Welcome, Welcome to another episode of
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  the Bulletproof Screenwriting Podcast. I am your humble host Alex Ferrari. Now,
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  today's show is sponsored by Bulletproof script Coverage. Now. Unlike other script coverage
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  services, Bulletproof Script Coverage actually focuses on the kind of project you are in
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  if you need your screenplay or TV script covered by professional readers, head on
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  over to cover my screenplay dot Com. Enjoy today's episode with guest host Jason
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  buff. Today we're talking with the director of one of my absolute favorite films,
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  The Last Exorcism. Daniel Stam is with us today and I'm really excited
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  for you guys to listen to what we talk about. I learned a whole
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  lot and one of the biggest things I got out of this was Daniel's checklist
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  that he goes through. You know, he's known for being a very prepared
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  director, and he actually gave me his list, his checklist of things that
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  he makes he looks at before he directs a scene. All right, here
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  is my interview with Daniel Stamm, and I think the best place to start
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  is going into win film really kind of affected you, like the films that
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  you were that kind of convinced you that you wanted to do this for a
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  living when you were growing up. Well, my dirty secret as always,
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  But I didn't start out wanting to make movies. I was a big role
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  playing game nerd, a lot of Dungeons and Dragons and my teens and all
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  that stuff, and I always thought, I have to find some kind of
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  job where I can keep playing Dungeons and Dragons basically and get paid for it.
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  So I wanted to be a writer. Okay, I was kind of
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  looking around in Germany for programs where I could study writing, because German parents
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  won't let you just do something if you don't get a diploma for it.
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  They don't take it seriously. So I knew I had to look for something
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  where I could get a diploma and it would kind of being taken seriously.
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  So I always said I wanted to be a journalist, which was a complete
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  lie, because I wanted to write novels, you know, make stuff up.
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  That was always amazing to me, just the feeling that you could sit
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  down with a couple of people and make something up and suddenly it exists in
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  everyone's minds and you have this, you know, this godlike power of creativity.
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  Was away mind blowing to me, and I think once once you've experienced
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  that, it kind of gets addictive. You know. There was never like
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  a question that I could do anything else. So then I ended up at
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  a film academy in Germany in Ludwigsburg, which was kind of the most modern
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  film school in Germany. They are very renowned traditional old film schools in Germany,
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  the bim Vendors and fast Bender and all like the Werner Hertzarg all the
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  old German grades went to. And then this film school opened up, and
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  it was very commercial, you know, it didn't didn't only support like making
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  movies that made commercials and made TV shows that made all that kind of stuff
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  that the other schools frowned upon. And I studied screenwriting there and I was
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  there for four years and wrote my little screenplay and then I would give it
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  to a directing student, and that directing student would go off and make the
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  movie and it'd be horrendous, which you always always looking back now, they
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  were pretty brilliant. But of course, as a writer at the time,
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  you're so stuck on what you have in your head that no matter what they'd
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  come back with, it's never what you imagine it like, you know,
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  right, I should have given them some words, But they also always came
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  back with these amazing stories that were like adventure stories because there was always I
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  mean, everyone who's tried making a movie knows that they're always unsurmountable conflicts,
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  you know, and it's a it's a team sticking their head together and trying
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  to figure it out. And the actresses are beautiful, and there's romance on
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  set. It's all that stuff that you're kind of yearned for, and you're
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  locked out of all of that as a screenwriter. And I always had the
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  feeling the storytelling process is kind of artificially cut in half because I've already figured
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  out the story of the characters in my head. All I need to do
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  is to communicate that to the actors and the cinematographer and the production designer and
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  I can call myself a director. It was always weird to me that there
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  was some random person coming in halfway through the process taking over being the big
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  shot that then gets half created for the movie. Right, So I thought
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  I can do that too. But then my friends at the German Film School,
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  they weren't that taken with their directing program. So when I decided to
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  start study directing, I knew I didn't want to do it there, even
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  though it's a great school. But I came to Los Angeles and studied at
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  AFI, the American Film Institute here, and I was lucky. It's a
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  crazy expensive school, which I had to learn that everything in the States is
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  in Germany. You know, you got a film school, It's an application
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  process that's kind of tough to get through, but once you do get through
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  it, you don't have to pay anything. And then af I suddenly it
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  was like a hundred thousand dollars something crazy, which I didn't have. So
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  it took me a year and a half to raise the funds through scholarships from
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  different organizations and all that, which was kind of a job in itself.
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  And then I came here all bushy tailed and wide eyed to Hollywood, which
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  still kind of amazes me every time I take the exit ramp and it says
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  Hollywood, I'm I was like, oh man, I've been heard that never
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  wears up. And then I found out that the German Film Academy that I
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  went to, they had sent a group to the American Film Institute before they
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  started the school. For a week to explore and to do research, and
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  then they basically rebuild the American Film Institute in Germany, like the structure,
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  the curriculum, everything, the people they hired. Even it was weird because
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  it was like I knew everything about the school and I'd never been there because
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  it was a one to one copy of the whole thing. And then I
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  started directing short films there and kind of met my team there that I'm still
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  working with. My cinematographer and my editor. We worked together there and it
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  was kind of a great environment because the German Film School didn't have the language
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  barrier. Everyone that was studying there came either from Germany, Switzerland or Austria,
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  so there weren't very big differences in cultural approaches to narrative, to to
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  storytelling to filmmaking. But at AFI, my first group was a native American
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  writer or an Australian cinematographer, an Asian production designer, and a Indian editor
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  and we were making editor me as a German director, and we made a
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  hip hop movie which none of us give anything about it. Of course,
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  that's of course, that's what you made exactly. It's cool because you suddenly
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  get challenged all the time, all these things that you kind of take for
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  granted and have never thought about, Like your editor will suddenly let a white
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  shot stand for two minutes and you kind of go crazy and you go like,
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  we can't do that, and she said, why can't we do that?
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  And suddenly you have to search inside of yourself what your impulse is,
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  where that's coming from, that you can't do that, Like everything every creative
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  decision you said, we have to verbalize and discuss with the team. And
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  there are some fights that you win in some fights that you lose. And
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  if I was very concerned with kind of d emphasizing the power of the director,
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  which I think was really helpful that you weren't the big shot. You
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  didn't get to call all the shots. Like the first short film was initiated
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  by the writer, so the writer had all the power, which created complete
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  chaos because obviously the writers were like in character, completely different from the directors,
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  Like the directors normally are these kind of grandiose, confident people and the
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  writers really sweet, kind of smart but introverted people. So it kind of
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  put everything on its head and it was a really good process because you couldn't
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  just take something for granted and just pull the director card and do it.
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  And then yeah. Then then there was a seminar for the cinematographers, I
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  think in second year where one of the teachers told the class a genius thing
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  that changed my life, which is, tell your directors to shoot, shoot,
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  shoot, shoot. Don't spend years fundraising, don't spend years developing,
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  because it's a trap. Like many of my friends that they are still fundraising,
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  they're still developing something and have been for ten years, and they never
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  shot a frame because they kind of missed that momentum and it's hard to get
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  that back out of nowhere. So my cinematographer called me every day and said,
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  are we shooting something yet? And I always said I don't have a
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  script. He said, it doesn't matter, Let's shoot something. And that's
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  exactly what we did. We kind of looked for a story that would support
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  us not having any money, because no one had any money. You're coming
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  out of film school, you're completely broke. Digital was this was in two
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  thousand four. Kind of you could shoot digital, but it was still kind
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  of expensive. So another seven or a day, if I actually taught you
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  to concentrate on what you have and build your project, your first project after
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  film school. We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor, and
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  now back to the show around that rather than trying to achieve things that you
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  don't have. So if you know a great actor, you know, write
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  something for that actor. If you know a great location, build something about
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  that. If you have access to crazy advanced camera, you know, then
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  construct something where you can show that up. And we were sitting down and
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  we basically said, again, we have nothing something but what you have in
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  Los Angeles. Of course, which is a tragedy for them but great for
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  us, is you have so many good actors out of work then would do
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  anything for no money, And if you can just find them and give them
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  something worthwhile to do, you don't really have to pay them. So we
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  decided that we make a fake documentary, which at the time that was kind
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  of before the whole fake documentary wave, like Great Player, which had been
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  made five years earlier but had kind of not really spawned any any new movies
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  yet. This was before paranormal activity and all that, and we thought,
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  if we shoot in that format, we don't have to lie at anything.
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  Ay, everything can look gritty and bad, and it doesn't matter because if
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  it looks bad, that's just adding to the realism of it all. So
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  let's shoot in that style. We'll just get a video camera that one of
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  our actors had and we borrowed it from him, and then we came up
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  with a story that there is a filmmaker, documentary filmmaker in film school and
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  for his thesis project, he is finding a suicidal guy on Craigslist and basically
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  is following him through his last weekend. And then of course there are all
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  kinds of complications there, becoming friends and the sound girl, he's falling in
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  love with a sound girl, and a kind of a kind of complications.
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  Right, But we had four pages, you know, we didn't have a
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  script. And I was so traumatized from afi from the process of working with
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  a screenwriter because me as a screenwriter myself, of course, we were bumping
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  heads all the time. So what why I wouldn't have shot anything for a
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  decade, probably like everyone else, is that I was so exhausted and even
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  the thought of getting together with the screenwriter again and writing something kind of sounded
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  crazy to me. So this this project that we went into with a four
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  page outline was kind of perfect, and then we improvised all the scenes with
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  the actors and made that movie. The downside was because we didn't have a
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  script, there was never it was never over, you know. We were
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  kind of improvising scenes into the blue. If something didn't work, then we
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  would just shoot more scenes and shoot more material. And it took us three
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  years to make the movie in the end, and of course, like the
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  tough thing is to support yourself while you're making your movie, and you're kind
• 12:46
  of phonetically single mindedly focused on making that movie, but at the same time
• 12:50
  you kind of have to eat and pay rent and all that stuff. So
• 12:52
  that was a tough time. But in the end, at some point it
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  was it was done, and then we submitted it to AFI Fest, to
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  the festival at which we were always told if I graduates, don't get into
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  a fifest because they don't want to be seen as kind of leaning towards their
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  own people and all that stuff. But somehow we got in and we won
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  the Audience Award, which was a big thing at the time because other films
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  that had won the Audience Award were like Hotel Ruanda and Life is Beautiful,
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  and all these kind of big movies and suddenly there was our small movie in
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  between there that no one had ever heard of it. You have admitted it's
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  unnecessary death, right, it's a necessary death. Yeah, it's on Netflix
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  right now. Oh really? Oh great, Yeah, I've I've watched a
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  lot of them. I watched the some of the footage you put on YouTube.
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  Oh yeah, yeah, those were the but I was trying to I
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  was trying to watch it and yeah, that's great. Oh that must have
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  been so weird to just watch the deleted scenes of something new approach. Um,
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  so let me talk a little bit about that. You know, Um,
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  in terms of improvisation, how would you guys like say you're you're going
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  out to shoot one day, how would you put that together? Well?
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  I think that the main thing is to, in the beginning understand that it's
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  a completely different talent to have for an actor to be good at improvising than
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  to be good at making written lines come to life and appear fresh and as
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  if they're being set for the first time. One of my actors put that
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  really well, that there is a different part of your brain that processes making
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  up lines for the first time, rather than regurgitating lines, and that's something
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  that a lot of producers, I later learned, don't really know about.
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  Like if you're making an improve project, then you have to cast improve people.
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  Doesn't make any sense to give them a scene and lines and see if
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  they can make that come to life, because it won't help you in the
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  moment at all. So I was very much focused on finding great improvisers.
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  And what you kind of get as a bonus is that you end up with
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  very smart people because improvising takes a lot of brain power, and you have
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  to be very fast, thinking on your feet, and you have to be
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  very high energy, which is really important. I didn't know that at the
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  time, but you really are looking for someone who has a higher energy than
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  real life. Like if you take people that are very authentic, but they
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  all kind of are either normal life speed or slightly slower, it'll bore you
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  to death on camera and you kind of have to try to make up for
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  it and editing and all that kind of stuff, and it's hard. So
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  luckily I ended up with very eloquent, very smart people, and then we
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  kind of went out and I always gave them a paragraph and said, Okay,
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  this is the scene we're coming from. The great thing is that you
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  can shoot in chronological order, which is huge, of course for the actors
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  to be able to kind of base their performance on the seeing you're just coming
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  from, which you don't have a normal narrative movies because they're always scheduled by
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  location, and sometimes you shoot the climax the third act first and then go
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  back to the third act first, and then go back to the first act
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  and all that kind of stuff. So a lot of rain pour always goes
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  to kind of reminding the actors where they are coming from and all that.
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  So that was easier for us because they knew where we were coming from.
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  But I would summarize it for them again and then kind of tell everyone what
• 16:10
  they are trying to achieve in this scene and not give them the outcome,
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  and just kind of give them the intention that they're going into the scene with
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  and really talk that up to them and sometimes take them aside and talk to
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  them separately so that they don't overhear what the other person's objective is. And
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  then we would just shoot and shoot and shoot them. Because it was video,
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  we didn't have to care about how much material we were shooting, so
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  the first take was always twenty minutes long, and then we did the second
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  take, and I kind of pointed out which the great moments were, and
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  we boil it down to ten minutes, and then to five minutes, and
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  then to two minutes, and then to one minute, and in the end
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  we ended up cutting all these things together, and oftentimes we ended up with
• 16:51
  the first take both parts of the first take, because it was kind of
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  the freshest, because it was the first time that they would come up with
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  this stuff, and to kind of keep it as fresh as possible, I
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  would always say new words, make up new words. Don't repeat stuff that
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  you've said in the last take the way you said it in the last take.
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  Keep the ideas, but phrase it differently, try different things, try
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  to surprise each other. And they were up for that, and they really
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  loved each other, which was great because we spent as I said, three
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  years together kind of making up stuff together. And if there had been one
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  bad apple in that group, I think it would have been really problematic.
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  But it was a really great group of four core group of four people.
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  And then the only the team only consisted of those four people, and then
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  my cinematographer and me I did sound. So altogether we were six people and
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  by sure you were directing and doing sound. Yeah, that kind of worked.
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  That wasn't the problem. That's like very do it yourself. We didn't
• 17:45
  have a single like location permit or anything. If necessary, we could cramp
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  the entire team plus equipment into a car. If we didn't have a location,
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  we would just shoot the scene in the car. It was like very
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  fast. You know, every nothing took a big setup. It's really a
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  big relief if you don't have to make it pretty. You know, you
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  don't have to light it pretty, you don't have to find a great location,
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  but you go for realism. All that stuff, all the design stuff
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  is off your chest. You just have to. As a director, it's
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  hard, and as a cinematographer too, it's hard to let that go because
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  it kind of it does something to your ego that in the beginning is very
• 18:26
  uncomfortable, But then after a couple of days you kind of switch to that.
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  My cinematographer, he's such a good cinematography. He's Hungarian and he would
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  kind of if he could, he would shoot black and white, high contrast.
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  You know, that's like a Vilmosh Sigmund disciple, and it was really
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  hard for him to switch to making it ugly, and he would frame things
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  so perfectly that from every now and then while we were shooting I would have
• 18:49
  to bump into him so that the camera shake. And then after after a
• 18:53
  week he came to me and I get it. Now, I get it.
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  It started. The big breakthrough for him was that he started listening to
• 19:00
  the to the actors, which he wasn't used to because the cinematographers are so
• 19:04
  focused on the framing on the image that usually they don't listen to the actors.
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  But because he had to listen to the actors because if they were suddenly
• 19:11
  pointing something out outside of frame, then he would have to pan over and
• 19:15
  show that. In the beginning, some actors were like, oh, look
• 19:19
  over there, and the camera would stay on the actor and I would always
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  have to tap him on the shoulder and pan over. And after he kind
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  of totally switched to that, So that was great. So that would be
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  my big advice. I think about making your first movie, don't I know
• 19:34
  it's it's tempting to really let your creative juices flow and to write something in
• 19:38
  the French Revolution or something in out of Space or something, but it will
• 19:42
  never get made. Like the Hollywood is so fear driven that no executive will
• 19:49
  give you that will give you money to make your first movie. That's the
• 19:52
  problem. You have to have made a movie to make your first movie,
• 19:56
  and short films don't count. That's the problem. We'll be right back after
• 20:00
  a word from our sponsor, and now back to the show. I know
• 20:08
  that short films are great to kind of learn stuff for yourself, but it's
• 20:12
  a total illusion that you can show a great short film and someone will say
• 20:18
  you are displaying such talent that now we're going to give you millions and millions
• 20:22
  to make your first feature. I think that was the case once, and
• 20:25
  there are a couple of famous examples where that might have happened. But that's
• 20:29
  like one in a million to bet your career on that. It's kind of
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  crazy. So I think what you do have to shoot for these days is
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  to make a feature, make it as independently as possible. If you are
• 20:41
  waiting for someone else to give you the green light, I can promise you
• 20:44
  that you will never shoot like if you rely on someone else's money, you
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  get all these all these stories where someone prepared and prepped and they were ready
• 20:52
  to shoot and then everything fell apart, Like almost every story ends like that.
• 20:56
  Yeah, it's really funny that you're saying that, because you're almost exactly
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  describing the scenario that I went through. Because we had a screenplay and we
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  had all these investors and all these things that were going on, and it
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  completely you know, I kept waiting and waiting and waiting for everything to be
• 21:11
  perfect, and then it fell apart. You know. So now what we're
• 21:15
  doing is just taking the money that we have and we're going out and shooting
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  something, you know, just getting out and shooting and making something, you
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  know what I mean. Yeah, and that's the hardest step, you know,
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  because I think filmmakers are kind of perfectionists by nature. So it's the
• 21:29
  impulse. So I think very common to wait for perfect conditions, but perfect
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  conditions will never be there, and money will always go away. Like my
• 21:37
  whole first movie cost three thousand dollars altogether, Like everything was on. We
• 21:41
  we got used tapes and we taped over the dailies of Day after Tomorrow.
• 21:48
  We got and everyone brought their own lunch. I didn't have any money to
• 21:52
  do anything. I was sleeping on a friend's couch at times, like it
• 21:55
  was very very clear. I promised everyone no one will ever make a dime
• 22:00
  from this, which changed everything because suddenly it's okay for everyone to work for
• 22:03
  free if they know that you also are putting in all the work and you
• 22:07
  swear to them that you will never make a dime from it, you know,
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  like the Netflix money that we are we're giving away to charity because I
• 22:15
  have to keep up this promise that no one can ever make any money from
• 22:19
  this movie. And that helps. That freed everything up, and everyone kind
• 22:22
  of contributed and brought their editing system and their camera and their sound equipment and
• 22:26
  the this and bad and it was kind of a really good time. But
• 22:30
  all that started with finding a story that you can shoot in a non pretty
• 22:37
  way, and how that really helped me later. I mean, I was
• 22:41
  lucky with all this stuff because what I learned what I didn't know coming out
• 22:45
  of film school, is that you have to do something that Hollywood, that
• 22:51
  is new and worthwhile to Hollywood, like the other things that no one in
• 22:55
  Hollywood will ever help you just out of the goodness of their heart. You
• 22:59
  have to get to a place somehow where you have something that they want,
• 23:03
  you know, and coming on a film school, of course, we always
• 23:06
  thought we have to emulate Hollywood, Like the biggest thing to us was like
• 23:11
  getting a helicopter shot, Like if we could get a helicopter shot, then
• 23:14
  we'd made it, which is complete nonsense because the one thing that Hollywood has
• 23:17
  is money. Like they can have all the all the helicopter shots that they
• 23:21
  want, it's not going to impress them. You know, if you have
• 23:22
  a great stunt, it's not going to impress them day. You have to
• 23:26
  give them something where they go like, oh, we didn't have that before,
• 23:30
  and it's not so it can't be about money. That there was the
• 23:33
  big revelation afterwards that we luckily went the right direction out of dumb luck because
• 23:38
  we didn't have money. So we really focused on performances and getting very authentic
• 23:45
  moments and kind of making this heart wrenching drama thing. And because all that
• 23:49
  all that we had was time. There's always this kind of saying that you
• 23:52
  have to out of quality time and money you have, you can choose two.
• 24:00
  You can either get something great and make it cheaply, but it will
• 24:03
  take a long time, or you can make something great and it'll take forever,
• 24:07
  or it'll be fast but it won't be cheap, and all these things,
• 24:10
  and I think that is really true. So we didn't have money,
• 24:11
  but we had all the time in the world, and we wanted to make
• 24:15
  something great, so we kind of concentrated on that. And then when we
• 24:18
  had made the movie, it turned out that that's exactly what Hollywood was looking
• 24:22
  for at the time, because the fake documentary thing was just coming up and
• 24:26
  was becoming popular, and they were looking for someone to be able to work
• 24:30
  in that medium and get great performances out of it. So that's how I
• 24:33
  got my first kind of studio job with the Lion State project that then became
• 24:37
  The Last Exorcism. Okay, did you was there the idea when you went
• 24:42
  out to shoot that it's like, since we're shooting video, let's just try
• 24:45
  if we shoot like, say an hour, let's try to have at least
• 24:51
  five minutes of that big goal that we can cut out. Or it was
• 24:53
  that kind of your process with I mean, back in those days, I
• 24:56
  think that shooting in video and you know, if you're shooting that in film,
• 25:00
  you have to kind of be like, Okay, we have to get
• 25:03
  it on this take. You know, you're not afforded that when when you're
• 25:07
  shooting video. It's a lot easier. It's it's huge for the creative process.
• 25:11
  Someone said that in an acting workshop at AFI, and it was amazing
• 25:15
  that the most valuable words that you can ever say as a director is I
• 25:19
  don't know, let's try it. It might not work, which is exactly
• 25:22
  the opposite of what you think a director should do, because you always have
• 25:26
  the feeling the director has to have the vision, has to know exactly what
• 25:29
  they want, and they have to be able to communicate it to everyone,
• 25:32
  and then everyone is trying to hit that on the nails somehow. And if
• 25:36
  you do that, then that's a lot of pressure to put on all your
• 25:40
  creative collaborators because they have to kind of try to hit your vision exactly.
• 25:44
  But if you say, guys, I don't really have a vision, let's
• 25:47
  just play an experiment and will come up with something together, then suddenly you
• 25:51
  take all the pressure away from them and you allow them to contribute. Everyone's
• 25:55
  waking up and is going like, oh my god, they want my input.
• 25:57
  They don't just want me to execute something that they have preconceived, but
• 26:02
  they actually want me to be involved in the creative process itself, and suddenly
• 26:06
  you get stuff that is not filtered through one mind. You know, if
• 26:10
  you are that kind of filmmaker that is kind of exerting that power and putting
• 26:15
  your vision on everyone, then that means that everything that ends up on screen
• 26:18
  is filtered through your mind. And if you're a genius, that might be
• 26:22
  great, if you're a David Fincher or Orison Wells or whatever. But I'm
• 26:26
  not, you know, and I know that, and so it's a big
• 26:30
  asset to me to get a group of people together that I think are funny
• 26:34
  and witty and brilliant and fast, and get all these anarchic ideas and these
• 26:41
  moments in the scenes together, and then be able to cut my scene together
• 26:45
  from all these moments that I didn't preconceive, but that were little gifts that
• 26:48
  came out during shooting. And they only came out because I gave them that
• 26:52
  freedom to just play and try stuff out. In Some stuff will be totally
• 26:56
  off and will not work at all, but that's fine because we're shooting on
• 26:59
  video and it's not that every second is golden because we're should shooting on film
• 27:03
  and every second costs so much money. But the video really allowed me to
• 27:07
  kind of open that up and stay, we have the whole day for these
• 27:11
  three scenes, let's just see what happens. And there was always there wasn't
• 27:15
  a single day when there weren't moments coming up that were completely surprising and a
• 27:18
  complete gift. And over three years, honestly, I never went home not
• 27:23
  being totally ecstatic about the day. And that's I think the only thing that
• 27:27
  can get you through this long shoot, you know, because that's the only
• 27:32
  payoff you have, is that if you lie in bed at night, you've
• 27:33
  got to I can't believe that moment happened today, That look between two people
• 27:38
  happened today, that line, that idea, that is that that, and
• 27:41
  it's just it's the most satisfying thing. And you never get that with a
• 27:45
  script because with a script, or you rarely get that with a script because
• 27:49
  with a script you have a very preconceived idea of what the scene is going
• 27:53
  to be and how it's going to look. And most of the time,
• 27:56
  the best thing you can do is to kind of achieve that. It's rare
• 28:00
  that you suddenly see something come to life in front of you that is so
• 28:03
  much better than what you had imagined in your wildest dreams, in your in
• 28:07
  your mind. Can you you told a story that I heard before about your
• 28:12
  screening in Kosovo. I was wondering if you could to talk about that for
• 28:17
  just a second. Yeah, because it's really interesting. Yeah. No,
• 28:18
  that was crazy because we I was at a couse of a film film festival
• 28:22
  with my thesis film, and then they invited me back the year later to
• 28:26
  be in the jury, or a couple of years later, I guess,
• 28:30
  because I did bring a rough cut off Unnecessary Death and there were three people
• 28:34
  in the jury and everyone was screening some feature film project of theirs and my
• 28:40
  colleagues films. This sounds very arrogant, but I thought. I thought they
• 28:42
  were there. They were great, but they weren't necessarily mind blowing. But
• 28:48
  the audience went crazy standing ovations, and I was like, oh my god,
• 28:51
  this is the best audience ever. Can't wait an wait to show the
• 28:56
  rough cut of a necessary and it was something that my editor had put together.
• 29:00
  It was a cut that I hadn't even seen, um, so I
• 29:03
  was excited to see it. And we're screening the movie, and the movie
• 29:07
  is over, and I'm getting ready for my standing ovation and for people to
• 29:11
  come up to give me an oscar, and there was complete silence, absolutely
• 29:18
  terrifying silence, and then there was like one person, which is the worst
• 29:22
  silence would have been. I thought in the moment was the worst thing that
• 29:26
  could happen, But then I learned seconds later that's the second FoST thing that
• 29:29
  could happen, because then someone in the last row started clapping like this,
• 29:33
  which is like in a Western. You know, when you want it the
• 29:37
  slow class in a Western, when you want to show silence, you don't
• 29:41
  just have it silent, but you have like a kyote howl in the back.
• 29:45
  There's like a cricket. And I didn't get it. I was so
• 29:51
  impressed and taken with my own creation up there. We'll be right back after
• 29:57
  a word from our sponsor, and now back to the show. And the
• 30:07
  great thing about take documentaries also because everyone is contributing, you don't have to
• 30:11
  be a egomaniac to love the product because it's everyone's creative together. Yeah.
• 30:15
  So I was really amazed by the thing and couldn't wrap my mind around why
• 30:21
  no one was responding to it. I thought it was so powerful. And
• 30:23
  then I was walking down the steps to do the Q and A and I
• 30:27
  turned around and everyone was kind of moving in the audience, which was weird
• 30:33
  because normally for a Q and A, you just stay in your seats and
• 30:37
  you don't get up and you don't walk. But people were walking out or
• 30:40
  running around or whatever. And then I realized that there were people in the
• 30:44
  audience that had broken down and their friends were kind of gathering around them and
• 30:49
  pulling them back up to their feet, and we're talking to them whatever,
• 30:52
  whatever. And next to me was a girl that was rocking back and forth,
• 30:56
  and she had her hand in her face in her hands, and the
• 31:00
  tears were running down her forearms. And that's when I realized, wait a
• 31:04
  minute, they didn't understand that this wasn't a real documentary. I didn't announce
• 31:10
  that beforehand. I didn't mean to fool anyone. There just wasn't a situation
• 31:14
  where you kind of would have announced it. And they were reacting to it
• 31:18
  as if they had just seen this guy kill himself on camera. Because the
• 31:22
  character is a very lovable character. They were devastated by it and I was
• 31:27
  running around. It was the worst feeling because you had as if you had
• 31:30
  dropped this bomb on these people and they were seriously hurt. So I was
• 31:34
  running around trying to tell everyone that this is a fictional film, and they
• 31:40
  didn't get it when I would say, Matt the suicidal guy. So there
• 31:44
  was Matt was the suicidal guy, and Gilbert was the filmmaker that was following
• 31:48
  him. And I would tell someone who had broken down, Matt is an
• 31:52
  actor, and the first the first reply I got was like, does Gilbert
• 31:56
  know Gilbert's an actor? Like it was so. And then there was one
• 32:02
  girl, an American girls as you would imagine, that was attacking me.
• 32:07
  She was jumping at me and she grabbed me by the collar and she shook
• 32:12
  me. She was this tiny girl, but she was just in a Nanja
• 32:15
  mode or something, and she screamed at me, you're a murderer. You
• 32:19
  shouldn't be allowed to make movies. And then her friends dragged her off,
• 32:22
  and then that the organizer, the organizer of the festival came up to me
• 32:28
  and whispered in my ear and said, stay where you are, don't go
• 32:30
  outside. There is a mob gathering to deal with which is exactly the words
• 32:36
  you don't want to hear in Kosovo that had just been through a murderous war.
• 32:40
  The last thing you want is a month that's gathering and it's bad when
• 32:44
  you're the worst thing in it was. It was devastating, and then I
• 32:50
  phoned my team, my editor and say, we gotta recut this movie.
• 32:52
  We've got to change the ending. People were devastated, and she said,
• 32:57
  well, isn't that what we were going for, which is true. It
• 33:00
  is a tragedy, so you kind of want to evoke these emotions. But
• 33:04
  it felt as if we were playing unfairly. And for the first time this
• 33:07
  whole sentence with there is responsibility in filmmaking, and you have to take responsibility
• 33:13
  in filmmaking. I understood what that was about. I'd never understood that.
• 33:16
  Whenever people were talking about Oliver's Stone with natural born killers got people to kill
• 33:21
  other people. I always thought, well, that's a powerful movie if you
• 33:24
  can achieve that. You know, obviously the movie work. It's a tragedy
• 33:28
  for the people that die, but is it really up to the filmmaker to
• 33:31
  prevent that from happening? And after seeing that an action in Kosovo, it
• 33:36
  just wasn't fun. It wasn't a rewarding feeling of oh, look what we
• 33:40
  were able to do. We just never thought about the why. You know,
• 33:45
  we worked so hard on trying to affect an audience emotionally. Would you
• 33:50
  always do when you make a movie that I never stopped to think, well,
• 33:53
  why are we doing this to them? We just try to get them
• 33:58
  to feel bad. We don't give them anything in exchange, you know,
• 34:01
  And that was kind of an epiphany to me. And then we did recut
• 34:05
  the movie screened at south By Southwest and then screened at AFI Fest and won
• 34:08
  the audience, which I think we wouldn't have if we hadn't recut the movie.
• 34:13
  But it definitely was counterintuitive to say, our movie is that sounds very
• 34:16
  arrogant again, but our movie is too powerful for the audience to consume.
• 34:21
  We have to watter it down. But that's kind of exactly what we did,
• 34:23
  and I think was the right to see. That's really interesting, you
• 34:27
  know. Can you talk about when you say give them anything in exchange and
• 34:32
  you know that you went back and recut it, what did you recut and
• 34:36
  what was the what was really the difference between the version they saw in Kosovo,
• 34:39
  and the one that was all the big difference was the ending. We
• 34:44
  had shot two endings, one which was very straight, so just to spoil
• 34:47
  it all, spoil the whole movie. In the end, Nats the suicidal
• 34:52
  guy and Gilbert the filmmaker, they're going into garage together and Nat is gonna
• 34:57
  shoot himself and Gilbert is gonna film that. And one ending was we stay
• 35:01
  outside and we hear the shot, and then there's silence for a minute,
• 35:05
  and then Gilbert comes out and we see an inkling of mat on the floor
• 35:09
  and he has shot himself in the head. And you can see on Gilbert's
• 35:13
  face that what he just saw it was so nightmarish that he'll never never be
• 35:16
  able to forget that, and he kind of is paying the price for his
• 35:22
  ambition to become a great filmmaker or whatever. That was one ending which we
• 35:24
  showed hi Kosovo, which played it very straight. You know, there's this
• 35:29
  guy who is announcing he's going to kill himself and then he kills himself.
• 35:32
  You know the entire time what's going to happen, and you always kind of
• 35:35
  hope some miracle will happen, but guess what, the miracle doesn't happen,
• 35:38
  and that's it, and that was just devastating to people. The other ending
• 35:42
  that we had shot was that we stay outside of the garage. We hear
• 35:45
  the shot, and then there's a pause, and then we hear a second
• 35:49
  shot, and it takes us a moment to understand what was going on,
• 35:52
  and someone runs to open the garage and both of them are on the floor,
• 35:55
  and it turns out that Matt has shot Gilbert before he shot himself because
• 36:00
  of the whole subplot with a sound girl who was Gilbert's ex girlfriend and Matt
• 36:05
  was in love with her, and Gilbert, who wanted Matt to kill himself,
• 36:08
  took the girl away from him to not give him a reason to live
• 36:12
  and all that kind of stuff. So he shot Gilbert, which was the
• 36:15
  much more Hollywood twist ending and played it much less straight and much less real,
• 36:20
  And it felt like that's exactly what people needed. They needed something that
• 36:23
  was kind of tipping it off and say it's all right, this is a
• 36:28
  movie. Here's a heightened reality. And also to punish Gilbert in a more
• 36:32
  conventional way for manipulating this guy that we've fallen in love with into suicide and
• 36:37
  now he paid the price by killing him himself by being killed. So that
• 36:43
  kind of seemed to work. I think that was the main thing, And
• 36:45
  I think in general it's always like you want to take something away from a
• 36:50
  story. I think that's the basis of storytelling, that we kind of communicate
• 36:53
  and insight into the world and into the human experience through a story and put
• 37:00
  your audience through different emotions and make them invested in the thing. But it's
• 37:05
  all with the implied promise that they will get something out of watching this for
• 37:09
  two hours that no one else knows. They will be let into a secret,
• 37:15
  you know, that they can take away into their life with, and
• 37:17
  we didn't really supply that secret. I had a feel I was basically saying,
• 37:22
  here's a movie that will make you miserable and teach you nothing, and
• 37:27
  that's responding to it. That was a problem at the time. Yeah,
• 37:30
  I think that's really, you know, interesting because with all the like horror
• 37:35
  movies, the whole concept of a horror movie is that you're going to watch
• 37:37
  something that's horrible. You know, that's something that's terrible, but there has
• 37:42
  to be some element of it that attracts people to it. That makes people
• 37:45
  want to experience that, right, you know, and gives them that like
• 37:50
  experience. One of the interesting things you said when you were working on The
• 37:54
  Last Exorcism, and I want to go to that in just a second.
• 37:59
  It's just that a documentary format doesn't give the audience a place to hide,
• 38:02
  right, And I thought that was really interesting. It's like you have more
• 38:07
  power doing that well because you have the first person narrative. People are looking
• 38:13
  right into camera, and the cinematographer is a character in the film. He's
• 38:16
  not kind of this invisible floating camera, but there is a direct proxy for
• 38:21
  you as an audience member in the movie. And if there's danger coming towards
• 38:25
  the camera, it's coming towards you, and it's you're kind of aware that
• 38:30
  there's danger coming from three hundred and sixty degrees. With a narrative conventional movie,
• 38:35
  you can always kind of count on them showing you what you need to
• 38:39
  see. Like if there's something that's important for you as the audience member to
• 38:43
  see and not to miss, they will make sure that they cut to that
• 38:45
  close up or that insert or whatever. And that kind of gives you a
• 38:49
  certain safety because you're being taken by the hand and guided through this story by
• 38:54
  someone who already knows the path of the story. But with the fake documentary,
• 39:00
  it's all about the stuff that you miss and that you don't see,
• 39:02
  so that you keep the audience on their toes about you know what, we
• 39:07
  might be showing you this side of the room right now, but that doesn't
• 39:09
  mean something can jump out behind you at any moment, because, you know
• 39:13
  what, we don't really know what's going to happen, and this we don't
• 39:15
  really know what's going to happen. I think it's a very important a component
• 39:20
  in an effect documentary, especially in horror, right, And you see that
• 39:23
  a lot with I mean, you know, Spielberg used that in Saving Private
• 39:28
  Ryan, the idea of you know, and you see that in a lot
• 39:30
  of films that you'll have a scene that's all handheld and shot like a documentary,
• 39:34
  even though it's in a traditional narrative film, right, you know,
• 39:37
  just to give people that feeling of uneasiness and that at any minute something could
• 39:42
  kind of you know, affect your your point of view or whatever. Yeah.
• 39:45
  I think the other component is that moving moving images just stimulate the viewer
• 39:52
  and kind of and put an energy. We'll be right back after a word
• 40:00
  from our sponsor, and now back to the show into the thing that the
• 40:09
  brain has to process. So you are there's just more happening on a very
• 40:13
  simple, simple way. And if you have a locked off shot from a
• 40:17
  tripod, whatever is moving is just the object in the frame. But ninety
• 40:22
  percent of what you're seeing on screen doesn't move, whereas as soon as you
• 40:28
  go handheld, that means every single piece of grain it would have been in
• 40:32
  film world, but now pixel moves at any split second. So I think
• 40:37
  there is something that is just kind of overwhelming to the brain and that really
• 40:43
  kind of pumps up the adrenaline just by the virtue of going handheld. And
• 40:46
  the other thing that I've found out about handheld that was amazing to me,
• 40:51
  and I still don't have an explanation for it, was when I was watching
• 40:54
  Lars Fontriers the Idiots. He has everything is handheld, and the performances are
• 40:59
  a maze, and then for some reason there's some scene in the woods that's
• 41:02
  like a minute long where he suddenly is static on a tripod and suddenly the
• 41:07
  performances suck, and I realized that handheld for some reason really helps out your
• 41:15
  performances, like everything gets better if you go handheld. Maybe that is because
• 41:21
  the audience can't focus on every single twitch in a face at any moment.
• 41:27
  Like if there is a stale performance, probably if you have Meryl Streep and
• 41:30
  Any Adams and John Malkovich, you're fine. You probably don't have to go
• 41:34
  handheld. But if you, if you have performances that are on the on
• 41:38
  the staler side, going handheld suddenly gives that whole thing a vital effect that
• 41:45
  you otherwise wouldn't get. I don't know what it is, but I swear
• 41:47
  as soon as you try it out, you'll see that your performances kept much
• 41:51
  better in handheld. Yeah, definitely, I think that. You know,
• 41:55
  it's also the concept that you're capturing something that's really happening in the Camera's not
• 42:00
  like the camera's not ahead of the action, right, you know, the
• 42:04
  camera's following the action and seeing things, you know, all of a sudden,
• 42:07
  And you see this a lot in The Last Exorcism that you know,
• 42:10
  as they're moving through a scene, it's like the camera is like it'll go
• 42:15
  over and capture something and you're like, oh, did I just see that
• 42:17
  or what was that? You know what I mean. It's like it adds
• 42:21
  a lot more dynamic feel to it. That's really hard to simulate for the
• 42:24
  cinematographer if you're on take twenty and you've walked through for him to kind of
• 42:30
  pretend he's very surprised by what just came into frame. It's kind of an
• 42:34
  art form in itsself. Okay, well, why don't we jump into that.
• 42:37
  Can we talk for a little bit about how the Last Exorcism started,
• 42:44
  how you got involved, meeting with Eli Roth, all of that story.
• 42:49
  So I had made Last Exorcism, and Last Exorcism had one the audience necessary
• 42:54
  death and the Audience Award which changes everything. Or that will be my next
• 42:59
  piece of advice for the starting filmmaker. Make that feature and then try to
• 43:04
  get it into festivals because Hollywood, like very few people in Hollywood I think,
• 43:08
  have taste and rely on their own It's true. It's really crazy,
• 43:14
  Like I get scripts from studios that are so bad that you go like who,
• 43:21
  not only who wrote this, but which executive read it and said that's
• 43:24
  a good idea, let's make this movie. And that's ninety percent of old
• 43:28
  scripts. And it's I think it's really rare. There's a handful of people
• 43:31
  in Hollywood that trust their own opinion and what they will what the other people
• 43:36
  will rely on is other gatekeepers that at some point put a stamp of approval
• 43:42
  on the project. And film festivals, big film festivals with a good reputation
• 43:47
  do that. Like if you screen a can or itself by Southwest Sundance or
• 43:52
  AFI Fest or LA Film Festival or something bigger and you screen there, that's
• 43:58
  already great. If you win an audience award there or a jury award there,
• 44:02
  suddenly people will take your movie seriously and they will think the movie is
• 44:07
  great, even maybe if it isn't, but they don't really dare to have
• 44:12
  their own experience. So suddenly after the audience award, there were a lot
• 44:15
  of agents and managers that wanted to meet. And I learned that because it's
• 44:22
  always like everyone always wants an agent and thinks their career will really hit off,
• 44:28
  hit it off when they have an agent, which is nonsense. And
• 44:31
  also an agent will never want you, like an agent that you have to
• 44:36
  approach will never want you. You have to make something again that that agent
• 44:40
  finds desirable and he wants you. So this whole knocking on people's doores that
• 44:45
  people are always trying is not going to work. But you have to kind
• 44:50
  of get the approval of the stamp of approval from some festival if possible,
• 44:53
  and then they will knock on your doors anyway. So I did the rounds
• 44:58
  with the agents and found an agent, and we were looking at different scripts
• 45:04
  and couldn't find anything. And then I had the feeling I had done a
• 45:07
  necessary death, and I had this feeling, I really want Jacob Foreman to
• 45:13
  see this movie. Jacob Foreman was a screenwriter in my year who wrote All
• 45:16
  the Boys Love Nandy Lane and was a really good guy, but we never
• 45:21
  never had that much to do with each other at Afi and I don't know
• 45:23
  where this feeling came from that I wanted him to see the movie, but
• 45:28
  it was just a really strong feeling. So I emailed him instead, I
• 45:30
  made this movie. Can I send it to you? And he said,
• 45:32
  sure, send it to me. I send it to him. I don't
• 45:35
  think he liked it much because he never recommented on it. But what happened,
• 45:38
  like a week or two later, was that he was writing a screenplay
• 45:43
  for a production company called Strike Entertainment, and they had had two directors,
• 45:49
  Hugbudco and Andrew Gerland, on this movie called Cotton, which was an exorcism
• 45:54
  movie, a fake documentary exorcism movie, and the two directors the project because
• 46:00
  they had another project with will Will Ferrell at the same time called The Virginity
• 46:05
  Hit, and they had to decide which one to make, and they were
• 46:07
  under obligation with Sony to make The Virginity It. So suddenly this project didn't
• 46:12
  have directors, and Jacob in during a lunch break or something, overheard two
• 46:16
  producers say, Man, we lost our directors. Where are we going to
• 46:21
  find someone who can do a fake documentary horror? Jacob had necessary in his
• 46:28
  bag, you know which. I don't believe in fate or the supernatural or
• 46:31
  anything like that, but I have no explanation for how that okay, and
• 46:36
  he gave them the movie and they watched it, and it obviously wasn't a
• 46:39
  horror movie, but it was exactly the format that they wanted. And so
• 46:44
  they called me the next day and sent me the script and wanted to meet.
• 46:47
  And the script was I think I can say it now all these years
• 46:52
  later, was horrendous, horrendous, And it was also wasn't written towards a
• 46:58
  fake documentary, because a fake documentary, if you really want to sell it
• 47:01
  as real, then you can't have something spectacular happen in every single scene because
• 47:07
  the audience will figure out after two scenes that this is obviously you're not a
• 47:10
  real documentary. Like in a real documentary if you catch one amazing moment on
• 47:15
  camera and people structure a whole documentary around that. You know. So this
• 47:20
  script kind of had some action sequence with people flying through the air and every
• 47:23
  scene and just didn't work. I went and I had no interest in making
• 47:28
  the movie, and I went into the into the meeting. If I had
• 47:31
  wanted to make the movie, I think I would have been really, really
• 47:34
  nervous. But because I basically just came there to say, your script sucks,
• 47:38
  I'm not going to do it, I wasn't nervous at all. So
• 47:42
  I told them that very bluntly, no diplomacy involved. And I learned then
• 47:46
  that there's nothing sexier to Hollywood executives than you not wanting to do their project,
• 47:52
  because they always they're not stupid. They know that the script that they
• 47:58
  have out there is not brilliant and needs work, as they always call it,
• 48:01
  needs a polish, but polish always means complete rewrite, and they kind
• 48:07
  of know that. And then they invite all these directors, like ten twenty
• 48:10
  directors to come in, and nineteen of those directors say this is brilliant.
• 48:15
  I want to do this. I'm the right guy for this. And there
• 48:17
  is one guy who comes in and says the script doesn't work. I don't
• 48:21
  want to do it. Then suddenly they want the one guy that didn't want
• 48:24
  to do it. I had that that people for other projects that they called
• 48:28
  and said, we've shown it to ten directors, nine of them love it.
• 48:31
  You didn't want to do it, could you come in for a second
• 48:34
  meeting? I said, well, go with one of the people. I
• 48:37
  want to do it, but they want to hear that you have ideas how
• 48:40
  to make it better another and I basically came out of that meeting with them
• 48:45
  saying, you can do with the script whatever you want, you can hire
• 48:49
  your own writer, you can completely rewrite it. We'll give you one and
• 48:52
  a half million dollars do it. And that was exactly what I needed to
• 48:55
  hear, because then I brought a writer on board that I love. That's
• 48:59
  a genius who completely rewrote the movie within four days or something. And then
• 49:05
  yeah, Eli was attached. I didn't talk to him in the beginning.
• 49:07
  I think a couple of weeks later we had a call scheduled, and now
• 49:10
  I was nervous because I suddenly was talking to like the horror legend Eli Roth.
• 49:15
  I think he was on the inglorious Bustard set in his trailer and had
• 49:17
  just seen a necessary death and was super nice and super complimentary and stuff.
• 49:23
  And then we went to make the movie and they let me bring on my
• 49:28
  cinematographer, my editor, and there was a little bit of a struggle.
• 49:31
  What I mentioned before that they because they had never made a fact documentary,
• 49:36
  they didn't couldn't quite wrap their head around the improv thing. Like they said,
• 49:39
  we need to see casting tapes, and we can only judge casting tapes
• 49:45
  auditions if we see actors that are doing the same scripted scene and then we
• 49:51
  can compare the quality. And I said, well, that's completely useless,
• 49:53
  because even as it's a great scene and written, it's not going to help
• 49:55
  you in an improv. They said, we have to do it anyway.
• 50:00
  We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor, and now back to
• 50:07
  the show. So I always had to make the actors read the scene.
• 50:13
  And for I knew it wasn't going to make a difference, but for the
• 50:15
  producers it was important. And then we went off to Louisiana to New Orleans
• 50:21
  to shoot the movie. And the great thing was that this company, Strike
• 50:23
  Entertainment, had made all these hundred million dollar movies with Brett Pitt and Robert
• 50:29
  Redford and whatever whatever, and they had never made a movie under eighty million
• 50:34
  dollars, so they had no idea what to do with our little one point
• 50:37
  five million dollar movie. So they didn't take it seriously. They meant it
• 50:39
  when they said do whatever you want, they meant that. They completely stayed
• 50:44
  out of it. So the conditions were very close to what we had a
• 50:47
  necessary death where a couple of more people, obviously, and the unions required
• 50:52
  us to have all these people. But there was a whole camera team that
• 50:54
  we never needed that was just coming in eating donuts and home and I wanted
• 51:00
  that because I wanted to recreate that intimacy. There was the big strength of
• 51:06
  working in that format that you don't have fifty people staring at the actors and
• 51:09
  that you don't, for example, have to use the slate, because it
• 51:15
  turned out to me that clapping the slate and going a scene fourteen, go
• 51:21
  action basically communicates to the actors, now create artifice. Now try to be
• 51:25
  someone you are not. You know, So I always try to avoid slating,
• 51:30
  or we would slate in the other room quietly, secretly, and then
• 51:34
  cut over with the camera because I didn't want them to act. I basically
• 51:37
  wanted them to be themselves and put themselves into the situation. And we never
• 51:43
  showed the script to the actors. With Last Exorcism, we had a script
• 51:46
  all written now, which we needed for the investors and for the production company
• 51:50
  and all that kind of stuff. But it was like my best hidden secret
• 51:53
  was this script. I knew if I ever showed that to the actors it
• 51:58
  would be impossible to get that out of their heads again and make them created
• 52:01
  from scratch and come up with all these fresh moments, because they would just
• 52:05
  try to reproduce the script. And it's amazing if you watch the movie and
• 52:09
  read the script, how close the two are. I think no one would
• 52:14
  believe me if someone who had read the script and seen the movie. Would
• 52:17
  not never believe that the actors never saw the script. But I think it's
• 52:21
  the same technique. You tell them what motivation they go into the scene with,
• 52:25
  which is actually very similar to what you do with a movie that has
• 52:29
  a script. You know, you talk to the actors about where they are
• 52:30
  coming from and where they want to go, and then let them go and
• 52:35
  kind of see how that goes. And that's how we did Last Exercism.
• 52:37
  And then we came back from this experience that was just really great and started
• 52:44
  editing and suddenly everyone was very involved. Suddenly we had a lot of producers
• 52:50
  in the editing room. That helps. And the ending, like if you've
• 52:57
  seen Last Exorcism, the thing that was great about the original script was the
• 53:00
  ending, and that was like the one thing that I was excited about,
• 53:05
  which was this only makes sense if you've seen a lot of exism, But
• 53:07
  the original ending was they go into the forest, they see a shadow,
• 53:12
  they hear the noises of the demon, and they run and they don't get
• 53:15
  killed, and they they reappear a week later and Cotton our Excesses now has
• 53:22
  a full church with hundreds of people, and he's a celebrity and he gets
• 53:27
  his own TV show and he's, you know, he's a star because he
• 53:30
  has he has gotten a demon or as close as possible on video, and
• 53:35
  he's basically marketing that. And what was so smart about it is that the
• 53:38
  whole movie he tells us what a successful evangelical preacher needs. He needs a
• 53:46
  hook, you know, which is the demon on video. And everything Cotton
• 53:52
  does in his little frauds is based on sound, and it's based on lighting
• 53:57
  and all that kind of stuff, and basically, in the end, it's
• 54:00
  just the huge version of that. So I wanted the audience to leave the
• 54:02
  movie as split as they had come in, with the believers saying, no,
• 54:07
  I saw a demon, and with these the cynics the atheists saying,
• 54:10
  oh, it's just it was basically a big pr video and this Exorcist used
• 54:15
  us and showed us this stuff for a financial game. And I thought that
• 54:20
  was the smartest thing that you come out of a movie. And you don't
• 54:22
  even know if you just saw a horror movie or if you just saw a
• 54:25
  drama about a preacher that has a great marketing idea, you know that it
• 54:30
  was our most expensive scene because it needed green screen for the demon, and
• 54:34
  it needed all these extras and the location of the church and all that stuff,
• 54:37
  and then we cut it together and it didn't work. Like I showed
• 54:42
  it to ten friends, and out of those ten friends, one friend thought
• 54:45
  it was the greatest ending he'd ever seen, and nine friends were completely confused
• 54:50
  and said, we don't know what just happened. And I learned that you
• 54:53
  can ask a question and not answer it in a movie, but it has
• 54:59
  to be clear that you're asking the question. And with our ending, it
• 55:01
  wasn't even clear that we wanted the audience to wonder about whether this was fake
• 55:07
  or not. They didn't even know what the question was, and we couldn't.
• 55:09
  We couldn't make it work. And that of course I had had my
• 55:13
  shot, and now it was opened up to the group. So every producer,
• 55:17
  every cousin of a producer, or the you know, the cleaning lady
• 55:22
  of a producer, suddenly had ideas about the ending. And then we ended
• 55:27
  up with one that I don't think does justice to the rest of the movie,
• 55:31
  but it was the best out of the bunch, and to this day
• 55:34
  I don't have a better idea. And I lie awake at night for having
• 55:38
  screwed up the ending, especially because there was a thing to go in with.
• 55:44
  But I guess you'll never get that second chance. It'll always be like
• 55:46
  that. Well, it's really difficult to especially when you're doing a movie like
• 55:52
  that. I don't know, there's very few movies that have like completely satisfying
• 55:58
  ending. When it comes to like kind of putting together a mystery, what's
• 56:00
  going on? They eventually figured it out, and then the endings never quite
• 56:04
  like The build is a lot more important, you know. That's what keeps
• 56:07
  you going through it. It's so weird though, I totally agree, but
• 56:09
  you work towards that ending most of the time. You have that ending before
• 56:14
  you have anything else, and then you build the entire movie to towards that
• 56:17
  ending. Like in screenwriting, you know that as a screenwriter you need to
• 56:21
  know where you're going. So the ending is, you know, the big
• 56:23
  payoff that you are working towards and can't wait to show to the audience.
• 56:28
  And then the outcome, for some reasons exactly what you're describing that it's always
• 56:31
  weaker than it needs to be because there's all this expectation on it after the
• 56:35
  two hour build up and then to pay that office really hard. You almost
• 56:39
  need like Fincher's head in the box in seven or in Fight Club. He's
• 56:45
  good with the endings that kind of pull the rut right under. But it's
• 56:47
  rare, It's true. Right now, I got so into listening to you,
• 56:54
  I was thinking about my next question. How did you in terms of
• 56:59
  finding like a bell and the actors? How was that process? Well?
• 57:01
  That was It was equally hard because our casting director had no idea how to
• 57:07
  do the improv thing and didn't believe in it and didn't really take the project
• 57:10
  that seriously, which was kind of hard to overcome. And she thought I
• 57:15
  was a complete dilettant and didn't know what I was doing, which he didn't
• 57:17
  tell me to my face. But there was a friend, an actor who
• 57:21
  was a friend of mine, which she didn't know, and he was auditioning
• 57:23
  and she was pitching to him about me not knowing what I wanted, which
• 57:28
  is exactly true. I didn't know what I want. But that was the
• 57:30
  point, you know, It was the point to keep it open and keep
• 57:32
  it free and whatever. Yeah, we just I just did improv with the
• 57:37
  actors, which I still do now with projects that have a script even if
• 57:42
  I know they're only going to to do scripted lines, because it very quickly
• 57:45
  tells you something about the energy and the IQ of the actor if they have
• 57:52
  to come up with their own moments, you know. And it's something I
• 57:55
  did an internship with a casting director called Mally Finn, who cast all of
• 58:00
  Cameron, Oh Sure, Yeah, Titanic and Terminator our Aswer and she said,
• 58:07
  always cast actors not just for how they're acting, but for who they
• 58:13
  really are, because when it gets to it and they are tired and you
• 58:17
  don't have time and you have to rely on them to get you out of
• 58:20
  that situation, they will always revert to who they really are at their core,
• 58:25
  which is completely true, but that also means you have to invest in
• 58:30
  that during the audition. So what I did is I said in the waiting
• 58:32
  room and I pretended to be an actor waiting to go in, and I
• 58:37
  was just chatting up the actors that were And it's a really interesting moment because
• 58:42
  it's stressful for an actor. They're nervous, they're trying to prepare, and
• 58:45
  there's a guy next to them that won't shut up and tries to involve them
• 58:49
  in some conversation and how they react to that tells you a lot about who
• 58:53
  they are. You know, as soon as they know that you're the director,
• 58:58
  they'll be on their best behavior. And you don't really ever have the
• 59:01
  chance to get to know them for real until you start shooting. So it
• 59:05
  was important to me to kind of have that moment, and with Ashley especially,
• 59:08
  like she was so sweet and so supportive, and I think she thought
• 59:12
  that I was nervous, so she was trying to calm me down because she
• 59:16
  and it was great. And then she was only the second girl that we
• 59:21
  saw for that role, and she just killed it. Like it was so
• 59:23
  scary to be in the room with her because we improvised the exorcism. We
• 59:28
  kind of I think in auditions you always try to see, hopefully your script
• 59:34
  has a certain kind of character development and show at least two sides to a
• 59:37
  character. One is the starting point and one is the endpoint. So I
• 59:40
  think it's smart in auditions to kind of have at least two scenes one scene
• 59:45
  each that showcases what you're looking for. We'll be right back after a word
• 59:52
  from our sponsor, and now back to the show. And if there is
• 1:00:00
  no scene in the script that does that. I think it's worth it to
• 1:00:04
  just write a script, write a scene for the audition that will never show
• 1:00:07
  up in the movie, but just very clearly focuses to see that one side
• 1:00:12
  from the actor, because you need to see the range. And then the
• 1:00:15
  other thing that I always do is like, no matter how great the first
• 1:00:19
  take is in the audition, sometimes people come in and they just nail it.
• 1:00:22
  You always want to do a second take and change something. And that
• 1:00:27
  can be completely random, again, has nothing to do with the character or
• 1:00:29
  the script. Like sometimes I say, now do it as a five year
• 1:00:32
  old child. Now do it as if you are on the electric chair.
• 1:00:36
  Now, completely made up stuff, but it tells you something super important,
• 1:00:39
  and that is how well can an actor adjust to suggestions to direction, you
• 1:00:45
  know. And it's something I learned that the hardware during during my thesis film
• 1:00:50
  that someone came in and was just amazing, and then on set she just
• 1:00:54
  couldn't get there. And it turned out that the night before the audition her
• 1:00:58
  boyfriend had split up with her and she was just so miserable, and the
• 1:01:01
  part was about a miserable drug editor and she was tired, and she just
• 1:01:06
  that wasn't acting. She was just so great because that really happened to her,
• 1:01:08
  and then on set she couldn't reproduce that. So since then, I've
• 1:01:12
  always tried to make sure that you can only really judge how great an actress
• 1:01:17
  if you asked them to do different things with the same material, with the
• 1:01:21
  same lines and see if that's if that's what you're going for. Yeah,
• 1:01:27
  So that's how we found Ashley. And then The Exorcist was much harder.
• 1:01:30
  We saw hundreds of people and we asked them to make up a sermon on
• 1:01:35
  the spot, and Patrick Fabian came in and he gave this eight minute long,
• 1:01:40
  perfect immaculate service and was preaching for eight minutes, and he talked so
• 1:01:47
  fast that I couldn't follow it, you know, I couldn't. It was
• 1:01:52
  actually saying, but there was this energy that he had that just made me
• 1:01:55
  want to kind of go up, stand up and cheer. And that's what
• 1:02:00
  in us Exorcism the banana bread scene comes from. Yeah, that was great.
• 1:02:05
  So basically that the Exorcist that the Exorcist says, I can sell them
• 1:02:08
  anything. I could preach about a banana bread recipe and they would see Hallelujah,
• 1:02:13
  and they wouldn't notice, and they make a bet and he does it.
• 1:02:15
  That came from the audition scene because Patrick Fabian our Exorcist did exactly that.
• 1:02:21
  Like he could have talked about anything and the energy still would have kind
• 1:02:24
  of been transmitted to the audience the way it was, right, was it
• 1:02:30
  always part of the story that he was, you know, kind of faking
• 1:02:32
  it and he was like just kind of pulling something. Because I read something
• 1:02:37
  about how it was influenced by that documentary, Yeah, mar Joe, Yeah,
• 1:02:42
  and I just recently watched that and it's like it's amazing how how much
• 1:02:45
  power comes from watching him in that documentary, and there's there's kind of a
• 1:02:50
  similar feel right right that. Yeah, I think that that's what the I
• 1:02:53
  mean, that was the script that I originally got, and I think that
• 1:02:55
  was the core idea to the original script was to watch someone who is not
• 1:03:00
  a convinced believer in Exorcist but doesn't even believe in God and it's just kind
• 1:03:05
  of a fraud. But at the same time, and that's always I think
• 1:03:09
  important in characters that there is a butt in there. He is a criminal
• 1:03:14
  and he's playing with people's tragedies, but he is so charming that you can't
• 1:03:22
  hold it against him. And he's also his argument is I'm doing this.
• 1:03:25
  If they believe in it and it helps them, then great. It doesn't
• 1:03:29
  have to be real kind of a thing. So I think this duality between
• 1:03:32
  the chirogueness and the crime criminal part of him and the charm is something that
• 1:03:39
  really made that character and that's what we were looking for in the actor too.
• 1:03:43
  And it's funny to now see Patrick in the different roles because he's been
• 1:03:46
  so many TV roles and he's always cast for exactly that person, for someone
• 1:03:53
  you know you can't completely trust him. He's a little bit too smooth and
• 1:03:57
  stuff, but he gets away with it because he's just very charming. So
• 1:04:00
  you build on that. Right now, it seems like what you're trying to
• 1:04:05
  do and do very successfully in the beginning is you know, it's very light.
• 1:04:12
  There's a lot of really kind of comic moments, but there is a
• 1:04:15
  little bit of a dark kind of like, um, you know, when
• 1:04:19
  they bring out the book, when they start talking about real exorcisms, it's
• 1:04:23
  almost like the audience should start getting concerned, even though he's not concerned,
• 1:04:28
  like yeah, you know what I mean. It's such a good observation.
• 1:04:30
  Yeah, I think humor is like such a good weapon because you want to
• 1:04:34
  in any movie you want to you want to create identification between the audience and
• 1:04:40
  your protagonist. In the first act. You want them to like him,
• 1:04:43
  to want him, they want they should want him to achieve what he's trying
• 1:04:48
  to achieve, so that you kind of suffer with them and you enjoy stuff
• 1:04:51
  with them if it goes well. And humor is a really good tool for
• 1:04:56
  that, Like if someone is funny, you immediately like so, especially in
• 1:05:01
  the horror movie where if you know you want to go horrific in the third
• 1:05:04
  act, you need to get the audience to care about that character. Otherwise
• 1:05:09
  it's not horrific because it's just some random people getting beheaded. Then no one
• 1:05:14
  really cares. So I know that it's tricky to do terrifying and funny at
• 1:05:19
  the same time, so I try to stay away from that. But I
• 1:05:23
  try to be exactly what you were saying light in the beginning and kind of
• 1:05:26
  draw the audience in through humor and fall in love with this character, and
• 1:05:30
  then we can go horrific later. But that's exactly what you're saying is so
• 1:05:33
  great that it would be great if there was kind of what you call dramatic
• 1:05:38
  irony, that the audience already has an uneasy feeling, and that you know,
• 1:05:42
  the feeling that the character is walking into a trap and he doesn't know
• 1:05:46
  it, but we know it, but we like him by now so much
• 1:05:48
  that we fear for him. I think that's a great place if you have
• 1:05:51
  the audience there at the beginning of a horror movie, you're golden, right,
• 1:05:58
  Well, you see that a lot with like Jaws and things like that.
• 1:06:00
  That's like all the characters are kind of unaware of stuff, but the
• 1:06:02
  way things are coming together, the audience is kind of like sitting there trying
• 1:06:05
  to hit the brakes, like no, no, no, no, no,
• 1:06:10
  come on, let's let's slow down. Don't don't just run in there
• 1:06:13
  with the you know, even though he's doing all these you know, really
• 1:06:15
  kind of funny things with the cross and the sounds and you know, and
• 1:06:18
  you see the father and the way he's acting, is there like a can
• 1:06:24
  you talk a little bit about getting into the second act and ways to you
• 1:06:27
  know, one of the things that I was doing is I always try to,
• 1:06:30
  you know, I'm working on a screenplay that's not even a screenplay,
• 1:06:33
  but just a story that's got the documentary vibe to it. And what I
• 1:06:38
  did when I was watching The Last Exorcism was just kind of watched minute by
• 1:06:42
  minute what was happening. And things happen so fast. In the beginning,
• 1:06:45
  you get so much story, you know, like, what's going on?
• 1:06:49
  Who this character is, what's going on? You know. And by the
• 1:06:53
  time he's leaving for I believe it was Georgia, right, New Orleans,
• 1:06:58
  Louisiana. Yeah, Louisian so um, I should know that. He uh,
• 1:07:02
  Like it's it's only like ten minutes into the movie, you know,
• 1:07:06
  Yeah, that's I mean, or something like yours. I mean, you
• 1:07:09
  want to keep that's that's the problem. You want to keep your first act
• 1:07:12
  as short as possible because people want to get to the meat of the story.
• 1:07:15
  But at the same time, you want to create that that identification.
• 1:07:19
  If you don't have that and you leave into the second act without that in
• 1:07:23
  your pocket, you're screwed. Um. But a lot of that obviously is
• 1:07:28
  editing too. It's amazing, Like my editor and I we love each other.
• 1:07:31
  She was like the priest during my wedding and all that. It's the
• 1:07:35
  greatest, But man, do we scream at each other during editing And it's
• 1:07:40
  ninety percent is because she wants to cut stuff out to create momentum, and
• 1:07:45
  I am trying to save moments and save scenes because I've worked so hard achieving
• 1:07:50
  those, getting that moment on camera, and and and she's just throwing it
• 1:07:55
  out and I take it personally it's it's it's as if she's, you know,
• 1:07:58
  cutting a leg of my kid or some thing. But it always and
• 1:08:00
  no matter how much I scream and kick and whatever, she always turns out
• 1:08:05
  to be right. It's always always we always end up with the fast version.
• 1:08:11
  And that is That's something I had to learn. That is actually a
• 1:08:14
  compliment to your filmmaking, because it means you've tried to create two hundred meaningful
• 1:08:18
  moments throughout the movie. And if you were successful at creating those two hundred
• 1:08:24
  meaningful, clear, and emotional moments, then you don't need two hundred of
• 1:08:28
  them. Then twenty of them are probably enough to tell the story. You
• 1:08:31
  know, and wanting all those two hundred moments in the movie is just coming
• 1:08:36
  out of your insecurity as a filmmaker and your vanity and your pride that you've
• 1:08:42
  created these moments. That actually what I should have heard when she said we
• 1:08:45
  don't need that moment is trust the other moments that you've created that are in
• 1:08:49
  the movie that they are strong enough to carry this moment. You know,
• 1:08:54
  It's the same with screen time, like actors are always we shoot this stuff
• 1:09:00
  like it's a good example, the sermon with the banana bread that cottoned it.
• 1:09:03
  We shot that for a day and the sermon was forty five minutes long.
• 1:09:08
  So of course Patrick Fabian watches the movie and goes like, oh,
• 1:09:11
  here, come by at least twenty minutes of su and then he's devastated when
• 1:09:16
  it's only forty five seconds of that in the movie. But how he should
• 1:09:20
  see that is that those forty five seconds communicate everything we need to know about
• 1:09:25
  the character because he is so great in that scene. And that's exactly what
• 1:09:28
  you're saying, we get so much information on that character that we don't need
• 1:09:32
  the twenty minutes. The forty five seconds are completely okay. And it's the
• 1:09:35
  same in editing. So I think when you're saying the first act is so
• 1:09:39
  fast, it probably in the director's cut was forty five minutes long and unbearable.
• 1:09:45
  And then my editor. The good thing is that I have a very
• 1:09:48
  bad memory, and whenever she wants to get something through, she just cuts
• 1:09:53
  it out and sees if I notice it or not. We'll be right back
• 1:09:57
  after a word from our sponsor, and now back to the show. And
• 1:10:05
  right if she shows me something in a week, I don't even notice that
• 1:10:09
  that stuff is gone. So we always end up with the tightest version.
• 1:10:14
  I think that's something for every filmmaker. With me, it was a long
• 1:10:16
  learning process. So if you could start with the knowledge that you almost can't
• 1:10:21
  cut something too fast and too tight, because the audience is so quickly bored
• 1:10:28
  that you if you're precious about your stuff and you want to stick to the
• 1:10:32
  script, and even though the editing rhythm suggests something different to you, you're
• 1:10:38
  dead in the water if you don't answer that all well, it's always an
• 1:10:43
  interesting contrast because, of course, later once you get into the more frightening
• 1:10:47
  scenes, the whole concept of anticipation and that something is going to happen,
• 1:10:53
  you know, then it's just like the scenes go on forever, you know,
• 1:10:56
  and everybody's just like waiting for something to happen. Yeah, it's such
• 1:10:59
  a care full balance because the other thing, and that completely contradicts what I
• 1:11:02
  just said about cutting a first But in some editing book I think it was
• 1:11:09
  Walter Merge or something, they wrote that the audience doesn't feel speed. The
• 1:11:14
  only thing that they feel is acceleration, which is I think so true.
• 1:11:17
  So if you start with a very fast first act, and then you have
• 1:11:21
  a very fast second act, and then you have a very fast third act,
• 1:11:25
  the whole thing will just seem like in one gear. It won't necessarily
• 1:11:29
  feel fast. But if you have a second act that is slightly faster than
• 1:11:32
  the first and a third act that is slightly faster than a second, then
• 1:11:36
  they will suddenly say, wow, that movie is really fast, even though
• 1:11:40
  in general it wasn't. But it accelerated, and that is something that an
• 1:11:44
  audience has a feeling for. And of course the other way around two what
• 1:11:46
  you're talking about, if you slow down, it's suddenly unbearable because we've gotten
• 1:11:50
  used to a certain speed, and suddenly, deliberately you stretch a moment you
• 1:11:57
  know that really does something to the audience is psyche. But such a balancing
• 1:12:00
  act. And that's why this whole wisdom of there, what's the saying there
• 1:12:04
  are three movies, one that you write, one that you shoot, and
• 1:12:08
  one that you edit, and that's the final move. I think that is
• 1:12:11
  really true. And the more you can subscribe to that and let go of
• 1:12:15
  all the preconceived notions that you had during writing, and then even harder of
• 1:12:19
  how hard it was to get that crane shot in that scene, and that
• 1:12:24
  you know that day that actor was in a bad mood and has still got
• 1:12:27
  a great performance out of him. None of it matters. The only thing
• 1:12:30
  that matters is what ends up in the editing room. My editor makes a
• 1:12:33
  point out of never coming to set and not getting to know the actors,
• 1:12:38
  because she says she doesn't want to be influenced by the reality of it all
• 1:12:42
  because the audience is not going to know that. The audience is not going
• 1:12:44
  to know the location, know the actors, know that, whatever. But
• 1:12:46
  she just wants to work with what actually materializes on the screen. And I
• 1:12:51
  think that's a really really good approach. Right. Another thing I think that's
• 1:12:56
  really interesting with the documentary approach is that you can, and I mean,
• 1:13:00
  you can do this with a regular narrative, but the idea that characters are
• 1:13:03
  lying and that you're finding out the truth behind things, it just it seems
• 1:13:08
  a little more realistic when you're seeing like characters, Like when you're talking,
• 1:13:13
  the two characters are talking, they find out the girl is pregnant, so
• 1:13:16
  they have their conversation, and then they talk to the dad, and the
• 1:13:19
  dads saying stuff and you know, you feel like he's lying or this person
• 1:13:24
  is saying something and you're trying to get to the truth with that. Yeah,
• 1:13:28
  one thing that's always intriguing to me is the whole idea that once you
• 1:13:31
  get into the second act, you know, or even the second part of
• 1:13:34
  the second act, that the the energy kind of dies in a lot of
• 1:13:39
  stories, and that's where most movies kind of start to you know, you
• 1:13:41
  start to like kind of wander around the theater. Do you have any any
• 1:13:47
  advice on that or anything that you can talk about in terms of the way
• 1:13:50
  you tell a story, you know, like structure it together so that it
• 1:13:55
  doesn't fall apart during that area. It's it's hard, obviously because the second
• 1:13:59
  I mean, once thing that happened we learned the Sitfield three act structure originally,
• 1:14:03
  and I think what people always were bumping up against was the second act
• 1:14:08
  is too low at two, too long, and it kind of there's a
• 1:14:12
  drop in the middle. And then Sitfield very smartly invented the midpoint, which
• 1:14:16
  is like you have a turning point from the first actor to the second act,
• 1:14:18
  of the turning point from the second act to the third act. And
• 1:14:21
  now he basically introduced another turning point, which he called the midpoint where everything
• 1:14:26
  shifts in the story. I think that's a big help. And then you
• 1:14:30
  just have to you have to keep having ideas. I always have the problem
• 1:14:33
  with scripts that I'm getting that I have the feeling writers are inventing and having
• 1:14:41
  ideas into the second act. If I'm lucky, until the end of the
• 1:14:45
  second act, and then it's oh, then there's violence, and then there
• 1:14:49
  is people throwing each other from buildings and shooting and car chases, and it's
• 1:14:54
  almost as if they start stop writing and just say and then third act generic
• 1:14:59
  third act action. And I'm always saying, because it's hard to tell your
• 1:15:02
  agents what you're looking for, I'm always saying, if you can find me
• 1:15:05
  a third act that is not based on physical violence, on generic physics,
• 1:15:10
  and that's hard, especially in horror movies and slasher movies, because it's always
• 1:15:13
  like the big confrontation in the third act. But if you can find me
• 1:15:16
  a script that has a confrontation in the third act that is not based on
• 1:15:21
  who is drawing his knife first and stating the other person first, then I
• 1:15:26
  want to read that. And that has to do with the other thing we
• 1:15:30
  were talking about earlier, that if you want to give the audience something to
• 1:15:33
  take away and some kind of a little bit of a piece of knowledge that
• 1:15:39
  they didn't have coming in, Like, how is that gonna work? What
• 1:15:42
  are they going to learn out of someone drawing pulling out their knife sooner than
• 1:15:45
  the other person. That's not really something, you know, the story doesn't
• 1:15:49
  resolve in a way that is teaching the audience something about life other than always
• 1:15:54
  be armed and always draw your weapon. So that's that's the main thing I'm
• 1:15:59
  looking for, And I have the feeling if there is a strong third act,
• 1:16:02
  like something that still has ideas, then the chance that the second act
• 1:16:08
  that's leading up to that is strong and not generic and doesn't slump is much
• 1:16:13
  bigger than if the second act is leading towards a generic third act. But
• 1:16:17
  it's it's tough. You really kind of have to You can't ever be lazy
• 1:16:21
  and you can't ever go to like the common places and have things play out,
• 1:16:27
  especially if you're working with the three X structure, because the audience is
• 1:16:30
  so savvy that you really kind of have to continue giving them something, So
• 1:16:34
  don't start shooting before your script does that. What really helps is telling your
• 1:16:42
  script to someone like I did that with Last excessis without knowing that every actor
• 1:16:48
  that came in in the beginning because they hadn't read the script, I told
• 1:16:51
  them the entire story of the script and watching them by after you've said it
• 1:16:57
  so many times, it's kind of an automatic thing. You don't and think
• 1:17:00
  about it anymore. So you can have the mental resource to really watch the
• 1:17:04
  listener react and you can tell exactly where they are engaged and where you're losing
• 1:17:11
  them, like I always lost them at the end. I should have known
• 1:17:14
  that there was always there was always a slump in the third act, looking
• 1:17:18
  back at it now that I should have reacted to it. We should have
• 1:17:20
  rewritten it. But it's really like, you have to tough. You have
• 1:17:24
  to be tough with yourself in that moment, and it hurts because you don't
• 1:17:28
  want to see. You don't want to acknowledge that you're losing them. You
• 1:17:30
  don't want to have to rethink something. But if you don't do it there,
• 1:17:33
  then the problem is just going to get bigger and bigger and bigger.
• 1:17:36
  So I guess you have to keep inventing the story until you can tell it
• 1:17:42
  in a way that keeps the reader engaged the entire time. And you can
• 1:17:45
  tell by oh, like you, you hear a lot of people telling you
• 1:17:50
  their story like this. So there is a student that falls in love with
• 1:17:55
  this girl and in the end it turns out she was a guy all along.
• 1:18:00
  And if you kind of go like, wait, okay, you told
• 1:18:01
  me the first act, you told me the third act, what's the second
• 1:18:04
  act? And you can kind of tell that the second act has gone to
• 1:18:06
  slump because in the three sentence of the elevator pitch version, it doesn't even
• 1:18:12
  come into play, you know. So I guess you have to keep working
• 1:18:15
  on your overall story until you can tell it in a way where you don't
• 1:18:20
  lose the audience ever. And then I think you know that you have a
• 1:18:23
  second act that will hold up. Do you when you're writing, do you
• 1:18:29
  try to write lots of notes and get everything out, and I mean do
• 1:18:33
  a lot of the work, basically have the whole story there before you actually
• 1:18:38
  begin the screenwriting process. Yeah, I'd be snobbish to talk about it because
• 1:18:42
  I haven't written a screenplay by myself since Films twelve years ago. But okay,
• 1:18:47
  I am writing. I mean they were always talking. I think that's
• 1:18:50
  very true about the inner critic that gets in the way, and we had
• 1:18:54
  that very strong. We had a great screenwriting teacher and she taught us all
• 1:18:57
  the techniques, and the result us that we were a class of great script
• 1:19:01
  doctors. We always knew what was wrong with stuff, but none of us
• 1:19:05
  ever wrote anything again because what we wrote would never hold up to our expectation.
• 1:19:10
  Yeah, So to get this critic out of the way, the only
• 1:19:14
  technique that I've ever heard about that does that is to have a notepad for
• 1:19:17
  the critic and just write everything down, you know, give him, give
• 1:19:21
  him the space to be heard, so that he doesn't get in the way
• 1:19:25
  anymore. But then it tends to those notes later. Don't let them get
• 1:19:30
  into the way of the initial brainstorming flow when you're writing something, and that
• 1:19:33
  really kind of works. And yeah, I do that religiously. I don't
• 1:19:39
  start writing anything before. I don't have an exact structure. I have the
• 1:19:44
  turning points. I'm very much going by Christopher Campbell's Hero's Journey, which I
• 1:19:48
  think is an amazing book, Joseph Campbell's Here This Journey, which then Christopher
• 1:19:55
  Vogler wrote into a book called The Writer's Journey. We'll be right back after
• 1:20:01
  a word from our sponsor, and now back to the show, which,
• 1:20:10
  yeah, which is absolutely I think, absolute genius. And of course there's
• 1:20:13
  a lot of controversy. Is it to formulaic, is it too whatever?
• 1:20:15
  Whatever, But just to be aware of those principles of those archetypes I think
• 1:20:20
  helps you hugely in structuring it. And that's what you're talking about about the
• 1:20:25
  slump in the second act. That also helps you to avoid that. Yeah,
• 1:20:30
  I mean, I think a lot of stuff. Vogeler is one of
• 1:20:31
  my favorite books, and you know, one of the things that it helps
• 1:20:34
  me with is when I'm writing, when I'm in the middle of a story,
• 1:20:39
  you know, if you go back, I never read I never went
• 1:20:41
  through the process of reading all those books before I started writing. You know,
• 1:20:45
  it was funny because I was already writing and then I was like,
• 1:20:47
  oh, well, this looks like an interesting book, and I would read
• 1:20:50
  that, or you know, even McKee's story or you know, Save the
• 1:20:55
  Cat, all these other books that are you know, kind of the canon
• 1:20:58
  of screenwriting books, and it's that you learned screenwriting from them, but you
• 1:21:01
  can it kind of jump starts your thought process of oh, okay, you
• 1:21:04
  know, if you're if you're listening to Vogeler, he's got all these different
• 1:21:09
  archetypes, you know, all these different characters that have played a role traditionally
• 1:21:13
  in stories, and you can say, oh, well, this character is
• 1:21:15
  kind of the gatekeeper or whatever, you know, and it just kind of
• 1:21:18
  it helps you jump start that kind of like creative process. So I totally
• 1:21:21
  agree. I think it's about getting you to ask the right questions. And
• 1:21:27
  that's where the formulate thing. I don't care that it's formulate because I don't
• 1:21:30
  have to have everything come into play if I don't want it. But it
• 1:21:34
  can't hurt to ask yourself the question, you know, do I need that?
• 1:21:38
  In that turning point here, if the answer is no, then fine,
• 1:21:41
  but at least you didn't miss asking yourself the question. And I by
• 1:21:45
  now I've even put together like a questionnaire with thirty six question questions then asking
• 1:21:50
  myself for every scene, because so much energy goes into remembering the questions that
• 1:21:56
  if I have that written down once, it's different for every story. Obviously
• 1:22:00
  the answer, but the questions are always the same, like what are you
• 1:22:02
  what are you trying to make the audience feel? How is what is lighting
• 1:22:06
  communicating? What is bumba bumba bum all these what's the subtext? What's the
• 1:22:10
  obstacle, what's the objective? There's always stuff that what are the stakes?
• 1:22:15
  There's always stuff that will contribute tension to a scene, And it really helps
• 1:22:20
  me to not have to start from scratch every single time and then go like,
• 1:22:25
  oh, yeah, right, the obstacles. But I have one questionnaire
• 1:22:28
  that clearly says what are the obstacles and then it gets me to think about
• 1:22:30
  it. And that's basically what all these screenwriting techniques do for me. They
• 1:22:34
  get you to ask the right questions. So that's huge. You actually have
• 1:22:40
  that document, I do, Yeah, I can, you can post it.
• 1:22:42
  I can humility, Oh yeah, that would know, I would absolutely
• 1:22:45
  love to just that's you know, that's that's really helpful because whenever you're you
• 1:22:48
  know, you know, I haven't directed a feature, but I mean the
• 1:22:51
  idea of, you know, having something to make sure you always have to
• 1:22:56
  like kind of get your head in the game and be like, okay,
• 1:22:59
  am I sure that all the things are happening because you don't want to go
• 1:23:00
  back later, be like, this could have been much better if I just
• 1:23:02
  accepted remember that they maybe they're fighting a little in this scene, or maybe
• 1:23:06
  there's like you know, there can be more tension with this or that,
• 1:23:10
  right, Okay, So I wanted to um ah, I don't want to
• 1:23:15
  make sure I'm not missing anything about The Last Exorcism. Um it's one of
• 1:23:21
  my I really it's it's like one of my favorite horror films of all time.
• 1:23:26
  Thank you so much. I can't hear that a lot because a lot
• 1:23:30
  of the real horror audience hated the movie with a passion, really, which
• 1:23:34
  I see. The thing that you always have to take into consideration is that
• 1:23:38
  we are rarely seeing a movie cold, right. We're always going in.
• 1:23:42
  We've seen a trailer, we know that, and that and that about it,
• 1:23:45
  and that's that's actually an interesting story when I like, when Lionskate bought
• 1:23:49
  it, they were counting something on their fingers and I was like, what
• 1:23:54
  are they counting? And turned out their counting while they're watching the movie.
• 1:23:58
  They're counting trailer more moments and when you know, So, when they were
• 1:24:02
  deciding whether to buy the movie or not, they wanted to make sure that
• 1:24:05
  there are seven trailer movies, the trailer moments in the movie that they can
• 1:24:10
  cut a trailer from. And once they reached that, they were like,
• 1:24:14
  We're okay, We're going to buy the movie. So that is something that
• 1:24:16
  I'm now keeping in mind when I'm writing or thinking of the story. Because
• 1:24:20
  if if you have six trailer moments that you are fine with giving away in
• 1:24:25
  the trailer, but one the last one is a major revelationtion you know,
• 1:24:30
  of a character that turns out to be the bad guy or of you know
• 1:24:32
  something, then the marketing department won't care. They will cut it into the
• 1:24:36
  trailer and you can argue all you want, you have no power over the
• 1:24:40
  anymore. They will give away your best kept secret. And with Last Exorcism,
• 1:24:45
  it was kind of similar in that the whole movie is basically based on
• 1:24:49
  the question is this girl crazy or if she possessed? And you only get
• 1:24:55
  the answer at the very last minute in the movie. You're waiting for that
• 1:24:59
  for an nineteen minutes. But what Lionsgate did to create a great trailer was
• 1:25:03
  they took a shot of the girl crawling away from the camera. They played
• 1:25:09
  it backwards, so now she's crawling towards the camera. Then they flopped it
• 1:25:13
  so now it's upside down. They put a silhouette in it that it looks
• 1:25:15
  like she's in the in the light of a flashlight, and now it looks
• 1:25:20
  like she's crawling towards camera on the ceiling, which which is a great shot,
• 1:25:27
  you know, And people are complaining afterwards, like where is that great
• 1:25:30
  shot in the movie, But it was in the movie. It was just
• 1:25:31
  backwards and on the floor. But it also gives away after eighteen seconds in
• 1:25:35
  the trailer that the movie that the girl is possessed, because otherwise she couldn't
• 1:25:40
  climb on the ceiling. And we were so careful not to have her do
• 1:25:44
  anything in the movie that a crazy girl couldn't do. Like in our movie,
• 1:25:47
  she didn't levitate, she didn't spin her head, she didn't, you
• 1:25:50
  know, whatever, whatever, because we needed to keep that question alive.
• 1:25:55
  But of course I should have. If I had known that lions Gate is
• 1:25:58
  gonna put the answer to the trailer, I would have structured that differently,
• 1:26:01
  because now we had an audience that had gone to see the movie because of
• 1:26:04
  the trailer, but was always nineteen minutes ahead of the movie. So it
• 1:26:09
  must have been a really boring experience for them to watch the movie because the
• 1:26:13
  main spine of it just completely fell apart. So I don't I don't get
• 1:26:16
  a lot of people that, like, most of the people that really loved
• 1:26:20
  The Lost Exorcism are not horror people necessarily. They're kind of like I get
• 1:26:26
  that a lot, where it's like, normally I don't like horror, but
• 1:26:28
  I really loved The Lost Exorcism. Yeah, Now rarely do I get I
• 1:26:31
  love horror and I loved The Lost Exorcis's that's really surprising, because you know,
• 1:26:39
  I think it's one of the most effective horror movies that I've seen.
• 1:26:42
  You know, and I watch a lot of movies, and I really have
• 1:26:45
  gotten to the point now with Netflix where I'll put something on and I'll give
• 1:26:49
  it about five minutes, you know, and if it doesn't pull me in,
• 1:26:54
  because there's so many bad horror movies now it's just like the now that
• 1:26:58
  the digital revolution and everybody's got cameras, and I mean, it seems like
• 1:27:02
  everybody's shooting horror movies, but there's a lot of people that really shouldn't be
• 1:27:06
  the care that are making them, you know. But it tells you a
• 1:27:10
  lot about because we were talking about the fast first act. You know,
• 1:27:14
  if you give the movie five minutes, that used to be like the titled
• 1:27:17
  sequence wasn't even over after five minutes. And now now there's so it's so
• 1:27:21
  easy to kind of click the next movie that as a filmmaker, you just
• 1:27:26
  have to be aware of that end give the audience something like I was.
• 1:27:29
  I was when I was on that jury in Kosovo. There was all these
• 1:27:32
  short films. I had to watch eight hours of short films, and there
• 1:27:35
  was this beautiful movie about two monks in the snow, you know, and
• 1:27:41
  I fell asleep immediately. I was like, if you just if you don't
• 1:27:44
  start with an explosion or a rape or something crazy, right that wakes me
• 1:27:48
  up and goes like watch this, you know, then you're you're kind of
• 1:27:51
  screwed for sure. I think with the with the horror, I think the
• 1:27:58
  next six assful horror filmmaker is the one that can figure out the next step
• 1:28:04
  after the fake documentary, because I love fake documentary. I think there's real
• 1:28:10
  strength in the format. But I think that people are tired of the conceit
• 1:28:15
  and for gimmick, and there is a certain cheapness that comes with them,
• 1:28:19
  you know, and people, I think want the next thing. And I
• 1:28:23
  think if whoever it is, can take the strengths of that movie but roll
• 1:28:28
  it of that style, but roll it into a conventional movie, then you'd
• 1:28:32
  really have something like it's not a horror movie, but Blue Valentine's that the
• 1:28:36
  Ryan Gosling Michelle Williams, Oh, yeah, yeah, they. I think
• 1:28:41
  we're very close to that where they you can tell that the performances are so
• 1:28:45
  fresh that I bet anything that they are not following any script, that they're
• 1:28:49
  improvising the whole thing. And yet it's not the fake documentary conceit. It's
• 1:28:55
  not like, oh, here's a documentary crew, here's a filmmaker, blah
• 1:28:57
  blah blah, And that's kind of I think the beginning of an approach where
• 1:29:00
  someone takes the strengths of both mediums and put them together. And in terms
• 1:29:04
  of a look, it's so bizarre because it used to be that film was
• 1:29:11
  so slow that you had to artificially light it. Right now video cameras and
• 1:29:15
  film are so fast that you really wouldn't have to light anything. We've just
• 1:29:19
  become so accustomed to the artificial, artificially lit look that when it's not artificially
• 1:29:27
  it kind of stands out. But maybe it's time to get back to that
• 1:29:30
  and to say we don't have just because we don't want to light something and
• 1:29:33
  we want to shoot available light. That doesn't mean that we suddenly need to
• 1:29:38
  have the documentary the fake documentary format. But we can also do that in
• 1:29:42
  a conventionally narrative movie. Right. So yeah, the thing that we're trying
• 1:29:47
  to do is well, that I'm trying to do is, you know,
• 1:29:49
  I put something together that was kind of, you know, similar to you
• 1:29:55
  know, The Last Exorcism, and you know, the documentary format. We'll
• 1:30:00
  be right back after a word from our sponsor and now back to the show.
• 1:30:09
  But I come from a background of documentaries, so I love documentaries by
• 1:30:14
  Errol Morris and a lot of these HBO you know, the true crime things
• 1:30:17
  and everything, And so the idea was to say, okay, can we
• 1:30:20
  go can we do it? Have elements of that, you know, handheld
• 1:30:24
  camera and going into stuff, but also have more of like you know,
• 1:30:27
  Errol Morris films all these beautiful scenes that are very cinematic as well. You
• 1:30:31
  know, so we're going to kind of see if that works. Because you
• 1:30:33
  know, I totally agree with you. You know, it's like you get
• 1:30:36
  a couple of hits, you know. The Last Exorcism rerec was also a
• 1:30:42
  really good example, I think. And then it's like people when I would
• 1:30:45
  tell them about what I was doing, the first thing out of their mouth
• 1:30:47
  would be like, oh, it's found footage, and I'm like, no,
• 1:30:49
  it's not really. But they're like, uh, you know, we're
• 1:30:51
  done with that, so they won't even let you in the door anymore.
• 1:30:56
  So it's like, okay, well, let me let me go back to
• 1:30:59
  my thinking, back to the drawing forget it. Yeah, maybe you are
• 1:31:02
  that next filmmaker that will break out. It's the time is definitely right for
• 1:31:08
  the next idea to come along, just like paranormal or like Blair, which
• 1:31:12
  and then Paranormal Activity. You know, they really hit the timing with with
• 1:31:15
  the fake documentary. I think if I were to make my first movie right
• 1:31:20
  now, I would really try to not make I know that it's tempting to
• 1:31:24
  do the fake documentary thing because it's cheap. But again, exactly what you
• 1:31:28
  were saying. People already kind of roll their eyes and are tired of it
• 1:31:30
  and won't even give it a chance. So if you can figure out any
• 1:31:34
  alternative, it's probably worth experiment. M One other thing I also noticed is
• 1:31:41
  the use of music in the Last Exorcism, which is kind of breaking away
• 1:31:45
  from the documentary format because you do incorporate a soundtrack, right, So I
• 1:31:51
  was just curious. It's just I think, I think score is such a
• 1:31:55
  powerful tool in horror filmmaking, and you kind of have to obviously find your
• 1:32:00
  balance of realism in the whole thing. I mean, people were complaining,
• 1:32:06
  it's amazing with the internet right now, how many complaints you have to you
• 1:32:10
  know, have to deal with um. Of course, people were like,
• 1:32:15
  very oh, this is obviously shot, it's two with two cameras or it's
• 1:32:19
  you know, different scenes because they cut that together and that together, so
• 1:32:24
  then you kind of and it's true, So then you kind of have to
• 1:32:26
  weigh is that complain worth or would it have been worth? But to not
• 1:32:30
  have shot reverse shot in your movie just for that, I can never say
• 1:32:35
  the word very similitude. There is for that, for the authenticity or or
• 1:32:42
  not, And you kind of weigh your your tools and what you're going to
• 1:32:45
  use. And with score, it was pretty clear to me that the effect
• 1:32:49
  that score has to me way outweighs the artifice of having score on the movie.
• 1:32:57
  Plus a lot of documentaries these days, if you look at Nick Broomfield
• 1:33:01
  stuff, or a lot of like modern documentaries, very very heavily youth music,
• 1:33:05
  you score. So that was never a problem really for me. Okay,
• 1:33:12
  so let's move into is there any are there any stories about the the
• 1:33:18
  life after you made it, or you know, is there any insight in
• 1:33:23
  terms of I mean, did you go to festivals or was it just a
• 1:33:25
  straight sell to lions Gate? Yeah? In terms of distribution, yeah,
• 1:33:30
  I mean I didn't have anything to do with it. It's amazing how much
• 1:33:32
  a filmmaker you don't have once you deliver your cut, there's really nothing.
• 1:33:38
  You're never being consulted again with especially here they did a very smart thing,
• 1:33:43
  and Eli is a great salesman, and he went around to different studios and
• 1:33:47
  showed that the movie true different studios at exactly the same time and let them
• 1:33:54
  know that other studios are watching it as well. To get him bidding war
• 1:33:58
  started and that's exactly what happened everyone, which was amazing to me. Everyone
• 1:34:03
  wanted the movie except for Fox, but the Wine scenes wanted a universal,
• 1:34:08
  wanted it a line scale, and blah blahla. And then in the end,
• 1:34:11
  it just came out to who is willing to commit to the most p
• 1:34:15
  and A, which is what is a prince in advertising? So how many
• 1:34:21
  and how many theaters are you going to screen and how much money is going
• 1:34:25
  to be invested into advertising? And Linscape committed to sixteen million dollars in p
• 1:34:31
  and A, which is kind of amazing for a movie that was made on
• 1:34:34
  a budget of one point five million dollars, and that was the highest that
• 1:34:40
  there was. And they committed to like almost three thousand screens, which is
• 1:34:43
  huge, or two thousand thousands of screens. And what then happened, which
• 1:34:47
  is kind of amazing. I never knew about this, they showed the trailer
• 1:34:53
  in theaters and they kind of the process is that you buy basically advertising time
• 1:35:00
  in front of another movie, right, so you are completely gambling whether that
• 1:35:04
  movie that your trailer is cut in front of is going to be huge success
• 1:35:09
  and millions of people will see it, or it's a complete flop and no
• 1:35:12
  one will ever see it. And we had we kind of had both.
• 1:35:15
  We had the movie in front of Splice, which I thought was a great
• 1:35:20
  movie, science fiction movie, but also a complete flop that no one ever
• 1:35:24
  saw, so that was kind of prantly ways. But then we also had
• 1:35:28
  the trailer in front of Inception, which obviously was a huge blockbuster, so
• 1:35:31
  that helped it. And then what's happening is that the studio is working with
• 1:35:38
  a company that is basically sending out spies all over the country into movie theaters,
• 1:35:45
  and they have a questionnaire and they all they are doing is that they
• 1:35:47
  write down people's reactions to the trailer, and they write down quotes like they
• 1:35:53
  sit behind you as I saw the questionnaires afterwards, and they would write a
• 1:35:58
  boy eighteen look up from his popcorn and says to his girlfriend, we gotta
• 1:36:03
  go see that, and pervaded. They write down how many people are watching
• 1:36:09
  the screen when the trailer is playing, how many people are going to the
• 1:36:12
  bathroom, how many people are not interested, how many people are all that
• 1:36:15
  kind of stuff, and then they that gets translated into a score, so
• 1:36:19
  the studio knows how well a trailer played. And we were playing like.
• 1:36:26
  Our release date was against Pirana three D, which was turned out to be
• 1:36:31
  an amazing movie. Alex Alexaja amazing, but they had problems with the trailer
• 1:36:38
  because they didn't have their digital Piranhas ready by the time that the trailer was
• 1:36:43
  cut, so they put in some kind of weird bead artificial Piranhas, so
• 1:36:46
  the trailer looked crap. So our score was a lot higher with our trailer
• 1:36:51
  than Piranhas score was, which was important because you tried to avoid having two
• 1:36:58
  movies off the same genre opened the same weekend because you're just cannibalizing your audience,
• 1:37:02
  right. If you were the only horror movie on a weekend, that
• 1:37:05
  means you get hundred percent of the horror movie audience rather than having to split
• 1:37:10
  it with the other one. So it was kind of this. It was
• 1:37:13
  always clear that Last Exorcism and Pirana would not end up actually opening on the
• 1:37:17
  same weekend, but none of the two studios Dimension at lions Gate was budging.
• 1:37:21
  It was like this game of Chicken that we're not moving, We're not
• 1:37:27
  moving. And then when the trailer scores came out, it was clear that
• 1:37:30
  the DM Dimension was going to move, and that gave Lines get such a
• 1:37:33
  big boost in confidence. I guess about the movie that they suddenly increase the
• 1:37:41
  p and A from sixteen million dollars to twenty four million dollars, which just
• 1:37:45
  means a lot of presents and TV spots and a lot of presents and posters
• 1:37:49
  and a lot of you know that kind of stuff, And I think that
• 1:37:51
  really catapulted the thing then too well not it was like number one on Friday,
• 1:37:58
  and it was number one on Saturday, but then the movie takers like
• 1:38:02
  overtook it on Sunday by hundred thousand dollars or something. But that doesn't really
• 1:38:08
  matter because everyone is looking which movie is winning the weekend on Friday. By
• 1:38:14
  the time, they don't rarely check in again on Monday and go like,
• 1:38:16
  okay, who actually won the weekend? So we were in everyone's eyes.
• 1:38:19
  We had this number one movie, and because it was a French French like
• 1:38:25
  the French finance, it was French money, so it was officially a French
• 1:38:29
  movie. And in France you don't go by opening weekend, whether you won
• 1:38:32
  the weekend or not, but you go by opening Friday. So to this
• 1:38:35
  day, France would say Last Exorcism was the number one movie in the country,
• 1:38:41
  when that's actually not true. But there is a lot of there's a
• 1:38:44
  lot of pr obviously coming from you have the number one movie in the country
• 1:38:47
  because you sell the movie worldwide, but the entire world waits until the US
• 1:38:54
  has opened the movie, Like France wouldn't suddenly go before the US or Czechoslovakia,
• 1:38:59
  Australia, China, and they're looking at the numbers, and depending on
• 1:39:02
  the numbers, they will decide how many screens to show it, on how
• 1:39:06
  much p and A to do in their own territories. And if you have
• 1:39:12
  a blockbuster in the US, that means that suddenly the entire world pumps a
• 1:39:15
  lot of money into your movie and you suddenly have a world wide whereas if
• 1:39:18
  you bomb in the US, you can have the greatest movie in the world.
• 1:39:23
  But it would be very rare that foreign territories have the confidence to go
• 1:39:28
  for a big release even though you're bombed in the US. So that's how
• 1:39:32
  we suddenly became this kind of seventy million dollars worldwide thing on a budget of
• 1:39:39
  one point five which sounds great, but obviously if you pump twenty twenty four
• 1:39:44
  million dollars into something, you could market anything, you know, But that
• 1:39:48
  was kind of great. And because it's unfortunately true that all Hollywood ever looks
• 1:39:53
  at is your last movie and how successful your last movie was, We'll be
• 1:39:58
  right back after a word from our sponsor, and now back to the show,
• 1:40:06
  and they go, for some reason, they rate success by box office,
• 1:40:11
  which is like such a crap, because I had nothing to do with
• 1:40:13
  the marketing. You know, the movie could be horrible, and there was
• 1:40:16
  great marketing and it was a great box office success that I then get hired
• 1:40:20
  for the next movie because they think I'm a great director because the movie did
• 1:40:24
  well. Kind of doesn't make sense and the other way around. I can
• 1:40:26
  have the greatest movie if you look at Steve Jobs This Weekend, which is
• 1:40:30
  an amazing movie with amazing Oscar Willing winning talent. But Tony flopped at the
• 1:40:34
  Weekend. If you just judge Danny Boyle by the box office income, then
• 1:40:41
  I guess he's a bad filmmaker now or something. So's it's bizarre, but
• 1:40:45
  it kind of opened a lot of doors for me afterwards and got me to
• 1:40:49
  did you go back to Germany and what kind of get to promote there?
• 1:40:54
  Yeah? I did. But Last Exorcis was a huge flop in Germany,
• 1:40:58
  and not really that it wasn't even a big release. It's very weird like
• 1:41:01
  which it was huge in France, huge in Italy, completely flopped in Spain,
• 1:41:05
  completely went up against Harry Potter completely Germany. My friends hadn't even heard
• 1:41:12
  of it, so that was a little bit. What did you tell them?
• 1:41:15
  You say, I'm a big filmmaker. Well, that's why I'm really
• 1:41:18
  famous. It's like, yeah, yeah, that's why Facebook is so important,
• 1:41:21
  so that everyone else was a successful filmmaker. Yeah. And then I
• 1:41:28
  made my next movie called Thirteen Cents, that I'm really proud of and there
• 1:41:31
  was a lot of fun to make and that I would argue is as good
• 1:41:34
  as The Last Exorcism. But it made nine thousand dollars at the box office.
• 1:41:40
  It was screening on twenty two screens, which again has nothing to do
• 1:41:44
  with the movie. It's just that Dimension. It was a Dimension movie,
• 1:41:47
  and Dimension hasn't had a hit in a long time, so they just don't
• 1:41:51
  have the money. Even if they wanted, they couldn't pump twenty four million
• 1:41:55
  dollars into marketing the movie. So if you're working with Dimension, you kind
• 1:41:59
  of know that you're probably not going to go theatrical until you're unless you're like
• 1:42:03
  Screen five or scary movie or something. And then suddenly my career is judged
• 1:42:10
  by my last box office, which is nine thousand dollars. So all the
• 1:42:15
  cachet that you have after the seventy million dollar movie is kind of out the
• 1:42:18
  window. And it's not you know, it's not your fault, but there's
• 1:42:21
  nothing you can do against that. You kind of live and die with your
• 1:42:25
  movie and you're health responsible even for stuff that you had no influence over.
• 1:42:30
  Well, how how was that because that was you know, looking at your
• 1:42:34
  career, that was the first straight up narrative, you know, not handheld
• 1:42:41
  um film. You know, how how was that different? How did you
• 1:42:44
  approach because one of the things that I was, you know, I do
• 1:42:46
  a lot of research and the actors were talking about how well prepared you were?
• 1:42:53
  You know, well that is I would say that is the questionnaire that
• 1:42:56
  we were talking about. Like me, because I always like I get star
• 1:43:00
  struck and I get nervous, like suddenly working with a Ron Perlman would completely
• 1:43:04
  terrify me. And the only or with Routina Wesley, who I had such
• 1:43:09
  a crush on, which she was on True Blood and to suddenly heap in
• 1:43:12
  person, And the only thing that protects me from completely hiding in my shell
• 1:43:17
  is that I know that I am going to be more versed in the story
• 1:43:23
  than they are. Right, I've said over the script for years. I
• 1:43:28
  know every line I wrote. Some of those lines. I know why they're
• 1:43:31
  in there. There isn't a single question that they can ask me that I
• 1:43:34
  don't know the answer too. I'm not always going to give them the answer,
• 1:43:38
  because sometimes you kind of want them to experiment a try and whatever.
• 1:43:42
  But the only level of security that I get comes from my knowledge of the
• 1:43:45
  script. So I guess that's what they're talking about when they say I'm so
• 1:43:49
  prepared. I always want to have one version that I know I could fall
• 1:43:54
  back on this scene if there's no idea on the day and I completely draw
• 1:43:58
  a blank, which you always to do. There's are one or two days
• 1:44:00
  in every shoot where you just for some reason freeze and don't have any answers,
• 1:44:05
  and then it's good to be able to fall back on something that you've
• 1:44:08
  figured out beforehand and kind of go off of that. And Yeah, it
• 1:44:12
  was important to me to not be pigeonholed into the fake documentary corner, which
• 1:44:16
  happens pretty quickly. And because in all meetings that I had, people were
• 1:44:20
  always asking me the same thing, which is can you shoot conventionally? Now?
• 1:44:25
  I was always like, well, that's what I studied in film school
• 1:44:28
  for years. Just because I've made two fake documentary films, like they're the
• 1:44:31
  exception. It's not that the narrative standard movie is the exception to what I
• 1:44:36
  do, but the fake documentary. So I kind of had to prove that
• 1:44:41
  to people. I think that was important to me, that it's not a
• 1:44:45
  fake documentary movie. But if you notice, there isn't a single locked off
• 1:44:48
  shot in thirteen Cents, it's all handheld. It's much much more stable than
• 1:44:54
  last Exorcism because the character itself is not supposed to have a character but it's
• 1:44:59
  all hand which goes back to the whole helping the performances and injecting the energy,
• 1:45:04
  right, I mean it's not what I mean is yeah, it's not
• 1:45:08
  like a shaky camera though, but it is right right. You know.
• 1:45:12
  Um, what was the hardest part about changing formats and going into like a
• 1:45:16
  purely narrative and you know, multicam kind of shot the film with that well,
• 1:45:23
  or in general, what's the hardest part of like making a film?
• 1:45:25
  What's kind of the part that you dread. I dread them all. I'm
• 1:45:28
  terrified of every single step of it. And then every time, every time
• 1:45:32
  after that step is done, I'm always like, oh that was kind of
• 1:45:34
  pleasant. I don't know why I was so afraid of this, But the
• 1:45:36
  next part is really going to suck. And then with every absolutely everything.
• 1:45:42
  When I'm writing, I think writing is the most terrible. When I'm casting,
• 1:45:45
  I'm like, oh my god, we'll never find our people. When
• 1:45:46
  I'm blocking, it's it's it's a stressful thing if you're not not made for
• 1:45:51
  that. I don't think character was I'm necessarily made. I'm more of a
• 1:45:56
  writer soul than a director soul. I'm very introverted and and don't really I'm
• 1:46:00
  not a leader person that goes like everyone look at me, I have the
• 1:46:03
  solution and follow me kind of a thing. So it sucks. Directing sucks
• 1:46:09
  a lot of energy every minute of it, just being social and being in
• 1:46:13
  exchange with so many people for weeks. It's just I'm dead after a movie,
• 1:46:18
  So that's kind of hard. The perfectionism is definitely hard because you have
• 1:46:26
  with the standard movie, because you have a very clear idea of what you
• 1:46:30
  wanted to be, and because it never is, you're always slightly frustrated and
• 1:46:33
  you have to work against that frustration, whereas with the fake documentary is the
• 1:46:38
  opposite. It didn't have a very clear idea of what the outcome was going
• 1:46:42
  to be, but you get all these gifts along the way, so you're
• 1:46:45
  always in a state of euphoria. So it's very different. Like one is
• 1:46:47
  a very dark place. But even with Last Exorcism, I'm so tense when
• 1:46:53
  I'm shooting that I can't and really enjoy it. If I look back at
• 1:46:57
  the Last Exorcism time, which was the greatest time. It's great cast.
• 1:47:00
  Ashley Bell could not be a lovelier and more talent person. I had my
• 1:47:03
  friends around me and my cinematographer, my editor. It could not have been
• 1:47:06
  a better time. And after it was done, I was like, why
• 1:47:10
  didn't I enjoy that more? And it is because you're always anxious because they're
• 1:47:15
  always expecting the next day to kind of go down in flames somehow, or
• 1:47:19
  in me at least I do. I'm kind of a defensive pessimist, but
• 1:47:25
  I'm always expecting doom around the next quarner. So that's maybe the hardest,
• 1:47:29
  hardest thing with the standard format, and that you have to block. I
• 1:47:32
  mean, there's so much you don't have to do in a fact documentary.
• 1:47:34
  You don't tell the actors where they had to stand when they say what line,
• 1:47:39
  you know, and that really helps and it saves you a lot of
• 1:47:43
  time because you can't count on the camera following the movement of the actors.
• 1:47:46
  Because you don't have to light anything, you can pan and go wherever you
• 1:47:49
  want, and it's just much more restrictive in a standard format. Now,
• 1:47:59
  do you want films while you're I mean, the obvious question is, and
• 1:48:03
  I know that you've you answered this previously about movies like The Exorcism or movies
• 1:48:10
  that are kind of in a similar genre. Do you try to watch movies
• 1:48:14
  that are kind of in the same genre that of the one that you're making,
• 1:48:18
  or do you try to stay Like with us Exorcism, it was important
• 1:48:21
  because we knew that we were up against a classic, the Exorcist, that
• 1:48:28
  no one has ever gone to top, and if we were trying to top
• 1:48:30
  it, we just failed. So the only the only way for us was
• 1:48:33
  to stay away from everything that the Exorcist did, like the levitation and the
• 1:48:39
  crawling down the stairs backwards and this whole sexual stuff, and go for something
• 1:48:44
  completely different and get out of the way of the Exorcist. And because of
• 1:48:46
  that, it was important to watch that The Exorcist and know it in and
• 1:48:50
  out, and also watch recent movies like The Exorcism of Emily Rose, because
• 1:48:56
  you also wanted to stay clear out of stuff that they did. And there
• 1:49:00
  was there was a scene that I loved in Last Exorcism that was so creepy,
• 1:49:04
  and then someone gave me a copy of Paranormal Activity before that came out,
• 1:49:10
  were editing Last Exercism, and it was exactly the same scene. It's
• 1:49:14
  that scene where the girl stands up and just stares at her boyfriend sleeping,
• 1:49:17
  and then it's kind of the clock going forward to little bit and you know,
• 1:49:20
  she stands there for a hour, And we had the same without the
• 1:49:24
  clock, obviously, but we had the same with the sun going up and
• 1:49:27
  sun going down of our girls standing there staring at the exorcist who is asleep.
• 1:49:31
  And we had to cut that scene out because I know we would have
• 1:49:34
  been accused of copying that scene even though I hadn't seen it when we shot
• 1:49:40
  it or wrote it. But yeah, you kind of have to be aware
• 1:49:43
  of what the movies are that are going to be compared to, like my
• 1:49:46
  next movie that I'm working on right now as a home invasion movie. So
• 1:49:49
  I've watched you know, The Strangers and You Were Next, and all those
• 1:49:56
  movies that came out recently, or that classics the genre, the wreck Back
• 1:50:00
  and Wrap too. We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor,
• 1:50:08
  and now back to the show, and you can know the men. You
• 1:50:12
  can also it helps to just pull freeze frames from stuff that you like,
• 1:50:18
  the look that you like that doesn't have to be home invasion movies necessarily.
• 1:50:23
  Like I've told a lot of Blade Runner references that obviously it couldn't be more
• 1:50:27
  different from story Bus, but I really like the look, and it really
• 1:50:30
  helps if you can show people what you like and what you don't like.
• 1:50:34
  With my cinematographer, I don't have to do that anymore as much because we've
• 1:50:36
  made so many I mean, done many movies together. But we've known each
• 1:50:40
  other for fifteen years and my taste hasn't changed that his taste hasn't changed,
• 1:50:44
  so we don't have to re educate each other every single time we worked together.
• 1:50:47
  But it definitely helps for everyone else, and for the producers that always
• 1:50:51
  ask how are you going to shoot this? Which is such a weird question,
• 1:50:56
  how am I going to shoot it? But I don't even know what
• 1:50:58
  they're talking about. I guess they need what is the color spectrum? Or
• 1:51:02
  are you going to use long lenses or not? Or are you going to
• 1:51:05
  move the camera? And I mean a lot of directing is pretending that you
• 1:51:11
  have answers that you actually don't have. It really is like every every meeting
• 1:51:15
  that I have, the truth would be I have no idea. Look to
• 1:51:19
  every question, how what do you whom? Do you want a cast?
• 1:51:23
  Would I have no idea? I'm not there yet. We're still in the
• 1:51:26
  story, but you need to give them answers because they want to feel that
• 1:51:30
  you're in complete control, which everyone knows is a lie. But because everyone
• 1:51:33
  is lying, every director that's auditioning for a movie is coming up with all
• 1:51:38
  these, you know, completely made up things that they throw out as soon
• 1:51:42
  as they start making the movie. But you first have to walk in with
• 1:51:45
  the concept. So it really helps to have a visual presentation together and to
• 1:51:48
  have a starting point for the work you're going to be doing. Well.
• 1:51:53
  I've got one final question for you. I really appreciate you, know,
• 1:51:56
  all the time that you've given us. If you could go back in time
• 1:52:00
  and give yourself advice, give a younger version of yourself advice, what would
• 1:52:04
  you tell yourself, Well, I lucked into it. I would tell myself
• 1:52:10
  to fucking hell enjoy it, because there's nothing wrong with enjoying it. It's
• 1:52:15
  not suddenly gone at derail just because you enjoy it. You know, you
• 1:52:17
  don't have to live in fear day. But I know exactly on the next
• 1:52:20
  movie, I'll be in fear again. And maybe that's just my amo.
• 1:52:24
  I think it's getting better from movie to movie, it's probably not something I
• 1:52:28
  can just tell my younger self and he would do it. But I lucked
• 1:52:30
  out with a lot of things that did happen with me. But I would
• 1:52:36
  tell and that I've basically gone through that why we were talking. I would
• 1:52:40
  tell younger people not to look for the green light, wait for the green
• 1:52:44
  light, to write something for the resources that they have, to not be
• 1:52:49
  perfectionist and wait for the right moment because it'll never come, And to not
• 1:52:54
  try to impress Hollywood with stuff that is money related, because they have all
• 1:52:58
  the money the world. I think those things. That's actually, at least
• 1:53:03
  what I'm trying to tell everyone from my old roommates who I watched wait and
• 1:53:09
  developed for five years and the script was never quite ready and maybe someone optioned
• 1:53:13
  it and maybe they'll get an agent until they walked out of the door with
• 1:53:16
  the script and said, fuck it, I'm going to shoot this myself,
• 1:53:19
  and I'm going to shoot it now. I always thought it was never going
• 1:53:21
  to happen, and so I think you have to get to that point.
• 1:53:26
  And if you look at people how people that are working in the film industry,
• 1:53:30
  how they started, most of them have exactly that story. If it's
• 1:53:32
  all in Pelly with paranormal activity, who just shot it for fifteen thousand dollars
• 1:53:38
  in his apartment with two friends or whomever. Like, the first efforts are
• 1:53:43
  always or almost always independent efforts that they didn't need anyone's approval for, because
• 1:53:48
  no one is going to bet on you until you've proven that you can do
• 1:53:53
  it. Short films are not proving it to them anymore, So it has
• 1:53:56
  to be a feature. So you do have to make a feature on your
• 1:53:59
  own and then just pray that you get into festivals and get noticed someone.
• 1:54:04
  Yeah, I think that's you know. I did an interview with Brian Judovich
• 1:54:09
  and that that was one of the key things that he said during that interview
• 1:54:13
  was that, you know, when they're putting together projects that they're not one
• 1:54:15
  of these gigantic studios. They find different elements and it's like, okay,
• 1:54:18
  what can we let's build a story out of what we already have versus you
• 1:54:23
  know. What I would do when I, you know, was just a
• 1:54:26
  writer, was I would sit down and I would just say, Okay,
• 1:54:28
  what can I imagine? You know, and I put stuff together. And
• 1:54:30
  there was a part of me that would try to you know, okay,
• 1:54:32
  well I don't want to have that spaceship blow up, you know. I
• 1:54:36
  try to make it small enough so a production company would look at it,
• 1:54:40
  But I was never writing it from what do I have right here around me
• 1:54:43
  that we could actually film and just you know, make something really quick.
• 1:54:45
  So I think that's well, it's really important because you think it'll be easier
• 1:54:49
  if you have more freedom and if you can write whatever you want, that
• 1:54:53
  you're not restricted by reality. But I think it's the opposite, like with
• 1:54:57
  me at itast with necessary death. Sorry came very quickly because I had all
• 1:55:01
  these restrictions, and I didn't look in outer space, and I didn't look
• 1:55:04
  to the French Revolution, to whatever. But it was very clear it has
• 1:55:08
  to be something that takes place in my kitchen, you know, and that
• 1:55:12
  suddenly gives you a better framework for stuff, and that that helps. For
• 1:55:15
  sure. I wouldn't even because you said you were writing something smaller so that
• 1:55:19
  a production company will like it. I would even urge people to go one
• 1:55:24
  step more radical and write something that they can do without a production company,
• 1:55:30
  because even production companies are are not most of it will fall apart or they
• 1:55:34
  never got to make it and you're tied up in that stuff. If you
• 1:55:38
  really you need the persistence and the energy to emerge with something that you've made
• 1:55:44
  without the help of a production company, I think, and there are probably
• 1:55:48
  a lot of examples that would prove me wrong. But I also I don't
• 1:55:53
  know anyone who actually relied on a production company and then got a movie made.
• 1:55:58
  I just don't. I know the people that have gone the other direction
• 1:56:02
  and shot their own thing and then one festivals and my wife is shooting something
• 1:56:06
  with our best friend right now. They've made a movie that was huge and
• 1:56:11
  was made for ten thousand dollars or something. There's just the thing is that
• 1:56:14
  there's no excuse anymore today. I understand that there were times when you needed
• 1:56:18
  that kind of money because the ever costed quarter million dollars and the camera shot
• 1:56:24
  thirty five millimeter film and whatever, and you needed that support. The great
• 1:56:28
  thing is today you need talent on your side, but you don't need the
• 1:56:32
  support anymore. And that's a really big chance that we should take. I
• 1:56:36
  think, Well, Daniel, I really appreciate you coming on the show.
• 1:56:41
  I mean, this has been an amazing episode where at like two hours now
• 1:56:45
  it was really really fun. Thanks Jason. I want to thank Jason so
• 1:56:49
  much for doing such a great job on this episode. If you want to
• 1:56:53
  get links to anything we spoke about in this episode, head over to the
• 1:56:55
  show notes at Bulletproof screen Writing that TV forward slash three nineteen. Thank you
• 1:57:00
  so much for listening. Guys, As always, keep on writing no matter
• 1:57:02
  what. I'll talk to you soon. Thanks for listening to the Bulletproof Screenwriting
• 1:57:06
  podcast at Bulletproof Screenwriting dot tv.