Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1029125
DGA QUARTERLY 39 aren't going to be up with your ideas. I had so many ideas. My think- ing was the day I felt technically competent, I'll start on a bigger work that will express a bigger idea. In '85, I started on my Super 8 feature. Q: That was your first feature, It's Impossible to Learn to Plow by Reading Books (1988), and an extremely interesting one. Slacker (1990) is incorrectly thought to be your debut. A: When Slacker first came out, the story was like I picked up a camera yesterday. But I had made probably 15 shorts and a feature before that. I didn't just go from college dropout, never seeing a movie. I watched thousands of movies. There is no overnight suc- cess. I know that's a good story. Like I was this guy on the street, this idiot savant filmmaker. But it's really not the case. Q: What did you learn on Plow? A: First, I learned to just really work through my ideas: reject the bad ones, embrace the good ones, and execute them. Then finding out how, after you get an idea, stick to it. I ended up cutting out a lot of stuff I loved, and going all the way with my original idea of shooting in a minimalist, structural style about alienation and a lack of com- munication, with a guy interacting with machines more than people. Q: That's important, because you made a hard artistic choice, a re- ally good example of setting up limitations. This belongs in and that doesn't belong in. A: You've got to make those choices. I deferred all the things I cut in Plow to include in Slacker. Q: How did you land on the key idea in Slacker, which was instructing your non-pro actors in Austin that you were filming a documentary of the fictional characters they were playing? A: It sort of came out of the French New Wave. I thought of movies like Jean-Luc Godard's Masculine Feminine, in which characters are interviewed. Fiction that felt like documentary. I was confident that I could do it. To do it now, it would probably scare me to get non- professional actors to do four-minute monologues without cuts and think we could pull that off. But then, I knew we could. I made the actors feel comfortable to put it in their own words. The dialogues and ideas came from a million different directions, but I wanted there to be a through-line of energy and thought and style and performance. I wanted it to feel real, however hyperbolic or crazy it may be. That was the first trick I think I ever pulled off that people felt like, "Oh, that just felt real." You can trigger some- thing in an audience's brain to make them think it's real. Q: Slacker stands as a testament to the power of ensemble and col- laboration, both of which were new things for you then as a filmmaker. What did you discover about this process? A: On Slacker I learned to actually collaborate. My biggest leap wasn't from Slacker, a super low-budget indie movie, to Dazed and Confused, a studio film, but from Plow, made completely alone, to Slacker, communicating with seven people who aren't getting paid and like why should they make my film and listen to me? Who am I? What motivates them? You get their trust. They showed up on time. Several of them were skeptical by nature so I would have to say, "No, here is the shot. Start here, we're going to do this all in one shot." And my DP Lee Daniel was like, "OK, let's do it." So, he was with the cinematic chal- lenge of what I wanted it to be and we got that. He was with my plan. You're doing the DP a favor if you know every shot you want and how you're going to use it. If you head in with no visual plan what- soever, you will probably get something that looks like a TV movie. You have got to have the courage of your convictions because the world is going to give you some really well-meaning but really me- diocre ideas. The people who love you the most will bring you really well-meaning ideas for what you should be doing with your life. And if you listen to all those, you will probably have a pretty boring life. You need to say, "Thank you, I love you, but here's what I want to do." You've got to have the courage of your own crazy ideas for what you are doing on every little thing. Q: After the phenomenon of Slacker, how did you handle the adver- sities that you faced with your first movie for studios, Dazed and Confused? A: It was so bizarre to sit through the test screenings and hear the audience go ape shit and then hear the studio's distribution people go, "Well, we don't have any stars in it. We don't have this, don't have that"—a glass half-empty attitude. I would tell them that everybody's been to high school and everybody's always in the mood for a comedy and, if you want to get technical, there are 40 million pot smokers in the country. I think there are actually some things here people might like instead of dislike. But they never could turn the corner. They were kind of suspect about me. I'm amazed I even got that film made. Universal at that time didn't really want to make it and Paramount did, but Universal wouldn't let it go in case it was a hit. The sad irony is on Everybody Wants Some!!, the opposite happened. I had written it under a contract with Paramount, and they didn't want to make it, but Universal did. Paramount wouldn't let it go to Universal, but let it get made and then didn't really get behind it. Q: A lot of directors would have quit. A: It's definitely dark-night-of-the-soul territory. I had to slap my- self in the head and go, "Wait a second." I had to come to my own conclusions really quick, and the thing I came to serves me to this day. I learned not to expect anything. Some things you can con- trol and some you can't. And you're not going to get it all. When it doesn't do as well as it could have, don't let that affect you. You have to find the process, and the reward is in the doing as long as I gave it everything I've got. Years later, while still disappointed with maybe how certain films perform in the marketplace or the way they get distributed, I know I like the film. I like the experience I had making it. The thing about (Dazed and Confused), people liked the film. Sean Daniel, one of my producers, told me everyone in the industry saw it and liked it. And sure enough, everyone wanted to do my next movie. I was able to get unprecedented creative control from Castle Rock to do this really weird arty film about two people talking. Like no one would have done Before Sunrise before Dazed and Confused. So some good things came out of that. The fact is that every director feels screwed over and misunderstood. But the worst thing about our industry is not being happy with suc- cess. I remember when School of Rock (2003) did well. But according