Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1097515
42 DGA QUARTERLY Q: How did you go from Welcome to Collinwood to directing network series? A: The Sopranos had recently changed television, and people were looking to independent filmmakers be- cause TV was aspiring to be more cinematic. Kevin Reilly was running FX at the time, and he came in the edit room while we were shooting Collinwood 'cause he was looking for somebody to direct a pilot called Lucky, about a degenerate gambler whose life was falling apart. They had just made The Shield, so they were really pushing in that direction. For various rea- sons, it didn't work as a series, but that pilot became an industry favorite. J: And we got a phone call from Ron Howard, who had been working on Arrested Development. A: That became our template for television moving forward. We'd direct a pilot, do many of the episodes, and produce the show. Once we won the Emmy for the pilot of Arrested, we had a lot of work offers in television coming at us. J: TV just aligned creatively with where our brains were at. We wanted to do risky material. We thought, we're getting a $2 million budget to make an episode of Ar- rested. Ten episodes, $20 million. Nobody would have given us that money to make it as a feature, to experi- ment with that tone, to make something as absurdist. Yet here we are with great production value, great ac- tors, and the ability to execute at the level we want to execute at. That's when we realized the indie scene from the '90s was turning into [television] in the 2000s. Q: Arrested and Community are two very different shows in look and tone, too. J: Lucky was a low-budget show, but it had a lot of lo- cation changes. So we used little to no light, we shot digitally because we could roll for longer periods of time without cutting, and you potentially save a day over six or seven days. Ron Howard saw that and said, "I want you to apply that to Arrested Development because we've got 35 location changes over seven days, and we don't want to lose any of them because we think that's part of what's essential to the show." Dogme was popular at the time, so we had a top sheet that went out to the actors that said, "Do your own makeup, we're shooting with available light." A: This was the rise of reality television, right? The half-hour spots were getting eaten up by cheaper, popular reality TV shows. Ron was a very smart pro- ducer, so his pitch to us was, we have to save TV com- edy. The sitcom in front of an audience had gotten a little stale, and single cams were so expensive, so how do we do this? Well, we knew how to make mov- ies for nothing, so Arrested Development became the first scripted show on major network television shot on digital video. We got a lot of flak for that from the studio. They said, "It's gonna look like shit." We were filled the theater, and a week after the festival, we haven't heard from anybody. Except a week after that, Steven Soderbergh called. If you find just one person moved by your work, that can be it. Q: Was this 1997, when he had his berserk comedy Schizopolis at Slamdance? J: That's why we bonded with him. Our first movie was nonlinear and riotous, absurdist in tone, the kind of movie only Steven Soderbergh would respond to. Q: What did he say when he cold-called you? J: I was in film school at UCLA at the time, and I thought it was one of my fellow students fucking with me. But Steven was very thoughtful. He took us to lunch and scared the shit out of us a little bit. It was "I want to help you guys get another movie made, but I'm worried my career may be expiring." That lunch gave us a perspective we still talk about to this day. At the time, Steven was the poster boy for maverick filmmakers, the most famous story to come out of Sundance, and eight years later was struggling with what to do. Q: He was making Out of Sight then, right? J: Yes. He said, "I've got to make somebody some money." He stressed to us that it's called show "busi- ness." That was the first time we thought about it that way, that your art has to in some way support the in- vestment that's been put into it. So we went on a jour- ney with him, watched him make Out of Sight and Ocean's Eleven, and tried to get our next film made, called Welcome to Collinwood. Q: What's a memory of watching Soderbergh shoot Out of Sight? J: There was a dinner scene in a glass-walled res- taurant on the stage at Universal. Steven likes a very quiet, calm set. This was before he was DP-ing, so he sat right next to the camera, and has a dialogue with the actors as the scene is pro- gressing. I think the only other people besides George Clooney, Jennifer Lopez and the camera operator were Anth and I two tables away. All we could think of was George thinking, "Who the hell are these two guys? Teamsters?" Q: Is it weird to think that you were once indie guys as he was making his big studio leap, and now you're di- recting massive tentpole films and he's shooting movies on an iPhone? A: We've thought a lot about the first half of that, but not the second half! J: It's interesting because we didn't understand how to make commercial content until we met Steven and George Clooney. "We would rewind the car chase in The French Connection over and over, study how [William Friedkin] made his edits, how certain angles created more tension than others. Watch Goodfellas a hundred times and you'll learn more than you ever could in film school." —JOE RUSSO