Girls and dot-dot-dot
David Gordon Green and Tim Orr on All The Real Girls (2003)
CATS CAN’T SUBLIMATE PLEASURE.
Rub them too long, purring turns to confusion, mrrrowl turns into a slash down your wrist. Paul and Noel, the ill-starred young lovers in David Gordon Green's second feature, All the Real Girls, are the cats: they feel so many conflicting feelings of desire and admiration and possession that all they can do is explode. It's such a sweet portrayal of youth's tremulous indecision and shattering desire, with its vast, unstemmable hormonal surges.
The 27-year-old writer-director has made an American original, authentic to the humidity and timelessness of the American South, yet with a post-modern willingness to splinter narrative for maximum lyrical impact. Green's nameless, tiny North Carolina mill town is a similar lost planet to the one depicted in George Washington, yet his splintered narrative is a step forward. Rather than poesy out of the mouths of babes, All the Real Girls’ rhapsodic dialogue and despairing over an imperfect love is measured in sustained takes without traditional coverage. Memory is a scalpel, and All the Real Girls cuts with its odd parallels to In the Mood For Love and Splendor in the Grass (with a touch of The Last Picture Show).
But the kiss: not Noel, in mid-story, quietly commanding, "Kiss me on my neck," but the story's start, after a few front-end credits, a Will Oldham song quietly churning breath, a long take in CinemaScope, boy and girl center frame, beautifully embodying the screenwriting dictum of get-in-late-get-out-early: it's all the stuff before and directly after the first kiss, and the smooch itself. The magic and madness that follows comes down to that: first time lips-on-lips, first time words become only embellishment and meaning comes only with the meeting of fingertips.
Paul, the kissee, is an unregenerate skirt-chaser, mostly in the company of his best friend, Tip. (A first act detailing Paul's amorous misprisions was axed in editing, which provides unusually elaborate flashbacks to his pre-Noel rascality.) Paul Schneider's face clouds often, bunched brow shadowing his eyes, as if shielding him from self-knowledge. The starriest moments belong to Zooey Deschanel, as Noel, the kisser, indelible as a dippy virgin who happens to be 18-year-old sister of Tip. Deschanel, startlingly present and transparent in her performances in small roles in movies such as Almost Famous is a marvel. While some may be reminded of the faux-naif delivery of female characters in Terrence Malick's movies, Deschanel is quite an individual. She gets so much out of a line like "I was thinking I like you because I can say what's on my mind." Her customary elongated enunciation is drawn out further by adopting a touch of the Carolinas accent. While a further level of emotion is provided by moody songs from bands like Mogwai and The Promise Ring, the sound design is exceptionally vivid. Its richness is clearest in Deschanel's delivery. She swallows words, syllables, and you can still hear them just fine. And when she says, "Shhh," not "Sh!" or "Shhhhhhhh!," it's as calibrated as any guitar solo.
Some found the picture overwrought, but what is serendipitous obsession if not the most coveted sort of madness? Why shouldn't dialogue be internal monologue revealed? Can you resist dialogue like, "I just want to be sure that a million years from now we can still get up close and you and I can still have amazing things to say."
With all the elliptical surprises of the preternaturally romantic Green's splintered, tipsy, love-besotted lullaby, I thought of E. M. Forster's note on stories: It's what happens next.
Tell me some oblique titles you like.
Green: God, people have been asking—I didn’t think this was a weird title, I didn’t even think that, ever. And now, apparently, it’s a weird title. You know the two best titles of any movie, ever, wait, three, there’s three best. O Lucky Man!, Full Metal Jacket and Take This Job and Shove It.
Orr: (laughs)
Why Full Metal Jacket?
Green: Just musically, as a musical title. It makes me want to dance. It sounds like huge drumbeats. It’s so great.
Orr: Every Which Way But Loose.
Green: Yeahhh! Good. What about Every Man For Himself and God Against All?
So. Girls and dot-dot-dot. That’s what came out of my mouth talking to you after that near-midnight screening the other night. We still agree? Am I mistaken here?
Green: I think that’s a pretty good way to summarize it. Girls and dot-dot-dot.
You’ve expressed a fondness for John Hughes’ handful of teen movies. Did you learn from, resist or embrace any particular attributes?
Green: Those movies achieve a certain elegance. in terms of a likable structure, an accessible narrative, a well-crafted production value. Intellectualized story points, y’know. I think we’re the opposite of elegant, where... what’s the opposite of elegant?
Scruffy?
Green: We are...
Orr: What are you? I dunno! (laughs)
Green: A little rough around the edges. A little rough around the edges. I’m constantly entertained by those movies, but I find very few moments in traditional Hollywood love stories that ring Emotionally true or honest within the characters in their dialogue. I feel there’s a lot of clever writing, a lot of smart doctoring, there’s a lot of craft to the technical aspects of structure. But I feel like the story in a lot of those movies dictates what the characters are going to do. in this movie, the characters’ behaviour motivates this story or the lack of story that will exist.
There’s very little that’s overtly “cute” in the movie. Maybe the bowling alley. There they are, hugging funny, no one around.
Green: Well, yeah. it is cute. But y’know, you get a few of those that people can latch onto, and it keeps the mysterious elements, like they’re in the middle of a bowling alley for what reason, I don’t know, where, who cares?
Orr: Does it matter?
Green: It’s a postured, interesting, secret place that these people are in, in a position that is intimate only to them. And it expresses, in a cute yet subtle way, his insecurities. [Paul] wants to dance but he doesn’t want her to watch. He wants to say he loves her, but he doesn’t want to say, he can’t look her in the eye and say that because how many times has he abused that privilege? How many times has he looked a girl in the eye that he hated and he just wanted to stick his dick into and told her he loved her?
How conscious were you of making stuff for a larger audience than George Washington? You shot with a more linear script, but then mixed it up in the editing room.
Green: Every step of the way, I wanted to make a more accessible movie and every step of the way, I thought I could bring something to a genre that nobody had seen before and that everybody could identify with. Never once did I say, I want to make an obscure art film about love and relationships. I wanted to make a film that my mom’s friends like, that an 18-year-old girl likes, that a 36-year-old construction-working man that’s bruised with tattoos likes. I think there’s elements of emotion, accessibility within the structure, and yet it’s a challenging narrative, y’know. I hope that we insist that the audiences look at things in a new way, look at movies in a way that’s not necessarily going to freak them out, but it’s gonna challenge them to realize they don’t have to be told every emotion along the way, they don’t have to exposed to every plot point. We put the pieces together. An hour into the movie, we find out she was in boarding school. We didn’t know that. We knew that she had been gone, but you unroll things, things are opened up... I mean, it’s never told [in great detail about his uncle Leland] that this wife died and his adopted Asian daughter... you don’t know the story, but you just emotionally connect to people in a way, that if we’re successful, in away that the details are insignificant, the plot, the structuring details are insignificant. What’s more important is what they’re wearing, how they’re looking at each other, how they touch each other, what you do and do not see about them.
The look. You spoke of George Washington as a reaction to not being allowed to make genre movies, that you and your friends would just make the most rapturously beautiful object you could. All the Real Girls is more shadowy, taking advantage of dusk past golden hour, of being able to do more nighttime work on the larger budget.
Orr: Where we’re coming from realism, we want it to feel real. But we want to create a corner of the world that people seldom see, where we can create our own rules and adhere to them in a very real way. As far as the look of the movie, I think we just kind of went with what felt right. Since we were making a film in the backwoods of North Carolina, a kind of tobacco-stained look for the exteriors seemed to suit that. But not as glowing or romantic as George Washington. It’s a dark film in terms of some of the night work, which I like because I think it feels real.
There’s a shot, late, where she leaves him by his car to nurse a self-inflicted wound, and when she runs back up her driveway, you see the slightest slip of her silvering away.
Orr: Right. It’s part of like painting, y’know, making it easy for an audience. I have an aversion to movies that are overlit and I think the vast majority of them are overlit. I’d rather err on the side of maybe challenging the audience to a certain degree in terms of having to really feel their way through the image instead of just having to fed them in a very bright way. What do you think, Dave?
Green: I concur!
The gentleman from no place in particular has nothing to add. What about avoiding male self-pity? Were you wary of making one of those things about a whiny guy who fucks up and blames women?
Green: Yeah, we worried for a while we’d be making a cry-baby story. There’s always that fear that you’re gonna slip into sentiment, you’re gonna have a movie that exploits pity. But in dodging that, you just try to make characters that are interesting and lovable and hateable all at the same time, have a guy who has made choices in his life and the consequences of it that he faces every day. The challenges of what he deals with how he’s lived his life and the same goes for Noel and Leland and Elvira. Everybody kind of looks at their own life and their relationships and the decisions they’ve made and that’s what it’s a part of. I don’t think we deal with it in an overly sentimentalized way. I think we try to be as true to their internal [workings]. Everybody recognizes the mistakes they made and I think they pay tribute to that with their communication with the other characters.
It’s nice, that ex-fling at the bar who tells him he’s not smart enough to have a regret. You realize that, every day in this small town, he lives with the idea that any one of a dozen women could walk up to him, say, “Paul, you’re drunk, let me tell you a thing...” Then it looks like he’s capable of hitting on her again, this whole hold-your-breath in the minefield.
Green: Yeah, right. That’s what it is when he admits to Noel, he says, I just want you to understand what it is that people hate when they see me. He’s totally admitting to her that he’s not the most perfect guy in the world and he’s made a lot of mistakes that are ugly and he’s got to live with it. He’s giving her a chance right then to back out if she wants. ‘Cos she’s trusting him and he’s afraid of her trust. I mean, that puts him at a vulnerable point. And sure, I think when he goes to the bar, if Mary Margaret, when she’s slamming him, I think if she said, “You want to walk back out to my truck and fuck me in the ass,” I think he’d do it. I think he’d consider it.
We’ve heard the stories about Wong Kar-Wai bankrupting his company with every production, constructing the footage through endless permutations of story so he has enough to work with in the editing room. Have you found that you need a certain excess of shooting to shape your two features? Supposedly, you discarded an entire first act of setup about Paul’s relentless tomcatting. If you’ve moving on studio filmmaking with "Confederacy of Dunces," you might not have such latitude.
Green: With this film, as opposed to George Washington, having the resource of multiple takes and scenes you may or may not use, you can feel it in the production. You shoot it for the story, to make sure you’ve covered all your bases, but you try to open it up. There are certain expositional dialogue scenes that we shot that I was hoping, and was fortunate enough, not to have to use.
Overly expository scenes you’d have to use as an editing bridge if certain scenes didn’t work?
Green: Right. in case we need it. I had a script that made perfect, logical, coherent, linear sense.
Fairly traditional.
Green: Fairly traditional.
C’mon, was that a smokescreen? Were you lying to the money? Was this a trick script? Did you always know you were going to chop-chop-chop?
Green: No. I would never... I would say that the script process, I’m realizing now, how different the script process is from the production process and from the post-production process. They evolved greatly and a lot of that reflects the emotional point I’m at in that process. Some things, when I was shooting, I was just like, “This isn’t working, I don’t know why, it feels like we’re just wasting time. Maybe we should move on.” It evolves in the post-production process. You find what you don’t need. You find you don’t need to tell everybody out loud what happens, you’d feel manipulative if you used all these things. What a traditional script does, it gives you an accessibility, the concept of the film and its approach. You can budget and schedule a project that’s realistic and then try to make a passionate project within those confines. Sometimes you know you’ve got time to do it in one take, so you do a master. Sometimes you try to do more traditional coverage.
Orr: I don’t think we necessarily over-shoot.
You use a lot of second unit, you’ve said, and you had the courage, or bravado, to chop a lot out of your continuity.
Green: We had it when they first met. And that’s just boring. I saw My Big Fat Greek Wedding. The chimes ring, their eyes sparkle, then everybody lit up: these guys are going to fall in love! It’s so cute! Then, it’s just like (growls), “No! Get that out of my face!”
Orr: It’s part of what feels right.
Green: At this point, I think we are all getting our confidence, our feet on the ground. I learned volumes. This movie was an education politically, legally, creatively, technically, everything you can imagine. This movie opened new doors and closed ideas and surrendered thoughts. It was just enormously valuable. I wanted to have the safety net of covering my bases, with the intention that either we’re going to execute in a way that’s original. If it’s got to expository, if we need that lesson learned or those words told, let’s do that in a totally original way.
Would you have been content if you’d wound up with a version close to those pages? You would have had a solid film even if—
Green: Yeah, yeah. It would have been solid, but... Part of the freedom I give the editors, Zene Baker and Steven Gonzales, they come in there and their specialty is bringing a flow, a narrative dream-like quality that takes you from one place to another. They aren’t the obvious choices from comedy or tragedy or character scenario. They’re masters at blending these things, using music, using overlapping dialogue and off screen voices. They know how to construct a smart, organic story that doesn’t feel manipulated by, again, by the technical aspects of this story. They just ooze with sincerity in finding these moments and finding these little tangents that are necessary and discarding others. I was talking today at a Q&A, you know that very last scene where Paul is talking to the dog? We had some hilarious, awesome shit where Paul is talking to the dog, the whole reason, Paul concludes, why the dog won’t walk [into the water] is because the dog is afraid of shrinkage on his penis, and Paul is like, “Look, it’s not so bad, it’s freezing cold, I know, but I’m in here with you,” and it’s so funny, brilliantly acted, but in the honest flow of the movie? It doesn’t fit. You recognize that, so you don’t use it. And you pray that somebody sneaks into your footage and sees it someday!
What’s the most piercing lesson of these thundercracks of realization you’re describing?
Green: Um. That the legal process is lonnnng and expensive. At this point, we’re working with financial entities and institutions that demand certain legal steps in place. You’ve got to deal with agents, you’ve got to deal with attorneys, managers and publicists. For actors, technicians, everything’s a political agenda for [providing] the foundation so that you can have the production. Without the trust in your team, your actors and your crew, it’s not worth the paperwork, the time-consuming negotiation of it. Y’know? this is coming from a guy who was enormously shielded from a lot of this, because my producer is taking on this burden. Still, you feel the tension and stress in the entire environment until it’s all ironed out and everyone’s ready to go and shoot the movie.
So now it’s not “Kids, let’s put on a show,” it’s “Kids, let’s start a negotiation”?
Green: Yeah. Perfect [example]: the guy I had cast as the Bust-Ass character, a day before he was supposed to show up, which was five days into the production of the movie, we’d done rehearsals, I’d talked to him on the phone every night, he bailed on the movie because he got a sitcom pilot and he was gonna make a nice paycheck. That’s kind of understandable, but he never called me to tell me that. His agents called the producers and that’s how it was relayed to me. And this guy at this point had become kind of a friend. We’d talked several times, we met with a lot, we’d rehearsed in L.A. Instantly, that was a nightmare. I’ve lost a guy that I totally believed in, that I’ve worked with, that knows what I’m trying to do with this. I made a phone call to Danny McBride, a friend of mine who we all agreed would bring an interesting light to this character but who probably couldn’t memorize the script. Worse case, it can just be him, we’ll give him a funny haircut and a mustache and he’ll be perfect. So he’s on the plane the next day, and rocks it, nails it, brings it to a new level of comedy like I’d never seen before.
He’s laconic, dorky and confident. The third time he says some come-on to a woman, he’s the most confident guy you’ve ever heard.
Green: And yet somehow he manages to be making macaroni and cheese and pizza with girls of his dreams.
What’s the origin of the scene where Noel leans in, “Come here, let me tell you a secret” and the refrain of “hellohellohellohellohello”?
Green: That was Zooey. that was all her. That was rehearsal. Me and her and Paul spent a lot of time sitting in these bathtubs? On locations, you could hide in the bathroom and put on music. The energy and chemistry with those guys was tremendously fun and inspiring and their ideas were invaluable. She came up with that, the credit is hers. That’s her heart and her soul. Those little whispers and little moments, it’s not a witty screenwriter behind there, it’s a genuine girl that feels thing and has a sensitivity you fall in love with, at least I do, y’know? It’s those little moments that make relationships I’ve had memorable. It’s the weird little quirks in girls’ mannerisms and behavior. Going on a structured date and going through the routines of a relationships are inconsequential and ultimately forgettable. But it’s those little things that just stab you when they’re gone, when you know you’re not going to get that whisper in your ear anymore.
It’s somehow a cluttered and a quiet soundtrack, with all the broody music you’ve got in there. Yet the production sound and sound design is superb: she says the quirkiest, quietest stuff and you hear it all.
Green: It’s like ninety-five percent production sound. We leave the wind in the mike, the pops in the recording sometime just to have those moments really captured. There’s a couple of ADR lines we did, but for the most part, it’s the [original] recording. That’s sometimes why they’re off-mike, or you can tell in the break-up scene, there’s some off-mike lines that we used, but those just sound right. It’s naturalism, it’s not like we’re trying to be cinema verité about it, it’s just, this is what feels right, looking at the characters, this coming out of their mouths. Sitting in a studio, you’re trying to re-create... We didn’t ADR one syllable of that break-up scene. That’s an editing and sound design nightmare, camera, matching, y’know, everything, matching the light technically on that day?
Orr: It turned out well, but it took so long to shoot that scene—
Green: It was like a full day—
Orr: The majority of the day just to shoot that scene from where she was sitting on the picnic table to where he starts beating on the ground.
Green: Four set-ups all day. Four set-ups, no light, all day.
Orr: There’s really only one shot, it’s getting near the end of the day, it was getting toward sunset, a cloud comes in front of the sun, there’s really only one shot of Zooey that kind of doesn’t match, but I still think it’s really beautiful, especially for that moment. It’s one of those things that kind of perfectly works.
Green: Then Zene and Steve brought into the editing, a point where her voice is gone, you’ll still see her talking, you hear him talking, you cut to this close-up. there are certain challenges in the editing process that you recognize and you try to accommodate artistically. My editors are brilliant at saying that, okay, these shots don’t match, these dialogue lines are pretty impossible to cut around, [yet] they make a meal out of it. For me, I love... Those obstacles are when creative inspiration comes, I think, you can’t cut it in a standard way.
A couple of my colleagues who saw the premiere, their taste doesn’t run to, well, that type of dialogue...
Green: [grinning] Certainly.
But both of them were taken with, shaken by the long take that ends the movie. [It’s a golden reflection of the town in a river’s onrushing waters.] The arty-fart part of me was saying, here’s Vermeer’s “View of Delft.”
Green: [laughs] I like the guy who came up to me, he was like, “It’s like he’s looking out at the river and it’s his whole world upside down.”
Tell me about the second-unit grabs, such as the amazing two-legged dog.
Orr: I would grab stuff when we could. We had a tight production schedule and a lot of principal... The A Unit was busy a lot of the time. The guys, their primary duty was to go out and find really interesting stuff that we wouldn’t have the time to do, along with the time-lapse sequence.
Green: Whenever we’d wrap early, me and Tim and the camera department would get some shots of the landscape, work some weekends.
Orr: There were many times, the end of the day, we’d see something great, and it’s like, we’re not done yet. “Paul, get over here. Sit up here and smoke a cigarette.” It’s trying to seize moments like that that are totally unplanned. It’s the same thing with second unit. I think we gave them like 10,000 feet of film, hey, go do the best you can.
It’s not like the legends about The Thin Red Line, “Oh, Terry’s been shooting snakes for two days.”
Orr: Not quite like that—
Green: Someday! It’s an admirable process. [Malick] follows what he loves, he knows what he’s good at.
Modern English gums up romantic language. I enjoyed a lot of the euphemism, “Did you date her? Did you sleep with her? You fucked her already?” Everyone’s asking, are you a couple, are you conjoined, but it’s in this evasive language.
Green: A perfect example. I was reading a review today of Neil LaBute’s new movie that referred to his “sizzling, crackerjack dialogue.” That’s all I have to say. I mean, sizzling, crackerjack dialogue, clever, witty writer banter, nah.
You have quite a few lines of dialogue that look awful on the page, flat or pompous as all get-out, but then I remember how they’re delivered, how they’re performed. You have the actors, the light, the moment—
Green: It’s just the truth of the actors, honestly. There’s a lot of stuff that I would write, and I tend to just over-poeticize a lot of dialogue, but I know when I get actors in the room, if they can’t bring an authenticity to it, I’m gonna just follow my instincts and then maybe it’s still too embellished for some tastes, but I try to use my instincts and maybe the actors come up with another way to word it. Sometimes they sell things I never dreamed that they could sell, like that line Zooey has up on the water tower, I just love the way she says, “I had a dream that you grew a garden on a trampoline, I was so happy, I invented peanut butter.” That could look like the goofiest, stupid writer shtick of all time if you put it in the wrong hands, but the way she says it, with such hesitation and affection right there that just... Nothing that she said means what she’s saying. She’s saying volumes, but talking about something that makes no sense at all and matters to no one but him. It’s just the way they can speak to each other and they can let each into their own worlds like that.
Or an exchange like when he jumps into the hot tub, “I tore my nuts,” and she says, “No more cannonballs, honey.”
Orr: [filling in a line] “No more pulling-down-pants games.”
You go, 'That’s absurd."
Green: I hope that audiences won’t be distracted by the absurdity of it. But it comes off genuine.
To take a line from the end of Badlands, Zooey, she’s quite a character.
Green: Yeah. I have a Badlands line in the movie, you recognize it? [Noel] says, “Well stop the world, you came to the door.” It’s also sort of Rebel Without a Cause. We also got a Days of Heaven line in there, where [Paul] goes, “I’m not the smartest guy in the world.” I’d forgotten all about that.
The music is an insistent part of the mood. Any of that fixed ahead of time?
Green: The only piece I knew we was use during the breakup, a David Wingo-Michael Linnen song. A lot of it’s the trust in the composers. Some of the other songs... I knew that when Paul has that confession to Zooey at her bedside, I wanted the song coming from a record player, that had lyrics, but wouldn’t distract from the dialogue, and felt emotional in the right time frame. That Sparklehorse song was the one. And I knew I wanted Will Oldham to write an original song opening credits song. I knew whatever he wanted to do was probably great. So, he went through a couple of drafts of it, and he made something I like a lot. It sets the mood, it sets the scene and you’re ready to go. One thing I learned with George Washington is not just to start the movie right off, because people are settling into their seats, Credits are a perfect way, to not have the fancy title sequence—
Orr: Over black—
Green: Simple. Gets you in the mood. Have a piece of music you can reflect on, get the names of the people you love and all your friends out there, and then everybody settles down, quiet, movie begins. A perfect little overture.
Did you use the same typeface as George Washington?
Green: You know what, I’ll tell you exactly, it’s the typeface from Fame. I wanted to open this movie just exactly like Fame. Which is just white and black credits, same font, and in same exact order of the departments.
That’s rich, after your take on the credits of Citizen Kane, with you and Tim sharing a card in George Washington. the way Welles granted Gregg Toland. You’re saying it’s all about instincts and trust.
Green: Yeah. Instincts and trust. You get everyone there you trust, and you feel confident in the collaborative energy of it all and jump as far as you can.
Do you treat actors and non-actors the same?
Green: Nah. It’s a different process, very different. the actors help me communicate with the non-actors, if that makes sense. Using their professional tendencies and the narrative skills of their improvisations helps keep a focus to the non-actors. It helps keep the subject matter in the scene on track. But what the non-actor does is keep the vocal quality, the natural inflections, the spontaneous kind of hilarity of the moment or the sadness of the moment, it keeps that fresh. So if you have the right chemistry between them, it’s a sparkling dynamic. Every actor needs something different. Some actors need to spend a lot of time, go through every little motivation and really dissect the dialogue. Other actors just want to keep it fresh, just show up. Others listen to music, feel the atmosphere and free-style it. Paul and Zooey, they’re like third take, always the best. Then we would do stuff off-script. The first and second takes, it was like the energy, it helps us have coverage and reaction shots, but we learned in editing, it was the third take we used. If you have actors who are off, if she was a first-take person and he was an eighth-take guy, I just don’t know how it works. I think you’ve got to discover that in rehearsals. We videotaped a lot of rehearsals just to get an idea of how they’d relate to each other with a camera in front of their face. I feel like I’m acting when I’m directing half the time—
Like giving rotten line readings?
Green: No, no. I’ve been fortunate enough to trust Tim with the compositions for the most part and Richard Wright with the art direction for the most part. There’ll be details I’ll try to tweak from time to time, but most of the time, it’s not me behind the monitor. I get to get in there, I’m swinging punches while the actors are talking to each other. I feel like my heart is invested into. It can be intimidating. A couple of actors that my adrenaline— Both the scenes were cut, but my adrenaline wasn’t the tool they need to get where I wanted them to go. I’d get aggressive and I’d try to get them pumped for a an angry, infuriated scene, and they’d just shrink and shut up. And that’s hard. You learn that every day is different. Paul pushes back, but these other people, “David hates me, he doesn’t like what I’m doing, I’m a shitty actor.” I need to obviously learn, if I’m going to try to manipulate a scenario, I gotta learn the psychology of each specific actor and how they work best, because everybody’s totally different.
So, Tim, describe the collaboration. It’s nice to find collaborators you don’t have to talk around.
Green: No shit!
Orr: Ultimately, David and I see movies the same way, we come from the same tastes. We’ve worked together enough to where I know what he’s going after emotionally and what he’s trying to get out of the actors for a certain scene. So I’ll try to respond to that in the lighting. He’s trying to do things that are about the mysteries of love and relationships, and I’ll try to complement that will a slightly challenging lighting style that’s not very pervasive, trying to preserve mystery. When we look at blocking, it’s kind of instinctive where to put up the camera. I’ll set up a shot, go “Hey Dave, come check it out.” Ninety-eight percent of the time, it’s “Yeah, beautiful, love it.” That frees him up to focus more on the actors. We have long conversations, we’ll ride around and listen to music and talk about it long before we ever get onto the set. We shot-list everything, but then I think we just kind of forget about it, we forget the shot list and go out and make the movie that feels right.
Green: What Steve and Zene do to your images— I haven’t ever asked you this, but when your images are backed up against each other, how do you feel about their editing and rhythms? Do you think they speak pretty much similar to how you envision when you’re shooting it?
Orr: Yeah, I mean, yeah. For the most part. Certainly there’s things in All the Real Girls that are now out of sequence or flashbacks, flashforwards. But I think the way we shoot things, it really shouldn’t matter. If we’re all just trying to make the best possible movie we can possibly make—
Green: When you’ve got me and Tim and the editors on the same page, with similar tastes and sensibilities and are motivated to producing the same product, rarely do we disagree. I hear horror stories about DPs and directors and editors—
Orr: I don’t think we’ve really ever had a disagreement, as far as the way to shoot something.
Green: Tim saw the first cut of the movie. He’s like, you could try this, you could try that. We had an opening shot that’s not the opening shot now. Tim’s like, “You could shave that off and just start with long shot for a five-minute take.” “Great, done.” There are a few shots he wasn’t happy with artistically, he’s like, “Just for me, take that out.” And I think, I can’t give it up yet, but then you find a point, you’re constantly thinking, how can I give it up because I haven’t figured out how it works without it? When I get the opportunity to take it out, I know I can do it. Steve communicates with me all the way through [suggesting coverage].
I’ve always loved Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond’s rule of collaboration: Don’t say it’s bad unless you have something better.
Green: I love that. that’s Perfect. Perfect. Perfect. Honestly, that’s our relationship with the producers, the line producers and the ADs. The people who are behind the project, its smooth running, the efficiency of the project. Here’s what I want. Don’t just tell me no. Say, yes, but this is what we have to do in turn. Or say, how about we don’t do that but we try this instead? In the stress, money pouring out as the day’s running through, you’ve got something in your head one way, if you’re gonna roadblock, you’ve gotta have somebody give you a detour, or at least throw up ideas. A couple of times, I just had to call our location manager. He’s the guy who really calmed my head down. When I’d get stressed out, I’d just say, call Scott Clackum, get him here now, I need to go for a walk. When you’re with Scott, smoking a cigarette and going on a walk—
Orr: Everything seems—
Green: Everything is so perfect. He’s the toughest fucking redneck, great guy, but this is for us. Let’s just think about this. You don’t need to stress out about this right now, you’re just like, okay, okay. He’s like, “Cool, bro, let’s just have a good day today.” And you’re like, “All right...”
Orr: You learn that more as you’re making movies. There was a lot more stress on George Washington, the resources were so limited and it could be a disaster any day. We only saw dailies on that film once, in the middle of production.
Green: Then we lost the second half for three weeks.
Orr: Right. There were times where people would snap because we were working straight through, but we’re getting better at understanding, if something’s not working the way we want to do it, we’ll find another way to do it.
Green. Yeah. If you’ve got the communication and the collaboration then you’re dodging egos. When I’ve been on other sets, watching friends of mine on productions and they’re miserable, it’s because of egos. What we try to do is file down the authority of it and have everybody on a common page. The best line in the movie is the sound mixer’s, on the drive to the set, it was amazing, my very favorite line, I had nothing to do with it, Paul had nothing to do with it, it’s the guy sitting ere mixing the fucking sound. That scenario, it’s probably pretty rare.
Orr: We’re all thinking, how can we make this film better?
Green: It’s hard, people come up to me, say, that’s such a great line, and I say, I didn’t write it. Y’know? It’s when Paul says, crying at the bar, “Have you ever seen an animal make a mistake? Have you ever seen a mistake in nature?” I’ll get credit for writing it, I certainly wrote it on the page, you look at the credits, I wrote this motherfucker. But there’s a lot of shit I didn’t write. Bug I’m not going to say, “Written a lot of this but...” I wish you could. In an ideal world, I was telling Tim the other night, it’d be like Jim McKay with Our Song, "A Film By" and [everyone listed].
I think the Italian version is “With the generous artistic collaboration of...”
Green: Wow. What directors did that? That’s great. Ultimately, we’ll get to the point in our careers we’re financially secure enough, we won’t be worrying that having that written-by credit can land us jobs, and secure enough in our position in our careers, to do it for the fun of it [and not worry over credits]. I think I’ll steal that for the next one.
A version of this conversation appeared in Cinema Scope 14. A version of the introduction appeared in IndieWire.