E.C. Authors David Licata and Rolando Teco recently embarked on an extended conversation on the subject of fame. Here's part six of their exchange:
In the last post, David asked Rolando the following question:
DL: So, Rolando, your next film project--will you be looking to attach celebrity
actors or not?
RT: Good question! I'd say, it depends entirely on the project. If it's something that I'd like to do on a micro-budget, and thus maintain greater control over the storytelling, then definitely "no." Because let's face it, the moment "names" are involved in any project, conditions must be met -- standard requirements surround actors of a certain level of fame because a certain level of fame affords them the opportunity to support a host of others whose livelihood depends on demands being made and met. Publicists, agents, managers, stylists, trailers, drivers, security etc. etc. This is no big deal at a certain budget level but at the micro-budget it would be impossible to sustain.
On the other hand, if a project has great commercial potential, there's an argument to be made for playing by the rules of the business. If you've written something that is clearly inherently commercial and could easily generate big box office, it would seem silly from a business perspective, NOT to cast box office celebrities in the lead roles. By casting unknowns, one would be essentially taking a certain kind of script and squeezing it into the budget and production schedule of something completely different.
I am not sure, however, that temperamentally I am cut out for big budget filmmaking. The experience is far less intimate... especially in working with the actors. On a low budget film, actors feel like true collaborators. On bigger budget shoots, they feel more and more like highly paid "flesh puppets," to borrow a term I first heard used by my friend Trefor Proud. They are coddled and isolated, protected in their trailers and hotel suites from the burdens of the shoot and from all serious decision making about the shoot. By protecting them so thoroughly, the production separates the actors from the organic process of the evolution of the director's vision. Because every shoot does take a director in unexpected directions. It's the nature of filmmaking. It's extraordinarily collaborative. When actors are coddled too much, they are partially cheated out of one of the most potent and thrilling aspects of their contribution, that of true collaborators in the overall vision.
I'll give you a specific example. When we were shooting the Nebraska sequence of We Pedal Uphill with Alvin Epstein and Molly Powell, the final pages of the script call for an eerie confrontation between the two characters. In our original scout, we had narrowed it down to two railroad crossings for these pages of the script. The scene takes place parked in the middle of a railroad crossing at dusk. The entire time, the woman has no idea whether a freight train might come barreling into the truck at any moment, adding to the tension of the scene.
When Alvin Epstein and Molly Powell arrived in Omaha we took them on a tour of locations a couple days before shooting. We had chosen a rather deserted industrial railroad crossing for the final moments of the scene. It was a kind of depressed area, with squat warehouse buildings but not much else. Definitely a place where no one would hear you scream at night after work hours as the sun was setting. When Alvin saw the spot we'd picked he expressed his surprise. In reading and rehearsing the script in New York, he told me he'd always imagined the scene unfolding in a much more deserted rural crossing, with not a building in sight--just farmland.
This was a surprise to us but because we were lean and mean -- shooting with a crew of fewer than 10 people -- our producer Darren Chilton and I agreed that after dropping the actors off at the hotel, we would spend a couple extra hours scouting for the rural railroad crossing Alvin had envisaged. With less than 36 hours to go 'til we commenced shooting, there was no guarantee that we would find such a place but we set out to do so nonetheless. And, to our surprise and delight, when we crested the top of a rolling hill in the farm country a mere 20 miles west of Omaha, we came upon what we both knew almost immediately was our perfect spot.
And so we scrambled to adjust our shooting schedule to accommodate the new location which was 20 miles in the opposite direction from home base from our original spot. We reconfigured the entire schedule that night in Darren's hotel room and announced the change to the cast and crew the following morning at breakfast. This, I am convinced, made that final scene far more memorable and I am grateful to Alvin for speaking up. But this sort of change would never have been possible with a crew of 200-300. So there are great advantages to shooting on a shoestring -- most notably, freedom to change course on a moment's notice.
And how about you, David? Any of your feature-length scripts cry out for names?
