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