INT: My name is Jace Alexander. It is now April 25th, 2012. I am sitting here in the lovely seventh floor board room of the DGA in New York City, and today I will be, I will have the pleasure and honor of sitting down and talking with John Sayles about his life in film as a director. So enjoy.

JS: Hi, I’m John Sayles. I’m doing an interview here at the DGA on West 57th Street.

INT: Okay, so I think most of the time, people end up jumping right into the films themselves, and I think this is the one appropriate place where it’s okay to go back and just talk about being a kid in Schenectady [Schenectady, New York], is that where you grew up? And how in the world you ended up seeing a movie that struck you as, "Oh, this is a movie, and I like it because of what it is."
JS: Yeah, I-we lived in the country when I was a kid, actually. I was born in Schenectady, but we lived in a place called Burnt Hills, New York. And so we went to the drive-in, if I was gonna go see a movie. And generally at the drive-in, there were the cartoons which they started before it was really dark enough, so you were really squinting to see HECKLE AND JECKLE [THE HECKLE AND JECKLE SHOW] or MISTER MAGOO, you know. And then the first feature would be a western in color, and then the second feature would be THE MAN IN THE GRAY FLANNEL SUIT in black and white, and unless it was Hitchcock [Alfred Hitchcock] or a war movie, I was generally not interested in the black and white movie, and would fall asleep in the back of the station wagon. And I know that I grew up pretty much not thinking that anybody or thinking about the fact that anybody made a movie, it was just a Gregory Peck movie, or a John Wayne movie, or a Sophia Loren movie, or whatever. And if it was a Sophia Loren movie, she was either dubbed or speaking English, ‘cause I didn’t see a subtitled movie until I was in college. And so it was just kind of this, I liked the movies, I liked, you know, the color ones, I liked westerns more than anything else. And then occasionally, you saw movies on television as well, but usually interrupted by commercials. And we didn’t have a-I didn’t see a color TV set until I went to college. So it was all black and white, whatever the movie had been, when I was a kid.

INT: What were some of those movies that you remember that you can tell us about?
JS: Well, what was interesting was, once again, it would be you know, like Hitchcock [Alfred Hitchcock] movies or westerns that I would bother to watch, despite all the commercials. I do remember when they would show DEAD END KIDS movies for about a week, and then everybody would be talking about the DEAD END KIDS for a week or two, or TARZAN movies so you’d hear people making the Tarzan yell, you know, in the neighborhood, ‘cause they’d show them, you know, the early show or whatever it was that we got. They’d show like a series of related movies. And I really, I just liked the movies. I liked them on a big screen better than on TV, ‘cause there was that power, especially in the drive-in, there’s that reverb, that echo that you get from all the speakers. And this is the day when the speakers were exterior, you didn’t have it come in through your radio. So you know, they always had to add on that half time of please remember to take your speaker off your window before you drive away, so you didn’t rip the window out. And you know, and I was the designated go to the snack bar person, would come back with all the, you know, all the popcorn and Coke [Coca-Cola] and stuff like that. And I’m sure for my parents it would, ‘cause it was one price per carload, it was great ‘cause there were four of us in the family, and they paid for one carload, and you went, and the kids fell asleep in the second movie and shut up for the drive home. You know, and if it was summer, you could, you know, stand outside and hear the echo of it, you know, whereas we were going to the snack bar, you could hear the echo of all the speakers playing the coming attractions or whatever it was. So there was a great three-dimensional feeling to the experience at a drive-in, and I liked the coming attractions, you know, which were loud and you could bug your parents about seeing that movie, even if it wasn’t appropriate for you. And because, you know, all the exciting stuff happened in the coming attractions, just like today. But I really didn’t think much about who made a movie until pretty late on.

INT: But did the westerns at least inspire your play as a kid?
JS: Yeah, I’d say the two things that we played was not only movie westerns, but TV westerns, so Davy Crockett [character] was very popular, so I remember I think I actually had the coonskin cap, and a plastic rifle of some sort. And we played a lot of cowboys and Indians. We also, THE UNTOUCHABLES was on TV, so when I first started writing stories when I was a kid, a lot of them were somehow the kids in Burnt Hills, New York dealing with the Capone [Al Capone] mob. Why they were moving into, you know, rural New York, I don’t know why, but there they were kind of fighting the kids that I knew in the neighborhood. And I do remember being very--we didn’t watch many science fiction movies or scary movies, but I do remember even the coming attractions of a couple of them. There was one that was, I think THE BEGINNING OF THE END [BEGINNING OF THE END] is the name of the movie, and it’s about giant grasshoppers. And if you watched it today, it’s not very scary, but it scared the shit out of me, just the coming attractions, when I was a kid. And it’s one of those ones where it was black and white, and they did the effect by getting these big Texas grasshoppers and actually putting them on still pictures of Chicago buildings, and then shooting like this, and then blowing them off when they got machine gunned or whatever, so... Peter Graves is in it, of course. So it’s one of those things that nowadays is very campy, but when you’re four years old or five years old, when I would first be dragged along to see these things, it would be, "Oh my god, the giant grasshopper’s gonna kill us!"

INT: As you got older, when you would play, did you find yourself in any position of control, organizing how things would go?
JS: No, not so much with kids, ‘cause I was large for my age, so I was always hanging out with kids who were a couple years older than me, and didn’t have the status to tell anybody what to do, you know, whether it was playing baseball or any--I was lucky they weren’t using me for second base as it was, you know. I was kind of a target. But you know, playing with little rubber figures, you know, you could kind of be the Director, Cinematographer, whatever, kill whoever you wanted to kill. I later used them in our movie MATEWAN, when there’s a big shootout at the end, and I had to figure out how to shoot this thing in two days when I knew that we were gonna go into the double if not triple numbers. I was gonna shoot, you know, 50, 60 angles of this thing. And what I actually needed to know is if I shoot it kind of in order, but not exactly in order, once somebody is killed on the street, their dead body has to stay in the background there. So I actually staged it with these little soldiers that I got at the, you know, the general store, and would kind of knock the ones down. I’d say, "Okay, now I’m up to about, you know, 137J, you know, and he’s dead, so he stays dead from now on, you know". And it was useful, you know. [INT: Sure.] Nowadays, there’s you know, computer programs you can do that with, but back then it was, you know, rubber figures. But yeah, I’m sure I was doing quite a bit of directing with those guys, but it was within a genre. I had the FORT APACHE set. There was a RIN TIN TIN [THE ADVENTURES OF RIN TIN TIN] TV show, and there was a FORT APACHE set which had the plastic palisades, wooden palisades, and Rip-whatever-his-name [Rip Masters played by James Brown] who was the star, and the little Rin Tin Tin, and the kid [Lee Aaker], and you know, and some Indians to attack them.

INT: And then, then you go off to college and you attended--[JS: Yeah, I skipped high school and all that other shit. Yeah.] But I was thinking, because you said that you started seeing films that you hadn’t ever seen before, and is that when something clicked? I mean, did you see a film and said, "Now I see, there are people actually behind this."
JS: Yeah, it had happened with fiction when I was fairly young. I started getting aware of technique when I was fairly young. I think there was something about seeing foreign movies with subtitles that actually made you look at them different, ‘cause it’s a little alienating, you know. So one thing was I was kind of interested in acting. I hadn’t really--I didn’t do any acting in college until my senior year, but I was kind of interested in that thing. I had seen almost no theater. I had seen our high school plays, which was either WHERE'S CHARLEY? or THE CRUCIBLE, several times. But you know, I was so, you know, ignorant about theater that the first play I saw when I went to college was Ibsen’s [Henrik Ibsen] THE WILD DUCK. And I was upset 'cause they didn’t have Norwegian accents, I thought you know, "How can this be Norwegian people? They got these--they’re not even doing the accents. What is this shit?" But seeing Bergman [Ingmar Bergman] movies, and seeing that very naked, with no soundtrack telling you how to feel acting, and saying, "Oh my god, these people are incredible. Even if I don’t look at the subtitles, I’m getting this emotional thing from them." You know, it was kind of a much more intimate kind of acting than often was being done in American movies at the time. And just while I was in school, American movies started getting more interesting, too. You know, those are the first Scorsese [Martin Scorsese] movies and things like EASY RIDER and you know, the kind of European influence on American films started showing up in these smaller films. And I had always liked, you know, I later, you know, as I’ve seen them again, I realized I had pretty good taste in westerns. You know, the movies that I liked the best, that I really remembered strongly, were very well directed. You know, they were John Ford, and Anthony Mann, and Bud Boetticher, and you know, Henry Hathaway, and you know, real good, solid Directors who did interesting things with westerns, and had a real visual sense to them and the characters kind of came out at you. They weren’t just generic cookie-cutter, you know, westerns. But--and then Hitchcock [Alfred Hitchcock], you know, because he put himself in his movies, they were identifiable as his movies, and they always had the suspense thing going with them. But I really hadn’t been--I started becoming aware of Directors 'cause we were told, "Oh, this is a movie by so-and-so." And I’d never heard this by so-and-so that you, you know, there was a name associated with it, other than Alfred Hitchcock, other than the Actor. [INT: Right.] And so that was kind of interesting, to start to really pay attention to--and there was not even a drama major at my college, Williams College, but there was one guy who was like a Henry James scholar named Charles Thomas Samuels, who just liked movies or interesting movies, and started teaching in Januarys you could take one course for a month, and he started teaching a movie class. And he did a Bergman [Ingmar Bergman] thing, where you started with Bergman’s first three or four movies, which are really pretty bad, and he didn’t have the hang of it yet. But because he was their big theater Director, they kept giving him another chance. And then all of a sudden, you see him kind of get it. [INT: With what, do you remember which movie?] SUMMER WITH MONIKA, or it’s sometimes just called MONIKA. An actress named Harriet Andersson, who is an incredible actress, who’s still around, was in that. And then another one called, sometimes it’s called SAWDUST AND TINSEL, and sometimes AFTERNOON OF THE CLOWN [possibly referring to IN THE PRESENCE OF A CLOWN]. You know, those are the ones where it’s like, "Whoa, I haven’t seen anything like this." The Actors are still incredible, but it’s not a soap opera anymore. And right about that time, he gets involved with Sven Nykvist, his Cinematographer, who’s also figuring out how to shoot movies, including that their first color movie isn’t very good, and then they figured out color, what they were gonna do with color when that finally came to Sweden.

JS: So I started not only getting aware of Directors, I saw Kurosawa [Akira Kurosawa] movies for the first time in college, and those were kind of mind blowing. And I just started noticing this looks really different, so THE SEVEN SAMURAI [SEVEN SAMURAI] is not THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN, even though the stories are the same, you know. And I like them both, they’re both very well made movies, but there’s some different storytelling strategies in each of them. And you know, I still didn’t know from long lenses or anything like that, but I was starting to get some feel of rhythm of filmmaking, and that idea that each movie is its own universe and has its own tone, and that when you enter that movie, it could be very realistic or it could be very unrealistic, but still work as a movie, as long as you kind of define for the audience what world they’ve entered right at the beginning, and kind of stay with that. So I started noticing those things, and really kind of going back and I was not very good at going to classes, and I always had a kind of insomnia, so I actually saw movies on campus and that were showing in the little town, but I also saw a lot of movies, mostly American movies, again and again, late at night 'cause I had insomnia. [INT: On television?] On television, with commercials. And sometimes it would be like the MILLION DOLLAR MOVIE, so they’d play the same movie over and over again. Or it would be something I’d seen before, and I’d say, "Well, I’ll check this, you know, CITIZEN KANE thing out, you know. I’ve never gotten through the whole thing, ‘cause if you take a long movie and you put commercials in it, it’s 3:00 in the morning before it’s done, you know. But I had insomnia, and once you stay up ‘til three, why go to your morning classes? So I was known to wake up just before JEOPARDY!, which was about 11:30, and watch JEOPARDY! and then go to lunch, and anything that was scheduled for the morning that was class-like, I just was not there. [INT: When was the film class, was that in the afternoon?] That was, that was one month in January, when the weather was horrendous, and then you got up and just did that. But you were watching movies all day long. He had one of the first machines that actually could stop on a frame, and when it malfunctioned, the thing would amoeba and melt, you know. So it took a while to get that, but it wasn’t video yet, it was still film. And the projectionists, the student projectionists were thrilled, ‘cause they got paid by the hour. And if you kept stopping, you went into a third, sometimes a fourth hour, and you got paid for more hours. And no matter if it was a 95 minute movie, at our college it always lasted two hours and five minutes. There was always a breakdown somewhere, so that you would go into that extra hour and get paid for it.

INT: So then you started watching all these movies. At what point did you go, “I want to be part of that. That’s what I want to do?”
JS: You know, I think for me, I was already writing short stories. I think it happened through theater, which is that my senior year, Gordon Clapp, who is an Actor that I’ve worked with since, asked me to be in a production of OF MICE AND MEN, and to read for this character named Slim, which I was in those days. And I said, you know, I’d already been working in jobs while I was in high school, and summers, and vacations, and stuff like that during college. I said you know, "I can actually--I could play this old guy for you. I’ve been around so many of these old codgers in the hospitals and nursing homes that I’ve worked in, I could do this guy". And he said, "Well yeah, audition for it." And so I played Candy, who was the old guy. A couple years later, Gordon [Gordon Clapp] and David Strathairn and some of the other guys I knew were in this theater company in New Hampshire, and they did it, and I played Lennie [Lennie Small, fictional character] in that production. So I’ve been in the same play, playing two different characters, which is I think a really great thing as an actor, a director to do, ‘cause you realize as an actor, it’s a totally different bunkhouse. There’s things you don’t see, there’s things you don’t hear. You could be on the stage, but you’re worried about your mouths, and they’re talking about something you don’t understand, or whatever. It’s a great, actually, experience to have. But anyway, I started doing some acting and then I directed Bruce Jay Friedman’s STEAMBATH, which had been on Broadway with, what was his name, the guy who was in… no, it was Tony Perkins [Anthony Perkins], and Hector Elizondo in like his first big break, which was a very funny play. But I liked it, I really liked directing, and I directed a couple shorts, and I started doing some more acting and stuff. And so the idea of working with Actors was very attractive, but I’d also always, you know, my storytelling medium that I was used to was more TV and movies than reading books, although I did read books, you know, it’s kind of I didn’t grow up with an oral tradition, you know, it was really like this stuff is out there. There were three networks, I watched them all. I watched sports. My brother and I would watch baseball games with our gloves on, and when we couldn’t stand it anymore, we’d go out and play for a while, and then come back and get the game. And so it was very alive in those days, for kids. You know, I could say you know, well it’s about 15 minutes after THE FUGITIVE. You know, I could tell time by the, you know, which channel you had to turn to on what night to see I SPY or whatever the show you wanted to see was. So that was my storytelling medium, so the fact that I was writing stories and it was free to do it was more that you didn’t have to raise money, you didn’t have to know anybody. You could just make the thing itself. So as I--when I got out of college, I was working in various--I worked in a plastic factory, I worked as a meat packer, I worked for hospitals for a while, I worked day labor for a while. But I was writing short stories and sending them off to magazines, to try to get them published.

JS: At the same time that I got a call from these guys up in New Hampshire, and our friend Steve Mendillo [Stephen Mendillo] had just gotten I think a job maybe on SLAP SHOT. So he couldn’t play the Indian in ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST, and I was the other large guy good at playing semi-retarded people who they knew, so I came up and I did that. And it was a really good production, and so I started being a member of that Summer Stock Theater Company. And then as I got a novel published, I started getting short stories published, I was still working shit jobs, ‘cause you don’t get paid that much as a novelist. I parlayed that into I got interested in screenwriting. I’d started to read a little bit about people who made movies, and the people in my head, and I kind of got the idea of well, I’d like to make movies, that would be cool, rather than plays, necessarily. And I would, you know, and I didn’t know that there weren’t that many Writer/Directors at the time. But as I read these histories, I realized oh, there’s Francis Coppola [Francis Ford Coppola], who wrote PATTON, and he’s directing movies now. And here’s John Huston who wrote a couple movies before he started directing. So that was one way in, it looked like, is to be a screenwriter first and then for some way magically, they’d say, "Hey, why don’t you direct this?" Which maybe in 1910 they did, but you know, not much after that. And then the other way in that I saw was Stanley Kubrick, who just made a couple movies. You know, with some of his money that he’d made as a photographer, doing commercials, or whatever he was doing, and kind of made these short movies, and then he made two little features, and then eventually got to be a feature Director. So there were these two paths, and because I’d not gone to film school, my one attempt was in those days the AFI, the American Film Institute, had a 10 thousand dollar filmmaking grant. And so I wrote a feature screenplay and said, "I can make this for 10 thousand dollars," and I could’ve. And I didn’t have any film to show, and I don’t know if they even read the thing, but it was basically a mockumentary, before those things existed, so it was about a--it was an allegory for the Vietnam War, and the film professor who’s making a documentary about this Vietnam veteran who’s lost his legs with his students, starts to--he goes from being a Johnson-like [Lyndon B. Johnson] figure, to being a Kennedy-like [John F. Kennedy] figure, to being a Johnson-like [Lyndon B. Johnson] figure, to being a Nixon-like [Richard Nixon] figure. He’s kind of losing it, and the students are having to deal with this while they’re making this movie. And it had that advantage that mockumentaries do, is that you’re shooting documentary style, hand-held, black and white, very cheap, but you’re staging it so you’re not shooting that much footage. [INT: But how did you know that? How did you know any of that?] I started paying attention, you know, and there was very little written about films in those days. I remember Roger Corman, when he hired people, would say, "Okay, there’s two film books," you know. One was by some German guy named Krakauer [Siegfried Kracauer], and there was like one that was an editing book written by a British Editor who later became a Director. And that was about it. You know, there just wasn’t that much literature about it, so I read those things, but I was paying attention to the movies themselves; to the documentaries, to the features. But I didn’t know that much, you know, but I just figured, you know, just kind of practically how would you actually make a feature for very little money? Well, the best thing is if it could look funky like a Pennebaker [D.A. Pennebaker] documentary, which I had seen a few of, with a hand-held camera, or Maysles [Albert and David Maysels] brothers, or something like that. But it was actually scripted, so you didn’t have to have the beautiful, you know, static shots and focus pulls and all that kind of stuff, and color and stuff, it could have, you know, air conditioner noise and traffic noise on it. But you would only be shooting like a 2:1 ratio, and then you could probably make, I don’t know. I just told them I could do this, and obviously they didn’t believe me, because they didn’t give me a grant.

INT: But you wrote a screenplay. Did you have any models to go on? I mean, had you ever seen a screenplay?
JS: Yeah, two. I think there was some book that was out that had just come out, that was about TV Writers, and it had a couple little sample scripts in it, like a Dick Van Dyke script and something else. And then somebody had given me a copy of THE STEPFORD WIVES, and so I had the format at least, you know. And you know, THE STEPFORD WIVES is a pretty good kind of, you know, genre film, but there’s not much extra there. So it was like, I’d seen this movie. It’s all there. You know, there was not a lot of transposing, you know, from William Goldman’s script. And so that was it, so I had kind of a format and I just wrote this thing out, and didn’t get the grant. And so what happened is, I was a couple years, a couple summers in Summer Stock Company, directing Actors. I got a novel and a short story collection published, and to sell my second book I was gonna be acting in New Hampshire. I just called up a guy I had not met, who had played poker with a friend of mine, and said, "Oh, I’m a literary agent, you know, can you give me John Sayles’ phone number?" And they said, "No," you know. And I said, "Can I get that guy’s number?" And so without meeting him, I said, "You’re gonna sell my book." And he said, "Okay, here’s the deal. My agency, my literary agency, has a deal with a film agency. So if I sell your second novel to a publisher, it’s automatically going to be represented by the Ziegler Agency [Ziegler Ross] on the west coast." And a little light went off, and I said, "Ooh! So can I have that guy’s phone number?" So I called up the Ziegler Agency, and I said, "Hi, you’re representing my novel as a property. I don’t think it would make a very good movie, or a movie at all, but I’m interested in writing screenplays. How do I go about that?" And they said, "Well, send us something you’ve written." So I had just read Eliot Asinof’s book, EIGHT MEN OUT, and I thought well that would make a great movie, and I’d written scenes from-adapted scenes, just for practice. I remember I wrote a couple big scenes from Ralph Ellison’s INVISIBLE MAN, which would've made a great movie. He didn’t want it to be a movie, so it never got made into one. And so I adapted this, you know, this non-fiction book into a movie called EIGHT MEN OUT. Didn’t own the rights, but I didn’t need to, ‘cause it was just a sample.

INT: That’s a lot of work, right? I mean, were you writing on a typewriter or...
JS: Yeah, writing on a typewriter with carbon paper, so you have a copy of it. The carboniferous age, I call it, you know. And you know, and I think I might have had an electric by that point, but it might have been a manual. Sent it out, and then it turned out that Evarts Ziegler, the head of the agency, had been Eliot Asinof’s literary agent 25 years earlier, when he sold the book. And he said, "Ah kid, you did a great job on this thing. You’ll never get the fuckin’ thing made, you know. There’s a curse on this, you know." ‘Cause it had almost been made a couple times, you know. "But come on out here, and we’ll see what we can do for you." So that was the come on out here thing. So Maggie [partner Maggie Renzi] and I drove across the country and we lived in Santa Barbara for two years. They assigned an Agent to me, and we were around for two or three months and then one day she called and said, "Okay, here’s the deal. There’s a JAWS spinoff that Roger Corman is making called PIRANHA. It’s a rewrite. You want it, you got it." And I said, "Wow! Yeah, I’ll take it," you know. And as it turned out, Roger’s [Roger Corman] assistant who did everything else for him that he didn’t do was a woman named Francis Dole, and she was kind of the opposite of the kid who’s supposed to be reading Chaucer [Geoffrey Chaucer] but he’s got a comic book inside. She would have the comic book on the outside, so she’d look like she was really working for New World Pictures, and be reading ATLANTIC MONTHLY magazine. She’d read a couple of my short stories. So when my name came up, she said, "Oh, the short story Writer." And my Agent said, "Yeah," and she said, "Oh, Roger [Roger Corman] always loves to get somebody who’s had experience he didn’t have to pay for." So I got this rewrite, which was basically okay, all we want to do is keep the title, keep the carnivorous fish, and then change everything else about it. You know, the Director Joe Dante really didn’t like the script much, and he begged, "{lease just let me have this rewritten by somebody". You know, and so I had like one meeting with Joe [Joe Dante] after I had written the script. So basically, I didn’t know that Joe [Joe Dante] was gonna do it. I don’t think he even knew. He was still working in the editing room mostly. And so I wrote it as if a computer could have directed it, if there had been computers back then, which was I wrote every shot, every, you know, cutaway, fish, you know, I basically saw the movie in my head and wrote it down on paper. Then of course, Joe [Joe Dante]came in and said, "This I can do," and you know, "the five weeks or whatever, six weeks I have to shoot this on a tiny little $300,000 budget, I have to do with this I can’t do." So you know, after he got assigned, I did a couple little tweaks for him that were just practical. But basically, I got to write this thing alone, you know, did maybe three drafts for them, and the nice thing about working for them is that Roger [Roger Corman] and Francis [Francis Dole] were just two people. There wasn’t a room full of executives changing with every meeting, and they were very specific. Roger [Roger Corman] would say something like okay, page 57, you’ve got two attacks really close here. I think you need about two pages of something else so the audience gets calmed down before we hit ‘em with another attack. Very, very good, rhythmic suspense kind of thing, and he really understood those kind of generic movies. It’s a monster movie, and it has a certain kind of, you know, structure and rhythm to it. And I’d seen those movies, so I was thinking of movies like THEM!, you know, which is the giant ants movie, or some of the Japanese, you know, GODZILLA kind of things, which aren’t horror movies. Monster movies, you know, they’re usually mutants of some sort. And so I wrote this thing, and they liked it, and they said, "Sure, go ahead." You know, I got paid $10,000 'cause Roger [Roger Corman] was a signatory to the Writer’s Guild [WGA], and that was minimum then. Joe [Joe Dante], however, Roger [Roger Corman] was not a signatory to the Directors Guild [DGA, Directors Guild of America], so Joe [Joe Dante] got paid $8,000. I didn’t realize this ‘til later. And then when it came time to do the soundtrack, the music for it, Roger [Roger Corman] said, "Just take some stuff from the library," and Joe [Joe Dante] had heard, ‘cause he’d been an Editor, he knew that library of music, you know, generic music they had, and he said, "It’s not good enough," and Roger [Roger Corman] said, "Well, that’s your problem." So Joe [Joe Dante] took his $8,000 and hired Pino Donaggio, who’s an Italian, you know, pop star and composer who’d done a couple Brian De Palma movies, so Joe [Joe Dante] basically broke even, you know, but got a good soundtrack, you know, for his movie. And it led to other things, it was a good investment, but he basically made nothing as a Director.

INT: Did you visit the set [PIRANHA]?
JS: Yes, because they called me one day and they said, "How’d you like to play a small part in this?" And they were shooting in Aquarena Springs, this little resort south of Austin [Austin, Texas] and north of San Antonio [San Antonio, Texas], ‘cause there was a drought in California. There were no rivers with enough water in them to have piranha swimming around in them. So they were over in Texas. And I said, "Yeah," and they said, "Well, there’s this sentry who doesn’t have a line, but you know." "Well why do you want me to come all the--" "Well actually, Roger [Roger Corman] wants some rewrites. There’s--it’s supposed to," ‘cause it’s a JAWS rip off, "there’s a, you know, a game park, theme park that’s opening, and that’s why they’re keeping it quiet that there’s piranha in the river that goes through it. And it’s written as if it’s new, but Aquarena Springs, if you look at it, it’s really not new. So we need a couple lines about why it’s such a funky looking park, even though this is the opening day." So I said, "Yeah, sure, I can do that." And I came down, and I got to see, that was my first day ever on a movie set. And I got to act at night, so I got to hang out in the daytime and see Joe [Joe Dante] running from set to set to get this, you know, pretty ambitious movie, as funky as it is, done on the little money and time that he had. And I really got a good education working for Roger [Roger Corman] on what is labor-intensive and what is capital-intensive. What can you just do with good planning, hard work, and creativity, and what do you have to throw money at. And since Joe [Joe Dante] had almost no money, it was mostly the former in his case, and he was having to figure out things. And then they spent their money on a few things, rubber fish and stuff like that. I know that they were shooting the underwater stuff in the USC [University of Southern California] swimming pool where Johnny Weissmuller used to wrestle rubber alligators. And they had brought in some real, you know, ferny looking plants for the underwater stuff, but they pumped so much Karo syrup blood into the pool that it reacted with the plants and turned the whole thing black, so they had to like, get a pool ecologist in and drain the pool, and put all these chemicals in, and then stabilize it. And then, because it turned black before they finished the sequence, they said, "Can we come back in?" and they said, "Well, you can’t put anything organic in the pool." So they had to come back and make everything out of burlap, green burlap, so if you look very carefully, although they printed it down, sometimes you can say, "That’s the organic stuff and that’s the burlap," or whatever. So you know, and I heard a lot from Joe [Joe Dante], ‘cause every couple days he might call me and say, "Can we change this in order to solve this money problem I’m having?" And at some point, I said, "No, they have to stay on a raft. I know it’s hard to make a raft float, but if it has sides, the piranha can’t jump up over the sides." Which in the sequel, which James Cameron Directed, never puts on his resume, PIRANHA 2: THE SPAWNING, [PIRANHA PART TWO: THE SPAWNING] they’ve interbred with flying fish so they can fly up and, you know, get you.

INT: So when you visited the set, was there anything about what Joe Dante did that you went oh, I didn’t realize that that was part of being a Director as well?
JS: I think the most obvious thing was how out of sequence they were shooting, that it was all about they were in Aquarena Springs, they were only gonna shoot things that happen in Aquarena Springs, but even that was way out of sequence with all the scenes that were in there. So just that really, really on the moment sense of oh, you’re just making yourself materiel, ammunition to go into the editing room with. I’ve written all this stuff, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But practically, they have to get it in the can, so it’s gonna be useful. That’s one of the reasons that Roger [Roger Corman] was hiring people like Joe Dante and Allan Arkush out of his editing room, ‘cause he figured well, these guys have been cutting trailers, they’ve been cutting features. They won’t do something stupid like not cover things, whereas Ronnie Howard [Ron Howard] was directing his first movie for Roger [Roger Corman] at that point, something like GONE IN SIXTY SECOND FLAT [referring to GONE IN SIXTY SECONDS?], or you know, GRAND THEFT AUTO. And early on, I went and saw it at the drive-in, and there was a really, really grainy shot of Tom Boswell [Tom Bosley. Note: Tom Bosley was not in GRAND THEFT AUTO], was the Actor? I forget the guy’s name. He was on the sitcom, but he was the father of the family. And I’m going why is that so funky, you know? And then I realize oh, Ron [Ron Howard] didn’t get a cutaway, and it’s like from a fore shot, and then they’re blowing it up so much to give him a cutaway, and it’s like you know, and Sam Fuller used to do those but in black and white, and even those were a little grainy, but you do it in color and it’s just like what happened to the screen all of a sudden? But he needed it. Well, the Editors wouldn’t make that mistake, you know, they would’ve been--even if the acting suffered, they would’ve gotten at least one cutaway from a big living room scene with the whole family. So I got that sense of oh, you know, there’s a strategy to the day to get the day done, but also there’s a strategy to you’ve gotta know, have some sense of how these things are gonna come together, or at least that you’ve covered enough that there is enough pieces to put together and have a little bit of leeway in the editing. But certainly, the Actor’s aren’t gonna get to do things, and you know, you might get killed in the morning and then meet your wife in the afternoon. And you as an Actor are going to have to deal with that. And you as a Director are going to have to help that Actor deal with that.

INT: Let’s jump to Actors, because you have, you know, a unique relationship in that you were an Actor, you are an Actor, you’re in your movies and other peoples’ movies, and you work with a lot of Actors over and over. And so when you’re casting a film, how do you think about that process? What is the first step?
JS: Well, if it’s Actors I’ve worked before, or whose work I know, it’s often boy that’s a good Actor, what have I never seen them do? [INT: Why do you go that way?] I think because the movies aren’t generic, and I think often you get the best energy from an Actor when they’re not playing their 25th FBI agent. You know, you think of these Actors who’ve been in a hundred movies, or 50 movies, or whatever, you’ve played a half dozen FBI agents, well what’s different about this one? When it really is a kind of just the facts, ma’am kind of part, you’re likely to just kind of go on automatic pilot and just say, "Just the facts, ma’am," you know, unless they give you something else. So I’m often interested in saying well, what’s probably in this person’s range? They may have done it in theater, but I’ve never seen them do this on the screen, that would be interesting to see them try. You know, Chris Cooper has played good guys and bad guys and all kinds of people. David Strathairn is really a great character Actor. I’ve had him play all kinds of different people, from and not from this planet. You know, very often it’s just like I haven’t seen enough of this Actor, or I haven’t seen enough sides of this Actor. And then what I tend to do is for two reasons, just because of my choice, I don’t prefer to do it, and because it’s expensive to do it, I don’t get everybody together and have a table reading. If they’re SAG [Screen Actors Guild] Actors, you gotta pay ‘em for that, you know. But also, I feel like I don’t want them starting to feel like this is the way to do it, from a table reading. I’ve written it, I’m not gonna change it from the table reading. You know, there are some people who use it that way, and have a couple rewrites after, which I think is a very--you know, Ron Howard’s done that, you know, interesting kind of process to go through. But what I tend to do is send everybody a bio that I write for them, and the bio may be just factual information that’s not in the script, how long you’ve been married, you know, something like that. Or it might be more internal, sometimes it’s like an internal monologue in the person’s voice, almost a first person short story to kind of give them an idea of how that character thinks. And then really what I do is I have a couple conversations with the Actor in person or over the phone, more often over the phone these days, where they can ask me any question they want. And then when we get to the set, their job is to know their lines, know who their character is, and play the moment. And what that fosters, and what I prefer about that, is there’s the shock of the new in the early takes, of ooh, you know, especially if it’s a character that they’re not supposed to know for a long time, you know, and it’s just like you know, in BROTHER FROM ANOTHER PLANET [THE BROTHER FROM ANOTHER PLANET], there was this great thing that Joe Morton is a stranger in a strange land. He’s mute, and what we do when somebody is mute or doesn’t speak our language is we talk a little louder and slower, except the second take it’s not quite as loud or slow, and by the third take people got used to him being mute, and just kind of were normal. Almost everything you see in that movie from the other characters is the first take, when they’re still reacting to this guy who they’ve gotta explain it to, you know. That shock of the new is hard to recapture. People may go, you know, a 100 takes, you know, to break the Actor down to the point where they’re so disoriented that there’s something new about it. I don’t like to paraphrase, so we can talk about the phrasing of a line beforehand, but it’s written the way it’s written for a reason. So I’m really saying, you know, I worked with Marcia Gay Harden on a movie CASA DE LOS BABYS, and her character was kind of a sociopath. And she came to me the day before, and she said you know, "There's just, you know, this person is really on the spectrum of being bipolar, there’s so many ways to play all these scenes." And I said, "And I want to see them all, without changing a line." And so every time Marcia [Marcia Gay Harden] was on, it was like okay, let’s see another one. And they were all legitimate, and then in the editing room, I had the choice of when do I want the audience to realize that this woman is really crazy, and should not be given a kid to adopt, and when do I want each of the characters to realize it? And so I had his this spectrum of behavior from her, somewhere other characters are observing her and some not, and I could choose from that range when to deal out that particular little bit of emotional information.

INT: But it sounds like generally speaking, though, you don’t prefer to do a lot of takes.
JS: I don’t prefer to do a lot of takes unless there’s something like that, and the one thing that I was just telling an Actor I had lunch with, the one thing I always say is generally I’m editing this thing as well, I’ve edited most of my movies, maybe 14 out of the 17. I’m editing in my head as a low-budget Director has to, to not just keep shooting and keep shooting and keep shooting. And so I’m often saying to an Actor, "We’re done with this scene." And they’re saying, "But I blew a line every single time," and I have to say, "You blew a different line every single time. You never broke character, your acting is great. I’ve got cutaways, I’ve got the scene. This isn’t theater, you don’t have to do it perfectly here. It’ll be perfect, it’ll be great on screen, and I’ve got the ammunition I need to do that." So a lot of the keeping the takes down is that, I’ve learned how to use when I can, usually when I’m working in 16mm or digital, two cameras, so that if it’s a big table scene with a lot of people, the B camera’s always doing something different and I’m--got the A camera on somebody until I really feel like the meat and potatoes of their stuff is delivered, so that they have to do 10 takes instead of 20, which is great for Actors, especially if it’s comic, to not have to do something comic 20 times just for coverage is great, ‘cause it’s probably not gonna be as good as it is the first time, or there might be something that you’re just never gonna recapture. I know reading some about the guys when they were doing GHOSTBUSTERS, those guys are riffing and ad libbing, they’re not gonna do the same thing, ever. So you don’t want to, "Okay, now we’re ready for you, take 21, now the technical shit is together and we’ve got the camera where we want it." You wanna have something that’s loose enough and fluid enough that you catch everything, and then you may just follow something. "Oh, I love that. Let’s go in that direction."

INT: You learned a lot of that, obviously, as you were, you know--[JS: Yeah, on the job training.] So for your first job, it seems, and from what you’ve told me before, you learned a lot. So how did you get to SECAUCUS SEVEN [RETURN OF THE SECAUCUS SEVEN], and what were some of the things that came up that taught you some invaluable lessons?
JS: Well basically, the guy who was producing the theater that I was in, Jeffrey Nelson, you know, said, "Okay, you’re starting to write screenplays, you’ve got a little money in the bank." I had actually $30,000 in the bank at the same time, unheard of, from writing these creature features. "We know so many good Actors, why don’t we make a movie?" And I said, "You know, I'm interested, I’ve always wanted to make a movie. And this is the days when there was nobody to tell you couldn’t, but it was actually not so easy to even get a film camera out of a place that rented film cameras, unless they knew you." [INT: Why is that?] Just because there weren’t that many around, and it was expensive equipment, and they didn’t, you know, they wanted the weekly rentals or the monthly rentals, rather than somebody who was gonna, like Robert Downey, Sr., would, you know, take the camera out on a Friday so he’d get the weekend, one day for free, and hand it back Monday morning and get three days of shooting out of one day of renting it, or two days of renting it. You know, it just was a smaller universe. And they didn’t want you to break the camera if you didn’t know how to use it, or whatever. So basically, I started with I’ve got $30,000, how am I gonna shoot this? I found… [INT: So the Producer came to you and said, "Let’s make a movie," but you were gonna finance it?] Yeah. Yeah. [INT: What was his role in it?] He was gonna figure out how to be a Producer. And Maggie, who was just a-Maggie Renzi who was just an Actor in it, figured that she was actually doing a lot of hosting things, that she probably should've been some kind of Producer, like a line producer as well as Jeffrey, and then started taking that title in later movies, when that’s what she was doing, even sometimes when she was still acting. But we were basically just figuring it out. It’s about a bunch of people turning 30, ‘cause the Actors I knew who weren’t in the Screen Actors Guild [SAG] yet were turning 30 and I knew a bunch of them, and it’s set in this rural part of New Hampshire, ‘cause that’s where we had our acting company, and we knew we could get the ski lodge where we put everybody up for about a dollar and a half per head, per night. And there were all these empty rooms we could make into sets, and then there was the woods, and we could put things in the woods, and there was a little theater, and I could have a scene in the theater, so that I would have this thing where no set was more than five to 10 miles away, so that you’re not spending any of your--I think we had 25 days to shoot, not paying any union wages, and the crew ended up being a bunch of people who once again, through somebody who played poker with a friend of mine, made commercials in Boston [Boston, Massachusetts] but had never worked on a feature. So nobody had ever--I think Gordon Clapp had had three days on a movie [RUNNING] where Michael Douglas plays a marathon runner, you know, and Gordon was playing another runner. The least marathon running body that I’ve ever seen, you know, but they shot in Canada and he was a landed immigrant at the time, and they needed cheap Canadian Actors, so he got the gig.

JS: So nobody else knew any more than I did, and so I didn’t have to pretend anything, and so I would sometimes just say, "Okay, everybody take 10 minutes and I’m gonna figure out what we’re gonna do next," and people were cool with that. So we were kind of inventing the wheel. These guys at least knew how to get an image on 16mm film. It seemed like I had enough money just to do it. And so I was figuring out coverage, and I was, you know, the part that was easy was directing the Actors. The part that was hard was figuring out how to attack the day. And we had some limitations of film stock. I knew I could only buy so much film stock, so I was gonna have to limit the, you know, and I did the math. I remember I was in this movie MY LIFE'S IN TURNAROUND, Eric [Eric Schaeffer] and Donnie [Donal Lardner Ward], and I was in the first day of the first scene, I was like the first Actor they turned in, and I was in a scene and I was playing a Producer, you know, who they’re pitching their story to, and just as a joke I said, "So which of one, one of you is gonna go and raise the other $50,000, ‘cause you’re gonna run out of film stock." And they said, "Why?" I said, "Well, what ratio are you gonna shoot?" And they said, "We’re gonna shoot 4:1." And I said, "Well already, you’re over, ‘cause you’re gonna shoot just from three angles. And if you shoot two takes from three angles, that’s 6:1." And they went oh, shit." They’d totally forgotten about coverage. They just thought we’ll do about four takes. And I said, "You do four takes, that’s 12:1. You’re gonna do three angles." And they went, "Oh shit," and I think they did end up having to raise more money for more footage. Well I had figured that stuff out, to the point where as I was directing these scenes, and I knew there was gonna be some cutting in them, I would not shoot the whole scene. I would shoot pickups, you know, and I would say, "Okay, I’m only gonna shoot--use the wide shot for the beginning and end of the scene, so do the first four lines and I’m gonna say cut. I’m not gonna do any of the middle in the wide shot, and then--"[INT: Wait, so did you cut and then, or did you let them go through the scene?] I said, "You can keep going, but we’re gonna turn the camera off. You can keep going if you want. We’re gonna turn the camera off," and I’d turn the camera off and then I’d say, "Okay, let’s start three lines from the end of the scene, and just for the fun of it, let’s do the scene right here. You know, we’re sitting in a booth," there wasn’t that much moving around or whatever. And they’d do it, and I’d say, "Okay, we’re gonna start at this line," and then I’d cover the end of it in the wide shot. Then I’d say, "Okay, now we’re gonna go to the middle, but we’re not gonna, you know, I’ve already cut this thing, and we’re gonna at least do the first two lines, so cut off the first two lines and let’s start from here." To the point where there’s a point in the movie where one of the characters is singing in this little bar, and there’s a lot of cutaways to his friends either watching or talking, and I realized geez, that’s like a three minute song, and I don’t wanna just keep cutting back to the same angle, which is always the sign of an amateur, you know. So what am I gonna do? Well, both of the camera operator and the DP [Director of Photography, Cinematographer] both had 16mm body for the camera, so I had two cameras. So I loaded them both up, and the other problem was that we were getting our film in bits, ‘cause I didn’t want to over-buy film and we’re getting toward the end of the shooting. I had this bar for 26 hours, they had one day off, I had 11 pages to cover with a lot of angles in 26 hours, and we only had so much film. And it was a weekend, so the Greyhound bus that delivered the film for us wasn’t gonna come until Monday. So there I am with so much film, I realize I really cannot overshoot anything. So I got two sticks and I put the two guys at vectors from each other with zoom lenses on, and I said, "Okay, you’re gonna both start out here and when I hit you once, you start filming. When I hit you twice, you stop filming and zoom in a third of the way. And you know, you’re eventually gonna end up pretty tight on them, and the same thing with you," so I said, "Okay, tap this guy, action!" The guy starts singing, and then I would tap this guy to start and this guy to stop. So it was like live switching, but each time they would move in a little bit, so by the next time I tapped them, it would be on the same plane but a different image size. And so basically, we covered the thing in like, you know, ‘cause they weren’t even overlapping each other more than just a tap, and about three minutes and ten seconds worth of film for a three minute song. The guy did it great, didn’t do a second take, and then we had these cutaways to other people, so I could always cut back to a slightly different angle, either in plane--in angle or just image size. So you felt like okay, well these guys really made this film, and they shot it a bunch of different ways. Well that was--that kind of economic thinking is eventually very useful for a low-budget filmmaker, or somebody who’s working in TV where you’ve always got those time and, you know, constraints.

INT: It’s useful, but did you feel excited by the challenge, or did you feel creatively hampered by it?
JS: The part I felt creatively hampered about is that my crew had been shooting commercials and I would have invented the MTV shaky cam style back in 1978 if they could have dealt with it, yeah. And everything’s not in focus perfectly at first, but it just made them too nervous. So the movie is actually--looks too good, you know, the lighting’s--they’re trying too hard, and the only time I talked them into putting it on their shoulder is there’s a basketball game and a volleyball game, where the operator said, "Okay, I’ll hand-hold." And he turned out to be a great hand-holder. He used to shoot the football games at Dartmouth [Dartmouth College], he used to shoot for Warren Miller who made the skiing films, and Bill [William Aydelott] used to ski downhill with his head between his legs, shooting upside down at a guy who was doing slaloms behind him. This guy was a great handheld guy, and I wish I had known it and pushed them out of that. So that was a little frustrating, and it just, the first shot I did was okay, let’s see how long it takes them to do a tracking shot. And we did a fairly simple tracking shot and it took half the morning for a very short scene. I said, "Okay, no more tracking shots." It’s just, yeah, with more people--we had a seven person crew, and that’s including a sound man and a boom operator, one PA, one gaffer, one grip, you know, a DP [Director of Photography, Cinematographer] operator, and an operator. That’s it, that’s the crew. So you know, and no art department or anything like that. So there’s a limit, you learn what your limitations and what takes time, so the rest of it’s gonna be on lock-offs and I’ve just gotta live with that. So yeah, there were some frustrating things where at the moment, I knew there was a better way to do it, but I couldn’t afford to do it. On the other hand, there were things that really, you know, I worked out with the Actor. There’s a cutaway to Maggie’s [Maggie Renzi] character that throughout the night, you keep seeing her come up and order a drink, and she’s getting lit. You know, she’s getting more drunk. And I said, "Well here’s the deal, Maggie [Maggie Renzi]. We can’t come back throughout the evening, ‘cause what you’re gonna be getting is tireder, ‘cause we’re gonna be shooting all night. And so just step forward, say your first line, then step back, and then step in again and order it, but be slightly more drunk." So she did this like four times, and she’s a good Actor, and so by the last time, you know, when you see it in the movie, you say, "Oh, she’s been drinking." You know, she can barely get her words out at this point. And the other thing that worked with us was that I did shoot roughly in sequence for this, so by the end of the night when everybody’s supposed to be tired and ragged, it was five in the morning, and they’d been sleeping in the next room on the floor, and I’d wake them up, and they were tired and ragged. They didn’t have to act it. So there’s a nice feeling to their acting in it, even though I was so tired, and this is why I don’t like to work long hours, that we came to one point and I couldn’t think anymore, so I just would say things like, "Put ‘em against the wall and shoot ‘em," you know. Everybody’s gonna sit against that wall, and if it takes you more than five minutes to light, I’ll think of something else, and we’re gonna shoot it, because everybody’s just too fried. So I do not recommend working that kind--but that was it, that we had the location for that 26 hours, and we shot for 26 hours and got it done, it’s a good sequence.

INT: It seems like you took a lot of those lessons and just kept improving upon that kind of economic way, which I always tell people that there’s economics to all creative things, because you have a certain amount of time and money, but also sometimes those simpler ways are the better ways.
JS: Yeah, there’s also the economics of having been an Actor and as a Director, having that be the way that I came into directing, was just directing Actors for stage and not really thinking about the--all the equipment and all the other stuff that go into making movies. And the kind of movies that I make are performance generated, that’s the most important thing. You know, in certain genre movies, there’s almost a tradition of bad acting or mediocre acting in them, you know, in Roger Corman movies very often, the stunt coordinator would be the second lead, ‘cause they weren’t gonna have anybody do falls, so they just say, "Well, we’re gonna give you some lines, but you’re here to die in a grisly manner in reel four," you know, and the guy would not really be an Actor. In our movies, it really is important that the acting is good, so I want to at least give the Actors the illusion that they have all the time in the world. And it’s important that they don’t feel pressed, even if I’m pressed. And that means giving them a few more takes, and so you’ve got to sacrifice somewhere to get those takes. So some of that is about being as efficient as possible, but also prepping your Actors and giving your actor a comfort zone so they feel like they can do their--they have their day in court and that they can do good work.

INT: Is that true even with the Actors that you have worked with more than once? Because don’t you develop a bit of a shorthand with some of the Actors that you know?
JS: Yeah, well that’s the--you know, I always talk about it as it’s like those guys who used to be on ED SULLIVAN [THE ED SULLIVAN SHOW], for anybody who’s old enough to remember Ed Sullivan, who were juggling all the balls and having the spinning plates. You know, when you’re on a movie set and there’s time running down, and it costs money, and there’s decisions about next Thursday you have to make, and the light is going, and all those things, there’s a lot of balls in the air. Every time you have an Actor who you know how you work with them, that’s a known quantity, he’s not in the air anymore. You’ve worked it out with that Actor. So like with Chris Cooper, one of the things I know about Chris [Chris Cooper] is he’s able to bank a performance and use the rest of the day, but still have something left for the emotional stuff. So when I was making LONE STAR, I just said, "Chris [Chris Cooper], you’re gonna get the last quarter of the day. It’s kind of a detective story, almost every day we’re gonna have another day player who’s got a big part. He may have, you know, seven pages to do. They’re new, they don’t know anybody, they’re gonna need all the help we can give them. We’re gonna be behind you with a camera for the first three quarters of the day. Use that time." And I know with Chris [Chris Cooper], he can use that. There’s other Actors I wouldn’t do it with. There’s other Actors, ‘cause I’ve worked with them, I know, they’re great on their first two takes and then it starts to fade or get complicated. [INT: So you start with them.] So you start with them. And that’s the known quantity, I think, you know, that or they know me enough to know that I’ll say, "I’m gonna have you overact in this take, but you’re mostly off camera, and believe me, it will not be--you will not be overacting in the movie. But I need you to help get this Actor unstuck," or whatever, or working with a kid or something like that. And so if you’ve worked with them before, there’s a level of trust that comes up. The other thing that I can say, and I just said this to this actress I had lunch with, is because of the way that we’re financing the movies, and because I’ve been lucky enough to make movies without having to totally lock into a studio system where there’s a lot more strings attached, the deal is between you and me. I’m the Writer, I’m the Director, I’m the Editor, and I have final cut. So the deal’s between you and me, not between you, me, a studio executive, a focus group in Milwaukee, you know, where they may just decide, "Oh, we don’t even like that character, let’s get rid of him," or "Let’s emphasize this, or let’s make this character look more ridiculous so the hero will look more heroic," you know. It’s between us, and the deal is I’m gonna try to use your best stuff, you know, as far as choosing takes, to the point where I’ll look bad as an Editor if you’re gonna look better as an Actor. You know, I’ll do a cut that’s not perfect, I’ll find a way to do it that’s not distracting but not perfect, rather than use a scene where the emotion isn’t as good, or the acting isn’t as good. And it’s a collaboration. This isn’t theater. The collaboration in theater with the director ends when the show opens, and then you got the ball and you can run with it as an Actor. With a movie performance, it’s a collaboration between what you do on the day and your Director on the day, and then with the Director and the Editor or whoever is in the editing room later, and that’s where the performance gets built. There’s very few Actors who get to just do a one-off master shot, here it is, take it or leave it. It’s gonna get monkeyed with. And so what you want is an Actor who understands and trusts that the monkeying that you do is only gonna make it better, and it’s gonna be about rhythm and a lot of what I explain is, "Look, I’m gonna sometimes ask for you to bracket a performance, which is there’s emotional things that are gonna happen within your arc. You may have figured out when you wanna reveal something, I may ask you to reveal it two scenes earlier. But I’ll also have you do it where you hold it in, so that when I get into the editing room and I look at it in the context of the movie, I have a bunch of choices as to when to release that information, when to let the audience know that about the character. And so all you’re doing is giving me a lot of ammunition to make you look good," and that’s--if you work with the Actors again and they say yes again to working for scale, you’ve built up a level of trust, and you’ve also built up a way of knowing this is what they need or don’t need, you know. So you give them more or less information, you stagger how they’re shot, whatever. Some Actors really get tired, and so you don’t want to work them long days, you wanna get them all the morning or all the afternoon, but not a whole day, and maybe be their Agent and be just, they put so much into something. There’s other Actors I work with, Rosanna Arquette, who’s a wonderful emotional actress, but she’s so emotional it’s hard for her to get back to one. So I would just say, "Well, we’re not gonna do take after take of the emotional stuff. We’re gonna do a take and then we’ll either sit and talk about it a little," or I’ll have another cutaway to shoot that she’s not in, and then in 20 minutes she’ll be ready to do another one of these ones where she blows everything out.