INT: So you just mentioned working with Rosanna Arquette, which was your third film, BABY, IT'S YOU, which was a significantly higher budget than you had worked with on your previous two films.
JS: Yeah, that was about three million and change, and… LIANNA was… LIANNA was three hundred thousand, and SECAUCUS SEVEN [THE RETURN OF THE SECAUCUS SEVEN] was about 40, once we blew it up. [INT: That’s a big difference, so how did you approach that differently?] Well, first of all, it had a different-it had started, and it was at Warner Brothers, and then they put it into turnaround, and we got very lucky in that the executive there who wanted to make it, Claire Townsend actually started making phone calls around town, saying wait, there’s a real steal, you could get this project. And Paramount [Paramount Pictures] picked it up, but they weren’t real sure about it. And they weren’t real sure about Vincent Spano, and they weren’t really sure about Rosanna Arquette. So it’s the only time that I’ve done-I had to do formal screen tests, which I thought was actually kind of cool, because it was either well, they’re either gonna say yes or they’re not gonna make the movie, because they didn’t come up with anybody I was at all interested in having play these parts, and we’d been doing all the stuff. So it was like, well either on Monday we’ll be directing a movie, or not. And you know, things happen and don’t happen. But I got to work for a day with Michael Ballhaus, the cinematographer, and it was like oh, somebody’s gonna pay for us to have a day where we get to mess around with the camera and get to get used to his crew, and all that kind of stuff? Well what fun is that? So we shot these screen tests, and they were nice scenes, and we shot a couple scenes and everything. But I got to at least talk with Michael [Michael Ballhaus] and get an idea of that thing that you always have to find out with a DP [Director of Photography] is his wide and low similar to my wide and low? This is before digital assists or any of those kind of video assists or any of these things, so you really had to look through the camera and say, "Yeah, that looks exactly like what I said. We have the same vocabulary about shots."

INT: But also, he [Michael Ballhaus] had made a lot more films than you had.
JS: Yeah, he had, but it was I think only the second thing that he had shot in the United States. He was in [Naibet?] at the time, he’d shot one movie for Peter Lilienthal that actually never got released, with Joe Pesci in it, called MR. WONDERFUL [DEAR MR. WONDERFUL. Note: Film was released]. It was a very nice little movie, but he really was new here. So it wasn’t like he was a saberlo todo [Spanish for know it all.], a know it all, he was more like, "Okay, how do things work here?" The crew setup was different and stuff like that, he was working with American unions for the first time. But really, because it was one of these things where we were making the movie on a bank loan, so all Paramount [Paramount Pictures] did was give a slip of paper to a bank and said finance these people. So it wasn’t an official Paramount movie until we were editing it. So they really, once they gave us the green light, had to kind of leave us alone. So they passed on Vincent [Vincent Spano] and Rosanna [Rosanna Arquette] and said, "Okay, you can make it with those guys. We’re not crazy about them, but you know, okay, go ahead and make it. It’s only three million dollars, and it’s a kid movie, and kids like this kind of thing." So we really then were left alone during the whole shooting, and really I think what was interesting is the first movie I did in the DGA [Directors Guild of America]. Bob Colesberry [Robert Colesberry] was going to be the line producer, the producers had hired him because they really felt like we needed somebody who had a lot of experience, and he’d been line producing for Marty Scorsese here on the east coast, and Bob [Robert Colesberry] was in the Directors Guild [DGA], and so they felt like well, we can’t just call him a producer. He really is the line producer, production manager, so you’re gonna have to join the Guild [DGA]. [INT: And you did.] Yeah. I remember Bob, because of the people he was around, he got Alan Parker, Sidney Lumet, and Marty Scorsese [Martin Scorsese] to sign my thing. [INT: That’s who signed your thing?] Yeah, and so I had to hand it in here for-and I needed to get it notarized, so there was a drug store here on 57th Street that said “Notary” and so I went in and said will you notarize, and the druggist who was also the notary looked and said, "God, Alan Parker? Martin Scorsese? Sidney Lumet? Who are you?" And he stamped it. [INT: That should be the title of your autobiography.] Yeah, WHO ARE YOU? Yeah. And you know, so I was in, and basically there were just things about it that the producers handled, that I had no-I sat down with Bob [Robert Colesberry] and he had had-I’d always done my own schedules before, and he’d already done a schedule. And he was kind of nervously hanging out, and he had the old cardboard board that was wide, and I looked at it and I said, "Well, I don’t know, can we afford to shoot eleven weeks?" And he said, "Well, maybe." And I said, "I don’t think I can stretch this thing out. I mean, I’ll do it if I have to." He says, "Oh, you mean you think you can do it shorter?" I says, "Yeah." I said, "Can I move these strips around?" And he said, "Yeah, yeah, yeah," and he had some oldies station on. [INT: But this was before the First AD [First Assistant Director] came on, or…?] No, he was gonna be the production manager as well, so it was before the First AD [First Assistant Director] came on. We hadn’t hired them yet. And so Bob and I basically, I said, "You know, let’s look at eight weeks. I think that’s comfortable for me. It’s more than I’ve ever had to make a feature before." And you know, these are in the same location, and I know I don’t do that many takes, and so we really had a good conversation about how I worked, which was very different than how, at that time, Bob had just worked with Scorsese on New York, New York, and KING OF COMEDY [THE KING OF COMEDY], where they were doing these long, almost semi-improvisatory things with a couple cameras running, and trying to stay awake in dailies when you’re running the third angle of a nine minute semi-improv scene, you know. And I said, "No, I’m not gonna change anything in the script." And he says, "Oh, that’s good news!" And so everything was good news to Bob, and we got it down to eight weeks. And later on, hired the ADs [Assistant Directors] on-I actually just, two days ago I was down at Duke University getting some award, and Ray Greenfield, who was my 1st AD [First Assistant Director] on that is living down there, so I hadn’t seen him for years.

INT: How did you come to that AD [Assistant Director]? Because before, I assume you didn’t have like a traditional First AD [First Assistant Director]?
JS: I didn’t, I just said, you know, hire me a First AD [First Assistant Director]. I guess if I’ve gotta have a First [First Assistant Director] and a Second [Second Assistant Director] or whatever you say I’ve gotta have for a Guild [DGA, Directors Guild of America] shoot, hire them. I got to hire the Editor, Sonya Polonsky, and met like four Editors and you know, the hard thing about talking with an Editor is they could have worked on six terrible movies, but as Paul Newman said of Dede Allen is, "She cut my first movie from a disaster into a failure." And she did heroic work doing that, probably, but as he said, "it still wasn’t a great movie." So you look at somebody’s credit and they weren’t very good movies, but you don’t know what the Editor brought to it, you know. So a lot of it was just personality, with hiring Sonya [Sonya Polonsky], and that she kind of had interesting ideas about what an… [INT: But you had cut your previous two films?] Two films, and the studio thought it was a good idea for me to have an editor on this. [INT: So how was that changed for you, when you got into the editing?] Well, because I was there every day, and sometimes I would just say, "Well let me fuck around with the montage scenes while you’re doing the straight cutting," and we’d switch seats. It was nice, I liked Sonya [Sonya Polonsky] and she was a good cutter, and she cut MATEWAN, so we got along. Eventually what happened is I just realized I’m in here every day, I’m always kind of wanting to sit in the big seat. Why don’t I just do it myself? I’ll have more fun and it’ll get done quicker. And you know, but I worked with Editors, when I worked with John Tintori on EIGHT MEN OUT, very much the way I work with Actors is I don’t go away, I don’t go look at the video assist, I’m right there and I say, "Okay, that’s take one. Here’s what I want you to try on take two." And I would be there choosing, I want you to use this take of this scene, and take three from this line on, so I’d be choosing the acting and then just saying well see if you can make the cuts work, but these are the moments I want to use from these actors’ performances. And then if there was a problem, then we’d look at, with the Editor, I’d look at alternates or other ways around it.

INT: And it [EIGHT MEN OUT] was also a period film, took place in the ‘60s [1960s]?
JS: Yeah, it was a period. It was a recent period, but it was a period. I remember one of the things that I had to do, there’s a scene where all these girls at Sarah Lawrence [Sarah Lawrence College] are sitting around smoking dope, and I looked around at the Actors and the extras and I said, "Y’all have smoked dope, haven’t you?" And they said, "Yeah, yeah, we’ve smoked dope." And I said, "Well, this is 1966 and these girls smoking dope in this scene, it might as well be some jug you have no idea what it’s gonna- you might not come back from this trip. You are pioneers, you know." And even though it’s only less than 20 years ago, this is a really different time, and you know, so you occasionally would have you know, the clothes and the cars and all that stuff, that’s fairly easy, especially if it’s only 20 years ago. The stuff is still out there and you don’t have to build it, you have to find it. But the changes in your head, you know, of being a kid, that you really had to talk to Actors and even extras about. [INT: But in terms of just a crew though, it brought people into your world that maybe you hadn’t worked with as much, like production designers and costume designers?] Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. And that was fun, I mean, to be able to expand your storytelling into areas that you used to say, "Well, let’s just minimize that part of the storytelling, ‘cause we don’t have the money to pursue it," that was really nice. For instance, in the bar scene I was talking about in SECAUCUS SEVEN [RETURN OF THE SECAUCUS SEVEN], we had extras for one half an hour. At lunchtime, we got a bunch of people to take off from their jobs and we had about 30 extras, so we did one tracking shot through a somewhat crowded bar, and then they all went back to work. And then we had no extras except for crew members, changing shirts as they walked in front of the camera. You know, I was doing some walking in front of the camera, I was in the scene, but I would also put on different shirts or do camera wipes and stuff like that. But mostly, we shot into corners so you could see nothing in the background, so you wouldn’t see that there were no people there. Now that doesn’t mean just because I started making higher budget movies, I never had that problem again. Shooting EIGHT MEN OUT, we always had to worry about who was in the stands, ‘cause it was before CGI and it’s the World Series. You can’t have a lot of empty seats in the stands. But I had enough extras, I had people that you know, my--I always remember this thing of about the fourth day, I went to the producer Amy Robinson and I said, "Okay, maybe this isn’t my deal, maybe I should just be the director and you take care of this other stuff, but there’s a PA who is all I ever see is she’s just sitting on like an ice chest, and like offering me a Coke every time I pass by. Is she just like a big brown-noser? Doesn’t she have a job?" And she says, "Oh, that’s Craft Services." And I said, "What is Craft Services, and do we need it?" And she says, "Well, it’s kind of a tradition, you know. Actually Malia Marmo [Malia Scotch Marmo] who was doing it later wrote a movie [HOOK] for Spielberg [Steven Spielberg], but she was Craft Service, and she was doing what she was supposed to, seeing if the director wanted a Coke, or a Diet Mountain Dew or whatever. [INT: But in successive movies, you did utilize your Craft Services person do more than that?] Sometimes. I mean, we’ve actually started going without them, or minimizing them, because you know, it’s kind of expanded, you know, in peoples’ minds, way beyond what’s affordable or realistically, you know, you’ve gotta carry them everywhere and all this kind of stuff. But yeah, it seemed like okay, I can get it, especially on a hot day. Is the crew, you know, it’d be great if they could get something to drink.

INT: So taking off from what we were just talking about in terms of the period piece, BABY, IT'S YOU, even though it was a recent period. You then, and we’ll get back to BROTHER FROM ANOTHER PLANET [THE BROTHER FROM ANOTHER PLANET] possibly, but then you did two very challenging period films in a row with MATEWAN and EIGHT MEN OUT, 1920s in Nowheresville, West Virginia, and 1919 Chicago. Given your understanding of what it takes to pull any kind of movie off, were you out of your mind? Like I mean, this is the hardest kind of thing to do on a low budget, right?
JS: It was, you know, what it meant is that I couldn’t improvise on the set very much, and that I had to, for instance, EIGHT MEN OUT, I had storyboarded it a couple years after I wrote it. So it took eleven years from when I wrote that first draft that I sent off to an Agent ‘til I got to make it, and for years Midge Sanford and Sarah Pillsbury and I had gotten the rights, and we would go and talk it around the studios, and they’d all say "no." And then every couple years, they’d say, "Well, a lot of studio heads have changed, let’s go." And the people who really eventually made it, Orion, had already turned it down twice. And Mike Medavoy would always start by saying, "Okay, just before we start, to me baseball’s like watching paint dry. Okay, go ahead." And eventually, they agreed not ‘cause they loved baseball or maybe even the story so much, but because there were a lot of young Actors who they were excited about working with. [INT: John Cusack, D.B. Sweeney, Charlie Sheen…] Yeah, and they said, "Well, are any of these guys on your list?" And I said, "Actually, quite a few of them are," and they said, "Well, if you can get three of those guys, we’ll go with this thing at this budget," and in the contract it said the movie will be two hours or less. You know, ‘cause this is a big story, and the screenplay wasn’t that long, but they knew, knowing movies, that things can expand with all the baseball and stuff. However, I’d already storyboarded the baseball. INT: [Do you storyboard all your films?] I have to storyboard them to some extent, just because I don’t have that much time to shoot them, so I have to at least have a plan of attack, even if I don’t stay with the storyboard. [INT: Do you do the drawings yourself?] I used to, you know. Now I have a computer program, and I let the computer--I move the people, the little people around, and I make the sets and all that kind of stuff. In the case of EIGHT MEN OUT, yeah I did. And the great thing about, you know, maybe a third of the movie is baseball games. You know the blocking. It’s always 90 feet between home and first base. You know that if, you know, if the ball’s going through the shortstop and the second baseman, and there’s a guy at second, he’s going to third and the pitcher’s kind of going to back up the catcher. The blocking’s there. And in those days, the box scores told you what every player did on every out, so I didn’t know just the box score, I knew what every at-bat had been.

JS: So one of the first things that I did is look, all this baseball, how are we gonna cover all this stuff? Well, how many times am I gonna have the camera behind a right handed pitcher throwing to a batter in this movie? Well really, the question is how many times, when they’re in their home uniforms, and how many times when they’re in away uniforms are we gonna make the ballpark look a little different? So a lot of what we did is we would say, "Okay, we’re gonna do 18 different shots from, you know, different parts of these nine games that we’re covering, or 11 maybe, even. But we’re gonna put the camera there, and it’s gonna stay there until we’ve done all 18." You know, it’s 18 setups. INT: [Including home and away?] No, just the home ones, right. And then we’re gonna come back and we’ll do another 18, ‘cause that’s a shot that we use a lot. And then Bob Richardson, the Cinematographer, figured out okay, how am I gonna deal with the stands? You know, we’re gonna be in and out of the stands, what if the people in the stands are always backlit? Well we can do that, ‘cause the sun’s gonna move around the ballpark. And so let’s start shooting toward home plate, then move over to first, then move over to right field, then toward center field, then toward left field, then we’re shooting down the third base line at the end of the day. There’s gonna be consistency to where the sun is, that in the context of a ball game is gonna seem like it’s not-the shadows aren’t jumping around. [INT: So you’re talking about the real sun, not make believe sun?] The real sun. And then the same thing we did with the extras, which is we can’t fill the stands every day. We can’t even fill them one day. So we went with a couple production assistants, we had an overhead schematic of the ballpark with vectors of how many seats were in each section, and we would say, "Okay, let’s stand on third base, shoot toward first, and put the 80mm lens on. How many people would we need to fill that vector? What if we pan with a long lens from first to home? Oh god, we’d need, you know, two thousand people to fill just that." [INT: So you didn’t pan too much?] We didn’t pan too much. We had Charlie Sheen day, you know, ‘cause we did some giveaway that Charlie [Charlie Sheen] had lunch with somebody, and we got like a 1,000 people, one day. That’s the only time we ever panned. [INT: Also, I think one of your answers to CGI was you did the old fashioned thing…] Cardboard cutouts, yeah. [INT: …of the Location Manager, Paul Marcus.] Yeah. Yeah, Paul Marcus in period clothing. Haskell Wexler later shot BABE [THE BABE] with John Goodman, and in the far outfield, he actually put balloons with hats on them out there, so the heads would at least move. But it was before CGI. So you had to figure those things out. So once you figure those things out, you have marching orders for the day. And then the second thing was, what games are bright blue sky, sunny, happy baseball games, what are a little down, and what’s the really awful, you know, looks like it’s about to rain weather. So usually what happened in Indianapolis, if you remember is the um, the sky right at lunch, the wind would come up and the sky would lock in. So usually we’re shooting happy blue sky baseball in the morning, and then we’d go to more troubled baseball in the afternoon. But it might happen for two hours, and you know, my script supervisor [Jacqueline Pine] did not understand the game of baseball, so she was really confused. She needed a lot of help. [INT: How did she get that job?] I don’t know. You know, at one point she said, "Now, he’s not gonna run back to first?" I said, "No, he’s not gonna run back to first. He’s gonna run to third." But she at least could say, "So, game five?" And then she’d have the whole game five menu of shots. And in game five, of course, there would be shots from behind the pitcher or whatever, and then I would have these little shopping lists for the second camera people to be doing, which the second camera was always up in the stands. So Bob [Bob Richardson] and I would sprint from somebody on the field while we’re setting up a new shot on the field, up to the stands, and we’d do a little dialogue scene with a couple guys and a few extras around them. And then we had a third camera unit doing scoreboard, you know, zeros going up, and then occasionally people sliding in. And so it was like a three-ring circus, but it’s a big ballpark, you can avoid each other. And we were getting 90 to 99 setups a day. I don’t think we ever hit 100.

INT: But I imagine a lot of the fallout there is that you would always ask your DPs [Director of Photography] to maybe take less time lighting than usual?
JS: Yeah, and always the, you know, I was just advising a filmmaker about to make her first short movie. I said that, “The quality that’s most useful in a DP is obedience.” And even if you don’t know anything about lenses or anything like that, you’ve gotta say, "Look, here’s what I want. Here’s the amount of time we have, here’s the amount of money we have. You find a way to try to give me that in this much time. Do your best." And I’m always saying to, you know--there was one year when four out of the five nominated cinematographers were guys I had worked with and can’t afford to work with anymore. And I’ve said to each one of them, "Do the best you can in 20 minutes. That’s what we got, you know, and we’re not-we don’t have another day to shoot this. You tell me the light’s gonna be gone in, you know, an hour. I need at least 40 minutes to get this thing done. Do your best in 20 minutes, but let’s talk about this,” you know. And it’s one of the reasons I never leave the set unless there’s an emergency, is I stay on the set. ‘Cause every once in a while, I’m seeing the lighting guys do something. Very often, I’ll sit in for the lead Actor, so they’re-I’m the lighting stand-in. And they’re doing something and I say, “What are you doing that for?” “Well, because it goes left and we run into this thing.” I said, "Well what if he goes right?" They say, "Well that’s not a problem." And I say, "Well, doesn’t matter to me whether he goes left or right, I just said it, you know." But usually, a Director leaves the set, and it’s, "Oh, the Director said he has to go, you know, this way, you know, and that’s…" [INT: An hour and a half later…] An hour and a half later, you know. So I’ve had to learn practically, over the years, ways to--just as you try to learn ways to help Actors, ways to help cinematographers do their best work in the conditions available. And sometimes, it’s really getting them when you’re going around, saying, "Okay, the schedule’s not locked yet. What time of day are you gonna have the easiest time here, and when do we start to get in a problem?" And so you just schedule, okay if that shadow’s gonna get us at 3:00, let’s be out of here by 2:00. You know, and then you don’t have to worry about the schedule, you know, and they’re not fighting something. And then you try to have also in your head, I always think of it as cover sets for the day, shots that you could get while it looks like it’s gonna be in and out for a while, and then maybe in two hours it’s not gonna be a problem. So let’s do something else for two hours, instead of, you know, looking at the damn thing with your sunglasses or whatever, and oh, we’ve got two seconds here to shoot in the sun, and matching something. Or do you just double shoot it, you know, and shoot one cloudy and do everything one and one.

INT: Now, you seem to really enjoy the challenge that you set up for yourself with a lot of this stuff, and how do you get your crew to be equally excited by this challenge? Because obviously you have, when you take somebody like Robert Richardson, who’s clearly on some projects taken maybe five times longer to light certain scenes.
JS: Yeah. Especially if he was working for Robert Redford. Don’t waste their time, I think is the most important thing. So you have your shit together, so that they’re working pretty much balls to the wall all day long, ‘cause the hardest thing to be on one of those set is to sit around while people are in a trailer talking. You know, and you’re getting paid, and you’re there, but there’s nothing to do. You know, crews like to do good work, and they like to be moving, and so a lot of it is to not have a lot of talk on the set. So you’ve done your talking with your Actors before, there’s very little of that. You’ve done your talking with the cinematographer; they have kind of marching orders, and maybe a couple alternate marching orders for the day, so they can actually think ahead. So, you know, I had Mark Davis who was a terrific, you know, key grip that I worked with a bunch of times. He wanted to be four shots ahead, and I was planned enough that I could say, "Okay Mark, you’re getting way ahead of yourself, but yes, we will need the crane four shots from now, and if you’ve got any guys, you know, loose and they can be far enough that we don’t have to hear them talking, have them assemble the crane." And boom, the crane would be ready way before we needed it, you know. And they loved that, you know, and they should love that, because it means that their time isn’t being wasted and they’re not setting things up and putting them down. One of the great things about video assist for me is I don’t really watch performances on it; I watch it while we’re setting up the camera. And I just say, "Nobody put anything else down, we’re gonna move around with the camera, and I’m gonna look." You know my DP’s [Director of Photography] looking through the lens; I’m looking at video assist, or a tap of some sort, until we agree on the angle. Because the minute, you know, tripod goes down, other people start throwing other stuff down that goes with it, and then they’re gonna have to move it if you, you know, and so it’s like oh, it’s like the lady wants to move her piano again, you know. And you hate to be that guy, so you really, I just say, "Just give us a minute and we’re gonna pick up where the next angle is from, and then go to it." And so there’s also not that putting it up and taking it down unnecessarily. Another thing that I’ll do is sometimes, we’ve had really things that are really fun for them to figure out. sS in LONE STAR we had these shots that went from whatever year we shot it in, 2000, back to 1957, in the same shot. [INT: Oh, in the shot.] And so we were flying stuff, we were putting walls on, you know, as we went in a 360, we’re putting cladding on the walls and taking things off the walls, and changing the lighting, you know, behind the camera as it went around. At one point, we had to pick Cliff James up in his chair ‘cause he was pretty big to get him up, so the grips just picked the whole Actor up and moved him out of there, you know. And then when we came back, they had to put him back in. You know, it’s a great challenge for them. On CITY OF HOPE, we did the same thing where we had these long, long shots and very often lights had to be flown in and flown out, because the camera would see them, you know, and things had to be flown around. There was one point where we were following two cops and we see the car-the cop car they’re about to get in, but then we get tighter on them. And while we’re tighter on them and don’t see the cop car, the grips are putting a step-up shelf with two prongs into something that goes under the car, into sleeves that go under the car, so the steadicam operator can actually step on the shelf that’s now on the car, so that he can follow them into the front seat and then drive off with them. And lights are being clipped on the car, and at one point, one of the grips had to be under, you know, doing some kind of bolt, and so the Actors, he had to, like, wait and listen for a gap between a line and make a thump so that they knew that he was leaving, so they wouldn’t take off if he was still under there. And you know, so they’re in this scene. And I think that thing, of really enlisting them into “Here’s what we have to do, here’s the time we have to do it, you guys are the professionals here, help us figure out how to do it.” You know, instead of just, “Okay, you’re gonna sit around and then we’re gonna tell you here’s what you do, and then we’re gonna go away, and then you tell us when you’re done, and then we’ll come back.”

INT: Can you describe your relationship with your First ADs [First Assistant Director] as it applies to all that?
JS: Yeah, I mean this has been a difficult thing. You know, I was in the DGA for a couple movies, and then I had to get out. [INT: Oh, okay. Wow.] And basically, they just weren’t set up for low-budget movies. And at one point, I came and I said, "Whoa, whoa, whoa. Now you can’t expect me to hire an AD [Assistant Director] for 10 weeks prep, when the movie’s only shooting four weeks. You know, I can’t afford that, but also it’s just crazy, you know. I’m not even gonna have the screenplay finished until four weeks before we shoot, you know? What’s he gonna be doing?" And they, at some point they said, "So what, you’re talking about a movie that’s under a million dollars?" And I said, "Yeah." They said, "Well, maybe we’re not the organization for you." And they, the dime hadn’t dropped that there were gonna be a lot of people making movies at that level, and that some of them were people they wanted to have in the Guild [DGA]. So I basically had to quit for a bunch of movies. Eventually joined again, I think about the time of LONE STAR, when Maggie [Maggie Renzi] and the other, her co-producer, wanted to get on the health plan. And I was, you know, I had a very good AD [Assistant Director] who was an Australian guy who’s a producer and AD over there. And we would fly him all the way, and he was terrific. And really was good at training new people to be ADs. He eventually joined the DGA as an AD and so when we went back to making union films, we were able to use him. And he was very good at training guys, you know, to run a very efficient and quiet set. But a lot of times, when I’ve just had to hire a DGA AD, I’ve really felt like they’ve got all the bureaucratic stuff and the rules down, but they don’t really treat people the way I want people to be treated. It’s a little, you know, treating the extras a little like furniture, you know. And yes, they’re doing everything according to the rules, but that’s still not human enough for the way I want to operate it. So it’s been, you know, it’s been difficult.

JS: What should be happening is it should all be about communication, because, you know, to run the things at the speed that I have to run them at, everything has to hit the table at the same time, and that’s all about communication. Including, we may have three alternates today, you know, from my very first movie, it’s, if it’s this kind of weather, these are the scenes we’re shooting. If it’s this kind of weather, these are the scenes shooting. And if it’s this kind of weather, these are the scenes we’re shooting. So you have to prep for three different days, and something may happen that I may have to take the last scene of the day, and I may have to shoot it just before lunch, and we have to be prepared for that. So you gotta carry a lot of information in your head, and that information has to go out to everybody who’s gotta show up. ‘Cause if a prop isn’t there that you need to be on screen, you can’t shoot it. And it doesn’t take many 15-minute periods where you’re not doing anything because something’s not ready, to add up to a couple hours. You just can’t afford, you know, one of the main-truly one of the main complaints I have from union crews on my movies is there’s not enough overtime. I can’t afford to pay for it, you know, and I don’t like to work long days. And I don’t like the Actors to work long days, but I also don’t think that well after about 12 hours, and so I don’t want the day… What I find, and I’ve been as an Actor on sets where they’re shooting, you know, night for day interiors at three in the morning, ‘cause they’ve gotten to… People get to this point where they’re working at about half speed because they’re too tired, and they should just take a day or two off, go back to the regular schedule. They’re not gonna catch up, but they’ll at least be doing good work ‘cause they’re thinking straight. So yeah, the AD [Assistant Director] thing is interesting. Also basically, to make the movies on the budget, with the ambition of the movie on the budget I’m doing, I usually have to do a schedule very early. That means that the AD is coming fairly late to a schedule, and then we adjust it together as we get more information, but I can’t go in blind. I have to, you know, for instance I’m working on one now, we’re gonna shoot in four weeks. There’s three main characters, everybody else is a day player. But they’re a day player ‘cause I’ve scheduled it so that even if they have three scenes, they’re all in the same day, ‘cause I can’t afford to carry people, you know, or bring them back nine days later or whatever it is, and pay them as weekly players. I have to have them be day players. So that’s, you know, that’s-and some different schedules, it might be locations that’s basically, it’s who do I have to pay for how many days, and how can we get this thing done in four weeks? That’s what the schedule’s gonna have to be based on. And, you know, quite honestly, it’s not ideal, but if that’s the given and there’s usually about six or seven variables in making it, you’ve got to have some givens, well that’s the given in this particular case. It might be Jack [Jack Nicholson] wants to go see the Lakers play and they’ve got a game tonight, and so we’re breaking at five.

INT: So since we’re on the DGA thing, I’ll just keep going with some thoughts there. So since you’ve rejoined, what would you say are the most important services, or the most important thing that being part of that umbrella has given you?
JS: You know, in a lot of ways, I’m not a real Director. I’m not somebody who gets hired to direct things. The last 10 years, I’ve basically financed my own movies. And I’ve always kind of had final cut, even the couple studio films that I’ve done, I’ve ended up with final cut, so the Directors Guild is doing less for me than I’m doing for myself. And so it’s not about creative control, obviously. Mostly, what I feel is I just made a movie in the Philippines that has no unions at all. [INT: This is AMIGO?] Yeah. The contract for the crew in the Philippines is a 24-hour day on, and then an unpaid 24-hour day off. People are cracking into trees late at night ‘cause they’re exhausted. There’s a lot of people doing amphetamines to stay up. It’s an inefficient 24 hour day, ‘cause they’re not paying people enough so that their lead may be doing a commercial in the morning, so three of your hours are waiting for the lead actress to get out of Manila traffic to get to where she’s shooting her feature. But because life is cheap and there’s no unions, this condition can--so a lot of what, you know, I think has been important for me about the DGA is when we’re working under DGA rules, it gives us a structure and it’s generally a reasonable structure for people to work under. And it’s an understood structure by everybody, so when you’re scheduling, when you’re planning your attack for the day, you’ve got a structure to plug into, that makes some sense as a work day. I haven’t had that many movies that have made money since I’ve been a Directors Guild thing, so they don’t--they’re not collecting money from me. I’m in the Writers Guild [WGA, Writers Guild of America], and I use their health plan, which is about the same, maybe slightly better in some things, maybe slightly worse in things, but I’ve made so much more money as a Writer that it makes sense for me. You know, I’m a lifetime member of their health plan there, so makes sense for me to do the health plan, so that doesn’t really apply to me either. So truly, I don’t use the Directors Guild for very much, but it provides, when I’m shooting in the States [United States], a great structure for other people to use. And also for me to use as just a way to plan a day, and plan a shoot.

JS: You know, for me, making these movies the way that I’m making them, that structure is important because you get to the point where you’re on the margins, close to being amateur, but you’re working with people from a bunch of different guilds. And we have a bunch of different guilds because of the Taft-Hartley [Taft–Hartley Act] law so that, you know, our contracts come up at different times, you know, so we can’t go as Writers on a sympathy strike with the Directors, or the Directors, or anybody else, and so it’s a very vulcanized union situation. All the minimums are set at different levels, so, you know, when you have a low budget film, you know, the DGA says this is a low budget film, and the SAG [Screen Actors Guild, SAG-AFTRA] says this is a low budget film, and the Writers Guild [WGA] says this is a low budget film, so, you know, you have kind of dodge in between these things. But for me, the working of the set and anybody who’s gonna help me doing it, that structure I think has been very, very important. And as the DGA has had to evolve from this factory system, they’ve had to kind of figure some things out, and there’s new technologies. Not just the fact that most movies are now shot on location somewhere and not on the home studio where people kind of had nine-to-five jobs. Even TV isn’t really shot, you know, an awful lot of TV is off the clock from what it used to be. You know, if you’re shooting a game show, yes. But you know, if you’re shooting a cable TV series, you could be anywhere, shooting any kind of hours. And I think that the challenge for the DGA has been keeping up with these things, encouraging work without giving away the store. And that’s a tough thing to figure out, you know, and there’s just not as much money in the film business as there used to be. There are, there’s not as much coming in, so how much do you bend, you know? How much can you lower your standards to encourage work and work in this country, let’s say, without making it well why do we even have a union, you know, if conditions or pay has gotten down to this point? And all the unions are having to figure that thing out.

INT: Obviously, as you said, the whole way of movie watching has changed, marketing has changed because people are making less films and people are going to see less films--
JS: Well, people aren’t making less films. [INT: They’re not?] The Sundance Film Festival got 4,000 feature films this year. [INT: They’re just not being seen by people?] They’re not being seen by people. They’re not getting a theatrical distribution. Theatrical distribution has gone down a little. Dramatic shows have actually increased, ‘cause there’s more networks every year, but the percentage of those dramatic shows that, you know, honestly, reality TV, there’s nothing real about it and it’s written, but we in the Writers Guild [WGA] have not been able to get those people in our Guild [WGA]. So there’s a lot of that kind of well, they’re not really Actors ‘cause they’re reenacting something, and they’re not really Writers because it’s reality, it’s a documentary and they’re not really Directors, even though they’re directing people, because they’re not Actors and… You know, so there’s a lot that grey area stuff that’s filling a lot of the hours, but there’s a lot of hours to fill, if you multiply it by the number of networks. What has shrunk is studio feature film making. They’re being a lot more careful, and I think also the networks and the cable people just don’t make the number of pilots that they used to, just, you know, oh, let’s just see if this is gonna go. So you know, they’re saying, "Well, you guys go make the pilot and then bring it to us, and then maybe we’ll put it on."

INT: But the number of screens has significantly fallen, and the number of screens available--[JS: Feature screens.]--for independent films--[JS: Has gone down.] So how did you react to that, and what steps did you take to allow your films to be seen?
JS: You know, all we’ve been able to do in the last couple movies is hire somebody. We have not gotten a distributer; we’ve hired somebody to do it. On the last movie, AMIGO, we did a lot of work on the web finding Philippine-Americans. So in New York City, we couldn’t get on an art screen in New York City. None of them wanted it. But we got in the 25-plex in Times Square, ‘cause we could go to the theater and say, “We--look at these groups we’ve contacted of Philippine-Americans. There’s a lot of them in this area. You’ll get at least two good weekends on this.” And in fact, we did well enough that we bumped COWBOYS VS. ALIENS into a smaller theater a couple nights, you know. So we’ve had to almost bodily pick up the audience and bring them to a theater to even get a screening. We’re holding back the DVD, so AMIGO is now available on demand, but we’re holding back the DVD because it’s actually getting a lot of play in academia. People who teach history courses are using it, ‘cause it’s only the third American movie ever made about the Philippine-American War, and it’s a contemporary one, and it really deals with the issues more than the others did. So we’re hoping that the college libraries will buy it for $300, so we’re doing a kind of limited release on the DVD, so then they can use it in their classes again and again, but they’ve paid something for it, ‘cause I kept for years running into, "Oh, I use your movie MATEWAN in my class," and you know, turns out that they didn’t return something to Blockbuster [Blockbuster Video] 25 years ago, and that’s what they’re still showing. And it’s not only not in good shape, it’s no money comes back to anybody for that showing. Whereas, you know, if you’re a professor and you wrote a book, at least for the next two years, it may change from now on, people have to buy that book or buy a used copy of that book. And so some money comes back to the publisher, and they’re encouraged to pay another writer for their book.

INT: But even before these first couple, these last couple films, you were very intrinsically involved in the marketing--you had to be.
JS: Yeah, we had to be, but you know, if we could get a distributor, then you work with them and you do-I do an average of 300 to 400 interviews for every movie, between domestic and foreign. Usually, I don’t have big enough stars to do interviews, or they’re not star-driven products, so we might get a couple of our actors for one film festival to come for a weekend, back in the days when distributors would pay for them to go. But usually, I had to carry my bucket, myself and Maggie [Maggie Renzi], and I’d go around to all these places and I’d do all the publicity, just part of the job. You get to talk about the poster; you get to talk about the trailer. I’ve never been crazy, usually, about either. But you get some input, so it’s not one that you absolutely hate. It’s usually something that you can stand. You know, but a lot of it is just the legwork of doing all the interviews, and making yourself the story, or whatever, and that’s fine. You know, I can do it. I was an Actor. I’ve done 35 interviews in one day at the Cannes Film Festival, and I think only Arnold Schwarzenegger has done more than that. But he’s a superhero.

INT: So you continue, well you have acted in a lot of your films. Has that--what’s the choice there? Is there some Hitchcockian thing going on, or…?
JS: No. Generally, at first it was more I know how to play this part better than I know how to cast this part. And then a few times, it was okay, I need somebody who’s taller than Vincent Spano, who’s about six feet, who can intimidate him. And easily, you know, even though he’s got a limp and some physical problems. And so yeah, I can play this part. Lately, I’ve been less likely to take a part in my own movies, ‘cause there’s an Actor I know who needs the day player gig, and I can figure out who to cast. It used to be anytime I got a script, it had Sam Shepard’s thumbprints on it, so it was like, "Oh, he’s a writer, but he’s also an actor, and he’s a white guy, and let’s get Sam Shepard," and Sam Shepard would say "no." And then well, "Is there another guy like that?" and they’d send him to me. But I, you know, I’d continue if I could get a day player of a couple days on a movie as an actor, and I’ve got time to do it, I continue to do it, ‘cause I think you learn a lot. I often cast actors I’ve worked with, you know, and it’s like they’re auditioning for me and don’t know it. I’m taking notes, the same thing with technicians I get to be around. But also, acting, there’s a kind of cross training there that I really like, which is you have to think, and you only have to do that one thing. It’s so easy compared to directing, as far as just the number of things you have to--it’s not easy, but it’s, you know, it’s just the thing itself. But also, for writing and for directing, you really have to think in character terms, you know. And it makes you think about okay, "I’m coming on this set, how am I being graded," you know? “How is this day player being treated? Is there something we could do that’s like this or better than this? How is the director helping the actors?” And so you get a little window, and I get it as a writer into how directors work, but I also get it occasionally as a day player, to see how directors work with actors.

INT: Are there any directors that stand out for you as somebody that you had a little bit of an ''ah-hah'' moment, like, “Oh, hadn’t thought of that?”
JS: Yeah, I got to do a movie, I don’t think it got a theatrical run here, called IN THE ELECTRIC MIST. It was like the last thing Levon Helm was in. And I got a scene with John Goodman and a scene with Tommy Lee Jones. Good actors were in it, but it was Bertrand Tavernier, and Bertrand likes to set up big, messy master shots. You know, really fuck up the frame as our friend Haskell Wexler says, you know. And not--[INT: What was messy about them?] There would be a lot of moving parts, and they weren’t like, “You have to do it at this moment.” It’s just like, “Yeah, go over there and talk to him about this,” you know, and then, “You people over there, check out the band and get yourself something to drink.” And so it was not choreographed to the point where you might not have to get around something or somebody that wasn’t there the last take. And he’s moving the camera in this, and then he’s not doing coverage. It’s gonna be a big, messy-he’s gonna pick the thing, and then he might get into coverage, and it made the producer and some of the actors very nervous. But it was a very European way; they eventually ended up with a big argument between Bertrand and the producer and lead actor, about what the cut should be. And it’s the only time I think they’ve done the really intelligent thing was, which was in Europe it was Bertrand’s cut, and in the United States, it was their cut, ‘cause they just couldn’t see eye to eye on it, and Bertrand’s was a much more European, less one thing leads to another, kind of cut. And theirs was a much more, you know, kind of thriller based, everything has a reason that leads to the next shot kind of cut. [INT: Did you take any of that with you into the next project?] Well, it’s just something to think about. It’s just something to think about, almost more the way somebody sees the world. Robert Altman has a way of seeing the world, and it was different than the Hollywood way. And when he got to work the way he wanted to, part of what was shocking about his movies was the sound design. And you weren’t thinking about the sound design, but you just, I’ve never heard anything like this before. Orson Welles had a certain way of looking at the world, and his soundtracks sound like radio. It’s like everybody got in the booth later because he was doing these complicated visual shots, and they didn’t have lavalier microphones yet. So a lot of the stuff was not hearable by the boom guy. You know, a lot of directors have that way of seeing the world. I try to have my style match the subject matter or the mood of that particular movie I’m making. So I have to be very aware of how am I gonna look at this subject? Is there a style I can afford that’s gonna be right for this particular movie? So it’s a nice thing to go on a set and kind of say, “Oh, I see what this director is doing. I see how they attacked this problem. I see what kind of their point of view into the world is.” I worked on a Jonathan Demme movie once, and Jonathan really likes the marginalia, he’s interested in the stuff happening at the edge of the frame, and the music, and stuff like that. And so the quirkiness of extras almost becomes, “Okay. Let’s give them two more lines. I kind of like what’s going on here." And that’s a way of looking at the world.

INT: So you’ve always been a writer/director. Was there ever a time where it could have been refreshingly different for you to be handed a script by somebody else and--
JS: Oh yeah, sure, sure. If anybody ever wanted to give me the money to make a movie, and it was a movie I wanted to make, and they’d give me casting control and final cut, you know, you where to find me. But nobody’s ever done that. The only time that really happened is I got to make three rock videos for Bruce Springsteen, and the script was there. [INT: How did that come about?] It kind of evolved. We used a couple of Bruce’s songs in BABY, IT'S YOU. I hadn’t met him at that point, but I talked to Jon Landau, his manager, and then, and just said, “Well, I have alternates, but you look at the movie with the music in, and if Bruce likes it, you know, can we buy your songs?” And then they gave us a great break on the half of the deal that, you know, they controlled. And then Maggie’s [Maggie Renzi] sister Marta [Marta Renzi] made a dance video [WHERE THE DANCE IS], and for PBS, and there you can use any song you want, you don’t have to pay ‘cause that’s PBS’ deal, but she also got in touch through Dave Marsh, who’s married to one of Bruce’s management people, and we met Bruce through that, and when he was about to start being in his own rock videos, we got a call from his people, and so we did BORN IN THE USA, GLORY DAYS, and I'M ON FIRE. And those, you know, the script is there. You know, the lyrics are there. There’s a story there. Bruce had ideas about what he wanted to see on camera, so I was kind of more the director for hire, but I only had three minutes to do. I got to cut them; I got to cut to Bruce Springsteen music, what’s better than that? And probably they were the equivalent of a 20 million dollar budget, for--and they were not expensive videos, but for what I was used to having to make three minutes, it was plenty. So that’s the only time I’ve really worked as a director for hire, and I got final cut, basically. I showed them to Bruce a couple times, and he’d have a couple suggestions, and that would be it. But he wasn’t gonna change the song. He wasn’t gonna change the plot of the song, you know, that was a given. [INT: And the opportunity or the desire has never come up to explore that venue again in a different way?] Well, that venue’s kind of-is really not there anymore. I did an interview a couple months ago about the golden age of rock videos. I didn’t realize that there had been a golden age, or that it was over--[INT: And you were in it.] Yeah, but I’m talking about the golden age of rock videos. But it’s like, you know, one of the great things about rock videos is so many people I know, either crew people or directors, they learned their stuff there, and because for a while the labels were spending a lot of money on them, there were 24 year old kids getting to use every bit of equipment in house, and it used to be, you know, when we started, you couldn’t get near a crane unless you’d made three or four movies. So there was a lot of technical knowledge and practice that people got to do, doing those things. And some of them went into commercials eventually, and some of them ended up directing features.

INT: When you talk about using Bruce’s [Bruce Springsteen] songs in BABY, IT'S YOU, but a lot of your films do use composers, and you worked with Mason Daring so much.
JS: Yeah. I think 16 of the 17 movies, one we didn’t even have composed music, BABY, IT'S YOU, so I didn’t work with Mason on that. [INT: So how did that relationship come up, and how have you been able to keep it as, you know, vital all this time?] Yeah, Mason was working mostly he’d--he was a folk singer, but he was mostly making money as a lawyer in Boston. And when I hired the crew for RETURN OF THE SECAUCUS SEVEN, they said, "So we should probably have like a contract or something." I said, "Yeah, well you know, do you know a lawyer? And they said, "Yeah, we know this guy." And he came to the meeting, and my car broke down on the way to the meeting. It had a bad radiator, just when I got through the Sumner Tunnel from east Boston where I was living into Boston itself, and I had to pull it over into Little Italy, into a gas station and just leave it there steaming, and walk to the rest of the meeting. And he said "Okay," very basic contract, there wasn’t much money involved. And then he said, "So, I fix cars." So he drove me back to the Little Italy, and he said, "Oh, well this is obviously the radiator hose, you need a new radiator hose, and I bet they have one, not in this one, but the one across the street." So we got it, and he put the radiator hose in. While he’s putting the radiator hose in, he says, "Oh, so what are you doing about music for this movie?" And I said, "Well, I can’t afford to buy rights." I knew that much, that the rights were way beyond what I could afford. "So I’m not sure what I’m gonna do." He said, "Well, I’m a folk singer. And if any of my songs are good, but also I’ve been doing law for free for every musician I know in Boston. So they all owe me favors, you know. And so, you know, maybe we should talk about this." And so he gave me a copy, it wasn’t a CD yet; it was an album of his folk singing. And there were a couple songs in there that sounded okay. And then I said, "So what would these musicians cost?" And he said, "We’ll have to pay for studio time, but even they owe me a favor." So we got everything for very low, and within three movies, Mason, who really didn’t want to be a lawyer, was getting enough other work because he’d started to get known for this stuff, that he could just become a composer, and that’s what he’s been doing for the last 30 years.

JS: And we developed this relationship where he [Mason Daring] was a musicologist, you know. He went to Amherst [Amherst College] and got a musicology degree, and not only wrote songs but studied ethnic music and American music and stuff like that. So when I’ve done these period things, I just say, “Okay, here’s the world that we’re in, Mason. You listen to a lot of stuff and tell me, and I’ll tell you stuff to listen to, and you tell me stuff to listen to, so we’re versed in this. And then we’ll have a philosophical conversation about what’s the palate, the musical palate, that we’re gonna use for this thing? I may buy a few things, but we also may just make some clones of things, or we may just do the whole thing composing, and you know, we’ll talk back and forth so that you’re gonna do a lot of it now on the synthesizer first, and we’re gonna talk about how does that sound, and so at what point do I know this is what I want, so I can hire the real musicians to come in and replace those synthesizer parts?” And then I come as much as I can to the sessions, and I can’t read music, and I don’t have a musical vocabulary, but we show the players the scene and I talk to them the way I talk to actors. And I say, "Okay, here’s what the scene is about," and at the end of it, whatever you’re doing with Mason [Mason Daring] about keys and all that musical stuff you’re doing, I don’t want it to resolve.” Like in MATEWAN, there’s a lot of confrontations between the Baldwin-Felts [Baldwin–Felts Detective Agency] agents and the miners. Well this isn’t the final one. It can’t resolve, there has to be something. And they say, "Oh, yeah." And they’ll, just as players know to do, or Mason [Mason Daring] will say, "Okay, well let’s go to a miner or something on this bar," and it’ll be like almost a question mark, you know. And players loved that, you know, ‘cause these are guys who can play it slightly even with sheet music, play it slightly different every take, and very often we’re not even going from sheet music, they’re listening to each other. And MATEWAN for instance, we got John Hammond to come in and do harmonica, and he really liked the movie, and just said, "You know, I could do more than you’ve asked me to do." And I said, "Okay, get your kit." And he laid his harmonicas out, and we put the headphones on, and he just, with a microphone, watched the movie and just played whatever he felt while it was happening, and I ended up using some of that stuff, too, that was totally un-scored. So it’s part of, you know, it’s part of the process of still telling a story, and a lot of what the back and forth with Mason is about it what’s the vocabulary we’re using? What does this moment need? And in the mix, I’m still pulling things out. So, you know, we joke about the triple album of cues that I didn’t use that were great cues, that just, it felt better without music. But it’s been great to have a collaborator who, you know, can write in different styles. [INT: Yeah, you’ve been to Ireland and you’ve been to Mexico.] Yeah. Louisiana and the Cajun area; we were just in the Philippines. And, you know, and we’ve expanded Mason’s list of players. They’re not just all Boston players anymore, like they were in the first one. And there’s some great players there too, who’ve, you know, who’ve, you know, settled in Marblehead [Marblehead, Massachusetts] where he lives, and so I’ve got guys who used to be with big bands who just are hanging around and say, “Oh yeah, I’ll play a session, you know? That would be really fun.”

INT: And, you know, it just made me think, that collaboration developed out of a car breaking down. And so total happenstance, fate maybe, and took a direction that became very important the rest of your career. If things hadn’t gone a certain way, do you think that you could have easily slid into spending your years doing something else?
JS: You know, I was making so little at my job-jobs that I’m very lucky that I’ve gotten this gig. You know, I make a living as a screenwriter for hire. And I think I would have tried to get some kind of writing gig, you know, I might have been writing advertising copy or something like that. Certainly writing novels and short stories doesn’t pay enough to make a living, so I’m lucky that screenplays exists, and TV exists, and that, you know, the way our guild [Writers Guild of America] works is in the United States, we have a tradition of multiple writers. And it’s the toughest thing, I think, about being an American writer, is you assume that at some point, you’re gonna get rewritten. Almost every project, you’re not the first writer, you’re not gonna be the last writer. Whereas in Europe, it’s more like a tradition of one producer, one director, one writer, and then you just kind of go through the whole process. Well, that means two things. One is that you’re, when you go to union meetings, you’re always gonna be next to some guy who might have fucked up your screenplay, and you don’t even know it. But also, there’s a lot more work, because they have the thing rewritten, and it gets handed around. And you have to feel like okay, I’m like the guy who comes in and gains twelve yards and then goes back and sits on the bench. [INT: It’s a role, it’s a job.] It’s a role. And maybe when you hit pay dirt, you feel like a lot of my work is up there, and maybe not. And maybe you keep your name on it, and maybe you don’t. But, you know, it’s a job-job, and I like it, and I like the people I work with. And it’s good for the muscles when I do my own screenplays, to just kind of stay in shape, but I’m very lucky that I have a bread job, and that’s what it is. So I don’t know what I would have done if I didn’t have that bread job. A lot of my friends who are trying to make independent films and only get to make one once every five years, they teach or they do something else, some of them are grips and gaffers and things like that. I don’t have any of those particular skills. I think I would have been about as successful making a living as an actor as I am as a fiction writer, which is I would have gotten a job every once in a while, but it would be a pretty meager living, like most actors I know. You have whole years where you get two gigs, and you barely make enough to pay your pension.