A: The original idea came from a guy I was working with shortly after moving to New York City in 1996. I commented that I needed $500 in a hurry to put down a security deposit (on the apartment I still live in in Williamsburg) and he suggested that I find an immigrant who needed a greencard and a crackhead who needed fifty bucks and arrange for them to marry, do the paperwork, and charge him $500 or whatever he was willing to pay. At the time, there were few security barriers and it was apparently pretty much standard practice.
Ultimately I raised the $500 doing physical labor, but his suggestion sparked my imagination and I started writing the story that became Every Dogs Day. I struggled with it for a couple of years, and got to know the city better, and by around 1998 or so I had it in a shape that wasnt completely embarrassing, so I showed it to Hal Hartley, for whom Id been doing Art Department and prop work, and asked him for advice.
Q: Thats interesting. He doesnt generally direct other peoples scripts
A: Oh, I wanted to direct it myself. I really was looking for writing advice. And Hal was really cool about it. He really helped me develop a technical vocabulary for writing screenplays. We developed it pretty closely, and he eventually suggested that he executive-produce it.
Q: What happened?
A: The fundraising fell apart for a number of reasons, and ultimately I guess I found myself feeling a little bit like a proxy for the movie that Hal wanted to make. Intellectually I wasnt opposed to that, but in my gut Im a pretty independent person so at the end of the term of the deal I decided to take a stab at raising money for it myself. Not too long after that Hal pretty much stopped talking to me.
Q: Ouch.
A: Que sera sera.
Q: So how did you go about fundraising?
A: Cluelessly. Im not a terribly social person, and I foolishly thought that a person could circulate a good script and it would get attention and people would talk to them which to a small extent I guess kind of happened. It was presented as part of the late great Fifth Night Screenplay Series at the Nuyorican, which helped get it a small amount of attention at Miramax that never really amounted to anything. It got covered but nobody would tell me what exactly the coverage was, only that it was generally positive. Fine Line read it and told me it wasnt edgy enough for them (it was a very traditional romantic comedy as it existed), and the response from pretty much everyone else who looked at it was that it was a good script, I shouldnt have a problem getting it made, but it wasnt for them.
Q: Must have drove you nuts.
A: It sure did! In the meantime, I busied myself with plenty of other stuff. I had to work, obviously, and had fallen into a trap in which the only thing that people would pay me to do was art direct indie features which paid poorly enough that I wound up sinking into debt.
Q: Why didnt you join the union?
A: Because those jobs are a career, not a day-job. And there are few enough of them in New York that theyre pretty competitive. I was pursuing a separate career, and the jobs that Id have to move up into, I firmly believe, should go to people who are professionally committed to them. I still do prop work and art department work, but primarily on still photos, which works out better for me.
Q: Lets get back to talking about Every Dogs Day.
A: Right. Sorry. So in addition to working, I kept on writing, doing readings of my fictionand meeting people. I met John Fukuda and worked with him, C.S. Lee, Phil Leong, Paul Juhn and Andy Pang in their improv comedy troupe Mellow Yellow. And I met Elyas Khan and Brian Geltner by way of their band Nervous Cabaret. I did a little work on Ilya Chaikens Margarita Happy Hour and met Eleanor Hutchins. And Steve Cuiffo by way of his Russello magic shows at the Low Bar in DUMBO. And I worked a script for a very funny T.V. pilot by Steve Randazzo. And after a little while I realized that I was surrounded by a lot of incredibly talented people so I bought a Sony TRV-950 and started shooting little off-the cuff shorts. Some of which you can find online, others of which are buried somewhere in my apartment.
Q: Isnt that Bianca Cassidy from Coco Rosie as Stella?
A: No. Anyway, I realized that there were plenty of talented people around who could populate Every Dogs Day and make it the unique, idiosyncratic, and special movie I wanted it to be.
Q: I notice you call it a movie as opposed to a film.
A: For one thing, there was no celluloid involved in the process whatsoever. So what am I going to call it? Narrative digital cinema? Too wordy! Its moving pictures. Its a goddamn movie. People who make the snobbish distinction between the cultural connotation of movies and films can go fuck themselves. You watch Bergman and Godard on the same screens you watch Woo and Spielberg on. Movies are a terrific art form with infinite possibilities, equally valid in their diversity. Like music. Stravinsky, Beefheart, and the Drifters did very different things, but they all produced greatness and youre depriving yourself a great deal of enjoyment by fabricating superficial quantiitative barriers.
Q: Talk about how Every Dogs Day came about please.
A: Right. Thanks. So by 2003, when I decided I had found the cast and had enough room on my credit card for the DVX100, which is a landmark terrific camera and had just come down in price, New York City had changed, and was changing, significantly. The elephant in the room being September 11th. Giuliani may have been good in the crisis (aside from the fact that putting the Emergency Command Center at the top of building 7 had been his idea) but I have some serious problems with how he handled the aftermath.
For example, the idea that everyone should keep on with their lives exactly as they were or else the terrorists would win struck me as absurd. Especially since so much of the things that were going on were so deeply petty and greedy and selfish. Dont get me wrong: New York City came together in a tremendous way after 9/11, but I dont think Giuliani deserves any credit for it. Here was a guy who, the feeling was, really put a finger in the eye of the communities who had brought New York through the economic nightmare of the 80s and the crack epidemic and then took credit for it himself. Im no one to speak authoritatively about it, thats just the feeling that I got living here and talking to New Yorkers.
Q: You really seem to have it in for transplants to the city.
A: You mean the Harvard kids in the movie? Yeah. Well, Harvards an easy target, especially since they were, and I guess still are, making an effort to assert themselves into the indie film scene the way Yale did into the art industry. So that deserves a poke. Also, there was just a cascade of blowhards into the city following September 11th, and they deserve a poke, too.
Q: But you yourself are a transplant.
A: Sure, but I guess I feel like Ive learned a lot from living in this city, and I certainly consider my younger self included in making fun of people who havent learned those things yet. I mean, I wanted to make fun of the frivolous things people occupy themselves with while Serious Things are going on in the world by making a funny and frivolous comedy. I mean, Im not going to Iraq or Afghanistan and documenting war. Which puts me squarely in my own crosshairs, which is really only fair.
Q: Is that why every time theres a radio or a TV on in the movie theres reference to 9/11 or the War on Terror?
A: Yup. That and it was public domain.
Q: In the newspaper in the opening credits you refer to the 9/11 Committee. Dont you mean the 9/11 Commission?
A: For one thing, that was shot when the Commission hadnt yet formed (the testimony was recorded off my TV a year or so later). Also, it puts the movie squarely in the realm of fiction. To paraphrase Brecht by way of Lindsay Anderson, I didnt want to show what things really look like, but how they are.
Q: When you finally shot the movie in 2003, youve said that it was heavily improvised?
A: It was. I did a skeletal rewrite of the script in a last-gasp effort to raise money. I was under the mistaken impression that it wouldnt be hard to put together $30 Grand. When we shot, the script was the framework around which we were free to improvised based on contingency. Steves Jay character really became the anchor, partly because he had an uncanny ability to remember lines verbatim on short notice and be able to let them breathe and come up with great stuff on the fly all at the same time.
Q: Is that why $30 Grand is the sum of money everyones after in the movie?
A: Yeah. Anyway, I found that either no one believed I could pull of a script with that many characters and locations on that budget. A couple people disappeared out of the blue. But I had already booked the cast and locations for June 10-20th so I shot it for the $10 Grand I had put together. A third of the budget went to the insurance policy so we could get access to locations like the jail and the boardwalk and the Wonder Wheel. A third went to paying Dan Johnson the sound recordist, and the rest went to tapes and food and transportation for the actors.
Q: Youve taken some heat for statements you made that actors dont need to be paid.
A: Thats bullshit. I never said that. Its a misinterpretation of something I posted on the Shooting People board. For one thing, I cast based on what the performers can bring to their parts and I place an extraordinary amount of trust in what they bring to the screen and thoroughly enjoy working with them and catering my expectations to their input, sensibilities and abilities. For another thing, every actor in the movie owns a piece of it in addition to a deferment greater than the SAG requirement for the Experimental Agreement, which it was made under.
Q: You wore a lot of hats on this movie.
A: Yeah. I was maybe a little ambitious. Susan Leber and Jeff Caldwell helped a lot with the production Susan on the pre-production end and Jeff with the day-to-day logistics and the Post. Even so, I did the locations work and the casting and was shooting and lighting and directingcontrary to what one might think, in a situation like that you actually give up a tremendous amount of control and throw yourself at the mercy of your environment. And Edna Leshowitz (my lovely wife) did the makeup and helped me schlep the gear in from the van at night.
Q: Would you say you learned how to make a movie from the process?
A: Hmmm. Well, having gone to film school and spending years working on low-to-mid-budget indie movies, I had a pretty good idea of how to make a movie properly. But then I also spent my high school years making no-budget guerilla horror movies in Philadelphia, so I was thoroughly comfortable with picking up the camera and doing what you have to do. Im a congenital storyteller by nature, and for me the camera is, among other things, a powerful tool for telling stories. So I dont think theres one way to do anything. Especially tell a story or make a movie.
Q: Would you be willing to make a movie this way again?
A: Depends on the story and the idea and how much control Im willing to give up. Unfortunately, I learned from doing low-budget art-department work that once you show you can pull something off with no money, nobody ever gives you any money to do it.
Q: In this increasingly immediate culture, do you think something shot in 2003 is relevant in 2007?
A: Unfortunately more so. I live in Williamsburg, which has become something of a fashion/youth capitol, and every time I walk out my door I see more and more fucked-up priorities worthy of satire. Not to mention the antics of the Bush administration, whose crimes are so much more damaging and egregious than Watergate but who persist in getting off scott free again and again and again. Round and round she goes
Funny and Quirky
