The art of preemptive ingenuity

Yesterday, my wife drew my attention to the latest episode of the podcast 99% Invisible, which irresistibly combines two of my favorite topics—film and graphic design. Its subject is Annie Atkins, who has designed props and visual materials for such works as The Tudors and The Grand Budapest Hotel. (Her account of how a misspelled word nearly made it onto a crucial prop in the latter film is both hilarious and horrifying.) But my favorite story that she shares is about a movie that isn’t exactly known for its flashy art direction:

The next job I went onto—it would have been Spielberg’s Bridge of Spies, which was a true story. We made a lot of newspapers for that film, and I remember us beginning to check the dates against the days, because I wanted to get it right. And then eventually the prop master said to me, “Do you know what, I think we’re just going to leave the dates off.” Because it wasn’t clear [what] sequence…these things were going to be shown in. And he said, you know, if you leave the dates off altogether, nobody will look for it. But if you put something there that’s wrong, then it might jump out. So we went with no dates in the end for those newspapers.

As far as filmmaking advice is concerned, this is cold, hard cash, even if I’ll never have the chance to put it into practice for myself. And I especially like the fact that it comes out of Bridge of Spies, a writerly movie with a screenplay by none other than the Coen Brothers, but which was still subject to decisions about its structure as late in the process as the editing stage.

Every movie, I expect, requires some degree of editorial reshuffling, and experienced directors will prepare for this during the production itself. The absence of dates on newspapers is one good example, and there’s an even better one in the book The Conversations, which the editor Walter Murch relates to the novelist Michael Ondaatje:

One thing that made it possible to [rearrange the order of scenes] in The Conversation was Francis [Coppola]’s belief that people should wear the same clothes most of the time. Harry is almost always wearing that transparent raincoat and his funny little crepe-soled shoes. This method of using costumes is something Francis had developed on other films, quite an accurate observation. He recognized that, first of all, people don’t change clothes in real life as often as they do in film. In film there’s a costume department interested in showing what it can do—which is only natural—so, on the smallest pretext, characters will change clothes. The problem is, that locks filmmakers into a more rigid scene structure. But if a character keeps the same clothes, you can put a scene in a different place and it doesn’t stand out.

Murch observes: “There’s a delicate balance between the timeline of a film’s story—which might take place over a series of days or weeks or months—and the fact that the film is only two hours long. You can stretch the amount of time somebody is in the same costume because the audience is subconsciously thinking, Well, I’ve only been here for two hours, so it’s not strange that he hasn’t changed clothes.”

The editor concludes: “It’s amazing how consistent you can make somebody’s costume and have it not stand out.” (Occasionally, a change of clothes will draw attention to editorial manipulation, as one scene is lifted out from its original place and slotted in elsewhere. One nice example is in Bullitt, where we see Steve McQueen in one scene at a grocery store in his iconic tweed coat and blue turtleneck, just before he goes home, showers, and changes into those clothes, which he wears for the rest of the movie.) The director Judd Apatow achieves the same result in another way, as his longtime editor Brent White notes: “[He’ll] have something he wants to say, but he doesn’t know exactly where it goes in the movie. Does it service the end? Does it go early? So he’ll shoot the same exact scene, the same exchange, with the actors in different wardrobes, so that I can slot it in at different points.” Like the newspapers in Bridge of Spies, this all assumes that changes to the plan will be necessary later on, and it prepares for them in advance. Presumably, you always hope to keep the order of scenes from the script when you cut the movie together, but the odds are that something won’t quite work when you sit down to watch the first assembly, so you build in safeguards to allow you to fix these issues when the time comes. If your budget is high enough, you can include reshoots in your shooting schedule, as Peter Jackson does, while the recent films of David Fincher indicate the range of problems that can be solved with digital tools in postproduction. But when you lack the resources for such expensive solutions, your only recourse is to be preemptively ingenious on the set, which forces you to think in terms of what you’ll want to see when you sit down to edit the footage many months from now.

This is the principle behind one of my favorite pieces of directorial advice ever, which David Mamet provides in the otherwise flawed Bambi vs. Godzilla:

Always get an exit and an entrance. More wisdom for the director in the cutting room. The scene involves the hero sitting in a café. Dialogue scene, blah blah blah. Well and good, but when you shoot it, shoot the hero coming in and sitting down. And then, at the end, shoot him getting up and leaving. Why? Because the film is going to tell you various things about itself, and many of your most cherished preconceptions will prove false. The scene that works great on paper will prove a disaster. An interchange of twenty perfect lines will be found to require only two, the scene will go too long, you will discover another scene is needed, and you can’t get the hero there if he doesn’t get up from the table, et cetera. Shoot an entrance and an exit. It’s free.

I learned a corollary from John Sayles: at the end of the take, in a close-up or one-shot, have the speaker look left, right, up, and down. Why? Because you might just find you can get out of the scene if you can have the speaker throw the focus. To what? To an actor or insert to be shot later, or to be found in (stolen from) another scene. It’s free. Shoot it, ’cause you just might need it.

This kind of preemptive ingenuity, in matters both large and small, is what really separates professionals from amateurs. Something always goes wrong, and the plan that we had in mind never quite matches what we have in the end. Professionals don’t always get it right the first time, either—but they know this, and they’re ready for it.

Quote of the Day

The funnier you make your movie in testing, the farther you get from life as it really is.

—Judd Apatow, to The New Yorker

The Judd Apatow paradox

I don’t think I’ve ever read an interview with a film editor that didn’t fascinate me from beginning to end, and Jonah Weiner’s recent New York Times Magazine profile of Brent White—Judd Apatow’s editor of choice—is no exception. Film editors need to think more intensely and exclusively about problems of structure than any other creative professional, and they represent a relatively neglected source of insights into storytelling of all kinds. Here are a few choice tidbits:

There are moments where [Will Ferrell] is thinking what the joke is, then he knows what the joke is, and then he’s saying the joke. Making the leap from one to two to three. What I’m doing is tightening up that leap for him: improving the rhythm, boom-boom-boom.

I reverse-engineer the scene to make sure I can get to the joke. Then it becomes bridge-building. How do I get to this thing from this other thing I like?

[Apatow will sometimes] have something he wants to say, but he doesn’t know exactly where it goes in the movie. Does it service the end? Does it go early? So he’ll shoot the same exact scene, the same exchange, with the actors in different wardrobes, so that I can slot it in at different points.

Weiner’s piece happened to appear only a few weeks after Stephen Rodrick of The New Yorker published a similar profile of Allison Jones, Apatow’s casting director, and it’s hard not to take them as two halves of a whole. Jones initiates the process that White completes, looking, as the article notes, for “comedic actors who, more than just delivering jokes, [can] improvise and riff on their lines, creating something altogether different from what was on the page.” (As Apatow puts it: “Allison doesn’t just find us actors; she finds us people we want to work with the rest of our lives.”) White then sifts through that mountain of material—which can be something like two million feet of film for an Apatow movie, an amount once reserved for the likes of Stanley Kubrick—to pick out the strongest pieces and fit them into some kind of coherent shape. It’s an approach that has been enormously influential on everything from a single-camera sitcom like Parks & Recreation, which allows actors to improvise freely without the pressure of a live audience, to a movie like The Wolf of Wall Street, which indulges Jonah Hill’s riffs almost to a fault. And although it’s been enabled by the revolution in digital video and editing, which allows miles of footage to be shot without bankrupting the production, it also requires geniuses like Jones and White who can facilitate the process on both ends.

Yet as much as I admire what Jones, White, and the rest have done, I’m also a little skeptical. There’s no avoiding the fact that the Apatow approach has suffered from diminishing returns: if I had to list The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up, Funny People, and This is 40 in order of quality, I’d end up ranking them by release date. From one minute to another, each can be hilarious, but when your comedic philosophy is predicated on keeping the camera rolling until something good happens, there’s an unavoidable loss of momentum. The greatest comedies are the ones that just won’t stop building; Apatow’s style has a way of dissipating its own energy from one scene to the next, precisely because each moment has to be built up from scratch. A Frat Pack comedy may objectively have more jokes per minute than Some Like It Hot or Annie Hall, but they start to feel like the comedic equivalent of empty calories, leaving you diverted but unsatisfied, and less energized by the end than exhausted. The fact that Anchorman 2 exists in two versions, with the same basic structure but hundreds of different jokes, can be taken, if you’re in a generous mood, as a testament to the comic fertility of the talents involved—but it can also start to look like evidence of how arbitrary each joke was in the first place. If one funny line can be removed and another inserted seamlessly in its place, it reminds us that neither really had to be there at all.

But if I’m being hard on Apatow and his collaborators, it’s because their approach holds such promise—if properly reined in. Comedy depends on a kind of controlled anarchy; when the balance slips too much to the side of control, as in the lesser works of the Coen Brothers, the result can seem arch and airless. And at their best, Apatow’s films have an unpredictable, jazzy charge. But a few constraints, properly placed, can allow that freedom to truly blossom. A movie like Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye can’t be accused of sticking too much to the script: perhaps five minutes total is devoted to the plot, and much of the rest consists of the characters simply hanging around. Yet it uses the original Chandler novel, and the structure provided by Leigh Brackett’s screenplay, as a low-horsepower engine that keeps the whole thing moving at a steady but leisurely clip. As a result, it feels relaxed in a way that Apatow’s movies don’t. The latter may seem loose and shaggy, but they’re also characterized by an underlying tension, almost a desperation, to avoid going for more than a few seconds without a laugh, and it cancels out much of the gain in spontaneity. It promises us that we’ll be hanging out for two hours with a bunch of fun people, but it leaves us feeling pummeled. By freeing itself from the script, it turns itself, paradoxically, into a movie that can’t stop moving. The great comedies of the past could live in the spaces between jokes; the modern version has to be funny or die.

The riffs of Wall Street

Over the weekend, I watched The Wolf of Wall Street for the second time, and I came away with two thoughts: 1) I like this movie one hell of a lot. 2) It still feels about twenty minutes too long. And unlike Casino—a propulsive three-hour epic that I wouldn’t know where to trim—it’s easy to identify the scenes where the movie grows slack. Most of them, unfortunately, revolve around Jonah Hill, an actor whose performances I enjoy and who works mightily in the service of an unwieldy enterprise. Hill is a massively energetic presence and an unparalleled comic riffer, and Scorsese appears to have fallen in love with his talents to the point of grandfatherly indulgence. The scene in which Hill’s character delivers a briefcase of cash to Jon Bernthal, for instance, seems to go on forever at a point in the story when momentum is at a premium, mostly so Hill can deliver two or three inventively obscene tirades. It’s amusing, but it would have been just as good, or better, at half the length. And while for all I know, the entire scene might exist word for word in Terence Winter’s script, it certainly feels like an exercise in creative improvisation, and it caused me to reflect about the shifting role of improv in film, both in Scorsese’s work and in the movies as a whole.

Improv has been a part of cinema, in one way or another, since the days of silent film, and directors have often leaned on actors who were capable of providing great material on demand. (Sigourney Weaver says as much in Esquire‘s recent oral history of Ghostbusters: “Bill [Murray] was kind of expected to come up with brilliant things that weren’t in the script, like day after day after day. Ivan [Reitman] would say, “All right, Bill, we need something here.”) Given the expense of physical celluloid and repeated setups, though, it wasn’t simply a matter of allowing performers to riff on camera, as many viewers assume. More frequently, an actor would arrive on set with unscripted material that he or she had worked out privately or in rehearsal, and the version that ended up in the finished scene was something that had already gone through several rounds of thought and revision. Things began to change with the widespread availability of excellent digital cameras and the willingness of directors like Judd Apatow to let actors play off one another in real time, since tape was cheap enough to run nonstop at marginal additional cost. When the results are culled and chiseled down in the editing room, they can be spectacular, like catching lightning in a bottle, and the approach has begun to influence movies like The Wolf of Wall Street, which was shot on conventional film.

Like all good tricks, though, the improv approach gets tired after a while, and Apatow’s movies since Funny People and This is 40 have presented increasingly diminishing returns. The trouble lies in a fundamental disconnect between improv, character, and situation. A line may be hilarious in the moment, but if the riffs don’t build into something that enhances our understanding of the people involved, they start to feel exhausting or enervating—or, worst of all, like the work of actors treading water in hopes of a laugh. We aren’t watching a story, but a collection of notions, and they’re at their weakest when they’re the most interchangeable. Hill’s riffs in The Wolf of Wall Street are funny, sure, but they’re only variations on the hyperaggressive, pointedly offensive rants that he’s delivered in countless other movies. By the time the film is over, we still aren’t entirely sure who his character is; there are intriguing hints of his weird personal life early on, but they’re mostly discarded, and the movie is too busy to provide us with anything like a payoff. Many of Hill’s big scenes consist of him hitting the same two or three beats in succession, and for a movie that is already overlong, I can’t help but wish that Scorsese and Thelma Schoonmaker had kept Hill’s one best take and saved the rest for the special features.

Of course, many of the most memorable lines and moments in Scorsese’s own filmography have arisen from improvisation—“You talkin’ to me?” in Taxi Driver, “I’m a clown? I amuse you?” in Goodfellas, the confrontation between DeNiro and Pesci while fixing the television in Raging Bull—so it’s hard to blame him for returning to the same well. Yet when we compare Hill’s work to those earlier scenes, it only exposes its emptiness. “You talking to me?” and “I’m a clown?” are unforgettable because they tell us something about the characters that wasn’t there in the script, while The Wolf of Wall Street only tells us how inventively profane Jonah Hill can be. And this isn’t Hill’s fault; he’s doing what he can with an underwritten part, and he’s working with a director who seems more willing to linger on scenes that would have been pared down in the past. We see hints of this in The Departed, in which Scorsese allows Nicholson to ham it up endlessly—imitating a rat, smashing a fly and eating it—in his scene at the restaurant with DiCaprio, but there, at least, it’s a set of lunatic grace notes for a character that the screenplay has already constructed with care. Improv has its place in movies, especially in the arms race of modern comedy, which is increasingly expected to deliver laughs without a pause. But as in so many other respects, The Wolf of Wall Street is a warning about the dangers of excess.

The lost years of Alexander Payne

It’s hard to believe that seven years have passed since the release of Alexander Payne’s Sideways. When I first saw it, I thought it was close to perfect, if resolutely minor, but if anything, it has grown even more impressive over time—and in retrospect, it’s more clearly a predictor of the last decade’s dominant strain in comedy. In the years since it first appeared, countless directors have tried to recreate its heady mixture of slapstick and intensely observed discomfort—much of Judd Apatow’s recent output feels like a younger, hipper version of Payne’s work, and both Jason Reitman and The Office owe a lot to it as well—but none has ever quite managed to satisfy its audience on so many levels. In fact, I loved it so much that I wrote at the time, without any sense that I was voicing an ironic prophecy: “If there’s any director who ought to make an annual movie for the next twenty years, it’s Alexander Payne.”

Cut to the present day, when Payne’s lack of productivity has been so notorious that it inspired its own article in the New York Times. Payne hasn’t been inactive—he developed various projects, shot the pilot for Hung, and was “credited” with longtime writing partner Jim Taylor on the script for I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry—but it’s still a startling gap between Sideways and his new film The Descendants. It’s true that the vagaries of Hollywood can lead to long hiatuses in careers for no discernible reason, but Payne himself seems to view his case as exceptional: he says that he hoped to have directed five more movies by now, and intends to pick up the pace. But there’s no escaping a sense that he may have lost some of the most productive years of his life. The Times article, by Frank Bruni, ends on a sobering note:

“They say you can do honest, sincere work for decades, but you’re given in general a 10-year period when what you do touches the zeitgeist—when you’re relevant,” [Payne] observed during another of our talks. “And I’m aware of that, and I don’t want my time to go by.”

Did the seven years between Sideways and The Descendants eat up some of his charmed decade, or is that decade just beginning now?

He was silent a few seconds.

“I have no idea,” he said.

That said, it’s hard to imagine Payne, or anyone else, making a movie like The Descendants every year. It’s precisely the film by Payne that everyone was hoping to see: small, intimate, agonizingly well-observed, yet emotionally and thematically ambitious in a way that sneaks up on you over time. It’s so modest in tone that it’s easy to overlook how beautifully shot and designed it is: its locations, its art direction, even the clothes by Wendy Chuck—all those Hawaiian shirts tucked into khakis!—are among the most subtly satisfying I’ve seen all year. And, not least of all, it features George Clooney’s most moving performance. Payne has always been great with actors, and watching what he does here with Clooney, who gets to indulge in everything from broad physical comedy to moments that draw on Brando’s scene with his dead wife in Last Tango in Paris, makes you feel the loss of the past seven years even more keenly.

Payne’s case is a difficult one, because he’s a formal perfectionist who tells shaggy human stories that feel as if they should be more numerous than they are. And while The Descendants was worth the wait, there’s still a sense of incompleteness to Payne’s filmography, as if a few lines had gone missing on IMDb. I don’t know if Payne, or his audience, would be any happier if he had been more like Woody Allen, who makes two minor films in a row so that everyone dismisses him, then comes roaring back with Midnight in Paris. But Allen’s career, with its amazing variety and productivity, comes closest to a model of what a director like Payne should be. Now that Spike Lee is taking a break, Allen is one of the few major directors who makes a virtue out of quantity—which, as I’ve noted here before, is often what makes quality possible. The Descendants is a great movie. And it makes me sincerely hope that we aren’t at the end of Payne’s ten years of relevance, but the beginning.

On going out to readers

Working on the acknowledgments section of The Icon Thief this week reminds me of the debt I owe to a special group of people: the readers who looked at the novel in manuscript. They pointed out inconsistencies and inaccuracies, gave me suggestions for where to cut or tighten, and helped me find the heart of the story. Some of their feedback even reshaped the course of the plot itself: the single most powerful moment in the novel, which nearly every subsequent reader has singled out as a high point, was the direct result of those early comments, and it forced me to rethink the ending of the book. So I’m quite serious when I say that reader feedback is an essential part of my writing process, which wasn’t always the case.

Once you’ve decided to go out to readers, the question is who and how many. While it’s best to get more than one reaction, too many can be a problem as well—you’re looking for focused, intelligent criticism, not taking a survey. Before I went out to agents, I ended up showing my novel to five readers, three of whom provided detailed comments, which strikes me as about right. They also came from various backgrounds, although this was more of a happy accident: they included a journalist, a doctor, a lawyer (who also happened, crucially, to know Russian), a poet and memoirist, and a film student. Because my novel had a female main character, four of these readers were women, which worked out nicely, because my editor and agents all turned out to be men.

So it’s safe to say that I ended up with a pretty good group. An equally important decision, though, is when to go out with your material. Personally, I think that it’s a mistake to show unfinished work. As much as my agent might prefer otherwise, I’m not showing him any part of the sequel to The Icon Thief until the entire first draft is finished. A novel doesn’t evolve in a linear fashion—a word choice in Chapter 44 can fundamentally change something three hundred pages earlier—so involving readers too soon can only disrupt the process. But you don’t want to wait too long, either, because if the draft is overly polished, you lose the chance to make surprising discoveries. The director Paul Feig, in a recent interview with the AV Club, talks about something similar in relation to focus groups:

Judd [Apatow] actually has this whole thing they do with side-by-side screenings at two theaters right next door to each other and do a “P” version, which is a polished version, which is the one we think is close to what we want to have be our final cut. And then another one called the “E” version, the extended version, which is the dumping ground for everything we think might work, or we wanted to try, or we’re just curious if it’s gonna work. And out of all of those screenings, you’ll always get about five or 10 new things that you didn’t think were ever gonna work that go through the roof and you plug ’em into the polished one.

The “E” version, perhaps tightened very slightly, is what you want to show your readers. If anything, I waited too long with The Icon Thief: I didn’t send it to readers until I was just about ready to go out to agents, which meant that I wasn’t able to make the wholesale changes that, in retrospect, the novel still needed at that point. For the sequel, I’m hoping to share it fairly soon after finishing the first draft, though not until I’ve followed Stephen King’s dictum and cut it by ten percent. (My compressed schedule, with a final draft due in September, means that I couldn’t wait too much longer, anyway.) After that, it’s in the hands of my readers, hopefully the same group as last time. And I have a hunch that I’m going to learn a lot from them.