CITY OF ANGELS: An interview with Random Shooting In L.A. director Jeffrey Delman. By Warren Curry 10/04/02 Part 1 of 2

One of the most pleasant surprises of my film-going year thus far is without question Jeffrey Delman's Random Shooting In L.A., which I first caught at July's Dances With Films festival. Told exclusively from the point of a video camera, which changes hands on several occasions, RSLA mixes together elements of cinema verite with more traditional narrative storytelling techniques. The film's unique arc, which builds from an almost aloof opening to a devastating conclusion, gives the film its power, and it's refreshing to see a multi-story, ensemble piece use this structure as an organic means of expression and not reduce it to a cheap gimmick. A graduate of NYU, RSLA is Delman's second feature, as the filmmaker, who cites Chaplin, Altman, Hitchcock and Murnau as his biggest influences, made his debut with the minor cult hit Deadtime Stories. RSLA is further proof that one needn't be armed with a multimillion-dollar budget in order to make a provocative, exceedingly well-executed film.

I was able to sit down with Jeffrey recently at one of the 25,000 convenient Starbucks' locations in the city, where we spoke in depth about his fantastic new film.

(Read Warren's review of Random Shooting In L.A.)

(Visit the Random Shooting In L.A. website.)

Tell us a bit about the process of getting Random Shooting In L.A. started.

It was a really long process. It was conceived in collaboration with Matt Keener, who is the producer, and I, and we wanted to do something in that particular medium (digital video). This is when the technology was just becoming available in the late 90's and there were a lot of films out there where people were trying to pretend that they were shooting movies in 35mm, but in fact were shooting on video. They never look quite as good -- it's not as much a matter of the stock as it is production values and things like that. We thought, "Let's do something that can only be done with the most minimal production value and then we'll just make that excellent." That's what we did going in. We were kicking some ideas around, that idea seemed to be kind of exciting and I had some friends that were playwrights, so we got a bunch of people together and said, "O.k., we're going to make a movie." Usually you start out with a script and then you say, "We can make a movie of this." We started out with the idea that we were going to make a movie and then we said, "Maybe we can get a script out of this." We started workshopping with the different writers and got a lot of different pitches. In the process, the project evolved into what it ended up being. We went in knowing that it would be a series of vignettes. It was exciting because we knew that we would be able to sculpt it, in a sense, on the fly. We started with five writers and ended up with eight vignettes.

Then you took these vignettes and shaped them into the structure of the screenplay?

The stories naturally gravitated towards different parts of the film. We started coming up with mechanisms to get the camera moving from vignette to vignette, being really careful not to repeat the handoffs. We were very interested in story structure. We were wondering if you could take a group of protagonists that were not connected and still give the audience the same experience as if they were watching a conventional narrative. We started looking at what makes a story. In the first act, you learn the rules of the world, how the characters react to each other. In the second act, the stakes rise and issues and themes begin to emerge. By the end of the second act, there's a moment -- in a Western it would be the moment where the gunfighter realizes he's lost, he hangs his guns up and retreats to the sunset, until someone realizes that he has to turn around and fight. We knew that we needed a scene that went to an emotionally dark place. In the third act of the film, all of the elements that you've seen previously all come together and issues and themes are resolved. The stories that were developed found their niche in the overall arc of the film, and we decided that the pacing would be more random as it began and more and more focused as the film went on.

How long a period was production and post-production?

We shot over a period of a couple of years. We did a lot of workshopping. Most of what was shot was actually scripted, but it was scripted through the workshop process. In other words, a writer would come up with a script, do a read through, toss the script away, workshop it for several weeks and then combine the script that was generated in workshop with the elements that started out on paper. That process took a while and we shot as money and day jobs would allow. Post-production took about a year. We had a few work-in-progress screenings in early 2000. We went to the IFP market in September of 2000 and then we locked it sometime after that.

Were you able to shoot in sequence?

No, we shot out of sequence. The first thing we shot was the couple, George and Sophia. The last thing we shot was the Raymond stuff. That was the last thing written, so therefore the last thing shot.

So you didn't have a completed script when production began?

We thought we did. We didn't realize that the abyss moment wasn't articulated enough. I don't want it to sound like that we didn't know what we were doing going in, because we did, but the film needed a very raw, spontaneous feeling. The problem with the film is that as a director I was not able to shoot stuff that was not motivated to be shot. We improvised entire lives of these characters, and a lot of what we improvised ended up not being in the movie. When we realized that our abyss moment didn't go into a dark enough place, we said, "Let's do something that is specifically dark," and that's where we came up with the nightclub scene. We actually mixed a heartbeat into the music track, so there's a sense of anxiety that is palpable. We were going for a real dark, primal moment. It wasn't until we realized that we didn't have that (dark moment) as part of the initial concept, that we went back and put it in. It really grounded the film. The neat thing about the film is we really learned a lot about telling good stories by making it. In a traditional story, you have a protagonist, he's got a goal, there are obstacles, at some point he gets his goal or he doesn't, and then the story is over. We take for granted those story elements. When you take those elements away, then you're really forced to look at what makes a story if you don't have the luxury of hanging on to a protagonist. We started to deconstruct what makes a story and then came up with a stronger sense of story. That's why I think the film works to the extent that it does.

How much guidance did you give the writers? Were they working from an outline that you had drawn up?

We had some ideas, but we were careful not to taint the writers in their processes. We gave them just the idea that somehow a camera gets to your story and leaves your story. We didn't want to dictate to them, simply because they might have better ideas than we did. In the first meeting, the idea of the tourist family showed up and that seemed to make sense. Beyond that, we didn't have any clear direction for them about how it would end. Cathryn de Prume, who plays the prostitute -- I had a made film a few years ago called Deadtime Stories that she was in, and I've always liked her work. In the early stages I said to her, "If you could play any part, what would you want to play?" She had been doing a lot of goofy comedies at that time and she said, "I would like to do something really dark." Her mom was Russian, so she had a good command of the Russian dialect and accent. She wanted to play a character using her Russian accent, and she wanted to play something really gritty. I asked her to come up with something and four days later she brought me her first draft and it was just amazing. The neat thing about that process was as we were workshopping her story, she saw from an actor's point of view how difficult it is to be a writer and from a writer's point of view how difficult it is to write for an actor. We found ways to take her story ideas and her character sense and meld them together. We chose that as the last story because it had this almost Flannery O'Connor sense of story resolution, where something magical happens completely contrary to where you think the story is going.

Did you always intend to have a specific element that was going to run through the entire film? In this case, that element would be the missing Doovis child.

Yes. From the beginning, we knew that in order to give the story an organic quality -- so you wouldn't have the fractious experience of getting constantly pulled out of stories -- it was important to have as many elements in the story as possible. We tried to do things like have the emotional life of the story follow day and night -- darker emotional things happen at night. The story begins during the day and then the first night is with the teens, and the story goes to sort of a dark place, but not as dark as it does the following night at the nightclub.

Of all the segments in the film, which was the one that provided the most difficulty in terms of physical production?

Well, I had a 103-degree fever when we were shooting the interior of the TV repair shop. As far as the crew goes, and just in terms of an ambitious production for the people working with us, staging the nightclub. We went to a storage facility and just dressed it, so it appears like it's a downtown loft party, but in fact it's a storage facility in Van Nuys.

Most of the characters we meet along the way don't have traditional resolutions to their stories. Did that cause a dilemma for the writers?

I think actually the stories, if not resolved, come to a conclusion. For instance, the Doovis' get their son back. If you look at the telling of that story: the parents are very fearful and, of course, whatever you focus on tends to happen. They're afraid something horrible will happen and something horrible does happen. In the end, in her TV interview, the mother thanks the people of L.A. and she realized that it wasn't so bad; that the world is a safer place than she thought. With the teens, we start out with this triangle and it's because they're not being honest with each other that things fall apart. With George and Sophia, the married couple, there actually is an ending -- it's not a happy ending, but he essentially got to the top of the ladder that he was climbing with her and realized he was up against the wrong wall. He was so focused on trying to find something in his relationship that wasn't there that when he found it, it wasn't what we was looking for. But their story is over.

This is, admittedly, an unfair question, but was there one character that you enjoyed exploring the most?

I really liked the stuff between Raymond and his father. The balance of love and disappointment and guilt that goes on between the two of them, I think, is really powerful. There are some nice moments that have nothing to do with the dialogue spoken, but just the way they played it. I thought that was really exciting. I enjoyed working on the character of Steve in the final segment. In his mind he's a good guy, he's just having fun, everything makes sense to him and he's, of course, a complete sociopath. But there's something so cheerful and disarming about him that you keep forgetting that he's like that. When you create fictional characters, it's the most fun to work on the ones that are the most disturbed because you can look at them and say, "That's not me." But at the same time there's something about them that's in all of us.

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