TALES FROM THE CITY: An interview with Thirteen Conversations About One Thing director Jill Sprecher. By Warren Curry 5/22/02 Part 1 of 3

To label writer/director Jill Sprecher's latest work, Thirteen Conversations About One Thing (which she co-wrote with her sister Karen), an unexpected surprise would be a mammoth understatement. This being her second feature (1997's Clockwatchers -- set in the world of office temp workers, which starred Toni Collette, Parker Posey and Lisa Kudrow -- was her first), Sprecher has made a powerful, elegant movie (for more of my gushing, please read the review), which smashes to bits her belief that she's merely a director "by default."

Based partly on Sprecher's personal experiences, Thirteen Conversations About One Thing examines the intersecting lives of several residents of New York City. The film features an excellent ensemble cast, which includes Matthew McConaughey, Clea DuVall, John Turturro, Amy Irving and Alan Arkin, who delivers the best performance I've seen so far in 2002. Sony Pictures Classics will release the film in New York and Los Angeles on May 24 with more cities to follow. Do yourself a favor and make the extra effort to seek this movie out.

CinemaSpeak had the pleasure of sitting down with Jill Sprecher during the film's recent Los Angeles press day. I'm pleased to report that the filmmaker was every bit as articulate, thoughtful and friendly (not to mention modest) as an interviewer could possibly hope.

(Note: This interview was conducted as part of a press roundtable, therefore not all of the questions were asked by CinemaSpeak.)

Because of the narrative structure, it seems that it's more important in this film than most for your actors to understand what the audience does and doesn't know about what is happening to their characters. How did you work with them on that?

Well, the script is very similar to the finished film. They all understood, just in script format, how their characters would fit into the bigger picture. It's a good thing, because we had the most complicated shooting schedule I can imagine. It's already so hard on movies -- everything is shot out of sequence, although I've heard in some movies directors want to keep them in sequence, and that's a real luxury for an actor. Most of the time actors are used to popping in and out of scenes and having to go backwards. On this shoot in particular, we had a very short shooting period and most of the actors were simultaneously doing other projects. Clea (DuVall) had to leave and shoot an entire movie in Montana and then come back to ours. Tia Texada, who is in a lot of scenes with Clea, went to California during that same time period to shoot another film. On their days off, Alan Arkin would come to the set and he was working on the Sidney Lumet series (100 Centre Street). Matthew (McConaughey) did some scenes, and then went to Texas and came back, so it was sort of a miracle that they all lined up to begin with. The actors, just from reading the script, had a sense of how it was going to fit together as a puzzle. They had a lot of mental track work to keep on top of.

The hectic shooting schedule obviously prevented you from doing things a lot of directors can do on a set. How did you keep your bearings on everything?

It was tricky, because we actually had a longer schedule when we started, but our financing never came together, so we had to cut days out when we were shooting. You just focus on the task at hand and try to make everything as simple as possible. The cinematographer, Dick Pope, and I had done some elaborate shot lists before we started shooting and, of course, when a week got thrown off our schedule that's when you have to go back and think, "How can we cover this scene in one set-up?" Those are the kinds of things that force you to really look at what you're trying to communicate and, in a way, it's a blessing to be able to always keep refocusing on the simplest (way of getting things done). There's something in philosophy called Accam's Razor, which is essentially the simplest explanation is usually the correct one, so we had to fall back on that many times. I think it's to the benefit of the film to make the storytelling as simple as possible.

What's the first thing you do when you need to start cutting corners?

Me and my sister give back our salaries! (Laughs) The first thing you do? Well, one thing that takes a lot of time are camera set-ups. You have to think, "Can we do this scene in a master shot?" That's going back to what I think is beautiful about cinema, although it's a huge burden to put on actors. There are several scenes that we just had to do in one take, in a master shot, and if the actors aren't completely on top of it and in-sync with each other, you end up throwing out that footage, but we never had to. What else did we do to cut corners? Well, craft service pretty much disappeared from the tables! (Laughs) I remember the lighting package got small, but fortunately we had Dick Pope, who is a genius cinematographer and can light a room with one light bulb and make it look great. One time we went to shoot at the location, which serves as Matthew McConaughey's loft, and there was another movie that was literally shooting right next door to us that had like eight trucks parked outside. I tried to put my hands over Dick Pope's eyes, saying, "O.k., don't look at all the stuff they have!" He was good sport, because he just looked at their truck and said, "Oh, it's going to look like crap. Look at all those lights." Everybody just got the bear bones minimum that they needed for their job and nobody ever complained, which was really nice.

After Clockwatchers, did you feel that Hollywood was going to be coming to you and that your second job would be easier?

There might have been a couple of weeks where we thought that somebody might offer us another job, and then we quickly realized that would never happen. We did think that getting a second film made would be easier than the first time. The first time we had no business making a movie and probably this time too. We didn't know what we were doing and we just kept going, waiting to be stopped by somebody, and ended up making a movie. Nobody called our bluff. We did think, "Now we have a little experience under our belt," so we could tell people that we'd done a film. It actually took three times as long to get the money for this movie as it did for Clockwatchers, and it was infinitely more complicated. Even when we thought we had the money, it turned out the money wasn't really there. It was a big struggle to get this one made. In spite of all these great actors and this great crew, it was really tricky. It almost didn't come off.

Can you tell us a bit about the incident that inspired the film? Apparently, you were on the subway and a complete stranger walked by and slapped you on the head?

Actually, something funny happened to my sister too when we were on the subway together. She was sitting in the seat closest to the double doors and there was a man standing in the door the whole time. All of the sudden, when the train stopped and the doors opened, right before the guy got out, he reached over and pulled her hair and then got out. I don't know what it is. I shouldn't feel like it's just me being singled out, because it's happened to friends of mine. I had been mugged a year before that and got hit in the head and had to have brain surgery. I got very bitter and, in short, Clea Duvall's character's trajectory kind of follows what I went through. Believe it or not, I used to be very nice when I first moved to New York. There's a movie with Harrison Ford -- I forget what it's called -- where he's this real shark of an attorney and then he gets shot in the head and becomes really nice (editor's note: Jill's referring to Regarding Henry). I found my head injury did the exact opposite. I used to be really nice before I got hit in the head. Then, if someone was looking at me too long, I'd think, "What are you looking at?" This episode on the subway -- it happened a year later and my hair had grown back, and for some reason a guy just walked through and slapped me. It wasn't hard, it didn't hurt, but it hurt me psychologically, because I had a lot of anger anyway. I think maybe sometimes I was projecting that I was a victim. Sometimes the way you carry yourself and can influence the way people respond to you. That incident broke me out of what I was going through in a weird way. The guy hit me and kept walking, and most people were reading their papers, but one guy had seen it and he looked at me and smiled. We have Clea kind of retell the story before we show that scene with two different characters. It was a kind of thing where I was literally thinking about how horrible people were and then I looked and saw that. It made me realize that if I was looking for misery, I didn't have to look very far to find it. But, if you're looking for kindness in other people, that's right out there too, and it helped me redirect my energy toward looking for those people.

How long were you in New York before the mugging happened?

Three years. I heard in New York City the statistics are that you're supposed to be the victim of a violent crime once every four years, so I have five more years before anything will happen to me, because I've had it twice. The slap wasn't the other violent crime, because that was just somebody in a bad mood, but I'd been mugged; a push in mugging in my apartment building three months before I was hit in the head.

What made you stay in New York?

I never thought I was a strong person. I guess I was so pissed off at people that I thought, "I'm not leaving." (Laughs) The sad thing is now I've left, because I finally did get forced out of New York financially. The rent just kept going up and my income kept going down. After this film, my sister and I are $150,000 in debt, so we gave up our apartment and put our stuff in storage there until we can go back.

Where are you living now?

We have a situation in L.A. where we get free rent and we're looking for the same offer in New York! We're lucky because our brother has a house here, and the real lucky part is that he has to travel a lot, so he said we could stay there.

But, you are still a writer/director. You have two films and are alive to tell the story.

We have two movies now and that's what our goal was. If you start off in independent films with the goal of making a lot of money, you're barking up the wrong tree. If the goal is to make two movies -- and I had the icing on the cake, getting to work with these people -- then we are very successful in that regard.

Click for Part Two

Home

Reviews

More Articles

IndieSpeak