TALES FROM THE CITY: An interview with Thirteen Conversations About One Thing director Jill Sprecher. By Warren Curry 5/22/02 Part 2 of 3

You assembled a great cast for the film. In that respect, do you feel that you were granted your wish list?

Yes, and we can't even believe it. When we sat down to put together our perfect list of people, everybody on there said yes. We like to start at the top and work our way down, and it takes a lot of nerve, but at this point people have said no to me and my sister so many times that we don't get offended by it. In this case, all of these people said yes. We were also very lucky on Clockwatchers. We went to these actors and they all just said yes.

Why do you think they said yes?

I think that we just picked the right people. Maybe that's part of the reason why we're fans of some of these actors, because they don't do the expected thing and it comes through in their acting. They take chances and are very passionate about the work. I think that we went after the right people.

Will the money come to get you out of debt?

Not on this film, just because we had to give up all future interests in the film to investors, who came in to keep it going. We're not very good business people! Oddly enough, my sister majored in business as an undergraduate. That's what she gets for not doing her homework.

In writing this story, how much effort was it to make the intersections work without seeming gimmicky?

We thought of this as a collection of short stories that all had a similar theme. We weren't trying to do anything gimmicky. Even though it has many storylines, we were cognizant of how moviegoers and people who watch drama, going all the way back to Aristotle, were very ingrained in this three-act structure. In a way, this movie does have a three-act structure and, in the whole second-act, we have these characters overlap mentally to show that they are all going through the same thing. The end of Act II really falls on John Turturro's story when he realizes that he doesn't know everything and he can affect people even by his non-actions. We don't have an ending for him. We have a climactic scene and we also wanted to make sure that, instead of having five endings to the film, we had a single ending. We always knew our ending, and we backed up from there and thought that we would leave each character just short of that ending. Several people have asked at audience screenings about what happened to the scene where Clea and Matthew meet. That's something we never wrote, but I don't think that's a stupid question at all. Certainly, if this was a studio film that would be an obligatory scene, but by the same token, we would rather leave that scene in the imagination and imply that he will do something for Clea's character.

Why does Matthew cut himself with the razor blade?

We had each of these characters come to this movie with a certain set of beliefs about the world. Clea's character is very spiritual, John's character believes in the laws of science, Alan Arkin's character believes that hard work pays off and then Matthew's character really believes in law. Of course, we pull the rug out from all the characters, so they have to re-examine their beliefs. We wanted to show that he's (Matthew) somebody who really believes that certain actions should be punished; he's spewing off about that at the beginning. Of course, then he does something and doesn't get caught. We thought that if the character is deeper than he appears at the beginning, he would figure out a way to punish himself. He's already escaped the hands of justice, so we sort of took a bit of literal license with it and he's the one who keeps his wound re-opened.

Do you consider yourself a writer/director?

I guess I consider myself a writer and the directing part has been both times by default. With Clockwatchers, my sister and I had that script and we couldn't find anyone who wanted to direct it, so I did it myself. I don't consider myself a director. I don't think I'm in danger of this happening -- that somebody would give me a script to direct! I'm not sure if I would know what to do. The reason I felt I might know what to do with these films is that, as a writer, I think you have a certain authority. If any actor asked me why I was doing this, at least I could come up with an answer, because my sister and I had created their characters. I still think of myself as more of a writer -- an aspiring writer, sometimes even.

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