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

Do you and your sister have another script?

We're writing a pilot for a possible TV series. There are also two scripts we wrote during the time we were trying to raise the money for Thirteen Conversations that we're now trying to sell. I guess there are two parties interested in one of them. We decided that we're the kiss of death for a movie, so we're trying to sell what we've written to other people and now are just trying to get some money upfront for a change.

Part of what you did so beautifully in Thirteen Conversations was to not respect certain conventions. Does understanding the conventions help you then break them?

From a writing standpoint, I've studied all the rules of screenplays and the three-act structure, but I think people are always looking for different ways to tell a story. In a way, literature has so much more freedom -- a book can be 1000 pages or it can be 10 pages -- but a screenplay, if you're going to do a feature length narrative film, is a little more boxed in. Something like Memento shows that people are now starting to play around a little bit more with storytelling. Still, there is this ingrained need to have a single protagonist and the three-act thing, and we do like to play with some of those conventions.

In regard to Clockwatchers, do you get a lot of feedback from people who have had many of the same experiences depicted in the film?

When we were trying to get financing for that project and put it together, we had both been working on other people's films. When you're in production you're working 16-hour days, so we thought we'd go back to temping at eight hours a day. Plus, we thought we'd have a phone and a copy machine. Just like Parker Posey's character, we were going to move in and use their resources. Some of the feedback we got was, "This is really exaggerated." When I went back to temping, I realized that we hadn't even scratched the surface, because I ended up working for the meanest man in Manhattan. Literally, he's the meanest man. Every headhunter in New York refuses to deal with him and he can't keep a permanent secretary, so he has eight temps rotating around him and I was one of them. Some people think that it's very exaggerated and others say it's exactly like where they work.

When you're writing a script that you know is going to be shot on a shoestring budget, do you feel creatively limited or that your hands are tied?

In a way, it forces you to be more creative in that environment. We didn't realize just how much of a shoestring budget it was going to be on Thirteen Conversations, and one decision we made was that we wanted to shoot in actual locations in New York. When you make that decision that cuts into the time (you have) to rig lights, take them down, pack them up and move to another place. In both instances, we knew that we had to focus on the characters and that they would be the most important thing in the film. If we could also achieve other things that would be great, but the impetus of both movies was people and that's something you can do as cheaply as anything.

Was there ever a thought to not shoot in New York? We can recognize streets in Toronto now, because they double so much for New York.

We were told that we wouldn't be able to shoot this movie in New York for our budget. Then we got this company Double A films involved, who had shot a lot of movies in New York for $2 million that looked wonderful. They told us that we could do the movie in New York. My sister and I decided that if we were going to shoot it in Toronto that we weren't going to try to pass it off as New York City -- we wouldn't even refer to New York.

Is there anything inherent about the characters and their behavior that is specific to New York?

I think so. It came out of a lot of our experiences there. It's that kind of urban environment where you start to -- out of necessity, I think, not out of cruelty -- learn how to filter out a lot of noise and a lot of other people to exist. I wasn't even aware that I'd become like that, but when I first got there from the Midwest, I was aware that people walked really fast and bumped into you and kept going, and then I became one of those people. For me, it's a very New York movie, but we did send it to our cinematographer in London who had no idea it was it set in New York. He just thought it was set in London. I think people in urban environments will understand it.

Click here for Warren's review of 13 Conversations About One Thing.



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