Return of the Secaucus Seven, Lianna | John Sayles

so this has been a real dream and a true honor to arrange with everyone at the American cinematech and internally here at the archive and we're thrilled to get this series started here tonight with the first two feature films by John sales so to say a few words to kick off this night properly I'd like to now invite onto the stage the brilliant the multi-talented and the prolific American Independent filmmaker John sales [Applause] thanks for coming everybody uh I I do want to thank thank the UCLA archive especially for independent filmmakers um where the your distributor tends to go out of business two or three years after you make your movie and then that library is bought by another distributor that goes out of business then that is bought by another distributor that goes out of business it's really important um to get your film somewhere where it's going to be kept and available and uh we've just had a great time working with them on on a bunch of our films and they have all of our our film elements from you know the various movies we've made um what you're going to see tonight uh was originally shot in 16 millimeter and then blown up and uh one thing you may notice if you have any sense of space is that uh we thought it might get on TV so we we actually didn't shoot it in in the academy ratio and then when it was blown up um they said well you got to get rid of some top and some bottom or all top or all bottoms so there's some very strange compositions that should not be blamed on the cinematographer um uh this this was really before people were regularly making Independent films I had some kind of pioneers to to think about um John cassavetes comes to mind immediately Melvin Van Peebles had made a couple films at this point but it was it was really just kind of I was in a you know theater group and uh knew a bunch of good actors who were turning 30 and um you know Jeffrey Nelson Miranda you know was a producer of the theater we were in said well we know so many good actors I was starting to make some money as a screenwriter for Roger Corman and I had the whopping son of I think thirty thousand dollars in the bank at the same time and uh that's we what we got it in the can for we later added another ten thousand dollars to blow it up to 35. um and um I had five weeks to shoot um I acted with many of the people in the movie before some were just friends some remained actors some didn't um and uh we got surprised and that we actually got some offers of theatrical distribution took about year to get onto screens uh it played for maybe a week or two in New York and didn't do very well and the distributor who was uh actually mostly an exhibitor in Seattle took it back and redid the campaign and then the second time that it came out a few months later uh it kind of caught on and there were a bunch of movies that came out right about that time and it that idea that you could make a film um in America that um was not a studio film and that it could get seen by people in a movie theater and that might even make a profit if the if it didn't cost started to catch on this is before the Sundance Film Festival and things like that um and it's you know very much of a film if it's time none of us uh crew or cast um or director had ever made a feature film before so there was a lot of on on the job training and uh really not a lot of time to shoot it and it was really a lot of fun and I will be back um to do a q a at the end of it and then if any of you want to stay for Leanna that's a cool movie too thanks hello everyone it's John sales I'm Marcos from the Los Angeles Times thanks everybody for for being tonight John the movie just played so warmly tonight to the audience it's so interesting it doesn't feel dated in in the least it still feels very present why why do you why do you think that is how do you feel about sort of like the the way the movie plays to contemporary audiences you know I think that the um most movies you you kind of hang with the characters uh they are of their time some things haven't changed much um you know I I don't know you know I think that you know people kind of hang out with the characters and feel like okay yeah one thing I always try to do is have a way into the movie for different kinds of people um so I know for some people chip the dip the guy who's you know kind of square then that was their way in and you know for some of the women one of the female characters was their way in and so I think some of it is there's a lot of people and so there's a lot of ways in and now when you made this film I mean it's your first film as a director but at that point in your life you had already published three books of fiction you had been a theater director and of course you'd been writing screenplays for Roger Corman like the howling and piranha did it feel like a natural sort of step for you to to direct a movie what made you want to make your own movie no I certainly growing up um I saw more movies and TV than I read books even though I like to read books um but you know um you don't have to raise money and hire people to write a book and and you know I didn't go to film school so um it wasn't even that easy to rent a camera a movie camera in those days the the places kind of looked at you funny and and you know so do you know how to use this thing and so um it just seemed like well this is something that we could do I know so many good actors I had acted with most of these people you know directed a little bit but mostly acted with them uh you know probably David strathairn and Gordon Clapp who are in this are the most the best known um Gina Davis was in our um our company it was her first job um and it it you know I wrote the I wrote the movie that I could make at that time with a limited experience I had and I wrote the movie for the budget so you know it's it's kind of the only time I've done that where um I figured well you know most of the actors I know who aren't the Screen Actors Guild yet who are good they're around 30 and uh so I'm gonna make a movie about a bunch of people who are around 30 and that's kind of what the movie is going to be about um and I the we had acted up in North Conway where the movie was shot we'd worked in that theater that you see um most of the Interiors were shot in this Ski Lodge that we used to live in you know during the Summers because it wasn't being used so we could put people up for about a dollar fifty a night um and I don't think we we shot more than five miles away from that that thing so it was a movie that was actually very efficient to make uh for five weeks of you know crew and cast never having made a feature before we actually had a lot of time to do it because we no time was lost in travel um the the you know you have a call sheet on a movie and our call sheet was on the bulletin board of in the lobby of the the you know the ski lodge and it would basically say here are the scenes we might shoot tomorrow and I would get up and depending on the weather we would shoot one of those three scenes um people were told to you know bring the kind of clothes that you would wear to a Rick and reunion and so everybody's wearing their own clothes we didn't have a costume department or nobody's wearing makeup so we didn't have a makeup department and you know we had a seven person crew um and I I think a nice thing was that I didn't have to pretend I knew anything because nobody else knew anything either but now given the work that you'd been doing in Hollywood why was it that you wanted to make this kind of a movie to make something that was so kind of naturalistic it would seem to me it would have been very easy for you the way that Joe Dante or Jonathan Demi did to have just made a movie for Roger Corman you know I I just felt like you know I may only get to do this once so a lot of people are making genre movies and I like writing them and I like going to them but I don't necessarily want to make one so if I'm only going to get to do it once why not make a movie that is about what I see in life and have never seen on the screen you know and those particular people I hadn't seen on the screen in that particular situation I hadn't seen on the screen and then you made the movie for about forty thousand dollars yeah about 30 out of pocket and then then another 10 to blow it up and now was there any I mean the obvious precedent for that is John cassavetes but was he in fact an inspiration like in I mean yeah that made you want to spend your own money on me well because nobody else is going to give me any money that's that's you know and I I I really thought well geez when's this going to happen again you know Roger Corman was in the the um he was a signatory to the writer's Guild then so I was getting ten thousand dollars which was the writer's Guild minimum at that time he later was not a signatory to it so people weren't getting paid that much but uh I had written three pictures for him and I had sold a short story collection and a and a novel at that point so I had this much money down I just didn't know I was gonna continue to make money that way and it just seemed like well this will be really cool to do um also you know I a lot of my models were people who had written their way into being direct you know Walter Houston I mean uh John Houston kind of writers who then became directors and when I would talk to people out here about well I'd like to direct somebody they said well what do you have to show and this was kind of well at least have even if it doesn't get released I'll have something to show you know there may be two scenes that are really good that I'll be able to show um so there was that kind of just experimental thing so there wasn't a lot of pressure on on us um and uh you know shooting 16 millimeter we were up in New Hampshire um probably the biggest expense in the whole budget was film stock and so we didn't want to over order film stock so every couple days film stock would come in cans to 6 000 salad balls which you see in the which was you know the bus stop as well and and a couple times we almost ran out of film in the bar scene we were getting really short on film stock so I learned a lot I mean the the scene there's a scene where you're cutting from JT who's singing around at the bar at night and I realized oh geez you know that's a song and I want to be able to cut back to him but I don't want it to be the same angle every time and so we actually had two camera bodies our our DP and our operator had brought a 16 millimeter body and so I had um one on a little piece of track and the other on sticks and with a zoom lens on and and I said to the guy who was singing this guy we're not going to do this too many times so you know try to do it and he had written the song so he knew it and um I had two sticks and because we were going to run out of film I I was worried about you know covering this thing and I just said to The Operators I said okay when I tapped you twice on the leg you start rolling when I tap you once you stop rolling and zoom in or or track in a little bit and so basically we covered the song in with about three minutes and 10 seconds of film and it's a three minute song and I got six angles so it was a little bit like you know live switching and you know that stuff I'm sure I could have learned it somewhere but on on the day you just figure that kind of stuff out because of necessity and I've also heard you talk about how the I think was the first day of shooting you did a tracking shot because excuse me you wanted to see how complicated or difficult it would be just how much time it would take yeah and that was the last tracking shot in the movie um it just took a little longer and I I did okay well luckily um the camera operator bill idolat was a much better hand-hall held operator than I knew or he would admit he had actually uh he went to Dartmouth and he he covered the football games and handheld there and he used to work for a guy named Warren Miller who made skiing movies and he used to film skiing downhill bending down and shooting between his legs to guys slaloming behind him so he's a really good handheld operator so the the the volleyball game and the charades game I got them to hand hold because there was not a style back then that that kind of handheld style and they were very nervous about it looking shaky I mean he turned up to be really good operators so I got a little movement that way but quite honestly I I one of the movies I had in mind when I made it was um Nashville uh Robert Altman's Nashville and I felt like okay I'm probably not going to get to move the camera much you know just on this budget how can I have a reason to cut because that's the other way that you kind of move the eye and move the audience board and I thought well what if I have a lot of characters and I can cross cut between them so this is a movie where a lot of the transitions are verbal transitions you know somebody says well well what about Jeff and the next thing you see is David stratarn's character saying Jeff you know um kind of you know hokey but I I didn't know that I was going to be able to do visual transitions um the dissolves in the in the movie some of them are kind of funky because at the Laboratories in in those days if you shot 16 the lab only offered um uh dissolves in multiples of eight and you didn't get to see them there was no digital or anything like that so you had to just guess oh I 16 uh 24 48 you know and you had to pay each time they did that and so I just kind of counted off one two three four I think it's a 64. and then that's what it is in the movie and and you didn't get a second chance um now similar to Nashville I mean you as you said you have a lot of characters but one thing I think the movie does remarkably well is that you get the sort of individual storylines of the characters and then this also a sense of kind of the larger Arc of like all of their stories there's like a big story happening at the same time and is that something that you kind of grappled with in writing the movie or was that more like in production and in editing no you know it's it's there wasn't much that I cut out of this movie you know um it's pretty much in the writing and it's something that I had done in my fiction as well you know I most of my novels have multiple characters in them and and multiple points of view the point of view here doesn't change that often it stays pretty omniscient but you hang with different people um you know one of the things that I I you know kind of spurred me to do this particular thing is is right around that time as we shot this in 1978 there had been a bunch of Articles and like Time Magazine and Newsweek about oh all those 60s radicals are you know they're starting to work for banks and stuff like that and you know happily selling out and that just was not true of the people that I knew um almost all the the men that I knew were actually downwardly mobile they were choosing careers teaching or you know working with alcoholics or whatever where they were going to make less money than their fathers did at the same time that the women were tending to have careers and I thought that was interesting and just in general uh I knew a lot of people who had been in Vista and the world had not turned out the way we wanted it to turn out and I was interested well how do people deal with that what's the next step you know and do you get disillusioned do you you know give it up do you go work for a bank or whatever and the people that I knew were trying to hold on to those ideals and now um do you you um there's a way in which the um you know people often like to reference The Big Chill when they're talking about this movie and I mean I've heard you say to you one of the big differences is this film really isn't concerned with selling out in a way it's a it's a hopeful yeah The Big Chill is called The Big Chill for a reason you know it's it's about people grappling with this hard thing of have we lost our our ideals or did we never have them in the first place and these are people who are you know they're they're not making as much money and they don't drive as nice cars but they are trying to to go forward with those same ideals but now as you've moved move here you've grappled with so many different genres you've made seemingly so many different kinds of movies and stories I've heard you say that all your movies are personal to you but they're not autobiographical and it's in a movie like this in particular I think it's very tempting to want to look for you in the movie like which character is the the you there and would people find one no no not necessarily um uh one of the actors because I always write bios for all the characters and even in my first movie I did this and and one of the actors came to me and and having read the bio and said how did you know that I've always felt like everybody's second best friend and I said I didn't know that about you but that's the character you're playing you know so yeah I I I'm not a especially autobiographer you know I'd say the movie that's closest to my own experience is Baby It's You um in the in the size of the city and the ethnic makeup of the high school and stuff like that but uh one of the things that interests me about you know a lot of my movies and books are about trying to figure out what can possibly be going through people's heads if they're acting this way and what's the situation and one of the things that's interesting is to start with well what is there to be in their head is this movie before the woman's movement is it before Freud is it before capitalism is it before people knew the world was round and that really affects what people might possibly be thinking you know it and and you have to start with that and and you you think about that from from the you know Ground Zero and then you build a character and then within within that of what you could know is how old are they are they educated are they not what class are they from what color are they what were the attitudes about that so there's all this stuff that goes into that now you know for my first movie you know talking to these actors all of them knew somebody like that you know they were comfortable they were the age of the characters they were playing they weren't playing people you know in the the distant past and so that was a an easier way to start and now at at this time when you made the movie there really wasn't an art house film circuit I mean Sundance didn't exist yet film X here existed here in Los Angeles what did you think the life of this movie was going to be I thought we might get on PBS somehow you know because they they had uh a kind of Series where people were making uh American short stories into like one hour things I thought well you know maybe maybe so so really what was happening and it and it kind of was the most the luckiest thing for us as filmmakers is it was right at the point when um people were starting to be able to you know very shortly after this people got home video and calendar houses which every June would play the 400 blows were starting to realize our audience has seen it a bunch of times 400 blows maybe we have to program something else and they were going from being calendar houses into open run houses and therefore they needed you know new movies and they and and well one of you know some people don't read subtitles and so what can we get from Britain or the United States and there were probably five or six um non-hollywood Distributors around and and probably the year Secaucus 7 came out there were 12 independent movies made in this country so they would look at the head of the company would look at anything with sprocket holes um and so you know we we you know now Sundance gets 2 000 feature films every year you know it's a lot more competition now and now did it work like do you feel like you got from making this movie what you wanted from The Experience oh yeah I mean actually what's happened in in uh my career is not all our movies have broken even some of them made a little profit a few of you made pretty good profit but nothing Mega you know but I've gotten to write for other people in every genre because of stuff that I've made so writers get you know Typecast and directors get Typecast just like actors do Joe Dante who who made piranha he only got not only horror movies offered to him but aquatic horror movies so you know he got offered Jaws three people nothing and orca two and things like that and he hates the water so um but luckily because then I got to you know make a movie that was about you know a gay woman you know I started getting some of those offers and I made a baseball movie so I get Sports offers and stuff like that so it's been good my my the movies I've made have been good advertising for my writing and kind of Vice Versa you know um so the biggest compliment um that we still get is even though it's almost impossible to raise money to make a movie when I do really good actors say they'll work for scale because it's a good part and they've seen another movie of mine they say okay I could be in one of those and do you feel like in some way you're always like staying one step ahead of getting Typecast like the fact that you make so many different kinds of movies makes it hard for people to pigeonhole you yeah well lately it's because I don't make many movies and so it's like oh is he still trying to make movies you know so you don't get pigeonholed if you you don't work for three or four years in between movies um but yeah it's it's you know um I've just been lucky and I've gotten to write in a lot of different genres and that's fun you know there's certain genres I'm not interested so I I haven't written in them but um you know got to writ gangster movies and westerns and horror movies and you know romances and a lot of historical stuff and is there a big distinction for you in between say writing one of your novels and writing a screenplay like when an original idea comes to you how do you decide what that story is going to be well sometimes just the scale of it or you know my new novel yellow Earth there's not a oil company that's out there fracking who's gonna come and invite me to watch them put up Rigs and then make them look bad in a movie um you know I couldn't afford to do the stuff that is you know portrayed in yellow Earth so sometimes just practically there's no way we're going to be or the scale of my last novel which you know a moment in the sun which would make a great 550 to 100 episode midi series but it's a thousand pages long and it's all over the globe and stuff like that there's just no way sometimes I've taken a small section of a novel and expanded that into a screenplay but you know and sometimes it just seems like this should be a book or this should be a movie I've written another novel since uh yellow Earth and quite honestly it's based on a screenplay that I wrote years ago that we were never able to raise the money for and then I just what a good story I should do something with it and now to talk a little bit about the second feature tonight Leanna your second film you actually wrote this screenplay yeah and and it you know it just seemed like nobody's going to give us the money to make this and and I don't think I can make it for the money that I have and so it was kind of sitting there and then uh we had this idea that oh good we'll make it for you know eight hundred thousand dollars and we'll make it in 35 millimeter and then almost a year later we said well maybe we'll make it for three hundred thousand dollars in 16 millimeter and we went from having you know uh we'll go to a studio or a small you know Distribution Company to okay uh does your aunt have some money that she might you know and actually Karen Trot one of the actors in this it was not in Leanna actually gave us like a thousand five hundred dollars to you know when we piece together between some of the money we made back on Secaucus seven and various friends and family and then some people we didn't know I think the biggest piece was like a fifty thousand dollar investment we pieced together 300 thousand dollars and made another movie and now can you talk about the inspiration for the story of the movie because I feel like if this came out if lyanna came out today so much of the conversation around it would be about you as a straight man making this woman about a woman's lesbian Awakening what was it that was the inspiration for you to want to tell that story yeah actually um you know two things kind of came together I I knew a lot of people who you know their relationships were breaking up and some of them were married and some of them weren't married but the real factor in what kind of breakup it was was whether they had children or not and if they had children it was not such an easy breakup and they were going to be in each other's lives forever um whereas the people who weren't didn't have kids it was have a nice life goodbye you know we'll try to avoid each other for a couple weeks but then we're going to run into each other and so so what um so that started it and then at the same time I was thinking about that there had been a couple big cases in the news of women who had been married had kids um broke up with their husbands got custody of the kids but then when they fell in love and started Living with a woman another woman their husbands brought them back into court and the judges just said no this is terrible for the kids the husband's getting custody and I thought well that's an injury situation where the mother would be the one who's locked out is on the outside looking in and then I felt like well how far into that world can I well let's go with somebody who is very new at it you know so this is not somebody who's known this about herself for a long time or thought about this for a long time uh and then and then the other part of the story is somebody who got married right out of college uh married her professor and really has never been on the job and relationship Market and all of a sudden she's in her 30s with two kids and she's got to think about digging and what do I do for a living and how do I make a living and and I knew a lot of women who had gotten into that situation as well so a bunch of things came together well an interesting thing is I I wrote a movie for John frankenheimer that was eventually called The Challenge and Scott Glenn was Scott Glennon Tortura mofuni were the the stars of it and uh I was in in Kyoto uh where they were gonna shoot the movie and Scott Glenn came down and I talked about and he had just been in and he asked me what I'd done and I explained the plot of this movie which had not opened yet and he had his last movie was personal best which was the other gay themed woman themed movie that came out that year and I asked her so what's that movie about and he said track and field and then I realized later he's the coach in in his in his character's head is track and field I don't care what these girls do you know outside of you know my area of Interest and yet uh for so many people I mean this was similar to what you were saying about sukaka seven this was a story that was really not on screen this was a story yeah I haven't seen that before yeah yeah I mean usually you know there's a joke in Leanna about um one of the the best known books you know within gay literature at that time was called The Well of Loneliness you know and I I thought well you know that's some people's experience but there's other experiences within there and can you talk about about casting Linda Griffiths who plays the story of the movie it is just a tremendous performance yeah Linda really kind of came up at the last minute um we had some other people who who um we had an interest of ing were a very well-known actress came in and um our casting director said well you'd be surprised at who just kind of showed up and you know she wants to read for this part and she was just in a really hot movie and she says it's it's the best material she's read you know in years and um I said okay well we've got one person before her and then the casting director came in and and and said okay here weird thing happened she's living with her agent and her agent just called and said she's not coming in because she really didn't respond to the material and she's still out there so do we tell her that or do we let her come in and audition first and then deal with her agent and I said just tell her and then she just went home and another actress said yes and then at the last minute got nervous and you know it's not it was a big deal then to play somebody gay whether you were gay or not and uh so we had somebody who at the last minute dropped out and then we had we went and saw Linda in this play where she she played um uh Trudeau and his wife in the same one-woman show and thought well she's good you know even if she is Canadian and uh you know uh and we cast her and she was she was great you know had not been in a movie before but I've heard you refer to the part as frustrating in that the the character she's hard to read she doesn't really know what she wants was that difficult both for her to perform and also for you to to direct to try like I don't know how you direct someone to be uncertain well you know I mean I think like at the end of the first Linda said to me okay so am I um miserable um really miserable or suicidal yeah because we were shooting a lot of those scenes and I said really it's moment to moment this is so new to this person and that's what you gotta that's what's going through your head is is this going to turn out all right is this really real am I just in love with this woman or am I interested in Other Woman what's this going to do to my kids you know I want to get my kids back and get you know am I going to lose custody of my kids you know all this is really really new and so it was a difficult movie in that way is there's always a subtext you know there there was always you know it's it's a difficult thing to play a whole movie you know my last movie um Lisa K Hamilton plays somebody who for most of the movie her son is being held as a captive and somebody sent her his ear you know and she said I've got to play everything like they might kill my son you know and I said well you know everything that's going to be there but there's other moment there's other things you have to do during this and some of your focus has to be on that don't ever forget that other thing but you can't play everything like you're you're you're right at the moment when your son's gonna die in two seconds it's a hard thing to do you know to have that kind of sub subtext all the time I know as much as the movie is about her promotional reality as you do in so many of your movies her economic reality is so present like you were saying just like get an apartment get a job and that's just something we don't see a lot in American movies at all like for you is that something you're conscious of like are you always thinking about inserting those things in your work or to you is it just a natural part of like human drama you know it's interesting um uh Hitchcock and a lot of other people who made Thrillers would have their characters be Architects because nobody knows exactly what they do you know they have a piece of paper and they wear a hard hat for two minutes and then and they and people just figure well they could take a week off and have an adventure and nobody would miss them but life doesn't stop for most people and you know I one of my favorite things is is the end of Goodfellas when he's trying to make the the spaghetti sauce and the helicopters are there and he's got to worry about maybe he's got to kill somebody that night or whatever life doesn't stop and and economic life doesn't stop and if you don't have a job you got to worry about you got to make the rent you know and yes your kids and it's the it's the reality for an awful lot of people is you know if I lose the I hate this job but if I lose it am I going to get another one you know I've got kids or somebody else you know depends on me um and you know aliens are invading can I take the day off or you know are they not going to excuse me because those aliens just blew up the White House and now lyanna is a a a kind of a bigger scale than sukaka seven it was more expensive you have kind of more locations when you were making the movie did it feel more ambitious did it feel like a step forward uh yeah we had we we had tracking shots more than one um we we had a few more employees uh we we did use our home as an office um I did let the grips take my car and it was a picture vehicle and don't ever do that um when they say they can put the front door back on they can't really um so yeah it was a step up uh it was still really difficult and we didn't have that much time to do it I think we have five weeks again um brother from another planet was only four so we had even less time to do that so you know and I've made I think four movies in in four week periods so you know it's you kind of just kind of feel like this is how much time we have this is how much time I can give the actors and the most important thing that you do as a director with actors is an actually an acting job which is to make them feel like you're not in a hurry you know so that they're never worried about blowing a line or the sun's going down or anything like that and and while you're kind of going oh God we've only got 15 minutes before the sun's gonna be down you you can't pass that on to the actors um and so you know just there were just more people to deal with and now is that in particular that idea of like not having the actors feel the pressure that you're feeling did you have to make some mistakes to learn that like or was it the fact that you yourself have some acting experience you kind of knew that that was the truth yeah I think the advantage that I had coming into I didn't go to film school but I had I had directed in theater I had been an actor um and I had a feeling of what's going to help people that's when I'm there you know you you don't you don't teach people how to act um you direct their talent and and so a lot of what I was doing was just trying to help them I gave him the BIOS beforehand you know um and and some a direction is really yeah can you do that again you know have all those same feelings but try to hold them a little bit more and then maybe the next time is okay let alone hang out you know or don't let her push you around this time you know those simple kind of things don't change any lines don't necessarily change your blocking but there's there's a different emotion that's going to be pushing you forward in this thing and that I was always very comfortable with and now one detail about this lyanna in particular that I I'm so taken with early in the film there's a scene in like a playground and it in fact is the same playground in Hoboken where scenes from On the Waterfront yeah were shot and now did you know that or they're just like not that many playgrounds to shoot it there's not that many playgrounds to shoot in you know and it was yeah it was great to to walk around Hope Oh there's the chair search where you know you know uh Carl Malden's you know church and here's this and you know uh there were a few people who you know had been extras in the film still around and stuff like that you know and they originally you know the they were going to shoot over in Brooklyn but that Waterfront was so mobbed up that they got too many death threats and so they came over to Hoboken they shot it and now before we take a few questions from the audience I'm just going to ask you one more question which I'm going to jump forward a movie and ask you something about baby it's you that's that's also going to be showing this part of this series that was actually the first American film that was shot by the cinematographer Michael ballhouse he had been working in Germany with Reiner Runner Fassbender and this is before he went on to work with Martin Scorsese he actually had shot a movie before that um for Peter lillianthal who's a Argentinian director called Mr Wonderful with Joe Pesci before he got known um that never got a release that was a nice little movie um so Michael was very very new his English was pretty good not great um and and somebody had seen that movie and recommended him and I had seen a bunch of the Fassbender movies that he had shot a wonderful guy to work with and did you for that movie in particular did you feel like he was going to bring something Bolder and like more style to the movie I just I just thought well here's a guy who you know he's shot really low budget movies and they looked great you know and and I'm going to be working with a lot of very new actors a lot of the kids who were in the movie had not been on screen before and I'm gonna need that time to work with the actors and I just said to Michael you know we're going to be working really fast I'm going to tell you what the shots are at the at the beginning of the day and so you you do your best in the time that we have and and Michael was also a great operator he's the best operator I ever worked with um and he you know he and his his uh assistant cameraman were like a U-Boat crew because they spoke in German to each other whispered in German to each other and they never locked the camera off so even if it was on a tripod they never locked it down and he would be you know in German saying go with the girl go with the girl the focus puller would because Michael would he would feel what was hot in the in the scene and and I gave him that kind of Freedom within the frame that I wanted um and also he was he was the first EP where if I said wide and low his wide and low looked like my wide and low and we didn't have video assist yet so you know when I would look through the camera and say yeah that's wide and low you know we never had to move the camera again and we have just a few minutes for some questions anybody no and then right there it's kind of kind of a boring question for uh Scott's seven you're talking about how the budget was low and you're ordering film just as a as you were shooting uh did you shoot on Kodak or did you shoot on something cheaper no we shot on Kodak um but but you know 16 minute millimeter is you know um it's not only cheaper because it's half the the width um but you don't need as many feet right so yeah um uh several movies later Silver City um I I realized geez you know I I don't think I can we are still shooting on film and I called Haskell Wexler up and I said so how's go again have you ever shot super 16 and yeah which is a is a slightly wider version of it um and there was a little pause and he said uh me and two other guys invented it so yes the answer was yes um but yeah I I you know we use Kodak and it was just before the ASA which was the the speed of the film got to the point where you could light by eye so it was still going around and with light meters and doing a lot of math in your head so the scene on the living room floor um when you kind of re you know the two kids make love on the floor and the camera lifts up and you see the other woman on the floor behind them and she's in Focus too we shot that in bright bright light and printed it down and they had to go around with light meters of oh this is two times hotter than this and then about two movies later they Kodak came out with a stock that was the ASA was so much higher that you could actually I could just go in and they could light it by eye they would still check it now and then but I could see what it was going to look like I didn't have to take the DPS word for oh it's going to look good once we bring it down which was scary thanks and we're gonna have to take a break now before we run uh lyanna and so everybody please join me in thanking John sales thanks everybody foreign