One thing I think is exclusive to the script — it’s never actually stated that Ali and Danny used to be in a relationship, but that’s in the stage direction.
That’s the kind of thing I always love. In Act I, there’s a prolonged moment that plays out in a single shot of Gayle Rankin and Dan Stevens sitting together on a couch while Lizzie’s off doing god-knows-what. It’s important that that moment have the extra element. But for me, in a music scene community, everyone has hooked up with everyone else for a few weeks here or there.
As for things that only live on the page, there’s an example that Jason Schwartzman cited when we were doing press for “Listen Up Phillip,” about a scene that takes place on his birthday. He was like, “When reading it before we met, I knew that that was the kind of thing that as an actor, you get excited about latching on to. It’s not about how do you show that, it’s about what do you do with that because it’s not going to be acknowledged.” On a job-job I did recently, I turned in a 110-page script to a producer, and he told me that when it goes to the studio, it could be one hundred, and I could’ve taken out eight pages of stuff that’s just for the actors and put that in a separate document.
For the first time, I did make a lookbook of visual reference points, I’d never done that before. Single images that reflect what I’m going for in terms of color and mood and setting. Act II is a still from “Sympathy for the Devil,” with the Rolling Stones in a big wood-paneled studio. Act III is an image of a woman on the floor clutching a guitar. Act IV is a still from “Last Days,” the Gus Van Sant movie.
The style of Becky Something’s dialogue is very distinctive, and on reading the script, a person starts to notice that her three big patterns are alliteration, rhyming, and spelling out four-letter words.
One of my favorite examples of this stylized sort of dialogue comes from a character in “The Stand” who spells everything M-O-O-N, this guy named Tom that everyone keeps calling a simpleton. He goes “M-O-O-N spells coffee,” or ‘M-O-O-N spells boulder,” stuff like that. My whole life, I’ve always thought about that book, and doing that with a character outside of Stephen King’s world struck me as something fun to do.
It’s been about eight months since the public release, has the film settled any differently with you in that time?
No. Generally, by this time, or even by the time of the world premiere, I’ve got so many things I wish I could take back. Triple-digits. But this time, I can count on two hands the things I wish had been done differently. And most of them are logistically impossible, due to time and money. It would’ve been satisfying to shoot a concert scene with two thousand extras, but that just wasn’t happening. We had two hundred, and that was more than fine, but we couldn’t get that classic concert shot from behind the musicians, looking out over a gigantic crowd.
I saw “Her Smell” and “A Star Is Born” on consecutive days up in Toronto last year, and I remember thinking while watching Bradley Cooper’s movie, ‘Huh, must be nice to be a first-time director and get to shoot at Coachella and Saturday Night Live.’
That’s the unfortunate thing about this false binary that exists after everything gets flattened out by being at the same festival. We probably looked like chump change next to “A Star Is Born,” they hit every physical and visual beat of what you want a concert scene to feel like, because they’ve got however many millions of dollars. Then you see us, and…
I’d say they’re trying to do totally different things!
Yes! That’s true. I’m just saying — would’ve been great to have that level of resources. But this is just one example. And you know what, I don’t think this movie got talked about so much in terms of its script, but that’s an incredible approach to a script. Takes a lot of story that needs to worked through, and just sails through it. I don’t remember how well-regarded the script was at the end of the year versus the performances, or the music. But it skips by so much of the stuff that industry-tales like this show. We get scene after scene of human interactions after things that other movies would focus on. We get a lot of time with them in rooms, arguing, having a relationship.
You’d said that you’d gotten offers to do “Her Smell” with a larger budget, but that the money came with strings attached. Does wrangling that kind of money require creative compromise, are those two things irreconcilable?
That depends on the scale in question. To do this and do it well, you need to convince someone else that your ideas are of value, which has eluded me as a skill for one reason or another. It comes back to what people feel when they look at the pages you share with them. Somehow, people look at it, and a movie starts playing in their head. This seemed like the kind of script that would get people excited in part because of the name attached to it, that Lizzie’s performance would really elevate what this movie could be. Now that doesn’t mean that it’s worth twenty million dollars, but it’s good enough to get made. I’ve been talking with my friends, who, like me, have met with resistance when you send out a script that needs more money. The problem is that it doesn’t seem good enough to justify so much money.
Is it a question of ‘good enough’ or ‘potentially profitable enough,’ because those strike me as two very different things.
Good enough to warrant the investment, that is. This script with no actress attached to it is a tremendously risky and difficult thing to say yes to. If I was like, “I dunno who’ll play it, there are lots of great actresses in the world! I’m sure we’ll find one!” Then people would flatly tell me it’s not getting made. I had to have someone in the lead role. If I’m just some guy who writes this script and I don’t have the pre-existing relationship with Lizzie from my past movies, this never gets off the ground. I’ve seen this happen with friends and with my own projects time and again. You write a meaty role, you think that someone big-league — maybe Emma Stone, or like, Margot Robbie — might be interested, so you wait two years for her to read it and clear her schedule, and nothing ever happens. But! If by chance someone like that does say yes, you can get that twenty-million-dollar budget. Ultimately, I’m writing for the actors, both in the dialogue and material, but also in the understanding that they’re part of what sells this. No one’s going to say, “You have total freedom, here’s ten million dollars, get casting.” It’s not 1997 anymore.
Do you ever get that Tony Soprano feeling, “I feel like I came in at the end of something”?
Oh, sure. It’s worse than it’s ever been. I say this as someone who’s been working for ten years and a fan for twenty-five. We’re in an apocalyptic time.
Alright, yeah, this is something I take for granted and it seems like you do too, but I interview a surprising number of directors who are like, “Aw, things aren’t so bad.”
They’re probably more successful than I am. I mean, okay, it’s not so bad. There are a lot of homes for things, a big audience out there, a cultivate sense of what works and what doesn’t. It only seems really dire if you think about it in comparison to the past. After “Listen Up Phillip,” I made two small movies back to back. But I also tried and failed to make a movie that, even in its lowest-budget form, would’ve been bigger than Her Smell. That never happened. It was going to be a music movie, big complicated period piece set in the ‘60s — ambitious, but on a small scale.
I talked about all this with Aaron Katz, one of my closest friends. We were both at Sundance in 2014, with “Listen Up Phillip” and “Land Ho!” My third movie, his fourth. For both of us, it felt like a goal we’d been dreaming of since 1997 had been realized. A big Sundance opening is every indie filmmaker’s dream. By that summer, nothing was happening for either of us, and we were saying that if we’d been there in 1994 or even 2000, we’d have both gotten started on something by that July. Passion projects of our own creation. Not that we were so great or anything, but it’s just that that used to be what happened when you get through the gates.
You’re either drafted for a hundred-million-dollar blockbuster, or at the same place you were before.
There are tiers in the middle, but they’ve gotten so rare. They used to let a lot of people take a crack at mid-budget original concepts. The big narrative for the Oscars a couple of years ago was “Moonlight” versus “La La Land,” right? And most people thought of it as corny white Hollywood fantasy facing off against a more soulful movie about social realism in a black community. But for me, I saw it as two young filmmakers. Florida or LA, black or white, I thought of them both as guys under forty. To me, the most frustrating thing is the lack of big opportunities for the young, a group I’m very nearly not a part of anymore. You see all the best things from the ‘70s, ‘90s, it was all people in their thirties, sometimes even late twenties. Those prime years are now getting lost because you spend them struggling to get anything going. Then when we do, we don’t have the means to take the really big swing. Everyone wants a “Pulp Fiction” or a “Boogie Nights” or a “Rushmore” — a chance to show them all what you’re made of. You can change the culture for a generation if you’re thirty and someone gives you a good amount of money and some creative control. Now, we’re struggling to do anything, for a little bit of money, and we hope that it has some small impact on someone.