The painful experience making “Margaret” and why it works better as a longer film
It was a long, painful, stupid process that surrounded the film, which I really loved. Making the film and even editing the film was not stupid, but it did take a while because of all the procedural arguments that blossomed into this really crazy extended situation. But the truth is the film — although I still feel sort of sick at heart at the degree to which the distributor abandoned the film, and in some ways deliberately buried it — the fact that it was rescued from total oblivion by people who liked it and, particularly, I must say, English people who liked it. We had a wonderful response here after it had been very much neglected, and that helped the studio pay some attention to it and it fed the small campaign of people who wanted to see it again and helped keep it alive. And that was really nice.
I mean the fact that we’re sitting here and you’ve seen the film is wonderful. I mean why should you have? There’s tens of thousands of other films, which you’ve probably seen too. I feel like the movie is clinging to life and maybe has a bit more life than it did 10 years ago. Well, not 10 years ago. It was released 2011, 2012. And it still seems to be there, so that’s a nice feeling.
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On the first two films there were logistical issues with making the movie, and you have to try to adjust the script to the budget and you have to make sure you can afford to shoot the material that you have. But I haven’t had any creative interference on either ‘You Can Count on Me‘ or ‘Manchester.’ The problems I had with ‘Margaret’ were in the editing, well after the film was shot. At first it was just procedural, they wanted me to edit in a certain way and show them the film in a certain amount of time, and I didn’t want to. It escalated from that, and they never really cared about the content. So I haven’t really had to grapple with that too much.
My feeling about that, however, is that if you care about the content you shouldn’t have to convince anybody of anything. You’re in a political situation, by which I mean you have to arrange to have authority over the content yourself, or have someone more powerful than you who has authority over the content. Because my style of arguing is to lose my temper and then give up, which is not very effective because you’re both disliked and you lost [Laughter]. So you have to be a little clever, you have to know that you’re going to be protected by the people who do have the power or you have to figure out how to get it yourself if you want to protect your work.
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Margaret, I really did think for a long time that it could work at the contracted length, which was two hours and 30 minutes. That became the fulcrum of the arguments that we all had. It turned out that it really just didn’t work. It actually moves faster and works better longer, because of the nature of the story and the nature of the structure. There was a trick that I discovered, or we discovered, where if you keep the scenes playing for longer than usual, when it’s working, it draws the audience in, or draws me in, and I feel that I’m really watching a real, two people actually talking to each other. We all know what the rhythms of a movie scene are. So I consciously… The first draft I didn’t pay any attention to this at all; the first draft of the movie I just wrote with my eyes closed. It came out at 370 pages, and I cut 200 pages out of it. I had scenes that were 16, 20 pages long that were just as good when they were eight pages long. But eight pages is still very long for a movie scene, I’m aware of that.
It seemed to be trying to tell itself in a way that was unusual, that was ultra-naturalistic, that was trying to not be movie-pacing. Part of that, I think, is because teenagers often think of themselves as being in a movie. The fact is there are many times in life when you wish you could just skip to the end of the movie and you can’t. You have to sit at the doctor’s office, you have to sit with the lawyer, you have to sit with your family, you have to sit with a person who’s furious at you and you can’t just jump to the next scene, you have to go through the whole god damn thing. That to me creates tension and drama and interest, and that’s how that movie accessed that side of life.
The other two films were more conventional and were more of a conventional length. Look at a movie like ‘The Deer Hunter,’ I don’t know how familiar you all are with that film. That movie has a solid hour in that town before the three main characters go to Vietnam. All that happens is that they get off work, they go have drinks, they get ready for a wedding, they go to the wedding. You meet them all and there’s little scenes with these storylines introduced, but there’s no real plot. And it takes an hour in that town. The effect is that when they go to Vietnam – it’s the first and only movie I’ve ever seen where you see the soldiers as people who live in a town who are now soldiers, which is what all soldiers are. And I’d never seen that before, and I thought it was immensely exciting and great. Those scenes are great and nothing’s happening. I could watch it for two hours before they go to Vietnam. But without that, without the movie proving that they exist in real life by staying with them for an hour while they have their very ordinary lives, without proving it with the structure and the content, that very bold idea, you don’t have nearly the value of the horrific scenes and experiences that they have when they’re fighting overseas. There’s something incredible about that. It’s not Robert De Niro playing a soldier; he plays a guy who lives in Pennsylvania who then becomes a soldier. Anyway, I think I’ve made the point.
