An Evening with David Gordon Green

27Feb/080

An Evening with David Gordon Green

Filmmaker David Gordon Green Last night No Budget Film Club sponsored a screening of George Washington bookended by Q&A's with writer/director David Gordon Green, plus a reunion of sorts - of several cast and crew members who worked on the film.

The interviewer, Peter Broderick, had a very laid-back discussion with Green, whose patience and openness in answering questions surely reflects his on-set demeanor. Before the movie, Green talked about how he began George Washington with a budget of $42,000*, all but $10,000 of it earned from doing odd jobs in Los Angeles including being a children's hospital clown, a school janitor, taping diapers to his shoulders to see if they would cause a rash, and a security guard at the Getty museum (which allowed him to write the script). George Washington was designed flexible so that "all but a few scenes were disposable." At one point seven rolls of film were lost in FedEx and they thought, "Well, it'll be a great short."

Continue reading about David Gordon Green and the making of his first film, George Washington...They did casting in teen centers and anywhere kids hung out. The kids chose him: "I just wanted someone to tell me they wanted to be in a movie." The ages of the kids ranged from 9 to 14. It was during the casting process that Green realized his script was "not interesting" and he began replacing lines and scenarios with the help of the young actors. In filming, he really looked for the mannerisms and gestures that are normally ironed out.

It was a 19 day shoot and cast and crew lived together in a big house. It had a 'fraternity atmosphere' and Green was surprised the parents didn't care if their kids were living with strangers for three weeks.

Richard Wright, the production designer, had a $700 budget. There's a day called Big Trash Day in the town where everyone throws out their "big trash." Wright and Green took advantage of this and drove around with a truck and picked up the furniture and random props seen in the movie. They also looked for real locations that didn't need production design - or lighting, for that matter. The only lights they had were hand-me-downs from an aunt and uncle's video company. D.P. Tim Orr and Green would scout locations and determine the best times of day for certain angles.

The first cut was 2 hours long and they whittled out everything they didn't like. The George character was the original narrator but Green fell in love with how Candace Evanofski (Nasia) looked at the world. He liked the idea of a "misinformed narrator" from Days of Heaven. (He's a big Terrence Malick fan and later worked with him on Undertow.)

The movie was screened - with what Peter Broderick remarked was lots of laughter. Green was not surprised - he meant the movie to be often funny. He said this was the first time he had seen the film in six or seven years.

There was a year of touring 13 countries with the film. It was rejected from Sundance, but accepted to Berlin, where it premiered. Green said he had a good foreign sales agent.

Green has continued to collaborate with d.p. Tim Orr. He talked about how they first met, talking on a drive to a location for a short film they were shooting in school about artificial cattle insemination. Green has also continued to work with his production sound mixer from George Washington and many other people.

He thinks of film as collaborative: an 'our' not 'my' enterprise. Several of the great shots in the film were shot by assistant cameramen who he told to make use of the camera (not keep it in its box). They collectively shot the landfill sequence, including a shot Green loves of the dying snake. (Someone later in the audience asked what this scene was meant to symbolize, since Green also cuts to a mechanical image after a traumatic event in All the Real Girls. Green said it was nothing other than a sort of intermission to let the audience process what they've seen. He tends to think of movies in halves, he said, rather than three acts.) The editors played with the landfill sequence and all others and worked hand in hand with the composers.

One big change from early cuts: The title card that says "1st of July" originally said "Thursday." As a personal note, I'm glad they gave the audience some context for the 4th of July parade that later happens.

Green said he felt All the Real Girls was a realistic next step for a second feature. It wasn't a completely smooth transition. There was an investor out of Texas who wanted to fund it to the tune of $1M but he wanted to control everything, including making him shoot in El Paso, Texas. Jean Doumanian of Sony Classics stepped in to produce.

While All the Real Girls was on tour at festivals - including Sundance, which is making up for rejecting George Washington by showing anything Green films apparently - Green was prepping Undertow.

Undertow is based on a script developed by Terrence Malick. (He had sent Malick George Washington through an intermediary, but is not sure if 'Terry' ever saw it.) He said with Undertow he had "more fun making a movie than you should be allowed to have."

Undertow was actually postponed for a while when it looked like he was going to direct Will Ferrell in A Confederacy of Dunces, a movie that has been 'kicking around since Jon Belushi and Harold Ramis." Will Ferrell did a reading of it at the Nantucket Film Festival that was a big hit, but it seems implied thatthe rights to the novel or who gets the money if the movie is produced or some other legal thing kept it from happening. Said Green, cryptically, about resurrecting the project: "I would never want to make a movie in a negative space because there are so many positive opportunities."

That lead to the two features he's completed but have yet to see release: Snow Angels and Pineapple Express. They showed the trailers for both. The Pineapple Express trailer got a great response from the audience.

Snow Angels is based on a book a friend had sent him pre-publication (galley stage?). He had been developing it since the time of All the Real Girls. They shot in Nova Scotia in Winter of '06. They had gone there for snow but there was very little snow that year. Still, he found it very beautiful.

To get the Canadian tax breaks, he had to leave a lot of regular crew behind. This forced him to be more communicative. He was looking to find "little nuances." The movie, he said, is about "life and beauty and ugliness." Sam Rockwell came attached to the project which was a big plus. Kate Beckinsale signed on at cut rate for the chance to 'go deep in a performance.'

As for Pineapple Express, he said just that day Huey Lewis & the News had finished the theme song. He got the gig when he was invited to set of Knocked Up and hit it off with the Apatow gang (including Seth Rogen) and saw how similar their improvised style was to his own.

Someone in the audience asked him if he felt more pressure to follow the script on a big budget movie like Pineapple Express. He said he actually felt less pressure, because they could afford to let the camera roll all day and improvise more on Pineapple than any of his other movies.

* An additional $60,000 was spent in post. Green did not say where this completion money came from.