Lessons on Filmmaking: Full James Kicklighter Film Courage Interview

I think you can feature life and death in any genre. In many ways, even if you look at screenwriting tropes, film is about life and death. But for me, I believe artistically it's important to tell the things that you know best, and the themes of life and death are something that, for better or worse, have been very prominent in my life. My father died when I was twelve of an unknown illness. The CDC was involved and thought it was perhaps the first American case of SARS, so no one knew what to do with it. He went from perfect health to dying in a week. They were concerned that myself, my mother, my sister, anyone he had come in contact with might carry it and might cause something infectious, because they had tried literally all of the different antibiotics and all the different treatments, and nothing worked. Nothing responded. He just got constantly worse and worse, and he died the exact minute that he was admitted the previous week. I had a very happy childhood, for the record. It was a wonderful time, a place where I was able to be imaginative and creative and foster that. My parents were both teachers, and growing up in a town of 123 people in rural South Georgia, I was able to live in a place where community was very important, which I think is also very important to film. Imagination was nurtured and fostered, because I wasn't living somewhere like Los Angeles, where everything's already imagined for you, where you're always with people of different cultures and different backgrounds, living in an urban place. When you're in a rural community, you have to imagine a lot of things for yourself. So going through that experience really has left an impact on my life, and also on what I want to do with my career. It was unexpected. It was not planned. And it made me realize at a very early age the value of time and what we do with it.

You're right, there isn't a perfect time for anything. At the end of the day, as a filmmaker, you can make excuses for what you choose to do and choose not to do, but you've got to always have projects ready, at whatever stage in your career you might be. Say you're waiting on a big project. Over the past year I've been waiting on a film that I've been developing for a while, which looks like it's going to move forward this year. I ran off to make this documentary, A Few Things About Cancer, a small film that didn't need much of a budget, because I believe you always have to be making and creating. Don't throw up barriers as to what you can and can't do. So certainly, in my own career, that experience with my father's death has motivated me to constantly be creating and working all the time.

When I was a kid I was always a pretty creative individual. I had spent most of my childhood writing and creating things. There's this wonderful game that came out when Windows 95 was released, on our Packard Bell computer tower, called Spider-Man Cartoon Maker. I don't know if anyone else played Spider-Man Cartoon Maker, but it was a wonderful game. You would take all these stock scenes, stock locations, characters and visual effects, and you would create movies out of them: little animated, 2D, very simple films. My sister and I would go on Spider-Man Cartoon Maker and make sequels upon sequels upon sequels. That's how I would tell stories. I really wish I could have figured out a way to capture all of those, because some of them are pretty hilarious in hindsight, but unfortunately you have to be able to run the program to open the files. You can't export them like you can now. So that was a big part of my childhood. And then, using my imagination in a small town, I would tell stories. When I was growing up, my parents bought me a tape recorder, and when we went driving on long trips, I would talk about all these characters I had invented in my head and play them like a radio play, and we would record these on cassette tapes. I had this little thing I'd keep in the back seat, and I would talk about these characters. One time we were coming back from my grandmother's house in Florida, and I did a ten-hour funeral for one of the characters, who was resurrected the next day. Somewhere that tape exists. I have no idea where it is, but I'm sure it's hilarious as well. Those things were formative in my childhood. So stories, and doing things that had to do with storytelling, were something I was already doing once I became a teenager and once my father passed. I did turn inward for a time, and then started turning outward to figure out ways to express myself, and I think that has really formed the person I am today.

Screenwriting isn't necessarily about physical life and death, though it can be, depending on your story. But it is about the life and death of the character. Anytime you set out to write a script, it's about the evolution and transformation of that character, if you do your job effectively. Your character starts at point A and you're trying to get them to point B. For your plot, for the character's journey, they have to evolve and transform into someone totally different, to take your audience on that same emotional journey that you're trying to lens through your character. So I believe that life and death doesn't always have to be physical in a screenplay. It can sometimes be that emotional life and death, too.

I think that's an interesting question, because a lot of people do put these litmus tests on what it means to make a real movie. [inaudible] It's a real movie the second that people are watching it and the second that people are writing about it. And I think that is actually the second most key component, especially in the digital era, when you have YouTube and Vimeo and all these digital platforms that aren't necessarily monetized. If you make a short film that someone writes about, and I mean film journalists, bloggers, all these various things, I think then you've made a real film. It has nothing to do with money, because your career is about creating things and evolving as an artist to tell stories that, hopefully, people are going to access and enjoy. But if they don't know that you're making something, then you're not making a real film, because it's not for an audience. It's then for yourself. So for me, the litmus test always has to do with when people respond to it. The first thing I did where I really had some people respond was a short film that I made for less than a thousand dollars, called The Car Wash, with an actress named Edith Ivey. It was a really neat experience. I had just finished directing a piece in college about the Golden Age of Radio, for the National Association of Broadcasters' education wing in Vegas. Over the course of a semester, while I was a full-time college student, I was taking classes Monday through Thursday, and Friday, Saturday and Sunday I was traveling around the country interviewing these folks. It was strenuous, it was awful, and it was a very difficult eight weeks. But over the course of that period I met Edith, who had just finished The Curious Case of Benjamin Button with David Fincher. I had been writing this screenplay because I wanted to make a short narrative, and I thought that Dixie Carter was going to play the lead, because I had worked with her on the first film I ever produced. But she had just passed away. So once I met Edith for this documentary that we were making, I said, you know, she's actually perfect for this role. I sent her the screenplay, terrified, because she had just worked with David Fincher, and here am I, a lowly college student. She read the screenplay and sent me a message back and said, "I can't believe that anyone under fifty-five wrote this material, and I will do it for free." I was mind-boggled by it. Now, of course, I did not have her do it for free. I did a SAG minimum, because I think that's ethical. I paid her a hundred dollars for two days, and we made the film. It went to festivals, people liked it, and it's got a lot of views online. That, I would say, would be my first legitimate film. The films I made afterwards did end up getting more press and such, but I think that's the progression you make.

Working with Edith now doesn't seem intimidating, but then it was extremely intimidating. Here's an actress whose first project was the pilot episode of The Guiding Light when it was on the radio in the forties. It might have been the early thirties, but it was early. Fifty years of work, in everything from radio to television to, most recently at that time, David Fincher. It was terrifying for a college student who hadn't graduated yet. I was trying to figure out how I was going to work with this woman who has far more experience than me and just happens to like this screenplay that I wrote. So when she arrived, I had someone go pick her up at the airport. I booked her the nicest hotel in town. I made sure she got the VIP treatment, as best a college student could give. And when she arrived on set, I was instantly disarmed, because she knew it. She knew the script by heart. It was ten pages, but she could recite every single line, because she had rehearsed far before she arrived. So the first thing she taught me is that if you want to work with an actor, clarify your vision at the outset, and make sure that you're going to work with someone who takes that role just as seriously. There are a lot of actors who don't take their roles seriously, who don't read a role and really try to dive into it. Edith taught me, first and foremost, to find those people who really care about what they're doing, because that's going to make your work better. It's not just a paycheck. The second thing she taught me on set is that, while I may not have had the experience that she did, she deferred those things to me, which empowered me as a director to get respect from my college-aged crew. I thought that was also very important, because at the time, in college, we were taking film classes where people cycle around. I might direct one project, then run the sound on another one, then shoot the next one. You're learning different skills, and people don't take it seriously because it's a class. But because Edith Ivey, who had fifty years of experience and had just worked with David Fincher, showed up, suddenly I had the authority to do what I wanted to do. Those early lessons were very formative for me. They taught me that it doesn't matter how much experience someone else on your crew, or someone you're directing, might have. It only matters that you as director have authority over your set, and that there's a singular, cohesive vision that everyone can follow and respect.

That's true. I got the idea for The Car Wash because I was sitting in a car wash one day, and an elderly lady looked over at me and said one brief sentence about loneliness: how she was just lonely and wanted someone to talk to. We didn't really go much past that, but it stuck in the back of my head while I was writing the screenplay. We actually shot The Car Wash in two six-hour days, which was really intense, because it's very dialogue-driven, almost like a one-act play. To do that, it was very important to be efficient and quick, because with Edith we had a very limited amount of time, and we had ten pages of script to go through. With something that's dialogue-driven, it's very much about the performance and how you block the performers to get the dialogue maximized for the viewer. So that was probably the most challenging thing: working within a twelve-hour shooting period.

Working with my cinematographer on that project, who was also a college-aged student like myself, this was the most challenging thing we'd ever done. When I was writing the screenplay, some of my peers were writing projects that were way too ambitious for what we had the capacity to do. They were writing scenes that had visual effects and action sequences. I felt that, as a director at college age, I did not have the resources or the capacity to direct something like that. So by doing something character-driven, someone sitting down, in a contained space, I thought I had a better opportunity to make something that would work at that time in my career. So in the way we blocked it, I was trying to figure out how to make this compelling from the standpoint of the dialogue. One of my favorite filmmakers is Sidney Lumet, who directed my favorite film, Network, and I think about that film a lot when I'm looking at compositions of scenes: how to set up a scene in a way that motivates the dialogue and the performance. In The Car Wash, I wanted to start wide and get closer and closer as the film got more intimate, because I thought that would be a way to better communicate what was going on with the character. Doing that gave us a simpler process to maximize our shooting schedule, but also let us divide and block out the script in a way that made sense dramatically.

That was my own money. In the early days, I self-financed a lot of my work. I would do weddings. I did a children's audiobook. I did anything I could find to finance the projects I wanted to work on, so I could buy a camera, buy a microphone. It's different now. This was 2006, 2007. Now you have smartphones that can shoot 2K or 3K with certain apps. We didn't have that in the early 2000s. We had to buy expensive DV cameras, or cheap DV cameras that didn't have very good quality, and then you'd have to buy the thousand-dollar Final Cut Pro system to work with it, and the laptop that could handle it. It was a lot more expensive then. So I would find any way I could to buy those pieces of equipment and software, so that as my storytelling developed, I could do better things.

I never thought, at the very beginning, of the films I was making as things that were going to be sold. A lot of filmmakers now, when they make their shorts or their web series or whatever it is they're making to break into the film business, always have an eye toward monetizing it. I'm not saying you don't need to monetize your work. Everybody needs to pay their bills. I like living comfortably, and I'm sure a lot of other people do too. But when you're starting out, you've got to find other ways to monetize your life so you can advance your career. If at the outset you're thinking about films like The Car Wash or Followed, or some of my earlier work, with an eye toward monetization, you may not get anyone watching, because no one knows who you are. You don't have a track record. You don't have any press. You don't have any authority to start charging people for your work, because you're starting out. It's just like stepping into an office at a nine-to-five job in an entry-level position. That's what you are as a starting filmmaker: entry-level. So if you give away your work, like The Car Wash or Followed, you give yourself the opportunity to get as many eyeballs as possible. It's a lot easier with the internet and social media these days than it used to be. People watch it, hopefully people write about it, people talk about it and share it. Then it might get into the hands of the right person, or the right press outlet, who will help you make your next project. If you worry about monetization at the outset, as I did not with The Car Wash, you're going to start putting roadblocks into your career at an age when you shouldn't.

I've seen many filmmakers do that in my career. One of the things you see as a filmmaker, and this is actually one of the hardest things to swallow, is that when you start, there are a lot of people who want to do it. Everybody wants to work in film. Everybody wants to work independently and say, "I don't go to a nine-to-five job every day. I write all day, or I film all day, or I edit all day." As you get older and more experienced, slowly the people you started with begin peeling off. Some of them disappear from the business entirely. Eventually there's only a handful of you who started at the same point. I think what separates people is that you have to take those tiny steps and not those big leaps. If you try to make a feature film before you've made a series of shorts or documentaries, you may not have the storytelling capacity to make a feature film, because a feature is a much different ballgame from a short. You can make a really effective short film, but if you don't understand the progression and the logistics of character development, of narrative arcs, of shooting out of order and putting something back in order so it makes sense dramatically, that's a difficult task. That's not to say there aren't examples of people who have done that effectively and successfully. But for the vast majority of folks, including some people I started with, they didn't have that capacity, and so they didn't get attention and weren't able to make their second project.

That is a very good question. I hadn't really thought about that before, but you're exactly right. It's not harsh. It's reality. There are people who are strong and people who are weak. If you're trying to determine what makes a strong filmmaker and what makes a weak one, I think it really has to do with people who see their career as a short-term thing versus a long-term thing. That is the differentiator. When you make a project, it's not just about that project. If you're thinking long-term, it's thinking about how this project is going to enable you to make the next thing, and then the thing after that, and the thing after that. It's about climbing that ladder, ascending the staircase, because each piece that you make, assuming you do a good job and people like it, will enable you to do something different in the future. But if you see your career as a short-term game, if you just think, "I have to make this project," and you make it and then have no idea what you're going to make next, or what kind of film you want to make next, or if you can't identify what kind of films you like to make, that's a problem. As I said earlier, I'm drawn to films that are about loss and identity. If you're a filmmaker who can't say very succinctly what kind of projects you make, no one will take you seriously, because they don't know what to hire you for. So if you want to be a strong filmmaker, it's very important not only to have an identity for the kind of films you like to make, but also to have a plan and a progression to jump off from.

I think the telltale signs honestly have to do with your motivation. A lot of filmmaking is stamina. If you're in the middle of production and you're already exhausted or tired of the film that you're doing, that's a sign. I'm always astounded when I talk to filmmakers who are in post-production on a film and they say, "Oh, I can't wait for this to be finished." I understand editing is hard. Filmmaking is a hard, long, strenuous journey. But when you aren't engaged in the process that you're actively involved with, and that can be in post-production, in production, in prep, or even in publicizing the film, you're not going to make it as a filmmaker, because it's about that long journey. It may take you three or four years to make a feature film. I don't mean shoot it. I mean develop it, shoot it, edit it, publicize it, release it. It's a multi-step process. I think that is the indicator of whether you're going to make it or not: if you can make it across each of the finish lines, not just one.

And not tire easily. You've got to constantly be fighting. If you're not an advocate for your own film, no one else will be.

Unless someone has some incredible piece of luck, I think that on every film there's a moment where you question yourself. You ask, can I do this? Do I have the capacity to do this thing? What separates you from other filmmakers, if you're successful, is that you have the capacity to troubleshoot and get past the roadblock. It may have to do with a location: perhaps you're filming somewhere and a location doesn't work the way you thought it would. Perhaps someone's late. Perhaps an actor's having a meltdown. That happens on film sets; I've had experience with that. You can't stop the entire production because any of those things happen. You have to figure out a way to chart a course forward, because especially in independent film, you don't have the resources or the time to stop because something doesn't work. So you've got to be able to say: here's my problem, here are some outcomes if this thing doesn't work out the way I think it will, and what path is going to be the best way for me to fix it? That's what you've always got to do. I've never had a moment of "I don't want to do film" or "this is not for me." But I have certainly had moments where I have questioned my capacity. What has made me successful professionally, I think, is being able to figure out what the solutions are.

I think about my grandmother a lot. She died a few years ago, but one of the things she always used to say about her husband, my grandfather, is that she never went to bed angry with him. Whether or not that was true in their sixty years of marriage, I don't know. But I think it certainly can be applied to your professional career, not just your personal life. If I get frustrated or angry, as we all do on a film set, maybe with a person I'm working with, an actor or a producer or someone on the crew, and I go to bed angry with them and hold on to that anger, it's very easy to lose sight of the big picture. So you almost have to take a zen approach: things happen, you deal with it, and then you move on from it. Because if you're constantly holding on to the bad, you can't focus on the good.

With the first few short projects that I did, I was very fortunate to have a couple of great publications around the world write about them. I was able to get into some wonderful places and have people watch them. Because those two things happened, there was some respect for the work I was doing, and it attracted attention from various producers. I started getting phone calls about projects. When that started happening, I knew I had some options on the table, which allowed me to be a little selective about the things I chose. As I was saying earlier, I see my career as a ladder or a staircase that you're building up with each project. You're figuring out what direction you want to take, and the choices you make directly impact which staircase you ascend. The shorts I directed got some international attention from various publications. I remember one day I woke up and Followed was featured in Spain's biggest horror outlet, the horror blog for Fotogramas, which is their main film publication. I thought that was wild, because I didn't send it to them. They just found it. When things like that happen, you start realizing that people are watching your work and paying attention to what you're doing. Without those experiences, I wouldn't have had the opportunity to direct Desires of the Heart, because I wouldn't have had the experience or the attention.

It wouldn't be honest to say that a filmmaker never thinks about the business side of a film, if you see your career not only as a progression but as something you're monetizing, that you pay your bills with. I do film exclusively. That's what I do. I couldn't afford to pay my bills if I didn't think about the business capacity of a film I'm making. So that's certainly a part of it. But at the end of the day, if it's not something that speaks to you creatively, it's not a project you should take, even if they are throwing lots of money at you, because you probably won't do a good job telling that story. It may not be something that fits your life experiences. So anytime a filmmaker is evaluating what film they should make, they should of course think about the business side: what is the potential for this film? But also: is this film something that I'm creatively equipped to tell? If you can't answer yes to both of those questions, you probably shouldn't do it.

Absolutely. I've turned down numerous projects. I will sometimes read a screenplay and it's a complete disaster, and I look at it and ask: is it worth fixing this story? Is the story fixable? If the answer is no, I'm not going to waste my time with it. Sometimes that has to do with the personality of the person on the other side just as much as with the content they've presented me with. If I don't think the person on the other side of the phone, or the email, or the table is going to be willing to collaborate and talk and evolve, I'm not going to have a further conversation about working on that project with them, because I know it's going to be hell on earth for me, and I like to have pleasant filming experiences.

There is an incredible capacity for people not to see flaws in their own work. I'm sure all of us put on blinders. I can tell you things about all of my work that I wish I had done better in certain scenes or moments. I would not be honest if I sat here and told you I thought everything I've ever made was perfect, because I certainly don't. But when you're sitting with someone who does think that, it's an indicator that you don't want to work with them, because they don't have the capacity to grow or evolve or change. You might be Aaron Sorkin, a brilliant, brilliant writer, but even Aaron Sorkin can collaborate with people. If Aaron Sorkin can do it, so can you.

It's funny. I was actually in Los Angeles for the two weeks prior to my interview for Desires of the Heart. The production manager of the film, whom I had known vaguely, called me because the director who was supposed to make the film had been hospitalized in India for drinking a handle of whiskey a day and smoking four packs of cigarettes a day. His health was in dire shape, understandably. I was here in Los Angeles having meetings with some pretty fantastic companies, and they kept calling me from Georgia, and I kept saying, "No, I can't come interview for this." Finally the producer called me and said, "I really want to meet with you, and I will come to Georgia when you return from Los Angeles," because at the time I was living in Georgia. So I got there, she flew down from New York, where she was living, and we had this eighteen-hour marathon meeting over two days, where we talked about the screenplay, about the movie, about all these different things. At the end of those two days I was exhausted, because we had gone through everything. I said, "However you choose to hire a director for this film, I wish you the best of luck." And she said, "Well, I've decided I want you to direct it, after our two days." That's how I got involved with the film: simply because I happened to know the production manager, who thought my work was suitable for the picture.

Savannah, yes. We shot two weeks in Savannah and about a month in Rajasthan, India.

It's a great question. I have never worked with harder-working people than the folks I worked with in Rajasthan. We brought in about two hundred crew members from Mumbai by train. They had to take a three-day train ride to get to Rajasthan, because Rajasthan is on the India-Pakistan border, way up there. They brought the camera, they brought everything. Everything comes from Mumbai by train. And they would do things I have never seen any crew in America do. Anything you ask them to do, anything that needs to be done, is done instantaneously, quickly and efficiently. I would take the people on that crew with me anywhere. They were fantastic. I think we can certainly learn something from their work ethic, because if people worked as hard on films here as they do there, you'd see a lot of independent films get made a lot faster.

There's no "that's not my job." There's only "let's get it done." And that, to me, was quite impressive.

American film and Bollywood film are two very different things. Culturally, they have different identities in many ways. With Desires of the Heart, I was trying to make an American film that had Bollywood elements, not the other way around, because I think that most Bollywood films aren't accessible to an American audience, for various cultural reasons. So I would say that if a Bollywood film wants to be successful outside of India, it could learn something from the way Western filmmakers tell stories, because for better or worse, Western filmmaking is what has influenced the global film market outside of Bollywood. Bollywood is its own thing. They make so many films, a thousand films a year, but only maybe a tenth of them or fewer are going to find a market outside of India, because they're really not designed for a Western audience. I'm not saying that's a bad thing. That's how it is.

Bollywood stars are on a whole different level. Val Lauren, who's the American lead in the film, and I would laugh about that, because Gulshan Grover, who's our Bollywood lead, is a huge star in India. We were filming one day in the middle of the desert, in a town that has no running water, with cow-patty huts. They couldn't easily find a movie theater, because they don't have electricity, and the closest one might be hours away. And when we arrived to film in their village with Gulshan Grover, the entire village showed up, because they all knew who Gulshan was. I have a fantastic picture of that on Instagram somewhere, with hundreds of people swarming Val and Gulshan in their chairs while they're waiting for the next scene to be shot. It was incredible to observe that people who don't have televisions, and don't have a theater where they can easily see a film, would know instantly that this guy is a huge Bollywood star, and know what he's from, because they read the magazines. That, to me, was fascinating. That's the kind of cultural difference you see between Indian film and American film. If Tom Cruise were to show up, people would be very excited to see him, don't get me wrong. But I don't know that you would see that kind of excitement in the far-flung regions of the United States like you do in India. The entire town literally shows up.

Through magazines, yes, which I thought was really interesting: a town with no electricity where all of them knew who he was. A remote town, not somewhere close to a city. They don't have cars. That was fascinating to me.

I think there is a comparison to be had. I've actually had this conversation with students at Georgia Southern. I'm on the advisory board, so I go back periodically to talk. The differentiator between distributing a short film and distributing a feature film is monetization. With a short film, in general, if you do it right, you don't really have to monetize it, unless it's a fifty-thousand-dollar effects-driven thing that you want CAA to watch. That's a different kind of project. But if you're making a standard short film or web series, distribution is not as much of an issue, because you're just trying to attract attention. When you make a feature film, there's money involved, and when there's money involved, distribution is extremely important. If you don't have a distribution plan, a pathway, or someone to purchase the picture, someone's going to lose a lot of money, and if someone loses a lot of money, it's not very good for your career.

I think it depends, and I know that's not a clear-cut answer. Long and short of it: I don't think most people are equipped to go make a fifty-thousand-dollar visual-effects-driven short film, take it to film festivals, and get the attention of a major agency to sign them to a studio picture that's going to be a multi-million-dollar event film. There are examples, but I think they're very few. Compare the number of people who get to do that with the number who attempt it. At the end of the day, you're better served spending the money in other ways, unless you happen to be a visual-effects genius, and if you are, more power to you, go do it. But if you don't have the capacity or the skills to do some of that yourself, you can make a fifty-thousand-dollar feature film instead of a fifty-thousand-dollar effects-driven short. That might enable you to do something better, which you could probably monetize by selling it yourself, and put you in a better position to advance your career.

It is a lot of money. I don't think there's such a thing as a maximum you should spend on a short film, but there is a maximum in terms of what you can afford and what your story needs to be served well. When you're making a short, or even a micro-budget feature, you always need to treat your budget as: what is the lowest amount I can make this film for that will best serve the story and not thwart my attempt to make it the best I can? Whatever it is, make sure you can afford it. Say, for example, you do spend ten thousand dollars on that short film. You've made the short film, but that's not the end of your expenses, is it? Now you have film festival submissions. Say you get into some festivals. You probably want to go to those festivals to network, to meet other producers and filmmakers, to do some press, to do the things that are going to give your movie attention. How much money did you budget for that? Did you not budget for it? Now you've added another couple of thousand to your total budget. Those are things you have to ask yourself at the outset. If you only have ten thousand dollars to make the film, that isn't just production. It's all of those other costs that come with it. So you really have to think: what is the lowest amount at which I can tell this story effectively, so I can get myself to my next goal?

Those are all factors that any filmmaker who takes their career seriously should consider. If you're doing this as an amateur, if you just want to make films because you like doing it as a hobby, you don't need to worry about all that. But if you want to be a professional filmmaker, a professional writer, director or actor, those are factors you absolutely have to account for.

Here's the thing. It doesn't matter if you're a Georgia Southern student or a UCLA student or an NYU student. Most college students do not think about the totality of the picture, because in film school they get taught the mechanics of it. They get taught: this is three-act structure. This is how you compose a frame. This is how you run the camera. This is how you turn the sound on. You learn these technical things, but most schools do not teach the practical elements of what it means to be a film professional. That's a very different thing, and unfortunately it's something most of our schools let students learn once they get out into the real world. It should be taught in our film schools before they ever leave college, because they need to understand how to see their career as a trajectory, not a short-term thing.

I think it's not taught because most people in academia haven't worked in the real world for a long time. There's nothing inherently wrong with that. For most professors, teaching is their life's calling and their passion, and that's fine. But it's very hard to talk about making a living when you've made your living teaching for decades. If I were to teach a class about how to make a career making films outside of college, I would start with finding things that are complementary. One of the first things that happened with the advent of the internet, and all these new platforms that are emerging, is that people thought they could make and edit videos on their own. But what people have discovered, with photography, with video, with graphics, is that if you're not experienced and don't know what you're doing, you tend not to do a very good job. So people are now paying others to make videos and tell stories about their brands, their ideas, their concepts. Those are great ways to start out as a filmmaker. You may not be telling the narrative or documentary story you want to tell, but you are learning how to tell a story, and how to tell it effectively for someone else. That's an excellent way to pay your bills doing the thing you got your education in, or that you aspire to be doing, as opposed to working at Starbucks or driving for Uber. You're actively making something that is a story, whatever that story is. And if you save your money, you can run off to make your short films and your documentaries, because you now have more experience working with someone. So when you go to make your feature film, and you're answering to a producer or a studio or a financier, you've learned to work with clients as a filmmaker, and you're able to understand the entire matrix of people you have to work with professionally.

There isn't a specific place, unfortunately. I think it comes in real life. It comes with experience, trial and error. In some ways I guess it's a good thing that it's not taught, because even if you were taught how to do all of those things, and I do think some of those skills would be very helpful to learn in the classroom, life is in many ways always the best teacher. When you figure out how to do something the wrong way, it makes you appreciate, and learn how to do, things the right way, from your own life and your own experiences with filmmaking.

One of the most difficult things I've ever learned as a filmmaker, and this comes back to something we were talking about earlier, is that when you first start out, there are all these people you tend to work with, and you work with them on repeat, not because they're necessarily the best people, but because they're the people who are accessible to you. Over time you start working with the same people over and over again. Some of them are good, some of them are bad. But eventually there comes a point where different talents and different skill sets are not helpful to broader goals, and you have to start letting some people go and replacing them with people who are better and who will make you better. That is, I think, one of the hardest things to swallow, because it's not just professional. It's also personal. On every project you work on, you pick up one person about whom you say, "That person needs to come back on my next film." But if you get to the point where you're recycling every single person on every single project, your work instantly becomes stale, because there are no new ideas being injected into it. As a filmmaker, you've got to constantly be finding ways to reinvent yourself, and one of the first ways you do that is by finding fresh new faces and fresh new ideas.

There's a very thin line between friendships and business relationships, and in independent film specifically, it's very easy for those two things to blend. I'm not advocating being completely distant from everyone you work with. It's okay to be friendly and accessible, and friends with the people you work with. But you can't allow your friendship to make you lose sight of the professional things that have to occur. That may mean that someone you work with does something wrong, and you have to reprimand them for it. If your friendship and your professional life are so intertwined that you can't have a serious conversation with them without them being upset or offended, that's not a healthy professional relationship, because you can't separate those two things. You've really got to make sure, when you're working with people, that you have those lines drawn.

I don't think anyone has asked me that question before. The first thing I like to do is see the actors, if they are on set, because I want to talk to them about what's going on for the day. If I've done my job as a director, the crew should already know. They should know what the shots are going to be, because I've already made the list. They should know what the blocking is, because we've probably already talked about it in pre-production. So I talk to the actors first, to make sure we're on the same page creatively, and that they understand what the dramatic arc is for the day and where we are in that arc. For example, say we're shooting a scene from halfway through the film, but it's only the first week of filming. What point does the actor need to be at emotionally, so that we can work with them later on scenes that come earlier in the story? That's very important. The second thing I do is talk to my DP and the crew. I need to make sure that the blocking we talked about, the shots we talked about, the set, all of those things are in order, so that whatever we discussed in pre-production is in fact being executed in production. The third thing I do is go to video village and see how everything is set up. Is my iPad there? I work with my iPad for the screenplay and various things. Is everything set up for me to be comfortable? Do I have water? Do I have coffee? Do I have a banana? Things that are going to enable me to sit there and really watch as I go back and forth between the actors and the monitor. The fourth thing I do is visit the DIT, because I want to see what we filmed previously and how it's coming out. One of the things I use in my process: there's a guy I work with who has a van that goes anywhere you go, if you're filming on location, and sends all of the footage to a wireless iPad network, so you can see what you've shot on previous days and check that it's matching. If I need to match something in the scene we're about to shoot, I might want to see where we exited the previous scene and where we're going to come into this one. That lets me remember things visually that I might not remember just trusting my head. And finally, I sit down with the producer and talk about how things have been going: how we are for schedule, for timing, even for budget. What have we spent money on, what are we going to need to spend money on in the days ahead, and do we need to make any cuts or revisions or changes? If I find out there's a piece of equipment or a lens that I need for a future day, and for various reasons the budget has changed, or we can't get it because of a scheduling issue, I need to modify that in advance so it's not an issue we have to deal with on the day. Those are the five things.

At the end of the day, the biggest way to waste time on a film set is not to communicate your vision. Communicating your vision is something that has to be done across all levels of production, from your above-the-line crew to the below-the-line crew, everyone from the production assistant to the caterer. Everyone needs to understand what your goals are as a filmmaker. If you don't explain that clearly to everyone, if everyone doesn't know what direction they're paddling the boat in, you're going to have a lot of questions. You're going to have a lot of stops and pauses throughout production, because one arm doesn't know what the other arm is doing. It's very important for you as a director to clarify that for everyone and make sure everyone understands it. And while you're doing it, communicate in a way that's professional and polite. I've seen other directors treat their crews in ways that are not acceptable. You've got to be polite. It's very important to treat everyone with respect, all the way from the bottom to the top. You treat your PA just as well as you treat your producer, because when you do that, you're not only creating a good work environment for your team, you're also making sure that everyone feels respected and wanted.

I think so. I don't think there is such a thing as a wall around Hollywood. I know a lot of people would disagree with that notion, but I can tell you from my own experience: I've met some fantastic people through things as simple as Twitter. I might follow an executive on Twitter who's at a major studio or a network or a talent agency, and I've had meetings just because they like me on Twitter. We'll message back and forth. They might retweet what I share, or respond to something I say, and I'll send them a direct message and say, "Hi, I really enjoy our conversations. Can we get a coffee? Can I meet with you?" I've met a lot of people that way. I think that goes a long way. For me, it goes all the way back to when I first started working in film. The very first thing I ever did was this frankly terrible documentary on the Western character actor Dub Taylor. Not terrible in the sense that it wasn't an ambitious or worthy project, but technically, none of us had any idea what we were doing. We were just running around with a camera at sixteen, trying to figure out how to make this thing work. One of the things I did, from my town of 123 people, was write letters and emails to talent agencies all over Hollywood, CAA, William Morris, Endeavor at the time, and ask them if Mr. Inexperience could come interview their clients. Eighty percent of them said no or wouldn't respond. But twenty percent of them said yes. At age sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, the team and I got to interview John Mellencamp, Dixie Carter, David Zucker, who directed The Naked Gun, Airplane! and all those films, and all these other fascinating people, just because we asked. That was extremely formative for me as a kid: to learn that boundaries are only put up if we don't ask to go past them. In the digital era, it's easier than it's ever been, because now you can just shoot an email, make a phone call, send a message. What's the worst they can do? Tell you no. So it's okay to reach out and ask. What's not okay is to pester, and there's a very big difference between the two. That's why I think Twitter and Facebook and platforms like that can be good. If you can get someone's attention, a kind of digital relationship forms. They get an idea of your tastes, what you like and don't like, and then perhaps some kind of relationship can come out of that.

When I'm following up on projects, say I had a meeting and pitched something and haven't heard back for a while, I try not to send emails or make phone calls on a weekly or daily basis. I've seen people do this. They had a meeting, and they write, "Oh, it was so great to meet you." A week later they haven't heard back: "Hey, it was nice to meet you." Then a month later, and they keep going and going. In my own experience, and from talking to executives, no one responds to that. What they do respond to is knowing what's going on with you and what you're doing. So every six months, every year, if I haven't heard from someone in a while, I might send them an email to say, "Hey, haven't heard from you in a while. I hope your life is going well and your projects are going well. I just wanted to let you know about this thing I just made. Here it is. Hope you have a great day." Very simple, very short, very direct. Something no one responds well to in Hollywood is five paragraphs of well-written prose. They want to read a one- or two-sentence, very efficient statement of what your point is, because they get hundreds of emails a day and don't have time to read your eloquent soliloquy on what you've been doing and what you need from them. That is the differentiator. Instead of making it all about what you want, tell them about what you're doing and engage them. What can you do for them, as opposed to what they can do for you? Don't make it so transactional. Make it broader.

And keep it brief. Very brief.

That's a tricky balance as a filmmaker. One of the things I have an issue with at the moment, in most mainstream films, is that a lot of directors and screenplays are making films that end with periods. They give you this very definite "this is the world, this is how it is, and this is the ending," all wrapped up in a nice tiny little bow. Some of my favorite films always end in a question mark, not a period. When you leave the audience with a question, you're doing two things. One, you're giving them something to solve on the journey of the film. But also, as the credits come up, you're leaving them with something to ponder, something to think about, something that may not be fully resolved: the ambiguous ending, if you will. With Desires of the Heart, that was something I really tried hard to do throughout the film: to leave these little clues along the way, but not answer all the questions. Even when you get to the end of the film, I tried to leave it with a question mark instead of a definitive ending, because I believe that viewers are intelligent, and you should give people the opportunity to interpret endings, and interpret your film as they go. If you're constantly giving them those periods, I think you're treating your audience with disrespect.

I'm biased, because my favorite film of all time is Network. I think everyone should watch Network, for a couple of reasons. The first is that it's a brilliant screenplay. It's perhaps the greatest piece of film writing ever done. Paddy Chayefsky's screenplay is not only astute and prophetic, it's also hilarious. It had this vision of what the future could look like, and if you look at today's media landscape, most everything he wrote about in that film has come to pass. But it also did it in a way that was sharp and really character-driven. People should watch it for those reasons: the overarching themes, but also how he developed his characters. And Sidney Lumet: one of the things not everyone knows about him is that in his early career he started in television, live television. In those days, in the fifties, there were three cameras, maybe four, and when they had to switch lenses, they didn't have a zoom lens, so they'd use primes. Having that experience in his toolkit, when he got older and started making his films, he could instantly tell you what kind of scene needed what kind of lens without ever seeing the lens, because he already had that in his visual memory. That's another reason people should watch Network: it is blocked and framed in such a specific way, motivated by character and by performance, that every filmmaker should see why it works, because then they would think more about what they do in their own work. It's not just about putting up the camera and shooting a scene. It's about thinking about how the camera motivates the performance, because that should be your first job as a director, and you do it in tandem with your DP. So, watch Network. The second thing you should do is read some showbiz biographies. I don't believe in reading film books. I've read a lot of film books, but I don't know that they tell you much. They tell you about mechanics and about structure, but honestly, I think all of us are programmed with an idea of what film structure is, because we watch movies and television shows. So instead of reading about that, read about other people's journeys and how they got to where they've arrived. I think that's really important, and there's a plethora of those you can read. You don't have to pick one in particular, although, again, I'm partial to Sidney Lumet's Making Movies. The third thing, and this is the one I think a lot of people overlook: read showbiz trade publications and books about show business. If you want to be a working professional as a filmmaker, you're going to be working within the framework of the film and entertainment industry. If you don't understand which executive has worked at which company, where they're moving to, and what their history is, you may have a very hard time when you sit down with that executive and can't engage them on some of those things. For example, in 2010 I was at the National Film Festival for Talented Youth with my film Followed. It's the largest film festival in the world for people under twenty-three. Dana Brunetti was there, and all these fantastic producers, and I made a good impression on the chairman of the CW network. At the time I didn't know he was the chairman of the CW network, but he invited me to their upfront presentation in New York. I graduated from college the week after, so it was this crazy time. When I got to the CW after-party, I found out that I was the only person there who was not with the network. And Thom Sherman walks up and shakes my hand and says, "Hey, I heard you were here." I knew Thom Sherman because I knew my showbiz history. He was the executive who developed Lost, Desperate Housewives and Grey's Anatomy. He was a huge figure in television, and he happened to be working for the CW now. So I could talk to him about those things and say, "I love Lost. I love what you did with that." And then years later, when I read the book DisneyWar, I got more insight into the behind-the-scenes machinations of what went on. You need to understand the breadth of it. It's not just about the creative. It's also about the business, and you've got to put those two things together. So: watch Network, read some entertainment biographies, and read the trades and books about what happens in the business.

Yes. It's constantly about reinventing yourself and re-evaluating your career. And it's not just about reading entertainment biographies. I also think it's important to surround yourself with experienced mentors in entertainment who can help guide your career. You learn about those roadblocks, and you learn how to get past them and move through them. That's not to say that someone else's roadblock is something you're also going to go through, but you might take something from it that can help with your own. I do believe that everyone's journey is very unique. There is no clear-cut way to make it in entertainment. There is no one way to get into the business. Everyone has a different story and a different path. But when you surround yourself with people, and when you read things that give you insight before you actually meet those people, then you too can figure out how to advance your career.

I'm constantly terrified about paying my bills. People tell me it's irrational, but I'm constantly terrified, because nothing is guaranteed in the film business. I think it's perhaps important that I do have that healthy terror in the back of my head. I've been fortunate so far that when I'm not directing a project, I might direct an ad campaign, or do some kind of commercial, or something that's about storytelling but not storytelling in a film. Those are ways that I pay my bills when I'm not directing other projects. But I'm always worried about that. And I think that if you ever arrive at a point where you're not, perhaps you've gotten a little complacent, because then you're Jack Dawson on top of the world, and the Titanic's about to hit, and you have no idea. You've got to always be prepared. Having that healthy skepticism, not only about your work but about your career and your future, enables you to work a little bit harder in the present.

That's true. Sometimes there are moments in your career where everything does come at once. What I try to do, if I have a big project that I'm working on, is schedule a vacation in advance. Say I have a film that ends on April 10th. I might schedule a vacation to Peru or Turkey or somewhere for two or three weeks after that. I step away entirely, and I make myself do it, because stepping away enables me to reset and refresh. And while I'm making that project, before I go on vacation, I'm always trying to figure out what comes after. I try not to be in a position where I have no idea what comes next. It's part of what I consider taking your career seriously. When you finish a project, whatever it is, a movie, an ad campaign, a documentary, a book, people are going to ask you what you're doing next. If you can't identify that, if you can't say, "Here's a screenplay I wrote," or "Here's a project I've been developing," people don't see you as playing the long-term game. You've got to be able to play the long-term game and say, five to ten years from now, this is what I want to make. This is my plan. It may not come to fruition exactly the way you expect, but if you have some kind of pathway to get there, you're going to have a much better chance.

I do not like the space of the unknown. Perhaps this has to do with losing my father at a younger age, unexpectedly, but I always want to have an idea of what I'm doing next. That's not to say I'm not open to a project that might come across my desk, or something new. That happens all the time. But if I don't have an idea of what the next two or three things are going to be, that makes me panic, for the financial reason you just talked about. I think, "Oh my gosh, I'm not going to be able to pay my bills. I'm not going to be able to live a lifestyle I'm comfortable with. What am I going to do?" So for me it's always knowing what's going to come next, having an idea about what it is, so I can be thinking about it and plotting it creatively, talking to actors and DPs and editors, the team I like to work with. But if something new comes across my desk, that can be exciting, and you have to be open to that as well.

Vacation's very important, I think. Not everyone does it, and everyone has their own thing, but for me, when I do a big project, I go overseas. I go far away for several weeks. That's what I do, and it enables me to really reset.

It's not just about LA. It's the US in general. It's physically picking up and saying, "I am in a foreign country, and I'm not turning my cell service on. It's off, and you can't reach me for three weeks." That enables me to see things in a different light, to see another culture and understand something. I think that's so important as a filmmaker. You've got to understand other things, not just what you're familiar with. It comes back to my upbringing in a small town, where I always had to imagine things. Now I'm at a place in my life where I can actually go see things and do things. That's really important to me. It's something I need. It's sustenance. If I stay in one place for too long, I get restless.

I'm thrilled you saw it that way, because that's really the film I intended to make. I thought a lot about time with A Few Things About Cancer, and that was one of the things that really struck me, especially now that I've hit my mid-twenties. I'm twenty-six. Compared with some people my age I've done a lot more, and compared with some people a lot less. But I think very much about what my pathway is going to be as a filmmaker, the things that I want to make and the things that I want to do. When I had the opportunity to tell Caleb and Jada's story, it struck me that they too were thinking about that a lot. They were in this nine-to-five job, living this nine-to-five life. They were newlyweds. And then this thing happens that completely changes the trajectory of their life: stage four cancer, which could mean a diagnosis of death. What do you do with that? What do you do with your life? And if you live, how do you move forward from that and change the choices you make? I had that experience when I was twelve, when my dad died unexpectedly. But for most people, your twenties are not when you're supposed to face death in the eye. You're supposed to be living your life, going to music festivals and going to clubs. You're supposed to be having fun, not sitting down and facing reality. And I think the moment we can all face reality is the moment we can really think about where we want our lives to go. With A Few Things About Cancer, I really wanted to do that.

Absolutely. I saw that a week into it. It was incredible. There's a moment in the film that I think is pretty powerful, where they start talking about what they want their lives to look like. I think that was their moment of realization. There was a moment in the hospital when someone who was supposed to have a good prognosis, a patient in another room nearby, about the same age, died suddenly. They realized in that moment: this isn't a game. This is real. That's not to say it wasn't real for them before that moment. Of course it was. But it was in that moment that they really got to see firsthand the fragility of life and how temporary it can be. And the moment we can all acknowledge that is the moment a lot of us can free ourselves from the confines of what we think is possible. Once we do that, I think anything can become possible for us, because we realize our time is limited and the choices we make directly impact what we are capable of doing.

It's a good story. I had been out of touch with Caleb for about five or six years. We were fraternity brothers. We were pledge brothers in 2007, and we met in a ditch outside of Georgia Southern, blindfolded, before our initiation party. Then we went through eight weeks of pledging together. I hadn't seen him for several years, because he had transferred to Georgia Tech to finish his engineering degree, and he kind of fell off, as happens with time. That's one of the things about time. It's not that friendships or relationships are necessarily ended, but sometimes time has a way of separating us. Then on Facebook, after I hadn't seen him for five or six years, he announces that he has stage four Burkitt's lymphoma. I start crying. I had no idea what was going to happen. I was sure he was going to die. He's twenty-five, he just got married, and I haven't seen him in six years. I felt guilty, because this was my friend, and now this thing had happened, and I had wasted six years of my life not being part of his. So I sent him a message and said, "I see what happened. Is there anything I can do to help?" Almost five minutes later, he sent me a Facebook message back saying, "Yeah, in fact, I want to make video blogs for my friends and family to let them know what's going on. You'd be a perfect person to do that." So I went to meet with him in the hospital, which was really difficult at the time. We talked about it, and I said, "We'll make the video blogs. I'll do it. But why don't we take this a step further and make a documentary about it, because I think that would be a better way for you to help people. But we won't tell anyone we're doing it. We'll film it in secret, and we'll make the video blogs every month." So I made video blogs for him every month that we put online while he was in the hospital. In the meantime, behind the scenes, without anyone else's knowledge, I gave them a camera to film their own material, so I wouldn't be invasive to their treatment process. They sent it to me by Dropbox every week. I would review the footage and give them notes. I'd bring in a small film crew of about three people every weekend, and we'd film with them at home or in the hospital, wherever it was. Over the course of about six months, we gathered this tremendous amount of footage and started whittling it down. Once we had the documentary finished, in November, we started talking about it. That's how we did it.

It was a very difficult thing to do. It's honestly probably the most difficult personal and professional experience I've ever had as a filmmaker. It was very raw to me, especially at the beginning, because we didn't know what was going to happen. You don't know how the story is going to unfold, because it's literally changing day to day, hour to hour, minute to minute, and you're making it live. It's not like a documentary where you have talking heads and you're interviewing people in different places. This is life. This is real. The difficulty became less and less as we went on, not on a personal level, but on a professional level. When you're a filmmaker, eventually you get to the point where you're trained to separate what's happening personally, with a subject or an actor or someone you're working with, from what has to be done professionally. So there came a point at which I was able to really separate that and focus on the filming. But that doesn't take away from the personal impact it had on me, initially and throughout the entire filming process. That was hard.

I had to work that out before we started filming. I had a conversation with the hospital's lawyer and their publicist about what we intended to do, because, justifiably, they were probably terrified we were making some exposé. I would have been terrified in their shoes too, because they had no idea what we wanted to do. The agreement we came to was that I wouldn't film any doctors or nurses. But really, I didn't want to film any doctors or nurses. When you watch the film, you'll notice a distinct lack of medical professionals in it, and that was intentional, not just for the legal reason. I came to realize, as we were making the film, that I was much more interested in the personal journey of cancer than the medical journey. Cancer affects so many people. Everybody knows someone who's had cancer. But I found that when you say the word cancer, no one actually knows what it means. They say, "Oh, you're in chemo," or "Oh, you're in a hospital," but they don't understand it unless they are part of the day-to-day process of treatment. So I thought that by eliminating the medical component, if we were successful with the film, we could show people that other half, which they really don't understand.

I think it's very much individual to individual. Many filmmakers have realized that there are avenues to create things they can monetize, because we now have so many platforms. I'll give you a great example. I don't know if you know who Crystal Chappell is. She's a soap opera actress. When the soap operas started to go off network television, a lot of people started going out of work, because if you work in soaps, that's kind of what you do. It's very hard to cross out of that. There are plenty of exceptions, but in general, most people who work in soap operas will always work in soap operas. What she started doing was creating her own web-series soap operas, using all of the fans, all of the people who watched them religiously every day on television at twelve o'clock, to create their own stories with their own parameters, without the network standards, without the broadcast standards. They charge twenty or thirty dollars a season. If you get five thousand, ten thousand people to sign up for that, which they did, you can monetize it. They can pay everyone normal rates. People can keep living and working. That's a good example of how the internet and all of these new platforms have created new ways for people to take their projects directly to the people who will buy them, as opposed to making something that's mass-market. It's not like making The Avengers for everybody. In independent film, especially in this new era, we now have the capacity to ask: what is the number that makes sense to make this project for? And who are the people who are going to watch the film? If you can identify that, then suddenly you can figure out ways to monetize your project. People like Crystal Chappell, and there are plenty of other examples, are doing just that. They're finding their audience, because they know who their audience is, and then they're going straight to them and cutting out the middleman. That's how you do it.

In recent years I don't feel my hands are tied as much, because now I can point to work that I've done. I think that's true whether you're twenty, forty or eighty. It doesn't really matter how old you are when you decide you want to start making films. What matters is that you can point to your body of work. Whether it's good or not is a whole other topic, and I'll leave that for other people to debate. But if there are things I've done that people have enjoyed, then I am more likely to have the leverage and the capacity to make other things that, hopefully, other people will also enjoy. In my earlier years it was a little harder, because I had to fight for credibility, and that's because of age. I'm not saying that's necessarily unfounded, though it's perhaps sometimes unfair. When you're twenty years old and you want to run off and make a film, why does a forty- or fifty-year-old financier need to trust you over the thirty-five- or forty-year-old who has years of experience, who's the adult in the room, who can command more presence? So starting so young as a filmmaker really made me hone my communication skills, and my ability to talk to people in different ways, so that they would understand, and hopefully appreciate, that I would be credible, and that they could trust me with their money and their respect: that I would follow through with my own work. So the answer is really how you present yourself and how well you know what you're talking about. Don't oversell or overpromise and then under-deliver. Never do that.

Oh, absolutely. But I would argue it's maybe better to undersell yourself at the outset, because if you can do things that people don't know you can do, or don't think you can do, you surprise them. And when you can surprise them, you have the capacity to make people excited about what you're doing. So I think sometimes underselling is more valuable than telling them everything, or overselling.

Absolutely. In general, people like unplanned surprises. It's like the example of going to a theater and seeing a film that ends with a question mark instead of a period: you're always asking yourself what's going to happen next, and we're not telling you what to think. I think it's the same for production and for development. If you're constantly showing the people you work with that you have something unexpected within you, then they can get excited about your vision and what you want to do, because they know this person has something in them that will constantly surprise. If you can find that, you can find success.

I've never read a screenplay that I didn't think needed some sort of tweak. I've never read a script and thought, that is the perfect screenplay. I think it's true of every work of art, including screenplays, because they are a work of art, that you can find something within it to change or modify or improve, because every person who reads something brings a whole different set of experiences to what they're reading. When I look at a script, I'm looking for a couple of things. First, characterization. How do the characters evolve as we read the screenplay? What do they start out with, and where do they end up? Second, how does that characterization tie into the theme of the screenplay? What are its themes? If your screenplay is effective, the themes and the characterization should weave together seamlessly, because the characters develop the theme and the themes develop the character. The next thing I look for is the pace at which it unfolds. Is it moving at a speed that makes sense? Is it too slow? Is it too fast? Where are the places where that rhythm breaks down, where it doesn't quite work? I'll work with the writers to find a way to keep that pace even throughout the screenplay, because, as the old adage says, if it doesn't work on the page, it's not going to work on the screen. You can't fix it as you're filming it. It's a very difficult thing to do. I have rewritten screenplays while filming before, and it's a horrible, horrible way to go about production. You've got to find those things at the outset. So for me, it's always about finding the character, finding the theme, and finding the pace. If you do those three things in a script, you'll probably find it to be effective.