Interview (Part 5): Rob Meyer and Luke Matheny
When I saw the trailer for the movie A Birder’s Guide to Everything, I immediately sought out its filmmakers: Writer-director Rob Meyer and writer Luke Matheny. It’s a wonderful story starring some terrific young talent as well as Oscar winning actor Sir Ben Kingsley. The movie comes out in theaters and on VOD this Friday, March 21.
In Part 5, Rob and Luke reveal some of the plans they have for other film projects, then share some thoughts on the craft of screenwriting:
Scott: Are you two collaborating on other projects?
Rob: Well, we wrote another feature, a romantic comedy about a second-class genie who grants only tiny wishes. We wrote a TV pilot called “The Home,” which is more about Luke’s adolescent experience.
Luke: It’s about an evolving friendship between a suburban white character and an urban black character. They’re both teenage boys who work together after school in a nursing home in the early ‘90s.
Rob: Like, “Freaks and Geeks” in the ’90s, and deals with race. Then, we’re looking out for new projects. We each have agents who are pitching us to write things and Luke’s writing a feature on his own.
Scott: Rob, you’re WME and, Luke, you’re Paradigm?
Luke: Yep.
Rob: Yeah, that’s right.
Scott: Luke, you’ve also now written or directed your own feature length film?
Luke: I directed a feature from a script that I did not write. That was a romantic comedy starring Matt LeBlanc, which we shot the same time as Birder’s Guide was being shot. That’s still in the very final stages of post. So we should be looking for a distributor pretty soon for that.
Scott: What’s the title?
Luke: It’s called Lovesick.
Scott: And Rob, you’ve got your own production company.
Rob: Yeah, and that’s the other silver lining of this film taking so long to get made. As it’s probably clear, Luke and I weren’t getting paid anything to write this script and almost no one gets paid to write their first script. We both had to find ways to make money.
The way I figured it out was, I started my own production company. We work with agencies to do short documentaries for various brands, but we also do little spots that have been on TV and little spots for viral videos. That’s a way I can support myself as a filmmaker without putting the pressure on myself that I need to land huge jobs as a writer/director as those are, as anyone knows, hard to come by.
Scott: So how about some craft questions, starting off with this: How do you come up with story ideas?
Rob: I’m right now actually, reading a lot of books and articles to be honest, because I’m not an idea generating machine. I know there are people, especially out in LA, people who can have, like, a great idea a day. I have a couple of other ideas from my life: My wife’s British and I sort of straddle the world of having to live in the UK and New York and it’s an interesting culture clash that exists there sometimes. There are things that I’m drawing upon, but I’m mostly reading a lot of articles and books right now for ideas. Luke and I, occasionally, do get together and spend a couple of days just spit-balling concepts and some of those things have turned into scripts, but most have not.
Luke: It’s very hard to come up with a new idea.
Scott: Having gone this route now in the indie film world, how important do you think story concept is to the commercial viability of a screenplay, even in the indie world?
Luke: Important. Though sometimes the concept can be a little misleading. Sometimes things sound great and then the script isn’t that good, or some things sound unpromising but the script can be really good.
As far as attracting a Sundance-friendly financing situation, yeah, there is no question. I think an edgier concept might get more attention, but it doesn’t really guarantee that the movie will be good.
Rob: Even in an indie film I’d say it’s actually more important to have a logline that 70 to 90 percent of people are going to perk up, and say, “Oh, that sounds kind of cool.”
Like our friend Craig Johnson, he just directed The Skeleton Twins. It’s a movie with Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig playing suicidal twins coping with their — See, it already sounds more interesting than a lot of indie loglines that you’re going to hear. Indie films are as much in the mercy of having stuff that sounds good to people in a pitch
Luke: That’s true.
Rob: Unless you’re going to fund the whole thing yourself, in which case it doesn’t matter. Or you can you can Kickstart it if you have enough friends, or if you want to make it for $10,000.
Scott: It does seem to be a kind of emerging phenomenon in the last five to 10 years, short film to feature films. Both of you have experienced this. Would you recommend to writers out there to go that route, do a short film with the hope of generating enough interest to expand it into a feature length film?
Rob: It worked out for us, not because Aquarium has so many fans that there were folks out there who were desperate to fund the feature version of it, but Aquarium got me fans as a filmmaker at Sundance, at NYU, and at an agency. It got me in the door into the world of film and film financing in a way that I hadn’t been prior to making it.
Then we wrote the script. The only reason people financed the script was because they liked the script. Then we showed them Aquarium, and they’re like, “Oh, great.” It was almost the same as making a sizzle reel or something for your film.
It’s not necessarily going to launch into a feature, but it might launch you as a filmmaker because everyone wants to be on board with a promising filmmaker. There’s a lot of potential energy in short filmmakers, especially in you can get into a prestigious festival.
Scott: You talk about being on that razor’s edge with Birders, how in different hands it could have been like an after-school special. It’s a mature film young people and adults should enjoy, and the key to that, I think, is you develop characters who feel real and are dealing with some honest emotions. So how do you go about developing characters? Are there any specific techniques or tools you use to develop characters?
Luke: I don’t know if we could list a set of tools, per se, in that way. We were trying to work in a pretty realistic style. I guess you have the benefit of the two of us having our own experiences of life. We could sort of agree when something felt like bullshit or when something felt true.
Rob: Yeah, and we did a lot of reading of it out loud to each other, and it was helpful along the reads to have actors read it, in terms of working on dialogue and the rhythms of the way the characters spoke. And we had a lot of time. It didn’t sound great when we started it, and by the time we finished it, they all had their own way of speaking.
Luke: I think a big thing for us was a built-in degree of difficulty with the premise, which was to marry the fun of a road trip with the sadness of a teenage boy’s loss. We knew for that to work a lot of other things would have to work. Everything was always in service of earning the ending in a way. That was a good way to tell if it was working or not. If the ending worked, then we knew it worked.
Rob: Mick Casale was one of our writing teachers at NYU. He likened it to a magic trick. Once you know what you want to pull off, what the trick is, what big emotional feat you’re heading towards, then you can work backwards to make everything else an obstacle or an opportunity to get your characters in.
That’s the kind of thing we would talk a lot about. We did write biographies of each of the characters, but we were more driven by this kind of leading the character to the ultimate goal, how to get him there, and then what all the other characters should be to surround him.
Scott: The thing you’re building towards, was that his speech at the wedding?
Rob: I think it was sort of a combination of his breakdown, his decision to go back to the wedding, and then yeah, his speech. His speech was sort of the reward for his journey. He’s now the kind of kid who, even though it was awkward, could give a speech like that, which he couldn’t have done at the beginning. I’d say it’s from page, whatever that was, 70 to 80 in the script. That was the real climax for us, for the character.
Tomorrow in Part 6, Rob and Luke share their thoughts about how to break into the business.
For Part 1 of the interview, go here.
Part 2, here.
Part 3, here.
Part 4, here.
Rob is repped by WME and Apostle Management.
Luke is repped by Paradigm.
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