Interview (Part 5): Matt Manfredi and Phil Hay (“The Invitation”)

I’m a big fan of producer Mynette Louie and what she and her cohorts are doing at Gamechanger Films, a film fund for women directors, so when I saw their newest movie The Invitation was coming out in April this year, I made it a point to watch it on VOD the week it went into distribution. I loved it! So I got in touch with Mynette who connected me with the movie’s screenwriters Matt Manfredi and Phil Hay, and we ended up having a great conversation about their careers, the craft of writing and their thriller movie The Invitation.

Today in Part 5, Matt and Phil answer some key questions about the writing craft:

Scott: Three days of rehearsal, 20‑day shoot. The team’s synergy, you can really feel it. The music and Karyn’s job of directing, I thought, was just terrific. What was the writer‑director relationship like on set? Were you guys there for the entire shoot?

Phil: We were there the entire time. Pre‑production, production, post, everything. I think the three of us became…Obviously, Karyn and I are married, Matt and I are partners and best friends, and Karyn and Matt are extremely close friends.

Obviously, we have a very long relationship, but it was so much fun to get to work together. The three of us are such a nugget as a creative team that…Karyn has said this before. She knew that we were completely in her corner and willing to give it all to support her vision. There’s complete trust there. The thing that is amazing about Karyn as a director, is that she is extremely collaborative, and very open to ideas, and to what’s important to everyone, but she’s also incredibly decisive. She knows exactly the movie she’s making, and she knows what’s in her head. She just has a very good balance of openness and surety that is very…to me that’s the perfect way to be as a director.

As you said, the composer, Teddy, is one of our best friends. The editor, Plummy Tucker, is a good friend of ours. She’s cut all Karyn’s movies. Randy Poster is a friend and a legendary music supervisor who showed up for no money because he wanted to be part of it.

We worked with people on this who became life long friends. The entire cast and crew were so special. We all came together to make the same movie, and I think we all saw an opportunity to really put it all on the line and really do our strongest work. Just put it out there and just hope that people would see what we saw.

That was a very magical experience. Making the film and then being able to travel with it to all these film festivals over the course of a year and then to have the release go so well… I actually can’t separate the experience of it from the movie because I think the movie doesn’t work or happen without, particularly, the actors being extremely tightly knit and feeling those relationships. They really became very, very close. We all became very, very close. I think that is part of the fabric of the movie that you see.

Phil Hay, Karyn Kusama, Matt Manfredi on the set of The Invitation

Scott: It resulted in getting an 88 rating among critics on Rotten Tomatoes. That’s not too shabby. I understand you’ve written another script for Karyn to direct. Is it a budget thing, or what’s going on there?

Matt: It’s another independent movie. We’re aiming for a bit higher budget level, but still independent. It’s an LA cop thriller…

Phil: … female led, with sort of a metaphysical underpinning to it.

Matt: So that’s what’s up next. That’s the plan.

Phil: Yeah, we’re almost done with the script. Again, the three of us want to get it going as soon as possible and be able to do it again.

Scott: Karyn got a lot of great press off this movie, and I’m sure you all did too, so it’s good to see. Let’s shift to some craft questions. How do you come up with story ideas?

Phil: Depends on the story, I’d say. I feel like a lot of times one or the other of us is just stewing about something for a while. I would say it’s usually a feeling, or a question, or a relationship nugget or something, and kind of cook it on our own for a while. Then one of us will just be like, “Could it be a movie if…” and we’d say whatever that little thing is.

The thing that’s interesting is that we almost never disagree about…if one of us feels something strongly, the other one is almost always, either immediately or with a little bit of talking, able to see why it has promise and why we should develop it.

For me, it feels like it comes less from high concept, less from something clever or something tricky, and more from some nagging, emotional thing that can’t be resolved, or a interesting relationship that I want to see, something like that.

Matt: Yeah, I agree.

Scott: How about your prep writing process, like brainstorming or character development, or plotting, research, outlining? What aspects of prep do you tend to devote most time to? Do you work to an outline or a treatment before you go to start?

Phil: We do. We talk a lot.

Matt: We talk a lot. That’s by far most of our time. I’d say as we’re talking, Phil and I both have a document open, and we’re just jotting down any notes that occur to us, whether it’s about character, whether it’s about maybe a set piece or a scene, a relationship, what it’s about thematically…

For me, it’s just a big vomit of words in a notes document, and then eventually, once we kind of feel we have enough, we’ll either write a beat sheet, or put cards on the wall. By the time we’re ready to write, we have outlined fairly meticulously, and we’ll go through every scene and say, “Well, let’s make sure.”

We divide up the scenes, and one of us goes off and writes each one, but we say, “OK. Well, remember this about that character, and when you’re writing that scene, just remember this other thing,” or “I have some dialogue I think might go there. I’m going to send it to you.”

So, by the time we’re writing, in some ways it doesn’t matter who writes the scene because we’re pretty far along in the process by that point, and then once we have all the scenes we cobble them together, and then go through it together line by line.

Scott: But you’re working in the same place?

Matt: Yeah.

Phil: Yeah, when Matt says, “Go off to write,” it’s basically, “Go off three feet to the next desk.”

Matt: It’s “Go put on headphones.”

Phil: Yeah, put on headphones. It’s true. We have that outline, so we know where we’re headed, and then we maintain contact, obviously, with every scene throughout, so I know exactly what Matt’s writing. He knows exactly what I’m writing. We’re sending them to each other.

We may read them right away, or we may put them aside and read the other person’s stuff a couple days later. But we are always maintaining contact with where we are because obviously it’s evolving the whole time.

But we’ve sort of settled into a routine where the two of us can never get too far afield from what the other one’s going to be interested in, or think is the right choice because we are always in contact about it. That said, it’s nice to be able to surprise each other on the page.

Scott: I’m guessing, just based on the work that you’ve done in The Invitation that you like working with characters. How do you go about developing characters? Do you have any specific go to tools or techniques that you do, in terms of unearthing who they are?

Matt: It’s a good question. It’s hard to say. It ends up being a lot of conversation. We don’t really often write out backstory. This movie we’re working on now is primarily about one character, and so we keep having more and more discussions and going further and further back about how she got to the place she is now, what happened in the past.

A lot of that stuff will never be in the script, but it’s helped. It informs us, but I don’t think that we have a specific process. I mean, a lot of times it’s the very basic, “What is this character’s journey in this script? What is he or she learning along the way? Where are we trying to get them to?”

That happens kind of in every script, or at least I think it should, but I don’t know that we have any specific tools that we use.

Phil: Yeah, the two things that I’d say that I…and again, this is more trying to put a label on something that we do instinctively, as opposed to something that we usually talk about, but I think that we approach it through their relationships to other characters, and how we try to complicate them or deepen them is to really look at them next to and in conjunction with the other characters. Where they sit in an ecosystem.

Then I think that we also tend to go at them through voice, especially, obviously, in comedy. That is the paramount thing. Once we have a voice for those characters, then the voice becomes — in a weird way, the voice comes from them and they come from the voice. That’s another tool. I think the rhythm of writing dialogue for these characters and hearing them then starts to make us learn more about them.

Not just about characters. At least in my experience, writing scripts is a learning process for us always, and especially with The Invitation. I felt like it was a script that I was constantly learning about while doing it. That’s how we kind of approach a lot of things, as an investigation.

Tomorrow in Part 6, Matt and Phil offer advice to aspiring screenwriters.

For Part 1 of the interview, go here.

Part 2, here.

Part 3, here.

Part 4, here.

Matt and Phil are repped by UTA.

Twitter: @phillycarly, @MattRManfredi.