Interview: Rob Meyer and Luke Matheny

The wonderful indie movie A Birder’s Guide to Everything was co-written by Rob Meyer and Luke Matheny, and directed by Meyer.

Luke Matheny, Rob Meyer, Ben Kingsley

Here are links to the six installments of the entire interview:

Part 1: “Rob had this idea about a quest for an extinct duck, loosely based on the search for the ivory-billed woodpecker, which had happened a couple of years earlier. We thought that was a great way to marry a fun “road-trip duck quest” plot with the great characters that he had laid out in his short, Aquarium.”

Part 2: “I think we also knew that the main characters’ arcs would also have a bittersweet quality in the sense that we suggest that the characters may not be best friends for the rest of their lives. To that extent, Stand by Me was certainly an influence with us. We always thought about that line, ‘You never have the kind of friends like you did when you were 12.’”

Part 3: “There were a lot of notes we wanted to ignore, of course, but the long development period really gave us a lot of opportunities to improve the script, to the point where when we went to shoot it, there was very little that we hadn’t really thought about many times over.”

Part 4: “To make it all work, we actually trimmed the script down from 110 pages to 90 pages to 88 pages and then there were a couple of bits we didn’t even shoot during the shoot. We cut it down to the bone.”

Part 5: “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.”

Part 6: “If you write an amazing script, someone is going to take interest whether it’s from a studio level or on the Sundance level. Don’t get distracted by things that aren’t related to writing a good script. Make that your main goal.”

The movie’s Facebook page here.

Twitter: @abirdersguide.

Rob is repped by WME and Apostle Management.

Luke is repped by Paradigm.

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