Interview: Screenwriter-Director Jim Hemphill (“The Trouble With The Truth”) — Part 1

For the next week or so, I turn attention to screenwriters, TV writers, and filmmakers who are on the front edge of making their mark in the business. Their insights, so recently on the outside looking in, reflect the excitement of breaking in, yet the challenges of attempting to carve out a career. Today: Filmmaker Jim Hemphill.

Jim Hemphill is a screenwriter and director based in Los Angeles. His first film, the award-winning horror movie Bad Reputation, was released by Warner Bros. and Maverick Entertainment in 2007. His second release the drama The Trouble With the Truth starring Lea Thompson and John Shea, opened in late 2012 to rave reviews from Variety, The Village Voice, Roger Ebert, and The Hollywood Reporter, among others. In addition to his filmmaking endeavors, Hemphill hosts a monthly podcast series on the website for American Cinematographer magazine, where he interviews directors and directors of photography about their craft. He also moderates discussions at the American Cinematheque, where he has hosted evenings with Peter Bogdanovich, Joss Whedon, David Mamet, and many other filmmakers.

In Part 1, Jim discusses how he found his way into filmmaking and his inspiration for The Trouble With the Truth:

Scott: How did you wind your way into filmmaking?

Jim: I loved movies from a very young age, and I always wanted to be a writer-director. The way some kids worshipped athletes, I worshipped Barry Levinson and Lawrence Kasdan and Paul Mazursky. As an undergrad I went to an excellent film school in Chicago called Columbia College, where I made some shorts and learned a lot about the technical side of filmmaking. It was kind of the tail end of the analog age, so we shot on 16mm and cut on Steenbecks and did our effects on optical printers and all that — ironically, the way the industry is moving it looks like my amateurish student films are the first and last movies I’ll ever shoot on film! I had been a film buff my whole life, but at Columbia my obsession got kicked up to a whole new level — I was watching at least four movies a day, everything from Kurosawa and Bergman to DISORDERLIES with the Fat Boys. I loved every kind of movie, high and low — and I still do.

When I graduated from Columbia I was leaning toward becoming a film critic, because I figured then I could get paid to do what I loved the most, which was watching movies. I went to film school at USC to get a masters degree in critical studies, and while I was there I became the film critic for the school paper and published a few reviews in other publications like Film Quarterly and Cinefantastique. Ironically, I discovered that making moviegoing my job wasn’t so fun after all — it killed the joy of being a fan. The upside, and the other thing that made me want to make films instead of write about them, was that being a critic enabled me to meet some of my favorite directors, like Walter Hill and John Landis. I became friendly with Walter and got to visit one of Landis’s sets, and as I got closer to the filmmaking side of things it looked a lot more fun than the critical side. So by the time I came out of USC I had a degree in critical studies but no longer wanted to be a critic. That said, writing reviews and articles for various magazines and websites kept the lights on for years while I struggled to break into filmmaking.

Throughout my twenties I had a number of odd screenwriting jobs on the fringes of the industry in exploitation movies and things like that, but nothing really went anywhere. So eventually I decided to take my destiny into my own hands and shot a horror feature called BAD REPUTATION for $20,000. My ambitions exceeded my resources, to say the least, but it was a great crash course in indie filmmaking and the movie ended up winning some film festival awards and got distributed all over the world. Warner Bros. picked up the VOD rights and a company called Maverick put it out on DVD in all the Blockbusters back when there actually were a lot of Blockbusters, so it was a nice release for what was essentially a kind of glorified student film.

Scott: How have you learned the craft of screenwriting?

Jim: When I was in film school I took a few screenwriting courses that helped me get started and I read all the books by Syd Field and McKee and people like that, but the truth is that like many people I basically learned how to write by writing a lot of bad screenplays. I’ve always found that reading interviews with other screenwriters and novelists is a huge help too, which is why websites like Go Into the Story are such an invaluable resource. But at the end of the day, the simple answer is that I learned from watching a lot of movies and reading a lot of novels and going to a lot of plays. If you really love stories I think figuring out how to tell them becomes kind of intuitive, and then you just need to hone your craft by doing it. Not that my craft is all that honed yet, but I’m working on it.

Scott: Your movie “The Trouble With the Truth” stars Lea Thompson and John Shea. Here is the IMDB description of the plot: “Musician and starving artist Robert reconsiders his own failed marriage to Emily after his daughter announces that she’s engaged.” What was the inspiration for this story idea and why did you think it would work for you as a movie?

Jim: When I made BAD REPUTATION, it got some good reviews in the horror press — Fangoria and magazines like that — and I thought it could lead to a job making a bigger-budget horror film. So I wrote a kind of DePalma-esque thriller, and the script got pretty good reactions from the executives I could get to read it. The problem was that those executives kept either quitting or getting fired! I would get close to financing at a company, and the executive who was my champion would leave and I’d be back to square one.

Eventually I got frustrated by this and decided to do the same thing I did on BAD REPUTATION, but on a slightly larger and more “legit,” shall we say, scale. My aim was to write something I could shoot myself without asking permission from anyone: a relationship piece with no special effects and no action and nothing logistically complex or expensive. The idea was to make a movie that would be labor-intensive rather than cost-intensive, because there are two things you can have be good in a movie without necessarily spending a lot of money: writing and acting. To have those two things be good takes hard work and talent, but it doesn’t have to cost a lot. Whereas a car chase or something is going to cost money no matter how clever you are.

The problem was coming up with a decent idea, which I didn’t really have. But I knew if I waited around for a great concept to come to me, I’d never make a movie. So I gave myself a deadline of one month to have a first draft, and decided I would just start writing — 4 pages a day, no matter what, and at the end of a month I would have at least a first draft. It might be terrible, but it would be something to start with. I had no characters and no story, but I stole a technique from Yasujiro Ozu. I read somewhere that he and his screenwriting partner, Kogo Noda, would sit down to write without knowing where they were going: they would simply start writing dialogue. As they wrote, the dialogue would reveal to them who the characters were, and out of that the relationships and conflicts would emerge. I decided to try the same thing, and on my first day of writing just wrote some back-and-forth dialogue between a man and woman talking about fidelity. It took the form of a kind of comic debate, and I found that I was getting to express a lot of my own ideas on the subject. And since I have a lot of contradictory opinions, I could put completely opposing ideas in the mouths of both characters but they were both reflections of me.

I kept writing these kinds of philosophical and comic discussions, and slowly the characters emerged, just as they did for Ozu and Noda. I figured out that the two people talking were a divorced couple, and that they were being brought back into each other’s lives by their daughter getting married. This gave me a kind of framework that would motivate all the discussions about men and women and marriage and regret, and from there it wasn’t much of a jump to figure out that the movie’s core question would be whether or not these two people had made a mistake breaking up.

Obviously it got to a point after a few days of writing where I had to figure out who these people were in some detail, but I told myself not to do anything with this script that would require research — that would be a sure way to get off track and not finish in the allotted month. So everything came from things I already knew about. Making John Shea’s character a jazz pianist came from the fact that my grandfather was a jazz pianist, for example, and making Lea Thompson a writer came from the fact that I’m a writer and know a lot of writers and know a lot about that life. Obviously then you make up a lot too — I don’t have a daughter and have no idea what it’s like to be a parent, and I’m a lot younger than the characters in the movie — and the script becomes a kind of bouillabaisse of personal experiences and memories, observations about other people, and acts of imagination.

The two key goals I had in mind were simply to finish in 30 days, and to have something I could shoot on a limited budget. So I wrote the script out of order — I just wanted forward momentum, so if I got stuck on something, I would jump to writing a scene that would take place twenty or thirty minutes later in the movie. Then I got to a point where I had all these disconnected conversations and had to write the connective tissue that would bind them all together. I don’t know that this approach is one that would work all the time, or very often at all, but for this particular movie it was the right way to go, and I did indeed have a draft in a month — though I rewrote and refined it right up until a week or so before shooting. The shape of the film — the notion that most of it would take place in limited locations on one night — was purely dictated by the financial limitations I knew I would have, because I wasn’t going to waste my time looking around for backing that would keep falling through the way it did on the thriller. My plan was to go to my parents, who are big movie fans but not in the business, and ask them to invest in the movie. Luckily for me, they did.

Tomorrow in Part 2, Jim talks about the writing and production process on The Trouble With the Truth.

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