Interview: Screenwriter-Director Jim Hemphill (“The Trouble With The Truth”) — Part 2

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

Scott: The movie is very much a relationship driven film. Were you at all inspired by the Richard Linklater “Sunrise/Sunset” movies?

Jim: Richard Linklater is an influence on everything I do — he’s one of my favorite filmmakers and I love every movie he’s ever made. But yes, for this movie in particular I was really inspired by BEFORE SUNRISE and BEFORE SUNSET, as well as MY DINNER WITH ANDRE. I learned a lot from those films about rhythm and shape, and about how to hold an audience’s attention in a movie that is just a pair of people talking. I also looked at Ron Shelton’s film PLAY IT TO THE BONE, because it has a long road trip section that consists of just a handful of characters in conversation, and I studied BRIDGES OF MADISON COUNTY, which is a wonderful two-character relationship piece scripted by Richard LaGravenese and directed by Clint Eastwood. You asked earlier how I knew the concept would work as a movie, and the answer is that I didn’t know for sure — but I thought it might, because Linklater and Malle and Shelton and Eastwood had all managed to make great films that had approaches in common with what I was trying to do.

Scott: What is the history behind writing the script and going into production?

Jim: Once I finished the script I showed it to my folks and they agreed to invest in it. At the time I had a friend who was friendly with a wonderful actor — a guy who’d been nominated for an Oscar and been in a lot of very good movies — and I got the script to this actor and he liked it. He agreed to do the movie with me, playing the part that John Shea eventually played, but he wanted a LOT of involvement. He wanted a say in virtually everyone else we hired, he wanted input in the script, over final cut, you name it. Now, I was just desperate to make the movie, so I thought, okay, I’ll try this. And he was a lovely man and we had great lunches talking about the script. But I slowly started to realize that we saw the movie differently, especially when he began to insist on changes to the script that I thought were hurting it, not helping it. The crisis point came when an actress he wanted to play opposite him passed on the project, and he suddenly wanted a complete overhaul of the screenplay. I’m happy to rewrite a script to make it better, but not to satisfy the imaginary concerns of an actress who isn’t even doing the movie!

I was really a wreck while all this was going on, because I worried that if I didn’t make the movie with this guy I might be making a huge mistake. After all, he had worked with tons of major directors and been in major films — what if he knew something I didn’t? But I also started to think that if I did make the movie with this guy I’d be making a huge mistake, because we were just drifting too far off course. The changes he wanted in the script and the ways he wanted to cast and shoot it might have been right for the movie he wanted to make, but not for the movie I wanted to make. I was feeling really depressed about all this and I gave the script to a producer friend of mine, Daniel Farrands, who did THE HAUNTING IN CONNECTICUT and some other movies I had admired. I said I wanted his advice, but what I really wanted was his help — I was hoping he would like the script so much he’d be willing to step in and help produce the film. Usually when I hope for things like this they don’t happen, but in this instance I got lucky — Dan showed the script to his producing partner, Thommy Hutson, and they wanted to get involved.

So Dan and Thommy came on board and we started from scratch. The biggest challenge was figuring out where to shoot the movie, because we couldn’t afford to take over a real restaurant for two weeks. We found a studio in downtown L.A. where we could shoot the movie economically, but they were completely booked up for the rest of the year aside from a three-week window — and that window was less than six weeks away. So we decided to jump out of the plane and hope that the parachute would open — we put down a deposit on the studio and had just over a month to cast and prep the movie.

This made for an extremely stressful few weeks, since now money was being spent and we didn’t even know if we’d have actors. Lea Thompson said yes only ten days before we were slated to begin shooting, and we had no idea who was going to play the guy. John Shea was Lea’s idea, and he lived on Nantucket Island. By the time we got the script to him it was only a few days before shooting commenced, and he didn’t say he’d do it until three or four days before we needed him. I didn’t meet him until the morning of the first day of shooting! I got lucky though, because when John and Lea and I all got together that first day we just clicked, and it was the exact opposite of the bad experience I began with. All three of us were making the exact same movie.

Scott: How long was the shoot and what were some of the unique challenges of production?

Jim: We shot the movie in twelve days, though two of them were only half-days, so it was really an eleven-day shooting schedule. I have to say it was a relatively painless process, because I had Dan and Thommy running interference and dealing with a lot of the usual filmmaking headaches — they were putting out fires, so I got to focus on the actors and crew and just zero in on what was going to end up on screen. Since John and Lea had no rehearsal time, we came up with an approach that involved them running lines every morning for several hours before we shot a frame. Then, once they had the lines down they would come down to the set and we would shoot, and usually we would bang out a bunch of pages very, very quickly. We shot with two cameras at all times (Canon 5Ds), so John and Lea didn’t have to worry about matching from take to take — they could just respond to each other in the moment and know I would always have a reverse angle to cut to. We also shot the movie in continuity, which is a luxury you almost never have but which was possible on this film given the fact that we shot everything on the same stage, and that helped John and Lea find their characters in a really nice, organic manner.

This enabled what Lea called “emotional improv.” For the most part the actors stuck closely to my script, yet the meaning of each scene would change from take to take depending on how they played it. They could play the same scene for laughs, then for intense tragedy, then somewhere in between. For every scene we had takes where they got tears in their eyes, but also takes where they bantered like they were in a Hepburn-Tracy romantic comedy. When it came time to edit, the challenge was to pick which version of each scene was most effective, but that challenge was a wonderful gift that the actors gave me.

Given the limited preproduction period, I got very lucky with my cast and crew. Everyone came fully prepared and gung-ho to get the work done. So there weren’t the usual challenges in terms of running out of time, or not getting the footage I wanted — I never went home thinking I didn’t get what I needed. On my first movie I thought that every single day. Here, the challenge was sifting through everyone’s input and taking the ideas that worked and discarding the ones that didn’t. Because here’s the thing that nobody ever talks about: the director is usually the least experienced person on any given film crew, even if that director is Ridley Scott or somebody. Because a director, if he’s lucky, makes a movie a year — most don’t even come close to that. But the crew members and actors are making four, five, maybe more movies a year. So you’re surrounded by people who have a lot more experience and knowledge than you do, and you’re an idiot not to take advantage of that. At the same time, people can have good ideas that aren’t the right ideas, at least not right for this particular movie. So your biggest challenge as a director is having the confidence to listen to your own instincts even when more experienced people are disagreeing with you, but without becoming arrogant and shutting out great ideas.

That idea of instinct is very important, and the biggest single lesson I learned on this movie, though I had to learn it multiple times before it really sank in. Without fail, the times I made mistakes on the picture were when I didn’t trust my instincts. Luckily, that wasn’t even an option for the most part, because of the accelerated preproduction and shooting schedule — the actors and I had to trust our first instincts, because there wasn’t time to second-guess ourselves. There were a few occasions where my gut told me a camera move was strange, or a piece of art direction didn’t feel right, and I didn’t listen to it — and those are the moments that still bug me when I watch the movie. And I really got into trouble when I didn’t listen to my gut in post.

Tomorrow in Part 3, Jim talks about getting an indie movie distributed and how Roger Ebert gave The Trouble With the Truth a 3 1/2 stars rating.

For Part 1, go here.