Interview: Screenwriter-Director Jim Hemphill (“The Trouble With The Truth”) — Part 3

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 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:

Scott: Movies are a visual medium, and yet “The Trouble With the Truth” relies heavily on dialogue. How did you approach shooting the movie to embrace both spoken word and the visual world?

Jim: That’s a great question. The cinematographer, Roberto Correa, and I felt very strongly that the camerawork shouldn’t be distracting, yet there’s a fine line, because if you’re too restrained in your visuals a film like this can become static and monotonous. So we decided to underline the emotional content with the visual style in a way that would be subtle and hopefully work on an unconscious level. The lighting, for example, grows increasingly harsh and unforgiving as the characters expose more and more of themselves throughout the film; the more layers of artifice that they strip off in their dialogue, the more Roberto peels away the kind of traditional glamor lighting that the story begins with. The final conversation, which is a little more raw and kinetic than what precedes it, is shot with wider lenses and a less precise compositional style than the rest of the movie, an approach that hopefully increases the sense of uneasiness for both the characters and the audience. Throughout the film the choices of lenses, light, and shot size are motivated by what is happening emotionally in the scene, but we don’t really do anything to add a new perspective visually the way that, say, Scorsese does, or Welles. It’s all about accentuating what is already there in John and Lea’s performances.

A lot of people who have seen the film have asked me if I ever thought about doing it as a play, and I easily could have done that without altering one word of the content. But for me it’s a cinematic story, because close-ups are cinematic. You can’t get a close-up on the stage, and so much of what this film is about are the subtle emotional shifts that register in the characters’ faces when they have revelations about each other and themselves.

Scott: Where did you do post-production and what was that process like?

Jim: The first part of post-production, the picture editing, was pure heaven. I worked with a superb editor named Michael Benni Pierce. This was an interesting movie to edit for the reasons I mentioned earlier in terms of John and Lea playing things differently every time, and Benni was brilliant at shaping the story and the performances by picking the right takes, without error, and molding them to give the film a lively rhythm. That’s the good news. The bad news is that for the rest of post I chose to go with a company that seemed great on the surface but turned out to do very mediocre work. Their selling point was that they had kind of one-stop shopping — they would do our sound mix, our color timing, and our one or two effects shots (basically just digitally removing cables and things like that) all under one roof. They also had some big credits on their resume doing studio films, so the fact that they would work with us within our budget seemed too good to be true.

It was, in fact, too good to be true. I had a sense as soon as I started working with the color timer that he and I were not on the same page — he was making the movie look worse, not better. But I kept thinking, well, I don’t know anything about this, maybe it’s the way the process goes. After all, they’ve done all these big Paramount movies. Well, I heard later that the people at the company who worked on the Paramount movies weren’t even there anymore, but the company was still selling itself as the post house for these big films. Anyway, I spent weeks with these guys on the color timing and it just kept getting worse, and that experience was echoed in the sound mix. I kept hearing weird things in the production sound, and the mixer would tell me there was no way to get rid of them. I couldn’t really argue, since I’m not a sound guy — for all I knew, he was right, though it sure seemed unlikely to me. When I later remixed with a guy who knew what he was doing, I learned that the first guy was either incompetent or a liar.

Instead of just pulling the plug with these guys the first week like I should have, I kept working with them and hoping it would get better. It never did. I ended up with a worse looking and sounding movie than I started with! I thought maybe I was just losing perspective, but when we looked at the final product Benni and Dan and Thommy all agreed that it was sub-par. I was devastated, since I felt like the actors and crew had delivered for me and here I was with a movie that didn’t fully reflect their achievement. Luckily, we had come in a little under budget, so we just redid everything — Benni color-timed the movie in Apple Color and it looked incredible, and we called in a favor at Mi Casa Multimedia, where Dan had mixed an earlier project, and they remixed the sound in a few days. It all worked out, but the big lesson here is that you need to trust your gut, because my gut was telling me right from the start that the first guys were not good — if I had listened to that instinct and pulled the plug right from the beginning, I would have saved a lot of stress and money and been able to take more time doing a proper sound mix. Luckily, Brant Biles at Mi Casa was able to work a lot of miracles in the short amount of time we had left to finish the movie.

Scott: Roger Ebert gave “The Trouble With the Truth” 3 1/2 stars, opening his review with this: “Jim Hemphill’s ‘The Trouble with the Truth’ is a pleasant surprise that gets better as the movie unfolds.” What does it feel like getting a review like that from such a legendary film critic? Has that review made an impact on your film’s public reception?

Jim: Well, you have to understand, Ebert was a god to me growing up. I watched his TV show every week of my life from second grade on, read every one of his books, and bought every one of his DVD commentaries. In fact, as a kid it was his review that made me want to see MY DINNER WITH ANDRE, which is a movie that rattled around in my head for decades before I decided to make my own variation on it with THE TROUBLE WITH THE TRUTH. So to go to Ebert’s website and see that review was hugely gratifying. As far as public reception goes, it definitely kicked us up another level — we were able to expand to more theatres beyond New York, L.A., and Chicago simply because art house managers in other cities had seen the Ebert review and requested the film.

Scott: Obviously it’s one thing to make a movie, it’s quite another to market and distribute it. You have taken what you describe as a “grass roots” approach to distribution. Could you describe what that means in relation to your movie?

Jim: The theatrical market for independent films has changed so much in the last twenty years. Unless you are very, very lucky, the chances of getting picked up by a major distributor like Fox Searchlight or Sony Classics out of a festival are miniscule, especially if you don’t play at one of the top, top fests like Sundance or South by Southwest. We finished our movie after the Sundance deadline, and I wasn’t patient enough to wait for the following year; in retrospect I think this was a mistake on my part, though my backer — AKA Dad — probably wouldn’t have gone for it even if I wanted to. So we submitted to a lot of very good but lower profile festivals, where audiences responded positively to the movie, but I didn’t have any of the major distributors banging down my door.

Luckily, I have a relationship with the American Cinematheque in Los Angeles, where I moderate a lot of Q&As with filmmakers after screenings — I actually met Lea Thompson there when I interviewed her after a BACK TO THE FUTURE program a few years ago. They own the Egyptian Theatre, which has two screens; the smaller one, the Spielberg, shows art house and indie movies, and the Cinematheque agreed to run TRUTH there for a week. That same week we four-walled a theatre in New York called the Quad, so technically we had a kind of national art-house release, albeit only on two screens. What that gave us was some good reviews from major publications — we got great notices in the Village Voice, Variety, Hollywood Reporter, and L.A. Times, among others. Thus the grass roots release began — off of those reviews we were able to get booked at Facets in Chicago, which got us the Ebert review, which in turn got us booked at theatres in other parts of the country. So for the past year or so we’ve kind of been trickling out a screen at a time, slowly building an audience and word of mouth, so that hopefully when the film comes out on VOD and DVD people will be waiting for it.

Scott: So let’s assume there are folks out there who read this that want to see the movie. What can they do to make that happen?

Jim: If all goes according to plan the movie will be out on DVD and VOD sometime in January, but in the meantime we have a couple more festival showings planned and I’m still trying to get the film shown on the big screen in more art houses. If you follow me on Twitter (@jimmyhemphill) or “like” the movie on Facebook — you can get updates on upcoming screenings and engagements. And the website will also have info about screenings as they emerge and about pre-ordering the DVD as soon as that’s available. One thing that will help make sure the film is widely available is for people who subscribe to services like Blockbuster Online and Netflix and Redbox to save THE TROUBLE WITH THE TRUTH in their queues — the more those companies see that people are interested in the film, the more copies they’ll order so that it’s readily available to everyone.

Scott: Have you got any further film projects on the horizon and if so, what are they?

Jim: Throughout the process of getting THE TROUBLE WITH THE TRUTH out into the world I’ve been writing new scripts and will hopefully be shooting one of them later this year if I can raise the dough. One’s a character-driven Western, one’s a sort of supernatural variation on FATAL ATTRACTION, and if I can’t get either of those going I’m writing a script for another low-budget character piece like TRUTH. I also just wrote a pilot for a TV series I want to do at some point, though God only knows how you get into that business. Ideally I’d love to follow John Sayles’s career path and write movies and TV stuff for hire so that I can turn around and put the paychecks into my own personal indie flicks, but we’ll see what happens. Thus far no one is handing me briefcases full of money to write the next superhero franchise movie, sadly.

Scott: What advice do you have for aspiring writer-directors?

Jim: Having made only two features I still feel “aspiring” myself, but the main thing I would say is be true to yourself and what kinds of movies you want to see and make. It sounds corny, I know. But I wasted a lot of time writing stuff to “sell” or because I thought it was what other people would like, and then when I turned around and made this odd little movie that I worried would interest no one it ended up being the thing that audiences and critics responded to. My other advice is to keep your scripts lean — don’t overdo the descriptive passages and adjectives. The more breathing room you give actors to bring their own interpretation to a script, the greater depth the movie’s going to have — and then you get to take the credit for all the complexity they’ve added.

For Part 1, go here.

For Part 2, go here.