Q&A: Elgin James (“Little Birds”), Part 2

Recently I had the opportunity to interview Elgin James who wrote and directed his debut movie Little Birds. Here is some background:

Elgin James’ first screenplay, “Little Birds,” was accepted into both the Sundance Screenwriters Lab and the Sundance Directors Lab. In 2009, James was awarded a Time Fellowship Grant as well as an Annenberg Feature Film Fellow Grant. He was recently named as one of Ioncinema.com’s “American New Wave 25,” in addition to being selected as one of Variety’s 2011 “Directors to Watch.”

Homeless as a teenager, James was a fixture in Boston’s hardcore punk scene, founding a national street gang that targeted neo-Nazi skinheads and robbed drug dealers to give the money to charity. After years in that lifestyle, James renounced violence and relocated to Los Angeles.

“Little Birds” marks his feature film directorial debut.

Here is Part 2 of my conversation with Elgin:

SM: Lets talk about “Little Birds”. In The New Yorker article, you talk about driving around the Salton Sea and you saw a girl on a bicycle and that was essentially kind of a flash for you, right?

EJ: Oh, totally.

SM: Could you describe that moment — how that translated in your head where you said this is a movie I want to tell?

EJ: Yeah, you know what, I was sitting there and I just walked away from the other project. My wife and I, we went up to Joshua Tree. We’d just moved to California pretty recently. We read in a book that the Salton Sea is crazy… don’t go there after dark… so we were like “Oh, we’ve got to go to the Salton Sea after dark.” We go, and the sun was just starting to set, and we stopped somewhere… and literally it was this girl on the back of her boyfriend’s BMX bike, sitting on the pegs with a cigarette pack in her sleeve. It just felt such like childhood; you know what I mean? It felt such like adolescence. It was like this perfect moment that touched this thing inside of me, and I was like — that’s a story, and that’s how I can tell this story about me and my best friend. It was just one of those magical moments that you could either pay attention to or not. I think that’s the whole thing…of trying to tap into things, of trying to be an artist…just be aware of those moments and just to run with them. Not to say that’s the only moment I’ve ever had — sometimes you hit a brick wall and that’s not anything — but to me, just seeing that in the evening… this girl riding around, her whole life ahead of her… but in this place. I knew that feeling from being in a small town and just wandering aimlessly. It’s just that feeling of my whole life is ahead of me but maybe I’ll never leave this town. Or, I’m too big for this town, I need to get out into the world… and then realizing, oh I got out into the world and then it chewed me up and spat me out. So yeah, it was really this time — my wife just went into a store — but for me, I was just like “Oh my god! This is it.” I was so excited; I couldn’t stop talking about it and figuring it out, like, the whole three hour drive back to L.A.

SM: You know what’s cool about that, Elgin? It’s like that old adage you hear — character equals plot. It sounds like what you had was — you zeroed in on this character, and then all of a sudden just saw the story unfold in front of your eyes just from that.

EJ: You’re right. That’s true. I feel like — it’s amazing you say that — that’s really how I… I’m trying to figure out, as we all are as artists, we’re trying to figure out who we are as an artist and then we’re trying to figure out who the hell we are just in life anyway and our art is a way to do that, and through writing. But character is so much more interesting to me than story. You’re totally right, and just from that, from her, from seeing just this girl… that’s where the story comes from. But I feel like to me, and the things I’m also interested in, it comes first with the character. The way I saw “Little Birds” was it’s almost like — cause I fell in love with westerns with John Ford in particular and those are very… they’re like a genre film… and when I was in Boston and I’d sneak off with my friends and go to these little arthouse theaters… there was a time in the 90’s, just this explosion of these amazing movies from “All Over Me” to “Kids” to “All The Real Girls” to “Thirteen”… I kind of wanted to make my genre film like that, and the character stuff is what’s interesting to me. Kids run away, and they go into the big, bad world, and things usually go wrong — I wasn’t trying to change the world with that — but what interested me is who these characters were and to be honest, when I was a kid and I was homeless, there’s just me and a bunch of boys in abandoned buildings. These runaway girls would come around; I could not care less about them at the time except for the one thing adolescent boys like adolescent girls for. But besides that, I didn’t care where they came from or where they were going. Now as an adult, those adolescent boys — I mean, my friends aren’t that interesting to me — but those girls, like what happened? What led them to us, and what happened after they left us? That’s what really became interesting to me.

SM: Let’s talk about those girls. Lily and Alison, two of the lead characters in “Little Birds” — how did you find the experience of writing those two keys characters who are two decades younger than you?

EJ: You know, I have no idea. I think because age is such a weird thing, because my life has been really stagnant… like I said, I feel like I just came alive a few years ago. It’s a hole I dug for myself completely, like I made choices in my own life. That’s the problems of people where something happened to someone as a child — it’s almost like you emotionally freeze, and then you feel like a victim, and then you can victimize the rest of the world, but inside you’re still stuck at this age. You’re kind of stunted. It wasn’t until I had these amazing mentors that were able to bring me out of that from the Sundance Labs and the Sundance Institute. I don’t know; I feel like we’re all — any of the things that would have let me let go of that …of what it feels like to be like a kid, aimless, trying to figure out who you are… like a mortgage and a job and car payments, I never had any of those. You know what I mean? So, that was still and is still, for better or worse, alive inside of me. The years didn’t change anything. It wasn’t that difficult. I think really what’s interesting to me is just how girls are so much more complicated. I always say that when I say something, I just mean that. When my wife says something, she means a dozen things, and I can only usually figure out the top two if I’m lucky. I had older sisters as well; I was like the pesky little brother. I was like many years younger than… but with all these teenage girls and just like following them and like them yelling at my mom to have me stop pestering them. You know what I mean? But just to hear those voices, it was still very alive inside of me in just the way that girls talk.

SM: That’s interesting. I was wondering — because you had this dramatic moment where you saw this girl on the bicycle — choosing two teenage girls at the center of your story, that is in some ways reflective of you and your friend, whether that was just because of the fact it was this girl you saw or perhaps writing female characters struck you as a more interesting choice, working with a female perspective.

EJ: Oh, completely. That’s why I think I was so excited about it, because I found my way in. That’s really what it was. It was just like this girl and this amazing moment. I think, even in other ways, I couldn’t even articulate yet. I was trying to. I don’t know if my wife could figure out why — she was my girlfriend at the time — she didn’t understand why I was so excited because I can’t even articulate this is also like my way and I’ve been surrounded by strong women my entire life you know starting with my mom. I just recently lost my mom, so it’s kind of like a love song to her. And to my wife now. And to Juno Temple, the lead, who’s one of the closest people in my life. To my cinematographer. I’ve been so blessed by that, and there’s a way to tell the story through somebody I was much more interested in and also can kind of, like, celebrate. And then not even knowing that when I’d get into it, that it could be so much more autobiographical with this stuff. The people from the labs — particularly Michelle Satter, who runs the labs — also would push me to go there, push me to be more autobiographical, push me to go deeper. It wasn’t about the physical things I’d done; just that kind of emotional place and because that must feel like — it’s the same reason I feel like I’d be a better father to a daughter than I would a son — because you’re used to being intimate with women. I’m used to being intimate with that, and being more vulnerable. I have three rescue dogs; I have two girls and a boy. With the girls, I’m all like “Aw, baby!” and with the boy, I’m like “Come on, buddy “ and I put him in a headlock and we’re wrestling around. I feel like even on the set, when I was trying to direct that that became a thing — I kind of had to have the boys be their own crew and almost be their own… I don’t know if I want to call it a gang… but they kind of had to be on their own so I could be there emotionally for the girls. Back to writing, that’s what I was able to do with the characters. I could tell more honest truths about myself through them.

Tomorrow Part 3 of my Q&A with writer-director Elgin James.

Here is Part 1.

Here is the movie’s website.

Little Birds debuted in NYC on August 29th. It screens for the first time in LA on September 14th.

Thanks to one of my former UNC students Ariel Butters for setting the interview into motion. Ariel has been working with Electric City Entertainment, one of the producing outfits involved with Little Birds.

Thanks as well to Black List intern Justin Kremer for handling the transcription of the interview and turning it around as quickly as he did.