Q&A: Elgin James (“Little Birds”), Part 3

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 3 of my conversation with Elgin:

SM: Let’s talk about that experience with Sundance Labs and The Institute. From the time you had that initial inspiration for the script, to the time you started principal photography, how long a period was that?

EJ: I wrote it in — I had it and my wife had gone away for like a couple weeks… so I wrote it really quickly. I wrote it in a couple weeks; I just got it all out. It had been built up inside of me for so long. I didn’t understand all the things about how to write a screenplay. I didn’t know all that stuff, so I was trying to figure out that with the formatting and everything. I wrote “Little Birds” in a couple weeks, and then it was maybe like a few weeks after that or so, that I got it to Jamie Patricoff — who ended up producing it because he’d done one of my favorite films “Half Nelson” and he actually did not want to make the film. He wanted to meet me about my life story. He’d heard about it, and there was a Rolling Stone article so he wanted to make the big biopic if you will…a twenty million dollar movie. I wouldn’t meet with him about it, but I sent two friends of mine instead to bring my script to him. Understandably, he’s like “What? This gang member thinks he can write a screenplay?” Like “Yeah, no thanks.” This amazing girl, Katie McNeil, who had only been his assistant for a month and a half, took my screenplay home, read it, and then came back was like “Jamie, you have to trust me. You have to meet with this person. There’s something special here.” She’s like, “I see myself in this script. There’s something special,” which is incredible. Then, she went from an assistant to the producer on “Little Birds” because of that, and she’s now the Vice President of Development at Electric City, Jamie’s company…with “Blue Valentine”, and all those other great films. Sorry, Jamie got it and then I met with Jamie who sent me to meet Michelle Satter from the Feature Film Program. I didn’t even know what the Labs were; I’d never heard about them. I obviously knew Sundance and I’d grown up watching, like — I said in The New Yorker — like lay in my mom’s lap watching “The Sting” and “The Electric Horsemen” and “Butch Cassidy” and all this stuff that Robert Redford did, because my mom, like all red blooded women, loved her some Robert Redford. Then all of a sudden, I walk into this room and here’s Michelle Satter, and everyone else from the Institute or the program, and it was just like I’d come home. She even said — one of her quotes was — I told her my whole story up to that moment and then she was just like “Elgin, you’ve been hanging out with the wrong crowd.” And yeah, they brought me to the labs and literally like my life changed. Then I’m there with everyone from Walter Mosley — who is like one of my favorite authors — to Scott Frank — who’s no slouch at screenwriting. It was really just incredible that way… to Wesley Strick to Tiger Williams… and just to have all these people talking to you. And then at the same time, I went there to the Labs- I couldn’t believe I was there… I was there with my other Fellows and they’d all already made films before, you know. They had films that appeared at Cannes and at Sundance and stuff. I was like the asshole like “Can you believe we’re here? Can you believe we’re at the screenwriting labs! Can you believe what he’s done? And what this writer’s done?” And they’re like “Of course, idiot. We’ve been trying to get here for a long time. We know why we’re here.” And Michelle Satter, she took me aside at some point — I’m not sure if it was a screenwriters lab or a directors lab — and was just like we’re not here…everything the writers would tell me was like “Yeah! That’s perfect! You’re right! Yessir! Yessir! Oh my god. Yes ma’am. Yes ma’am.” I was so happy to be there, and she was like “we brought you for your fierceness. You can’t lose that. We brought you for your voice. You can’t be so accommodating.” The whole thing is they push you to find out who you really are. They don’t push you to tell you ‘this is right’ or ‘this is wrong’. They have a screenwriter to tell you this is a story that I would write, or there’s certain physical things — it’s not like a class — it’s more like “why did you do that? Why? What does this mean?” And there are some screenwriters that wanted answers in “Little Birds”. And they wanted answers of why Lily cuts herself, and luckily through Michelle Satter and through the program, I was like “you know what? No. I’m not going to answer that, because when you’re a kid you don’t know why you do shit. “ I’m a grown ass man and I’ve probably done ten stupid things today. I don’t know why, and I especially didn’t know why when I was fifteen. They want to know, well was she molested? I was like “I’m not going to make that movie.” That’s not interesting to me. It’s beyond that. It’s not about — I think with screenwriting its like — audiences are smarter. That’s one thing we should know as like artists. You don’t have to answer everything, and you’re talking down to people when you do.

SM: It sounds like one of the things that you learned out of that experience, or maybe kind of honed down, was to find your voice and respect that. Stay with that. Don’t lose that.

EJ: That’s exactly right, and that’s really what they want out of you… is to find out who you really are and where you’re going to fight back. When you have people that are much more brilliant and much more successful and accomplished at what you’re trying to do than you, and they’re trying to tell you something…you’re going to find out how strongly you really feel about something, and that’s where you become an artist. If you’re like “nope… I don’t care what you say. This is what I have to do.” And a lot of things become bumping my head against it and being like… okay… but I have to find that out myself, and a lot of that came from the directing lab. When you have Caleb Deschanel, an amazing cinematographer, telling you where to put the camera and I’m telling him “no, I need to put it over here”, and I put it over in this other place and it’s wrong because I’m an idiot…I had to find that out myself, and that’s what’s so great about the labs. It’s the same way with writing. “Well okay, that may be the story you’re going to tell, but this is my story. “ What really they’re trying to get out of you is just…at least for me… was to go as deep, and as autobiographical as you can. Shed away all that other stuff, and just make it as honest and real as possible.

Tomorrow Part 4 of my Q&A with writer-director Elgin James.

Here is Part 1.

Here is Part 2.

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.