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Director's Note 002. Flashback, Installment One: Scripting

Well. Hello. It's been awhile.

Principal shooting for the feature film Intermission wrapped in April, and now in the beginning of July we are finally done with the bulk of editing. I am going to the post office today to send off the rough cut of the film to our composer, Gerard Estella. I was supposed to send it to him Monday (today is Friday) but I am an idiot and could not figure out why the compressed file (14gb) would not fit onto the flashdrive (32gb). For those of you who don't know, evidently you have to format flash drives if you want put big files on them.

Yup. So that happened.

Last day of shooting on set was a mixture of relief and sadness. Sadness, because I effing love my crew, and relief, because after shooting for four months, I was beginning to worry we wouldn't be finished FILMING by our rough-cut deadline, let alone have a rough cut! But we've made it through, and are fast approaching the finish line.

This film was a collaboration from the very start; it began as a twenty-three page short film I wrote when I was twelve, and dug out again about three years ago now, (in 2010) thinking "this might be fun to shoot." But then I read it through - you cannot imagine what a bad writer twelve-year-old me was, I was almost as bad as I am now - and scrapped the idea.

But a year later, I somehow found myself sitting at a picnic table in Antioch park talking through the characters and general story arch with soon-to-be AD Patrick Poe and future screenwriter/current playwright Zachary Weaver. This was my first time ever sitting down with Zachary, we had met in passing - and completely by chance! - that summer. Together the three of us roughed out all the characters (which basically means I gave them what I had and they fixed it), I gave him the character arcs and general plot points, and we parted ways - Zachary said he'd play with it and see what thoughts he had and get back to me. This was in September 2011.

Come January, I'm sitting in Florida, having mostly forgotten the project - I tried to write out a feature-length script a couple times, but it just wasn't coming - and I open my email to find a note from Zachary, apologizing for the delay. Attached was the 80-page foundation we built this film on. I was thrilled. I spent the next couple weeks elaborating on it and building characters until we had a modified 112 page draft (so, basically, Zachary did all the hard work. And then I just added enough to take co-writing credit. :P).

Initially, something was missing from the role of Jana. At the very beginning the character was a first-time director, young, Osawata kid who'd never been outside her hometown. You had her and Marvin both working on their very FIRST show, together. It just wasn't working for me. We had too many characters, that were too much the same. I talked to Zachary about giving Jana a different back story - "Let's have her been a fallen broadway star!" He was hesitant, only because he didn't know who we'd get to play her - saying we needed someone who could pull off the larger-than-life personality I was describing if we were going to script her that way.

But I already knew exactly who I wanted.

This woman named Em Loper who I had met, again, completely by chance while working backstage on She&Her's production of Urinetown. She'd had a bit part, I'd never actually seen her act, but I knew - just KNEW - that this was my leading lady. I told Zachary, "She's got this." And I proceeded to write her character into it. The main concern was whether or not on our budget we could pull off a New York City backstory - but thanks to our incredible cast and crew, I think we made it work.

It took us I think seven versions of the script? Emailed back and forth and back and forth - before we settled on a final rough draft to cast from. At this point, we were into February 2012. I returned to Kansas City, and Patrick, Cat RunningElk (casting director) and I began setting up for auditions - we had Jana, Brie, Marvin and Iggy pre-cast - but everyone else, I was looking for.

It was to be a year-long casting process.

More on that later. I really need to get to the post office. Now that we're a week behind schedule thanks to me.

-Loren

#type: director's note #crew: lolo loren #director #intermission #intermissionthemovie #type: text