So it’s about meaning.
Yeah. It’s about refining the meaning of your film. I’m always amazed by how your film tells you who it is in the cutting room. It walks and talks the way it needs to walk and talk. And when you try to make it do something it doesn’t want to do, it just rebels against you. After you finish shooting, the editor does a first cut while you go away on vacation for about a week. Then you see the first assembly. A lot of people say they just want to kill themselves when they see it. It’s rambling. There’s no temp music. But I’ve never felt horrified.
Then again, I don’t overshoot. Most people shoot so much that there’s so much to take out. I do a lot of the taking-out process as we go along. On Home for the Holidays, for example, I’d come to [editor] Lynzee Klingman during shooting and say, “I don’t want to see that scene. Let’s take it out now.”
It’s remarkable that you are so certain that you aren’t even tempted to look at it one more time.
Well, that’s my Achilles’ heel. I pare everything down to the most succinct degree. I can tend to be really linear. I’m not a big dreamer. And that’s not always good. I’m so methodical that I don’t really need an overlord. What I need are people to work with me and say, “You can afford to do that. Try it. Why not?” On any movie, you have one overriding question: What is my movie about? From the beginning to the middle to the end of the process, you’re always refining the answer.
Give me an example.
During rehearsals on Home for the Holidays, I got this idea for a new ending. To shoot it involved all the actors, seven different locations, probably seven pages of dialogue. You do two pages a day, so that’s like three days of shooting, $75,000 a day — that’s a good $300,000 out of the movie. So what I did was organize the rest of the movie to take out things that weren’t important to me. Peggy Rajski, my producer, helped find the money in other places and made room. None of it was in the original script. But for me, the new ending is the point of the film.
Let’s talk about a particular merle and the collaborations that underlie it. Your production company, Egg Pictures, developed ‘Nell,’ in which you also starred. So you were involved from the beginning.
Nell was taken from a stage play, which was very surreal, set all in one room. So the first collaborator we needed was a writer. We brought in Bill Nicholson, and he said, “I have to construct a completely different language for Nell, because the play’s Shakespearean language makes no sense.” He came up with ideas about why the character of Nell — a hermit’s daughter who’s been raised completely apart from civilization — was the way she was. She seems like a wild child, but she bathes and is meticulously groomed. Why? Because her mother was a serious Bible person who taught her good grooming. As we constructed her history, the language Nell used evolved from that.
Coming from a mother who is a stroke victim and never having met anybody else, Nell’s speech reflected how a victim of a right-brain injury would speak. Some stroke victims don’t lose their meter. Rhythm is stored in another part of your brain, so the music of your speech not only stays intact but is much more enhanced. So the Southern musicality of Nell’s speech had to be way out there. Also, for stroke victims the words that do come out very, very well are often things that are high affect, like “Taxes!” “Death!” “God!” and things that are rote — whether songs they sang as a kid or biblical phrases they learned by heart. So each of those elements had to be built into Nell’s speech. She was also a twin. Twins can develop vocabulary and sometimes even grammar that’s all their own. So then we had to figure out where the little pieces of twin-speak would come in.
