Hello Twilighters,
This may be a bit technical for some, lots of ‘film’ talk. It is an interesting look at Rob’s film How To Be. I transcribed the Q&A session which took place after the NPA screening on August 7th at the Charlotte Street Hotel in London. There are a few questions tagged on to the end that I asked the HTB guys after the official Q&A.
Post Screening Q & A with Justin Kelly (Producer), Oliver Irving (Director) and Joe Hastings (Composer).
Q: Were there mistakes? Things you would do differently?
OI: The biggest mistake we made is… well, we didn’t have it all planned and ready for the editing cause we were constantly moving things. Originally I had a plan to edit at home. Nowadays its so easy to just edit at home, you can. We got into the shoot and we hadn’t got the editor.
To JK: I’m allowed to talk about mistakes now, aren’t I?
JK: Yeah.
OI: Ok, I’ll try not to sound too bitter, I won’t mention names. Basically, we thought we’d need to get someone to sync all the rushes every week and show us what we got and edit it as we went along and give us an idea of what was going on. That’s kind of how things are done properly but in actual fact nowadays they can sync all your rushes up for you and send them to you anyway so that makes life easier. But the guy we got, we thought was very experienced but he just turned around and said ‘oh great they’re all synced for me! ‘ and just stuck them straight in and Cathy (nods to Cathy) probably knows about all the problems we had because of this. That caused us lots of problems.
In actual fact a lot of those things are simpler in a way than you’d think. It’d be simpler to shoot your film and then later on look at all the footage you’ve got and figure out what you’re gonna do with it as opposed to… I don’t think… for us it didn’t benefit to have some one editing as we went along it actually ended up causing us big problems
JK: It was also a slightly different sort of editor because he was used to doing a lot more action films and he didn’t get the subtleties of what Oliver was trying to get at.
Q: Was that decision made, I mean because I’ve seen it on sort of bigger budget films they kind of do that so that there is room to re-shoot…
OI: Yeah if you had an editor and they were sitting there cutting all this stuff together and you were giving them massive input and they said ‘You know you’re not getting enough of this, you need to do that… go back and reshoot’ and our schedule as it was, there was no way we were going to go back and re-shoot anyway so unless he spotted something HUGE. And, creatively he wasn’t there in order to say ‘you know what would really work…’ which would have been nice because then we could have, well we did have a couple of pick up days but you know, we thought we were doing it the proper way but in fact I think we… I think some times you have to not think about what you could have done.
JK: Very difficult. We didn’t rush the edit and we did a number of test screenings which were really helpful. Originally the film was way longer and you kind of get so close to the film you don’t really have an objective view on it.
Q: But the film has been going around the Festival Circuit hasn’t it?
OI: Yeah, a little bit.
Q: Has that opened up any opportunities or what has that meant for you?
OI: Well we finished the film and then went straight to do SlamDance which is part of Sundance
JK: Well, separate. But same time, same place.
OI: Same time, same place, it’s… on the same street as it were and so that was really good. We won the Grand Jury Honourable Mention which is not winning the first prize, but still winning. The problem was that we literally finsihed the film and had just done the D.I. It was a only a week before and we got the tape the day before, then got on a plane to go out there. So we didn’t have much time to prepare for that as much as we would have liked to. It was a bit tricky but always when you are on a low budget you haven’t got time to prepare for the things you need.
JK: But what is really helpful when you’re doing this kind of thing is to have somebody who can really help you out on the Festival front.
OI: Even with that small prize, it does make a difference people are more interested.
JK: And you see here (shows on screen) this is our festival hit list. There is a friend of Oliver’s called Mike Williams who is an Associate Producer who has really been a great help in terms of festivals. There’s still lots more work to do but you can see how many festivals there are that we are working through and so on.
We’ve gotten into a quite few others. We have our east coast premiere tomorrow night at the Rhode Island Film Festival. We’ve been programmed the 9 o’clock slot on Friday night in the 800 seater theater and we’ve flown Ronny the agoraphobic musician over there. He is freaking out about it but he’s there and Krista and Kim, our two publicists from over there, who’ve come on board because they like the project and so on have kind of kidnapped him. They’re running around with him now and we’re going to do a phone in with Robert Pattinson who’s busy filming.
It is just incredibly important for us to keep people interested. So, here is our website (brings site up on screen). I thought you might want to quickly have a look you can watch the trailer on the homepage and there is facebook and so on and you can sign up to be kept in touch on email.
(JK talks about website, newsletters and downloadable press kit with stills from the film and explains you can you can hear some of the film’s music on the site as well)
JK: It great because when people sign up to the email you can find out where the film is looking popular and keep track of how many clicks go where, I won’t bore you all with it now but its very useful to keep track and build up momentum in the picture.
Sorry we’ve been talking way too much. Are there more questions?
Q: What did it cost? I know it’s a rough question so you don’t have to answer.
JK: No, no it’s fine. We are quite careful about what it cost because it is a double edge thing. Half of it is we are really proud that it didn’t cost much money and then the other half is you don’t want to say it cost nothing because then people think ‘oh I don’t need to pay for it.’
It cost us under half a million quid. It was shot on Super 16 and we did a digital intermediate grade and a full sound mix by Catherine Pollard who is over there and did great job at Pepper post and we did a 5.1 mix and M & E tracks. So yeah, well under a half a million quid but we only finished an HD Cam Sr tape and we’ve got it on the hard drive so we can go out on the digital screen network and you just saw a digibeta here with a stereo mix but we probably won’t go to 35 mm print because it just doesn’t make sense economically for us. But that is what it cost and we deferred fees and so on. We just wanted to make as good a film as possible with what we had.
The one thing to bear in mind is we spent a lot of time – Oliver and our DP was incredibly careful about lighting the sets and took a long time doing it but lit it well. However, it meant that Oliver really had to cut his cloth a lot before he got his shots because he had so much less time than we’d scheduled for him and at that time we didn’t think we could afford a digital intermediate, which is this way of grading your film afterwards.
When we got to the DI suite which we did down in Wales at Dragon DI, a really good place to do it, they said ‘I can’t believe the power we have here in relation to grading and lighting!’ Paul said if he’d known at the time we were going to be able to do a DI he would have spent half the amount of time lighting ’cause he would have just put that light there and that there and we know we’re gonna DI so we can boost that later or dim that or whatever. But we didn’t think we could afford it. Luckily when we needed a grade, a lot of post houses were quiet at the time, so I could go round and work one off the other off the other off the other until we got such a good quote that it was feasible for us to do it. But I wish we’d known when we were shooting that we were going to have a DI because we could’ve taken much less time lighting.
OI: Yeah, I don’t know if that necessarily would have changed it. Because you can’t shoot with the idea in mind ‘oh well it doesn’t work, I’ll sort it out later.’ You have to try and get it balanced. The best stuff wasn’t the stuff that we DI-ed to death to make it work, it was the stuff that looked pretty good in the first place. But, it does make a difference, it would make a difference. It did certainly help us out a lot.
The classic one it REALLY helped us out with was the shot in the bedroom. We’d had all sorts of problems, as you do on these types of shoots, and the location wasn’t right and the art department hadn’t done it right and we were near the end of the shoot and we were out of time and blah blah blah.
So we had this really small room with just… the wrong lamps and we just didn’t have the time to sort it out because of the way everything worked out. So these lamps just spilled light absolutely everywhere and the room was a small white room. So you can imagine there was just no way. The DP just sort of said ‘Well there’s nothing I can do, I can’t stop this light spreading everywhere.’ And then we went into the DI and it was like ‘Oh, hang on a minute you can just make it look, very artificially, like the lights some how only spilled out that much’ which made that scene slightly more feasible that Doctor Ellington would be hiding in the corner of the room or whatever, or at least made you not think about it so much.
JK: This is Joe Hastings who just walked in who is ‘Nice Guy Dave’ and also the composer on the film. (clapping)
Q: Music is such a strong element of the film and one of the main themes. How did you work together on the music?
JH: When we were writing the script , I mean, the film is sort of a bit of a bodge together of anecdotes and funny things and was changing all the time how it was going work. But one thing we had in mind right from the beginning was sort of how central music would be to it and the fact that he would write a piece of music and that piece of music would kind of get souped up and become the score of the film.
OI: So Joe and I sort of worked on the music from the beginning. When we were playing to investors, the music, we were saying this film is going to have this music in it. We had that planned. We did extensive demos and stuff. Then we wrote the script at the same time, kind of based around the music. So Joe was involved in the script writing and I was sort of involved in the music.
Q: So have you two known each other for quite awhile?
OI: Yeah, he’s been in my films since I was about 10 or something. So he’s been involved in a lot of the things I’ve done. We’ve done a few other projects together, but this is one of the first he’s done the music. We were in a band together when we were younger as well so we kind of knew about this stuff. He’d acted in lots of my films or been involved with them but this is the first time he got to do it as a professional composer.
Q: And how did you find the whole process?
JH: Well it was lengthy. I guess because it took a long time for us to fully realise the idea.
OI: Time equals money and when you have no money everything takes much longer. Every little decision, every little thing just takes so long to do. Apart from the shoot, which just gets shorter and shorter and shorter. There’s no time for the shoot but it takes massive time for everything else.
JH: We were also relying essentially on musicians who’d be willing to work pretty much just for some food. All the string players were given sandwiches… that we made. And that was it. So, it was kind of a struggle. It took longer because we weren’t using concert quality musicians but equally it meant that we could play with ideas and make the soundtrack distinctive. The idea was always that the mood of his music is developed and emphasized through all the incidental music.
OI: And again I think one of the things about the way technology is moving, with post now you can relax. I can do all the editing at home in my bedroom. To some extent Joe could record pretty good sounding demos of what he was thinking and even has software that could add strings enough to give us an idea of what we were doing well before. So everything could be planned well. In a way, when you did get the musicians they could do it more quickly or more efficiently as well.
JH: I think in terms of the themes within the music, it was always trying to create something distinctive. So melodies were important. Melodies we usually developed from vocal and then from there we’d just play around with different instruments – link two instruments together and use them together to sort out a melody.
JK: Any other questions before we finish up?
Q: I found the cast really quirky in the film and I was wondering because you had so little time, was there a long rehearsal process?
OI: Well it is interesting because with people like Joe or Mike who played Nikki, or Johnny who played Ronny… they basically have acted in my films for years and years and years before. So I kind of trained them up, well certainly Johnny, in the ‘Oliver Irving School of Drama,’ so they knew how to work with me.
When we were writing the script at the beginning we’d write it and then rehearse it and say ‘oh that works, that doesn’t work, oh that was good when you said that.’ We’d improvise it and then I’d go in and re-write it. That is why it had to be really open.
The problem with the film, I think, is that so many elements were flying around all the time that you could kind of miss the point here there and everywhere. But the good thing about the film, I hope, is that we held onto is the idea that sometimes you get those really great moments out of it. That is how we got the funny moments with the 3 guys acting, from doing that. From keeping everything really open and improvising on set and then writing it in and waiting for things to sort of come through.
So with those guys we rehearsed with the very first draft and then before the shoot we had a couple of weeks, which is fairly good I think for a feature film to have 2 weeks of full rehearsal, because again that’s free essentially. So, we were working with Rob and the other guys in rehearsal a lot. The person I didn’t get to rehearse with was the mother because I only met her half way through the shoot.
And of course Powell (Dr. Ellington), we wrote the part for him and I knew what he was like and how he would play it, he was very consistent that way. With all the other parts, Ronny is playing a version of himself so it is kind of him really just a bit souped up and the same with Nikki and to some extent the same with Rob who plays Art. He is playing the version of himself that no one gets to see. They see the cool him that is in Harry Potter but REALLY he is much more like Art then people probably realise.
So that’s how we got the performances. Basically I knew all the people and rehearsed with them a lot, it was the only way because otherwise… Well, when we were shooting the scene on the sofa and he says ‘I’ve got an erection.’ That scene, it was right at the end of the day, we had no time, we didn’t have any time to light it, we had 5 minutes to shoot it and we had a strong idea of how the scene would be. We had rehearsed it.
The guy playing Nikki was REALLY really ill, had a really bad flu so when we were doing lighting set ups he had coats over him and was just lying there asleep. We’d wake him up and be like ‘Ok we’re gonna shoot now’ and we’d go for it. Because everyone knew how to interact with each other and we’d played it so many times, we were able to get away with that. If we hadn’t the shoot, I think, would have been awful. It was right on the edge the whole time.
Q: Did you write the screenplay before you met and how did you meet?
OI: It was being written right up until the point we shot. The editing was a full re-write as well.
JK: We met in the draft which didn’t have the character of Nikki in it and I can’t remember any major other differences but there was certainly a good six months of us working through ideas and changing it substantially a little bit.
OI: Substantially a little bit?
JK: Yeah, it’s lawyer speak.
Q: So you got together because you liked each other rather than you reading the script first?
OI: What happened was… Justin was working for a big American sales company and he invited me to his office. We had talked about it a little bit and kept in touch a little bit. Then he invited me to his office to sort of talk about it. He had this massive desk and he’d hired some goons to sit next to him and I walked in and I was like ‘Oh dear!’ So I brought in Nikki and brought other people with me as like backup. I think we impressed him with how cool we were and he sort of impressed us with his big desk and everything. And I found out later it was sort of a general conference room that belonged to everyone in the building… but yeah we just carried on.
JK: We kept on meeting up every couple of months or so on until about 6 months later. We’d just come back from a meeting with a potential investor and we were at my house and Oliver said to me, ‘Well, Justin do you want to produce it?’ Because up until that time we’d been just thinking about it. I took about 10-20 seconds and just said, ‘Right, yeah, ok.’ and from that moment in, that was that.
OI: He sort of slowly started to produce it. I would ask him ‘Justin could you call up these people and do this and do that.’ and he say ‘Oh, I’ve already done this’ and gradually we kind of realised well, hang on a minute he might as well just…
JK: Admit it
OI: Yeah, with all this ringing investors and stuff, come to terms with it.
JK: Thank you all for coming its been really nice of you to spare your time for us. (clapping)
END TRANSCIPT
So, whilst quaffing beverages and chatting with the guys I asked Oliver, ‘Everyone living in London for any amount of time has felt like Ronny or Art, I certainly have anyway. I especially love the line in the film ‘London is perilous.’ Do you feel the story specifically applies to London? Or is it more universal? Was the lack of ‘London Landmarks’ intentional to make it universal?’
OI: London IS perilous! Yes. We wanted it to be universal and timeless. The lack of London landmarks was not just because there is no way we could have gotten the funds to shoot anywhere in central London, it was also because we wanted people to feel like it could happen in any city anywhere. There was also things like the specific lack of mobile phones in the film, to make sure that it was clear the story could take place anywhere at any time with a buffer of about 10 years.
Our other TNUK (Twilight News UK) contributor asked Oliver ‘where he came up with the idea for How To Be?’
OI: I just had so many peers who were going through something similar. When starting to write I was observing many of my peers all facing the dilemma of what to do with/ how to live their lives. They have so much they could do yet despite (or perhaps because of) the amount of choice open to them, they are paralised. And I read all these self-help books because they just really interested me.
The funny idea that they can give you the rulebook to life is so naive – but maybe it helps some people? I read one in particular called ‘They F*** You Up’ by Oliver James though (this book is actually seen in the film before Art finds Dr. Ellington’s book) which is all about the nature/nurture debate – not really a self-help. I read an awful lot of these books it just fascinated me, the part of my brain that loves to systemize – to work out the form of psychology. But the more you know the more you realise you don’t know – or in this case the more you deconstruct the more complicated it all becomes…
