the list of 9 for august 10, 2006:
NINE THINGS I WOULD DO DIFFERENTLY IF I COULD MAKE "CLAUSTROPHOBIA" AGAIN
There's no milestone in Claustrophobia's history being celebrated today, no anniversary.But I'd been meaning to write a more personal List of 9 for some time, and also wanted to sharesome regrets with other independent filmmakers who can hopefully learn something from my mistakes.Hindsight is 20/20, of course, and some things were beyond my control (like my distributorschanging the title to Serial Slayer), but if I could go back in time to May, 2002 and makesome different decisions, here's what I would do:
- Sign a different agreement with SAG. The Screen ActorsGuild keeps altering their filmmaker agreements, but the one I signed - the "Limited Exhibition"agreement - wound up biting me on the butt. Under this agreement, I would pay my cast a smallamount of money up front, and if I sold the film, then I'd have to pay them more. Of course Iwas hoping to sell the film, and I did sell the film, but if I signed the "Modified LowBudget" agreement instead, I would have paid a little more up front but would not have had to worry about deferred salaries, and in the end would have saved a few thousand dollars.
- Nix official rehearsal time. Some film actors loverehearsals. Others don't. You never can tell how your cast will feel about it. Althoughrehearsal time did help me realize that I had cast Melanie Lynskey and Sheeri Rappaport in thewrong roles and thus I switched their parts, it was overall a waste of money. (SAG considersrehearsal days to be work days, so even if you rehearse for just a couple of hours, you have topay your cast the same as if you had been filming them all day!) Next time, if I have actors whowant to rehearse, we're going to do it unofficially, voluntarily, off the SAG clock.
- Cast somebody else in Melanie Lynskey's role. Withoutgoing into great detail, Mel had some family issues that she had to deal with back home in NewZealand, but because I was freaking out about my leading lady vanishing just days before shootingmy film, I talked her into staying. She did, and wasn't at all happy about it. (My switching herpart with Sheeri's didn't help.) If I'd had the generosity to let her go to be with her family andthen cast another actress in her place, Mel and I might still be friends today, and I would havehad an actress who felt better about working on the picture. I will always regret not doing this.
- Hire a different stills photographer. The guy I had wasvery nice, but he showed up on bad days, didn't understand how to work a digital camera (almostall of his interior shots were too blurry to use), and wasted several rolls of film takingyearbook-style portraits of my cast and behind-the-scenes shots of me and my crew. I wound up withan embarrassingly small amount of usable stills for the picture's publicity. If I could go backin time, I definitely would have gotten somebody who knew how to shoot a proper still.
- Get a haircut! Speaking of stills, I looked just awful in most of them. Allow me to be vain for a second, but my hairstyle at the time was rather unattractive - think Andy Warhol meets Adolf Hitler. Just a month later, my friend Lainie gave me my current nice 'do. Wish I'd had it while we were filming, and while that stills guy was photographing me.
- Be more diligent about the insurance. I won't mince words:I believe the couple at whose house we shot the film were fleecing me and my production insurancecompany for as much money as possible. I was trying to be nice and didn't insist upon beingpresent as the claims adjuster came to the house to check out the veracity of their claims. Bigmistake! If I'd been there, I would have been able to point out that most of their "damages" wereiffy at best. I might still have had to pay my $1500 deductable (or at least some of it), but Icould have prevented them from scamming several thousand more from the insurance guys.
- Insist upon a "film look" for the video master. We shotthe film on PAL DV. My editor and I used some NTSC conversion software that gave it a nice filmlook. My domestic sales representatives felt that would not pass my stateside distributor'squality assurance standards. So I took the PAL master to an expensive lab to convert it to NTSC"correctly." The results: It looks like home video! I was just about to leave town for two monthsat the time, so I did nothing about this. Major error on my part. I should have insisted that thepicture look the way I wanted it to look before it was to be mass-marketed to all of NorthAmerica. Consumer response to its shot-on-video rawness has been violently negative.
- Hire different sales agents. I won't name names, but thisisn't Integration Entertainment (my domestic reps) or Inferno Film (my current foreign reps) I'mtalking about. The firm in question made some sales that perhaps other reps would not have beenable to do, but getting the money they owe me - a five-figure amount - has been like pulling teeth.I do hope this doesn't go into litigation, but as of this writing, that's still a possibility.
- Avoid producing! I honestly did look for a "real"producer, somebody who could own and nurture my film, but got no bites. So I produced it myself,only to discover that in the film world, most of the cast and crew consider the producer to be thebad guy and the director the good guy. Wearing both hats made me unpopular at times. I might nothave ever made this film if I kept waiting for a producer, but forging ahead on my own wasn't soswell either.
|