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| CineVegas '06 Interview ('Full Grown Men' Director David Munro) |
by Erik Childress
The "Full Grown Men" Pitch: Wow, I thought I was done pitching! Ok. Full Grown Men is about a pathologically nostalgic guy named Alby Cutrera who although he’s 35 years old with a wife and kid really just wishes he could ride his Schwinn 5 speed around all day on a Cherry Slurpee high.
His wife and kid love him because he’s funny and creative but it’s not cute anymore and there’s rent to pay. She finally calls him a loser so he splits and goes back to his mom’s house where he looks up his best friend Elias from when he was a kid. Alby is thrilled to get back with his old pal and relive old times, but there’s a problem – Elias remembers a much less rose-tinted version of their childhood, basically one in which he was Alby’s performing monkey. But like always, Alby convinces Elias to take him along on a trip to Diggityland, a theme park in Northern Florida that was their favorite place as kids. Elias is going there to get an award for his work as a special ed teacher, a grown-up occupation, while Alby needs a ride up the coast to sell his precious action figures to a collectibles broker – a move he thinks will reinstate him in the good graces of his family and signal his transition into adulthood. Along the way, as the two friends’ history begins to implode, they meet a series of similarly damaged romantics – Alan Cumming plays a disgruntled ex-theme park employee bent on revenge, Amy Sedaris is a horny bartender working her way through clown college, Debbie Harry is a delusional former Weeki Wachee mermaid – who each poke a new hole in Alby’s fantasy bubble of being a kid forever. Ultimately it’s one of Elias’s students, an autistic kid named Rollie, who teaches Alby the value of seeing beyond himself and taking responsibility for his actions.
Back when you were a little kid, and you were asked that inevitable question, your answer would always be “When I grow up I want to be a …” what?
DAVID: I had no idea, honestly, which is why I can relate to Alby in more ways than I’d care to admit. Mine was really the first generation that was allowed to follow the beat of their own drum. You know? Permissive, I’m OK, You’re OK 1970s parenting – let him do his own thing. Let him express himself. So I spent most of my time with my wise guy friends inventing two-story bicycles, recording radio plays on a Radio Shack cassette player. My father was constantly on me about getting jobs, doing chores. It wasn’t until I fell in love with film in my late 20s that I learned the lessons of hard work and sacrifice. Before that it was “How can I fuck off today?” Looking back, though, if I had followed my dad’s wishes, I would have enrolled in ROTC and probably gone to law school. So maybe letting a kid daydream a little bit isn’t such a bad thing? I’m amazed and a little terrified at how regimented kids’ lives are nowadays. I understand parents are often both working and need to keep kids occupied and cared for, but you don’t have to prepare a kid for SAT exams when he’s barely out of kindergarten either.
Not including your backyard and your Dad’s Handycam, how did you get your real “start” in filmmaking?
DAVID: Advertising. I mean, my friends and I made films all the time growing up. My best friend’s dad was an electronics distributor, so we had full use of one of the earliest video cameras – a huge, pre-Beta, pre-VHS system from Akai that weighed about 500 lbs. and the camera was attached by this NASA-looking umbilical cord. It was awesome, though, and it was black-and-white, so even our most inane productions like “Celebrity Wrestling From Florida” had this arty, chiaroscuro quality. But I never imagined it could be a profession. It just didn’t fall into any category of “work” that my parents set out for me. Law and medicine were pretty much it. Even my brother who’s an architect was somewhat of a weirdo in my family. Out of college I was so clueless I bought one of those “What Color is My Parachute?” books and learned about advertising. The job description was perfect: are you a master of trivial knowledge? Good with a quip? Can you command short attention spans in 30 second of entertaining effluvia? Hey, that’s me! So I became a copywriter. Of course there are amazingly talented and thoughtful people in advertising, many of whom have gone on to become remarkable filmmakers. Though the higher end examples of this tend to be European, where storytelling and a license to be more artistic and less bite-and-smile prepare you for the transition. About three years into writing TV commercials and going on shoots I got the opportunity to direct some low budget public service announcements, and I was hooked. I quit my job, took out a bunch of loans I’m still paying back, and enrolled in film school.
How did you get your film started? How did you go from script to finished product?
DAVID: I learned to be a business person, which was the last thing I thought I’d ever be in my life. I made several successful short films in film school, which earned me enough credibility to call myself a filmmaker and not be laughed at. The downside of that, though, was that for awhile I bought into the myth that film directing was a meritocracy. I thought, well, I’ve made these award-winning shorts, and now I’ll just sit back and field offers. Which is a great way to never make another movie again. So after a few false starts in Hollywood and more years waiting for other producers to make my movies, I realized that I had to become a producer, too, if I was to get anything off the ground. Sundance does a great job with their writing and directing labs, but what they really need is a “How to get the fucking money” lab. That’s the number one skill you need as a filmmaker unless your last name happens to be Rockefeller. My wife and co-writer/co-producer, Xandra Castleton, and I started a company in San Francisco called Grottofilms, raised money to float two years of development (during which time we wrote Full Grown Men), and then incorporated Full Grown Men LLC with a third producing partner, Brian Benson. We raised our entire feature budget through private sources, from a group of very supportive, high-risk, mostly Bay Area investors, and we were off to the races. If you can’t talk to money people in their language – the language of risk/return – you’re just a dilettante, or at least that’s how you will be perceived.
When you were in pre-production, did you find yourself watching other great movies in preparation?
DAVID: Oh yes, absolutely. Our DP Frankie DeMarco and I watched movies together constantly in our rooms at the Holiday Inn in Hollywood, Florida. Because our main character Alby sees the world through a nostalgia filter, we wanted the film to feel like a slowly degrading fable, what Wim Wenders’ called “poetic dilapidation” in his photo studies for Paris, Texas, where a wished-for world is in growing conflict with the harsher reality of how things really are. So we watched a lot of Paris, Texas. And also My Own Private Idaho, Kusturica’s Time Of The Gypsies. It’s not about aping a style, but it does open up ways of approaching material. We also listened to a lot of music in what I call the melan-poppy vein, songs that have a twinkly, carefree innocence to them, but with an underlying sadness, where you can hear the halcyon dream slipping away. Brian Wilson is the master of that.
Our colleague, Nick Digilio at WGN Radio Chicago, has a list of what he calls "the five essential guy movies"; five movies which every guy must see or else turn in their man card. The films are "Diner", "Breaking Away", "Beautiful Girls", "Fandango" and "Hangin' with the Homeboys". I personally would add "The 40 Year-Old Virgin" on that list. Other than your own, what would be your own personal five films about the way men are.
DAVID: That’s a really good question. I’d say Goodfellas is my ultimate “guy movie.” Homies just sitting around kicking the shit, shooting people for fun on the side. Michael Curtiz’s The Adventures Of Robin Hood is a classic dudes-in-tights flick. Fellini’s I, Vitelloni. I like The Pope of Greenwich Village a lot. My friends and I still think Eric Roberts was the talented one. Diner’s great, too. I have one friend who constantly bugs me to make “our Diner” as he calls it. And I shouldn’t forget The Wanderers, Phil Kaufman’s unsung masterpiece. I don’t know if Full Grown Men is a “guy movie,” per se. Most guy movies show friends getting wasted, trying to get laid, usually with a fist fight or two mixed in. Alby and Elias get in a noogie war, but I’m not sure that counts. They grew apart before they got to “guy” age, so most of what they do is circa 5th grade. It’s something to shoot for, though. Maybe we can knock Fandango to 6th place on Nick’s list?
Name the three directors working today that you most admire.
DAVID: Gus Van Sant, David Lynch, and Jane Campion, with Harmony Korine a close fourth.
Of all the Muppets, which one do you most relate to?
DAVID: I like that stoner dude in the band. I don’t remember his name. He had shades and a Fu Manchu mustache. He was always baked. Grover was cool, too. He was a mensch.
How have things changed for you since your film started playing on the festival circuit? If this is your first acceptance into a film festival, describe what that's like and your thoughts about CineVegas. What are you looking forward to most during your CineVegas experience?
DAVID: CineVegas is our second festival screening. We premiered Full Grown Men at Tribeca last month, which was amazing. We learned a lot about our movie at the premiere. There’s the movie you think you made, and there’s the movie the audience walks away talking about, which is really what your movie is about. We felt pretty sure people would be amused, but we found out that our movie has a lot of heart, too. People were charmed by it. And that’s really cool. We were invited to CineVegas by the lead programmer Trevor Groth who knew my short films from Sundance. I like Trevor a lot, and it means a lot that he appreciates what I’m trying to do. There are so many festivals, it’s hard for them to “brand” themselves in any particular way. I think Trevor’s done a great job of positioning CineVegas as a festival for films that take chances. Indie films can be just as formulaic as Hollywood films, in their own way. So it’s good that CineVegas is going out on a limb with films that are blazing their own trail, so to speak.
During production did you ever find yourself thinking ahead to film festivals, paying customers, good & bad reviews, etc?
DAVID: I wish I’d had the time! I think as a director (and before that, as a writer) you are your own harshest critic through every phase of making a movie. You’re not really thinking about what other people might think so much as you are constantly evaluating how you’re feeling about what you’re doing. And that feeling changes a million times before it’s all over and done with.
Have you been turned down by other festivals? If so, which ones and what do you think could be improved with festivals in general.
DAVID: We sent an early cut of Full Grown Men to Sundance but it was pure folly. We didn’t finish the film until two days before our premiere at Tribeca, which was three months after it would have screened at Sundance, so there’s no way that was ever going to happen. Premiering at Tribeca definitely put us on a different path in terms of distribution. Sundance is a captive audience – the whole industry is there to buy movies and your film has the benefit of a built-in hype machine. So we’re on a more strategic path, where word-of-mouth, good reviews, and strong festival showings will to mean a lot. The upside is, we can use what we learned at Tribeca to more effectively market our film to buyers, most of whom have not seen our film yet. At Sundance, that’s basically your shot, and if you’re not ready for it, the whole industry has already sniffed your film and made up it’s mind. I think we’re going to sneak up on people. Audiences feel very passionate about our film, and some perceptive buyer is going to see that and have a nice little discovery on their hands. To CineVegas’s credit, I like that they don’t show a ton of films, so there’s more attention given to a smaller, hand-picked field. They also have a one-badge-gets-you-in-everywhere policy, so it’s less bureaucratic, no fussing with tickets which most filmmakers don’t have the time to choose from anyway.
Have you seen any independent films recently on the festival circuit, in theaters or on video that influenced you? Or anything that you would just like to give a shout-out to that audiences should be seeing (or given a chance to see?)
DAVID: I’ve been terrible about seeing new movies lately. I’ve been watching a lot of old stuff, and I miss seeing what’s out there. It just seems like if I’m not working then I’m passed out on a couch and it’s all I can do to lift a remote and pop in a DVD. I plan to see as many CineVegas films as I can when I’m not at the baccarat table.
If you could share one massive lesson that you learned while making this movie, what would it be?
DAVID: Shoot for the moon in terms of assembling talent. Just as it’s a challenge getting investors to take a movie seriously, it’s equally daunting to get top creative people to take a pay cut and work on your first feature. But they will do it if they like the script and they believe that you will run through walls to make a great film. That’s how we got Frankie, who shot Hedwig And The Angry Inch, Susan Block who was the production designer on Todd Solondz’s Welcome To The Dollhouse, and Alexis Scott who did wardrobe for Buffalo 66. And of course our amazing actors Alan Cumming, Amy Sedaris, and Debbie Harry, along with our two leads, Matt McGrath and Judah Friedlander. Nobody did it to get rich, that’s for sure. Everyone wants to do work they’re proud of, that they feel personally invested in. So when agencies send you reels of DP’s just out of film school, keep pushing. Get friends of friends of friends to send scripts out to people you want to meet. You’d be amazed how receptive people are to fresh material.
If a studio said ‘we love this, we love you, you can remake anything in our back catalogue for $40m’ – what film, if any, would you want to remake?
DAVID: Blake Edwards’ The Great Race, no doubt.
Two parter – name an actor you'd KILL to work with, and then name an actor in your own film that you really think is destined for great things.
DAVID: Ok, an actor I’d kill to work with... Kate Winslet. She’s modern and classical at the same time. I just love her work. As for our film, I think both Matt and Judah are going to break out before too long. They’ve both done terrific work in film but they are also throwbacks in the ‘70s sense, in that they are character actors with star qualities, like Al Pacino and Ned Beatty. Early test audiences who saw our film weren’t bowled over by Matt, but it’s because they saw him on a TV-sized computer screen in our edit room. They freaked out when they saw him on the big screen because his acting is so nuanced and intimate, he doesn’t mug and indicate which is more like TV acting. Judah is more like our main character Alby than Matt is in real life, he’s a stand up comedian who’s always cutting up, always janking on people. But as Elias he turns in a sensitive performance as a guy who took a lot of crap growing up but still loves his sometimes-tormenting friend. They are very different actors but both extremely talented. The sky’s the limit. If I can throw in a third actor, Benjamin Karpf, who plays Elias’s autistic student Rollie, is a natural. He’d never done anything on camera before. We found him in acting camp in South Florida. I don’t think there are a lot of kids, or adults for that matter, who can do what he can do.
At what point will you be able to say, "Yes! I've made it!"
DAVID: Paying rent would be nice. I can say I’ve made it when I get to make movies that I care about for a living.
Honestly, how important are film critics nowadays?
DAVID: In our case, critics are extremely important. I’m sure there are a lot of smart, discerning buyers out there, but we all want to be told we’re making a good decision. Critics can make or break a small film like ours that doesn’t have a huge star or a huge genre hook to distinguish it from the million other movies out there looking to get picked up. We got a great review from a guy named Bilge Ebiri at New York Magazine and it definitely got our sales reps more stoked about approaching buyers to sell our movie.
If a studio bought your film and then decided not to show it to critics, what would your reaction be?
DAVID: Do you mean not showing it to critics because they don’t think it would get good reviews? I’m not sure that would make much sense. Reviews are so important for any independent film hoping to cross over to larger audiences. I suppose if my film were Porky’s 4, I wouldn’t argue.
You’re contractually obligated to deliver an R-rated film to your producers. The MPAA says you have to delete a sex scene that’s absolutely integral to the film or you’re getting an NC-17. How do you handle it?
DAVID: Well, this is hypothetical, since indie films rarely receive an MPAA rating to begin with. Our DP Frank DeMarco recently shot John Cameron Mitchell’s new film Short Bus, which shows actors having graphic sex on camera. I’m sure they’d love the controversy. But if I were obligated? I don’t know, I’ve been poor for so long, I don’t feel threatened by making less money, since I make almost nothing to begin with. I guess it depends on how important the scene is to the movie, whether it’s integral to the story and the characters or whether it’s just a nice little scene. You have to pick your battles.
What’s your take on the whole “a film by DIRECTOR” issue? Do you feel it’s tacky, because hundreds (or at least dozens) of people collaborate to make a film – or do you think it’s cool, because ultimately the director is the final word on pretty much everything?
DAVID: My wife and co-writer may want to weigh in on this! We argued a lot about that but ultimately I took (and she graciously conceded to me) the possessory “film by” credit for Full Grown Men. it all depends. Some people feel that unless a filmmaker writes, directs, edits, and stars in a film, that a “film by” credit is bogus. I don’t feel that way. I’ve been in bands, too, and there are a lot of people who contribute to the making of a song: producers, mixers, other musicians. But at the end of the day it’s a song by Bono. It just depends on how encompassing the artist’s vision is. That sounds terribly pretentious, I know, but it’s true. In the case of Full Grown Men, we had brilliant contributions from everyone involved – actors, crew, producers. But I didn’t just hand them the script and say “Do what you want.” I told them how I wanted things in great detail. I had an entire wall plastered with photo art for production design to reference, I wrote countless character studies for the actors, I assembled a scratch soundtrack for the composer. Now that’s not to say that each of our collaborators didn’t plus my ideas a million-fold, because they did. But the overarching vision was mine. And when it came right down to it, it’s just how I felt in my heart. is this film the way it is because it sprang from me? The answer, for better or worse, was yes. It’s not surprising to me why the French Cahiers critics-turned-auteurs like Godard and Truffaut made a distinction between Hollywood paint-by-numbers movies and personal films that bore the distinctive stamp of directors like Hitchcock and John Ford. You can watch a Kubrick film half asleep and know who made it.
In closing, we ask you to convince the average movie-watcher to choose your film instead of the trillion other options they have. How do you do it?
DAVID: Well, everyone was a kid once, and everyone had to grow up at some point. So I think, man or woman, young or old, people can relate to a story about struggling with the demands of adulthood, and sometimes wishing things could be like they were when your number one job was hanging out with your best friend all day and just having fun. Another review we got said “this is what other ‘can’t grow up movies’ would like to be.” And I think that’s because we approached our subject with honesty and some depth. Alby’s situation, trying to escape the present and relive the past, is fraught with absurdity, so it’s funny, but it’s also universal. We all do it in one way or another, whether it’s rooting for a sports team we grew up with as kids, or collecting memorabilia, or listening to a song by Ambrosia that you first made out to in the backseat of a car, songs that are guilty pleasures but you know every word. Someone once called nostalgia a “guilt-free homecoming,” and what Alby finally learns is there’s a price to pay for living in the past. There is a price to pay for not appreciating the life you have now and the people in it. And besides that, there’s plenty of potty humor, and who doesn’t like that?
Full Grown Men, directed by David Munro, will screen at the 2006 CineVegas Film Festival on Monday, June 12 (3:30 PM) and Wednesday, June 14 (6:00 PM). Click HERE for film & festival information and Read Marc Kandel’s 4-star review of the film HERE
link directly to this feature at http://hollywoodbitchslap.com/feature.php?feature=1842
originally posted: 06/02/06 14:57:35
last updated: 06/24/06 23:09:10
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