Film Courage: What’s your formula or process
for telling a good story?
Jay Silverman, photographer/director/producer
of OFF THE MENU: This is a great question.
I think storytelling…I am not a verbal person,
I am a visual person and constantly if you’re
Steven Spielberg you self-edit before you
even go on a stage, go on location and you
already know you want bing…bing…bing…bing.
If you’re really fortunate and I always
used to say this when I was doing commercials,
Ridley Scott builds a 180-foot wide set and
when the scene is over with you look at it
and they only use 12-feet of it.
He’s got that luxury and in independent
filmmaking you don’t have that luxury and
quite frankly you have to be intuitive enough
to recognize what your quest is and in storytelling
you know it is “Is that scene really necessary
where the little girl goes and knocks on the
door and says Hey, you want to come out and
play?”
Can we just cut to her already there already
there and then you start self-editing and
typically this is motivated by your desire
to keep the story intact but be inventive
and we had to do that all the time and I think
especially having…even though Jen [screenwriter
Jen Goldson] wrote the script, Joe Gamache
who is one of the producers and is also a
writer and he was able to on the fly help
us simply scenes that were sometimes over
complicated and I’m not talking about the
writing, I’m talking about having to shoot
it from six angles.
And it’s interesting because when you read
or hear interviews like you’re doing on
me, great filmmakers typically (especially
someone like Clint Eastwood) will actually
talk about the fact that ‘Why’d that scene
only come from one point of view?’
And you he goes “That’s all I needed.”
And even the actors complained.
They wanted “Don’t I get a close-up?”
And I thought to myself Clint Eastwood has
got a lot of hutzpah you know to be able to
wake up in the morning and just say “No!”
It’s so funny because I’m always fascinated
by reading about backstories about other filmmakers
and it takes a lot guts and a lot of self-confidence
to take the most dramatic scene in your movie…my
last film GIRL ON THE EDGE there’s a very
climactic, dramatic moment where Peter Coyote
is talking to Taylor Spreitler (the star of
the film) and it’s a very serious moment
and we just organically felt this isn’t
going to be covered in and it will be all
handheld and we’ll do it from a couple movies
on the fly but we will not do new setups,
we will just keep filming.
And that works for me and it worked for the
film because from an editorial standpoint
you’re not putting together five angles
emotions that are drifting.
You know, one moment you might feel it’s
great to talk about this and get close and
the next take you might not and I think actors
appreciate that giving them the freedom to
bring out storytelling in a way that is coming
from their hearts.
