The Honest Filmmaker
Are you about to leave Uni with a filmmaking degree? Or want to change careers and work in a creative industry? We want to give you the tools you need to enter the real world of production or freelancing. Honest and open career advice from people in the business.
We also talk to those in other creative industries to discuss their careers, the potential cross over with film production and practical tips for a successful and fulfilling career.
http://www.thehonestfilmmaker.co.uk
The Honest Filmmaker
Genre Rebels - Telling Stories that don't fit the Formula with Lorissa & C.J. Julianus
#genre #filmpodcast #filmmaking
This week on the podcast, I’m joined by filmmakers Lorrisa and C.J. Julianus, the husband-and-wife team behind the feature film The Misadventures of Mistress Maneater.
Lorrisa wrote the script and stars in the lead role, while C.J. directed the film. We dive into the challenges they faced during the release of this unique romantic comedy—a film that defies easy categorization and was at times misunderstood by audiences.
In this episode, we discuss the sales and distribution process, the difficulties of marketing a genre-bending movie, and how being “hard to define” impacted the film’s reach. Lorrisa also shares what it’s like to edit a film while critiquing her own performance as an actor, and C.J. offers valuable advice for new directors on working with actors, especially on a low-budget feature.
We also cover marketing and PR strategies, the realities of piracy in independent filmmaking, and practical tips for protecting your film from being pirated.
If you’re a filmmaker, storyteller, or film fan, this episode is packed with insights into the highs and hurdles of independent cinema. Don’t miss it!
Check out the re-release of Jim's first solo directing feature The Witches Hammer - out now on amazon
https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/video/detail/B0F235F4T8/ref=atv_dp_share_cu_r
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HONEST, OPEN ADVICE ABOUT YOUR FILMMAKING CAREER
Are you about to leave Uni with a filmmaking degree? Or want to change careers and work in a creative industry? We want to give you the tools you need to enter the real world of production or freelancing. Honest and open career advice from people in the business.
We also talk to those in other creative industries to discuss their careers, the potential cross over with film production and practical tips for a successful and fulfilling career.
Join the community: http://www.thehonestfilmmaker.co.uk
[Music] hi Jim here and you're listening to the honest filmmaker podcast career advice from people in the business this week I'm speaking to filmmakers Lissa and CJ julianis husband and wife team Lissa and CJ have released their feature film The Misadventures of mistress Manita Lissa wrote the script and stars in the lead role and CJ directed the film I talked to them about some of the challenges of releasing the film uh it's a very unique romantic comedy that has potentially been misconceived as other things when it's been released you'll find out about that when we have our chat um we also talked about sales and distribution process some of the challenges they faced because the film was hard to categorize uh we talked about how it was to actually shoot the movie Lissa talked about what it's like editing she edited the movie editing her own performance as an actor and also CJ gave me some advice for new directors on how to direct actors in a micro lowbudget feature film uh we also spoke about Market and PR and we spoke about piracy and some techniques to get versions of your film that are out there taken down enjoy so I tell you what let's start with Lissa um tell me your route into film making oh Jim I have adored films ever since I was a kid I'm sure most of us have otherwise we'd never go into the industry right but it's been part of my family tradition my grandmother grew up in the depression and what she loved more than anything was getting a coin or two from her Grandpa or sorry from her father my great-grandfather just to be able to go see the movies her one little Indulgence and uh growing up every night my mom would be putting on a movie and we'd have all the VHS tapes and uh I just thought that's how everybody lived I thought everybody lived to watch movies in the evening um so it was a dream of mine to be able to write them uh from a very young age I was submitting scripts and uh getting odd phone calls from production companies going why do you have a re a parental release submitted with your script I'm like well I'm trying to do this the right way I'm only 13 and you're like you're what so I ended up uh majoring in screenwriting I went to Columbia College Chicago I'm born and raised in the Chicago area and uh through very circuitous route um always tried to stay in the film industry as much as possible whether it was as a performer um behind the scenes doing various things Bo okay what what about you CJ well well I I don't even know where to start with my um so when I was uh when I was young my my mom and dad they started a theater company at our church to raise funds they do a yearly play and uh if they needed a juvenile delinquent I got tpcast love it so that started that then I went into the military and I was in the service for a long time and I left all that behind but while I was in in the service I was actually discovered by a talent agent and uh I was in the Navy at the time and I was stationed in Miami Florida of all places and PanAm Airlines was looking for a blond-haired blue-eyed boy Nextdoor looking guy everybody in Miami is from Cuba so you it was not they were not blonde hair and blue eyes so I ended up um getting cast in my very first uh commercial which was great and um then many years later I moved back to Chicago and everything culminated with me starting a theater company that did very very well that's where I met Lissa um and I was directing and producing Live Theater which making movies is a natural extension of that although doing theater is a lot more satisfying and a lot less expensive yeah lovely lovely and then uh the film you've got out uh the one that I've recently watched the Misadventures of mistress Manita you said it right the first time because I've got it I've got it written down I didn't want to mess it off I've got it written down in front of me um so Lissa give me the what's the pitch for that give me the synopsis oh Lord I've never been good at the elevator pitch for that one there's not an elevator pitch for this film cuz it's so dense right well it's a romantic comedy unlike anything you've seen so two very unlikely characters a art historian who has to make ends meet as a dominatrix um is has an offer of hey this dangerous debt that you have to pay off in 30 days or else hey all you need is some naughty photos with this gentleman in this small town well this gentleman turns out to be an Episcopal priest who wants absolutely nothing to do with her and but he also um uh raises money for his church by being an MMA fighter at night so um secrets are revealed and there's a a Rena not a Renaissance A baroque painting at the center of a mystery um I'm actually my inspiration was a season 2 episode one of the BBC show Sherlock interesting I'll have to revisit that one um because what struck me about it was when CJ sent sent it through to me I saw the picture I was like I know what this is I know exactly what this is because I saw the front poster and I was like this is going to be some sort of slightly titillating do you know what I mean it's going to be a certain type of movie but it's not at all fact that it's romantic comedy surprised me and it's not graphic or offensive at all so in fact it's quite gentle was that uh decision to write that on purpose did you did you have any thoughts about where it was going to go when it was finished or did it just kind of evolve that way I'd say that it was definitely one of the most challenging aspects of the marketing was realizing what expectations were and trying to find the right tone of marketing to fit that because there aren't a lot of edgy romcoms or I find that romcoms that dip into other genres um but also like you said stay very clean and PG-13 and that's why I was inspired by a lot of the um you know PBS uh BBC uh television shows that I do see and those Productions because it's like oh we mean we can be this daring we can actually bring this to you know a public broadcasting station bring it to the edge but that go all the way over and what's interesting is Lissa when Lissa first started this whole this whole process up it started off as a script that was very it was like a one acre Pond that was one one foot deep it wasn't fluffy it was yeah like most romcoms are yeah so yeah most romcoms are very predictable I mean you think romcom you think Hallmark and they're all the same basically the same kind of story and uh then she turned it into a novel at the suggestion of another filmmaker friend of ours who thought you know if this was a novel series you might get have a better chance of getting funding and the novel was naughty um but then after she wrote the novel and really fleshed out the character she went back to the script and she made the script that we made the movie from and so as a theater producer and director whenever I produce theater I'm reading probably a couple dozen scripts to figure out what I want to do and if it's worth spending my time to do it well when I read Lissa's script I had in my mind this is brilliant my Lissa is brilliant the script was brilliant it was funny I laughed out loud with it when I when I read it and I got immediately in my mind that we're making this movie and uh because the script was that good you know sometimes as a and you know this Jim you're you make movies and things sometimes when you read a script it grabs you sometimes you immediately see in your head how shots are going to look the way it's going to progress right other scripts you read them and you're like you feel nothing but with Lissa's script I felt it so uh a few months later I worked as assistant director on a webisode series and that's where I started working with our Director of Photography and in the course of doing that work I was like I can work with this guy I can work with this guy and I told him I saidhe I've got this script I really want to turn it into a movie would you take a look at it he's like yeah yeah yeah I I'll take a look at it can't I can't commit to it I don't know when I'm going to do it but so that weekend he calls me up he goes I started reading it and I couldn't put it down I finished it I finished it reading it in one sitting yes I will help you make this movie and um so then Lissa and I we had to set about deciding how we're gonna how we're going to pay for it because making movies is expensive and making good movies making good movies yeah yeah there's definitely a race to the bottom when it comes to budgets and quality these days because it's so incredibly difficult and daunting to make your mud your budget back these days even if your budget isn't that big so what Lissa and I did is we flipped a house and right okay yeah so we took the profits from we worked on the flip that house for goly six months but when we got the money in it was a substantial amount of money and I came home and I said Lissa um we're making your movie and Liss Lissa's reaction was what what we're what what so uh I told her I said you know what honey this is a great script and I don't want to leave it up to somebody else to make and to cut it up and to you know to to do something something with it that we don't want we want to follow our own artistic Vision with this and we want to use it as a vehicle to hopefully open doors for Lissa and her Talent um and per perhaps even our company binary star pictures to do more films and that was the idea going into it so um we spent nine months on pre-production WE shot for 28 days it was a 28 day shoot schedule and then we had about another eight months of post before we had it formal release it's it's a long expensive time consuming process as you well know so yeah and it's not easy um and I've had this conversation before because you get to that end point you've shot it all you put it together first time you look at it you're like oh my god what have I what is this it doesn't make any sense then you mold it and you shape it and you spend all that time on it until you finally get it out there so did you find um the fact that it was kind of on the edge you know you didn't cross that line did that make it do you think that opened up more sales opportunities and more audiences the opp the oppos really oh that's interesting frustrated me um because I'm one of those people that I I like the edge you know I like oh is it we can't fully classify it and and so it's unpredictable because oh there's a little bit of this going on there's a little bit of that every genre as you know has a very predictable pattern but when you start to combine them I feel like okay not only is that a greater respons ability on the Storyteller and the filmmaker to tie up each of those aspects of the story in a satisfying manner in a well-crafted manner because every genre has its own demands but it also makes it less predictable overall because you have the elements of different genres saying no no no you can go this way no you could go this way there could be a surprise yeah and there's there's another aspect to this that we found out so um luris and I when we watch movies and we know exactly where the movie is going to go from from the start we don't like that you know we don't like predictable movies where it's like pretty obvious what it's going to be and we really endeavored to make this be completely unique but the the issue with that is and we discover this doing theater um when you're doing theater often times the hardest cell is the newer scripts that people don't know anything about they don't know where it's going to go so for instance um I I directed many many plays that were uh new or more obscure or certainly more edgy um one of which was a play called the last days of Judas thear it was written by uh New York playright stepen adley gearus who actually is a pretty pretty busy working actor here in the states as well and uh getting getting that sold to audiences to where they would come and see it it was a daunting task now if I had done the Odd Couple I would have been having soldout shows every time but but that is precisely the the D kind of like the dichotomy that we have as producers you you want to make your budget back or you want to be able to say you you're able to make money with your project but at the same time it just seems like um if you're if you're looking for a big audience it's it seems like it needs to be a little bit more predictable and not on the edge and that is what it seems that they want what we learned from our film agent was that the the job that you have in marketing is to set and then fulfill expectations in your audience and that was the challenge that we faced because like you said um people see it or the the title I found that when I was pitching it as a novel to um at at writers conferences and to agents um you know I you'd give the pitch i' gave a much better pitch then believe me I practi and you know you'd have that person be like that's hilarious I want to see that or I want to read that that's exactly what I want because they understood what it was trying to do and that was you know something they hadn't seen and what something they'd been looking for but by and large you would get the okay so it's really naughty no oh so it's super clean and safe and graml like it well maybe not so it seemed that when it came to marketing that was the biggest challenge is trying to uh push the edges of the predictable yeah people want it it seemed that in the marketing world people really want to be able to see a little thumbnail and know exactly what it is and be able to get exactly what they're expecting so that was our biggest challenge that we faced well one of the things we that we did find and I'm sorry to interrupt I'm sorry yeah go ahead Lissa found especially when pitching to agents was like okay uh I can pitch or I can pitch a novel with a Dominatrix and I can pitch a novel with a a mixed martial arts fighting priest but I cannot pitch a script that has the dominatrix and a Prest you know so um to and to us it was just like no what we're trying to do is we're trying to take ra romcoms have a formula like Lissa said movies have set set tropes that a lot of times you have to fulfill but the neat thing with romcoms is they have to meet at the beginning it's either a meat cute or a meat ugly like in our movie it's a meat ugly and then at the end of the movie they have to wind up together those are the two things that you have to accomplish in a romcom but anything can happen in between so that's why the idea of having really desperate characters appeal to us because we've never seen those characters before and there's a lot more at stake and as you know as a filmmaker the more you can raise the stakes the uh the the high the the harder your protagonists have to fight to achieve their goals and the more your audience is going to be going how can they do it how is it even possible so a lot of round coms you know the the big the big high state is oh is the wedding going to happen and our movie is is she going to get killed killed we're not paying back a debt to her former boyfriend Russian mobster but we do feel fortunate that um even though it has been harder for us to get you know this huge uh commercial audience that the people who have found it and discovered it so many people are very passionate about it so that in many ways has been the the payment so to speak yeah so the monetary pay and you know this Jim you know what's happening with streaming and uh you know when when we first were considering making this movie Amazon was paying like a dime or something like that per per view or something like that then it went down to a nickel then it went down to two and a half cents now when you watch my movie on Prime you watch the whole movie we get paid one penny you know and from that one penny I pay my distributor 20% you know so I make I don't even make a penny if you watch my whole movie and that's the direction that the independent movie business has gone into as you know what all of the uh the BFI reports that have been coming out over the last couple years in Britain yeah it's just it's an industry that that needs to be respected and supported and artists uh like us and you know we watched your movie The what was the the the apocalypse box apocalypse box it was fantastic you did you did a wonderful job on and I have to tell you I do not like horror movies and I was like this was good this me watching you you guys can come on again if you're GNA it was so well made and I was like wow you did a lot with uh you know limited locations and you know because I had way too many locations but we understand the challenge of that but the real challenge is these days is that yes we're passionate filmmakers we're passionate artists we we earn a a lot of our living in the Arts doing live entertainment and live type stuff that that pays us we make more in one afternoon doing that than we do in an entire quarter of getting a penny at a time it's supply and demand yeah right now in the audience but what were you gonna say Jim I was gonna say I wonder you're talking about um it being a project that was hard to define or maybe hard for the audience to understand but then part of me wonders whether it's the audience or the layer of sales and Distributors who don't AR can't categorize it very easily maybe and that the obviously the challenge is always going to be you reaching the audience but a lot of those um I'd say middle middle level sales agents and Distributors they sort of want something a bit cookie cutter that they can just Chuck into different categories and know they don't have to work hard to sell it um I guess that brought me onto the question of PR marketing how did you approach that with the film well that's well you know as far as things that we wish knew uh we wish that we knew that these days it's probably more important to have twice the marketing budget as the production budget that you have because you're you're screaming into the void there's so many films out there how do you set Yours apart um and when we were speaking to uh interested Distributors um you it's just like you said uh we were told oh yeah we do great with dominatrix movies and it's like no no it's not a dominatrix movie she doesn't want to be a dominatrix then we had another distri distributor say oh you guys made a neat little horror movie it's not a horror movie that's when I decided okay I have to redesign the poster and take out the black background it has to be a light background you know I learned I wanted to break free from those tropes but I realized no they actually serve you um the design and and art Direction tropes um they serve you as a filmmaker because this font and these colors tell people what genre you are it's become especially in romantic in romantic comedies and in so many genres that's the only way for them to immed imately know what it is when they're scrolling through so well was like okay I now I have to follow the rules butling titling was tough so I think one of my biggest uh piece of advice would be start with a really really really great title yeah so that's interesting you brought up title so um we went back and forth back and forth we we worked on that title probably for three four years we always came back to it we're like there's nothing really that's better it it was hard to come up with a title that kind of encapsulated what we were what we were trying to accomplish but also was compelling but was you know we so uh our film agent um our film agent is a guy named Jeff Dow and Jeff Dow is an interesting guy um he is the person who the dude in the big Labowski was based on he's an actual real person and he was our film and he told us he said I don't like your I love your movie I don't like your title whereas his partner loved our title his partner loved our title and man he said you need to come up with a new title so what I did because Lissa and I we went through this for three years um I put out to all of my circle of of of friends on Facebook okay you've seen my movie we're considering retitling please let us know what you think a good title for this would be and if we pick it we'll buy you the best steak dinner you ever had in your life so we got all these suggestions back and they were all terrible the best one was the best one was Beauty and the priest which of course then people think sounds like a poor movie and that was a challenge we faced that we didn't think of like when I heard of Misadventures of mr's Maneater to me um having someone who you know likes romance novels I thought oh that sounds cute and fun and a little cheeky um but it to other people it's like oh that sounds like a porn title and it never even occurred to us that that's what people now here's another thing that we brought up we bought we brought up the word porn so when we released Star movie this is also something that we did not know so this is really important for aspiring filmmakers we the the week our film was released it was hacked by 800 internet hacker pirate companies did you have the same issue with yours Jim we we had a well as soon as it I'm trying to think which platform it was but we noticed immediately it popped up it was like the next day it just popped up and it's so frustrating especially when it's near your initial release date and you're really excited about getting out there and sharing it and then you see this these sites appear it's just heartbreaking it was it was not just heartbreaking it was absolutely maddening because I viewed them at that time we were doing uh we were doing uh Amazon uh where you had to pay-per-view it was a pay-per-view type thing and we were selling our movie for like 299 or $4.99 something really small we just felt like you know what for $4.99 that's a lot less than going to the movie theater let's price it there well we viewed that these 800 companies were stealing money from our pockets so uh I had uh I had a luckily I had a few experienced filmmaker mentors and one of my mentors um was from Hollywood he was a film critic for Reuters many many years film critic for Reuters and he had a film out um called crazy [ __ ] and derivative title right and uh so it did well so he decided Well I'm going to make a sequel guess what that was called crazy [ __ ] to maybe yes come for I think and uh but it was pirated like right away and so he told me about a takedown service and uh that he used called muso muso and that's actually based in Great Britain are you familiar with them I'm not no actually I'll have to look into that Musa so m so muso and they did a wonderful job so I signed a one-year contract for them to be a takedown service but I had a lot of skin in that game because what I had to do is I had to go and Google every my my film title and every company that was showing my film for free I had to report it to muso and then they would take care of it from there so I would say for the first few months every week I was spend probably 5 six hours just scouring the internet for pirate sites and reporting to them to muso and unfortunately um because of the title and the imagery a lot of the the places they were pirated were on porn sites which then ended up disappointing all the visitors to those porn sites ROM comedy we got hammered so we got terrible reviews saying there's no nudity there's no sex sces how dare they exactly so like what you were facing Jim with your film where you're getting you're getting this influx of really like where did these bad reviews come from I mean did I make Citizen Cane no but did I make a one star film no but the thing was is like the thing that maddened me the most when I was doing the takedowns is that one of the sites I went to was a it was a pirated porn site it was either Chinese or Japanese and my trailer for my film was right next to another trailer for a porn film where the girl was being really defiled and I was so angry after a year of of my contract with muso over 2,000 pirate sites were taken down by them and there were some sites that we couldn't because they didn't abide by US law places like Iran and where they've got a lot of that pirating going on so um I viewed it as these people are stealing my content and taking credit for it I I can't let that happen um and that's why that's why I contracted with them they were expensive too but I also learned a lot as a writer and an editor it's like wow you know I didn't anticipate this being an issue if I did a film in the future it would either be an r or a PG not a pg3 nothing in between make it very clear yeah yeah yeah that's a tough that is a tough one so I've not used M muso uh all I've been able to do is uh get things delisted off of uh Google so filling in a form getting sites delisted because I guess I figured at the time um the unfortunately these sites uh are going to they're always going to be there so that all you can do really is to get them taken off of search so your average person who searches won't uh a pirate one won't pop up it'll be the actual one but getting it on porn sites that's a different together and that's where a lot of the bad reviews came from like Lissa said they were expecting you know they were expecting flesh they were expecting action like they were expecting porn action and you know they just got they just gave us one star reviews saying that you know we misrepresented or whatever and we didn't because we didn't ever posted it to a porn yeah it's the the the one star review thing is is a bit of a epidemic at the moment and I think it's I guess the message I would say to people is if you watch an independent film review it even if you don't review it you just give it a star rating what you actually thought of it it really does help the movie for that little action has a big effect on it um so I'm making the Assumption here are you guys married or what's your oh yes oh yeah for 20 years yeah I thought about check I didn't want to assume so I so I um my wife is my producing partner um obviously and I I often ask people because you do find a lot of couples in the industry how does it work for you guys and does it always work do are there any uh onset arguments that you bring home you know how do you deal with it well I actually have never felt closer to CJ than when we were working on this movie because it was truly our baby it was truly our creation together and the fact that you know day in and day out we were both focused on this both working toward a common goal I I I mean I would have dreams at night of us being on journey together side by side and I always felt safer and more secure and it was much more fun knowing I had CJ at my side yeah we you know I think we had one little dust up one night where you know Lissa was very concerned it was a car scene was the car scene um where he jumps through the window and they drive off I'm sure you remember that and uh I we had we had we had a little misunderstanding but at the end of the night it was fun it just you know you know one sentence one sentence then I okay fine but you know the thing is is like Lissa is my best friend that I've ever had we've been together for 20 years we've never really had a fight we disagree on things um but you know I think when you have a really great relationship with somebody that really colors everything you do anyway you know and fortunately there was really no ego between us in creating this it was just hard hard work yeah we were always the first one doing things and we're always the last person doing nobody worked harder than us did so many different things so that that got very stressful but we also were able to take over the positions that were best suited to us I'm much more introverted and so um when it came to hey if I I got a the hardest thing I think I did in pre-production was building the schedule which as you know can be for us at least it was very difficult with I don't know 40 locations 40 speak BR people from California you know um yeah and uh but yeah so many locations so many speaking RS you know having to rent or a Tesla for certain scenes and that was only because Tes Nicolo Tesla was Serbian okay our audience now that we know more about Elon we're like we probably wouldn't used a few things I would have changed about the writing knowing what I know now um but um CJ took care of so much of the calling people up and hey let me talk to you about what we're doing can we shoot at your location I would have found that a lot more stressful than just me in a computer nobody around so I I and and for me I I absolutely loved editing more than anything else so I could be in front of my computer for 12 hours straight doing the minutia of oh no this music is one frame off from where I need it whereas that would have driven CJ nuts it would have yeah because so we we we have a very yinyang thing so her strengths are my weaknesses and vice versa so we really pick each other up that way and I'm sure you that you're the same way with your wife you know so um but yeah when 20 people all have I always say like directing a large group of people is like driving a bus full of first graders and they all have to pee so on said you know I was so glad CJ was the director that everyone could come to you with what about this and oh I need that BL that would have been a lot too much for me when when I the only night that I actually almost got close to chewing somebody out which I never did I I want people to come to my sets and feel comfortable and and welcome and whatever but um the big fight scene rough night at the end of our movie uh we scheduled the fight scene to be the very last day of shooting because if there was an injury to our main characters and we had shot that up front we could have lost our whole shooting schedule so we decided to do all of the fight scenes at the very very end and we shot the very we had like 80 extras It was 95 degrees no air conditioning very dust air it was so you know trying to I'm trying to get all of these fight scenes done in one day when that was the only day we had all of our ex and we had a skeleton crew very very few people it was it was really hard and I had an extra coming up to me telling me how I should shoot these fight scenes when we'd rehears them you know random for three weeks beforehand so we could shoot them efficiently and this random extra is coming up to me telling me Oh you really ought to do this and I I looked at him like if you don't get away from right you know so they says the extras don't approach the director don't do it so but uh it was um and what well you know what I loved was that since I we didn't have a scripty and I kind of ended up being the scripty because I was going to edit it so I had created the shot list and um understood what I absolutely needed as the editor for coverage and of course my big elaborate shot list goes completely out the window as you might have experienced some nights too when you're just raising against the clock and so cj' be coming to me and going okay we got this we got this what else do we need and I was so glad that you did that I always did that because there may have been a pickup shot that we needed to get in there to segue from one seene to the next having the editor as your lead actor and as your writer really kind of made things better for us because I was able to say okay we got my coverage we got his coverage we still need the wide shot or you know we got the wide shot we got mine I need his cover otherwise I cannot cut this together and and I I knew as we were shooting it oh we didn't get that shot I were going to have to come back for it but I also knew it was only me in the shot no audio was needed we able to do some pickups that were just me no no sound people were needed you know me the makeup artist the shooter and that was it um so that was helpful too was we only had one day of pickups yeah we we shot so efficiently and so well that after I cut together just a couple there was just a couple of like B shots transitory shots that we had to go get and it worked out really really well yeah it's nice I guess from my from our side it's so nice having somebody else who knows the film inside out like you yes and like you say can pick up and go oh we haven't done this or they're wearing the wrong hat in this sequence or something ridiculous yes yeah having that is having that person there who knows it well as you and to your other point something I always say to students because I've had that very situation where you get somebody you know I've had someone trying to offer a professional soundman advice on how to hold his boom that kind of and it can make your skin crawl a little bit and it is for mainly to students you've really got to read the room and remember if you're if you're new on a set you're kind of the green person you need to sort of keep quiet and learn rather than uh trying to put yourself out there too much um so uh what was going to ask you was acting and directing so I'll take them one by one I'll start with you on this one CJ so if you're about to go into your first debut feature film what is the most important things you should know uh about directing actors oh what gosh that is such an all-encompassing question um so when I I cut my teeth as a theater director and um my theater Productions always were very high quality we were actually my theater company was actually named by Money Magazine uh as one of the reasons the town we lived in was so great so really really proud of that but when I was directing I always told my actors if you trust me you will be your best but you need to trust me I am the Sur good audience and I am here to make a story the best it can be and if you're going to be on the screen or you're going to be on the stage in front of people I will make you the very best that you can be if you will listen to me and take my direction a lot of actors are egotistical and they think they know better or they think that they have a better way or whatever and I try to establish right away that no I'm on your side and I am not going to talk just to hear myself speak if I see something that needs to be done or something needs to be worked on we're going to work on it and we're going to get it right before we move on and when you can get those actors on board with that philosophy they will walk through a wall for you the other thing is in your casting is that you really have to be cognizant of you're going to be working with these people for the long term you've got to like them and they have to like you and they have to be team players you know so you if you let one rotten apple into the whole cast it's going to ruin everybody's attitude and I Lissa and I both both we did our best to create to create an atmosphere on set where people felt important and that they were part of something bigger than themselves and I pledged to everybody when we started that Lissa and I we had the skills to do it it was our first feature film but it was not our first production we know what needs to be done and if they trust us we're going to we're going to make sure that what the end product is going to be is something that they can be really proud of and that that made that made a huge difference trust is very important yeah so uh the other thing is is we we we had a budget where we paid our actors a lot of independent films actors are the last ones to get paid and uh we we had a we didn't have a lot of money but we had enough money I wish I could have added to zero behind everybody's paycheck frankly but um just the mere fact that we were offering uh paychecks and we were even offering stiens to some of our people you know that weren't they weren't necessarily sag actors but they were busy indep independent film actors we found ways to put money in their pocket because even that little bit makes people feel like they're uh their talent is respected or their time is respected so uh that that also can go a long way in in helping uh get cooperation from the people that are involved with you you have anything you add no okay so then uh so then I was let's turn that on its head so acting lead role feature film if you're talking to actors what what any advice for them well um my co-star Shannon Brown gave me a wonderful piece of advice um he said halfway through shoot you are going to have a breakdown nice and sure enough on day 12 I can recall I think it was in the bathroom and Craig was taking a shower and I just you know because it just got you know being the producer and the writer and the you know and being doing all the things I had just gotten too much to me and I was like this is what Shannon was talking about I'm not alone every day I set it felt like we were s sopus pushing the boulder up the hill so that was a big help to realize oh I you know this is the way it's supposed to be this is hard Um this can be exhausting and you know once I realized I was like oh okay I I'm better now I you know this is not a a foreign feeling um I mean it's always a a struggle I think as an actor shooting out of sequence and uh especially if you're used to theater where you have you know whatever is music everything's linear yeah and everything is going on around you um as part of the emotional flow but instead you have to create the emotional flow because of you know you you you're trying to cry you know have a a crying emotional scene and you can hear the chatter of various people on the they're shooting a movie over there while you're trying to have this emotional moment um the the advice I'd give to actors is I felt that uh one of the one of the things I learned the most was in the editing process even simple things like you cannot blink and the reason you don't blink is just not just connection but because the editor cannot cut on a blink and that is never told to people when they're being trained as an actor why you you don't blink you know all the technical reasons I think every actor at a certain point needs to edit themselves and edit their own performances to understand um how to give the best performance in the future and what the director and the editor are actually seeing um beats were very important to me studying the script ahead of time understanding the flow the beginning middle and the end of each scene emotionally the journey you go you would go on um also writing out the backstory I was very fortunate that I knew this story and this line inside or in these lines inside now yeah you read the script yeah it had been with me for five years and I had written the a novel about it but to actors who don't don't have that you know it's it's a stranger's words I have found that for me personally what helps me the most to instinctively have that those that inner journey and that inner life and those thoughts going on while I'm saying the words having all the subtexts that you need is writing out the entire backstory of the character yeah even if you're guessing in the case of auditions it's just it gives you extra your words extra something more than just the surface level and it gives you a sense of connection and ownership and authorship so I personally find that to be very important yeah Matthew MCC when he did True Crime for HBO he did a 200 Page Bible of his character 200 pages of just going through and and and doing that kind of thing so yeah that is really really important to to understand to to basically put down a foundation of what your character is rooted in and that way you can pull emotions from it and memorization uh was we had an issue with a couple actors you know who weren't fully memorized which definitely slowed down production you got to show up on set with the lines M and these were people who you know were in only had did not weren't necessarily carrying the film um but also for auditions I took note of the people who when they had to say different uh foreign cities foreign words they looked up the pronunciation that meant a lot to me it's like okay they went that little extra just for that bit of authenticity those Details Matter especially to the person who penned the words and also so you you are authentic in the character so I mean it seems so basic to those of us who are behind the camera but um I you know I think we all need to be reminded of those things as the actors because they don't always have a sense of what's going on behind the camera yeah and I'm sure as you said if you're sat there editing it those beats within a performance like you say they're so important um I mean I've worked with kin who was my lead uh she played the prime minister's wife in The Apocalypse box she was also in you might yeah amazing she' done years of soap acting so she knows where the camera is you know you can cut on a move it'll be the same every single time it'll be just as good every time she does it but she'll be in the same position same ey line knows where the camera is it's like a magic trick when you're watching it she just oh thank God when I get to the edit there going on with her performance I felt that way about all of your performers and actors and how how extremely skilled they were and I believed all of them I was there with them and it really kept me engaged I feel that that's where a lot of Indie filmmakers um miss the Mark is they concentrate so much on their production quality so much on all these aspects that are completely time consuming but very often they don't necessarily have the High Caliber actors that they need and I I find personally watching the film I I'm a little disconnected right away if I can tell that this actor is not necessarily a skilled actor or the best actor for that role and so it doesn't matter if the sound is incredible and the music is great and the shots and the lighting it's a movie Everything has to be right because it's forever that's it you know so when we did theater theater's great because everything's in the moment even mistakes that's what the audience comes for you know and and seeing the actors pick it up and and do that you know it's part of the charm of of live theater is you just don't know what to expect but with movies movies are forever and any mistake that you make is going to be able to be you know paused and reviewed and looked at and people are going to pick it apart and so yeah we got to make everything absolutely correct yeah and and also as an actor you don't have any control over the editing um a good editor can make a not so great performance look a lot better or it can make a great performance look pretty bad as you know and uh so I think that's another reason why it's it would be it's a wonderful exercise for an attribute to be able to cut their own performance at some point to have that additional Le sorry additional layer of authorship so they can understand the process and what will be in their control and what will not be in their control right I hope you enjoyed that episode if you'd like to hear from more industry professionals how they got into the business and how you can do the same or you just want to listen to some cool stories from movie sets around the world then please do subscribe to the honest filmmaker podcast [Music]
