[Note: Reeler editor S.T. VanAirsdale is taking the week off, but the blog is in the good hands of trusted friends and colleagues; click here for other entries in the series. Andrew Wagner wrote, directed and shot The Talent Given Us, VanAirsdale’s favorite film of 2005. Here, he sends a dispatch from the editing room of his latest film, the New York-set Starting Out in the Evening.]
The great seduction of shooting in New York City is to assume your film inherits the intensity of the city simply by virtue of taking place within it. It’s a concern that was heightened for me because I grew up in New York and feel it on a cellular level. So I was especially motivated to approach the city/character dynamic from the inside-out and was devoted above all else to exploring the inner lives of the characters and the relationships between the characters. In this sense, the real turf of the film is the field of emotional necessity. To reflect this, in shooting the city itself, we worked with the idea of wide avenues that produce a constant rev that is equivalent to a kind of silence because it is within the shadow of stillness that the true self resides.
There is a tremendous tension in the soul of New York City. While it’s a point of origin for forward-thinking and future-making, the city’s very essence is born out of the energy of the moment. The hum of human endeavor marries the city to the present tense. New Yorkers are embedded in the moment, a condition that is the starting point for drama, where catharsis and transformation are produced by doing and being, in characters who are not separate from their narratives and become aware of their second skin, their unconscious patterns, finally and only as an act of survival. And this idea cuts to the center of Starting Out In The Evening, a story about a New York writer who makes it into his 70s before he awakens to the necessity to change.
Going back to this idea of emotional necessity–it’s really the password to storytelling. In Starting Out In The Evening, we’re telling the story of author Leonard Schiller’s unacknowledged need for love and recognition. Because he’s in the last chapter of his life, the possibilty for these needs being met enters his life in the unexpected force represented by a young graduate student–Heather Wolfe is writing her masters thesis on Leonard’s long-forgotten novels and through her thesis she aims to return this exiled king of American literature back to his throne. Painfully for Leonard, his young emissary to immortality has a collision with truth, idealism and ambition that splits his heart and leaves his legacy where it was before her promises: in doubt. But his losses leave him unnaturally vulnerable to a core shift; and though the honesty he gains with his daughter and his work will not have a public value when he’s gone, it will sustain him in the rest of his life.
In making this film I had the privilege of working with a cast of uniquely gifted actors–Frank Langella, Lili Taylor, Lauren Ambrose and Adrian Lester. They all prepared and worked differently, but they had in common a passion and commitment that was so pure it was almost shocking. To the film’s great benefit, Frank agreed we should rehearse as much as possible in the months leading up to the shoot. He was unflinching in the discovery of his character, and as I watch the film unfold now in the editing room, I’m awestruck by the transformation he pulled off in becoming this sealed-off man who dares only to show himself through measured word and minor gesture. And it also went this way with Lili, Lauren and Adrian, who give performances of genuine power and tenderness. We only had 18 days to shoot this film, and perhaps the most gratifying aspect of the collaboration was to witness the place of sheer transcendance these actors went to as the chaos of the filmmaking process was going on around them.
(Photo: Backstage)

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