By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com
S07: Transcribing Hartley, Araki, Jenkins, Green
Hal Hartley, Gregg Araki, Tamara Jenkins and David Gordon Green comprised a sturdy Sundance roundtable; At GreenCine, Craig Philips transcribes more than 5,500 words. Hartley: “I don’t think I’ve ever been in a development situation. It’s always: Write the script and then come to the table with the script. These are my friends and we want to make this film. I guess I mean I’ve never been paid to develop a script. That sounds like such a civilized thing.” Green: “I guess development to me is like flirting with a girl; you have to give yourself a lot of opportunities to turn around and go the other way, or you can hook up. You get in a room with producers, financiers, actors, you kind of all look at each other, assess each other, size each other up, see if it works. If it does, take the next step. Some of them, I’ll write, get producers attached, and then I’ll get to the casting and all of a sudden the studio or whoever I’m working with will say, “Eh, we see a different cast.” I’ll say, I don’t like that idea, then go away and close up that project, open up another one. So I’ve got a number of experiences in… not going all the way.” Are they “in it for the money”?Hartley: Well, to be perfectly honest, I am in it for the money. I mean, I consider myself an artist, too, and try to be true to that, but I do have a family to take care of. Why should I do this for nothing? I’ve learned a lot about doing business; I just do it in a particular way. I’m much more interested in talking to business people than I am talking to philanthropists. I don’t want to be a charity case. It’s important because, in the early days of your career, you get a lot of people talking about support. “We supported you.” Right, you didn’t program the film on television and make money – you were supporting me, that wasn’t business. Right. So, you have to be careful about that. But, yeah, I’m a professional filmmaker; that means I get paid for what I do. No reason to be ashamed of admitting that.” Green: “I think everything is fun. I even like going to the corporate meetings and pitching it. Getting everybody excited, that’s kind of fun. The only thing I don’t like is when you have to make the credits for your movie and everybody starts crying because they wanted their name in a specific place. I actually had to appeal to my union so that the title of my movie could come after my name. There’s so many weird politics about it; everybody gets really possessive about credits. I don’t think we should even have credits – the title sequence should just be cool parts of the movie, and they should take out the titles.” [Much, much more at the link.]