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What about approaching a scene? I love to talk to filmmakers about when they’re on set and they get ready to shoot something, and for some reason, something about the scene just isn’t really working, and having to come up with something on the fly to fix that problem in real time with the pressure on. What about in that mode? Is there anything you can think of there?
Yes, I can speak to a few things. Yeah. A big thing I learned on this was — this is my first time really working with actors on this level. In the [“Cowboy Bebop”] promo you saw, in that case, I meet John [Cho], Daniela, and Mustafa [Shakir] sort of day before. “How’s it going? Here’s what we’re doing.” We’re not going deep into anything. So I really learned a lot by working with the actors.
One big thing I learned is how a good actor can carry subtext and just work wonders with it. There’s a scene where it’s like Alycia [Debnam-Carey] and Devon [Terrell] are sitting in the basement. He’s tied to a pole, and they had this conversation which mostly takes place in split screen. That initial scene was like three pages, and it essentially had all these character beats in it, and it explained a bunch of stuff. And that morning, Devon and Alycia both came to me. They were like, “Hey, man, we kind of feel like this scene is overwritten and it’s too long.” And it’s one of those things where you’re like, “Oh, man.” And I only have five minutes to have this conversation. But basically talking to them, they’re like, “I think we can just whittle it all down.” And I remember Alycia specifically saying, “And we can do a lot with subtext.” So we cut the scene down to like six lines and I was amazed at just watching them rehearse it, how much they communicated just by the way they said stuff. I’ll never forget that lesson. So yeah, that was special to me that I had that experience. Just how you can do more with less, I guess.
That’s a big deal for a first time feature director to take that note from his actors and be like, “All right, I trust you guys. Let’s do this thing.” I feel like a lot of people would’ve been like, “Okay, that’s interesting. We’re going to shoot the whole thing anyway and I’ll figure it out in post.” But for you to actually take that note on the fly, that’s an interesting thing there.
I honestly … during the whole shoot, during the rehearsal, they all came with so many thoughtful ideas and questions. And I just trusted them so much, just seeing how much they thought about stuff; I never had an actor think about something I wrote with that level of scrutiny. So yeah, I just trusted them. I try to approach directing like you want to surround yourself with … I need a cast who can act better than I can, which is not hard. [laughs] I need a DP who’s a better DP than me, and therefore I need to listen to him. So yeah, I think as a director, it is just about listening to all the ideas from your collaborators and just trying to have no ego and be like, “Yes, this is a better idea that serves this version. It’s irrelevant if I came up with something different a year ago.”
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