Screenwriter and author John August

Self-taught and self-doubting

May 12, 2011 First Person

Earl Newton worked as a freelance (and self-taught) writer, director and editor for almost ten years up and down the East Coast before making the move to Los Angeles. He lives in constant fear that a film school student will one day explain that “F-stop” doesn’t really mean what he thinks it means.

His username on Twitter is [@strangerthings](http://twitter.com/strangerthings).

——-

Last week, I spent my thirtieth birthday as a director on a professional set in Los Angeles. Any concerns I had over turning thirty die off as I type that sentence.

Yet for the first 29 years of my life, I did literally everything I could to avoid LA and a career as a professional filmmaker. And I’m here to tell you why that hesitation — that waiting, born of reluctance — was the best thing that could have happened to me.

Young, dumb, and full of stay
—

earl newton By the time I entered college in my tiny Florida town, I’d already decided I wouldn’t be moving to Los Angeles. While my friends shared fantasies of $2000 two-bedroom apartments and lives made of ramen noodles, I’d been infected by the Rodriguez disease, and I felt a furious, indignant independence. I wanted to make my own path, outside of Los Angeles.

Also, it seemed expensive, and I knew I still had a lot to learn. Having been home-schooled, I was already comfortable with self-education, and struggling to survive in a major city just to learn the basics seemed like going to Harvard to take English 101.

Also, I’d been rejected from film school three times and I was terrified I’d move to Los Angeles and fail immediately.

Such is youth.

I had a bit of money to invest in my education, partially from an inheritance and partially from a loan co-signed by my parents. With it, I bought my first camera (a Sony DCR-TRV 510) and a Dell computer for editing (MotoDV Firewire card sold separately). For just about $3,100, I had the equivalent filmmaking power of an iPhone.

When you are poor and poorly connected, you exploit the only teaching resources you have available: books and practical experience. There are three books I recommend to any filmmaker: [Backwards and Forwards](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0809311100/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=johnaugustcom-20&linkCode=as2&camp=217145&creative=399349&creativeASIN=0809311100) by David Ball, [On Directing Film](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0140127224/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=johnaugustcom-20&linkCode=as2&camp=217145&creative=399349&creativeASIN=0140127224) by David Mamet, and [In the Blink of an Eye](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1879505622/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=johnaugustcom-20&linkCode=as2&camp=217145&creative=399349&creativeASIN=1879505622) by Walter Murch. I haven’t found any that speak as concisely on storytelling as those. They are all quite thin as well, which led me to theorize that the size of the film book is inversely proportionate to its usefulness.

So I read and shot everything I could afford. Much of what I shot was useless. I could feel something worthwhile buried in it, but it still felt awkward, and I couldn’t put my finger on why. Watching hours of this kind of footage made me grateful I didn’t have to undergo these growing pains while juggling P.A. jobs. Looking back at these first works, I’m still grateful.

Being without a real mentor, I went looking for one in cinema history, and I found him, in the thick of Communist Russia: Sergei Eisenstein (creator of “Battleship Potemkin”).

Long before Robert Rodriguez, here was the original writer/director/editor. Here was a man, similar to myself, far from Hollywood, figuring out movies without a film school (in his case, none existed yet). With no teachers available, he reached out to other disciplines and looked for ways to apply them to cinema. As an example: one story suggests he developed his concepts of film montage after he learned how Japanese kanji expresses meaning. (In kanji, two unrelated symbols are juxtaposed to create a third idea. The symbol for “dog” combines with the symbol for “mouth” to represent “bark,” etc)

Taking a page from Eisenstein’s book, I studied as many different crafts as drew my interest. At my local community college (and later, at a nearby university) I took classes in acting, improv, theatre directing, and scene design. I took computer science and sign language. Anything and everything seemed to hold some insight into movie storytelling. I also took care to study the roles of other departments to greater or lesser degree: sound recording, visual effects, photography, etc.

To directors: starting out, you’re going be encouraged to familiarize yourself with the jobs of other departments. I highly and humbly recommend this.

You’ll be told it’s because it makes communicating your vision easier, and that’s true. But there are two more important reasons. First, if you know how to be a sound man, you know how to make the sound man’s job easier. This has the potential to make you very popular with sound men (or editors, or cinematographers, etc), something you’ll need when your only currency is good will. Second, when you begin producing your own work, this renaissance approach to filmmaking will allow you to start before anyone else signs on. Knowing you can finish in a pinch, if you have to, will lend you a confident relentlessness that makes others want to get involved.

This went on for a number of years. I took regular jobs, but could never stay settled for long. Two years was my maximum. [Read more…] about Self-taught and self-doubting

Born on the Fourth of The Nines

May 11, 2011 QandA, The Nines

In The Nines, was there a particular reason you chose to make Dahlia and Gavin’s birthday the same, November 21st?

— Guarionex
Florida

If you look through the screenplay of The Nines in the [Library](http://johnaugust.com/library), you’ll see that many scenes in the second section of the movie are basically unscripted.

Here’s that scene as written (italics in original):

INT. SUSINA COFFEESHOP – DAY

Gavin meets with Dahlia Salem. She’s pretty, funny, and very cool.

They talk about the other pilot (Gatin’s), the role, and how fucked up it is to be having these double-top-secret conversations. It goes well. They seem to genuinely like each other.

When filming these scenes, I was beside the camera as it was rolling, telling the actors what to talk about. I told Dahlia that she and Gavin had the same birthday, and she went with it. (In fact, she misunderstood at first, and assumed that she and Ryan Reynolds had the same birthday.) Ultimately, it didn’t really matter what they were talking about, just that they were talking and seemed to click.

All of Part Two was shot essentially this way. Even in scenes with traditional dialogue, I would “wind the clock back” a minute and have the actors talking about something else, eventually getting to the text of the scene.

The conceit of this section is that it’s a half hour episode of a reality TV show, so I needed lots of little pieces to suggest the conversations have been stitched together in editing. Non-scene conversation got the right rhythms goings.

Part Two was the last section we shot, and by far the most fun. It was like real-time writing. A lot of things that came up in the moment could easily be incorporated; I’d say something, then have Ryan say it. Melissa McCarthy talks about buying a house because just that day she bought a house.

The Nines was a very special case, and the only time I’ve done it. I wouldn’t suggest trying such non-writing in your own scripts unless there’s a particularly good reason for it.

Write the way you speak

May 6, 2011 Psych 101, Words on the page

As he loses his voice to cancer, Christopher Hitchens writes about the idea of [literary voice](http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2011/06/christopher-hitchens-unspoken-truths-201106?currentPage=1):

> To my writing classes I used later to open by saying that anybody who could talk could also write. Having cheered them up with this easy-to-grasp ladder, I then replaced it with a a huge and loathsome snake: “How many people in this class can talk? I mean, really talk?” That had its duly woeful effect.

> I told them to read every composition aloud, preferably to a trusted friend. The rules are much the same: Avoid stock expressions (like the plague, as William Safire used to say) and repetitions. Don’t say that as a boy your grandmother used to read to you, unless at that stage of her life she really *was* a boy, in which case you have probably thrown away a better intro. If something is worth hearing or listening to, it’s very probably worth reading. So, this above all: Find your own *voice.*

College was the first time I started writing how I speak.

Or, more accurately, college was when I stopped trying to write the way I thought I *should* write. Whether through explicit instruction (topic sentences, Roman outlines) or imitative insecurity (we all had a Hemingway phase), any unique quality in my prose had been flattened. The occasional quirks were mostly borrowed from Spy magazine, whose pithy precision I worshipped without really understanding.

A freshman year newswriting class probably changed me more than anything. J54 taught us how to align fact-bearing sentences in a deliberate pyramid structure so that the story could be truncated at any point without losing its meaning.

We learned the rules. We wrote the articles. The process was almost automated; given the same facts, any two news writers should generate very much the same story.

I hated it. I revolted. Why should I waste my time writing something anyone else could have churned out?

Writing isn’t harder than speaking, but it’s lonelier. It’s a conversation with someone who isn’t there.

When you’re writing, you end up hearing your own voice a lot. I think that’s why so many people struggle with it. We don’t like to be alone with our thoughts. They scare us. But in the same way people don’t stutter when talking to a dog, it helps to envision a friendly reader at the far side. Let writing be talking with someone you like.

Staying indie after getting big

May 2, 2011 Film Industry, Indie, Talk

Prompted by a recent [post about Kickstarter](http://johnaugust.com/2011/raising-movie-funds-on-kickstarter), writer/director Jay Duplass (The Puffy Chair, Baghead, Cyrus) emailed me about an indie documentary he’s putting together through the crowdfunding site.

His email suggested a larger discussion about why filmmakers continue to pursue indie projects after they’ve found studio success. I certainly do it, with both The Nines and The Remnants, along with other experiments like The Variant.

None of them are a good use of time, at least in a monetary sense.

I’d make more money simply writing more screenplays. If I want to direct something, it should be a studio feature. My agent tells me this. It’s his job to tell me this.

And yet Jay and I still find ourselves drawn towards the little, difficult, uncategorizable things. Is it boredom? Fear of failure? The appeal of new frontiers? A desire to reclaim our scrappy youth?

Rather than keep the conversation between us, I suggested to Jay that we record it. He was game, so he came by the office today.

This is our half-hour conversation, un-edited:

Some links to things we mention:

* [Jay’s documentary Kevin, on Kickstarter](http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2035579744/kevin)
* [Jay’s credits](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0243231/)
* [The Remnants](http://vimeo.com/2755105)
* [Topspin](http://www.topspinmedia.com/)
* [A Thousand True Fans](http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2008/03/1000_true_fans.php)
* [Lena Dunham’s Tiny Furniture](http://tinyfurniture.com/)

Runtime is 30 minutes. You can also download this as [an MP3](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/jay_duplass_john_august_kickstarter.mp3).

My thanks to Jay. Check out his doc.

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