John August

Go

Casting Go

Go, Projects

Taking a look back at Go, Keith Kuramoto singles out the cast as one of the film’s big achievements:

In a movie where every single character has an important speaking role, casting is critical and this film is no exception. It’s an expertly cast movie, where every actor may not be Oscar-caliber, but you believe them in the role and more importantly, they feel right against all the other characters within the mosaic.

Casting director Joseph Middleton had an absurd number of roles to fill and a creative team that was impossible to please — myself included. We spent weeks on casting, seven of us in a room at 8000 Sunset auditioning every young actor with a headshot. We ended up with just the right people, none of whom were stars when we cast them.

Tim Olyphant originally showed up to read for Adam or Zack. By the end of the meeting, he was Todd Gaines, and would be on a new career track.

Katie Holmes had shot the pilot for Dawson’s Creek, but it hadn’t aired yet. Sarah Polley was the timid girl from The Sweet Hereafter. Scott Wolf — well, he was sort of a known deal off of Party of Five. But still — he came in to meet, and it was only after pairing him with Jay Mohr that we offered him the part.

Casting is one area in which the screenwriter tends to have little say, which is a mistake. TV gets it right: the person who wrote the words helps decide who says them.

In Go, would Todd have shot Ronna?

Go, Projects

questionmarkThank you for writing one of my favorite movies. I saw Go at the theater when it was released and it has since been one of my favorite movies. One my favorite characters in one of my favorite movies is Todd Gaines.

There is one part that has always left me wondering. Was Todd really going to kill Ronna?

On one hand, Todd simply didn’t seem like a murderer. A sleazy drug dealer? Yes. Murderer? No.

On the other, in a deleted scene, he did pull a gun on Claire and left Ronna for dead after Adam and Zach hit her with the car.

Todd also didn’t come across as stupid, reckless or naive. It seems if he wanted to kill someone, he would have chosen a better place than a very public party where he likely would have been recognized by his clientele.

This has always been a dilemma to me. I was hoping you could shed some light on it for me.

— Thomas Lehman

todd gainesTodd Gaines never shot anyone, and had no intention of killing Ronna. He wanted to scare her.

Look at events from his perspective: He’d been played for a fool by a cocky teenage girl. Beyond the sting to his ego, she’d cost him money. If word got around out how she’d outsmarted him, other customers might lose their healthy fear of him. He knew where Ronna would be, so he decided to go find her.

When their conversation was interrupted by a poorly-driven Miata, Gaines bolted. I’d consider that fight-or-flight, a self-preservation instinct. When they find a girl’s body, you don’t want to be the guy with a gun.

In conversations with Tim Olyphant before we shot the movie, we discussed that Gaines probably wasn’t a full-time drug dealer. Maybe he went to art school, or worked as a club promoter. For set decoration, we gave him an art table and a bunch of illustrations.

If you met Gaines on a rainy morning — like Claire later does — you might think he’s a pretty nice guy.

Don’t make the feature version of your short

Genres, Go, Sundance

I had coffee today with a writer-director whose acclaimed short film got him many awards and meetings all over town. And deservedly: it’s terrific, a labor of love that took several years to make.

He said he was finishing up the screenplay for the feature version. I told him to focus on something else instead. You shouldn’t make the feature version of your short.

This seems like terrible advice. After all, it’s easy to think of several acclaimed filmmakers who expanded upon their short films, including Neill Blomkamp and George Lucas.

But having worked with many emerging filmmakers through the Sundance Institute and other programs, I’ve encountered a lot of silent evidence that suggests it’s a pretty bad idea.1

  1. Great shorts are great and short. The perfect haiku isn’t improved by rewriting it as a sonnet.

  2. You will burn out on the idea. Having already made the short, do you want to spend several more years making it again?

  3. Show what else you can do. A career isn’t one movie, or one idea. Even if you make the movie and it turns out great, you’ve still only told one story so far in your career.

  4. Safety is paralysis. It’s less intimidating to expand on something familiar. But you need to push against your boundaries.

Your first feature project should ideally be in the same class or genre as your acclaimed short, but not a retread. If you made a charming short about blind leprechauns, write a feature about kleptomaniac crows. Let the connection between projects be your ambition and sensibility, not a single storyline.

Go was originally written to be a short film — but we never shot it. Had the short version been made, I can’t imagine going back to write the full thing. I would have been too hamstrung by my original choices, and the scenes that had already been shot.

Worse, I wouldn’t have felt the same things the second time through. You don’t get your first kiss twice.

  1. Silent evidence: You’re only seeing the movies that got made and released, not the ones that didn’t. ↩

How to logline a dual-plot story

Big Fish, Go, Projects, QandA, Story and Plot

questionmarkWhat is the best way to write a short logline for a screenplay with dual storylines, especially if both storylines are crucial to the telling of the story?

I feel like scripts with multiple storylines (3+ stories) like Pulp Fiction or Crash can rely on simple loglines that get across the overall theme of the story. But what about scripts with two distinct storylines that parallel one another…do you pack both storylines into the logline? Or do you pick one and focus the on it?

— Mac
Los Angeles

Some movies are really difficult to logline. Go is one. When forced to give a short description, I try to chart the three main threads: “It’s about a really tiny drug deal, a wild night in Vegas and two soap opera actors — all of which cross paths at LA’s underground rave scene.”

Again, not great. But it gets the job done.

For something like Big Fish, I make the parallel structure clear: “It’s the story of a man’s life, told the way he remembers it: full of wild, impossible exaggerations. At the same time, his grown son is trying to separate the truth from the fantasy before his dad dies.”

Julie and Julia has dual storylines, yet summarizes easily: “It’s the story of a young woman determined to cook her way through Julia Child’s famous cookbook, intercut with the adventures of Julia Child’s life.”

If both plotlines are key to your story, you need to make that clear in the logline. Otherwise, you risk future readers feeling like you bait-and-switched them.