The Nines

Writing the music before shooting the film

April 21, 2014 Projects, The Nines

Alex Wurman, who composed the music for my film The Nines, has the soundtrack up on SoundCloud. Take a listen.

The composer often comes on board a project while it’s in post, but for The Nines, I needed Alex to write the main theme of the movie before we’d shot a frame. That’s because during one scene in Part Two, Gavin (Ryan Reynolds) plays the theme on the piano. It’s a major plot point, and I knew we couldn’t fake it. So Alex and I spent a few days hashing out the musical idea of the story.

When talking with a specialist (a composer, a cinematographer, a choreographer), I’ve found it best to describe feelings rather than functions, using similes rather than concrete vocabulary. So I said things like:

broken clockwork
skimming across a summer lake, but there’s something dark under water
an unanswerable question
something half-remembered, and you’re not sure if it was something positive or negative

This got us to the main theme, called Knowing:

The theme shows up all over the movie, often on piano, but sometimes pushed to other instruments and other tempos.

I love Alex’s music in The Nines, but if I had it to do all over again, I would have found a way to get bigger with the music at the end. Right now, it all feels a little too delicate and same-same.

We had a very limited budget, but the visuals would have better served with some serious strings. In my head, I can hear this theme re-orchestrated, and it’s what the film wants: the boldest expression of the musical question and its answer. To achieve that, I would have re-prioritized other elements to free up some money.

Let’s just say we were #51

July 13, 2012 The Nines

EW recently ran a feature on the 50 Best Movies You’ve Never Seen.

First off: Kinda presumptuous, you guys — how are you to know which movies I haven’t seen? Are you keeping track of my Netflix history?

Oh — you are. That’s what that click-to-accept thing meant.

Okay. Well. That indie movie I sort of fast-forwarded through, only stopping when I saw bare skin, that was research for a movie on sad people.

Anyway, I was a little disappointed you left off The Nines, because it certainly meets the criteria of being highly praised and little-seen.

Fortunately, your readers wrote in and got you to pay attention:

ew nines blurb

And while you rightly praise the much-more-famous-now Ryan Reynolds, let’s not overlook Emmy-winner and Oscar-nominee Melissa McCarthy, along with Oscar-winner Octavia Spencer. Plus Oscar winner Jim Rash — sure, it was for writing, but it counts.

This movie has all of these people, plus Elle Fanning and telepathic koalas! (spoiler.)

So if you’ve never seen it, what more can I do to convince you?

We’re streaming on Netflix this month.

If you’re a Amazon Prime member, you can even watch it for free.

For international readers, we’re in iTunes almost everywhere.

My dream is that the next time EW does this kind of list, they’ll omit The Nines simply because too many people have seen it.

Formatting notes in a screenplay

August 11, 2011 Formatting, QandA, The Nines

I’ve searched through The Hollywood Standard and most of your site’s scripts, and nothing pings for “WRITER’S NOTE.” Does that mean they don’t really exist or should never be used?

If they can be used, what would you suggest as a way to format instances where the screenwriter wants to stop and point something out that helps the readers read? Even saying that makes it sound like you shouldn’t do it, but I swear I’ve seen them used before…even though I can’t find any examples now.

— Steve Maddern

In most cases, you can handle things like this in scene description. For example, if you have a recall of a character we haven’t seen in a long time:

Durban’s massive Henchman -- the same one we saw in the opening sequence -- emerges from wreckage, cut and bruised but somehow still alive.

Or to describe how a sequence is meant to be shot:

In a dreamy, super-saturated haze, Celia makes her way through the crowded party, a grin stretched ear-to-ear. She is floating, with TEENAGERS rushing past her.

Only very rarely do you have to do a full dead stop to explain something to readers. I’ve probably done it twice in 40+ scripts. For The Nines, I have a note to readers right after the title page:

nines reader note

But that’s a really odd case.

You’ll almost always be able to handle it in-line with scene description. Set it off with parentheses, brackets or dashes if it helps. But there’s no need to label it as a writer’s note or somesuch.

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, 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.