You’ve said “casting is rewriting.” Would you describe your approach to directing as sturdy yet flexible?
Yes. I prepare a lot. I’m a big believer in extreme preparation. I have two versions of a shot list. Every crew member would have a shot list everyday and know exactly what we were doing. But on the other hand, I might see a shot ten feet away from the shot that I prepared, and I’m still willing to change that. Likewise with actors. To me, even if they’re not improvising all that much, and the script is the script, I feel that all acting is improvisation. Emotionally, it is improvisation. Most people forget that. Very often people ask me if there any improvisation in my work, and I’m always thinking that everything is improvisation! Unless an actor is dead and terrible and doing it the same way, every time. And there are those, but an actor that’s really alive is improvising emotionally all the time and really rides language and allows the language to buoy them. That’s something that Greta understands incredibly well. So do all of them. The cast enjoyed the language. Each of them really met me half way. So I think that casting is rewriting. I like to have the writing meet the actor. Depending at what stage an actor comes on, there’s a lot of room for tailoring something to someone. I want to hear what they say. One of the beauties of making a film versus a novel is that a novel doesn’t really talk back to you. You can listen to your novel, but that’s not the same. When an actor is actually speaking to you and if you listen, you’ll learn what you’ve written from them.
Nora Ephron famously likened writers to cannibals. You always have to be careful what is said at a dinner party…
Because everything is copy.
Aside from the threads of narrative that Karen Rinaldi presented to you, did you find that you were braiding in tidbits from friends and observations?
Oh definitely. For example, I went over to Karen’s house one day. Our sons are best friends. And she plopped some butter into her coffee. [Laughs] I said that’s totally going into the movie. You’re not getting away with that. Certain characters are based on friends of mine. But they’re also not. It’s a mix in writing. I think I’m more of a magpie than a cannibal. Maybe I find it more pleasant? [Laughs]
Cannibalization is a little rough.
And there’s a dead body at the end. [Laughs] A writer is always filtering, like a fish with gills, taking oxygen out of life around them. But I think sometimes the most valuable material marinates for quite a long time and you don’t know when it’s going to bubble up. Things that you heard, felt or saw five or more years ago. Stanislavsky said that you had to wait five years to use material because otherwise it was too emotionally fresh and you couldn’t turn it into art yet. I don’t know if that is necessarily true for a writer, but it is certainly interesting. I do think, in waiting, it does become more potent.
You’ve joked that, as an actor, you’ve worked with many of the giants on the worst of their films.
[Laughs] Yes. It’s my specialty.
But were each of those experiences —with Mike Nichols, Peter Brook, Carroll Ballard and Paul Mazursky— like individual master classes in directing?
Absolutely. It was extraordinary. That’s how I went to film school. I didn’t plan it in the sense who can plan to work with those guys, but when opportunities presented themselves, I had my little notebook and I was watching. I saw how the character of each director imbued or almost tinted the whole film set. How it influenced the character of the set, and I watched how crews worked and how a set functions almost like body and how imbalances could happen. The culture of a movie set is quite interesting. It never ceases to amaze me how things get done on a set in a way that nowhere else do they get done that way. Everyone just pitches in and does their job, knows what they have to do and does it. Where else in life does that happen? Nowhere.
“Maggie’s Plan” opens on Friday, May 20.