ONTD Exclusive: Q&A with 'The Learning Curve' Director Phil McCarty
Based on an essay by New York Times Best Selling author David Sedaris, "The Learning Curve" is a short film starring Matthew Gray Gubler (Criminal Minds, 500 Days of Summer) directed by Phil McCarty, and written by Phil McCarty and David Dong.
David has just been offered a teaching position at a local art college and attempts to be the teacher of his students' dreams. -meteachpretty [x]
Of all of Sedaris' work to choose from, what made you decide to tell "The Learning Curve"'s story?
Phil McCarty: There are a number of reasons we chose The Learning Curve, initially. Allow me to be sort of… arty for a second (or new age) (or west coast) (or crazy) (or schizophrenic) (or [word that implies a disconnect from reality]). One of the things that I love or find fascinating about art is discovery. In context of your question I mean, very frequently you make a decision for what you think is one reason, and then later on something you hadn't even considered becomes the driving force for that decision, rendering your earlier reason sort of unnecessary above and beyond the fact that that reason got you to the second one.
That's an overly intricate way of saying it but what I mean to say is...
Have you ever heard a song, and INSTANTLY loved it, and then only weeks (or years) later, listened to the lyrics carefully and discovered that the song is describing exactly what you were going through at that time? Or maybe the song had nothing to do with your life then, but now it does, and it makes you love it any more? The Learning Curve is a lot like that for me.
The initial reasons we picked the story were twofold. Practically speaking, it's a very simple story to shoot. Relatively speaking. The whole story (more or less) takes place in a classroom. In addition, it's one of the few stories that don't involve his family, so no need for kids, or the elderly. We could mostly work with college age kids which the world (and my phone) is teeming with. You can throw a rock and hit a college-aged person. I'm so tempted to make a joke about rock assault here but I won't. I'll leave that to you.
The second of those two folds (?) was that at the time I was actually sharing the script with Sedaris with the hope that he would turn and read some of my own prose, and grade it, much like he did for the students in the classroom. There was no greater ambition than that to be honest. I just thought it'd be cool if David Sedaris read and graded my writing, regardless of whether or not he hated/loved it.
However those two reasons, while being enough to spark the creation of the short, aren't why it speaks to me now. (Not that it speaks to me like a ghost or a burning bush or whatever, but you know. It resonates, emotionally).
As we got further into production, I realize that, in a lot of ways, I'm a lot like the character in the story at that point of his life. He finds himself doing something that he always DREAMED he would be able to do. And deep in his heart he fears being judged incapable of doing it. Similarly, this was my first time really directing a production of any scale. I'd done a number of smaller fun projects with friends but this was the first time that 30+ individuals (and 11 actors) expected me to, at the very least, not completely waste their time. And the reality of directing is that by the time you are on set, Directing, most of the crew has spent an infinite number of time working with an infinitely larger number of directors than you have. If you've done your job well you are simply surrounded by people who know more than you and are better than you at their jobs than you might ever be at yours. It was very humbling.
How close to David's original work is the film?
Short answer: Close but not Too Close.
Long answer: Adaptation is as much of an art as it is a science (holy crap I just said that?). Because at core you absolutely want to hold the text sacred, and the essence of it that attracted you to it in the first place. There'd be no point in falling in love with a piece of material, just to change it completely. That's like, for whatever reason I use relationships as a metaphor for pretty much everything, falling in love with someone and then wanting to change everything about them. Why bother?
On the other hand the fact is, the audience doesn't -exclusively- want to see just what they're familiar with. At least I don't, as an audience member. Because if I've already created the piece in what someone (I'm not sure who) calls "the theater of the mind", then why bother with watching the adaptation? Every person that loves reading, I presume, has a vivid imagination with an infinite budget, and can imagine the story perfectly on their own. So that means there is some freedom to embellish on the original story, to surprise the viewer, but without violating the tone and spirit of the story that they read initially. There's a really good book on this worth reading, "How to Adapt Anything Into a Screenplay" by Richard Krevolin.
The other thing that forces you to push away from the story a bit is the fact that when you're reading a book you're privy to the narrator's interior world and monologue. Half of what makes great humorists funny isn't just what happens to them, but what they think about what's happening to them. My writing partner is super talented, so we went out of our way to find ways to concretize what makes Sedaris' tone so identifiably him.
What was the process in choosing the actor you did for the role? Why Matthew? How did he seem the best fit for David?
We had a short list of actors that we wanted to go out to initially. I wasn't, admittedly, familiar with Matthew's work, but when his name popped up twice from two people whose opinion I respected, I thought "Okay, let's check it out." I saw a brief scene from 500 Days of Summer and knew he could command screen presence, but then he and I went out to lunch to meet. Within a minute I -knew- he was the perfect David Sedaris, so our search began and ended with Matthew.
As to why he seemed the best fit? He has the perfect balance of charisma, self-deprecating humor, intelligence, and mild neuroticism. All of the things that I personally attribute to the character in this piece.
Did Matthew suggest any modifications or did he stick to the script? Was there any improvising?
Oh man I could write an entire novel about working with Matthew. I don't know if it's possible that a first time director could work with a more perfect actor. I told him on the set (and the first time we met) that he may have absolutely ruined me as a director because the experience was just fucking perfect.
Now, that sounds like mindless sycophantism, so I'll back it up with an explanation:
Matthew is a filmmaker and, I believe, was a filmmaker before he was an actor, at NYU. He directs episodes of Criminal Minds, and in addition he's been acting on Criminal Minds for a number of years now, which means he's spent hundreds of hours in front of a camera. Which (see where this is going?) means he's also worked with dozens if not maybe hundreds of different directors and been able to see what does or doesn't work in a real setting, and seen how different personality types work with different kinds of crew members etc, etc.
Having a person with that kind of knowledge and experience working with an -inexperienced- director can be a nightmare. Because there's always the chance that that person will sniff out your weakness and pounce on it. Instead Matthew was EXTREMELY nurturing and encouraging, and frequently, while I was working with him, I would forget that he was infinitely better at his job than I am at mine. That's how good of an actor he is. He was able to act like he needed direction from me. He didn't because he's just that good.
To answer your question more directly, yes, he improvised a lot, some of my favorite lines in the short were written on the spot by Matthew. And, yes, he also stuck to the script. After he made sure we got what we absolutely needed for the editing room, the -core- script, he then basically did a few exploratory takes just to see what else he might find, organically. And, more often than not, he found great stuff.
What informed your visual choices for this film (i.e. this is not just a pure, straightforward adaptation)?
The most "non-book" visual decision here is an effect, which I won't go into TOO much detail on, if only because I don't want to spoil it for people who do get to see it in theaters. Suffice it to say I don't think it's something that people have seen before, and it does a good job of externalizing Sedaris' inner intelligence, humor, and creativity.
Aside from that,we liked the idea of setting the piece in a somewhat indistinct time period, er, that's a clumsy way of saying that we like the timelessness of the piece. So to the extent that that was accomplished I can basically point at our amazing team. Our production designer Justin Michael Patterson made magic with what must've been about three dollars and twenty cents that we gave him. Our costume designer Serena Duffin did a great job with making the piece feel "periody" (which seems oddly menstrual but isn't) on a similarly constrained budget. So, as such, the students aren't wearing, you know, Nike or Ed Hardy or whatever. Our Cinematographer Quyen Tran was a godsend and shot it perfectly, Mike Howell, our colorist, did a nice bit of work with the final post production to distress the film a bit, and make it seem like it wasn't shot, you know, last week.
The exact reference films for the visual look were "Dog Day Afternoon" and "One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest." The reason we chose those movies wasn't just for the year they were shot, but also because they were both great films about confined spaces that were studies of insanity and confinement. In "Dog Day" it was a number of normal people trapped with a "crazy" person, and Cuckoo's nest is the inverse. So it felt natural to use those as touchstones for the visual look of this film, because, as anyone who has ever been in a creative writing class can likely attest, it alternates between both dynamics on a class to class basis.
Are there plans to eventually make this film available for video on demand or iTunes or other download sites?
Not at the moment.
Any plans to turn this into a feature length?
Not at the moment.
-
'The Learning Curve' will be screening at the New Media Film Festival June 12th during the 7:30pm 'Closing Night Programming' at the State of the Art Theatre, The Landmark 10850 W. Pico Blvd. You can purchase tickets here.
Source: ONTD