Paula Nechak is a freelance writer based in Seattle. She is a regular contributor to The Rocket, Stereophile Guide To Home Theater and Amazon.com. Her reviews and interviews can be found in The Seattle Post-Intelligencer and on the New York Times wire service.
With only two films under her belt, director Jill Sprecher, who co-scripts her films with her younger sister, Karen, certainly merits the best actors for her quiet, detailed movies. Clockwatchers starred Parker Posey, Toni Collette and Lisa Kudrow and was a precise and perfectly rendered look at the hell envisioned by a temp worker in new and impersonal corporate surroundings.
Sprecher’s new movie, Thirteen Conversation About One Thing, featuring Matthew McConaughey, Alan Arkin, Amy Irving, John Turturro, Clea DuVall and Barbara Sukowa, has New Yorkers weaving through five stories about fate and events that are interconnected, finally forming one significant tale with a single message and meaning. “We count them happy who endure,” says a title card in the film and, considering Sprecher herself survived a fateful encounter with a stranger in 1985 who smashed her in the head with a bottle, it is mostly about finding the courage to change for the better. We change because we have to, and Sprecher’s carefully integrated, expositional morality play that encompasses past, present and future tense, as well as hope, and in my mind, dignity, is a work that embraces everyday urban existence and survival and turns the ordinary into something extraordinary. Sprecher met to talk about her movie during its screenings at the 2002 Seattle International Film Festival.
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PAULA NECHAK: So, how many responses have you had to the “One Thing’ of the title?
JILL SPRECHER: It’s great because people are seeing a lot of different things. Some have said faith or grace, others happiness. We read somewhere that someone thought it was about dissolution or entropy. It’s interesting, when my sister, Karen, and I had the title; initially we were sure people were going to assume it meant sex [laughs]. All the answers are great.
PAULA NECHAK: There’s a very interesting color palette in the film. In Clockwatchers everything was florescent and too bright. This film is full of dark greens and soothing colors which really bounce against the subject matter. How carefully do you integrate script and the visual look?
JILL SPRECHER: It’s weird because my sister, Karen, and I write certain details into our scripts and one of the things we envisioned in this film was that we didn’t want any white in the color palette other than as a motif that would float through the stories to link them together, like the white shirt. We wanted to differentiate the characters, creating individual environments by making slight variations on the color but still having one overall movie and having an audience psychically link these people. We took the script to Dick Pope, our cinematographer, as well as our production and costume designers and when we took our first meeting everyone separately brought up a painting by Edward Hopper. His paintings are sort of a reference now for urban isolation and so we used a couple of his works as a springboard.
PAULA NECHAK: in both your films you allow story to unfold on its own terms; there’s time, quietness, honesty and dignity there. Even when your characters behave badly they still maintain a kind of innate dignity. Is that something essential to you as a storyteller?
JILL SPRECHER: I love the way you said that, I never thought of it that way but as you know a lot of the material is autobiographical, including the people who do terrible things. My sister and I haven’t gone to the extreme of say, Alan Arkin’s character, but we’ve certainly felt his envy. I think because we so understand these characters we don’t see any of them as bad people. They’re flawed but they¹re probably their own worst enemies.
PAULA NECHAK: Is it your view of the world that there are patterns of quiet? Is there more said in the unspoken than the spoken?
JILL SPRECHER: Yes. There was a sparseness to the script and maybe it subconsciously influences the performances, I’m not sure. The actors also dictate the way a movie should be edited. There’s a tendency now to quickly get out a line and quickly get the reaction shot. I’m lucky to have worked with Stephen Mirrione twice now and he’s the best editor in the business. I like to think we discovered him and he’s been stolen by bigger people in the business [he cut Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic] but he’s very attuned to the nuances of performance and he edits based upon performance.
PAULA NECHAK: I’ve heard your film compared to Mamet or Kieslowski -- do you find it difficult to wear comparisons when you write from your own experiences?
JILL SPRECHER: That’s good company [laughs]. Now I know where the Mamet comes in -- probably from Glengarry Glen Ross: somebody compared Clockwatchers to it, a female version, though I wasn’t thinking of it when we wrote it. But Mamet’s very specific about language and having actors say it as written and my sister and I always look at the script as a blueprint which is handed over to experts. It’s more a living organism that grows while you’re doing it. But if I had to pick a cinematic reference for this movie I think it would be Stanley Kubrick. He has a great sense of isolation with his characters and I was very struck, when I was studying film, by the structure of The Killing. It jumped all over in time but you always felt you were moving forward.
PAULA NECHAK: Your films are ensemble pieces and you opt to work collaboratively with your sister in the scriptwriting. What do you think of the auteur theory?
JILL SPRECHER: I think a movie is total collaboration and I’m such an inexperienced director that in going into Clockwatchers I was like, “One of these people doesn’t belong in this group” [laughs]. I thought if anyone asks me something at least my sister and I wrote it and we know what we were trying to say and we know the characters and so I can answer on that level. In my mind a director is an ultimate decision maker but I like to learn from everyone on the set. I understand the auteur theory, especially if you see a body of a person’s work and see interests or stylistic things appear, but it’s weird that when we wrote the script for Thirteen Conversations About One Thing we thought we wrote something opposite of Clockwatchers. We were stunned by people constantly telling us they saw similarities.
PAULA NECHAK: For a woman who’s endured a ‘random attack’ and participates in a business that’s as uncertain as you can get, there’s irony in the fact that your scripts try to find order in chaos.
JILL SPRECHER: That’s something I’m obsessed with in movies and in life. When I got hit in the head with that bottle I remember making a choice that day -- I could have either called a messenger to run something around the corner or I could have saved six dollars and delivered it myself. You start to think, “If I had only turned this way instead of that.” It’s natural to say “what if” or “why.” Plus I studied philosophy as an undergraduate and you’re trained to look for meaning [laughs]. That’s the whole reason for writing -- to take apparent chaos and find order in it.
PAULA NECHAK: Where do you think a film is actually ‘made?’ It’s a question I like to ask directors. John Sayles says the editing room, James Ivory says it’s the casting --
JILL SPRECHER: It’s between the two. The director’s most important job is picking the right people who will be involved in the movie and once that’s done it’s about trying to create an environment that’s comfortable for everybody to do the best work they can. Editing is the final rewrite of a movie, so many things can happen that you can’t predict while you’re shooting and usually they turn out better than you think. Stephen Marrione read every draft and it took us three-and-a-half years to get the money for the film, which we lost while shooting, so he had a very short window to edit the movie. We had to go back and re-envision things in their simplest form so it was wonderful to go into the editing room with him because he knew the essence of it and he cut it in six-and-a-half weeks.
PAULA NECHAK: You’ve said you and your sister are very similar. Does that symbiotic element make it easier or harder to write and bounce ideas off of each other?
JILL SPRECHER: I’ve written things on my own but they’re nothing I’m proud of. It’s fun for us because writing is so solitary. It becomes less like work and more like fun because it's a dialogue. I say we’re similar because obviously we share a gene pool and background experiences. But in film she has more mainstream taste and mine is off the path. She’ll tell me, “That’s too weird, you’re the only person in the universe who’ll get it.” So we balance each other out. Maybe it would be better to work with a polar opposite but we’re so comfortable it feels honest. It saves a lot of time in the end.
PAULA NECHAK: You cast phenomenally well -- between both films you’ve had Parker Posey, Toni Collette, Lisa Kudrow, Matthew McConaughey, Alan Arkin, Amy Irving, John Turturro, Clea DuVall and even Barbara Sukowa in parts. You use real actors, not personalities. How do you like to work with your actors? What experience would you like them to have when they work with you?
JILL SPRECHER: I can’t believe they agreed to be in the movies. And I don’t think Hollywood knows what to do with Matthew because he’s a character actor in a leading man’s body. He was amazing and so smart. First, rehearsal is a luxury on any movie and with this budget it was out of the question. Getting a schedule for all these actors was so convoluted. In the end they really took it in and did the research. They did the details and they just got it. From the initial meeting we were all on the same wavelength and each actor had their own method to make the character his or hers.
PAULA NECHAK: I love the ending of Thirteen Conversations . . . because the current trend in contemporary literature and movies is to not have an ending that’s in tune to what’s come before.
JILL SPRECHER: We would never dream of doing anything unless we knew the ending. I think it was Paul Newman who said “a screenplay is all about the first five pages but a movie is about the last five minutes.” An ending is so important to a movie. I read about studio films thrown out and tested and they go back and re-shoot the ending, and it always feels tacked on because it’s not organic, it’s not moving toward the point and the message and that’s what you have to move toward.
PAULA NECHAK: Finally, I’ve read about your legendary shyness . . .
JILL SPRECHER: [interrupting] Can you believe it meeting me now? I really was a very introverted person and the change hit my parents when they came to the Toronto Film Festival. The film premiered there and I thought nothing of it because I’ve now done this a lot but they were shocked. I had to get up in front of 1500 people and announce the film. I guess getting hit with a bottle, well, after that -- and I don’t think change happens overnight, it’s cumulative -- I realized I was much stronger than I thought and I changed a lot of my behaviors. I had a victim’s stance, I had been mugged twice in a three-month period, and I realized maybe it was something I was sending off. When you live in New York City you get bolder. When my sister and I started Clockwatchers it snowballed and we thought let’s just keep going until someone says “frauds.” We really were waiting for someone to just stop us. All of a sudden we were shooting and I remember there was a moment when forty people on the set turned to me for an answer. It’s a ping-pong because part of the time the job of writing is socially isolating and then all of a sudden you’re thrown into something on a set that’s a miniature society. [laughs] It’s kind of one extreme to the other.