Matthew Wilson says:
After winning the May contest for The Umpire, many people asked me what I would buy with the money. The answer is time. I quit my job and worked on this project exclusively for four months (minus a few weeks I spent on a mission trip in Africa, and a week vacation with my family in Hawaii).
The budget was $3500 (although more will be given to the actors if I win again). I shot it on the Canon T2i, the same camera I used for The Umpire, but this time I had a boom operator (the wonderful Maylin Tu!) there with a mic and sound recorder, rather than recording the sound directly into the camera. Admittedly, when I started shooting The Umpire I didn't really know what I was doing, but throughout the course of production I learned many things, and that knowledge helped me make Speak to Me in Poetry a better film. Things like where to place the camera, how to stage action, how to be clear in my direction with the actors, how to pace the film in editing, had all been learned through trial and error (mostly error) on The Umpire.
But enough about The Umpire. Let's talk Speak to Me in Poetry.
I wrote this script three years ago, and it was the first one where I tried to do something I thought an audience would find interesting rather than something I thought studios would buy. I had gone through various lit managers and had many specs go out to companies, but in the end nothing ever sold. It was time to try something new.
When people first read this script, the feedback was always something like "This is good, but it will never work." Eh? Apparently they enjoyed reading it but couldn't see it as a movie. Well, now with Amazon I have a chance to let them see it as a movie.
There were many things that didn't seem to come across on the page which I knew I could make clear in the movie. The biggest issue was tone. People heard the pitch and assumed it would be something like "Liar, Liar," but it was never my intention to make that kind of movie. Anyone who comes to this with the normal expectations you would have of a comedy (or romantic comedy) is going to be disappointed. But someone who comes to it with an open mind (like you would bring to a Coen Brothers or Charlie Kaufman film) has a better chance of enjoying it.
I wanted to take the story in the direction I thought it would go if this were real. Normally in a movie, you take the story in the direction that will maximize the comedy (or whatever value of the particular genre you're working in), but I decided to try something different. Rather than think of how this wish fulfillment would help him, I thought about what would happen if someone really started speaking in rhyme all the time. People would hate him! Well, the kind of people he was with, anyway. The kind that don't understand creativity. So instead of wish fulfillment, this is curse fulfillment. That opened the story up to new directions. Now we could go down the rabbit hole and see what was there. And find reality in the most absurd places.
Another thing I did differently (and this, admittedly, is a gamble) is having a relatively passive lead character (I say "relatively" because he is active, but his activity is mostly running away from his problems). I know that I'm testing the audience's patience as I make them wait a long time before Ben finally stands up for himself and does something we can root for. But by doing this, the story was able to go places the audience would (hopefully) never have expected. This, to me, is the best feeling a filmmaker can give to the audience - to not know what will happen next, but to WANT to know what will happen next. The hope of something great. Because we've all seen movies where we knew exactly what would happen next, and when it happened we were disappointed. We've also seen movies where we had no idea what would happen next, but we didn't care because it all seemed nonsensical. The goal is to find that happy place where the audience cares about what will happen and is not disappointed when it happens. Hopefully Ben is empathetic enough that the audience will stick with him on his journey and be engaged in the wild changes of his circumstances as they wait for his inevitable turn.
The last big note is that I hope the audience gets so caught up in the character that they barely even notice that he's rhyming. Greg did a great job of always sounding natural in his delivery and not calling too much attention to the rhymes. This was important to me, because I didn't want the audience to react the same way as the characters in the story and say "Enough with the rhyming!" I wanted them to understand him.
So that's it. Feel free to post comments and let me know what you think. I would love to get a dialog going.
Thanks,
Matt
The budget was $3500 (although more will be given to the actors if I win again). I shot it on the Canon T2i, the same camera I used for The Umpire, but this time I had a boom operator (the wonderful Maylin Tu!) there with a mic and sound recorder, rather than recording the sound directly into the camera. Admittedly, when I started shooting The Umpire I didn't really know what I was doing, but throughout the course of production I learned many things, and that knowledge helped me make Speak to Me in Poetry a better film. Things like where to place the camera, how to stage action, how to be clear in my direction with the actors, how to pace the film in editing, had all been learned through trial and error (mostly error) on The Umpire.
But enough about The Umpire. Let's talk Speak to Me in Poetry.
I wrote this script three years ago, and it was the first one where I tried to do something I thought an audience would find interesting rather than something I thought studios would buy. I had gone through various lit managers and had many specs go out to companies, but in the end nothing ever sold. It was time to try something new.
When people first read this script, the feedback was always something like "This is good, but it will never work." Eh? Apparently they enjoyed reading it but couldn't see it as a movie. Well, now with Amazon I have a chance to let them see it as a movie.
There were many things that didn't seem to come across on the page which I knew I could make clear in the movie. The biggest issue was tone. People heard the pitch and assumed it would be something like "Liar, Liar," but it was never my intention to make that kind of movie. Anyone who comes to this with the normal expectations you would have of a comedy (or romantic comedy) is going to be disappointed. But someone who comes to it with an open mind (like you would bring to a Coen Brothers or Charlie Kaufman film) has a better chance of enjoying it.
I wanted to take the story in the direction I thought it would go if this were real. Normally in a movie, you take the story in the direction that will maximize the comedy (or whatever value of the particular genre you're working in), but I decided to try something different. Rather than think of how this wish fulfillment would help him, I thought about what would happen if someone really started speaking in rhyme all the time. People would hate him! Well, the kind of people he was with, anyway. The kind that don't understand creativity. So instead of wish fulfillment, this is curse fulfillment. That opened the story up to new directions. Now we could go down the rabbit hole and see what was there. And find reality in the most absurd places.
Another thing I did differently (and this, admittedly, is a gamble) is having a relatively passive lead character (I say "relatively" because he is active, but his activity is mostly running away from his problems). I know that I'm testing the audience's patience as I make them wait a long time before Ben finally stands up for himself and does something we can root for. But by doing this, the story was able to go places the audience would (hopefully) never have expected. This, to me, is the best feeling a filmmaker can give to the audience - to not know what will happen next, but to WANT to know what will happen next. The hope of something great. Because we've all seen movies where we knew exactly what would happen next, and when it happened we were disappointed. We've also seen movies where we had no idea what would happen next, but we didn't care because it all seemed nonsensical. The goal is to find that happy place where the audience cares about what will happen and is not disappointed when it happens. Hopefully Ben is empathetic enough that the audience will stick with him on his journey and be engaged in the wild changes of his circumstances as they wait for his inevitable turn.
The last big note is that I hope the audience gets so caught up in the character that they barely even notice that he's rhyming. Greg did a great job of always sounding natural in his delivery and not calling too much attention to the rhymes. This was important to me, because I didn't want the audience to react the same way as the characters in the story and say "Enough with the rhyming!" I wanted them to understand him.
So that's it. Feel free to post comments and let me know what you think. I would love to get a dialog going.
Thanks,
Matt
