CS Weekly Archive > From the Trenches > 2/05/10

Reel Life:

BY JENELLE RILEY

Indie filmmakers Josh and Ben Safdie love to blur the lines of reality. In bringing their autobiographical tale Daddy Longlegs to life, they chose to work with a cast of mostly non-actors. Playing Lenny, the loving but irresponsible father who only sees his two young sons a couple weeks out of the year, is filmmaker Ronald Bronstein, director of Frownland. Cast as the two sons, Sage and Frey, are real-life brothers Sage and Frey Ranaldo. And the film was made without a script; instead, the Safdies wrote up a short story that they used to guide the filmmaking process. 

The film, which played Cannes and Sundance, is currently available on demand from Sundance Selects, with a limited release planned for late April/early May before it returns to VOD following the release. The Safdies' first feature, The Pleasure of Being Robbed—in which both brothers appeared as actors and shared editing duties, and which Josh wrote, produced, and directed—is due on DVD next week. 
 
I understand Daddy Longlegs didn't have a traditional script; you had actors improvise off a short story?
Josh Safdie: We had written a couple of screenplays and found that while writing them out, we tried to pack all the details and write all the nuances of acting into the script. What we ended up finding was we were killing the movie. So, with this movie, we wanted to keep it alive in much the same way that when, as a filmmaker, you read a short story or book you're imagining the movie. We tried to use adjectives and certain words and syntax to indicate certain shots we wanted and certain emotions we were getting at. We wrote a 44-page prose story that kind of followed the film. We had some pretty choice dialogue, but for the most part we were mapping the stimuli that we were going to throw at the actors out on the page for Ben and I to translate for the actors.
 
Ben Safdie: We looked at the screenplay format more as a production tool, because when it came down to actually making the movie, we had to break up the entire story by noting loglines, daytime, interior, and such. But we wanted to wait until the very last second to do that, to keep it fresh. Because once you do that, you're sort of regimenting everything so strictly that the movie has to get made right then and there. We wanted to keep that immediacy.
 
Josh: There's such a sense of completion when you finish a screenplay, you can almost be creatively satisfied when you're done with it. And you can sit on it. We didn't want that to happen.
 
Did the actors ever read the short story?
Josh: Ronnie Bronstein didn't read it at first. We kind of walked him through the entire story over the course of five 12-hour diner sessions. We sent him a script; he just never read it until after the movie was done. The way we look at performances is kind of like you hear a story at a bar and you're so transfixed and moved by it, you feel compelled to tell it the next day to someone else. Your own version of that story versus the one you heard, the differences, is kind of the way we look at performance. He didn't want to read it because he understood all the stimuli we were throwing at him. He didn't feel it was necessary to pore over the script again and again, and I think it shows. Eleonore Hendricks, who plays the girlfriend, did read the script because she's a producer as well. And her performance has a more traditional sense to it. 
 
Ben: Because we were working with a lot of non-actors, we didn't want to cage them in with dialogue and make them feel like they were getting the answer wrong. We wanted the performances to come from within them as opposed to from us at them. So we had to tailor everything to that. 
 
The film is said to be quite autobiographical. Does that make it easier or harder to tell?
Josh: It's one-hundred-percent emotionally autobiographical. Our father, all he was worried about was not being forgotten. He had such limited time with us that he didn't have time to reprimand us or time to be an authority figure because that would set a lapse in our high. What's hard is dealing with reviews—because the film's story is so close to me. That's why it hurts when I read reviews and someone calls him a bad father. Our mom watched the movie and she saw it as a hate letter towards our dad. But our dad saw the movie and he saw it as a loving, understanding portrait of a man who's trying. 
 
Ben: We wrote the movie basically trying to understand where he was coming from. If you're ever trying to understand somebody, you're always going to come at it from a place of compassion and love. You wouldn't come at it from a place of hate. So yes, here are some things he does that are really messed up, but these kids' lives wouldn't be the way they were if they didn't have to balance those two worlds. And we wouldn't be the people we are if we didn't have those two sides.

Was it challenging to work with not only non-actors, but children?
Ben: That was actually really exciting, because we had to come up with certain plans of action to guide their performance. It was fun and it kept the movie alive. 
 
Josh: And it dumbed down the level of production. We're always a little skeptical with the professional side of filmmaking; I'm a champion for the amateur. These kids forced us to throw our slate in the garbage and free ourselves from any traditional filmmaking technique. We wanted to get them to forget they were on a film set and force them into these moments of sincerity. 
 
Ben: And that makes everyone more comfortable and genuine.
 
Josh: I'm looking forward to using that on a bigger scale as we go on to make bigger movies.
 
Is that the plan, to move on to bigger films?
Josh: Yes. Of course, as directors we like to make personal films, but I think it's going to be exciting. I never want to abandon the non-actors, because there's so much beauty and nuance and natural poetry that non-actors bring to a set. But to mix them with these real thespians would be really fun, and I think the only way to get to these trained, professional actors is by upping your production. If nothing else, it will be an interesting experiment. One of my favorite Cassavetes movies is his studio movie, Minnie and Moskowitz. I really like what he was—not compromised to do—but how he dealt with the comprise. I think it's an amazing movie.
 
Ben: It's a tough balance. The budget we had with this was very small, but we had a lot of freedom and were able to stretch every dollar to a mile. And that sort of constraint brings a certain type of creativity.
 
How does it work with the two of you writing together; do you ever have arguments?
Josh: What's really special about working with Ben is the fact that we have been through so much crap and shit together and we are the only constant each other has had. We lived in 15 different apartments growing up, and only had each other. Because of that, there was always this constant communication. I always knew if he was upset, we always knew which was more stable in a situation so the other could break down. In general, I tend to romanticize things whereas Ben likes to be very critical in them. We're very interested in the fusion of those two, which is where I think the complication of the movie comes from. So we embraced that. And if we were ever fighting, we knew it was because it was over an idea that wasn't settled or strong. So the fighting was very strong and heavy, but it was important.
 
Your next project is a short film. Why return to the short medium when you're already accomplished feature filmmakers?
Josh: Length is kind of arbitrary to us; it's whatever the movie needs to be. If you look at the first feature film I directed and Ben edited, it's barely 70 minutes. It was intended to be a short film. We have no intention of this next movie becoming a feature film, but who knows? We could be shooting it and something crazy could happen and we could just run on that tangent and choose to develop it into a feature film. We just know that right now we have a 12-page story written out. 
 
Ben: I think one of the problems with short films is, most of the time, they're thought of as short films. You sort of neglect the fact you can work in character and emotions and everything doesn't have to be two-dimensional. You're just dealing with less time. That should be a challenge: to get all the same emotions you can get in a feature film into a short film. It shouldn't be as limiting as it is. I think that's maybe a fault of how screenwriting is taught. I know when we were taught screenwriting, it felt like it was killing any experimentation we wanted to do with story because there were certain ideas or things you had to do. Even to the point where the script has to be three-hole punched with only two brass [brads] holding it together. You're thinking about all that stuff and not the content. 
 
Do you ever encounter writer's block? How do you handle it?
Josh: It's not really writer's block. It's like a world block. All we need to do is have a temporary title and a character. Then we just go about living our lives and through kinetics, things make their way into this world. What is frustrating is if you can't articulate the world you want to enter. So you're having a hard time understanding what the frequency is. That's the closest thing to writer's block that we have.
 
Ben: If you're getting blocked, the most important thing to know is that something isn't working for a reason and you're blocked because you're going down the wrong path. Just that acknowledgement alone will get you further. And it will only make your work stronger in the end.

Jenelle Riley is an L.A.-based writer. She hates spiders.



Daddy Longlegs courtesy Sundance Selects

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