CS Weekly Archive > From the Trenches > 5/16/08

Working His Way Upstream:
Turn the River's Chris Eigeman

By peter clines

Actor turned screenwriter-director Chris Eigeman tells his thoughts on the intertwining elements of a good script, and the Hollywood forces that drove him to write one.

Amidst dozens of film and television roles, actor Chris Eigeman is probably best known as the sadistic gifted-students teacher on Malcolm in the Middle or Lorelei's offbeat boyfriend Jason on Gilmore Girls. What most people don't know is that he's also an avid writer and storyteller who has been working on screenplays and pilots for years. Now, he makes his screenwriting and directorial debut with Turn the River.

Famke Janssen plays Kailey, a gambler and pool hustler who lost custody and visitation rights to her son (Jaymie Dornan) during a bitter divorce from her husband, David (Matt Ross). Now scraping by with her winnings, Kailey and little Gulley (Dornan) meet on the sly and pass letters through her friend Teddy (Rip Torn), a local pool hall owner. With Gulley suffering at the hands of his subtly abusive father and new stepmother, Kailey forges a plan to take back her son and flee to Canada. All she needs to do is acquire two high-end passports that will get them across the border, and to do that she needs to win $60,000 from a local pool shark (John Juback) who has never been beaten.

As he finished up some last-minute projection decisions, Eigeman used his final free hour before the film's Los Angeles premiere to sit down with CS Weekly at the Landmark Theater's bar and talk at length about Edith Wharton, getting lucky at cards, and why he will never, ever tell someone he'll see them tomorrow.

Now, I worked on sets for a long time. I'd say nine times out of 10, when you see an actor who turns writer, especially writer-director, it's because they want better parts for themselves—
It usually ends badly (laughs). That is very true. I play Mike Simms, who is this degenerate, persistent loser to Duncan (Juback), and you really only see me when Famke comes out of the back room, saying, "Is there a game here?" It's me he's beating. It was one of those parts where it was possible he was going to have a line, so I thought I'd just do it rather than cast it. I was 90% sure I was going to cut the line, and I didn't want to do that to an actor. That's a shitty thing to do. Don't audition an actor and then cut him. One of the things I'm really—this sort of goes with the actor-writer thing—I'm really most proud about is that every actor in the film gets a chance to swing for the fences, no matter how small the part is. One of my favorite moments is the kid in the coffee shop. I think it's important that actors have a chance, no matter how small the part is, to really do something, to leave a mark.

Since you weren't doing it for yourself, what made you decide to sit down and write a screenplay?
I think in a lot of ways it's the same skill set. I'd written a bit before. Noah Baumbach (Margot at the Wedding) and I wrote a pilot for NBC years ago that didn't go anywhere, and I'd written some other screenplays. I started this and I had one or two scenes that I thought were really interesting. One of them was where Kailey confronts the ex-husband with a gun, which I was really interested in. On the one hand, you take the character at her word for doing the stupidest thing in the world. What the hell is she doing? And she says, "I'm doing it so you know that our kid will be safe." But by doing that you're almost ensuring it'll end [badly]. You're almost guaranteeing failure by doing this. And then I think there's a thing she doesn't say, which is, "I really wanted to break your nose," which I think is fair, too. So I kind of had that scene, and then I went off and worked with Famke as an actor on a movie called The Treatment. I was really taken by her—no bullshit, really confident, really committed to what she does. Then, when I went back to the script, I realized I was writing for her. The next scene I wrote was the first Gulley-Kailey bench scene, and it was really clear. Her voice and that scene became a touchstone. Whenever I got lost, I would always [go back] to that scene, because I knew any problem I had would be answered.

Did you get any sort of formal training when you started screenwriting? Classes? Books?
None, but as an actor, there are times I'd be reading a script every two or three days. I love the form. I got an English degree and a drama degree, but what I love about screenplays is, it's only dialogue and imagery.

There's two ideas that I use often. One is an Edith Wharton quote. Not a prominent screenplay writer, Wharton (chuckles). I'm confident she never wrote one. She had this quote that dialogue needs to be the foam on top of the wave, and the wave is everything else supporting that little bit of foam. It's plot, it's character, it's the story's drive—it's that little bit of foam that is actually everything below it. I've always liked that image, that dialogue is the result of everything else. If I keep that in my mind, I don't start writing things like crappy, expositional dialogue.

The other thing is, people love to take apart scripts and start talking about plot and character and tone and music and all this. That's all crap. The reality is that character is plot. Plot is dialogue. Dialogue is character. When it's working well, it's all one thing. I'm happy to sit around and talk to people about plot as plot and character as character. It's convenient and it helps in conversations, but truth be told, I don't believe in it. I think that it is all one thing.

Do you write just so you can direct, or would you want to just write a screenplay for someone else to direct?
I'm going into production on another one right now, another one that I wrote, so…I wrote it to direct it. The idea of writing something that means something to me and giving it to somebody else to direct…it makes me want to put my face in a blender. I don't know that I could. I probably should (chuckles). It was also a rebellion against writing for television, where you are a servant to so many masters. You're a servant to the studio, a servant to the network, your individual producers, the characters, the stars -- I just needed to be unburdened of all that.

David, the dad—he's a bad father but it's a lot more subtle than in most films. Why didn't you use any of the standard film shorthand for that?
I don't do any of that, and I really hate that stuff. I wrote it specifically for Matt, but it's a "trap" character. If the actor doing the part does any of those things, tips it too hard, you're doomed. Now you're just a stereotype "bad dad," and suddenly you're making a very different movie. The dangerous thing about the father is he can be mean to his son in a way that only his son understands he's being mean. Nobody else. That is a really insidious and insipid thing to do. David also does the truly evil thing in the movie, out of weakness and revenge and out of just not liking his kid particularly, by saying, "She has a gun." When he knows damn well it's not a gun. If he didn't do that, we'd have a very different ending.

Speaking of the ending, without giving too much away, the film ends a bit bleakly. Why set up so many rays of hope throughout the film and then finish dark?
I've taken some flak for the ending. It upsets people. It upset people when I wrote it. My producer was never upset by it. Famke was never upset by it. It's the ending. There's press out there that takes issue, and I understand that. But if I'd done the inverse, there'd be a lot more press coming down on me (chuckles). That's just not the movie I made. Don't get me wrong, I'm not out to kick puppies. I don't want to do that.

Now that you're on this side of it, how do you feel about actors changing lines in the script?
My opinion is that we beat the shit out of this script to make sure it was solid, that it could survive. These are all actors I'm either friends with or I admire. Anyone who wants to make a suggestion—welcome. Some parts lend themselves more than others. Markus (Terry Kinney) is the least defined on the page. There's almost no text there; it's pure subtext, and the subtext is, "I am desperately in love with you but have absolutely no facilities to say how desperately in love I am." The Kailey character doesn't lend itself much to improv. We would change little things here and there, but for whatever reason, that character just didn't lend itself much to it. David and stepmother and Gulley, no. Especially those dining room scenes, there's no wiggle room there. That is what it is.

"Turn the river" is a poker term, yes?
It's a lot of things. It's sort of a poker term. In cards, in poker, the second to last card, no matter what game you're playing, be there community cards or not, the second to last card is "the turn," the last card is "the river." So there is a sense that the river is the card with the most fate. At the same time, if you win a hand on the river, it's sort of dishonorable. You didn't play that hand particularly well, you just got lucky. That's how Kailey wins her first game, and that's why that guy goes mad.

The other thing it is—I grew up out west, and summers I would work on a ranch. There was very little water, and these old guys would come in and irrigate fields for you. They were kind of like witches; they could make a lot happen with a little bit of water. I remember one of them used to always say, "Water's gonna do what water's gonna do. You can't turn a river." It's the same idea. It's still dealing with fate, but it's a little gentler and it goes down a little simpler.

What do you think you learned on this first screenplay that you'll use on your next one?
I wish to God somebody had told me this. It's small and stupid but it's so important. Don't ever write, unless you gun-to-your-head have to, "I'm going to see you tomorrow." Because if you say that, you have now locked yourself into a timeline. If you suddenly get screwed in editing and tomorrow needs to be two days from now, you can't be on me when I say that. But it feels very weird to be on you when I say, "Let's meet tomorrow." There's one time in the movie that I do it, when Lois says, "Well, let's all go to church tomorrow." And I got hosed. So, "Let's all go to church on Sunday." Nobody knows what day today is. It's a movie. That was a really stupid, chumpy thing I should've known and I didn't and it bit me in the ass. I know you were looking for something bigger and better, but God, I really wish someone had mentioned that.

The other thing I learned: sometimes you'll write something, particularly in scene description or in action, and it will just lay there. But you know that cinematically it's really important. Don't abandon that. You know that, cinematically, he turns around and waves again, which you could cut for page count, but then you might forget it. Stick by that. One forgets that we're really dealing with images, as well as action and dialogue. Don't give upon imagery, even if it just lays there sometimes.

Peter Clines has had a lifelong love affair with the movies. He grew up in New England, where he studied English literature and education, and now lives and writes somewhere in Southern California. If anyone knows exactly where, he would appreciate a few hints.

Chris Eigeman, Turn the River courtesy Screen Media Films

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