CS Weekly Archive > From the Trenches > 8/1/08

Making It Count:
Swing Vote's Joshua Michael Stern

By peter clines

What if a series of coincidences left the future of the free world in the hands of one man? And what if that man was…well, not the man you wanted making that decision? Writer-director Joshua Michael Stern takes a look at how an electorate of one changes the political process, and how that one got there.

After a few years of struggling through the film industry, Joshua Michael Stern's first attempt at being a writer-director, Neverwas, attracted an A-list cast and more than a few critical nods. Now he returns with Swing Vote, the tale of an every-day guy in modern America who ends up having to make a gigantic choice.

Bud Johnson (Kevin Costner) is a small-town guy with no aspirations past knocking back a few beers with his friends, keeping his no-stress job as an egg-checker at the packing plant, and taking care of his civic-minded little daughter, Molly (Madeline Carroll). Despite a promise to vote on election day, Bud passes out drunk and Molly decides to sneak in at the last moment and cast his ballot for him, accidentally causing a glitch in the voting machines in the process. That glitch means Bud will be allowed to recast "his" vote and decide the result of his county…which will decide the result of his state, which in turn will decide the result of the very, very tight general election. Now the incumbent (Kelsey Grammer), the challenger (Dennis Hopper), all their staff members, and a legion of reporters are descending on the flyspeck of Texico, New Mexico to see whom Bud will cast his vote for. However, despite Molly's urgings, her simple-minded father can't see the great responsibility he holds and just believes he's the luckiest man on Earth to garner so much attention and get invited to so many parties.

As Swing Vote gets ready for its box office returns and exit polls, writer-director Stern took some time on the phone with CS Weekly to talk about insecure actors, his love of outlines, and why his film dodges all the big issues.


Swing Vote is only your second film, yet from the start you've attracted A-list stars. What do you think is it about your scripts that attracts so many great actors?
Actors are drawn to good roles that have good arcs. I think we would be surprised at how few scripts come across an actor's desk that have the kind of arcs and growth that really get them interested, that would go beyond them doing a movie for money. When I write any script, I always have in my mind to get a movie funded, have a movie be good, and having a part that will really attract an actor. Secondly, it's meeting them and letting them understand that theirs will be a participant process. When I meet an actor, I very often let them know a role written is sort of "off the rack." It can't necessarily apply to every actor that would be, age-wise, appropriate for a role. Every actor brings their own nuance, personality, and sense about them to the role. So I let them understand this is a process. That we'll go through the dialogue, go through the character, and when there needs to be something more to round out the beats, we'll do that.

What's writing generally like for you? Lots of outlines? Note cards? Do you spew out a first draft and spend months editing it?
I'm a believer in outlines. I think they're really important. The outline's the time to really feel the movements of the movie—the first, the second, the third act. If anything, you just spend time polishing the outline and getting a real sense of where your movie will lay. And then there's a point, and you always do sort of feel it, where there really isn't anything you can do except move forward. I think there's less chance of having the third act go completely off the rails, as it might happen if you didn't outline and were just writing stream of consciousness. I think for writers the biggest block is the initial draft. It always is. It's the most painful draft, and it's also the one that keeps writers pacing in front of that blank screen. The easiest way to circumvent that is to not make that first draft precious at all. An outline allows you to almost robotically fill in the blanks. It allows you to wake up in the morning and simply write. There's scenes one, two, three, four, five, and six, as opposed to waking up and thinking, "Gosh, what comes next…?" So if you have every scene pretty much outlined, you're not thinking about the polished dialogue, you're not about what comes next, which often stunts you and freezes you. You're just following what you've written, for good or for bad, and you just go. When I write with my writing partner, Jason Richman, I always feel it's completely okay to leave scenes blank if you're on a roll. If you get stuck just put a slug that says 'They say something here,' and move on.

What first sparked the idea for Swing Vote?
I had finished my first film and Jason had finished this rewrite of a studio film and we both felt completely disillusioned with the political system. More than that, we felt disengaged. We didn't want to watch the news, we had no interest in what was going on, we just felt separate from the political system. Yet at the same time, we were in the midst of one of the most trying times we'd been in a while. So we wrote a populist movie about one man's vote out of that sense, and knowing the next election would probably be the most important election of the next 20 years. I don't think we could've predicted it would be this close or the country would be as divided as it is. So the fact that the actual events are somehow correlating and paralleling the script is fortuitous.

How long did it take you to figure out a premise or plot device that would let one man's vote decide the election?
A while. We knew by the nature of the set-up the main character, Bud, couldn't try to vote himself because at this point he's apathetic and not engaged in the system. But we also had a little girl who was engaged and really wanted her father to vote. I think that high concepts are dangerous. So many studio films or big concept comedies fall flat because they're really hard to pull off. We always knew the only way to sell this comedy was to deliver a character who so believed it that you would suspend the disbelief. When Molly is sitting in front of that polling station, she's just so broken up, and she goes in to do the voting, I think it works. If it didn't work, nothing after page 18 would've worked. I mean these are fantasy, Capra-esque movies that are not based in reality, but at the same time you need to drive the plot forward with believable characters. I'm a huge believer you can get away with any concept no matter how ridiculous if people love and care for your lead characters. It's amazing how a beautifully crafted film can fall apart after 40 minutes if you just don't care about any of the characters. I was in terror about that scene when she votes, because I knew if it didn't work the movie wouldn't work.

Is it tough to write a believably dumb character like Bud?
[laughs] It's very hard to write a dumb character, and it's very hard to write a drunk character. It's the same credo for actors—it's hard to play dumb and it's hard to play drunk, because you can't play into it, you just have to be it. You have to create a character that isn't a complete buffoon, but at the same time you have to have somebody who's believably out of it and apathetic. He was really tough, and we went through many incarnations and drafts of certain scenes to get the tone of that right. A lot of it is really working with the actor and finding out what his zone is. Costner is not necessarily the guy you're going to play as the drinker. He drinks in the movie, but that's not going to be his thing. He's going to come up with that much more innocent, sort of goofy guy, as opposed to another actor who probably doesn't have that innate sense Costner does of that kind of American Everyman he's always played, that iconic baseball player. That's why he was so perfect for it, because when you write these characters you also have to have people be sympathetic to them. Even if it's not a huge amount of sympathy, you have to have some sympathy.

There isn't a lot of actual politics in Swing Vote past a few standard, fairly partisan topics, and even these get played for laughs when both sides are so willing to reverse their positions. Why make a political film that doesn't deal with any politics?
One of the issues we knew as writers, up front, was we didn't love political films. I'm not a lover of films about politics, and I also think that audiences tend not to be. You can get very preachy and 'higher-than-thou' when it comes to feeding them messages about politics. We didn't want to just stand on politics; we wanted to take a stand on someone's want to be involved in this system. So it was a real balancing act of having a movie that dealt with the election coming down to one man's vote, and the two candidates going and campaigning to an electorate of one, and at the same time needing the actual issues to be a C or D story. As far as the issues themselves go, we also wanted to choose ones that would not be dated. We wanted this movie to have some legs. So we came upon those hot-button issues we knew would probably never go away, just given the Judeo-Christian makeup of the country. Abortion's never going to go away, gay marriage is never going to go away, the issue of immigration will be here in 50 years, believe me. We knew those issues would stand up more than any particular issue that might be more of the moment, like the Iraq War.

Your film does have an incumbent Republican president going up against a Democratic candidate…is there a subtle real-world message there?
It wasn't really. When you write these movies, you're creating four or five different storylines. You have to be very careful about how you plan out those actors' arcs, and you have to say a lot in a very little amount of time. We felt the Republican president could say, in two pages, a lot more than if we had the Democratic president, because the Republicans tend to be a lot more cut and dry. Yet at the same time, we felt the Democrat would be a good person campaigning because he's a little more in the throes of a campaign. We felt it was a good match to have those two. We tried to be fair in how we skewered both sides, not attempting to favor one or the other.

Did you learn anything while writing this script that came in handy on your upcoming King Lear?
I think King Lear's a bit different because it's an adaptation, even though I've cut it and given it a take. Actually, I'll reverse myself. I think I have learned something that could apply to Lear or to any movie. It's very hard, when you're writing, to see the whole film. I had a couple of gut instincts on things I left in Swing Vote in the writing stage that eventually were cut. Granted, there was not a lot cut, but there were a few things I did. When you make a movie, every day is precious filming. You need to be ultra-aware when you write a script to make sure every scene is moving it forward, everything is completing the arc of your main story, and you're always with the people who are driving the plot. Whenever you're deviating, you have to bring it back. Never fall in love with a storyline just to fall in love with the storyline, because in the end you want the movie to work as a whole and not be at the mercy of what your particular liking is. You have to really objectify it. Edit, edit, edit.

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.

Joshua Michael Stern, Swing Vote courtesy Touchstone Pictures

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