Remaining Screening Times: May 2nd, 10:30pm (AMC Village VII), May 4th, 11:00am (Village East)




John Magary is having a good year. Fresh off winning a prize at SXSW and a run at the Student Academy Award with his powerful short film The Second Line, which debuted last year in Edinburgh, he finally has a chance to screen in front of a hometown crowd. His newest project, Blood Abundance, or the Half-Life of Antoinette, was workshopped at the Sundance's January Screenwriters Lab and was recently accepted into the June Directors Lab for his newest project. John, whose girlfriend Myna Joseph (Man) is a terrific filmmaker in her own right, was part of a dynamite 2006 MFA Film class at Columbia that included 07' 25 New Faces Fellipe Barbosa Gamarosa and Moon Molson, both of whom will also be at the June Director's Lab with there projects.

Filmmaker: Tell us about the genesis of The Second Line - what initially inspired you, what the writing process was like, how you raised money, etc...

Magary: I went with my brother Jim and girlfriend Myna to New Orleans a few months after Katrina. While we grew up in Dallas, my brother and I had never been there before, and we figured--I don't know what we figured, that we would see it for the first time at its lowest, and maybe do something to help out. We got in around New Year's Eve, and volunteered briefly with a now-legendary activist recovery group called Common Ground Collective, gutting a house in Plaquemines Parish, which is a drive out of the city.

We also ate a bunch, drove through the okay neighborhoods and the ruined ones. We saw Ray Nagin twice; the first time he was eating beignets at Cafe du Monde and the second time he was ushering in the New Year at a very foggy Jackson Square. We were not impressed with Nagin then, and we aren't now.

Still, I fell hard for the city. We all did. It was a remarkable few days. The act of gutting a house is pretty grueling, pretty unpleasant. You're basically tossing someone's material life away, which you have to, because it's all been rendered useless and harmful, covered in molds and muds. Story ideas don't come very easily to me, but I knew I wanted to shape a short narrative around this act of house-gutting. Ripping out the innards of a stranger's house.

I'd written a feature script with two side characters named Natt and MacArthur, and decided, on Myna's advice, to base the script around them. The writing process took months and months. The first drafts don't much resemble the last ones. I got a great deal of help from friends at Columbia, and my friend Jeff McMahon in LA. My teacher Eric Mendelsohn was exceedingly helpful with the script.

Geoff Quan, another Columbia student, agreed to produce it--it would be his thesis, as well. We got an initial grant from HBO Films, one given through Columbia--that made the whole thing seem real. Then it was a matter of writing desperate letters to family and friends, and taking out heaps of student loans. Geoff and co-producer Myna Joseph worked some very good deals in New Orleans, and in Dallas. (Myna, who had more experience with production than Geoff, was indispensable--we couldn't have made it without her. Seriously, she saved us.)

We had to fly in some key crew positions--oddly enough, as a money-saving tactic--and got the rest of the crew from the area, mostly through the University of New Orleans. We scored a great local AD, Matt Paul, as well as an amazing local production designer, Mara LePere-Schloop, who's gonna be a Captain of her Field and must work with me always. All in all, our crew was great.

In earnest, pre-production was about four to six weeks. Shooting was seven days, in total. Post-production seemed like seven years. For a twenty-minute film. Who'd 'a thunk it.

That was such a long-winded answer. I'm sorry.

Filmmaker: Post Katrina New Orleans is often portrayed in the news media as a cesspool of misery and violence - what was your experience like shooting there?

Magary: Well, shooting was relatively smooth, partially because--and this is a sad reason--it was so empty in parts. We shot in a FEMA camp at UNO, which we were very nervous about--you're dragging track around someone's front yard, and they're not exactly happy to be there in the first place--but it was close to Christmas, so most of the students were gone. Also, and this was hilarious, but college students in general have such low expectations for housing that some of these guys were absolutely digging their new trailers. And they had a point: it was just them! Their own pad! Pretty funny. All in all, though, just being in those trailers can wear hard on you. They're cramped, and they smell weird. And some have been found to be toxic.

The other location was an ungutted house, and what you see in the film is what is was: a flooded house, full of muck. There wasn't much design there, beyond shifting piles around. Of course, there were safety issues. Black mold is toxic, so we were careful to supply the cast and crew with masks and Tyvek suits. We shot all the gutting scenes in one day. It was not a pleasant day.

The violence issue is tricky in New Orleans--part of it is perception, that you're in this notorious city, where, as we've seen on TV, everyone just walks around shooting at cops, who are usually too busy looting Wal-Marts to notice. Some of those perceptions have a lot to do with race, and the fact that a lot of white people are scared of black people.

The other part of it, sadly, is statistics: the murder rate is very high there, as is the rate of handgun ownership. Add to that poverty, struggling public education, criminal government negligence, and sweltering humidity. I don't want to overstate it, but there's certainly a more off-kilter vibe in the city. It's smart to keep your wits about you.

On the flipside, and this is a big part of why I love the place so much, New Orleanians don't just say hi on the street, they ask how you're doing. There's more hugging, more compliments out of the blue, more dancing with strangers, and in general, a hell of a lot more fun. It's a warm place, leisurely, but also socially complex in a way that very few places are. In his stage directions in A Streetcar Named Desire, sixty years ago, Tennessee Williams called New Orleans a "cosmopolitan city where there is a relatively warm and easy intermingling of races in the old part of town." As far as I can tell, it's still like that.

Another long-winded answer. Two for two. I guess I'm lonely.

Filmmaker: What were your biggest challenges when constructing the film in post-production?

Magary: I edited the film myself, which presents its own psychological challenges--why did I write that? Where are the takes? Why did I say cut?

It took a few solid weeks, and again I had great notes from my peers at Columbia. A constant struggle to sharpen the narrative.

My old college roommate Kai Gross did the music. I'm very proud of his score, all played by friends individually in Kai's home studio, then mixed together beautifully by our sound editor Paul Bercovitch. Scoring and spotting and sound mixing are processes I really, really love.

The worst challenges ended up being pretty boring. Issues with HD transferring, and timecode errors, and on and on. We shot on Super 16--Chris Teague, an amazing DP who has worked with me on most of my films, shot it--but knew we probably wouldn't have the funds to make a 35mm print, so we finished on an uncompressed HD tape. We were lucky to be able to use a new HD facility at Columbia, and got a lot of crucial help from the post supervisor at Columbia, Cecil Esquivel-Obregon, who has a zen-like patience. The room enabled us to cut uncompressed HD, but we were guinea pigs, so...as I said, many days lost to a boiling sea of 1's and 0's.

Filmmaker: Al Thompson and J.D. Williams, who, despite their relative youth, both seem like veteran New York actors, are terrific in your film - tell us about working with them.

I'd seen their work, and made heartfelt offers to them, and bizarrely enough, they accepted. It's funny, originally, of course, I wanted to work with all local talent--wouldn't anyone shooting in New Orleans?--and we have two great local actors, Dane Rhodes and Karen Pritchett, at the heart of it. But we just couldn't find the right guys for Natt and MacArthur.

Al and J.D. have been in a lot--commercials, features, shorts. They were relaxed and professional, which was crucial, because we weren't able to do much in the way of rehearsal. With the help of another actor in the film, we'd gone through some very cursory dialect work, some cadences of New Orleans. And then we just went from there. They're pretty unfussy: they've waited around before, they've had the home cooking, they've been in odd locations--neither was happy about eating muffalettas, but we got through it. We set them up in the French Quarter--I think everyone had a pretty great experience, honestly. Geoff and Myna and Nelson kept them very happy. No pretensions, no huffs.

I'm not sure I threw them any curveballs, really. J.D.'s performance is right out there--he's not swallowing anything up, really, because Natt's a bit of a hothead. Al was trickier--he gives such a muted performance, there were times, I admit, when I'd turn to Chris and whisper if he's seeing anything. It was one of those cases--when I was cutting it together, I saw exactly what Al was doing. He's quiet, but there's a growing disturbance. I was so happy with his performance.

And then there were these little unexpected bonuses from their past work. At the climax, J.D.'s character is required to do some minor stunt work. Of course, from his days on The Wire, J.D. is stunt certified, so he's really orchestrating it all there. We were in good hands.

And they were patient when I sometimes gave them mumbling paraphrases instead of useable actions. And they let me know when some of my stabs at African-American dialect were goofy. God bless 'em.

Filmmaker: Your film was made in conjunction with the MFA Film Program at Columbia and clearly was not cheap. If you hadn't been working toward a degree, would it have been feasible to make this kind of short? With very little infrastructure to support non-feature, artisanal film work, are shorts worth making in and of themselves?

Magary: No, it wasn't really cheap, though you'd be horrified to know how much cheaper it was than some shorts, especially some from schools. We didn't waste money, that's for sure.

These are great questions, really. Would I have made the film if I didn't have that thesis deadline? I've asked myself that a bunch. Motivations and deadlines help me out a great deal--ask anyone who's worked with me. I need a deadline.

Without Columbia breathing down my neck, I would've made something in New Orleans, but probably not on this scale. Film school is a horrible money-suck, but while you're in the thick of it, you're getting loans and you're using their facilities. On top of that, we got a grant that ended up being over a third of our budget--without Columbia, there's no grant, without the grant, we're probably not making a twenty-minute short on Super 16 1300 miles away from our apartments. Because how would we?

There's the added pressure, too, of this being Your Final Short Film ever, which is a mistaken perception, but that's the way it's set up as you grind into your last years of school. You do want to make it count. You've learned a lot (hopefully), you've formed relationships with teachers and peers, and you just want to make something...I want to say "good," but "good" doesn't require a budget. I wanted to make something better, certainly, to tackle something I hadn't tackled before, in the framing or in performance or in the whole conception. I wanted to shoot on film, for whatever reason, as did Chris. My shot design often required a good, fluid dolly. We needed lights, we needed a good central crew. We couldn't fake the locations. I'm sure someone could've shot this script in two days handheld on DV, and done it well. But I couldn't, and moreover, I didn't want to. So you scrape up the money, and you ask your mom if she'll cook food for everyone. Which she did. And it was tasty.

Are shorts worth making? Of course! Some expressions are short--that's that. A million things can dictate length: character, plot, formal requirements, pace, tone. Beyond that, budget, format, interest, someone's schedule. Shorts only seem like an inferior form because we never get to see them. That's our loss.

What you can do with a short--where you can show it, how you can show it--is another issue entirely. There are markets for shorts, but they're mostly in Europe. Here, you just hope they can be seen in a theater with a nice audience at some festival somewhere. If someone wants to see a DVD, you send it to them. Maybe some day it'll be on PBS or HBO Zone or whatever, or, less preferably in my case, the web. Humble goals for a short, really.

In any case, if you've never made something, and you want to, a short is as good a way as any to learn. Smaller cost, smaller risk, smaller regret when you inevitably fuck it up.

Filmmaker: You've had a tremendous festival run so far, with stops at Edinburgh, Sundance, San Francisco, Clermont-Ferrand and the Student Academy Awards, along with prizes at SXSW and AFI Dallas. What advice would you have for short filmmakers about to embark upon the often dizzying festival trail?

Magary: Oh man. I might be the wrong person to ask. I miss deadlines all the time. Sarasota? Boston Independent? They sound great, but yeah, I forgot to apply. Next year--

There are so many festivals. I would advise you pick the ones you might actually want to go to, and check on their infrastructure, their taste. Do they program good stuff? Because if you've made a good film (or you think you've made a good film, anyway), you're not going to get into a festival with dumb programmers, because they're dumb and they'll pick a dumb film. Nothing more annoying than getting rejected by a festival run by half-wits.

I would also advise, ALWAYS, asking for a fee waiver. Just write the festival a nice little email, stating your case, saying if you've gotten into anything, and asking if they might waive or reduce your fee. Otherwise, you might be spending hundreds or even thousands of dollars just to enter festivals, which is absurd. Most of them will say no; some will take pity.

It's looking more and more like an industry, a festival industry. Every city and town each needs their own six opposing festivals, and regardless of their history or taste, they'll charge you forty bucks just to look at your eight-minute film. Then you fly to it, and they don't do a Q&A, the projection's crap, the other movies are crap, there are six people in the audience, and you're out another five hundred bucks. And you're staring at a cash bar.

Don't get me wrong, some festivals are great. You interact with people, you talk about the process, you talk about the work, what you could possibly have been thinking when you did X, etc. Those kinds of festivals give you the brass to keep going.

But yeah, it can get overwhelming and frustrating. If I were you, dear reader, I'd apply to a slew at the outset, see what happens, don't get discouraged, but also don't drag it on forever. There's no point. Make another film. Also, if you do get into some festivals, but you can't afford to go, then don't go! Your film will be seen either way, and that's what matters most--you're reaching a new audience.

Filmmaker: Tell us about your new project.

Magary: I have a feature script set in New Orleans, tentatively titled Blood Abundance, or the Half-Life of Antointette. How's that for convolution? It's about a mother raising seven kids.

I was really lucky to get the script into the Sundance Screenwriters' Lab, and now it's going into the Directors' Lab in June. it's been a great experience. They're tremendously supportive, Ilyse McKimmie, Michelle Satter, Mike Mohan, all of them. Their reputation precedes them, of course, but seriously, to phrase it with a dated urban slant, their shit is for real. They want me to make the movie I want to make, and I am eager to oblige.

So, yeah, I want to make the feature, I desperately want to make it. The scale of the thing's a little large--it's a period piece with approximately eight gazillion characters--so I want to write a back-up script, something much smaller, much closer, something totally different. To keep my motor humming, in case things develop slowly, and then POW, I make another one. POW.

And there's a short I'd like to make in the summer sometime. And maybe some specs or sketches or whatevers, with friends. You know, for giggles. Things we can afford. We all keep saying, a bunch of us from Columbia, we don't MAKE enough films. Why aren't we making more? Are we scared? What the hell's our problem?

I'm also planning on writing even longer answers to blog interviewers. You know, REALLY getting into it.

# posted by Brandon Harris @ 5/02/2008 01:27:00 PM

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