Eastern College Filmmaker Interview
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Interview With director James Francis Flynn By Chris 22/9/09
Eastern College is another great indie college comedy with great acting, good directing and great writing. I wanted to know so I did.
1. How did the film come about?
In the summer of 2006, I worked on my friend AJ Rickert-Epstein’s movie, “Fingerman”. It was an action/comedy movie about a young man who suddenly discovers the ability to shoot invisible bullets from his fingers. AJ and I wrote the screenplay together based on a short film he’d done several years prior. I had written several screenplays before then, but this one was the first one that had gotten produced. It was also the first time I had written anything comedic.
I had a small bit part in “Fingerman” and was around the set quite a bit. The thing that I discovered is that making a low-budget comedy is a lot of fun. It was more fun, I imagined, than making a low-budget drama. With that in mind, I went back home to Chicago after spending the summer shooting “Fingerman” in Ohio and wrote a comedy about college.
There were three main reasons for this: 1) I knew I could go back to my hometown, a small college town in Ohio, and shoot the movie cheaply; 2) the interdisciplinary degree I got from my university was being phased out, and I wanted to address some of the emotions I had about that; 3) and finally, I had enjoyed my time in college quit a bit and I knew there were many stories from my journals that I could mine for laughs.
2. What was the inspiration behind the story?
The above pretty well addresses this question.
3. How long did it take to film the movie?
Almost exactly a month. We started in Chicago in late June 2007 and shot all of July.
4. How was the process of choosing the actors for the film like?
Most of the actors were folks I knew either from growing up or from college, and I wrote several of the characters specifically for those actors. The character Nathan was played by Jonathan Dominic, who I remembered from seeing on stage at Miami University. Chris Cowan was the lead in “Fingerman”, and I wanted to cast him in a completely different role from his nerdy character in that film. Noah Applebaum is someone I grew up with and have known since kindergarten; I wrote that part for him; Brandon Lea is another childhood friend who has done lots of theatre and short films.
Lauren Parkinson was another Miami University actresses; Jonathan Dominic recommended her after a Chicago actress I knew had to drop out. Laure-Lyne Zbinden was someone I found on Craigslist; she had no prior acting experience. Hannah Phelps is a friend from Chicago. Christina Napier had been in “Fingerman”, as had Darren Bailey. “Low Ride” was played by Nicole Bailey, who is Darren’s wife. And finally, Elizabeth Laidlaw, who plays the bad guy in the movie, is a Chicago actress who I worked with on a short film at Chicago Filmmakers, a local co-op.
5. Was it hard to edit the film to make the story flow?
No, the editing was fun. AJ and I sweated in out in his small apartment in the San Fernando Valley in September of 2007. We stuck pretty closely to the screenplay, and the flow wasn’t hard to maintain because of the small amount of coverage we shot.
What was difficult was keeping the length of the film down. There was quite a bit of improvisation on set that was hard to cut, and, being this was my first film, I did the typical rookie mistake wherein I wrote too much story for what the movie needed to be. It took several more months of tweaking the film to get the cut down to a reasonable length, because it is really hard to kill your babies.
6. Has the film had much international sales yet?
We’re in negotiations right now.
7. How have americans taken to the film?
I’ve had some minor success on the film festival circuit. I premiered in my hometown, where we shot the film. The town is Oxford, Ohio, where Miami University is located. The film one the Audience Award for Best Narrative Feature, and then went on to play festivals in Los Angeles, New York, and Iowa. We’ve picked up a few awards here and there, had several other screenings of the film not affiliated with film festivals, and got the film picked up by a distributor for worldwide distribution. For such a low-budget film with no stars, I consider this a success.
8. Were you happy the way the film turned out?
That’s a difficult question to answer. I’m proud of the film and I’m happy that I made it, and I think it is a good stepping-stone. That said, I believe I can make much better films than this, and I intend to.
9. Was it hard to make the film with the budget you had?
Not especially. We designed the film, both in the writing and in the prep, to be shot for a very small amount. I mainly wish that we had had more money just to pay the cast and crew.
10. What have been the responses so far to the film been like?
Generally, I think peope find the movie funny. If so, mission accomplished.
11. Was it hard to get finance for the film?
There were two small investors, and considering they were family, they were not difficult to get. The rest of the money came from me, which was also not hard to get!
I’m working on financing my next movie independently. This is proving to be trickier.
12. What did you learn from making of this film that you can use for
future features?
Too many things to mention.
13. Has the internet played a good part in promoting the film and
generating sales?
Yes. Between Facebook groups, having the movie on Amazon.com for pre-order, having an email list to notify cast and crew of screenings, and many more things, the internet hs been invaluable to the making and promoting of this film.
14. What was the editing process like for the film?
I answered this partially above, but to go into more detail, I slept on part of a sectional couch in a small apartment in North Hollywood for a month. AJ and I would wake up every day in the late morning, make breakfast, and cut for about 12 hours a day. Then we’d play video games and drink beer. Then we’d do it all again the next day.
We did an assembly while we did the main edit. In other words, we’d usually go chronogically through the story, and I’d pick the takes and the direct the shape of the scenes, and AJ would put it all together and make it look professional.
We spent about a month doing this, at which point we had a 2:15 cut. A month later, AJ came to Chicago and we cut 12 more minutes out of the movie. We cut another 15 minutes out of the film before our world premire, and then another 6 minutes out by the time the film was released on DVD. These subsequent cuts were mostly from reactions of friends who had seen the movie, audience reactions from film festival screenings, and just sitting with the movie for many months and getting a sense of what worked and what didn’t.
15. Is their anything you wouldn’t do next time that you did this
time in regards to making of the film?
Again, there are many things that I learned, but they are too lengthy to get into in depth. The point of making this movie was just to hop in head-long and give myself a filmmaking bootcamp — to go from the academic, intellectual idea of what making a film is, to the practical, nitty-gritty of what it is actually like. The pressure of being on set, of answering myriad questions that the cast and crew have, making split decisions, creatively collaborating. When you do that, you’re going to learn a lot, and I did.
16. What next for yourself?
I’m prepping a new feature, “The Stick-Up Kid”, to shoot in Chicago this autumn. The movie is about Montgomery Greene, a mugger in Chicago who is trying to give up the criminal life and return to his first love: playing saxophone in a Motown-style R&B/soul band. The plan is to have a cut done in the winter, premiere the film at a festival, and then immediately start touring the film with a live band accompanying the action on-screen.
17. Did the actors stay pretty much to the script or was improv allowed?
It depended on the scene. I actually sometime write in the script a description of scene but no dialogue, forcing them to improvise. There were several scenes with Noah Applebaum where I did this, because he’s very good at improv and whatever he did would be funnier than anything I could write. But sometimes, the actors would improv, and I would gently lead them back to the written lines.
18. Were their any major problems when making the film?
There were several things: the original main house location fell through and we had to find a new one; we didn’t prep the movie enough so we were stressed during the shooting, and there was constant hair-pulling about getting the movie cut down to a proper length.
19. Is it hard to make an independent film in this day and age?
I think it is easier to make a film than it has ever been.
20. What advice can you give to some one wanting to make a independent film?
I have conflicting advice here: if you want to make a film, go out and make one! That’s the best way to do it.
At the same time, there are too many films being made right now; the market is flooded with bad movies. So, I also think you need to really know what you’re doing before you do it. Take the time to learn your craft — go to film school, work as a PA on other people’s work, watch a LOT of films, read a lot of books, study acting and screenplay and story structure (this is key), write and write and rewrite and rewrite again, study the independent film market and where your movie fits into it, go to film festivals and meet other filmmakers and learn about the business, and make short films before you make features. Do not hop right into features — you aren’t ready.
Like David Foster Wallace said, “I wish you way more than luck.”
