Caffeinated Clint
Dana Adam Shapiro Co-Directed his first Documentary, “Murderball”, which was released on the festival circuit earlier this year to a phenomenal response, and gathering several major awards along the way. In town to promote his new novel, “The Every Boy”, Dana was kind enough to speak with me for my first interview about “Murderball”, “The Every Boy”, Writing, Editing, Directing, chewing in Henry Rollins ear & killing his darling.
I’ll be completely honest with you, I’m a bit nervous. This is my first interview!
Oh Yeah? This is your very first interview?
It is indeed, so if I come across as a bit amateurish, I do apologize!
No worries at all!
You were formerly the senior editor at Spin Magazine for non-music articles, is that right?
Yeah, that was from about 2000 to… it was about two years and a little bit, like 2 years and 2 months.
And you were also a co-founder of Icon Magazine?
Yeah.
So what inspired the move away from the magazine editing world, to first writing the article for “Maxim” on “Murderball”?
I was writing freelance while I was an editor at Spin so that wasn’t really a leap. But in this case, the article was the gateway to a film. I think the heart of journalism is very similar to that of documentary filmmaking: Non-fiction storytelling. Find a subject, find compelling characters, sniff out the story. My filmmaking partners, Jeff Mandel and Henry Alex Rubin, all brought different talents to this project. Henry was the only one with any actual film experience – he’d co-directed Who is Henry Jaglom in ’97 and shot some second unit. Jeff was in law school when we started and really learned how to produce on the fly.
When you decided to make the documentary, how did you approach the key players in the film such as Joe (Soares) & Mark (Zupan)….. How did you approach them and gain their confidence that you were gonna be making a serious documentary on them?
At first it was just research for a potential film. I did a bunch of interviews with the guys -Zupan, Hogsett, Bob, Andy – and they told me all about their accidents, their sport, and then Hogsett said: "If you’re really interested, the world championships are next month in Sweden." Seemed like a great first act. But how to get to Sweden? So I pitched it as an article. Which was good, because the guys never really believed that we were gonna make the movie, but they all knew "Maxim," so when we showed up with our cameras we had this banner of legitimacy. It really helped establish us right away, and then when the article came out they were able to see the take, the tone, which was very different from the up-with-people, cue-the violins stuff they were used to. But over the course of the film, it was really just because we became friends with these guys, and they trusted us. That mutual trust and respect is the most imprtant part, because without it there’s no access, and without access, there’s no scenes. Suspicious people make terrible subjects.
When you actually started to film the documentary, how important to you was it to avoid the sentimental clichés, the typical tear-jerker storyline that the film could have taken…. Was it important to you to show, “Hey, these are actually just regular guys, this could be any kind of area”… Just to get their back-story on there. Was it important to you to avoid just going for the tears?
Yeah, I mean conceptually from the beginning we never wanted to make a movie like that. We never wanted to cue the violins or pull at your heartstrings, and luckily, these guys just don’t lend themselves to that type of story, so it was a combination of us not wanting to make a movie like that, because we wouldn’t want to see a movie like that, but also when you’re dealing with these characters, it would have been difficult to make that movie because these guys just don’t inspire those types of “touchy-feely” emotions. We really tried to reflect their attitude.
So, when the movie’s done, and you’ve started to get a limited run with it… all of a sudden the accolades, and the praise starts coming in for it, was it what you expected?
(Laughing) No! No, it was definitely much more and… there were really 2 schools of critics that we were worried about of course. There was the film critics – you want your movie to get out there, and then there was the quadriplegic community, who we had tried to represent so accurately, and for them to come out and write reviews and start talking on websites about… They were saying things like, “Thank you for getting it right”. Normally when people try to talk about this subject matter, it ends up being, “Oh, look at the inspiring cripples, aren’t they so amazing?”, and it ends up being unintentionally condescending. So they thought that it was sort of a very refreshing thing just to show them as guys, instead of showing them as these handicapped achievers.
When you were dealing with the guys, were you surprised at how frank they were with you?
Yeah, very much. I mean, as a journalist, I think that’s what you’re trained to do, is sort of cut through a lot of the bullshit, and get to the frankness. But you need a willing subject. A suspicious subject is gonna give a terrible interview, so again, so much of it was just that mutual respect, that we were really able to bond with these guys – for the most part we’re a similar age, and from similar backgrounds, similar interests.
When the movie first came out, you had the invitation to screen the film at “Sundance”. How was that experience?
That was amazing because we were able to go there with the guys, with the subjects, and they put snow tires on their wheel chairs and came to Utah, and it was the first time that we were really able to hang out, since we started making this movie almost 3 years earlier, without any cameras, so it was just us and them sitting back, watching this thing that we’d made after all this time and saying, “Is this really gonna work? Is this really gonna work?”, and so to be at the festival with them, just as buddies, was the best. That was just amazing.
As far as the acclaim… all the praise that you’ve gotten obviously with the Seattle International Film Festival, you won the “Best Documentary” prize there, but there’s a great trend here…. You’ve got the Full Frame Documentary Film Festival – winner of the Audience and the Jury awards, Indianapolis Film Festival – winner of the Audience award, and Sundance – winner of the Audience award as well as the Jury prize for editing, and also nominated for the “Grand Jury Prize”. So the audience has obviously responded in a fantastic way to the film.
Yeah, and those are the awards that we wanted. I mean, if we could have gotten the Audience or the Grand Jury, we definitely would have wanted… I mean, who would have thought that we were going to get anything, but that’s the most important… y’know, that the people like it.
So, the Godfather of all reviewing, Roger Ebert, gave you a fantastic review as well. He went so far to compare the scope of “Murderball” to “Hoop Dreams”.
Yeah, he came out really early for us, so he was a big help to us because he saw the film very early at Sundance, and you know people very obviously read Roger Ebert, and he wrote this….. “Variety” also, we got really nice reviews from “Variety”, and Roger Ebert very early on in the festival and you know there’s so many films in the festival that people are like wondering, “Well, which one’s do we want to see?”, and so those reviews were just tremendously helpful.
And I guess, where the comparisons for Roger and his review mentioning “Hoop Dreams” is that “Murderball” is not necessarily a film that focuses on the actual sport as such, more so the stories of the people involved.
Exactly. I mean “Hoop Dreams” really isn’t a Basketball movie… they might as well be going for…. It doesn’t matter what the dream is, it’s really about being poor and black in America at that time, and the dreams of these kids who…. this was the way that they were trying to get out of the situation that they were in, and likewise, “Murderball” really showed me… I mean we were lucky enough to come across this amazing sports rivalry that was very much like Frazier & Ali, Rocky & Drago or something like…. real revenge and real rivalry between the United States and Canada, but ultimately the best moments in the film take place off the court.
During the filming, Joe Soares, the coach of “Team Canada” gave you a call to let you know that he’d had a heart attack, and invited you along to film the experience. How did that happen?
Well, he had a heart attack, and he called and he said, “I’ve had a heart attack, and I’m going in for surgery tomorrow, and if you’d like to film it, then you can”. It wasn’t as calm as all that of course, but I basically called Jeff, and Jeff who’s my producing partner, and who is also an amazing lawyer, somehow managed to clear the access with the hospital so that Henry (Alex Rubin) & I could go down and shoot, and it turned out to be just this riveting scene, I mean it’s difficult to shoot a scene like that because you feel like a vulture a little bit. I mean on the one hand he invited us in, so we know that he wanted us there, but we had grown really close to these guys, so our friend is basically having a heart attack, and it’s very scary, but at the same time as a filmmaker, you recognize that this is a huge scene in the movie, and so it was difficult to walk that tightrope between being a filmmaker and a friend.
So give us a rundown on what “The Every Boy” is about.
Well, a quick summary of it is that it’s about a 15 year old boy that dies mysteriously and leaves behind this massive ledger that his father finds & uses to figure out what happened, and get to know his son for the first time. But ultimately it’s about this dysfunctional family in New England.
You’ve had a mix of descriptions on the book, quotes such as it’s “Salinger-esque”, ‘Quirky’ but not Quirky, Profound but not precious, and you’ve had praise from people like Tom Perotta who wrote “Election”, and J.T. Leroy who was the author of “The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things”. Who are your influences in the literary world?
Well, (J.D.) Salinger definitely, but Salinger more when I was younger. “Catcher in the Rye” was probably the first book that I ever read, that I thought, “Maybe I would wanna write a book”, but now, Flannery O’Connor is one of my favorite writers, I like her very much, I just read “Disgrace” by J.M. Coetzee, which I liked very much, Melville – I’m a big fan, and Truman Capote “In Cold Blood” is a book that made me wanna…. That again was sort of a cross between Fiction & Non-Fiction, this idea that you could write about Non-Fiction in a very literary way. I think that that’s the way I’ve always tried to approach journalism, and even movie making…. It should always be story driven & stylistic.
I guess one of the, and hopefully you don’t take this as an insult, but one of my favorite modern authors is Nick Hornby, and I guess without sounding like a complete suck-up, when I read “The Every Boy”, I thought that it was a really great mix of everything that I like about Nick Hornby’s books in one great story. It made me think, did “The Every Boy” start out as one story for you, or did you have a couple of different ideas that you rolled into one, or was it that you had the story you wanted to tell, and you sat down and wrote it?
Well, it started with a character, with this character I started taking notes on… Henry, on this guy that was going through this crazy… crisis. And I knew that it was gonna be a family story, so I knew that Harlan & Hannah, and Henry & Jorden were going to be there. And then all of the other characters came later. So I started taking notes on this character, like things that he would do, things that he would say, things that he would get into, and then the family surrounded him, his mother and his father, and their relationship. You know that he was estranged from this guy, they used to box, his father was into these deadly jellyfish, and then I came up with the skeleton of the story, which was that he’s gonna die on the first page, and leave behind this ledger. Here’s a story about a kid with an excessive amount of enthusiasm and a very literal manifestation of that enthusiasm is this 2,600 page color coded ledger, which is something that in my opinion only a 15 year old could do, ‘cause it’s sort of absurd. I can’t imagine a 30 year old keeping such a diary, or I can’t imagine an 11 year old would be doing it either. Of course he started the journal when he was 10, but he was obviously able to put all of that on the page… Things that he wasn’t able to say. So it really came about like that and then all of the other characters like Papi and Lulu, Benna and Mope Pope and Gimmel… They all came as I was writing.
I listened to the “Hollywood Podcast” that you did with Tim Coyne, and I heard that Lulu was actually inspired by your Grandmother, Mimi.
Yeah, I was living…. I wrote a lot of this novel living in Cape Cod with my Grandmother, and so she’s…. actually Lulu is the only character that’s really based on somebody. And that’s definitely based on my Grandmother Mimi.
As a former Editor, how hard was it to turn this manuscript into someone else for the editing process?
It’s hard. I mean, if my editor wasn’t great, it would have been disastrous, but yeah, I was definitely worried about that. But it ended up being a very nice process. You’re grateful when someone can make your stuff better, and so that’s also something that… As an editor, you’re usually sort of the last word, so it was nice to be on the other side, but when I write for magazines, of course I have an editor.
From what I understand, you haven’t actually read the book since it’s been printed. Is that still the case?
Yeah, I sort of picked it up… I need to read it because I’m gonna be writing the script, but yeah, I haven’t read it from front to back since it was published, no.
Speaking of the script, obviously the same way as going from Maxim to “Murderball”, “The Every Boy” is set to become a feature film under “Plan B” productions, and you yourself are set to write the screenplay, and also Direct the film.
Yep, that’s the plan.
How does something like that come about?
Well, “Plan B” optioned the novel before Sundance, so they had it, and they were planning on hiring a Writer / Director. And I said “Y’know, I’d like to do it”, but that was sort of a ‘pie in the sky’ wish, and then they saw “Murderball”, and really liked it and said, “Why don’t you come out here and tell us how you would do the movie?”, and so that’s what I did, and they liked it I guess, and said “OK, go ahead, you’ve got you’re shot”.
How is the actual production process coming along? Obviously you’re about to adapt the novel into a screenplay, do you anticipate that it will be a difficult process for yourself?
I’m looking forward to it, just because it’s something… it’s new, I’ve never adapted a book, let alone this book, so it’s kind of like….. When I read it, I’m really gonna try to read it from a screenwriters point of view as if this isn’t mine, you have to “Kill your darling” so they say, really get in there and chop and chop and boil it down to the essentials, ‘cause there’s a lot of side roads in a novel.
Jumping ahead to the future, and you’re about to start production on the film, is there a kind of film where you’ve thought “That’s the kind of film I want to make”, or “That’s the type of style I want for this film”?
Yeah, I’ve been watching “My Life As A Dog”, and “Walkabout”. I like both of those movies very much, and I’ve been thinking about them as I’m looking through this.
There’s some fantastic set-pieces in the book, none that I want to ruin, but…..
Oh, “Blue Velvet” also.
“Blue Velvet” is a great film! There’s the one scene in the book that involves the fate of Henry’s toy cow, “Moo”. To be honest, when I was reading it, it brought memories of almost a “Rushmore”, or “Garden State” kind of sense to some of those scenes, like with Harlan getting about in his “Stinger” suit – just very interesting characters that you can imagine how they’ll look on the screen. I guess it’s a very distinctive story, that is one of those stories where it’s not exactly a mainstream flow, but one of those occasions where like a “Garden State”, or a “Rushmore”, it would pick up a very distinctive audience.
I hope so. But I mean, I like “Rushmore” very much, and “Bottle Rocket”, and those are… you know “Rushmore” is a little more “stylized” then I would want this to be. I think because the characters are sort of stylized, and I want the look of the movie to be a little more “raw”. I like that “Walkabout” has this Cinematography that’s textured, and there’s this real emphasis on surfaces, and this book has a lot of emphasis on surfaces. So, even the way that “Eternal Sunshine Of the Spotless Mind” was shot, I like that too.
So if you had the ability to pick your dream cast, say for the main character of Henry, is there anyone that you’ve looked at and thought, “That person would make a really good Henry”?
I haven’t, and you know actually, I interviewed Jason Schwartzman who plays Max Fischer in “Rushmore”, and Wes Anderson had this idea for the character, that basically he would look like a young Mick Jagger, and then he went casting and casting and casting, and couldn’t find anybody, and then ultimately ended up casting Jason Schwartzman who, A). Was just totally unknown, and, B). Just didn’t look at all like the character he envisioned. So, for me, this character is kind of a shadow, there is no really…. Human face to him yet, he is kind of “The Every Boy” to me. He looks like a lot of people. I think it’ll be the thing that I know it when I see it, and I would hope that he doesn’t bring any associations with him, meaning that it would be sort of an “Introducing” type of casting, whereas this is the first thing that he does, like Max Fischer, like Jason Schwartzman in “Rushmore”.
I know we’re about to run over here, so I’ll say thanks very much for your time……
Oh, no worries, thanks very much!
And hopefully I haven’t embarrassed myself too much!
No really, I can’t believe it, my first interview was awful. My first interview… actually I was eating, and I was interviewing Henry Rollins, and this was my very first interview, so I was eating my lunch as I called him, I was like (makes loud chewing noises), “Is this Henry?”, and he was like – “Are you chewing in my fucking ear?”, and I was just sort of like (sheepishly) “No……..”
It doesn’t surprise me, I’ve seen him doing his spoken word tours a few times now, and he strikes me much the same way as Russell Crowe, where he is the kind of guy who won’t put up with an ounce of bullshit, so if he sees you chewing gum in the first row, he’ll be giving you am order to spit it out. Given the fact that the guy is built like a brick outhouse covered in tattoos, you’d be doing it pretty quickly!
Yeah, I was pretty happy we were on the phone, so I could act a little tougher than I would!
MURDERBALL is in Cinemas September 15th
THE EVERY BOOK is in bookstores now
Visit the Official Site
Thanks to Dana, and Georgie at Hardie Grant for speaking with us.
– ADAM WEEKS
