You're a well-known screen actor: Did you always harbor a desire to direct too? Or was it just Trees Lounge that you wanted to direct?

It was a combination of having written a part for myself that I wouldn't be cast in; and also the notion of creating my own work, which I used to do a lot when I was doing theatre with my partner, Mark Boone Junior. We wrote and performed mostly one-act plays and sketches known as 'The Steve & Mark Shows'. We never really considered ourselves 'directors', but we did direct our own material. It was just part of putting the show Up. When I was writing Trees Lounge, I thought of other directors; but all the directors I really like were directing their own scripts. So naturally the notion came to me that maybe I should direct. Then if I was going to direct, I started to think that maybe I shouldn't act in it. But it seemed harder to find another actor and explain to him a character I'd written for myself. So having decided to direct and act, I then realized I should make a short film so I could see for myself if doing both jobs was something I could handle. So I wrote this short film, based on some dialogue from a 'Steve & Mark Show'. The funny thing is that, having written Trees Lounge in 1989, I then got cast as a film-maker in In the Soup. After that, I did Reservoir Dogs, and after that, I made this short.

So by the time you'd directed your short, you'd already played a director?

And by the second time I played a director, in Living in Oblivion, I was able to draw on my own experiences as a director. That's a question I get asked a lot for Living in Oblivion: did I base that character on any director that I worked with? Yeah, myself ...

Can you tell me a bit about the short?

I financed it myself and shot it over a weekend. Mark Boone Junior and Seymour Cassel are in it; but it's really different from Trees Lounge. It's just an odd little piece about an incident in a bar: my character is a real psychopath but you don't realize that at first.

You said somewhere that everything went wrong that could have gone wrong on the short.

In the beginning, you are not directing; you're producing. That's the hardest part - to get other people involved. I asked some of the people I had worked with on Reservoir Dogs to help me out. Mark was helping me produce it but it was really hard for me to have that leap of faith that it was going to happen. I remember going to look for a bar that we could shoot in and being so nervous that I needed a couple of drinks before I had the nerve to say I might want to shoot a film here and ask the bartender who the owner was. I felt it wasn't going to happen. It was 'who am I to think that I'm going to make a film?' I had people who were willing to work on it for free. It was just hard to get the logistics of it right, to find somebody to make all the phone calls. Finally Seymour Cassel hooked me up with this guy, James Hardy, who ended up being the first AD. I explained how much money I had and where I wanted to do it. I asked him if I could do it in this amount of time and he said to me, absolutely. Don't worry about it. It's easy! He seemed so at ease with it I was convinced it would happen. And it did.

How did the shoot go?

We shot exteriors on a Saturday with no sound, then got into the bar on Sunday morning at six a.m. Most of the crew were working on other projects the next day. So by seven or eight in the evening they started drifting away. By ten o'clock we had just the bare minimum crew, including James. Then he had to leave. But I was thankful that at least he got me there, because once you're shooting you can't stop the train. We shot for twenty-four hours. I remember the next day having to drive some of the equipment we'd borrowed to a place two hours away and just feeling totally exhausted. And when we finally went to see the dailies, they were all out of sync. We had borrowed the camera from Declan Quinn who had just been shooting a music video in Europe and it was set for 25 frames per second. No one checked it, so we shot the whole film at 25 frames per second. But we were recording at 24 frames per second so the film would start out okay, then go out of sync. I would watch it, yelling at the projectionist, 'Why is it going out of sync?!' Once we figured out what the problem was it was easy to fix. But it was an additional nightmare.

What was most difficult about directing for the first time?

The biggest problem I had was figuring out how to work with the script supervisor who'd tell me I couldn't do certain shots: that it didn't make sense. Of course we were shooting out of order. We had to shoot everything that looked this way and then everything that looked the other way and jumping round the script was hard to keep track of. I felt like I had it in my head but it was really hard to have the confidence to say it's OK to the script supervisor. There were a lot of times that I was trying to figure out if I was shooting in the right direction.

But you must have been used to this?

No, because as an actor I never really paid that much attention to what the director was doing. I was always concerned about what I had to do and it just seemed like a big mystery why the set was being lit in a certain way, why the director was using a certain lens, why they would use a dolly, why they wouldn't. And it's not something I really pay attention to when I am watching films either. I pay more attention to it now.

Do you think you learned a lot?

Yeah. I relied on Phil Parmet, my DP a lot. I knew what I didn't want. I didn't want elaborate camera moves because I knew that stuff takes up a lot of time. I wanted very simple camera set-ups and different angles because that was the way to keep it interesting although the film uses very long takes. So I learnt a lot in the shooting of it. I was aware of being very tense and hardly being able to speak with anybody.

Did you feel very different to how you feel on set as an actor?

Absolutely. I've worked on a lot of low-budget films as an actor and I'm used to the pressure of having to get a scene done in a short amount of time. As long as nobody's yelling, I'm happy. I kind of like that pressure because it focuses you. But as a director I didn't really like that pressure on set because there was so much to think about. You realize that you're really the only person who cares if this thing gets finished or not. There were some paperback books, pulp novels, that were important in the short and I knew that I had to get some insert shots of them. I remember James Hardy saying we could pick them up later. But I knew that if I didn't get them then we just wouldn't get it together. Get it later! he was saying. But I was thinking, the camera's here, everybody's here! Let's get this now! You look around the room and everybody's relaxed but you're dying inside because nobody's lifting a finger. I suppose it was good that nobody went crazy. You want people to be relaxed. I remember directing Seymour Cassel and just wanting to get some reaction shots from him, talking him through it without really taking the time to do the scene for him to react to. Because he was off-camera I didn't want to go through the whole scene and I remember him stopping me and saying, wait a minute, slow down. And thinking, there's an actor I really love and respect and I'm totally fucking this up and he's getting pissed off with me. But he was great. Very patient. I learnt a lot about dealing with that pressure. It was almost too much. At the end of it I felt I don't want to do this. This is too hard. And then the editing was a whole different process. Luckily my wife, Jo Andres, has made films. So she edited the short and taught me a lot. There were some real problems that I didn't know how to fix and she figured them out. We both did together. Once we'd completed the film and I had a little distance away from the awful feeling of being on set, I started to think, I made it through that. I think I can do it again. And I was proud of the way it came out. It turned out well enough that I wanted to show it to people.

What happened to it?

It was shown in a few festivals. It played on Bravo. I never ended up getting all the rights I was supposed to get, so it's not something I'm comfortable about showing that much. Having done Trees Lounge now, it's not something I'm that interested in showing any more.

What about your tastes as a filmgoer? Does Trees Lounge reflect those tastes?

Working with people like Jim Jarmusch and Alex Rockwell and seeing how important the visuals were to them, I absolutely picked up on that stuff. One film that I love and that was part of the inspiration for Trees Lounge was the John Huston film, Fat City. The other person who was a big influence was John Cassavetes. I had taken a screen writing course one weekend where this guy tried to give you the basic formula for writing a Hollywood script. I didn't want to write a Hollywood script but I thought I should at least know the basic rules if I wanted to write something. He said that you should know your beginning, middle and end. You should have an outline. You should know what the characters are going to go through and the rest is just filling in the dialogue. Well, I was just the opposite. I was good at writing dialogue but terrible at story, at plot structure. So I tried to start writing and I couldn't. I was just totally blocked. I then saw a retrospective of Cassavetes's work at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. I had always known who he was but I thought he was too 'out there' for my tastes. But when I saw all his films together I was inspired because they didn't seem to have a strict structure. Watching them a few times since, I think they do have a structure but it's unlike any other films. The thing people say about his films is that they look improvised. From knowing Seymour Cassel and hearing him talk about it and from reading about Cassavetes, they weren't all improvised. The first one, Shadows, came out of a series of improvisations but the rest he wrote. He gave his actors a lot of responsibility and I'm sure there were improvisations that happened within the scene. But basically they were working from a script.

Did seeing Cassavetes's work directly inspire you to write Trees Lounge?

I had already had the idea for the screenplay for Trees Lounge before I saw the retrospective. But the thing that inspired me was that you couldn't figure out what his characters were going to do. It just seemed like everything flowed so organically. It didn't seem like anybody could possibly have written this and it was so inspiring to see that he'd done it. He broke every convention, every rule and yet he made these films that were so personal. That's the other thing. The films were personal to him and yet they were touching me. I didn't find them esoteric or indulgent. I remember watching Faces and for the first half, thinking this one I don't like, I don't get, and by the end of it, thinking this was my favorite one. So, that really inspired me to start writing and not care about where it was going. If I got into trouble, fine. It was one of the things that this guy at the workshop said: 'You don't want to get into trouble.' And the thing I learnt was, well, why not? I mean, you may have to start over again but everything you write is of value. I would show scenes to Boone and to my wife and hear their comments and write a little bit more. It took me a period of about seven months to finish the screenplay because I'd also get work and go off and act in a film.

That sounds pretty fast if you were working at the same time?

People asked me how I worked on so many films. But I only worked on them for a few weeks!

Was it always your intention to make the film partly autobiographical?

Mark Boone and I had collaborated on a screenplay before with someone who wanted to direct the piece and had tried to gear it towards this guy's notes and what he thought would be commercial. That took us about seven months and we ended up with a screenplay that was okay but basically a jumble. So I wanted to write something totally on my own, make it personal and not worry about any prospects of it being commercial. Boone was the one who said, why not do something on Long Island? That really threw me because I thought, Long Island? There is nothing interesting there! I was in denial about where I was from and what that whole experience was. So he really gave me that idea and the more I thought about it, the only way I could think about writing about it was, what if I hadn't left? What would I be doing? In that way I could use stuff from my own life while I was living there. Driving an ice-cream truck is something that I did, working in a gas station, and of course, hanging out in the bars I did a lot. So that was the genesis of the idea.

Did you find it hard to write the screenplay?

It was tricky, frustrating. And it was enjoyable too. Writing dialogue is my favorite part of writing but you just can't write dialogue for ever. Every scene has to end some time or it has to lead into something else. That was the tricky part because I didn't really want to have an imposed story: that these characters had to do something because the story dictates that. I wanted the story to come from the characters. So I thought of all these situations that these people were in, put them together and saw how they'd interact with each other. And that was basically it. In the beginning, I saw it more as an ensemble piece. Like a Robert Altman film where you follow a few different characters at the same time. It took me a while to realize the character I wrote for myself was the lead. That's something I had to face in the edit: we're going to have to follow this guy's story. And that's what it became, but with all these other characters that he interacts with.

How long did it take to write? Did you write it in one go?

It went through a lot of changes. A lot of stopping and starting. And a lot of stopping and thinking I couldn't start again. I somehow finished it and over the years would constantly rewrite it. It was more a process of taking stuff out. Taking out the fat. You're constantly trying to figure out what's the interesting character stuff that's useful? That happens in the edit too. You're constantly taking out stuff that you love but which doesn't help the piece as a whole.

Were you bouncing ideas off other people?

People would read it and say to me that they just didn't get it, that it was too dark. In the beginning, a lot of people didn't seem to get the humor. And that's something that I always knew would be in the film. It's a long way from the Hollywood archetype.

It is quite a sad film and Tommy's life is unresolved at the end.

Right. You don't know what's going to happen to him. But in my mind, the character I play, Tommy Basilio, is for the first time thinking about his position in life, his actions, his future. He is thinking about what he has done in the past, and what may happen in his future. Granted he's not talking about it. He's just sitting there, thinking about it. But it's the first time you see him in the bar where he is actually thinking. Every other scene of him in the bar, he is oblivious to what's going on. That's his place to forget, not to deal with his life. So it's the first time you can see on his face that hopefully he is dealing with something. Whether he will do anything about it - I didn't know.

When you had written a draft you were happy with, did you go out and try and raise the money immediately?

For long periods of time I wasn't even actively trying to get it made. I was working on films, trying to get the short together. Various people knew about it. Sometimes I'd go through a long thing with a potential producer and it wouldn't work out. For the first couple of years I wasn't really showing it around that much. It was a lot of different people who floated through to make it happen.

Who or what made the difference?

It was Julie Yorn and Claudia Lewis who were both really behind it. They worked at Addis Wechsler, the management company I was with. Claudia ended up leaving Addis Wechsler to go to Fox Searchlight and then we got the money from Live Entertainment. I was always sad she wasn't able to see it through because she was one of the first producers that really cared about the script, one of the first people I talked to about the script and actually made changes based on her notes which were very good. Before Julia and Claudia I didn't really have a pro- ducer who was active on my behalf.

When did you actually go into production?

I completed the screenplay in 1989 but didn't shoot the film till 1995. I had to shoot it in fairly good weather; and It had to be in Long Island. That wasn't something I could fake. So I'd start to get my hopes up right before spring. Then I'd go, okay it's not going to happen this spring. Maybe this summer. Or fall. And then a certain point I'd just say, it's not going to happen this year. This went on for two or three years until I felt it wasn't going to happen. The trouble is it's always in your head. You're obsessed with it and you think if this doesn't happen, how will I live with myself? I have to do this. It really becomes something you feel you have to do. Otherwise you feel like a total failure. 'If I don't get this movie made, I am a total failure.' Yet at the same time, you're absolutely scared to death of doing it - 'Oh my God, what if I do get the money?'

Where did you try and get finance for the movie?

I knew that no Hollywood studio would be interested. Or if they were, they'd want to change certain things and certain people. So we tried independent companies here and in Europe, mostly France. I can't tell you how many meetings I had, and then writing various drafts where I would try to keep the integrity of the script but listen to their notes. Endless meetings. In the end, Brad Wyman, a producer who lives in LA, called Julie Yorn one day and said, 'I heard Steve has a script. I love Steve. Can I read it?' Then he said, 'Look, give it to me for thirty days. If I can't get a deal, it will come right back to you guys.' At that time Brad was partners with Chris Hanley who I'd known from my East Village days. So I thought, why don't I give these guys a shot? Brad took it to the people he knew at Live Entertainment. We had a meeting and by that time we had certain people in the cast, like Sam Jackson and Mimi Rogers, who were strong enough names to make a company like Live interested. In retrospect, they were looking at the video market. Video distribution was their main business. But still there was the issue of the script. Mainly it was a question of clearing things up and reassuring them that I didn't intend to make a deeply dark and depressing film. There is humor in this. If it's not coming across, I'll do my best to try and show you it's there. But the ending was a problem.

What was the problem?

No one could get over the fact that the guy just stays in the bar and it ends. So I ended up writing a tagged-on ending: he goes out, works on his car, is able to fix it then drives away. That was some sort of hopeful note and that seemed to be enough for them to give me final script approval. But I had to let Live think that I was planning on re-shooting the scene. We only had twenty-four days to shoot the film and I said to them, look, this is an easy scene to get. Me and the car, and that's it. And they said, okay. But you will shoot it, won't you? Well, I never shot it. When the day came to shoot that scene, I couldn't. I thought, I don't want this to be in the film. If I shoot it, they could very well force me to use it. What I did do was shoot my character leaving the bar. I left myself that compromise, if the film did end up being too down. In the editing, I tried using the take of me leaving the bar. We even had a test screening and in the focus group at the end some people said, 'Well, it's good that he left the bar. It shows that blah blah blah.' But most people said, 'Yeah, but where did he go?' And I used their comments to say, look, the ending is confusing. The film ends with me just sitting at the bar, which I think is the strongest ending. It took a lot of talking to the executives there. But to their credit they agreed that I'm the film-maker and they let me have my way.

So, once you had ironed out the wrinkle in terms of the fictitious final scene, they agreed the money?

Yeah, but there was a lot of haggling along the way. They still weren't satisfied with the casting. You had some fairly well-known names. Were they difficult to get? No, they were friends of mine. Samuel Jackson I had asked before he hit it big in Pulp Fiction. Mimi Rogers was with Addis Wechsler as well and I'd met her and liked her. Anthony LaPaglia was also with Addis Wechsler. I had wanted Stanley Tucci to do a part but he was doing Big Night. But for the main roles I wanted myself, Mark Boone Junior, Elizabeth Bracco, Eszter Balint, and my brother, Michael Buscemi. These were the people you see the most. I think I could have got the film financed earlier if I had let those parts be played by better-known actors. Besides the script being dark, Live was saying, who do we sell this movie on? I had enough supporting players who were names. But they still felt I needed more. It drove me crazy. When I cast Chloe Sevigny, one of my agents at William Morris, Cassian Elwes, had to convince the president of Live she was a name. Kids hadn't been released yet. But she was on the front cover of Interview magazine and he said, look, she is going to be so big and you're getting her in this film. She's your other name. And they bought it. If Chloe's picture hadn't been on the front cover of Interview magazine, I don't know what I would have done.

What was the budget?

About a million dollars. That was the other crisis meeting we had with the bond company: them telling us that we didn't have enough money and going back to Live and saying, they are not going to insure the film unless you give us more money. It amazes me that any film gets made. Especially an independent because the bottom can drop out at any moment. That's the thing I didn't realize as an actor. It is a miracle that we all show up on the first day. It made me really appreciate what Alex Rockwell went through, getting In the Soup made. Basically he had to finance the first day himself because the financiers weren't writing the checks.

Did you do much rehearsing?

I wish I'd had more time with the actors. Some of them were coming from LA. Boone just got there maybe a week before we started filming and once you're in pre-production there's so much other stuff you're thinking about. That was one of the things that surprised me: that even while I was directing, I would forget that the actors needed attention and direction. I had a great cast and they pretty much took care of themselves. When they asked me something, I was able to articulate what I wanted most of the time. Or I would watch a scene and be able to guide them in another direction. But the pre-production was a wild time. I was working with the DP, Lisa Rinzler, and I spent a lot of time with her making shot lists, watching other films and trying to articulate to her what I wanted and how to do it in the least amount of time. And how to make it visually interesting. And then scouting locations. For the short film we just had to find one bar. For the movie there was so much. So many decisions that have to be made. You have to cast your crew as well as your actors. So it was really overwhelming.

Did you find that some of the locations had changed since your days in Long Island?

Well, the bar itself, Trees Lounge, was an old place, and for years I thought at least I have that. Then six months before we got the money I got a call from my brother saying he'd heard that the bar was sold and that they were taking down the neon sign. And I said, we've got to get the sign at least. I remember going down there and asking if I could buy the sign. They thought I was crazy and that they were really getting one over on me because I paid two hundred dollars for this neon sign that they were just going to toss away. But the guy had changed the bar so much that when we went back to him and said that we wanted to shoot there, it just seemed too expensive undoing what he'd done and having to put it back together the way that he liked it. Also the extra travel time of going to Long Island was a problem. So we ended up finding a bar in Queens that was closer to Manhattan where most people lived. Plus we really didn't have to do anything to it. The way it looks on the film is pretty much the way it looks in real life. So that was a heartbreak, not being able to film in the bar that I had envisioned that we were going to be shooting in all these years. And not being able to use the neon sign because it didn't work on the new bar. But what was also great about the bar in Queens was that it had an apartment on top where the owner lived. In the original script my character had his own place. But when the location manager, the production designer and me looked at those apartments we said, could we use these? I mean, these are great. We looked at each other and I thought, could Tommy live above the bar? Is that too much? And the more I thought about it the more I thought, it's perfect! It makes it that much harder for Tommy to get out of the bar. His life really does revolve around the place. And then I also had the older character, Bill, live above the bar. And it actually added another dimension to the script that I didn't have in my draft. They both share this apartment-and part of Tommy's function is helping this guy get up to bed every night.

Was it a strange experience? Revisiting your past?

Very strange. The time when I was driving an ice-cream truck was after high school. I had gone to community college for a semester and dropped out. I had started taking some acting classes but that whole world seemed so distant to me. The first year I drove the truck I had a partner, who actually got me into it. The first year, I was eighteen or nineteen and everybody thought it was just a summer job. I had told everybody, I'm going to acting classes. I'm going to become an actor. I am serious about this. Come another season, there I am again, back on the ice-cream truck. People tended not to believe me any more about being an actor. Most of my friends had gone to college. Actually, most of my friends were still in town, hanging out in the bar. And I was driving that ice-cream truck. I would park my truck outside the bar. Driving around thinking, something has got to happen. I don't have any other skills. If I don't make it as an actor, what's to stop me doing this every summer? How am I going to live? So fifteen years later, to be driving the ice-cream truck but now being followed by a camera, was an amazing experience. Very moving too. We were doing a scene where I was driving the truck down the street and these kids were banging, hitting me with their plastic ball bats and I was yelling at them with the camera outside the truck. We would do about three takes and then I would ride around the block and start up again. But in that ride around the block I was alone: just me in the truck, driving the same streets and feeling like, 'Oh, my God!' One day my brother, Ken, was driving to the set. He saw me drive by without the camera crew and he said it was the weirdest feeling to see me all alone in that truck again.

Tell me a bit about how you collaborated with Lisa Rinzler?

Even before we got to the location, we would think of shots. We would imagine what the basic layout would be and then when we got to the locations we spent a lot of time just shot listing, even while we were filming. Once our AD, David Wechsler, was hired, we did it with him. The three of us would figure out the quickest way we could get in there and cover the scene. And a lot of it was them asking me questions: do you want to do this and this and that? I would say, no, I just need this particular shot with maybe one other angle. But, no, I don't need singles. So really, it was just figuring out how we could use our time the best way. Also for Lisa and I to figure out the look of the film and how we could make it visually interesting without spending a lot of time on it. I didn't want to do a lot of dolly shots and she had to make sure that I wasn't not doing things because I felt we wouldn't have the time. I really had to impress upon her that in certain films I like, the camera is static. She was great. She really wanted to know what was inside my head.

What can you remember about pre-production?

The whole pre-production process was just wild. I was lucky to get Sarah Vogel and Kelley Forsyth, who were hired as line producers and really ended up co-producing the film because they were the ones that really got the crew together, the nuts and bolts of production. They set up the production office and once you have a production office it becomes real. At one point I remember hearing Lisa talking about the color scheme to the various department heads and really feeling that I was losing control; that they were taking over and really feeling panicked about it. Then I remembered something Phil Parmet, my DP on the short, had told me. It was the simplest thing: just let people do their jobs. At first I wasn't sure what he meant by it and then it started to sink in that it was their job to be very anal about everything and pay great attention to detail and talk amongst themselves. And it turned out that they would always come to me and say, here's what we think. What do you think?

Did you find it easy to make decisions when you were on set?

No. That was something I had to get used to: all the constant questions you get asked. I remember working with John Carpenter on his Escape From LA. I was in his office when he was in pre-production. Somebody came in and said, which thing? This one, this one, or this one? And he went, that one: The guy left and I said, that's pretty good, John. And he goes, always give them an answer. You can change your mind later but, you got to give them an answer!

How did you go about conveying the look that you were after?

Just by going around different bars and talking about different places. Color was something that my production designer, Steve Rosenzweig, discussed with Lisa Rinzler and then came to me. And I really trusted what colors we should stay away from. I remember talking to Stanley Tucci when he was in pre-production on Big Night. He also paints, so the palette of the film is something he's very articulate about. I remember listening to him and thinking 'Oh man, I don't know any of that-I'm in trouble!' But the thing is, you don't have to know everything. You have to hire people who know their jobs. It's their job to figure out what you want.

When you visited a location, did you know what the shots would be or did you discover it when the actors were there?

The hardest thing to shoot was the scene in the middle of the film where the softball team comes into the bar. Boone is on the phone with his wife. Anthony LaPaglia's character is there. My character comes in and sees him. There's a lot going on. When we rehearsed it, it wasn't at all like I thought it should be. I hadn't really taken into account that the room is filled with these softball players, and Anthony was at one end of the bar and I was at the other, and we were supposed to be having this dialogue with all this going on in the background. And then Boone was meant to come out and be a part of that dialogue. We were so spread out I knew it wasn't going to work. I started to feel panicky because I knew we had to start shooting, otherwise I was going to lose the day. I looked around the room and was asked a question, where do you want to put the camera? And I looked at everybody in the room and said, I have no idea how to shoot this scene. I don't know what to do. And there was a moment of, okay, I guess we are not going to get any help from him! And Lisa and David Wechsler talked and said, well, we should start shooting this way towards the window because we are losing the light. I said, okay. You set it up and I will try to re-think this scene and I got together with Anthony LaPaglia and Boone and said, something's wrong. Anthony said, yeah, do we have to be that far apart? So I said, no, we can be closer. Then I said, Boone, right now it is too hard to try and include you. I'm just going to leave you in the phone booth. I'll cover your stuff separately. And we literally changed the dialogue and rewrote the scene while they were setting up; even while we were shooting. On each take I would try something different with Anthony because me being that close to Anthony changed the whole dynamic of the scene. I didn't know what we were getting or if I was going to be able to use it. I just had to go on trust that something would work. It was a hard scene to cut but it works. I ended up getting something that I was able to use. I was afraid that the whole thing was going to be unusable and then I'd have this big gap in the film. So that was the worst day of me not knowing what to do. The other really difficult day came before that. It was the last day of the first week and I only had Debi Mazar for a small amount of time. It was the scene where Debi comes with her child to get an ice-cream; and the child was played by my son, Lucian, who was only four years old. I was so nervous about using my son that I told my casting person, Sheila Jaffe, to get a back-up kid who was older. So she got another kid who was on the sidelines. I went up to the kid's father and I said, you know the deal, right? I may not need him. And he said that his son was looking forward to it. That morning the crew had concerns about what we were doing that day. It seemed like we were trying to do too much. I thought, the crew's not happy. Nobody really wants to be here. It's no fun now. The last thing I wanted to be was a director on a movie where people weren't enjoying themselves. It's like, oh, man, not another fucking low-budget film! Not enough money, not enough time to shoot. Anyway, my son was great. He was such a professional. We had to rush to get this done then they called lunch. And I looked over at this other kid, and I could see his father telling him; and I saw a look of such deep disappointment that I went over to the kid and said, 'Okay, now it's your turn.' I called for quiet on the set and we just shot it using a video camera that my wife had. The kid cheered up a little bit, but I still felt like I scarred him for life. Later, when we were shooting in the bar, I went into the bathroom stall and locked the door and practically broke down in tears. I thought: what am I doing? I'm fucking everything up. Nobody wants to be here. I felt like the biggest jerk. And then we got through that day and then after that things started to go a bit better.

Every director will probably say they don't have enough time. But twenty-four days does sound fast.

What was funny was that when we were in pre-production, Living in Oblivion was released. My whole cast and crew went to see it and of course saw this madman on screen yelling. I thought, I can't become that! So I ended up internalizing everything and making myself sick. And trying not to show it. On Chloe's first day I didn't want to make her nervous by showing her I felt I was losing control. But after about two weeks of that I finally started to let go and told myself, it's okay. If you don't finish the day, so what? I'm not going to die. The worst they can do is fire me. Either another director will come on or we will go over budget. These things happen. People do go over budget. Part of it was exhaustion too. I realized I was spending so much time worrying and it wasn't useful because I didn't have that much energy to be spending like that. So I was able to let go more and let my AD worry about stuff like that, understanding that while it was his job to move things along, it was my job to say, no, we can't move along yet, we didn't get this yet. Most days we got most of what we needed. There were some scenes that we didn't get to, that I thought, I guess I am going to have to make this up. But once we got in the editing room it seemed like I had enough to make it work and I eventually started to feel a rhythm. Finally it became-we get there, we look at it, we decide, we rehearse, we shoot and we move on. So towards the end I started to enjoy it a little bit more, reminding myself that if I want to direct films, I should be enjoying this; there has to be joy in it, the same joy that I get from acting. If I'm not getting that, how can I create that? And so sometimes it would be in the afternoon and we'd be hustling to get a shot and I'd be joking around and I heard my AD saying, 'Steve, that's very funny but really we have to get on.' And I was thinking to myself, I know what his concerns are, but it's very important that I joke around right now. It is really important that I do not take this too seriously because I know how much of a pressure of time we are under. In fact, towards the end of shooting...

...you were totally laid back?

Right! 'Who cares?!' The scene we were shooting at night, with me and Boone in the car, I was drinking real beer. The prop guy literally didn't have time to pour out the beers and pour water in the beer cans. Even though it wasn't a lot, it was enough. I was thinking, God, this is what I need right now. I mean, anything that helps you get in character!

Another time, when we were shooting the dinner scene with Danny Baldwin, Mimi Rogers, myself and Chloe, Danny wasn't there. He had been in a car accident and wasn't going to show up that day. So I had to shoot the scene without him. What I ended up doing was shooting a three-person master and singles. Then a week later when Danny was there, I shot a master of me, Danny and Chloe and then his single. In the editing room it works, even though Danny and Mimi were never in the room together. But I think if that had happened at the beginning of the shoot, I would have been saying, 'Oh my God! This is terrible! I'm jinxed. What do I do?' I was lucky that the choreography of the scene was that Danny and Mimi are sitting at opposite ends of the table.

Was it difficult to be the director and the lead character at the same time?

Mostly it was just exhausting. I don't think one job suffered because of the other. Sometimes it was hard being in a scene where I was in the background and I wasn't able to listen to what the other actors were saying. I remember the first week I was asking for a monitor to play back the scenes and when I finally got it, I realized I didn't really have time to look at it. So I would only check it to see what the framing was. If we did a take and Lisa thought maybe something wasn't up to par with the camera, then I would look at it. I never checked it for performance. I always felt that I could tell the performance from what was going on in the scene with the other actors. If I stayed in character, then I felt that they were also in character. But if something they did took me out of it then I knew that something was up.

Were you constantly involved in the composition of the shots? Or did you leave it largely to Lisa?

I had thought I would be an actor's director, but really the person I worked most closely with was Lisa. But I was very concerned about the visuals. When I see films I often see camera moves that I think are unnecessary or too many close-ups or over coverage. Lisa, of course, was concerned that we weren't getting enough coverage. Or tight shots. I tended to shoot a lot of things wide and not get in very close and Lisa would always be asking me, do you want to go in tighter? And sometimes we'd be out of time and I'd say, 'It's okay. I think we got it.' A couple of times we had to re-shoot, because I did need those tight shots.

Did you make any efforts to mug up on the technical aspects?

No. I guess I'm more concerned with the performances. Though to me the way the camera photographs them is important to the performance. It's just that I can't say, give me a 50 mm! I can't say, give me this lighting! I just don't know about that. Basically what it comes down to for me is looking through the eyepiece and saying whether you like the frame or not. Even if I knew the lenses it wouldn't mean I'd know which one to use.

How did you feel about the experience of walking on to the set of your own film?

I do remember a general feeling of being in the last week of pre-production and wanting to get started: thinking, I'm ready. I don't want to wait another five days. I just want to be shooting. Four days before we were going to start shooting, I was casting the role of my parents in the film and I got a call from my wife saying my father had had a heart attack. He was okay and actually had a little walk-on part in the film. But having something like that happen, so close to filming, just makes you think about what your priorities are. It was an amazing connection between my father and me. Being that there is that element in the film-the disconnection that the character feels with his family. To have a connection like that with my father right before going into the film was very strange.

The night before I'm sure I was nervous. But I was also ready. On the first day I was very aware that this was the day that everybody would be looking at me, at how I was presenting myself. I had to act like I knew a little bit. I knew I had to keep things moving along and had to have some semblance that I knew what I wanted and what I was after. The first day it was just shots of me job hunting. So it wasn't big scenes. And they were all outside. Later that day we did an interior barber shop scene where I get my hair cut, but that was cut out of the film. The day ended just grabbing shots in a car because I needed a scene of me driving. By now I was feeling really pleased that we'd made the day. But in the morning, I was feeling pretty nervous but trying not to show it.

Was the post-production another revelation for you? Had you been involved in the edit of any of your films, apart from your short?

Working on In the Soup, Alex Rockwell let me see every cut of the film although I was never in the editing room with him. But just seeing all those different cuts gave me an idea of how drastically films can change and what you can do. What little things you can do to make them better. What things you have to lose for the sake of the film. But this really was a whole new experience for me. You feel like you are sculpting, scouring, looking for moments. Trying things different ways and trying to cut it in a way that gets back to the feeling I had when I wrote it. 'This is what I was feeling. Now I'm watching it, I'm not feeling that thing. How can I get back to that feeling?' I remember going through a deep depression, being so immersed in it and not being able to figure out why it wasn't working. Especially after spending all this time on it. Plus, it was such a personal film that it was bringing up all this stuff. I was pretty much a wreck. But I enjoyed collaborating with my editor, Kate Williams.

Did the finished film change much from the script?

The whole beginning of the film changed. What I had written, we tried to make work and couldn't. It just didn't make sense. You were left in the dark for too long. So the scene that we started with in the bar was the second half of a later bar scene, which on its own was way too long and which I thought I was going to have to give up. Kate and I were banging our heads against the wall, thinking, what are we going to do for the beginning of this film? And it was the assistant editor, Jane Abramovitz, who suggested starting in the bar.

How did it start in the script?

It started with Uncle Al having the heart attack on the ice-cream truck almost running over a kid. The bar scene that we started with was actually a continuation of the Debi Mazar drinking scene, after she's gone and I'm passed out in a booth. We figured, why not start the film this way-this way you immediately know this guy's life.

How long did it take to edit?

In all, it was about four months. It was broken up by the fact that I needed to get some work, so I went off to do an acting job in LA. By that time we had a cut but I knew that it needed work. The music wasn't right, the ending wasn't right. So I was still trying to do some editing while I was working on the film in LA. But Live Entertainment were pretty good about it, and they gave me an extension.

What was your reaction to the first rough cut?

I could tell that we had something but the beginning was still too long. It's not really a movie in three acts. It's really in two halves. The first half establishes Tommy's life in the bar and introduces all the characters. Then in the second half Tommy gets to work in the ice-cream truck and that goes on until the end of the film. Once we got to the icecream truck there was only a certain way the scenes could be cut. Whereas the beginning was really up for grabs. How much time do you spend on introducing this character? How much of Mike's story is important? So besides editing the final scene which was a killer, the first half of the film was the toughest to figure out.

Do you remember first showing it to your friends even before the public?

We just showed it in the editing room. In the beginning we didn't have the money for a work print so we had to watch it on the Lightworks. And we just invited a few close friends. I felt okay because although they said the beginning isn't there, at least they hooked into it emotionally. They were with my character: they cared about what happened to him. Everybody had ideas but you can't try them all.

What was it like the first time you showed it to Live?

We knew it wasn't ready yet but they wanted to see something so we said, 'All right, let's show 'em.' They gave us some notes, which we were expecting, some of which were very good. Part of the problem with editing is that it is really hard to get the distance, to be objective.

Was the question of the ending resolved?

The ending was the hardest thing because they were pretty insistent about my character leaving the bar. There was talk of re-shooting but of course it never happened. And like I said, we had that test screening in LA. We had the focus group. That was really weird. Me, sitting there, trying to hide myself, not wanting them to know I was there. Just listening to the comments, some of which were useful, others of which weren't. I felt that the audience was very young. They weren't going to get it and I didn't care if they got it or not. They seemed to be from eighteen to twenty-five.

What were their comments? Do any stick in your mind?

There is one scene at the beginning of the film where I am driving to the bar and there are four guys in a parking lot across the street dressed in black suits. They weren't extras, they were just guys walking across the street. When we showed it at the test screening, there was a laugh. I was then in the bathroom and I heard these young guys of about eighteen saying that they liked the Reservoir Dogs reference. I just shook my head. It even came up on the form about favorite scenes. I almost took it out but I didn't have anything to replace it with.

Another thing I remember was listening to them talking about the ending. I heard a couple of them say that it was unsatisfying. 'He left the bar. Why? Where did he go? We are left with these other people in the bar and we want to know what happens to him.' Well, what happens to him? I don't know. To me the strongest statement that you could make was that he was still there. He is there and if you just end on him that is the simplest, strongest, clearest ending-even if you don't know what's going to happen to him.

So Live finally accepted your ending?

Finally, yeah. I had a long talk with one of the executives there, Yalda Tehrariian. At that point Leaving Las Vegas was being released. I hadn't seen it yet but I said, I know it's a lot darker than mine. The main character dies at the end. Yalda said, yeah, but when he dies he's in love-he has a smile on his face. I couldn't argue because I hadn't seen the film. But I thought, he still dies. He dies! At least I don't die. Why won't you let me end my film my way? Finally she said, all right, we'll go with your ending-even though she disagreed with it, which I really respect her for.

Did you have a guaranteed theatrical release for the movie?

No. I thought I was supposed to have consultation on who the distributor was. But they decided that they would distribute it themselves with Orion Classics. I was disappointed in the way it was distributed because they spent all their money on big ads for the first weekend. It threw me at first because I thought, they really are behind the film. But after that first weekend it went down to a tiny ad in the Friday Times, not any other paper. There were no posters put up. I remember arguing with the head of marketing, saying, why don't you put any other ads in? And him giving me this whole line of well, it's our experience that when people decide what movies they are going to see, they check the Friday listings and that's how they plan their week. I said, that's not how I do it. If I want to see a movie, I look in the paper and see what's playing no matter what day of the week it is. I don't plan what movies I go and see on Friday if I am going to see a movie on Wednesday. And I had friends calling me, saying, we want to see your film but we don't know where it is just because they couldn't find the ads. It was released in the fall, but too close to the Thanksgiving period when the big films come out. And we were just pushed out. We were in a good theatre but I felt maybe we should have been in a smaller theatre. Or that it could have been moved to a smaller theatre.

How many prints did they release?

Not as many as I hoped for. Now I see that what they wanted was to get the reviews for that first weekend. They wanted to release it so it had a theatrical profile and after that it was marketed as a video, because that's what they're good at.

How did you feel about this?

I felt extremely grateful that they put up the money for the film and allowed me to make the film I wanted to make. On the other hand, I felt like they really didn't know what they had, because I feel like the film could have stayed around. Had they known it was out there, I think more people could have enjoyed seeing it on the screen. Since then I am thankful that a lot of people have rented it. I've had some weird comments. Just the other day someone came up to me and said, I saw your film. I liked it very much. Was it rough on you that it wasn't successful? And I thought, what is it? He's thinking that it didn't make a lot of money. But to me it's a successful film, because I made the film I wanted. I've also had other people say that they saw it on video and liked it-and were surprised because it had gone to video so quickly. And I totally understand that.

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