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From Blockbusters to Billy Bob
Screenwriter Ed Solomon makes directorial debut with Levity
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| Ed Solomon directs Kirsten Dunst on the set of Levity. |
Levity is not the kind of film you might expect from Ed Solomon, the scribe behind such Hollywood blockbusters as Men in Black and Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. But to hear him tell it, you can’t judge a moviemaker by his/her IMDB credits. In an interview with MM earlier this month, Solomon talked about shifting between the roles of writer and director, why his industry credibility offered more hindrance and help and the inspiration for Levity, which opened this year’s Sundance Film Festival and is in theaters across the country now.
Jennifer Wood (MM): When did you begin writing the script for Levity?
Ed Solomon (ES): In some ways I began writing the script in 1996, but in other ways I began in 1978.
MM: It’s based on a true story—an experience you had, correct?
ES: Well, it was “inspired” by one. The inspiration came from when I was at UCLA and working in an organization called the UCLA Prison Coalition, which used to tutor kids in prison. I went to one particular prison out in the San Fernando Valley; it was a maximum-security penitentiary for kids who’d committed violent crimes. There was a kid there who I worked with just a few times. He’d been tried as an adult and was sentenced to life. He was just about to turn 18 and was then going to be transferred to a state prison.
We weren’t supposed to engage with these kids on any level other than the Math or English we were supposed to be tutoring them in, but I did talk to him a little bit about what he had done. He used to carry a photograph of the boy that he had killed with him, which really struck me, so I asked him about it. He wasn’t very articulate, but I remember him saying that “The judge didn’t think that I knew he was a human being, so he made me hold his football.” I guess he had been instructed to manipulate the victim’s clothing and other artifacts so that he would understand, in a tangible sense, that it was a human life he had taken. I don’t really have a clear image of the boy that I worked with anymore, but the eyes of the boy in the photograph were seared into my mind.
Additionally, when I was in high school there had been a relatively sensational event where one of the kids from my school, his older brother had robbed a liquor store and shot someone and he and these two other guys had been taken to prison. In my mind for some reason, just as I was stewing it over over the years, those two events sort of melded.
MM: So the idea had been with you all those years?
ES: That image of the photograph is really the thing that lingered. In a way, the smile from the photograph sort of posited a universe that was hosted by the boy, and I started to imagine. Initially, the movie opened with a voiceover from that boy which ended with: “Me, I’m off now. Part of the universe, part of everything there ever was.” And I stayed with that until the day before we locked the final sound mix on the movie, when I realized that in fact the movie had sort of outgrown that initial idea.
MM: Had you been adding stuff throughout the years? When you read or saw about a story or situation that related, were you always storing ideas?
ES: It lived with me for a long time, and I initially started to write it back in 1986. I worked on it for a while actually but it was much more about comedy, in a way, which is where the title came from. It was about a guy trying to laugh and trying to make people laugh. The character that Billy Bob [Thornton] played, I initially imagined him as being lost and wandering around the city and then finding work in this place where this guy, who is ultimately played by Morgan Freeman, has these kids who are full of rage. And Manuel gets assigned to help them funnel their rage into humor, which was an idea that I really liked but in reality was pretty lame when I started to write it. It seemed really fake and it didn’t really resonate with me. After about 30 or 40 pages I could tell that I wasn’t really writing it up to the level of what I wanted the idea to be, so I put it aside.
It was actually really sad, because I didn’t know if I was going to be able to make it work. But I still thought about it—a lot. About five years later I started it again and it was the same thing: after 40 or 50 pages I had a sense that it wasn’t right yet. Finally, about five years after that, in 1996, it became clear to me what the movie needed to be. It felt like the real emotional truth in this film was a pervasive melancholy, and a kind of haunted quality—a sense of a guy wandering between borders—between the borders of his own past and the present.
MM: Yes, you definitely get the sense that there are two worlds happening.
ES: Yeah, exactly: past and present, secular and spiritual, fantasy and reality. That’s when I realized that a key part of the movie was going to be Billy Bob’s relationship with the sister of the person he killed, which was Holly Hunter’s part.
MM: When you sat down to write the script this time, how long did it take you to complete?
ES: About a year. I think the writing of it was six or eight months, and then I did a little revising.
MM: Had you always planned to direct it?
ES: I always knew that I would direct this film, and I thought—I guess naively—that it would be easier to get the film made than it really was.
MM: Had you always wanted to direct this script, or had you been looking to just direct something?
ES: This script! I had written another script in 1990, a spec script. As I was writing it I thought ‘Wow, this is really going to be great!’ I spent a year and a half writing it and had planned to direct it. When I finished, I took a few weeks off and then I put on my director hat, so to speak, and reread the script—and passed on it. [laughing] It didn’t work! It was a real bummer for me, but I knew it didn’t work.
There have been a few stories that I thought, ‘If I can get this to work, I want to direct this.’ From 1996 on, it was Levity. Directing is really, really hard. I’ve got a family and I’ve got kids, and the commitment to directing a movie, you really have to be willing to not see them. You have to love something so much that it’s the only thing that matters for a while, which is a tough place to be in, emotionally.
MM: Did your success as a screenwriter help to open any doors that wouldn’t typically be an option for a first-time director?
ES: My success possibly opened a few doors, but those doors were not the doors that I thought they would open. In fact I think that, overall, it did not help—and I would even argue that it possibly hurt.
MM: Were people expecting you to bring in the next Men in Black or Bill & Ted—a sort of blockbuster, fantastical comedy?
ES: Absolutely! That’s the first thing people were expecting. I get the sense that people look at the film with my IMDB credit list in one hand and go “Wait a minute!” It’s so hard for me, partly because anyone who knows anything about how movies are made knows that it’s very dubious to look at someone’s credit list and think that represents them as a creative individual, or as a human being. I think in some ways it was really hard, partly because I would like people to look at Levity as really being by a first-time director—certainly not as though it’s by the guy who wrote Men in Black or something.
MM: But at the same time, do you think your experience in the film industry helped to lessen the sort of trepidation that your team—from cast and crew to financiers and producers—might typically have when it comes to a first-time director?
ES: It didn’t help me in any way with regards to financiers—at all!
MM: How long did the financing take?
ES: Well, from 1997 when I had the script finished until 2001 when I started shooting.
MM: Was it a full-time thing that you were working on?
ES: Initially I came out of the box trying really hard. Then, after six or eight months, when it had been rejected unilaterally everywhere—by every studio and every independent source that I had access to and every producer I met with—I started to slow down a bit. I still brought it with me everywhere I went and said ‘Hey, there’s this movie that I want to do,’ but I had to start doing other things, as well.
MM: What made you keep going?
ES: I guess it was maybe two years ago—right when I was turning 40. I started thinking about what I really wanted to do, and realized it was making Levity. So I rededicated myself. I’d been trying, and I’d come close a few times. At one point I got some money, but not enough to make it I didn’t think. It was hard! [laughs]
MM: It’s also not a mainstream movie, which is going to make it more difficult. Even looking at a movie like Monster’s Ball—which was a success both critically and financially. Studio executives are still going to take the ‘lightning only strikes once’ attitude, the thinking being that this “kind” of film has already been successful once, and they don’t want to take a chance on seeing whether or not it can happen again.
ES: You know, you could have 37 hits and if someone doesn’t want to hire you they’ll say “Well, lightning doesn’t strike 38 times—it only strikes 37 times!” [laughs] People can find reasons to say yes or no to anything, which goes back to the other question: I made the mistake of thinking that the more experience I had as a writer, the better I’d be as a director. But it’s irrelevant. No, that’s not true, it’s not irrelevant…
MM: But is it only relevant in the fact that you know the inner workings of the film industry?
ES: But you don’t. There are things about being a human being in the world that really help you in directing a movie, but only a few of those things do you learn within show business. Most of them have to do with general creativity and working with people. I think that in all of my years as a writer, most of the skills that I had honed did not help. It’s interesting, because I hadn’t really thought of it that way.
MM: You spoke about an earlier script that you had written and planned to direct and how, when you put on your “director hat” you had passed on the project. Did you make any modifications as the director of Levity, not thinking of yourself as the screenwriter?
ES: Well, ultimately it’s all the same. It’s being guardian or steward of this entity—this organic entity. How do you create enough room and space for this delicate little thing—this movie—to be what it’s telling you it needs to be? To that end, as the writer you sort of give birth to it and try to nurture it and let it be whatever it is up until a certain stage, when it goes off to someone else who then continues to let it evolve.
I guess as a director you could argue that it’s all writing—every choice you make is a writing choice in certain ways. We call one thing “writing” and one thing “directing,” but the boundaries are a lot less clear-cut, particularly when you’re the same person and you’re just continuing the same process. I think an outline or a screenplay, they’re both sort of snapshots of something that is in process; something that’s evolving. You take a snapshot and call it a “screenplay.” Then you revise it, you take a snapshot and you call it a “second draft.”
MM: But do you separate the two roles?
ES: Yes. Sometimes I would be standing there as a director on the set and ask ‘What the hell was the writer thinking at this moment?’ And sometimes I would watch the dailies going ‘What the fuck was this director thinking?’ The writer often got in the way. I think you often fall back on what you know, and when you’re directing a film there are problems and things don’t work or things happen that you have no control over and you have to quickly make changes. I think if you’re an actor, you tend to solve the problems in the performance. If you’re a production designer, you tend to see things visually. If you’re a writer, you think in terms of writing and so you always fall back to those skills that you feel comfortable with to sort of do your triage. But then, as soon as you’ve done that, you sort of step back into a larger role.
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