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Tamara Jenkins Gets Savage
Oscar-nominated writer-director beats the sophomore slump
(Page 2)
MM: There was a nine-year gap between your first movie and your second one…
TJ: So what happened? (laughs)
MM: Yeah.
TJ: After Slums of Beverly Hills, I worked for a long time on another project that was owned by somebody else… You end up walking down a lot of streets that turn out to be dead ends. It’s easy to get frustrated when all these ideas for features end up withering on the vine, so I started channeling my energy into doing little theater projects with friends and some uncredited script-doctoring on the side.
But I kept writing the entire time. Then, when The Savages script started accumulating enough to turn into something that seemed significant—to me, at least—it took another few years to finish writing it. When I finally got it down to a practical length, it was another year to get it financed. I wish I could say, ‘Yeah, I just rushed it out and we started production a month later.’ Movies like this take a lot of time to get going—a lot of time.
MM: How long was your first draft?
TJ: Two hundred pages. It read more like a novel than a script, with all these details and a lot of attention paid to the minutia. Screenwriting is really like making a reduction sauce: You make this thing and then you just keep taking more and more out. (laughs) By the time I started on my second and third drafts, it was almost like I was adapting a book I’d written.
MM: The film feels like it could have come from a John Cheever short story, in terms of its dialogue and set-up.
TJ: I actually spent time at the Yaddo writers’ colony, where John Cheever and Sylvia Plath and Philip Roth—you know, real writers (laughs)—worked on stuff. A lot of The Savages got hashed out there.
MM: Do you think that contributed to the literary feel at all?
TJ: Not specifically, though listening to a lot of fiction writers discussing their work did encourage a different mindset. When I started getting into the mechanics of the script, I felt like I suddenly had license to get into the internal workings of the characters more—what is going through Jon’s head right now? What does the dandruff on his shirt look like?
I was indulging in prose, and that helped me immensely in terms of figuring what this movie was about as I was sketching everything out. The problem, of course, is when you start writing in Final Draft and a character name suddenly pops up when you press a button: “Oh, he’s got to start speaking now. I’m not ready for this yet!” (laughs)
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This story was published in the Fall 2007 MovieMaker Magazine. The headline was:
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