Inside the Creative Process: Karyn Kusama Walks Through Five Phases of Production, From Screenwriting to Distribution

Development

During prep is when you’re getting the feel for your film. You’re hoping to get as much time to think about the movie on a creative, emotional, and practical level as you can. It’s also when you’ll start to form core relationships with your cinematographer, production designer, and composer.

One way to do this: Share the script with your composer before you start shooting. On both The Invitation and Destroyer, my composer Teddy Shapiro started recording music while we were in prep. Your composer can start by writing music based on his reaction to the type of music that’s in the script, and on his reaction to the type of music you’re listening to, as you imagine what your finished film might need.

I’m hesitant to tell people that casting is everything, but it kind of is when it comes to the practicality of getting your movie made. I have a bunch of films in the works that I know will most likely only be made if I can attach an actor of significance. There are moviemakers who make a certain kind of movie that doesn’t need star power, but even the most low-budget film financiers are usually looking for a name they’ve already heard of. Whether it’s a smaller movie like The Invitation, a bigger movie like Destroyer, or the biggest movie I’ve made, Æon Flux, none of them got made until the right actor came on board. Meet with actors before their schedule fills up with a new project, foster relationships with them and develop a shorthand. That way, once you go through the trouble of getting agents and managers to read your script to see if it’s something their client might like, you and the actor you want won’t feel like strangers when you get on the phone.

Spend a lot of time on the road during the locations process. Imagine not only what you can make work for your movie creatively, but what can work logistically. Destroyer is such an L.A. movie, so it was important for our locations to have a freshness— for the places we shot to have something that audiences haven’t seen before in such a familiar city. The story lived in a gritty, grimy version of L.A., so it was an exhaustive search to find different locations that had a level of vivid specificity with the griminess; some locations had plenty of the former and none of the latter. We also needed to find places that hadn’t been overshot by many moviemakers before us, and because our fast shooting schedule only gave us 33 days, we had to come up with creative and pragmatic answers to putting our film crew in a lesser-shot area that might’ve been a problematic place for us to be in.

Prep is extremely intense, primarily because before actors land on set and you’re actually rolling a camera, you’re working on all fronts. Living with that anxiety can be stressful, but developing an unusual world—one you haven’t quite seen before—makes it all worth it.

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