David Mackay has directed diverse movies, ranging from emotional (“Providence” and “Ace of Hearts”), to the terrifying, action-filled (“Fear of Flying” and “Black Point”). But most of “Supernatural” fans know David as director of his latest movie “Ten Inch Hero”.
David Mackay respectively, was so kind to give interview exclusive to Supernatural.ru and revealed a lot of interesting details of casting, acting and filming process.
“…Priestly was written as kind of a quirky guy and Jensen is a very model, good looks kind of guy, not so quirky looking…”
If you are fan of this amazing movie, you’ve got a chance to learn all these facts at first hand!
I really appreciate Alice Jester (The Winchester Family Business) for transcription of audio interview.
Click to download audio version – questions 1-7
How did you choose the script? Did you like Betsy’s story at first sight or did you have some other stories in mind? I’m still amazed how the indie “Ten Inch Hero” became so popular in Russia and other countries on a level with Hollywood blockbusters, although it hadn’t been screened in theaters. Maybe it’s concurrence of circumstances – great directing, script, cast and actors’ performance?
There is not a long story behind that but we started a small company called Brave New Films in about 2002. And it was a producer working with me, Mark Witsken, another development person named David Reeder and we had some financing from an independent executive producer his name is Roger Theodoredis, and he gave us the money and we put together a small company to produce independent movies. Up until that point I had directed six or seven other movies and I wanted to find some material that I really liked that wasn’t just an action movie. I did a movie on an airplane called Turbulence 2, I did some stuff that I really did like but I just wanted to find something that was more personal. And I had done that once before with a movie called The Lesser Evil and I was really happy with the way that film turned out and it was independently financed and I produced and directed and so I basically wanted to do that again coming off a movie that I wasn’t as thrilled about.
So we read probably a hundred scripts or a hundred and twenty or thirty scripts. We also looked at a lot of other synopsizes and other short versions of stories, we didn’t read all of them but we read the ideas and we whittled it down and whittled it down to about two or three that we liked the most and Ten Inch Hero was one of those two or three. So we talked to Betsy, told her we were a small company but we thought we could get her movie made. I told her my take on it and she agreed to let us option the screenplay, which means we have the sole rights to produce it, she can’t sell it to anyone else, and we have a period of time, one year, to be able to produce it.
So, we went down that path and we all liked the script a lot and we started to try and raise the money for it. Even though we had raised money to have the company operating we hadn’t raised millions of dollars to make the movies. We still had to go out and find the financing. We spent what turned out to be almost two and a half or three years to put the financing together from 2003 to when we shot in 2006. So that was a lot of work talking to financers in Germany, the UK, and various distributors that I worked with before on my other movies and finding independent investors in the United States.
And it was a long, long road and Betsy stuck with us and let us option the script for another year then another year. And all along the way we were meeting with actors and we were talking to casting directors, we were trying to figure out who the actual original cast was going to be even though we didn’t have all the financing put together yet. So, I hope that answers the question but there really were a lot scripts but this was the first one we made for the company and the one we definitely liked the most.
Did you change something in the original script?
The answer to that is yes. When we first read the script there were a lot of things we liked about it and that’s why we got involved but there’s always things I want to change as a director or things that my producing partner Mark thinks we could improve upon and make funnier, make better, make easier. There were some things like, for example the scene where they had the wedding on the beach. That was originally scripted to be in a big forest in a grove of redwood trees and we were not shooting in a place in around Los Angeles and in around Santa Cruz where we were going to be able to bring the crew and the cast to a grove of redwood trees.
This was my idea because we were already shooting on the beach for so many other scenes in the movie I said why not have that wedding on that same beach. We were already there to shoot other scenes, it’ll look beautiful, it’ll be part of the story because we’ve been so much at the beach, the setting is at the beach, and the characters are at the beach and the restaurant is called the Beach City Grille, for those reasons I thought it be appropriate we have it at the beach. If we had done it in a redwood forest you probably wouldn’t have thought twice about it and I’m sure it would have been beautiful, but we didn’t have the organizational ability and the logistical ability to do that.
Now that’s not a dialogue change but a location change. There were a couple other scenes in the movie that we thought just could be a little funnier and so we brought in a friend of mine named Joe Reitman, who’s a writer and we had him do a little bit of dialogue changes throughout the script. He just punched up some jokes, he tweaked a few lines here and there and we felt that made the script better. He doesn’t get credit for it because he didn’t change that much but he was still involved in the process and made some changes that I think improved it.
We also did a rewrite with Betsy and gave her notes and we said we want to change the t-shirts for example and let’s get some funnier ideas on Jensen’s t-shirts, and let’s make this more emotional. There’s a montage when they go down see Fuzzy, you know the driving scene with the song when they go down through all the beach towns on their way down to Morrow Bay. That scene was not in the movie, that was another idea I had that and I felt we needed to show all the girls come together and get excited about meeting this guy and take a road trip and that way they’re a little more invested in the outcome. And I think if we build the audience up and get them excited about it and it feels fun and it’s an adventure then when it turns out it’s a guy she’s embarrassed to meet it’s more of a fall, it’s more of a heartache. So I thought adding that sequence, there’s not really a scene, there’s not any dialogue but it’s a montage. By adding that montage it creates a more of a roller coaster emotionally for the characters and then more of a roller coaster emotionally for the audience. So that was something we changed from the original script too.
There’s other bits that we just tighten up a little bit sometimes for example the scene with Piper and Noah when they’re sitting on the porch and she explains to him that she thinks Julia is her daughter and he explains that no it couldn’t possibly be your daughter because I was there in the room she wasn’t adopted. Well that scene was maybe thirty seconds longer and there was a few more things that Noah talked about his ex-wife, incidents with the girl, and things that just made that scene too fat, is the way I refer to it. Too slow and too long. So we cut out a few lines of dialogue and sort of tighten up the scene and it feels better – (Marta: So emotional) – and in some ways more emotional because it’s not so long and drawn out. That happens in the editing room, it didn’t happen before we shot it. So that’s another change we make from the script editorially but not in the writing of it because we shot a whole scene the way she wrote that. We just ended up cutting it shorter.
There’s a couple of scenes that were cut out that we didn’t leave in the final movie. They’re actually on the DVD. There’s extras and bonus features and it shows a couple scenes that we cut out. Hopefully at some point you can see that.
What was your role in the casting process? Did you have other actors in mind to play your characters but then became convinced that the casting was perfect? Were there many actors auditioning for Priestly? Was Jensen Ackles your first choice or did you have anyone else in mind? As for me “TIH” cast is simply amazing!
Well, I don’t want to hurt anybody’s feelings but he wasn’t technically the first choice. When we were casting there were a lot of different actresses we were thinking about and some of them were Amy Adams, Jessica Biel, and they all have agents and managers and they loved the script and Jessica Biel came and met with us and Amy Adams met with us, Rachel Blanchard met with us, Amanda Ziefried (?) met with us and this was before we had financing. So it was great to meet with those actresses and in some cases I think the movie would have had more notoriety had we ended up with Jessica Biel and Amy Adams playing the leads, but by the time we got the money together they were already on other movies and Amy Adams had blown up and won an Academy Award and that made it very difficult for her to come back and say “Okay I know I was interested in your movie last year but I can’t do it now.” And that’s what happened.
In the course of that to get back to Jensen, one of the agents read the script and said “I have an actor named Jensen Ackles who you may or may not know who I think would be great for this role of Priestly. Will you please meet with him?” And I said yeah, I’ll happily meet with him and we had a great conversation. I didn’t know about Supernatural at the time. I heard of the show but I didn’t even know he was on it. And he was very enthusiastic, loved the script, was fun to hang out with, had a good take on it, but I had to say he was a little better looking and a little more together than I had originally imagined for the part. And there was someone else we were thinking about, you know who Seth Green is, he was someone that we thought maybe had a better physical characteristic for the movie. Priestly was written as kind of a quirky guy and Jensen is a very model, good looks kind of guy, not so quirky looking. Initially we weren’t thinking of someone that was really a leading man and he’s very much of a leading man. We wanted a character actor. But, in the course of casting and talking to Jensen and he came in and I wanted him to be, very avant-garde and very different looking and you know, I don’t really like the word punk, but you know, have some piercings and a haircut or a Mohawk or something that made it very unusual. Also, so that at the end of the movie when he decides to get rid of some of that he feels like a different person and at first you don’t even recognize him.
So, it worked out great and we loved having him in the movie. He brought a lot to it and it worked out great. I wouldn’t have thought that we were going to go with that kind of actor initially but it’s great that it works out in a way that we love. So, it couldn’t have been better, even though he wasn’t the first person we started thinking of when the casting director and Mark and I sat down and made lists of actors. Justin Long was someone else we thought about, there are really a handful of more comedic actors and Jensen to date had ronly done Supernatural which there isn’t much comedy in and Devour was a horror movie, some of the soap operas are dramas…
In Supernatural there are a lot of comedy moments
Are there? Yeah, I’ve seen some, that’s true. But he’s thought of a comedic actor I don’t think and initially when we started casting we picked a list of comedic actors. Which is a little shallow and that’s something that should always be done. It’s interesting when you cast someone in a different kind of part, which is what we ended up doing, so it worked out good.
What was the worst complication during filming? The most difficult scenes to shoot?
It wasn’t a very complicated movie. It’s very contained, which means a lot of the movie was shot in the sub shop, like nine or ten days in the same location. Which is very easy, it’s easier than moving every single day to a new location, that’s very very difficult and time consuming so that part was easy. We’re on the beach for two or three days, that was pretty easy, all on the same location. We made it look like different beaches but it’s all the same location. So, from a scheduling standpoint it was pretty easy.
There were a few things that were maybe a little complicated, one example is Jensen’s hair, which changes four or five or six times throughout the movie. Different colored Mohawk, spikes, styles and when you shoot the movie you don’t shoot in an order so it’s not like he had a green Mohawk one day and then a red Mohawk the next day and a blue Mohawk the next day. Some days he had to have three or four different hairdos because we were doing scenes that needed to be pretty much in an order that favors the actors. For example Alice Krige, who plays Zo, what happens is when we scheduled her we shoot all of her scenes in one or two days. And so all of her scenes are sprinkled throughout the movie in a way where Jensen has a different haircut for every scene that she is in. So because we had to shoot all of her scenes first to finish her in one or two days, Jensen ends up having to change his hair four or five days every day. So that was very complicated and time consuming and figuring out the continuity of what day in the script it is, which hair do we have that day, which wardrobe he’s wearing that day. It all needs to get changed and needs to be done in between setups.
So, we’ll shoot one scene with blue hair and then he’ll run to the makeup trailer for a half hour and they’ll wash it out and they’ll change his hair style and then they’ll dye it a new color and then run him back to the set and we’ll shoot another few hours with that hairstyle. It’s somewhat complicated. It’s something that he handled very well and he was always racing. He never wanted us to be waiting for him so he was always moving as fast as he could and he did a good job with that. So did the hair department.
Another thing that was a little tricky was the mural on the back wall. At the very end of it you see the painting she’s done of the wedding. Well throughout the movie there’s different stages of progress for that mural. It starts out just a white wall, then it becomes a line drawing, and then it gets painted in a little bit then it gets colored in even more and then finally it’s the finished version. When you shoot the movie out of order we always had to change the mural on the wall just like we have to change his hairstyle. We may shoot one day where the mural is the finished version and another day when it’s a line drawing and another day where it’s a blank wall and it’s a huge wall, it’s the width of the whole submarine sandwich shop so they would have to walk it in and walk it out and attach it to the wall and take it down and sometimes three or four or five times a day also. So it was another thing that was a little complicated because we weren’t shooting in order.
What are your favorite moments in this movie?
I like the montage, I was partial to that. I think emotionally that is a good scene to get people really excited and then I like the way when Jen has her breakdown on the beach when she’s just too embarrassed to meet Fuzzy. I think that’s an emotional scene that works well. I like a lot of the moments with Jensen and he’s got a great sense of humor that brings to the movie. It livens up every scene. I can’t say there’s one particular scene. I like the convenience store where he has to buy the tampons and he has that call with Danneel and there’s that little bit of code they’re speaking in and the way he tries to impress the guys in the convenience store that he’s buying tampons and that he’s a cool guy with a great relationship with a great girl that’s why he could do it and that it shouldn’t be embarrassing.
It was also the scene we saw as the trailer.
We put that on the internet on purpose because we thought it would interest people. People really liked that. So we picked that scene for a reason, it was one of my favorite scenes and we thought it would interest his fans so I guess that worked.
Yes, perfectly.
Who is your favorite character? There is always someone special, so who would that be?
It’s one of those movies that everybody is so well written. There’s so many different characters and it’s called an ensemble movie because everybody has a character arc, everybody has some emotion in the movie and it’s not just like a love story with two people. It’s really six people. And they all have interesting curving arcs, actually seven if you count Noah, so they all have relationships and arcs and bring a lot to it. I have to say I like the script because I like them all. If there only one or two that I thought were good than the whole movie wouldn’t be good.
I asked Betsy Morris the same question and she can’t pick between them too and loves them all but said that Tish is the most complicated of all the characters and she feels protective of her cause not everyone understands her. Betsy was so grateful to Danneel because many actresses would have played her as a two dimensional character but Danneel understood her and made her into a wonderful complicated woman.
Yeah, she did a great job with it and we didn’t want it to be just a one dimensional character, you know a girl that really likes having sex with guys. It was definitely intended to be much more than that and that maybe she’s hiding behind that and she thinks that’s something that really would attract people to her but in some ways it’s the opposite you know. It makes her less attractive over time and with some mixed experiences it changes her thinking about it. So, she’s got some depth to her, all the characters have a lot of depth.
How did you choose filming locations? Was it a real sandwich shop or a set?
What did it look like to you? A set or a real place? (A real place). Yeah, it was a real place. We thought about doing it on a stage but in some ways it’s more expensive to build an entire sub shop than to just find one we could rent. We found this one in San Pedro, it’s a small town near the beach about 45 miles south of Los Angeles. It’s a very small one street town with old looking architecture. It was basically what we were looking for. It wasn’t a sandwich shop it was really a café. Ironically across the street there was a submarine sandwich shop that just sold submarine sandwiches but we really didn’t like the look it. It didn’t have as interesting of a counter for everybody to work behind, it didn’t have booths, and it didn’t have a look that I liked. So we shot at this café and we just of course converted it a little bit to look like a sandwich shop where there’s an area to make sandwiches and a counter to order and we changed a few things in the sandwich shop to make it look more like that and less like a restaurant. It was a real place.
The beach we picked out from five or six different beaches we looked at. I wanted to find one that looked more like Northern California because the beaches in Santa Cruz and Carmel and Monterey have lots of rocks and they’re more barren I guess. And the beaches in (Southern) California tend to be covered with people. Everywhere you go in Manhattan Beach and Newport Beach and Santa Monica there’s people everywhere and I didn’t want it to feel like a Los Angeles beach. I wanted it to be like a beach in Northern California. So we picked one that was a little cove that was very private. We also shot some scenes in Santa Cruz. In the opening scene when you see the pier and that beach, that’s a beach that’s right in Santa Cruz with the boardwalk and the roller coaster, that’s the real boardwalk in Santa Cruz. But the beach where we filmed the scenes with the actors talking was a totally different beach in Los Angeles.
To be continued
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