Almost Linear

I recently had the privilege of speaking to Lawrence Michael Levine, writer and director of Black Bear, starring Aubrey Plaza and Christopher Abbott. We spoke a little about that movie, where I tried to pick his brain for some answers. We also talked what it’s like directing your own work, how he gets his films made, and the small steps to putting together a low budget feature.

J: I know that with Black Bear, there was the distinct choice to split it into these two segments, two worlds… I have to ask, could you say anything about which one is real?

L: None of it is. I always get confused when people ask me that because none of it is real. It’s all story. It’s not a documentary. None of it’s real, or any of the characters, I think what people mean when they say real is, were any of them intended to be the real story that then gets transfigured into the film or something. But, in which case, the clear real story would be what, what would the real story be if one got transfigured into a film? I don’t really know. It’s all fiction. It’s a character study, is how I think of it.

It’s interesting, because I feel like anything I say about the story makes it less interesting and rich for people. So I’ve always been reluctant to do it. I would just say it is all in the characters head, whether those are memories she has, or work she’s dreaming of creating, or work she’s currently creating in the movie, those are all open questions. But the experiences that this character has had that are then transposed into either artistic imaginings or artistic products are elusive. I think one’s led to believe in watching the movie that they have something to do with her life. But I don’t think you even know whether or not that’s true.

J: I remember early on in the film when Christopher Abbott is helping her with her bag he mentions that her husband is absent. And when she’s talking to him about her past work, she paints herself as somewhat difficult and possibly having been fired from a project. Then in the second one, Christopher Abbott is the husband and he’s controlling. I feel like there’s arguments for each side.

L: Yeah, how chronological things are is never going to be clarified. But these details of the character’s life, for example, the second film could be seen as experience she’s talking about in the first. Or, or the second film could just as easily not be. I’ll leave it at that.

J: I did want to ask you more about the experience of directing your own work, because that’s something I am extremely new to.

L: So as far as directing my own writing, it’s all I’ve done, I’ve never not directed my own writing. Even my earliest experiences I was writing and directing my own stuff. So, that’s all I’ve known. It’d be harder to talk to me about directing someone else’s work. I’m a writer-director, and the people I admired when I first started out mostly were that also. 

J: How does that play into looking at your own work, critically?

L: Here’s one thing that I have learned that’s helpful. Once I’ve finished something and I’m getting set to direct it, I always do an exercise where I try to imagine that I’m not the writer of this material, but that I’m a director for hire. And I read it as if I don’t know what this script is about. I don’t know the first thing about it, my agent has sent it to me and I’m reading it as if I’m thinking about directing someone else’s work. I’ve found that exercise to be really helpful. And many, many times when I do this exercise I’ll then go back and do rewriting, because certain things I thought were clear were not clear to that person who didn’t know anything about the story. If it’s a mental state that you can get yourself into, I would suggest it. It helps you see things with a more open mind. I find it to be a very useful exercise.

J: Being in school and not having an agent, I don’t know much about film production in the indie world. What was getting financing for Black Bear like?

Did connections you’d established in earlier films help, did you know while writing you were going to get it made?

L: No, I didn’t know whether I’d be able to make it or not. I know I’ve been a professional screenwriter for probably about 10 years, and semi professional screenwriter for the 10 years before that so it’s been 20 years building a career. And yes, in that time I made connections and established myself as an artist and everything so I hoped that there would be money for Black Bear but I wrote it on spec. I just tried to keep it cheap, tried to keep it small, one location, not that many characters. So that it was something I could feasibly make, something I wouldn’t need a ton of money. It was pretty uncommercial material anyway so it wasn’t something I was counting on getting money for. I’d been getting paid to write screenplays and create TV shows for a while, so I had some money. Black Bear wasn’t written with any assurance that it was definitely going to get made or anybody paying me to write it, nothing like that.

J: That’s been all my writing so far, so I definitely have more time to write things that I probably should, but at the same time there’s nothing I’m obligated to right now.

L: If you’re writing something on spec there’s nobody looking over your shoulder. And if you’re writing something for a production company or network or studio, they give you a timeframe, but they know that it’s a creative process and it’s not set in stone. If you sign a contract that says 12 weeks and you deliver in 16, nobody’s going to kill you or sue you. But yes, there are some situations where you find yourself pressed for time. Let’s say you have to do a rewrite in two weeks because the shoot is coming up. That can be stressful.

J: Did you know any of the cast involved before making the film? Lots of heavy hitters in there. 

L: Yeah, I had. I was friends with Aubrey (Plaza), I wrote it with her with her in mind. If she had said no, that would have been okay, I would probably try to get somebody else. But I did write it with her in mind and hoping she would do it. After Aubrey said yes, she and her agent were pretty helpful with the rest of the cast. I had met Chris (Abbott) a couple times prior. I had asked him to be in another film that I was working on, he said no. Didn’t dissuade me from trying again. And Sarah (Gadon) I admired but I didn’t know her. I thought she was great from several things I had seen her in. And then a lot of the supporting cast were my friends.

J: How did you find the place? It’s a beautiful house.

L: We just found it by looking where anybody would look, I think VRBO perhaps. It was my wife who found it, she helped produce the movie. I believe that she found that house. We were just looking at places upstate because we wanted to take advantage of the New York tax credit.  And it was truly isolated, very little phone service, WiFi, or anything like that. So in a way it was pretty cool. People weren’t like just hanging out on their phones. 

J: Going into the script, before writing it, did you have any specific ideas of a theme or message you were trying to get across? I feel like there’s a lot there.

L: No. This is very different from any other script that I’ve written in the sense that I didn’t have any plan at all going into it. It was more like automatic writing. And I did very little additional work on it after that initial outpouring. I’d done a lot of work in Hollywood that was more conventional with studios and production companies, etc. And I got paid to do it but I was frustrated because none of it ended up getting made. I felt that I had been a really good soldier and I had worked with those partners very diligently and scrupulously and understood they were paying me. I took the sense of responsibility pretty seriously to give them what they wanted. And still, this stuff didn’t get produced. Doesn’t mean it won’t someday, things take a long time out here, but there was a feeling of frustration and I figured, I’m just going to write my own thing. I just wanted to explore and do some art for art’s sake. And I didn’t want to be so intellectual about it. A lot of the process when you’re writing in Hollywood for, for the industry, let’s just call it, everything needs to be sold. You need to tell everybody what you’re thinking. You need to tell everybody what you’re going to do before they pay you to do it. And I get it. That’s fine. People are scared when they start to give money, they want to make sure it’s going somewhere. So I understand why that’s necessary. But there’s also another way to work, which is more spontaneous and intuitive. I was hungry to do something like that just because I’d been working this other way for several years. So with Black Bear, I rented an office for myself, to sort of get away from my home environment and not have any distractions, and I did a lot of meditating, and I gave myself a lot of space. It took several months before I did anything. I went to this office, just sat there and thought, let my mind roam freely with the idea that I was trying to think up stories. And eventually, while that process was going on, I had a dream. When I went to the office the next day to write down the dream, more stuff started happening. That became the first part of Black Bear. Um, Then there was some time after that thinking, okay, this isn’t a full length movie. I’ve always been interested in films that have a weird structure. There were certain filmmakers that I was watching at that time that were sort of inspiring me. I got interested in the idea of dream films, and somewhere along the line. It occurred to me that an old story I had sketched out about 10 years prior would pair in a really interesting way with the one I had just written. And then I put them together to see. Once I looked at them juxtaposed, I saw these interesting ways that I could nudge them to comment on each other and interweave. That’s kind of how it unfurled. It was kind of an improvisation. A lot less planning than I usually do or have done subsequently.

J: I’m trying to think if you’d label Black Bear as a nonlinear story, per se.

L: They’re just juxtaposed against each other and they’re not chronological, necessarily. There’s this Korean director Hong Sang-soo. He has this interesting film called Right Now, Wrong Then. And it’s the same story twice with slight alterations to it. That, I think, is a fascinating movie. There are more things like that where there is chronology, they’re just not told that way. There’s a linear way to tell those stories. Those filmmakers just didn’t do it that way. I didn’t set out to do a nonlinear movie. I didn’t set out to do anything in particular. I was more rolling with what my subconscious was giving me. And any rewriting was really in terms of playing the two halves off of each other in more interesting ways. The initial idea was for the second part to be the backstage drama of the first part, which isn’t a bad idea. But something about it felt too straightforward, and I wanted the movie to feel more dreamlike. So, I scratched that idea and chose to interweave them in different ways. That would have been linear in a sense, or at least chronological.

If you’ve enjoyed our chat so far, hop over to Part 2 where we’ll talk more about writing and making your own films.

Be sure to check out Levine’s film Black Bear, starring Aubrey Plaza, Christopher Abbott, and Sarah Gadon, as well as all of his previous works.