MEDIA: Is it intimidating or difficult directing a movie in which the star is also the writer?
RAYMOND: Yes, it is. But I wouldn't have done it if I didn't feel from when Paul and I first met that we had kind of the same sense of things and the same take and the same kind of humor. We liked each other. It's not something I would suggest somebody do if you don't like the star and writer, because it's hard to make a movie. And you're going to probably have too many sensitive moments that you're going to feel are not helping you creatively as a filmmaker. So yeah, it was definitely something that I thought about. But I loved Paul's script, and I loved the idea of him and Peter together. And when I first read the script and I heard Peter's voice coming off the page and I realized he had done a perfect kind of writer mimicry of Peter, I thought, "This will really work. We can do this."
So it was a very open collaboration between the two of you?
Yeah, and we worked on the script together a little bit, too. We took the script and cut it down a little, and shaped it a little, and found ways to say things...simpler ways than originally it had been written.
Shooting in upstate New York in the fall, did you face any challenges with the weather?
Yeah, you never know in that part of the world. But we were really lucky because we knew we were going to go in the fall, and we knew we were going to shoot somewhere in the Northeast. And I went to college in upstate New York, and I remembered that there was this time of the leaves turning. And I said we have to shoot during those couple of weeks, all of our exteriors, because they are a character in the film. They're part of what the road trip's about. And they're also part of the autumnal nature of what's happening in [Paul's character's] life. And we hit it right on. It's a little hard to predict. We kept shifting it a week or two this way or that way. But we were pretty lucky.
Where did you find the classic Ford that Peter's character buys in the movie?
Yeah, isn't that great? It's funny, [Paul] always had in the script that they bought a 1944 Deluxe. I remember saying to my production designer, "The car's another character, so we have to cast it right away, because we can't just have any old car." And you couldn't find one anywhere. So we started looking at options, and we started going, "Well, we can get an old Lincoln." But by then, we had found a photograph of the old Ford, and we loved it. And I still don't know quite why Paul was so specific about that car, but it was so beautiful. And finally, on Staten Island, we found one guy [who] happened to own a restored 1944 Deluxe. He was the nicest man, and he drove it upstate for us. He stayed with the whole shoot.
To make sure no one scratched his car?
Oh, yeah. Absolutely. [laughs] As he was correct to do, because film crews are notoriously shady about stuff like that. You know, you're too busy, and things get knocked into. But it was great. He gave us his car for the shoot.
How did you go about casting the supporting roles, such as Paul's onscreen sisters, wife (Elizabeth Perkins), and mother (Olympia Dukakis)?
Actually, the sisters are all really great, local New York actors. Mimi Lieber is a really good theatre actress...Ann Dowd. Elizabeth Perkins was an idea that Paul had. I don't know if they were close friends or not, but they had met a couple times, and he suggested her. And I thought it was kind of a long shot, but she actually turned down another movie to do this, because she said, "I think this is going to be fun to do, and I don't really want to do a movie I don't like." The same with Olympia Dukakis. We were always trying to figure out who could be the mom. The mother part's funny, because she's talked about forever, but she only appears at the very end. But in a way, it's kind of a good actor's role because by the time you appear, everyone thinks they know you because you've been talked about through the whole thing. And Paul had worked with Olympia on something else. And we sent it to her, and I thought, again, "Gee, I don't know, is she going to do this? It's just one scene at the end." But she was like, "Oh yeah, I'd love to do this." I think she was wise, too, in knowing that she was very much the focus of the story even though she only actually appears at the very end of it.
Peter mentioned that the fishing scene was an impromptu moment you just decided to shoot. Do you have a lot of extra footage where you would roll camera on the actors without necessarily alerting them?
Yeah, there's a lot of extra footage, but that was really the only time we just fully improvised a scene, because we didn't really think we were going to do anything but take a long shot of them doing the bait. But what they were doing was so funny that I just said, "Let's just shoot this and let them go." And actually, this was very helpful to be shooting on video. When you're shooting on film, especially on a low-budget movie, you have this horrible conversation at the end of every day where the producers come to you and tell you you're spending too much film. And it's terrible. They have to tell you that, because it's costly. But in the big realm of things, it's not that costly. And as a director, I'm always thinking, "It's so hard to get a movie made. It's so hard for us to all get on the set and be here, and now you don't want me to shoot it?" I just want to spend film. I want to get whatever there is out there. On tape, nobody cares. Tape doesn't cost anything. You can roll hours of tape and just leave the button on. What I did do a lot of on this was never really cut. I would just keep the tape rolling and in between takes, say, "Hey let's do it again, whenever you're ready." And it kind of just removes a huge pressure from the entire thing, and a lot of the time I think it helped with the naturalness of everyone's performances. We never really knew when we were on or not.
Did you enjoy that style of filming?
Yeah, I like it a lot more because, to me, successful directing of acting is only about getting actors to be like humans, and not like they're playing something. It's very much Altman's secret. You know, Altman is never quite clear with actors when he's filming or not. He's so good though, that he can do that with film. I don't quite know how he's worked that out over the years. Of course, he's directed a hundred movies and I've directed three. But it's certainly his technique. He's never quite clear with actors when he's photographing them or from where. He's very clever about using lenses so that his close-ups...They don't know it's a close-up. I think that's the essence of filmmaking and directing actors.
Thank you for your time.
Pleasure to talk to you guys.
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