Podcast #7: Scott Mosier

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Transcript

Colin: Hello and welcome to the latest episode of filmonomics @ slated. My name is Colin Brown and I’m your podcast host for this series that looks under the skin of the film business in order to better understand its decision-making process.

Now, for the uninitiated, you might think that learning how films are made for commercial consumption might be akin to hearing how sausages are made — a hidden world full of unpleasant truths that will only get in the way of our enjoyment. As with peace treaties, the less you know what goes into sausages the better.

But the reality of moviemaking is not nearly so unappetizing. The more you interview film decision-makers, the less mysterious and distasteful the business of making movies becomes. For all its colorful personalities and conniving tactics and constant shifts, cinema has historically boiled down to a couple of core considerations that never went away, namely: Do you have a story worth telling visually and, if so, how can that story be dressed up to entice a paying audience. Those two essential elements — development and marketing — are what the most successful film executives seem to keep forever in their focus, while all around them the methods by which films are made, measured and distributed are subject to perpetual change.

I was reminded of all this when interviewing this week’s special guest, Scott Mosier. As the producer and co-editor of most of Kevin Smith’s movies since they first made CLERKS together twenty-four years ago, Scott has enjoyed a front row seat in the evolution of the independent filmmaking business these past couple of decades. That period has been nothing short of transformational for all those concerned and yet, as you will hear from our conversation, the fundamentals have remained the same.

Today, of course, Scott is firmly established as a producing force. Check out his profile on Slated, where he joined as one of its earliest members, and you will see that he has a Slated score of 61 no less on the back of successes such as FREE BIRDS, ZACK AND MIRI MAKE A PORNO and GOOD WILL HUNTING.

You would think that by now professional life has become so much easier for Scott than in those desperate learn-as-you-go-days fresh out of Vancouver Film School when he and Kevin used every trick in the no-budget book to cobble together their debut. Far from it, says Scott:

“In many ways it feels like more work now. It feels more difficult to escape. I think that because of all the technology, people have been shrinking schedules. So we’re doing the same amount of work in less time. Because it is possible.”

In catching up with Scott over the phone from Paris, on the eve of what turned out to be a momentous French presidential election, the conversation frequently returned to the side effects of all this technology on our personal and business lives. Those advances, he suggested, seem to be happening faster than our ability to absorb and process all that new information — and certainly at a much greater pace than he experienced growing up as the locus of suburban entertainment gradually switched from playing arcade games at the mall to watching videos and playing on consoles at home. As someone who taught himself all aspects of the film production process, Scott has also seen first-hand the impact of that accelerated technological change on the independent cinema his films have helped to shape. His years since CLERKS have played out like a living laboratory of filmmaking R&D.

Scott: Kevin and I made CLERKS in 1993. We shoot it in ’93, we cut on film, sell it in ’94. MALLRATS is also done on film. And then we were going to do CHASING AMY. I’ve always been interested in editing — it’s one of my favorite parts of the process — and I remember hearing about the Avid and reading about it. There was a guy I knew who lived near us in New Jersey and he said, “Oh, we got an Avid in New York.” And I was like: “Well, can I come up and kind of take it for a test run, maybe give me some tutorials, so I can learn what it is?” And I’d go up on the weekends and nights to learn how to use it. I remember I bought a 9-Gig drive for, like, fifteen hundred dollars or twelve hundred dollars, or something like that. And so CHASING AMY was the first movie that we cut on an Avid. When we finished shooting, Kevin and I went to New York and basically we were just in this edit room day after day, sleeping in it. We did a first cut of the movie in, like, two weeks because he would fall asleep and then I would cut, and then I would fall asleep and he would cut, and we would just keep going, going, going. And I was sort of also teaching him my limited knowledge of it.

So we were at the very beginning of this sort of digital revolution through the film industry and kind of watched it from those early days till now. And it’s just so completely different. Everybody I think gauges how the world changes based on many factors. You know for me, having started in my early 20s making movies, that has always been a real gauge of how fast things have changed: from movie to movie to movie, watching the process of how dailies and digital cameras and digital editing systems and all that just change. Every time I went to make a movie, it would change. It felt to me like from CHASING AMY forward, every time we made a movie, the technology had advanced. The resolution had changed, how dailies were done had changed, or the DOP. At a certain point, once digital started — and obviously there has been a lot of investment and a lot of money poured into it — it was like just watching it change more and more and more.

Colin: Of course, one of the defining moments in the democratizing rise of digital cinema is CLERKS itself. This raunchy, raggedly made, film about sex, death and hockey in a New Jersey convenience store won prizes at both Sundance and Cannes and was released by Miramax. Inspired by the early films of Rick Linklater and Spike Lee, CLERKS was a film that itself inspired Gen X filmmakers everywhere into believing that the means of production were within their reach. And that even the seemingly uneventful lives of do-nothings could also have the makings of great entertainment. Kevin Smith and Scott scraped together the $27,575 they needed to make the film from maxed out credit cards, money borrowed from parents and selling a prized comic-book collection. Kevin even went to so far as to register at the New School for a cooking class in Roast Suckling Pig just to get a student ID — and with it a 30% discount on Kodak film stock. Shot in black-and-white, for no better reason that they had no money to do any color correction, the film was screened for the first time to an almost empty room at the Independent Feature Film Market in Manhattan — empty except for one eagle-eyed Sundance programmer who recognized what one critic would later call a “Grunge Godot”. The rest is history, propelling Kevin and Scott into careers as the poets of profanity and a thriving sideline as pundits of pop-culture with their own podcast series — or SModcasts as they call them. All these years later, I asked Scott how he saw CLERKS’ contribution to indie filmmaking.

Scott: It’s such an interesting question because I always think about the timing of when we made that movie, you know? I think when we made that movie the real attribute we had was the script. If you strip everything away — and I couldn’t say this when I was 21 — but I can sit there now and ask: “What’s the defining thing that makes that project?” And that’s not to say there are tons of contributions that are put on top of that, that aren’t additive. Absolutely, there are. But if you look at it from ways back, lots of people were making independent movies then — there’s a lot more now obviously — but even at the time, we weren’t the only people making these smaller budget movies. And so I have always thought what’s the thing that distinguished what we were doing, or what we did, versus some of these other ones? And like I said there’s definitely more than just one thing. And to reduce it down to sort of the script is, maybe, diluting it down to one thing too much. But it’s not like it was down to my vast experience of making movies or Kevin’s vast experience in making movies or Dave Klein who shot it — who’s now shooting HOMELAND — or the actors! Did we all bring a sensibility or add a moment on this or that? Absolutely. But the thing that I believe really made that movie into the success that it is, is the script. And it’s the thing that even nowadays you can sit there and look at and say, yes, digital technology has made it possible for anyone to tell a story. But the difference between just making a movie and making a movie that people are going to relate to, or is going to tap into the zeitgeist, or however you want to describe it, I think, still comes down to your ability to generate material. Generate great material that is going to be the foundation for what that movie is going to become. That, to me, is the thing that hasn’t changed. And I think we still see it now where there’s definitely more movies being made now.

And even in the documentary field — where I made a few documentaries — yes, anyone can pick up a camera. I can decide to make a documentary about you. I can make a documentary about anybody. And we can do it. Even if you make a documentary about somebody that’s famous, it doesn’t mean it’s going to be a good documentary. You still have to sit down and go: “In my estimation, is there a story there? Or, is there a compelling idea there that will track through the film, where I actually care to get to the end?”

Those things, to me, still apply. But that could be, once again, me having grown up watching what I watched, and that might be ingrained in my brain, and you know — and this is a really long answer — I also think about the idea what do audiences want? And maybe what I’m trying to generate, or what I’m trying to tap into, or what I feel are the foundations of a good movie, there’s a chance that that is evolving too, that that’s changing. Because even if you look at movies from the ’30s or ’40s, there are certain elements of those that you couldn’t necessarily do today, you know? Like an audience wouldn’t be accepting of it. Whether it’s being in black-and-white, which is generally really difficult to do, or how people would speak, all those things. And those have changed based on people’s tastes, based on people’s experience with the world. So there’s no reason why that change won’t continue, you know?

Colin: Since CLERKS, Scott has occasionally made films for the Hollywood studios as he did with MALLRATS and soon possibly again with a new animated version of Dr Seuss’ HOW THE GRINCH STOLE CHRISTMAS that Universal has pegged for a November 2018 release. But throughout most of his producing career, Scott has stayed resolutely on the independent margins, catering to a loyal constituency of Kevin Smith fans and also separately pursuing his own film, documentary and animation projects on subjects that speak to his personal tastes. For Scott, deciding what kinds of movie to make comes down to opportunity and also knowing which trade-offs you are willing to live with as a filmmaker.

Scott: For me the answer is really a personal choice of every filmmaker that’s out there. What you’re presenting is the choice of: Who do I want to make movies for? Or how do I want to come at this?

And I think it all comes down to money.

So, if you want to make a $90 million movie you have two paths to doing that. One, you’re going to make a movie with a lot of input from a lot of different sources, meaning marketing, the studio putting up the money, test screenings, market research screenings. And you’re also going to have to deal with the ‘what is the sort of movie of the moment?’ question. Like: “Oh, this was successful this week. Do we have any of that in our movie?” If you want to go make those movies, or make movies in a studio system, all that stuff are things you’re going to have to contend with.

You can also make a $90 million movie if you are able to start at a level where you can make your specific movie, you know, exactly to your taste. Find your audience and then with each movie afterwards you get more money and you continue to be successful. There’s a world where you can make a $90 million movie exactly the way you want. But you’re going to have to create success. You’re going to have to hit some stages, you know. You’re going to have to make that smaller, lower budget movie — and then you’re going to have to climb up from there.

And that’s where I think it’s a real personal decision of what type of filmmaker do you want to be. For me, I go back to Kevin and Clerks, because contained within the script was the voice, you know? The movie had a unique voice, absolutely, but that was in the pages. It was in a script. Like it was a document that had his voice inside of it. And then what we were there to do was to just kind of assist in putting that voice on film. And it wasn’t like a voice where you’re saying: “We’re not quite sure what he’s trying to say here”. It was distinct and you knew it, and you knew that you hadn’t seen a movie like this. And the writing was sharp. And you known we couldn’t have gone to a studio and got that movie made. Like rated-R movies where people say the sort of things that we’re saying that were not part of the mainstream sort of movie culture at all. And so you had to make that movie there. And that’s where it got started. And you can have a distinct voice. And if you want to have a distinct voice, and do things that are off the radar, then you should really be looking into how you can do that and how you can make movies for less money, and figure out the distribution of what you can get.

And, like you said, you may want to make a series of movies that are in that wheelhouse — which have a really distinctive voice. And maybe your distinctive voice has a limited audience. Maybe your distinct voice is not going to attract an audience so large that you can move into the studio system and make $90 million movies. But I also admit that this is where the change in distribution and all that stuff is something that I’ve not kept up that well and I’m not an expert on.

I made some documentaries, like 3 or 4 years ago, and one of them was called A BAND CALLED DEATH. We didn’t make it for a lot of money. I loved the story. I was really excited about the story when I heard it and we got to make it the way that we wanted to, where, yes, we’re showing it to other people but generally it’s a case of we’re going to decide what the best version of this movie is, and then we’re going to send it to Sundance and SXSW etc.

And I loved the movie and I thought the movie was great and the reviews and people who’ve seen it have been really great and really responsive. Which is great, because the filmmaker in me says, “If I love a movie then I love hearing that other people love it.” Because partly it’s like: “OK, I can continue to have a job, because my tastes aren’t so fucked up or off what people like.”

Because if you make a movie where it’s like “I love this!” and then no one else likes it, then it’s really hard to go to work every day. Because for me, personally, you are relying on your taste to a certain degree. To do your day-to-day job, you have to rely on your taste. There are no computers sitting around where you can type in: “What kind of song should I play here?” You are relying on your taste on a day-by-day basis. You have test screenings. You get other people’s opinions. But the real day-to-day work of making a movie is your experience and taste and all that. And it was great to get that response. But once we got into the cycle of some festivals and trying to sell it, it felt like — having not necessarily done that for a while — it felt like: “Oh, wow, the whole space of distribution has changed.” And I think I came into it a little bit with the attitude that you go to a festival, you sell it, there you go. And that’s bad advice, at this point!

Colin: The documentary feature that Scott is referring to here chronicles the incredible story of Death, the pioneering punk band formed before punk even existed by three teenage brothers in their spare bedroom in Detroit during the era of Motown and disco. Intimidated by both the name and the music, Death were rejected by the music establishment — until three decades later a dusty 1974 demo tape found an audience several generations younger. It’s the classic music fairy-tale and one that I imagined might have benefited from taping into Scott’s own loyal base of avid fans. Would a BAND CALLED DEATH fit into the SModcast brand, I wondered.

Scott: I think that can always be a plus. It’s never a negative. People are always saying, “Oh, you have that outlet in order to promote things.” But in trying to get that movie out there, you know, we submitted to SXSW and it got a good response. But we submitted the same year as SEARCHING FOR SUGAR MAN. They’re musically very different stories but there are certain similarities. And so you end up in a situation where they’re left making a decision. And whether or not they like one better than the other, they also are stuck on trying to program for variety.

And I really like the movie. But in that moment, in the life of a movie like that, had SEARCHING FOR SUGAR MAN not existed and we got into Sundance — well, it just changes the path. There’s always a world where an audience will find a movie, you know? There are always those stories. But it still is a world where certain film festivals can elevate the status of the movie. They can, in the minds of distributors, eliminate some of the risk by saying, “OK, well somebody has stepped in and created a profile for this movie. And we’re buying it with an existing foundation knowing that audiences have seen it, that critics have seen it.” They get to come in at a time when other people have elevated it.

And so we didn’t get in there. We didn’t get into SXSW, but we played LA Film Festival, which was great. The screening was great and we did a deal with Drafthouse, which was also great. But then it’s a world where you are still trying to compete. And, you know, money and marketing and all the rest of it becomes really important. And it was a really different experience. I remember when we first came out and were getting good reviews and following it online, we were thinking: “Oh, shit, like here we go!” And then you realize, four days later, that it’s like: “Yeah, but in order to maintain that buzz is not easy.” In the world of the Internet somebody slips a nipple at the Super Bowl and you’re gone, that’s it. If you’re relying on that as your major source of advertising, you’re in there for a moment and then anything can take you down really quickly. In the end, you’re just another movie, you know? Another movie comes out, or another trailer, any of that stuff, and then you have a hard time.

So it wasn’t a financial windfall at all. But on the hand I have watched the movie travel and I know that it’s gotten all over the world. And that the band itself has played in Brazil and Paris and they’ve been able to travel all over the world playing their music. What you realize is that people’s ability to access the movies is still there and that word of mouth still exists. Like these things get passed on and on and on — on a global level even. And obviously for me, it’s like I’ve had success and so even though the financial part of that did not necessarily work out, I’m OK. And knowing that the band’s out there in Brazil makes me feel awesome. I love the movie and I love that those guys are out there. The whole experience has been great. But as a filmmaker you have to look at it and think: “OK, well there’s a movie that has played in different territories all over the world — and the band’s been able to follow up in those territories and play — but how do you turn that into a financial situation for yourself, where you can move on and make the next movie and the next movie, you know?” Because a lot of guys are making these documentaries or making these independent films and putting up the ten thousand, twenty thousand, fifteen or whatever amount of money. And it’s not that easy to necessarily recover, after you do it, and just go make another one.

There are people out there making documentaries about food and shit, and they’ve not only created a forum to make movies, but they have mailing lists. They’ve created a brand, essentially, and that brand is allowing them to make film after film and using the proceeds from the film before. So it’s really changed and there are opportunities. But I think for people that are coming into the business it’s really important to understand that, and it’s important to understand it so that you can decide which path you want to take. Because regardless of which one you want to do, for me it’s all about hard work. It’s all about putting your time in and working really hard. But there are two very different paths to get there.

Colin: If it is all about hard work, I wondered if this new world of disruptive wonders and technological hacks has served up any hard-earned shortcuts for busy producers such as Scott? Is work-life any easier now?

Scott: It doesn’t really let up! It’s like the work is still the same but I actually think that it’s a little bit harder now. I think that with e-mails and text messages and cell phones what’s ended up happening is that it actually feels like more work now. Because you can’t escape it. Because it’s no longer a case of “Alright, we’re going to go off today and shoot” and there’s one person with a cell phone the size of a suitcase in case there’s an emergency. I remember when we were making DOGMA all I was really doing was be on the phone maybe three times a day with the executive to go over stuff. And that was it. I wasn’t getting a flurry of e-mails.

And of course with e-mails, I think that there’s little or no filter. People sit there and have some random thought in their head and they’ll send you that e-mail or they’ll send you that text message. But given the choice to call me on the phone about it, they might not do it, or at least they’ll think about it for a second because talking to me on the phone and having me go like: “What? Why are you calling me about this?” And that’s true of me or of anybody. You can end up sending anything in an email or text. Sometimes it’s a case of: “Well, you could have just called; you could have sent me one e-mail with 5 questions at 3 o’clock, as opposed to sending me 5 emails with one question, from like 9 to 3 o’clock.” None of those questions needed to be figured out right away.

In many ways it feels like more work now. It feels more difficult to escape. I think that because of all the technology, people have been shrinking schedules. So we’re doing the same amount of work in less time. Because it is possible. But the effect on the people making the movies is, I think, a feeling that we’re getting crunched a lot more.

Colin: So how does a person who juggles between producing, editing, podcasting, writing and the occasional acting roles cope with all those competing demands on his time? How does one remain effective?

Scott: Mostly what I try to do — and I’m not saying that I’m successful at this at all, since this is my constant battle — but with anything I’m trying to do I try to be focused on that idea or on that thing that I’m doing. It’s funny, even when I made A BAND CALLED DEATH and MILIUS and another one called BEST KEPT SECRET — which I won a Peabody for — I made them all the same time. I kind of got into a frame where I just wanted to make documentaries. And I’d done some stuff but I I really wanted to make a music documentary, a movie documentary. And BEST KEPT SECRET kind of came through some connections. And I just thought the material was awesome. And then when I was done, I wanted to try animation. And so I worked on FREE BIRDS.

Some of it is opportunity. And then while I’m doing it, what I’ve tried to do is this: Put my wife first. Put that specific project second, and then everything else, I kind of deal with. I mean even scheduling this podcast interview, I have my top two priorities and then the rest of it I sort of figure out when the right time is, where I’m sort of going to be able to mentally be focused on it enough, that I’m not just sort of phoning it in, you know? And so sometimes I can’t do everything, especially now. Sometimes I have to say ‘no’ to things or push things off for three or four weeks, before I can find the time, or my head space is more clear.

I just think multi-tasking is like a total load of shit. I can do four things at once, but I can step outside my body and say, “Yeah, but you’re not doing a great job of those four things.” Like I’m doing a good enough job where nobody’s going: “What the fuck you doing?” But I can sit there and think: “Yeah, but you’re not as connected to each individual thing, and you’re not thinking each thing through.” And to try to figure out a way to make sure that you’re concentrated on each task specifically, and giving it that sort of deeper consideration is not something that I even do on a regular basis. Like I get caught in the wheels of multi-tasking and having multiple things going on. But I’m always trying to reset and make sure to think: “Alright, we have to reschedule these things or change these things around.” So that I’m not doing a half-assed version of ten things. Because I think you can do a half-assed version of ten things and the world will react accordingly, you know? And you can do a really thoughtful version of one thing, and I think that you’ll have more impact than all that sort of half-assed crap you put out there. And I am not saying that’s exactly how I live my life. But it’s something that I’m sort of struggling and pushing up against on a daily basis.

Colin: All of which brings up full circle back to CLERKS. As Scott observed earlier, the foundation for its seminal success was the script itself — and you can’t really create such a fantastic blueprint from which to tell a story without putting the work in and slowing down to concentrate on creating the best screenplay one can. The ability to screen out everything else becomes an ever more important skill — something that, looking back, applied also to the making of that movie over the course of 21 productively by-their-pants shooting days. Had Scott and Kevin’s tiny band of collaborators allowed themselves to be bombarded with all of today’s concerns, not to mention worry about their follow-up film to CLERKS, their careers might never have lifted off in the first place.

Scott: You know whenever I think about the movie — and obviously I have very fond memories of making the movie — at the age that I’m at now, I realize that part of why that movie was able to be what it is was that we all just showed up there and that’s all we were concentrating on. We didn’t have any distractions. And all we were really doing was showing up and going, “How do we make this funnier?” “How do we make this?” Even just like “How do light an exterior, we don’t have enough lights?” You’re dealing with these very specific issues. And all those issues are concentrated on the project that you’re making. And I think that especially for people out there trying to make their first movies, they should try as much as possible to create an environment where you’re able to do that too. Because it does translate onto the screen. And too much of being worried about what your next movie is, or all the rest of that stuff, can really muddy what that first movie has to be, which is a real true personal expression. And in order to do that, you have to be really focused and be living it one hundred percent.

And I have the same thing. That’s why I carry my phone around. And it’s always dinging and binging and pinging while I’m supposed to be focusing on one thing. And you can get convinced that you can answer that email and also concentrate on this. But, you know, I always liken it to driving a car. People drive and text and do all kinds of crap in their car when they should just be driving, you know? And I think that obviously we have the capacity to think that we can do it all. And like I said I just don’t agree with that. I don’t think I can do that, at all. I can experience the moments when I’m trying to do ten things, when I’m not at a hundred percent. Which is a simple pie chart: If you’re in a room and a bunch of people ask you to do something, if you set your phone down and don’t look at it, and you take a deep breath and focus on it, that’s a hundred percent. The second you’re glancing at your phone or doing something else, the pie is getting smaller and smaller. You’re just not concentrating a hundred percent. You’re keeping part of your brain open to something else, to the thought that “Oh, I’m supposed to email about this or email about that.”

And I think, as much as you can, to be able to set things aside and say to yourself: “This is what I’m going to do for the next 30 minutes.” And then you can check your email. And then this is what you’re doing for the next 30 minutes. The more you can do that the better off you are.

Colin: That was Scott Mosier speaking from Paris in an interview recorded a couple of weeks ago. The fact that so much of what he says is relevant for all fields of life these days — and not just film producing — is a reminder that business productivity is a matter of more than just processing numbers and gathering information and insights. You also have to find ways to be ‘in the zone’, the phrase so often used by athletes, psychologists and creatives to describe that tunnel-vision state of mind when you achieve clarity and turn all that incoming data into something powerful and purposeful.

The constant bombardments of our hyper-connected lives are not exactly conducive to such states of heightened focus and performance — which is why screenwriters so often escape to their caves to be able focus and rejuvenate their creativity. And why it may also be a good idea for producers and business executives to make a similar point of switching off for extended periods too. You need to find ways to feel inspired, but not overwhelmed. A delicate balancing act for sure. And on that note, I will leave it there for this week — and deal with my own flurry of emails.

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