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Pete Jones - Rewrites
The toughest part about Greenlight for me is the transformation from contest winner to director. Some of you might be thinking the fact that there needs to be a transformation might be my biggest problem. You might be right, but the fact is, I'm a writer. I'm a writer who is getting a chance to make sure what I put on paper is what an audience sees. The best and worst part of being a writer/director is there is nobody else to blame. In the end, the movie is mine. And I don't mean that to be egotistical because the collaboration it takes to make a movie possible is monumental. But, in the end, if the movie blows, it has everything to do with deficiencies in my script and/or my inability to communicate my vision to everyone involved.
The beginning of the collaboration starts with Chris Moore. Chris Moore is physically, verbally, emotionally, and figuratively larger than life. I decided to take a back seat to Chris because, well, actually, I'm not sure I decided to take a back seat as much as Chris assigned the back seat to me. The fact I did not assert myself right away seems to be the origin of this "aw shucks" persona I've been labeled with, but the fact of the matter is Chris knew from experience what had to be done and I did not. And so I followed his lead.
I decided to put my full attention to the rewrite of the script and leave the biggest issue, the budget, to Chris and Pat Peach. Little did I know that the budget and the rewrite have so much to do with each other.
Luckily, because of the threads on the website message boards, I had learned to take critique and grow thicker skin, but in the end, the script I entered is pretty much the script I shot. The major difference is that the young Jewish boy Danny Jacobsen had an older brother who died in a fire. It was a universal critique, and I include myself in that critique. Another universal critique, one I disagreed with, was that the rabbi needed to be more human and more argumentative. I had envisioned this rabbi as sort of a Job character whose faith carried him through and after many hours of discussion, I realized the critique was spot on. This rabbi needed more dimension, and I went to work trying to create a more rounded man. As far as his religious convictions, I did not change the fact that Rabbi Jacobsen allows Pete to question Judaism in an uneducated and, to some, offensive way. This rabbi believes in questioning one's own beliefs and finds it refreshing that a young man, though uneducated in Judaism, is searching for meaning. I felt that people were lacking understanding that when they see this kid on the screen with the rabbi, they would understand the kid's innocence and the rabbi's wisdom and warmth.
The rewrite brings me to my next collaboration. The film's Co-Producer Jeff Balis is an Irish Catholic looking Jewish kid with little knowledge of either Catholicism or Judaism, but a great understanding of structure, story, and humor. Balis was the strongest creative collaborator on "Stolen Summer" and we spent many hours discussing the path the rewrite would take. It was Jeff's job to combine the notes from Moore, Damon, Affleck, Sy, Gordon, and himself. I quickly learned that Jeff had a way of filtering the notes. If he agreed with them, we talked about it for hours. If he disagreed with the notes, we barely discussed it. In the end, though, Jeff had the best understanding of what I wanted to do with this movie. So good, in fact, that his relentless badgering would lead me to tell him to go write the scene his way. And he would. And now you can bet he will appeal to the WGA for official credit for the work he did.
The major issue, which I mentioned earlier, was the budget issue. I'll deal with that in another column, but the budget affects the rewrite in ways I naively didn't understand. So I had to condense scenes and locations so that Pat Peach could bring the budget down to a number Miramax would sign off on. So the reality of a rewrite in this case was to improve the quality while reducing the quantity. And that, as a writer, focused me like nothing else. Because it made me realize what had to be fought for and what could be sacrificed. And in the end, to me, that is the art of moviemaking.
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