EPISODE 7: The Short Film That Launched Brad Pitt — And What It Teaches Us
Download MP3So since the beginning of this podcast, I've been teasing to share with you a story about a short film that I produced that starred at the time a somewhat unknown actor by the name of Brad Pitt, and share with you what that experience was like working with Brad and what it was like making that film. And I've chosen to put it at this point in the podcast is because the film and the production of the film and what I'm going to share with you about my experience working with Brad and my experience working making that film, which was nominated for an Oscar, was like and how the elements that I have been outlining up to this point in our podcast really, are underlined, and you can kind of get to see how they all come together and work or don't work to help tell a short film success story. After forty years in Hollywood and watching more than 3,000 short films as an Oscar voter, I know what separates a good short film from one that wins awards. My name is Bob Degus. This is the Hollywood Film Coach Podcast, where we'll help you create award winning short films.
Bob Degus:Episode seven, the short film that launched Brad Pitt and what it teaches us. So in episode six, we were talking about working with actors, building the right relationship with actors, how what the conditions are to create a great performance. And in this episode, I wanna take a film that I know quite well because I produced it and share how those dynamics and situations play out in real time. The film was called Contact. It was made in 1992, and it stars Brad Pitt, and it was nominated for an an Oscar as best, live action short film.
Bob Degus:And so I wanna give you some context for this. So it's it's in the early nineteen nineties, and one of the challenges if you were someone who wanted to direct a film at that point in time, You had a problem that you couldn't get hired to direct because you needed a film to prove that you could direct. This was before iPhones. This was before digital, you know, ways to shoot things digitally. And so the only way to do that is you had to go and make a short film.
Bob Degus:And making a short film on a professional level was a somewhat undertaking because you needed 35 millimeter film, which was expensive. You needed equipment that was limited. You had to get a Panavision camera. You had to have very bright lights to record the film. It was a very big undertaking.
Bob Degus:So it was very hard for film industry professionals who were looking to cross over into directing to get that opportunity and to be able to have a film that would showcase what they could do. And I worked for a number of years at a company called Chantel Claire Films. I started there as an intern, and several years later, I had worked my way up to becoming head of production where I was overseeing all the films that we were making, and then I also was producing some of them. And during the time I oversaw the program, we got five Oscar nominations. And we went to Sundance and we went to a lot of different film festivals with these short films.
Bob Degus:It was quite successful. So this one particular film that I want to share with you and kind of underline all of the things we've been talking about up to now was a project called Contact. And it was made during the time we made this was during the American war in Iraq. And the director Jonathan Darby had written this extraordinarily powerful script about two soldiers, one is an American and one is an Iraqi, who have gotten lost from their units and they're out wandering the desert by themselves, and they encounter each other. And so you can imagine a scene where you meet your enemy soldier, and you pull your gun, and he pulls his gun.
Bob Degus:And now you're holding who's gonna shoot first. Neither one of you wants to die. And you're out in the the the hot baking sun of the desert. And eventually, soldiers end up finding a hut that they can go into that, gets them out of the sun, but they're still adversaries and they're still fighting each other. And as the story progresses, they need to cooperate.
Bob Degus:And I can't quite remember the details of this, but essentially it's one of them has food and one of them has a can opener and they kind of have to share the, okay, you can use my can opener and I'll share some of the food. And they eventually, they discover a dead body in this hut that was killed by some air attack. And so the device of this film is they also can't communicate because because the American doesn't speak Iraqi and the Iraqi doesn't speak English. So they have no way to communicate except by pointing in kind of sign language. The three quarter way through the story, they see it's night, and they see an advancing group of soldiers, like a battalion coming towards where they are that is clear it's going to search the inside of the hut, and they have to make this decision.
Bob Degus:They don't know if it's Americans coming or Iraqis coming, but basically it it's one or the other, and one of them is going to be taken hostage. So they end up tying themselves to each other and hiding, and the soldiers comes in come in. I think they were Iraqi. And they look, and they don't find anything. And they leave, And then the two men that we've been following decide to go bury this body together.
Bob Degus:They shake hands, against the sunset and and walk off in different directions. So it's a really powerful story about peace and coming together during a time of war, which was the the impact of the story. And so as we were casting this movie, we were trying to find someone who could play sort of the all American soldier who looked like that part and who was embodied that. And Brad at the time was not yet famous. He had done a small part in some he had been on television, and he had done some small supporting roles in some feature films.
Bob Degus:And he had just finished shooting Robert Redford's River Runs Through It, and that's how we heard about him. And then obviously, we auditioned him, and we thought, oh, he's perfect. He has the perfect face to look like an or like the all American soldier. And we offered him the role and he was excited to play the part. And so that's kind setup of the background of what this was.
Bob Degus:So this is an opportunity for a film industry professional to direct their first short film to showcase what they can do as a director. Now one of the other things you need to know to make this story even more powerful is while Chanticleer was really great at helping directors cross over into directing, it also served as a place for many other film professionals to get their first opportunity to do a job that they wanted to do. So it was a place where very often there was a first time you could retire first time editors or first time cinematographers or, early career production designers. So you had this excitement of everybody getting to do the career positions that they wanted to do, and that brought a lot of positive energy. And then you also had the of the reverse issue of that, of you had people doing jobs for the first time who necessarily didn't know how to do them and were learning on the spot.
Bob Degus:So that is the setup for some of the stories I'm about to share with you that I learned from working with Brad and I'm sure he learned from working with us. So one of the things I've always disliked about watching marketing videos about movies, especially with the when you have the director and the actors and the sort of the talkbacks, is everyone is always saying, Oh, was just such a wonderful experience, and I learned so much. And that's never been my experience on set. They're they're always very challenging experiences, and they're they're difficult and you learn things, and this particular film was a very hard film for a lot of different reasons, and I think it's interesting to share this on the podcast in a very direct and honest way because it's going to help you learn a lot and not make the same mistakes. So I'm not going to give you the, it was just so wonderful and we all loved each other and it was just the best experience because it wasn't.
Bob Degus:So let me start out by setting up some of the production issues so you can even see this more further. So there are these two main locations. There's the exterior desert location and then there's the interior of the hut location. And the interior of this hut was shot on a sound stage. So that had air conditioning and, you know, it was basically an interior set.
Bob Degus:The exterior desert scenes were shot, exterior desert, outside of Los Angeles, and it was a particularly hot, miserable series of days. And one of the traditional ways that you schedule a movie is that you shoot the exterior scenes first. And the reason you schedule them and shoot them first is because if it rains or if there's some problem, you can then go to what's called going to a cover set, and you can go to your set and keep working for that day and wait for the rain to leave, and then you get a second chance of shooting the exteriors. Whereas if you leave the exteriors to the end of the schedule and you shoot everything else and now you have to be outside and it's raining, you're stuck and you have to shoot the weather. So we shot the scenes exterior in this heat, in this horrible Los Angeles heat out way out, like, at the edge of the studio zone first.
Bob Degus:And sitting here now, having done been involved in, you know, hundreds of movies since that point in time, That was really not smart because shooting in Heath is very, very hard. And we had an enthusiastic but also somewhat inexperienced crew. We had a first time director. We had a lead actor who was at the beginning of his career and had not developed a lot of the skill and a lot of the ability to work in challenging situations. And we're shooting out I was out by Basques Rocks.
Bob Degus:We're shooting out by Basques Rocks, and it's hot, and it's the wind is blowing the dirt, and it's just it's just unpleasant. And so that was the beginning of the movie, was shooting these exterior scenes in this very difficult situation. And now you have to remember, this is an indie film. So it's smaller. It's we're using equipment that's older.
Bob Degus:We're using our trailers where people are staying the old trailers, they're not the nice new polished trailers, and if you're thinking about this now just in telling the story, Brad has just come from working with Robert Redford, and where they had nice trailers and where they had really good craft service and where they had air conditioners and all the creature comforts to our independent movie. And we have a craft service person who did a very good job, but they didn't have much money to get much food. And so I think there was a bit of culture shock for him coming into this situation. And then there was a dynamic that happened really right at the beginning of the film between Brad and the director Jonathan. And Jonathan had written this very beautiful script that he had crafted over many months, and the dialogue, the specific dialogue, was very important to him, as it is to many writers and as it is also to many directors.
Bob Degus:And I think the combination of the heat and the dust and the shock of coming off of a very luxurious production into our production set up this dynamic between the director and Brad that was difficult to recover from. And Brad had a challenge at that point in his career with his lines. And some actors have difficulty with lines and some actors don't. And Jonathan, who was directing the this was, I think, the very first thing or maybe it might have been the second, but the first or second thing he was directing also didn't have the experience to know what to do when you have an inexperienced actor who can't remember their lines on set. And so this became a problem the first couple days as we're shooting in this immense heat.
Bob Degus:And it set up this, not rivalry, but difficulty between the director and the actor. And this caused us to have to do more takes and but doing more takes didn't help Brad be able to say the lines more accurately or more clearly than in other versions. And so there's a couple approaches to this that you could use as a director. You could accept the fact that the actor isn't going to learn their lines, and you could embrace the fact that they're going to say the intent of the line rather than the actual word for word what's in the script. And one of the challenges of this movie was because these two actors can't communicate, Brad speaks English, The the other actor, Elias Kutais, he he's speaking Iraqi.
Bob Degus:The movie relies on Brad to kind of talk his thoughts out out loud. So he he he, you know, is kind of talking to this Iraqi soldier, saying what his internal dialogue is to to this to the soldier, like, oh, I bet you'd like to eat this meat or whatever whatever the the dialogue was. So it it, in Jonathan's mind, required Barry Brad to be very specific about what the lines were because they're on camera and because it's it's pacing this movie that's largely, in some ways, a silent film except for Brad speaking these lines to a guy who can't understand them. And so shooting out in this heat, think, just became a very difficult dynamic between the director, between the actors, and then we have a crew who, they were a great crew, but they're also learning their jobs. You have a cinematographer who's, who's, has shot a number of things before, but he's figuring out lighting.
Bob Degus:Like it was this whole thing, and of course I'm figuring out how to be an effective producer because we're all doing this early in our careers. So that kind of was the setup for what would then transpire when we moved onto the soundstage. As I'm thinking about this now and remembering, so where we were shooting, the director wanted to see in, like, be able to see in three sixty degrees, which meant that we had to park our truck some distance away. So you would have to bring the actor from base camp up to the set and back to the, you know, base camp where there was some air conditioning and some water and some and so this this just on a a level, forget we're even making a movie, there are these big distances between where base camp is and where we're shooting these scenes out in the middle of this deserted nothing. And I remember one of the problems, and this is a problem often on sets, is you ask for the actors to come to set, and so the actors come to set, but then you're not really ready for them.
Bob Degus:And so now the actors are on set, and especially in this situation, it's hot. And so, like, okay, waiting, waiting. We're working on the lighting. We're fixing some other thing. We're doing something.
Bob Degus:And maybe there's a twenty minute delay from when you've asked for the actor to come before you actually start working with them. And So the next time you ask for the actor to come to set, the actor remembers, well, last time I went there, they weren't ready for me for thirty minutes, so I'm gonna not come to set for thirty minutes. And so there's this this tension in dynamic between these two things. And it might seem if you're inexperienced to movies that, well, why can't that actor just come and hang out on set? But at the same time, you want the actor staying relaxed in a place like in their motor home or trailer so that when you bring them to set, they're ready to give you their best performance.
Bob Degus:But if they've been standing out in the heat for thirty minutes wilting, they're not necessarily going to be able to give you their best performance. So there's a dynamic on both sides, but I think this was also something as I'm remembering this production now that we would ask for Brad to come and he would come later and later to set, and of course the production at the same time we're aware that oh we asked him to come and we weren't ready, so now we're not asking him to come until we really, really are ready, but now he's putting in this thirty minute delay to come, and so it just was this difficult dynamic, and I had this really great assistant, Holly, and I remember saying to her one time, I handed her walkie talkie, and I said, okay, your job is now just to hang out with Brad, because then I could call Holly and say, okay, where's Brad? Can you get him to set? So anyways, typically, on a movie, you will shoot a few days if you're shooting. So this this would have been probably a seven or eight day shoot, and we would have shot two days, like maybe a Thursday and a Friday, and then we would take the weekend off and then shoot again on Monday.
Bob Degus:And that weekend off would give us a time to regroup, to look at what went well or didn't go well the first couple days of shooting, and then hit the main work of the film on that Monday where we've now regrouped and retooled everything. So over that weekend we decided that the lines were really important and we had to somehow support Brad to deliver the exact word for word lines that were in the script. And so I don't remember who made this decision. And certainly in retrospect, I don't know that it was the best decision to make, but we decided that we were going to give him cue cards to read off camera. And I don't I don't think he liked that, and I think that that continued to sort of set up this rivalry between the director who had his legitimate vision for what the movie should be, and the actor who was in the process of becoming a very big movie star.
Bob Degus:So when he cast when we cast him, he he was still smaller unknown actor. And then because the advanced press on Robert Redford's movie, it was clear he was gonna be a very big star. There was this this dynamic changing. And what was interesting is I think if because everybody was new, I mean even Brad was just starting out in his career, so Brad didn't know how to work with a less experienced director. Jonathan was right at the beginning of his career, so he didn't know what how do you help an actor deliver their lines when they don't know them.
Bob Degus:I'm, you know, producing and I didn't then have the experience to know how to navigate that situation maybe in a better way. And you had all of it, and again, the less experienced crew. So we're on the sound stage, and we have these cue cards that Brad can read off camera, and we get through the movie, but it's not a pleasant process. It's just this very Adversarial is not the right word, but just this very difficult process of a group of people who don't quite like working together. They like the idea of the film, but but there's just this tension, and it's not good tension.
Bob Degus:Sometimes tension on a film set can be really interesting and useful, and this wasn't. This was just difficult at at at best. And so we finished shooting the movie, and then we went on a traditional editing process. And at that point in time, we were still editing on film. So you were cutting work print, editing it, and shaping the movie.
Bob Degus:And at some point in that process, we realized that we had actually made a really pretty good film through all of that difficulty. And that was the surprising thing to me is that you can't really judge the finished film based on the experience you had making it. And in that year, there was another film that I had just a great experience making it. And the film was good, but it didn't win any awards. It it didn't made get really much notoriety.
Bob Degus:So you can't take the experience of making it does not translate into the film's life after you finish it. So the editing process would have taken a number of weeks, probably eight or ten weeks of cutting because editing on film was slower certainly than it is today on computers. And we would have tested test screened the movie. And we like I said, we realized we maybe had something really special with with this film. We really believed in the message that it was conveying about peace and about people coming together.
Bob Degus:And one thing I do remember that was very interesting about the film, and it was a challenge, is that Jonathan, there there was a forty minute version of the film, which I think I still have the only 35 millimeter copy of. Forty two minutes. It was it was too long for the Oscars. And the question for us was that we we had a film that we felt might have a chance at getting an Oscar nomination. But at that point in time in the Oscar's rules, a short film was something that was thirty minutes or less.
Bob Degus:So if you had a thirty five minute film, it meant that that film couldn't qualify for an Oscar. And so we had this long discussion about should we take this version that we feel is the best version of the movie that was like forty or forty two minutes, and should we cut it down to a shorter version so that we can submit it to the Oscars for Oscar consideration? And at that point in time, it wasn't like on a computer where you just save your timeline and you make a new timeline. We were really talking about cutting the film physically and making a shorter version. And so we ultimately decided to do an exactly thirty minute version.
Bob Degus:And so we did a cut down of the longer version to make a thirty minute version that we could submit for Oscar consideration. And that simple sentence that I just shared with you is so technically complex to have done to go into a movie that you've already cut the negative on and to then recut a shorter version because, working on film is destructive editing. You're literally cutting frames and you can't put it back together. So we cut the shorter version, and then of course we submitted it for consideration for the academy. And you had to do what's called a qualifying run, and this is something that you still do to this day if you want, which is that you have to have your film screened in a theater in Los Angeles or New York, and I think it's like for seven consecutive days, and there's a certain number of screenings per day to qualify it for its theatrical run.
Bob Degus:And then you have to send proof and documentation to the academy that you've done that. And then that qualifies the film to be viewed by the nomination committee. And so the there's another way that's worth mentioning now. If you win a first prize at a certain number of Oscar approved film festivals, that also is another way to do it. So you have those two paths today.
Bob Degus:You can either, just legitimately run it in the theater, and qualify it that way, or you can win a first place at one of the qualifying film festivals. But at that point in time, the only way to qualify was to do the theatrical run. So we ran the thirty minute version of the film in a theater, and then we submitted it to the Oscars. And then the I don't even know if they were shortlist back then because I remember the film got nominated, and then, of course, it didn't win. So the lesson for you in that film and in the story that I've told to me is that one of the reasons we cast Brad Pitt aside from that he had the right look is we felt, as did many people in Hollywood, that he was on the verge of becoming a really big star.
Bob Degus:And so to have a movie that you cast someone in who was just on the edge of becoming a big star, and then they become a big star, your movie has a higher prominence because of how their status has changed. So that was part of the calculation on why we cast Brad in this movie was was because of that. But then I look back also on the the difficulty in the dynamic between between, the director and the actor. And would we have had an even better movie if we had cast a different person that was more aligned with how Jonathan wanted to work? And that's where I said in in the last episode, we were talking about the auditioning process.
Bob Degus:Can you work with the actor? Because in this case, they had this tension that was not productive to the unfolding of the set. And that isn't anyone's fault. It's just different working styles. There are some directors who love improvisation.
Bob Degus:Like, the script is just an outline that we're kind of following and say what feels right in your mouth, and that's fine. Jonathan wasn't that way, and he was very specific about the words he wrote. And would he have had a better experience if we had cast a different actor who who was from that same school of thinking? No way to know. So this short film, I think, really helps you to think about who it is that you're casting in your movie, how you work with them.
Bob Degus:How would you work with an actor who couldn't remember their lines? You know? And it's not as uncommon as you think. In other words, it happens more often than you would expect it to. And usually there's something else involved.
Bob Degus:I worked on another movie with a very well known older actor who had a real drinking problem, and he couldn't remember his lines, somewhat famous man. And ultimately, the director on that project decided to fire him. And the because it just wasn't working. And so it's pretty rare to fire an actor, but we fired him. And then a few days later, he called up the director and said, look, I'm I'm I'm you.
Bob Degus:I'm gonna turn a corner with this. Please don't. Please let me finish the movie. So we agreed, and this actor had a really long scene where he had four pages of dialogue, which was the issue we were concerned about, he couldn't get through four pages of only him talking. But we took him at his word and at his sincerity, And on the day we shot his big scene, his son came to set with him.
Bob Degus:I still get choked up about this. And he had the father, who's the actor, had had his son help him learn his lines so he could could say them flawlessly. And we knew this only because we noticed the son standing in the back of the set mouthing the words with his father. And so these issues of what is the right way to deal with an actor who doesn't know their lines or what is the right way to deal with an actor who's chronically late to set. One of the things I've learned over many, many years is you can't start a war with the actor because you as the director will lose that war.
Bob Degus:The actor will always win. So you have to find, because they're the one on camera, so you have to find other ways to work around that to accomplish the goal of creating the best movie you can create. We were fortunate with Kontak that we did that, and I think that's really credit to the script that Jonathan wrote because the script was so strong, it could handle all of this other noise around making it. But it is something to think about, and some of these things you only learn how to solve with experience and how you might solve it on one project. I don't know that you'd solve it the same way on another project.
Bob Degus:And I've been thinking as I was preparing for this podcast, how would I have solved that situation with Brad now? I don't know that I would have done agreed to let them do cue cards unless the actor asked for that. See, think that was the difference. I think that it was insulting to Brad. But if the actor said, Hey, can you help me and do this?
Bob Degus:Well, that's a different thing, but it's a challenge, and it sort of takes all of your experience to figure out in how to know, how to navigate things, and how to, both as a producer and director, shepherd your film so that it goes from the script into production through editing, and then has the opportunity to come out and be shared with the world. So what's the broader lesson from this and how can you take it and apply it into your own work? I think it's to be really careful and critical about who you choose to collaborate with. Do you connect with them? Do you see the same project?
Bob Degus:Do you see the same working styles? I mentioned this notion of Brad coming off a very expensive, well financed movie into our little rinky dink indie film. That's a real thing. That happens a lot. If you think about you're gonna make your short film, and you're going to your uncle is friends with an Oscar winning cinematographer, and he agrees to shoot your film.
Bob Degus:On one hand, that's a great opportunity. But the problem is that Oscar winning cinematographer is going to be require and need his very expensive gaffer, the the crew of five people in the electric department, the very expensive key grip, and a very large rental and lighting package to go with him to shoot your small film, and that may or will likely sink your film. So these issues of looking at how collaborations occur and how to make great collaborations, really want to balance out a lot of times who you're working with, and the the, you know, notion of of working with some extraordinarily famous person on your short film may not be the best thing for it. I know a number of instances of people who've gotten very big film composers to write the music to the score of their short films, but they didn't get to participate in the creation of the score because the famous composer just said, Here, here's your score, instead of it being a collaboration between a composer and a director, whereas if they work with a newer, younger composer, there would be that collaboration in place. So it's as you're thinking of all these things, and it's largely the producer's job to look at the chemistry between people before as you're hiring people, like, can these people all play together in the same sandbox?
Bob Degus:Or is there one person gonna be so much bigger that it's gonna unbalance the dynamics on the set. And again, there isn't a right or wrong of this, just like with with this movie Contact. There there really wasn't any villains in it. It just was this team of people who are all at the beginning of their careers trying to figure things out and making a lot of mistakes that to me are kind of obvious and funny now, but at the time we were figuring out our way through it the best that we could. And I think you're going to encounter those things on your own productions, And I think the the key takeaway is to really try to trust your instinct and make sure that everybody's coming on board to make the same production and has the same situation situations that they wanna participate in so that the energy that you're putting into it is going into the filmmaking and not trying to keep the chaos calm.
Bob Degus:So in our next episode, we're gonna move from the craft of making your film into the politics and strategy to getting your film seen, getting it into film festivals, getting it out into the world. And that is a whole topic into itself and I look forward to sharing it with you in the next episode. One more thing. If today's episode sparked something for you, head over to hollywoodfilmcoach.substack.com for the companion piece. It's original writing that goes deeper into the most important idea from today's episode and includes links to every film we've talked about so you can watch them yourself and form your own conclusions.
Bob Degus:The gap between a good short film and a great one that wins awards is smaller than you think. I'm Bob Degus. This is the Hollywood Film Coach Podcast. Be sure to subscribe, follow us and check out the next episode. Join me for episode eight, the Festival Landscape, Understanding the Ecosystem.
