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That Stephen King Guy
An interview with filmmaker James
Renner
By Bob
Ignizio |
James Renner is a life-long resident of Northeast
Ohio. For the past few years he’s made his living as a journalist for
various publications including ‘Scene’ magazine, but his heart is really in
making movies. Thanks to a program where writer Stephen King gives aspiring
filmmakers the rights to adapt his short stories for one dollar, James
recently had the opportunity to shoot his version of King’s ‘All That You
Love Will Be Carried Away’. The thirty minute short stars Joe Bob Briggs,
and features Clevelanders Harvey Pekar, Michael Stanley and Rebecca Wilde in
supporting roles. The film makes its Cleveland premiere Thursday
October 28th at The Cedar Lee Theater. It will screen at 7pm and again
at 8:30pm.
Utter Trash: What first got you interested in making
movies?
James Renner: My parents were divorced when I was
very young. I’d see my mother only every other weekend. When we’d get
together, she’d take me out to see the latest movie. One of my more vivid
memories is going to the theater and seeing ‘The Never Ending Story’ and
thinking that there were people who made that. I think that was the first
inkling I had that maybe that was something I wanted to do. Movies were a
special thing for me when I was growing up. I came from a town near Kent
that was out in the boondocks, and it was a good 40 minute drive to any sort
of theater. So movies were few and far between until I got into high school
and was able to and was able to drive all over the place.
UT: Did you make sort of “backyard” films with a
camcorder or Super 8 camera when you were a kid?
JR: Yeah. I made a series of films in high school
called Edinburgh: The Series. They were kind of blatant rip-offs of other
movies. They were 45 minutes in length, each of them. The first one was a
rip-off of ‘Die Hard’, but set in a school. I edited with a deck to deck
system, I just patched two VCRs and edited that way. Surprisingly some of
it holds up, and some of the editing is pretty good for a 16 year old. The
odd thing is, there’s no way we could have got away with that today. We
made this movie about terrorists invading a high school and then eventually
blowing it up. And the principal came to the screening. Nowadays, if I had
made that I’d be locked away. It’s weird that even in that small amount of
time, 10 years, so much has changed. But I made the three films in high
school, and then I made a feature in college called ‘The Leaf Eater’ about
kids who time travel and inadvertently cause the Kent State shootings. And
it was a comedy, go figure. The second feature in college was called
‘Sullivan’s Clone’. It was a dark drama about the first human clone and
things going awry. Unfortunately that didn’t do as well as ‘The Leaf
Eater’. People don’t really want to see a low budget drama/sci-fi movie.
UT: What kind of screenings or releases have those
had?
JR: They haven’t been released, but I screened both
of them at the Kent State campus, and ‘Sullivan’s Clone’ screened at the
down town theater in Kent. I might eventually re-edit ‘Sullivan’s Clone’.
Especially now that the star, Dave Stann, is now the dealer and co-host of
‘Celebrity Blackjack’. He’s kind of the top guy in the nation for
blackjack, and he’s been in some other independent movies.
UT: Did your journalism career force you to put
filmmaking on the back burner somewhat?
JR: Actually I can do the film thing now because I’m
getting paid for the journalism thing. I waited tables in Cleveland until
about 2 years ago, and I started getting jobs freelancing for commercials
and movies that came into town. I’d work in the production department being
a P.A., eventually working up to production management. It’s just not a
steady pay check. Scene offered a job, and I knew I wanted to write, so I
very happily took that. But I still can work on film in my spare time.
UT: Between the college films and the Stephen King
film you just finished, did you work on any film projects of your own?
JR: I directed a short that ended up in the
semi-finals of ‘Project Greenlight’ for season 2. That was called ‘Fish Out
of Water’. It starred Danica McKeller who played Winnie on ‘The Wonder
Years’. I flew out to L.A. and shot with her for a day. It was a 3 minute
short, that’s one of the rules is it had to be under 3 minutes. I submitted
it and made the semi-finals, but didn’t get any farther than that. But I
wanted to continue with the whole ‘Project Greenlight’ thing, so I ended up
working on the winning film, ‘The Battle of Shaker Heights’, in the camera
department.
UT: So how did the Stephen King project come about?
JR: Not too many people know this, but Stephen King
has this program where he gives the rights to his short stories to aspiring
filmmakers for one dollar. They’re called “Dollar Babies”. It started with
Frank Darabont, who directed the short “Woman in the Roon” in 1984. I think
I was the sixth person. Since I got the rights a year ago, he’s just gone
nuts with this thing and there’s been like 30 people in the last year who’ve
gotten rights. In fact there’s two other people who have the rights to the
story I did. It’s a little scary, but I think mine is going to stand above
most of these.
UT: Which story did you do?
JR: The one I picked was “All That You Love Will Be
Carried Away”. It’s a short story in ‘Everything’s Eventual’. I read it
when it was originally published in ‘The New Yorker’. As soon as I read it,
I realized this was something special. It has kind of the same theme as
‘The Shawshank Redemption’, which is, “get busy living, or get busy dying.”
It doesn’t have any supernatural element, or really any horror element.
It’s a story about the human condition. It’s about a traveling frozen food
salesman who checks into a hotel to commit suicide. His one source of hope
in the world is this notebook he’s carried with him for years in which he’s
collected graffiti and poems and sayings that he’s found on stalls of rest
stop bathrooms along the way. I just really like the story. It sets apart
from the normal Stephen King thing.
UT: One of the hardest things about adapting a story
for the screen is staying true to the source but making sure everything
works as a film.
JR: We threw everything out. I added a monkey
(laughs). We had to do a lot of narration because we wanted to stay in the
character’s head. We stayed really true to the story. I didn’t add much at
all. The only thing I did was rearrange the sequence of events a little bit
in the middle, just to make it a little more visually stimulating for the
viewer. Other than that, we added one scene at the last minute. When the
main character, Alfie Zimmer, is checking into the hotel we get to see
another salesman checking into the room next to him, and they have a
conversation. That whole conversation is in the story, but it’s all in
Alfie’s head. What we did I think makes it a little more understandable for
the viewer.
UT: You got Harvey Pekar to act in the movie. How did
that come about and how was he to work with?
JR: I interviewed Harvey for a story that I submitted
to Scene about a year ago. They didn’t take it unfortunately. But Harvey’s
sort of this cranky old man, and he likes the attention he’s gotten from
‘American Splendor’. I called him up and he remembered me from the
interview. I told him it was this King project. So he agreed to do the
film. At the same time, I knew he wasn’t the most reliable person in the
world. We actually sent someone to his house to pick him up and bring him
to the set. That way we knew he was coming, and he couldn’t leave once he
got there. We filmed his scene, and he’s just absolutely terrific. He will
steal the scene that he’s in. We also have some other Clevelanders in the
project. We have local rocker Michael Stanley playing the part of a
sheriff. He’s also pretty funny. He just exudes this rock aura in
everything he does. We’re hoping to get a song of his on the soundtrack as
well. And we have Rebecca Wilde, who is the morning DJ on Q104. She’s just
adorable. She has the best laugh I’ve ever heard, so we wanted to get that
in the film. And she’s good. She’s very good.
UT: Who’s playing the lead?
JR: That’s Joe Bob Briggs. He looks exactly like I
pictured the character, and he delivers the lines exactly as Stephen King
reads it. Growing up, my father would read me some of his articles when he
wrote the Drive-In movie reviews, and I would watch him on the TNT
Monstervision, where he was kind of a national “Big Chuck” for a while. I
was casting this thing, and we had other actors in mind but they just didn’t
seem to fit. I’m eating dinner with my dad, and not even on the subject we
just started talking about Joe Bob Briggs and then it dawned on me. I
should ask him. I got back that night and sent him an email, and he got
back to me and said, “yeah, I’d love to do this.”
UT: So what kind of budget did you have?
JR: $6000. There’s a lot of people who helped out.
Dave Thomas, not the Wendy’s guy, is the producer. He set up a really nice
editing system for me in his office in Tower City. He’s an entertainment
lawyer in town. Dave really helped out. He got the equipment, got us our
cameras.
UT: The market for shorts is pretty limited. Where do
you see this being shown?
JR: Good question. Festivals, basically. What I’ve
done is put together the first annual “Dollar Baby” film festival. It will
take place in Bangor, Maine on the 25th of September. I’ve asked
the other directors of the past “Dollar Babies” to send me their tapes, and
I’m compiling the best few hours of all these films and we’re going to show
them in a mini festival. So that will be the first showing of “All That You
Love Will Be Carried Away”. And we’re going to do a Cleveland screening
just on its own probably in mid to late October. From there, we’re
submitting to Sundance and some of the major festivals.
UT: Isn’t one of the stipulations for the Dollar
Babies that you can’t make a profit off of them?
JR: That’s true. It’s just for festival circuits and
for my personal demo reel. Still a great deal.
UT: Any chance that down the road a non-profit “Dollar
Baby” DVD might come out, with the profits going to charity or something?
JR: I think that’s very possible. The “Dollar Baby”
film festival is the first step in that direction. There’s room for other
things, too. Of course Frank Darabont released his “Dollar Baby” along with
a couple others on a tape you can find at most video stores called ‘The
Night Shift Collection’. Occasionally they get out there.
UT: Any projects you’re planning on doing next?
JR: I have three feature scripts finished that I’d
love to turn into films. After this I’d like to parlay this into a feature
somehow. There’s three films that I have to make. If I don’t do any more
than that, that’s alright. But if I don’t make these three films that I’m
sitting on I will never be happy.
UT: Do you want to keep shooting in Cleveland, or
would you like to go out to Hollywood?
JR: I spent two months in L.A. working on the
‘Project Greenlight’ movie, and it helped because I realized I never want to
live in L.A. I can do it here, and I want to figure out a way to make
features here. This is where I want to live, and where I want to raise my
family.
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