COVER STORY: David Gordon Green celebrates film that started it all
By Joe Scott, News & Record (GoTriad)
April 1, 2010
In late spring 1999, a young filmmaker named David Gordon Green set out with a group of friends to make a largely self-financed motion picture in Winston-Salem.
The film was “George Washington,” a haunting, lyrical story about an interracial group of kids from a crumbling North Carolina town during the most tragic summer of their young lives.
When it was released a year later, the film won critical raves and awards. It also single-handedly put the director’s alma matter, the UNC School of the Arts, on the map and launched the filmmaking careers of many associated with the project, including actors Paul Schneider (“All the Real Girls” and NBC’s “Parks and Recreation”) and Danny McBride (“Foot Fist Way” and HBO’s “Eastbound & Down”) .
To honor the 10th anniversary of the film’s release, the RiverRun International Film Festival will screen a special presentation of “George Washington” April 23. Green will receive the festival’s 2010 Emerging Master Award.
A path toward filmmaking
When Green studied filmmaking at the UNC School of the Arts (then the N.C. School of the Arts), the conservatory didn’t have any famous past graduates to attract prospective students. In fact, it didn’t have any graduates at all.
“We were this little film school in North Carolina that was still very young,” says Dale Pollack, dean of the filmmaking program from 1999 to 2006. “USC was started in the 1920s, NYU’s filmmaking program was started in the ’40s. Here we are starting in 1993, so we were way behind the curve when we began.”
A native of Dallas, Green had attempted to join the filmmaking program at the University of Texas at Austin, where he now lives. But when a 33 average during his freshman year closed any possibility of pursuing an arts degree, he almost left filmmaking altogether to join the Marines.
“My mom didn’t like that idea,” Green says during a telephone interview from Los Angeles, where he’s in the process of casting a new movie starring Jonah Hill. “She was trying to bait me with finding a cool conservatory that I might be more artistically and academically inclined to excel.”
She told him about the School of the Arts, and after a weekend visit to the campus with his father, Green opted for the small film school instead of the Marines.
With classes no larger than 20 students, Green became close with many of his fellow students who have worked on his films. He also had access to the school’s rare 35mm films, which helped shape him as a filmmaker, including the western drama “McCabe & Mrs. Miller” by Robert Altman and “Badlands” by Terrence Malick .
“It’s great seeing movies that inspire you in different directions,” Green says. “Like I would see a Jacques Tati film or a big popcorn movie that I’d never seen or a strange short film that would have never crossed my path or been on my radar, and having an archive at that institution is just so valuable to me.”
Birth of ‘George Washington’
Green graduated from the School of the Arts in 1998 and left with friends for Los Angeles, where he hoped to make a name for himself.
But other than finding the work that helped him finance part of the budget for “George Washington,” Green wasn’t impressed with the city.
“It seemed very materialistic and superficial in a lot of ways, and the movies I was interested in and the movies I wanted to make were always left to center,” Green says. “In terms of getting my foot in the door, there’s a million people in line to be the next so and so, but I really wanted to carve a unique path with my friends and live in an environment where I’m happy, and that was elsewhere, and it still is.”
Green slept on friends’ couches to save money to make his own film and then returned to Winston-Salem, where he shot “George Washington” for an initial production budget of $42,000.
The film’s budget was largely self-financed by Green, but he was able to generate some funding from minor benefactors.
“A dancer at the School of the Arts’ father gave me a thousand bucks, and to me, that was monumental at that time, and the movie couldn’t have been made without it,” Green says. “He has no idea what a huge lift that was when I opened up the envelope and saw the amount. My jaw just hit the floor. ”
A tight budget meant finding props and set dressings for free. To do this, Green and production designer Richard Wright collected furniture for the film by driving around Winston-Salem during trash collection .
“ David and I hopped in a pickup truck and just collected every weird thing we could find,” Wright says. “We drove it back to my garage and dumped it out and kept doing that.”
The film’s low budget also required the crew to work on a deferred payment basis, meaning they would be paid on the back end, but only if the film made money.
“I was editing while drawing unemployment, which was quite cool,” says Zene Baker, one of the film’s editors. “I was the only one that ended up getting paid during the making of the film.”
Rebel filmmaker stands out
Despite the production’s many cost-saving strategies, Green allowed for one indulgence. He shot the film with anamorphic CinemaScope lenses, creating a wider, more cinematic picture at a higher cost.
“Shooting anamorphic was discouraged by everyone, so the kind of rebel in me thought that’s the perfect reason to do it, to make it stand out against the trend of low-budget, no-budget independent film,” Green says. “I thought it was the only way I’m going to stand out because I can’t get a marquee-named cast or a big budget, and I don’t really have sort of a high concept or plot twist to leverage me into the limelight.”
In terms of the script, Green allowed the child actors to improvise parts of their dialogue to reflect how they spoke naturally, with the caveat that they were not allowed to swear.
“I admired the script, and he did a great job allowing us to kind of interpret how we thought the characters communicated,” says Donald Holden, 25, who played the lead role of George at age 15. “And (Green) definitely gave us some leeway and let us make it a little bit easier for us to be in touch with the character by allowing us to manipulate the script to how we would say it.”
While portraying the film’s soft-minded but tenderhearted protagonist, Holden says Green helped him “pull from inside” to hit the delicate emotional notes required to nail his challenging scenes. One of those scenes, Holden says, shows his character confronting his father, who is in prison for killing his mother.
“David knew that my relationship with my father wasn’t that good at the time, so he kept on reminding me of things like that,” Holden says. “He would say, ‘Donald, George is nothing like you, but you have similar experiences. You’ve got to pull from them. Just pull and start thinking, ‘What would Donald do in this situation?’ and that really helped me connect with George a lot more.”
A landmark of Southern filmmaking
“For some reason, a lot of people think we got into Sundance, and that’s not true,” Baker says. “We were turned down by Sundance.”
Needless to say, Green was devastated.
“I thought they were the gatekeepers to your success, so there was a day where I was pretty (expletive), and I wish I hadn’t done it, but I tore up my rejection letter,” Green says. “I wish I had that now because I’m friends with all of those guys now, and I kind of want to be able to flaunt that now as a flag of confidence because in a way it gave me twice the determination to let this movie see the light of day — to try and find an alternative route and not a traditional route.”
The alternative route was the Berlin International Film Festival, which accepted the film four weeks after Sundance rejected it, Baker says.
“Just as this movie was made in a nontraditional way, so was the exhibition of it,” says Green, who traveled with 20 friends and crew members to see the premiere in Germany, where the 1,000-seat auditorium sold out.
“It was above and beyond any expectation, and from there, it just turned into a huge publicity storm for me,” Green says. “Festival invitations started popping up, and I had a year and a half where I just traveled the world for free, going to festivals and exhibiting the movie and finding audiences and meeting people and filmmakers.”
Critics declared “George Washington” an instant landmark of Southern filmmaking because of cinematographer Tim Orr’s stunning photography of North Carolina. They also applauded Green’s depiction of children blind to racism.
“I grew up outside of Dallas and went to a school that was very mixed race, and when I was in elementary school, it (racism) was never an issue in my life,” Green says. “It was a very utopian-type atmosphere of ethnicity and race and economic background and people of such diverse cultures in one little area, and you don’t have an appreciation for them until you look back.”
By the time the film hit the United States, “George Washington” had received rave reviews and a debut at the New York Film Festival, where the cast and crew received a standing ovation, a moment Wright describes as one of the best moments of his life after graduating from film school.
“It’s kind of hard to do what you want to do versus working for a paycheck,” Wright says. “But I think it taught us all a good lesson that money isn’t the only driving force in supporting filmmaking.”
It also taught Holden some life lessons.
“Working on ‘George Washington’ allowed me to see what people with passion have and how it drives them,” says Holden, who lives in Raleigh. “To be able to do a film like that with the budget David had to make it with, you have to believe not only in the art but the actors and that your script is going to be good enough. And seeing that type of passion and drive helped me with a lot of my goals in life. You have to go hard all the way or not at all, and I took that away from the movie.”
From indie dramas to studio-budgeted comedies
“George Washington” secured a national distribution deal from Cowboy Booking International, as well as a DVD release from the prestigious Criterion Collection in 2002.
Pollack believes these two factors created a surge in interest for UNCSA’s filmmaking program.
“I think it helped put us on the map,” Pollack says.
Baker and Wright both believe that “George Washington” eventually led them to work on other film and video projects.
“I’m actually in Los Angeles right now working on a mobile phone commercial where the reason I have a job is the director had seen ‘George Washington’ and asked if I could do it,” Wright says.
As for Green, he has directed three other low-budget films: “All the Real Girls,” “Undertow” and “Snow Angels” — all of which received positive reviews from critics such as Roger Ebert but limited box-office success. Green then scored his first mainstream hit with the offbeat comedy “The Pineapple Express” in 2008.
The director’s next film will be “Your Highness,” a medieval comedy starring fellow UNCSA alum Danny McBride, Natalie Portman and James Franco due out Oct. 1. Green says his transition from indie dramas to studio-budgeted comedies was necessary for him to keep working at a time when independent film is disappearing from theaters.
He also likes the challenge of trying something new.
“Right now, I’m having fun exercising other muscles with making people laugh. It’s got its own rewards in a different way,” Green says. “You got bigger toys to play with, and I’m getting to explore other genres that I was always a fan of.”
Want to go?
What: 10th anniversary screening of David Gordon Green’s “George Washington”
When: 6:30 p.m. April 23
Where: ACE Theater Complex, UNC School of the Arts, Winston-Salem
Tickets: $8
Information: 721-1945 or www.riverrunfilm.com
