Sundance 2010: Interview with Michael Mohan (One Too Many Mornings)

In One Too Many Mornings, director Michael Mohan intelligently explores the nuances of friendship and responsibility and keeps it charming. The hilarious film perfectly illustrates the complex problem of wanting to be loved while refusing to make yourself attractive. The acting is great, the characters are real, and the story’s challenge asks you personally—this is your life; what are you gonna do about it? – Sundance Festival Guide

Eric Lavallee: Can you discuss the lead up to One Too Many Mornings (your background as a filmmaker, your previous three shorts /collaborations with Stephen) and can you discuss the genesis of this project – how did the initial idea come about and how did this become a story you wanted to tell? Finally were screenwriting duties partitioned between you, Anthony and Stephen?
Michael Mohan: Absolutely. I think pretty much everything I’ve done has really paved the way for this feature. When I got out of film school in 2002, I really just wanted to keep making short films. I was working as an assistant at Fox Searchlight Pictures, and on nights and weekends would keep cranking out shorts. I was able to do this by working with first time actors who needed material for their reels. So anyone who approached me, if they would pay for the budget of the short, I would make it, and work for free. These shorts were definitely of varying quality, but it allowed me to just keep working that muscle, and figure out a lot of the technical aspects of low budget filmmaking.

Eventually the program I was working for at Fox closed down, and I was fortunate enough to start working at the Sundance Institute, in their Feature Film Program. I answered the phones and scheduled meetings for Michelle Satter, who helped creatively develop the careers of almost all of my favorite filmmakers (PT Anderson, Quentin Tarantino, Miranda July). I also made popcorn up at the Directors and Screenwriters Labs. This was probably the best job any aspiring filmmaker could have – it was like auditing the most progressive and exclusive grad school. I was able to sit in on every advisor meeting, I was right there observing the development of some incredible filmmakers. This it really forced me to look at my own work – which up to that point had not been nearly personal enough.

The epiphany happened in a screenwriting workshop that Stewart Stern (Rebel Without A Cause) leads. Anthony Deptula, Stephen Hale, and I were about to make a low budget horror comedy script. A producer/financier had contacted us to write it, and we were ready to pull the trigger to make it happen. During that workshop, I realized that while I was intellectually interested in that story, I simply wasn’t emotionally invested. And in looking at the year ahead of us, I didn’t want make something our heart wasn’t 100% in.

The three of us decided to pull the plug. We’d rather not make a movie that year, than make this one. That’s not fair to us, or to our audience. So we regrouped in Stephen’s apartment, which happens to be in a large church complex. He lives there for free in exchange for turning off the lights and locking the front door. He also works at the YMCA next door. It’s an incredible situation for a young actor.

And in looking for something truthful – we started from there: “It’s about a guy who lives in a church.” We now had a free location too. And it all fell into place from there. In terms of screenwriting duties – the three of us really just sit in a room and hashed it out. A lot of the time, one of us will just start improvising or telling a story, and I would frantically type out what they were saying word for word so it sounded natural on the page. Because this script was so personal, it was so much easier to write than anything else I’ve done. We didn’t have to force anything. It’s cliche, but that phrase “write what you know” is absolutely true.

EL: Can you elaborate on what kind of work went into the pre-production process (how long you’ve been working on this project prior to pre-production and what specifically you did to prepare, and were there specific people involved in this process that are worth signaling out?
MM: The smartest thing we did was set a start date. It was January 2008, and we basically said “On March 8th we’re going to shoot our first scene.” We knew going in that we were just going to shoot it just like we shot our short films – on nights and weekends. We just knew it would take a lot longer. So we started with all the scenes that were free. Scenes that only involved Anthony + Stephen, and that had zero logistical complexities. That way, even if we had NO money, we could still get the ball rolling.

The film takes place over the span of 5 days. It was eventually shot over the span of 700. Because I knew it was going to take a very long time, I created a huge document that accompanied the script that I called “the bible.” This had all sorts of directorial notes for every single scene. A shot list. Notes on the motivations of these characters. Ideas for improvs. It even had a list of what costumes the characters would be wearing. This document was longer than the actual script. It helped every person on set – it was a reminder of all the intentions we had going in. We could all be on the same page, literally.

EL: How did you ultimately make the decision to shoot in b&w? and what kind of other aesthetic decisions did you make prior to shooting?
MM: The joke on set was that “we can’t afford color.” The first reason was very much practical – we knew we’d be using lots of borrowed equipment, and if we shot black and white, we could mix different lights with different color temperatures and not have to worry about it. The second reason was just that we could. We didn’t have any studio executives breathing down our necks – we could do whatever we wanted. I knew if things went well with this film, it would probably be my last opportunity to shoot black and white, so I wanted to take advantage of that while I could.

One of the best books I’ve ever read about filmmaking is Steven Soderbergh’s published journals during the writing and making of Sex, Lies, and Videotape. Originally he was going to shoot that movie in b&w, but the budget went up so high that he was eventually unable to do that. We didn’t have that problem.

EL: I love the tagline: “A coming of age comedy about two guys who are way too old to be coming of age”. Did you guys add any biographical elements to the script?
MM: Right before writing this script I was going thru a pretty rough patch. A friend of mine had a drinking problem, and I had no idea how to help him through it. He would get really drunk, do something stupid, and then apologize for it, saying he’s never drinking again. A week would pass, and it would happen again. It was incredibly cliché. I had no idea how to help him through it. I would try talking to him, but didn’t have the proper words. I would encourage him to get professional help, but that would just piss him off. During that time, being his friend really sucked. I hated loving him. This is pretty much the main conceit of the movie.

Making this film allowed me to explore this obligation of friendship, and how people you think you know incredibly well can also be complete strangers. Through making this film, I discovered that when you are forced to help out a friend with their problems, it really forces you to look at your own. Sometimes your own problems are even worse.

In terms of directly biographical elements – there are stories the characters tell to each other that are taken directly from our lives. Anthony and Tina Kapousis (Rudy) actually got engaged halfway through making the movie in real life. It doesn’t get any more biographical than that.

EL: If you could name just one – what stands out as your most favorite experience you had during filming?
MM: The thing I’m going to remember the most are the cast and crew sleepovers we’d have on Friday nights. Every weekend, we would all leave our respective day jobs on Friday night, meet at the church, set up the lights, build the sets, and maybe shoot 1 scene late into the morning. Then whoever was up for it would crash on the floor of the church, wake up and shoot all day Saturday.

Those Friday nights were awesome. I’d sometimes bring short films or scenes from other movies that we’d watch that would inform the next day. Apparently one night my production designers tried to levitate me using “light as a feather, stiff as a board” while I was sleeping. As we’d drift asleep we’d tell ghost stories. We’d dream about going to Sundance, knowing that it was such a long shot. But our crew of friends, we really felt like a family while making this film.

EL: Anatomy of a scene: What was the most difficult sequence during production?
MM: One of the most logistically challenging things to do in an indie film is to shoot in a moving car. It sucks. Cars are hard. In so many low budget films – if a scene takes place in a car – the camera is almost always handheld in the passenger seat, shooting profile at the driver on the widest lens possible. This shot is always there by necessity – it’s the cleanest shot you can get of the actor driving, while not needing to add a car rig onto the car. It’s a pet peeve of mine – to me, profile shots should mean something. There should be a specific emotional or intellectual reason why you shoot someone in profile instead of straight on, or at an angle – it’s a visual decision, and it’s unfortunate that the confines of a car dictate that you have to shoot cars in this very basic way. Additionally, cars are loud, roads are loud, and many car scenes, in addition to looking bad, also need to be ADR’ed (re-dub the actors reading their lines).

So, when writing the movie, we were thinking so much about the resources we did have, and thinking about it in a way where we knew we could achieve a specific aesthetic within that limited range. For this very scene, I made cars off limits. One very short, dialogue-less car scene made it into the script, but otherwise – off limits. We couldn’t afford it – we didn’t need it. Until our reshoots.

When we reconceived how we were going to be introduced to the characters; there was one piece of information that we needed to get across: Peter had driven all night long to get to Fischer’s house. The easiest way on paper that we could achieve this is by showing him that morning, asleep, but seated at the wheel of the moving car. I loved this idea for many reasons. Like the rest of the film, it’s both really funny, but also kind of terrifying. It also serves as a larger metaphor for his character – without giving anything away, you could say that Peter is asleep at the wheel of his life, really. It’s a perfect solution to both setting up his character, but also giving the audience the information they need to get the story moving. But writing a scene is free. Shooting a scene is a whole other story. So how were we going to do it? The simple answer is: illegally and dangerously.

On a “real” movie that has a budget for such things – we’d simply close down a street and tow the car. But we didn’t have money for closing a street, nor money to even rent a U-haul hitch. It was out of the realm of possibility. So really, we just needed to do it for real. The first step was finding a road. We needed a stretch of road wide enough so that we could drive alongside the picture car in a second car. It also needed to be off the beaten path so that there would be a lot less other cars on the road. More importantly, it needed to be straight. And ideally –this would be a bonus- it needed to be visually interesting.

So back in June, Anthony and I took a whole day and just drove around. We were delirious. It sounds kind of simple, but all the roads we were finding that were wide enough, they were simply too main of a road. We would have been stopped by the cops in no time. All the roads that were off the beaten path – they were too skinny. We drove all over Camarillo, Oxnard, Simi Valley, and found nothing. Just strip malls. Finally we somehow found ourselves in Agua Dulce, not too far from the rocks where several episodes of Star Trek were shot. There were definitely houses and small businesses around, but it was otherwise fairly desolate. Next up, we had to figure out where to put the camera. I mean, we’re doing this for real, we’re putting Anthony’s life in danger – so let’s flaunt it. We did this in two ways. The first was we got this specialty car mount that Elisha borrowed from a friend (for free!) that was a series of industrial strength suction cups. So we could mount the camera almost anywhere on the car. Additionally, we borrowed a van from another friend (for free!) so that we could drive parallel to the moving car, and shoot from the side of it. We could see the entire car and clearly depict that in no way was this an illusion.

The day of the shoot we woke up at 4:30am. That way we could not only start shooting right as the sun came up, there’d also be even less of a chance of people catching us. We didn’t realize this – but at the end of this stretch of road – the one house we would meet in front of, a fireman lived there. At one point he got out, saw us, got in his firetruck and left. At another point his wife came out to check out what we were doing. We called that meeting point “the fireman’s wife’s house.” We were kind of scared of them. The one expense we incurred – we rented walkie-talkies. It cost $40. But that way we could communicate with everyone all at the same time. For most shots we had one car driving in front of the picture car, and one car driving behind it. Meg was up ahead at the end of the road on lookout. If a car was coming up ahead – Meg would call out “car coming!” and we would stop. Like everything– I think a hefty amount of naivety is important to success. Otherwise you may psych yourself out of doing it, knowing what the difficulties are going to be. So that, mixed with a large dose of luck has lifted us and our ability to craft what I think ended up being one of the most visually compelling scenes in the movie.

EL: This was accepted as part of Sundance’s NEXT section (their emphasis on no-budget filmmaking). What is the most sound advice you can offer for first time filmmakers out there?
MM: Make sure you are personally connected to your story. Movies that are made on as small of a scale as ours take a lot of time, in our case it was 2 years. If we weren’t so emotionally connected to these characters, it would have been hard to maintain not only our enthusiasm, but the enthusiasm of our collaborators. The film will ultimately dictate what it wants to be, and for us that involved a lot of reshooting. All of this was easier because the passion for this project never wore off.

Michel Mohan’s One Too Many Mornings is part of the Sundance Film Festival’s inaugural NEXT section. You can watch OTMM exclusively on Youtube.