Sundance 2010: Interview with Jeffrey Blitz (Lucky)

Veteran director Jeffrey Blitz (Spellbound, Rocket Science—2007 Sundance Film Festival Directing Award winner) has skillfully crafted a revealing look at the way one’s identity is undoubtedly turned upside down after the big payout. Thoroughly involving, Lucky cleverly strips off the veneer and shatters our perceptions about the ultimate American dream. – Sundance Film Guide

Eric Lavallee: Can you discuss the genesis of this project – how did the initial idea come about and at what point did you know that you wanted to commit to the idea of making this?
Jeffrey Blitz: After Spellbound, I was rummaging around for my next documentary. Sean Welch and I would pitch one another potential movies by sending emails with the subject header of simply, “Number 2.” We probably sent forty “Number 2” ideas before I happened to get an email from Rebecca Morton. We didn’t know Rebecca at the time. Since then I’ve said it was like an “over the transom” email. She just wrote an impassioned letter suggesting that I make my next movie about lottery winners. It instantly clicked for me. Like with Spellbound, it felt like a subject that was generally thought of (if at all) in a superficial light, but that had the potential to reach deep into a complex cultural thicket. Here was a subject that by revealing innermost dreams might thrust questions of identity and fate onto a handful of people plucked from anonymity. Seemed like a good place to start digging.

Once we did enough research on the subject and I was satisfied it was a rich one, Sean and I looped in CAA to help us look for partners. We met Peter Saraf and Marc Turtletaub from Big Beach and we had an immediate sense that they were the kind of executives we would mesh well with. They just got it from the start; they understood the potential appeal and understood our vision for it. With that, we were off and running. We eventually had Rebecca move temporarily out to LA and we collectively began our first months of work on it.

EL: Back in late 2007, Big Beach joined the project, making it the first and so far only documentary project they produced. What was in the original pitch that got them interested and did you have any footage to show at that point?
JB: Shortly after I started working on Lucky, I remember talking to Jehane Noujaim (Control Room) about her filmmaking process and how she felt it was critical to start shooting on her own before bringing on any outside support for a doc. She felt it was appropriate that the initial burden of proof–proof that there was indeed the possibility of a film–had to satisfied by a director before anyone also could join in the risk. I think she’s probably right that this is the most sane and most proper approach. Anyway, by the time this sage advice had been shared, we had already begun production. And the funny thing is, had I approached it Jehane’s way, we never would have made Lucky. The first big stretch of work on it (six months? a year?) was deeply frustrating because of how inaccessible our favorite winners turned out to be. But I’m hopeful that just goes to show that there are limitations even to very good approaches because, although it took far longer to crack than anyone had thought, when it did finally start to fall into place, it felt like we benefited from having to work especially hard at the beginning to find the right stories.

EL: How much of a hurdle was it to secure interviews with previous and the more recent lottery winners? Were the State lottery organizations weary of you uncovering some of the darker issues?
JB: I had foolishly imagined that reaching out to lottery winners would be easier than finding willing subjects for Spellbound. In my first movie, I had no track record at all and I was cold-calling parents to ask to come to their homes to film them. In retrospect, it’s a wonder anyone agreed. But with Lucky, I imagined people would be eager to share their exceptional journeys with a filmmaker who now had a history of treating participants respectfully. Instead, they were incredibly difficult to reach. Lottery winners learn very fast how to make themselves inaccessible. This is true of new winners and old winners. So the effort to find a compelling mix of stories was thoroughly challenging.

Also, as you guessed, state lottery agencies weren’t particularly responsive. They are marketers, salesmen of a product–the lottery as a dream. They obviously don’t want it “exposed” by some anti-lottery muckraker, which I’m not, but they don’t even have an interest in a truthful, character-based story. Like with any marketing or ad group, they want their message along to cut through the clutter. So while a handful of state agencies were helpful at directing us toward happy stories, none that I can think of helped with stories that weren’t clearly fitting into their fantasy storyline. The difficulty in getting the right subjects, as much as anything, meant that our timetable more than doubled. Neither we, nor Big Beach would have been satisfied with less than stellar stories, so we simply stayed after it for years longer than we had planned until we landed a group of winners we felt were thoroughly entertaining and brought us into the underlying ideas of the film.

EL: If my memory serves me right, this is the first time you worked with animation. What aesthetic decisions did you make prior to shooting?
JB: The decision to add animation didn’t happen until well into editing. After seeing a cut, Peter Saraf and Jeb Brody from Big Beach suggested I think about some way of getting more of the interesting facts about the lottery into the film. Lucky is such a character-based piece and they were both commenting how fascinating some of the world is that surrounds the lottery that the characters don’t address. I was extremely dubious at first but the deeper I dug into the anecdotal history of the lottery in America, the more I thought we could find a really compelling way in. As soon as I committed to this idea, I knew that animation would be a great way to support it. The (essentially ridiculous) model I kept in mind was Lars von Trier’s Breaking The Waves, the way the movie was punctuated with a handful of stunning tableaux landscape shots backed by pop songs.

I felt like I was going to break from the unvarnished reality of the film that it needed to be a stark and deliberate break. From the beginning I had a style of animation in mind and, just by chance, I happened online onto an animated Death Cab for Cutie video done by Walter Robot, an animation house in LA, and it was spot-on for me. Because I added the animation sequences to the film late in the game that it created more work for Yana Gorskaya (editor), Sue Jacobs (a music supervisor who worked tirelessly to find me the songs in the style I wanted) and the Walter Robot guys themselves. But in the end, it makes for an interesting and weirdly organic juxtaposition for me.

EL: I think one of the reasons why Spellbound might have been such a major draw with audiences is because people like to cheer for the underdog. At the beginning, did you have the concern that it may be harder for audiences to feel empathy for multi-million dollar winners
JB: You’re absolutely right. Dubiousness and disdain if not outright resentment is likely to be the default position of many people going into the movie. I think it’s just human nature, actually, that when people are lavished with riches that they haven’t earned that people want to see them pay for it somehow. It’s built into our scolding moral sense and probably our equilibrium-seeking narrative sense, too. So, yeah, very different than a group of incredibly diligent and hard-working kids going earnestly after an impossible goal. But for me, that’s actually a big part of the appeal of Lucky. Spellbound was a look at one side of the American Dream, a side that most people are unabashedly proud of: that Protestant work ethic that has become a part of our cultural mythology. Lucky is the reverse. An exploration of that other American Dream, getting something for nothing. I’m sure the emotions it will conjure will be utterly different than what Spellbound inspired. But I didn’t set out to replicate the experience of my first movie, only to get as deeply into the lives of my subjects here as I did there, and to create as stirring a set of responses. That they should be of another sort completely is exactly right. That they should be just as surprising in their own right would be great. It’s what I’m hoping for.

EL: Some say it’s easier to win the lottery than to get into Sundance. This is your second trip here. Can you tell me the difference about using Sundance as a platform for fiction and now, docu films?
JB: I don’t really know. I think the thrill of showing in a big festival with big audiences that want to be appreciative will probably be the same. But in terms of how Sundance launches a film, I plead ignorance. Rocket Science had distribution going into the fest so there was none of the anxiety, dire frustration or huge joy of trying to sell a film that I guess we’ll look forward to with Lucky. That may be the more notable difference in the experience? I guess also I’d say that Rocket Science was great fun because so many of the cast and crew were there. On Lucky, it’s just the creaky rowboat’s worth of people who made the movie. We love each other, indeed, but I imagine we’ll all be clamoring for new dinner dates pretty early into the fest.

EL: We are still early on in your film career, but it appears that you belong to a niche of filmmakers such as the James Marshs, Kevin MacDonalds and Herzogs who dabble in docu and fiction. From your POV do you find some sort of balance in working in both forms?
JB: Balance is exactly right. The honest answer is that I mostly don’t think of it in terms of the final result but instead in terms of the process. I don’t think–ah, I’ve made a fiction film, now I’ll jump to documentary and then back to fiction. Instead, I feel like I enjoy working on film projects that are very small and self-contained and on ones with a big and rowdy mix of personalities. When Sean Welch and I discuss this, it’s generally in very practical terms: do I want to work on a movie where I’m miserably dragging my own camera equipment through twenty airports but I have only a few well-chosen partners to engage with; or do I want to work on a movie where I have the pleasure of having a crew of astonishingly talented people to help me get what I want but I have to face the prospect of being punched every day by a hundred questions and as many of egos? So far, with the limited experience I’ve had, doing one creates an amazing desire for the other and so forth. So, although I don’t imagine I’ll deliberately choose to hop back and forth, it wouldn’t surprise me if it turned out that if I’m lucky enough to be able to keep on making movies.

EL: I imagine you might have seen Up in the Air. I was wondering if filmmakers feel about “uncovering” a talent and seeing that person receive major kudos in a following film. Are you flattered when another director picks an actress based on a performance delivered in your film?
JB: Jason Reitman told me recently that, based on how much he talks up Rocket Science in his interviews for Up In The Air, I owe him some of my next residuals check. I really do hope he’s right that the DVD sales of Rocket Science go up and that my residuals on it jump from eight dollars to eleven. Regardless, I’m a gigantic fan of the character Jason wrote for Anna and really humbled and excited that he found a spark for that in my film. It’s not just that it’s flattering, which it is, but I like to think of myself (totally erroneously) as the first person who perceived Anna’s ridiculously deep talent. Anytime someone comes along and writes a role for her to buzz through, you can count me in as thrilled.

Jeffrey Blitz’s Lucky is featured in Sundance’s U.S. Documentary Competition.