What was the basic production timeline? How long did it take to get from idea to final film?
I knew 100% that I wanted to make this movie 3 years ago. It took me a year to get up the nerve to contact Tobias Wolff and ask him for permission. It took him about 17 minutes to email me back and say ok. Apparently he checks email as compulsively as I do. Probably the longest part of the process was post-production. I took forever to edit the film. But then this is my thesis film (at Columbia), and the last project I’ll probably ever be able to take as long as I want to cut. The editor, Paul Frank, and I cut the movie separately, scene-by-scene. Initially we would only check in with each other every few weeks to compare cuts and compile what we thought worked. Working alone like that, we were able to follow our ideas through to their conclusions, and found a lot of great stuff as a result. It was wonderful creatively but a very slow process. We locked picture about six months after we started cutting. So all in all the movie started screening at festivals about a year after we shot i
