You’ve been a screenwriter for quite a while. Why did you decide to start directing at this point in your career?
I’ve wanted to get behind the camera for awhile and was pretty close a couple of years ago on another script that I wrote. I think inevitably many screenwriters have to direct because if they really want to see their material made the way they intended it, there’s no other way to do it. That’s been particularly true for me. There’s been a number of movies that I’ve written where it’s been incredibly painful for me to watch the results of what I’ve wrote as it appears onscreen.
Most of my original scripts – “Last Action Hero” and “Suspect Zero” being the two most glaring examples – I mean, I haven’t even seen “Suspect Zero.” I can’t bring myself to go see it. “Last Action Hero” kind of famously was so rewritten and so changed that enough of that and after a while it’s like, “Okay, I have to stop complaining and start doing my own stuff because there’s no other way to do this.”
I’m very grateful for having a successful screenwriting career and I still enjoy writing. I still try to keep up with it. But fundamentally you get into this because you want to convey something to an audience. You want, as a craftsman, people to see your wares. And if you make a beautiful chair and someone painted it like puke green, it’s not so fun to watch it get sold in a flea market. For me, directing was inevitable. I had to do it to keep myself sane and I’m actually going to do another movie soon.
Speaking of other movies, will your upcoming poker movie be shot in a style similar to "Incident at Loch Ness?"
I will be. We won’t try to keep it a hoax. It’s going to be a fictional film. I am going to use some of the same stylistic elements just because I enjoy doing it. And it’s a really interesting way to work with actors and it actually also allows you to work on a much lower budget, which is one of the key things.
One of the things about doing interviews with people and allowing them to talk to the camera is that it makes it a lot easier to shoot because you can cover scenes that don’t come out well or that you don’t have the money to cover in an interview. Someone can say, “We got in a spaceship and flew to Mars,” and you don’t need to see it.
Everyone seems to love poker now. Why did you choose to do a poker film?
I know that it’s turned into the hottest subject in the world but a lot of it is, you’ll just have to trust me, I’ve been playing poker since I was a kid and I play in a weekly game here in Hollywood for 12 years, 13 years. And a lot of my friends are poker players. Some of the people who are in the movie are people who play in that poker game. So that’s one of the reasons. I just happen to really like poker.
I wanted to do something like “Loch Ness” in that I wanted to do something that had some of the same format, but I didn’t feel like shooting on the water or having a lot of special effects or any of the other things that were necessary for that. Telling a story against the background of poker has its advantages. It’s inherently dramatic and it has an inherit structure to it. Whereas if I said let’s do a Christopher Guest-style movie about collecting baseball cards, the problem is no built-in story. One of the things that I liked about this idea – and it was pitched to me by a friend of mine – was it just has this built-in narrative which I don’t have to worry about, which is the tournament itself. Also I was a really big fan of “Spellbound” the documentary. The movie kind of follows the structure of “Spellbound.” It starts with the eight people at the final table and then follows them back to how they got there.
How does poker's increased popularity affect your film?
I’m sure it will be a two-way street like all things. I’m sure it will both be helpful in that people are far more familiar with poker than they were a year ago, which is good for me. It means I don‘t have to put as much explanatory stuff in the movie. And I’m sure I also will deal with a lot of people saying, “They are just doing it because poker is a hot subject.” I’m sure I’m going to have to say a thousand times in interviews I was playing poker before it was on the cover of these magazines.
Poker’s been around a while. People made movies about poker 10 years ago and 30 years ago, and whatever. If it wanes in popularity… I’m not trying to make a movie that’s trying to be “Titanic.” It needs to just appeal to the audience who likes movies like this. Like “Loch Ness,” it’s going to be less about monster hunting and more about the characters who inhabit that world. “Loch Ness” is far more about making movies than it is about searching for monsters. And I think the poker movie will be far more about other things – I’m not sure exactly what yet – than it will be some sort of in-depth study of poker.
