”dot the i” was well received at film festivals back in 2003 and now it’s finally getting released in 2005. How frustrating was waiting for the theatrical release after doing the film festival circuit quite a while ago?
It has been frustrating. It isn’t now that it’s coming out, but it has been. But it’s weird. We shot this in 2002 and some in 2003 and it’s been out in about 15 countries. Like in some European countries, like France and Spain. It’s been out in the Far East in Japan. It’s been out in South America. So it kind of has been out. My understanding of it is that every territory was bought by a different distributor and then it’s totally up to them what they want to do with it. Whereas some films will get bought by one distributor for the English language, one distributor for Europe, one for Latin American, and then they’ll coordinate the release. This didn’t happen with this movie. So it’s weird.
It was frustrating for a while because it’s like, “When’s it coming out?” But it’s kind of weird more than anything, to be talking about it sort of two or three years after I made it. I’m happy. One of my fears was when I was writing it, because of the whole reality TV angle, I was like, “Well, this might be dated by the time I get to make it.” But the reality TV thing shows no signs at all of running out of steam so it doesn’t feel dated. I mean, I’m not frustrated now. I’m happy that it’s coming out.
It’s a weird process because there’s only so much you can do. You can do interviews, you can do your thing, but really you just have to let it go.
Is it hard to find as much passion now talking about a movie you shot so long ago?
No, because I look at it as I look at everything I do on the work front. The moment I’m done with it I look at what I like about it, what I don’t like about it, what I’ve learned from it. I’ve never done anything on any level yet that I’m totally 100% happy with. So I look at this movie and I care about it. Would I make the same movie now, three years on? No, because I’m not the same person I was three years ago. But do I look at it and enjoy it? There’s still moments that make me laugh, even though I’ve seen them God knows how many times. I haven’t stopped caring about it, you know what I mean?
I probably talk about it from a different perspective than I did, for example, at Sundance when I just finished making it. When I was just fresh out of it. When I talk about it now, I probably talk about it slightly differently than I did then. You just have a different perspective on things once you’ve done work and move on.
Being that "dot the i" was your first feature film, do you think your style of directing changed over the course of the shoot?
I don’t think it did during that film, but it has since. I mean, I think as a first-timer… I hadn’t gone to film school. Some first-timers will come and they’ll have been actors so they’ll have been around a lot of film sets. Or they’ll have been writers who’ve had a lot of movies made or they’ll have done a lot of commercials. I was relatively inexperienced when I came to that film set, so my preoccupation was that I knew what I wanted to make. I wanted to make a fun movie. I knew I had a great cast. My thing was that I just had to concentrate on shooting the script and keep doing the best that I can. But I think my confidence obviously grew during the shooting of it.
But, of course, with these things it’s like a lot of things. The more you do it, the more you realize how little you know. That’s the strange thing about directing. It’s one of those professions that you can only really learn by doing. And it’s hard to do in the sense that if you’re a writer, you can sit down and write. But if you’re a director, you can sit down and direct with yourself and your TV camera, but that’s not working with crew. It’s not working with actors. It’s a hard thing to get the experience of doing, just by its very nature.
If you would have asked me that at the end of 2002, I probably would have said, “I learned x, y, and z.” But I think several years on now, some of the things that I learned during that shoot and since have probably sort of meshed into one another. It’s hard to distinguish what I’ve learned from one particular project.
