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GR: What were some challenges of making your first full-length film? Was doing four vignettes a way to ease into it? GP: I think it was actually harder to do an anthology picture than it would have been to shoot a traditional, single-story feature. In many ways, we had four times as much work to do: four sets of characters, costumes, locations, and production design. GR: On your site, there¹s a pretty comprehensive guide to shooting on DV and transferring to film. Do you consider yourself a tech guy? If so, does this side ever conflict with your comedic improv side? GP: I guess I'm pretty geeky, although my expertise is narrowly confined to Macintosh computers and film-related programs. PCs make me cry and I don't know PowerPoint from Peoria. Can't say there were ever any tech-related conficts with my improv work. Although I can remember a show years ago in which I did a series of html jokes that totally died. GR: Does your background as a comedic improv group member come out when you¹re trying to convey ideas to actors? Do you have to contain it? Also, how does one teach comedic improv? It seems to me that you¹ve either got it or you just plain don¹t. GP: The great thing about good improv comedy is that it all relies on working together as a group, on listening and building together. Focus, agreement, commitment, and justification--those are the big keywords. Teaching improv is all about getting people to listen to each other, to affirm and commit to the reality each other is creating, and to justify the inconsistencies so the relationships and the scene can build. For the most part, the humor can't be taught; it comes out naturally through the human interaction. But the principles of creative interaction are eminently teachable. And, yes, I think all that training did help me work with the actors in Robot Stories. Ultimately, it comes down to taking the emotional premise of a given moment seriously and working with your partner to find the emotional truth of the moment. And that leads to great comedy in improv and moving moments in drama. GR: In the third segment of Robot Stories, a middle-aged mother becomes a toy fiend. Where did you get the Micronauts for it? GP: All choice selections from my own childhood collection. GR: I was pretty impressed how Tamlyn Tomita was able to "connect" with the robot infant in the first segment. Was that hard for her to pull off or did she hit it on the first take? GP: Tamlyn nailed that stuff from the beginning. It's like those improv principles we were talking about; she just totally committed, totally invested that baby with emotional reality, and never let go. There's a funny still from the shoot of us rehearsing with a wicker basket instead of the robot, and she was as committed to making that basket real as she was when we were working with the real thing. GR: If you were able to have cgi robots, would you have replaced the ones in the film (except for yourself)? Or would that make a difference? Maybe there's something else you would have done if you were George Lucas and could re-do everything with a bigger budget? GP: I'm pretty happy with our indie effects. They're clean and simple enough that they make the stories believable without being so overwhelming as to distract from the emotional content. But if I find myself with millions of extra scratch 25 years from now, I'd consider embellishing a few things: airships in the backgrounds and that kind of stuff, little details to more clearly establish the condition and nature of this slightly futuristic world. And I might give the baby's eyes another layer‹a kind of translucent, blinking pupil. Little brush strokes, basically. But, happily, I can watch the movie without agonizing over stuff like that. The relatively low-key effects seem to match and complement the deeper emotional content of the film. |