If I have the timeline right, you guys wrote the script and then you cast Ben and Matt. Was that correct, or did you have them in mind when you were writing?
By the way, two years ago, this script did not exist. It didn’t exist until May of 2024. And Dani Bernfeld, who was at Artists Equity, who’s really the wonderful ignition on this thing, I had been in there, I talked to Ben about some stuff, we talked about all of us figuring out something to work on and so on. And when that was done, Dani’s like, “Listen, just give me 48 hours. Before it goes out in a larger context, give me 48 hours with this movie. Let me figure it out.” And 24 hours later I had Matt, and 24 hours after that, I had Ben.
It was funny because they’re producing it, obviously, and they’re going, “Let’s talk about cast. Who do you see in the movie?” I go, “Well, you guys would be okay!” [laughs] “I don’t know. What do you think? Maybe you guys is perfect casting.” And then honestly, we were just off to the races, man. It happened very quickly. We were done shooting that movie by the end of 2024, and spent last year editing and fine-tuning it and doing all that good stuff.
Did you have time to rewrite anything to their strengths, or was that all found on the day where you created a little moments for them?
We had one little day of reshoots to clarify some stuff, because I think we really were trying to hone this thing, so it would cut through anything. The story moves. And I think all the extraneous stuff that maybe we would find cumbersome after a while, we just shore away slowly. So that’s what that process was. But there was a lot of discussion about the very end and what that would look like, and that was a very different thing that went through a lot of iterations. We finally got a version that we all love.
That’s the thing about the movie, it’s the version I love, it’s the version they love, it’s the version Netflix loves. It’s not like we settled for everybody’s second-favorite choice, which sometimes happens in instances like these. You go, “Okay, well, this is the one we can agree on, so we’ll let this…” You don’t want that. You really want to feel like you put your best foot forward.
Right. Yeah, I was going to ask about different iterations of the story, and whether or not that iterative process happened early or late. Was that in the edit or was that in the writing, pre-production stuff?
I always say there’s three films: There’s the one you write, the one you shoot, and the one you cut, and they can be wildly divergent in what they wind up being. There’s an application we use, FrameIO, which is basically, you watch [the movie], but you can make comments on specific moments and go, “We need to do this here.” I think I was somewhere in the 13,000 range of individual comments on the various cuts over the 10 months or whatever, because we just wanted to make this thing a rocket sled. And my girlfriend jokes about it: I’d get up at 3:00 in the morning, and [be like], “Here we go.” And we did it again and again and again.
Kevin Hale, my buddy who I’ve known for 30 years who cut the film, early on, I realized I was being so abrasive, because he took one note that I had just written, “Flat, flat, flat. There is no narrative push here, there is no drive, this sucks,” and he says to his wife, “I don’t think Joe’s happy with this cut of the scene.” But brother, when I tell you we roughed this thing up, we really took this thing through its paces. We really knew what this movie was at the end of the day.
