Photo Credit: Hopper Stone / Bleecker Street
I recently had a chance to speak to Dan Fogelman, the writer and director of the new film Danny Collins, which stars Al Pacino, Bobby Cannavale, Christopher Plummer, Annette Bening, and Jennifer Garner. We spoke about movies, art versus commerce, and trying to become better each day.
Hi, it’s good to meet another ‘Fogelman’.
It’s nice to meet you,
So I wanted to ask, you’ve probably heard this kind of question a lot, but you really have only written stuff before.
Right.
So did you feel like directing was the step you always wanted to go?
Not necessarily, no. I didn’t have huge directing aspirations, I’ve always been a writer first. I’ve observed, when you write a really good script and give it to a director it could become a really shitty movie or a really bad script can become a really good movie. That’s part of the process and I’ve enjoyed it, working with a lot of directors, but I’ve spent a lot of time on sets picking up bits and pieces and at certain point I was starting to get opportunities.
People were saying, “Would you like to take this book to direct it?”, an actor you worked with is a writer, you could direct him in this, etc. I wasn’t feeling quite either ready or interested, and when I wrote this one, by the end of the script I couldn’t fathom giving it to anyone else. And that was what kind of pushed me into directing this movie.
So this had something more of a connection to you and you felt like this is it.
The time was right. It was a bunch of factors that hit at the same time, which is that I felt ready, I felt like I knew what I was doing now, I felt established enough and I knew how to talk to actors, and I knew enough about cameras combined with the fact I felt really attached to the material.
That makes sense. I always like to to think about movies as the script is almost like a recipe, and it can be really great, but you could make some mistakes, and on the other hand, you could take something that was a little weak and turn it into something amazing.
And the same goes for performances really. It’s a director’s medium, and it’s very possible with some really terrible film performances where you go “Wow, that guy’s terrible in that movie,” who actually if you got to the edit bay and saw stuff that might’ve been really good in the movie if a different version of the movie had been edited. So there’s a lot in that recipe that can go really bad just by putting on a little salt.
That’s why in general I try to be more optimistic about movies. There’s so many parts and it’s so hard just to get it made. Unless it’s something that I know that it’s clearly a huge company making a huge movie, in those cases I feel a little safer being judgemental, but otherwise I feel like giving a bit of leeway. I assume in most cases people actually care about what they’re doing.
Right, it’s true, I’m in the business so I have to see a lot movies. And sometimes I’m like “Yech” about a movie but then I think you know what, there’s somebody out there that put their sweat, life and blood into it and I actually know the person, they’re not a bad person. And they’re not intentionally setting out to make a shittyy movie.
Yeah, I would hope not. So what was interesting to me is that this was based off of a real life person, but the level of fame you created for Danny Collins was orders of magnitude more than this real life guy. So why did you decide to make that change?
Because more than anything, and I’ve been saying this a lot, it’s that it’s based on an incident that happened to a guy that it is based off the guy himself. When I heard the story, my initial instinct was wow, a guy gets a letter after 40 years from his hero telling him don’t worry you control your destiny, you don’t have to worry about fame and fortune corrupting your art.
When I heard the story, my initial instinct was wow. tweet
And I immediately, literally before making it to the end of the article, thought oh my god, a movie about a guy just like that, a guy that lost his way. And in talking to the real guy, Steve, it’s not his story. His story and regret was left at “well, shit, I would’ve liked to have gotten a chance to meet John Lennon.” And there wasn’t much more than that because he stayed musically and personally true to himself. That didn’t seem like an interesting movie to me!
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