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HBO Online Exclusive Interview with Jim McKay
HBO
Tell us a little about the genesis of the project. It had quite a long journey from concept to the screen.
JIM MCKAY
Nelson George, the executive producer, is the person who actually initiated the whole project, with the idea of soliciting stories from the general public. And they received all these pieces of writing and went through them and whittled them down to a more manageable group that they felt were really strong, and that's when I came onto the project, which was the winter of 2000.
Nelson and the other executive producers came to me saying we've got these stories, and we think they should work their way into a film. We're interested in possibly doing improvisation with actors, somehow within this process, and what do you think? I've worked with actors in improvisation a lot before, so I was very intrigued.
I read through all the stories, and they really crossed a giant spectrum. I thought they were very, very interesting. The one thing I definitely felt upon reading them was that I didn't want to take these stories and dramatize them, or re-create them. It just didn't seem like the most artistically interesting way to go about it for me. But what I did think would be interesting is if we created a fictitious story of our own, and then took these stories that we had collected and assigned them to characters who would be played by actors.
I think we had maybe fifty characters, all different sorts, and many of them were paired up with one of these stories and was told, okay, this is something that happened to you.
In the end, they really were little seeds, but by the time you see the film, all these stories don't exist, really, for the viewer at all.
So we did this workshop, we worked for about a month with all these different actors, and we just worked with improvising situations that I had come up with for this story that took place over the course of twenty-four hours in a restaurant. And after the workshop was over, we had all this material and we spent the next year honing everything into a script which developed out of the inspiration of the workshop, and became a film.
HBO
What was the experience like with Everyday People at the New Directors/New Films festival?
JIM MCKAY
Well, this is the second time I've done New Directors. It's fantastic because it's a hometown crowd. You know, the movies I've made have been fairly New York centric. So that's always a really fun and interesting part of them, it's definitely a more diverse crowd, racially and class-wise.
But then again, the New Directors Festival is put on by the Museum of Modern Art and the Film Society of Lincoln Center and it's at Lincoln Center, so it's a little bit more the people who appreciate film as art, crowd.
And the curators, in particular, being from these institutions, which are kind of the creme de la creme.
HBO
Mm-hmm.
JIM MCKAY
It's a real honor to be included. But I think mostly what it is is that the hometown crowd aspect of it really is wonderful. For me, the exciting thing about this film compared to my other films is that it will show in a really big way on HBO.
When you make work, your goal might not be first and foremost to have as many people as possible see it, but it might be more about honing your craft as a storyteller or making art, but, there's no doubt about it, you want lots of people to see it.
And I think having this film premiere on HBO on a Saturday night, that's what it's all leading up to. Because so many people will see it that night - an amazing cross-section of Americans will see the film.
HBO
The film kicked-off this year's New Directors festival - that's quite an honor.
JIM MCKAY
Totally. The film played at Alice Tully Hall, which is a very big room. I don't think I've ever played in a theater that big. I think it's eleven hundred seats. And they have a big presentation and you come on stage beforehand, and then you sit in a box and they shine a spotlight on you. It's a little bit of pomp and circumstance, so it's nice; it's a special night.
HBO
The idea of a diverse group of individuals whose lives intersect at a neighborhood diner - where did that come from?
JIM MCKAY
That was something that I created. I felt we needed a place to have the story situated where it would be realistic, where all these different people would cross paths within the course of a day. And I felt like a workplace made sense, because I think that in this country, for some people, the only place where they really do interact with people of different races and class oftentimes is in the workplace.
Not all people, but I think for a lot of people that's where things are the most diverse in their lives. And they don't necessarily have friendships that they take home with them that cross those racial boundaries. So that was one of the inspirations and also thinking that it would be a lively place.
And then the whole going-out-of-business thing became a whole side story about our changing neighborhoods and our changing economy, and how people grapple with issues like that.
Everything grew organically. I think in the end, it's not just a film about race at all. In many ways it's just as much a film about work and it's a film about family. And all that stuff just kind of came along with thinking about and re-writing the story.
We shot the film in the former Ratner's, which is on Delancey Street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. It's very similar to the restaurant in the film. They closed down about a year before we filmed, and so we could kind of build our own restaurant within the space that they once held.
HBO
The film seems to play with stereotypes, and then reverses many of the ideas we have about them.
JIM MCKAY
Definitely. There's a saying about you don't know a person until you've walked in their shoes, or you can't judge a book by its cover, and as cliché as it may sound, I think there's a lot of truth to that.
There are a lot of people who like to think they don't have prejudices and that they're open people, and yet, we all have that in ourselves, oftentimes against people of our own race or our own gender or whatever.
So there was a definite desire to portray a different world than we often see in Hollywood. Because I think when people watch a film, and they go through that experience themselves, that maybe another character did when they misjudged someone, then there's a little piece of enlightenment there, you know.
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