WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. — The 25th RiverRun International Film Festival kicked off and that brings filmmakers from across the globe to the Triad area. This year, Oscar-Winning writer of "Dead Poet's Society", Tom Schulman, is being honored with the Master of Cinema Award at the festival. WFMY's film critic, Manning Franks, sat-down with the filmmaker for a discussion of his work both new and old, and what this honor means to him.
Manning Franks - "So,Tom first off welcome to the Triad area, what was it like being or getting the call or saying hey, we want to honor you with the master of cinema award at the RiverRun International Film Festival?”
Tom Schulman - "It was a little surreal, you know, I immediately told my family pay attention to me now! *laughs*, but it’s a big honor and I’m really happy to be here.”
Franks - “How did you find out actually?”
Schulman - “Rob [Davis, Executive Director of RiverRun] sent me a letter!”
Franks - “A hand written letter?”
Schulman - “No, I think it was an email letter, although I printed it out so now it looks like a letter, maybe, maybe he sent me it through the mail now that you mention it because there were some programs from the last couple of years. So yes, it came through the mail.”
Franks - “Obviously, not only are you getting this honor/award, you also have a film that is playing here called at double down south, and you are an acclaimed Oscar winning screenwriter, but you’re also a director too, what was it like for you getting in the director’s chair for this?”
Schulman - “I had directed once before, I directed a movie, called "Eight Heads in a Duffel Bag", many years ago, so I think I knew what was coming and I was excited to do it. I trained at a place called Actors and Directors Lab to be a director, it was something that I wanted to do off and on for years.”
Franks - “For those people who are unaware, "Double Down South", what is the premise that people can expect when it is playing at the festival today and on Sunday?”
Tom - “It’s a thriller set in the world of high stakes pool and high stakes gambling, and it’s based around a game that disappeared, but used to be pretty popular in the 20th century called Keno-Pool, not to be confused with a bingo like game in Vegas. They put a board in about a third of the length and width of the table, and there are holes on the table from 1 to 15 and the idea is to get them all into its hole. You know, one ball into one hole and there’s also a double hole in the board and if the person who breaks gets a double on the break they get twice the bet.”
Franks - “In this one there is this woman gets involved with this shall we say politely, maybe underground, cede side of things, what is that about? What is her story?”
Schulman - “Her story is she wants to be, or at least the story that she presents, is that she wants to be the best Keno player, wants to win a lot of money playing Keno. And she comes to this place that is an illegal gambling hall out in the middle of the sticks in Georgia, but it is famous in the world of Keno-pool, so she wants to go there and when big.”
Franks - “You say this is a story that 'she presents', so I’m guessing there’s more let me see I see what is going on I’m assuming?”
Schulman - “I think the people that made her think that so you’ll have to sort of figure that out. *laughs*”
Franks - “I love it! It’s a little tease, that’s why we go to the movies! We see a trailer, or we hear something like a synopsis, and we were like “Oh, I have to know how this ends or I have to know how this continues.”
Franks - “Did you film this during the pandemic at all?”
Schulman - “We did, we did.”
Franks - “How was that for you as the director?”
Schulman - “It was scary, because you were just worried that one day people would get Covid and we were going to have to shut down. We don’t want people to get sick or to have to shut down, so omicron had just hit, or had just broken out in December, and we had shot in late February and march, so it was a concern in the whole way— the whole time. We messed up the whole time and we were very concerned with the cast in hopes that they wouldn’t get sick. But we managed to get through it without one case of COVID.”
Franks - “Obviously, of course, you know, the precautions, the danger is always there, but the film making process is a joy as well, how was that like for you?”
Schulman - “I loved it! I mean we all stayed in the same few places where we shot outside of Madison, Georgia also in Union, South Carolina. The cast all stayed in the same victorian house and bonded there which was necessary for the characters in the film, it was— we shot pretty quickly, but we rehearsed for five days, which is, which you never get to do that, so we did, and that just made it a much more sleeker experience for everybody.”
Franks - “Do you have any memories that stand out to you during the film making process?”
Schulman - “Oh, my god, so many!”
Franks - “A good problem to have!”
Schulman - “Teasing Kim Coates one night on his birthday, you know, pulling a surprise on him. Just the fun of the cast, we were all having a good time together, the cast was learning to play this game for the first time, you know, so that is the fun of having somebody yell, “Tom, I just made it to my first double!” And some things like that. At the same time we were shooting in one room, we’re in another room practicing and having fun. It was like a family experience.”
Franks - “You are both the writer and director of this movie, what interested you in telling the story?”
Schulman - “I think that, well, first of all, I grew up with you know, with a bit of a misspent youth playing pool, and I went to a pool hall where this game of Keno was played and there was this attractive woman that would come in and gamble, and it was a tough place to be at this pool hall, it was a rough time, I mean, a bunch of us got into a fight, some sort of a melee outside of his pool hall, one night! So it was a dangerous place to be, and I always wondered how this woman could come there and win money, and never seem to be threatened by the whole thing, and so I was fascinated by it. This strong woman and many years later, I realized, I understand what the story should be.”
Franks - “In someways, "Double Down South", to an extent, obviously, is kind of autobiographical from your own experience, from some of the stuff that I’m hearing, would you say that’s true?”
Schulman - “I think so. I mean you never know when you start writing the result turns out to be something through but the elements are all, for instance, there are three characters named Nick in this movie that run the pool hall, and at 20th century Pool Hall in Nashville where I was growing up, there were three Nicks!”
Franks - “So they were all named Nick?”
Schulman - “There was young Nick, Old Nick, and Little Nick, and we have the same thing in this movie.”
Franks - “Dead Poets Society, your Oscar-Winning Screenplay, you have called it autobiographical in a sense. Obviously they are very different movies, “Double Down South” and “Dead Poets Society”, but do you feel like as a writer that you’re always going to put a little bit of yourself, and what you have written as you have seen with Dead Poets and now Double Down South?”
Schulman - “I think you have to. In a way you have no other choice because if you are writing about something you know, nothing about, probably no one is ever going to see it on the big screen anyway. And for me as I’m casting a character in a movie, or in a script, I pull from my life from people that I knew. And once I understand the function of a character in a movie, then I will say “ who do I know that would fit in that function?” And then I pluck them out of somewhere in my memory, and they become a character in the movie.”
Franks - “So was that the way you casted for "Double Down South"? Did you have an idea of what you wanted or were there open auditions? What was that like?”
Schulman - “I had an idea that, Kim Coates, I pretty much knew from the get-go that I wanted him for, well, more than pretty much from the get-go, that I wanted him for Nick, or one of the Nicks.”
Schulman - “And the others were auditions and people whose work I had seen and you know I thought Lili Simmons was perfect for this!”
Franks - “What possessed you to say “This is what I want to be my next screenplay that I’ve written and directed?””
Schulman - “I mean it’s hard to say what, I’ve written a lot of things, and when I get done with it, I think, “this is not, ugh, I don’t even want to show it to anyone much less director it”, but my excitement about this continued to grow after I finish writing it and, you know, rewrites seem to just get richer and richer. I think that the nature of this cast is one of a family with the characters in this — a dysfunctional family, but that kept drawing me back to it, and felt like it was in deeper as I did more work on it. My producer, Rick Wallace, responded very strongly to the script and kept encouraging me, and helping me with rewrites and so forth so that kept me going and I think the interest just didn’t wain.”
Franks - “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids", you didn’t write it, but you came in to rewrite it if I’m not mistaken, why did they say? “Hey, Tom, we want you to rewrite this to make it more comedic.” Why did they feel like you were the one to go after? And what was the process because you had Rick Moranis for about another week or two?”
Schulman - “I don’t know, they told me at the time that they had essentially decided to reboot the entire creative team based on the test screening and so forth.”
Franks - “and by reboot you mean, *cut motion with hand*.”
Schulman - “Unfortunately, and by the time I came on, they had to let go of the original director, writer, I mean really that entire team. And they had one week to show Rick Moranis the script that he approved or he was bailing out of the movie. And why they picked me I don’t know *laughs*, they had bought "Dead Poets Society", and they intended to make it but I don’t think we were in production in it yet and I think that maybe the fact that it was ensemble with kids? I just don’t know. I had written a comedy that was called "Love At Second Sight: that became a movie called “Second Sight” from the script, so maybe they read that and thought maybe he could also do comedy, it was daunting! *laughs* but you know there was.”
Franks - “"Dead Poets Society", your Oscar winning film, I’m sure you’ve gotten these questions numerous times in your entire career about Dead Poets Society and about your time, obviously you wrote it before it was ever commissioned, you were like, “I want to tell this story”, YOU wrote it and you were kind of shopping around, if I’m not mistaken or did people come to you?”
Schulman - “Oh no! I was sort of living screenplay to screenplay, and I had a couple screenplays that turned into movies and TV shows, but nobody was knocking down my door for anything, so I very much have been working on this idea for a few years and finally decided OK I’m going to write it, so when I finished it, my agent at the time called me at 2 o’clock in the morning and said, "Wow! This is an amazing script, the best script I've ever read, come to my office tomorrow morning!", so I got there and he said to me “I love this, but I can’t get it made.” And I said, “Why?”, he said, “You know, it’s a boarding school, it’s all boys, there’s no sexiness, nobody is going to buy it. If you want to get a MADE, you’re gonna have to get another agent I don’t think anybody’s going to get it made, so think of it as a calling card and let’s move on,” and I wasn’t willing to do that, so I shopped around, finally got another agent for it and a couple of years later I finally got sold to Touchstone Pictures and a couple of years after that made.”
Franks - “Obviously, when I finally got made, you won an Oscar, obviously to when you were riding it at that time in 1985 that was probably the last thing you were thinking?"
Schulman - “I mean theoretically you love everything you write or you had better or if you don’t, no one else well, I just because of you love it doesn’t mean others will.”
Franks - “How do you in this current space, Tom Schulman of today, look and like, “you know what, this is how I view Dead Poets Society!”?”
Schulman - “I don’t look back. If I do, I’m proud of it, or I’ll take myself back to those times, to remember all the moments of when you find out that it’s going to get made, and so forth, certainly the whole shooting of it but I just continue to look forward and I don’t think it does much good to look back because if I watch the movie now, I could pick it apart with dozens of things that I would like to change and maybe I’d make a mistake doing it, so it’s best to just leave them alone.”
Schulman - "To people who are writing, and I guess fledgling directors, I would say, just work a lot, write a lot. I mean for me, it’s just a trial and error kind of learning process where you just the more you do the better you get because it’s just like a muscle. It might be weak at first, but if you keep exercising it, it just gets stronger."
Tom Schulman has a new movie hitting festivals called "Double Down South". It is currently playing at the RiverRun Film Festival on Friday, April 14th and Sunday, April 16th.