A daily chronicle of creativity in film, TV, music, arts, and entertainment, produced by Southern California Public Radio and broadcast from November 2014 – March 2020. Host John Horn leads the conversation, accompanied by the nation's most plugged-in cultural journalists.
James Schamus has been an Oscar-nominated film producer and screenwriter. He partnered with Ang Lee on a number of films, and has writing credits on “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” and “The Ice Storm.” Until this January, he had never been to the Sundance Film Festival as a director. He attended the indie Mecca most recently as the head of Focus Features, the arthouse division of Universal, where he was looking to buy movies. But this year he took his directorial debut "Indignation" to the festival in the hopes that someone would buy his movie. The night of the premiere Lionsgate bought it for $2.5 million.
"Indignation" is an adaptation of the Philip Roth novel of the same name, and it stars Logan Lehrman, Tracey Letts and Sarah Gadon. It's in theaters now.
The Frame's John Horn sat down with Schamus to get a sense of what it’s like for him to be at the festival in this new incarnation.
You have been in the Eccles theater [at Sundance] probably more times than you care to count, but it's always been in the role of a buyer, somebody who's looking at a film, trying to figure out if it was a good match for Focus Features. What was it like watching your film not as that person?
That question assumes that while I was sitting in my seat I was actually capable of watching my movie, rather than just kind of feeling what the audience was communicating to me, which was the primary experience, really. So it was quite different.
What was that like?
It was great. Obviously, being in the theater with 1,200 people and having the audience burst into applause at a scene in a drama was weird. I've never had that except once before — at the world premiere for "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," when people applauded after the first fight scene. I thought, Oh well, that [scene in 'Indignation'] seems kind of like a fight scene, too. So I guess it makes sense. But it was very odd.
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(Logan Lerman and Sarah Gadon star in James Schamus's directorial debut, "Indignation")
This is the 12-minute scene between Logan Lerman and Tracy Letts?
You're warm!
Fifteen?
But the point is, it's not a macho thing, let's put it that way, like how long it is. But to the extent to which [the scene] played narratively and intensely, people really got the underlying structure and architecture of it. That was the biggest moment, obviously, for me in the evening.
And were you able to separate yourself out from that experience, or did it feel as if you were watching it from some altered state?
The thing is, whatever calculations went into writing and making the movie, the moment of calculation passes by the time it screens. So it is a different experience, on the one hand, than those that I had when I was buying films as the head of a studio. On the other hand, having seen a few hundred movies over the years here at Sundance, my philosophy was always the same — which was, after about 10-20 minutes or so, usually, as a buyer, I would know whether or not the film was for Focus. But I maintained, for myself and my team, [the] ethos, Never walk out of a movie, no matter what. So I sat through all those movies.
You are very rare in that category. Because most of the buyers I know will walk out quickly and loudly.
Yeah. And I refuse to participate in that. I thought that this is a filmmakers' festival. These people have worked hard, no matter what. They made a movie. I'm going to sit and watch that movie. Quite often, the movies that I most enjoyed here at the festival were those that I knew I would never have anything to do with as a businessperson. So I could just sit back and say, Look, let's see where this person's taking me.
They might not have been the best movies, and sometimes they really were the best movies, but they were movies that I was not in a position to distribute.
When you introduced the film at the premiere the other night, you referred to being — and I'm quoting you — "uncharacteristically humbled." What do you mean by that?
[Laughter.] What I meant by it was the followup to it. Which is, uncharacteristically humbled and potentially humiliated. Luckily the potential humiliation [seems] not to have appeared, so that was great. I'm very happy for that outcome. But you have to admit your own vulnerability. Here I am of a certain age and a certain career. And I could easily continue to be doing things that would enable me to be well-remunerated and to receive various life-achievement accolades until whenever. But when you stand there, you're really — even though it's a collective work of art, and I had a great crew and a great cast — you're the guy with the target.
There's nobody else to blame.
Exactly. And rightfully so. So I was vulnerable. And I should have been.
I want to talk a little bit about filmmaking influences. You have worked in the business for decades. You've produced a lot of movies. You've written a lot of movies. As a director, as a different job, do you think of yourself as being influenced by filmmakers you've worked with? Do you think you have your own style? Or are you really able to differentiate those things as you're making a movie?
I've learned so much from everybody. And what I tried to do as a first time director on this movie was something that I've noticed. Sometimes directors fall into a certain trap — they screen their favorite movie for the crew, right? It's like, Let's watch "The Seventh Seal" together and you'll see what I'm really going for! Which to me is just a nightmare. Because A), I'll never get there anyhow. That's Ingmar Bergman and I'm not. And B), I don't want the crew to think that I'm just emulating something. So, I pulled from as many disparate sources and inspirations as I could, knowing that I was going to organize them in a specific style at the end of the day.
If the people who run NBC Universal didn't have a different view of the world, you might be here at Focus Features looking for films. You are not, because they changed the company radically and changed your job in it. With a film here now, does part of you say, Everything happens for a reason?
Yeah, of course. Even if I didn't believe it I'd have to answer that question that way. For sure.
Here's the truth, to be honest. My exit from Focus was something that I had foreseen and had planned on, just not quite as early as that. So I had seen that writing on the wall. I did not see the fundamental change, obviously, to the lives of the other staff at the company at the time. But besides that, I think it had been time. The job had gotten much more corporate the last couple years I was there. And you know, over the years I was able to maintain a pretty fun balance between my own personal creative work and the work of really supporting the company and the films I was delivering for it. But that balance was certainly disappearing.