First feature genre

The first film I ever edited was a drama and it was incredibly difficult to do, but immensely rewarding.

I'm planning to do a low budget comedy as my directorial debut. Not the script from my sig, however. :P
 
An old actor on his death bed is visited by a young actor friend. They both know it's just a matter of days until the end. The young guy tries to sympathize:

"I know this must be really hard for you" he says.

"No" the old man says. "Dying is easy. Comedy is hard..."
 
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Kholi said:
http://www.slashfilm.com/high-road-...walsh-directorial-debut-bevy-comedic-talents/

So very relevant to this discussion/topic. Check out the trailer, that's supposed to be a comedy, and then read the talk-back below.

On the money, you guys are.
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Without knowing the movie there is one sentence in the review that sticks out:

It’s heavily improvised, which would seem like a huge plus considering the players involved.

Improvised comedy can become easily a daft heap of embarrassment - something in a style we used to call "musicians jokes". It's incredibly funny if you are actually there, backstage, with the girls, the vodka and maybe have smoked as much as the guys of the band. It's so funny because, actually, it's un-funny and very, very, very cool. Lots of jokes on the second or third or eleventh meta-level of humour. Heavy, heavy subtext. Your so inside, all insiders will laugh with you. But then you have to show it to the outside..... darn. Result can be a bit like when your friend calls you in the morning after a drinking binge you had and starts telling you, what you had done that night, what you said to your boss, why your credit card is gone and why you find the telephone number of a gay Brazilian wrestler tattooed to your underarm .... and you think "ouch"!

Good comedy needs to be near-perfectly scripted first. But, true, at certain points you can or need as a director to open the gates of the script to some improvisation. But you need to stay within the dramatic structure the script has given you and you need dearly to watch that the sub-genres don't get too mixed. Especially in film. There is a world of difference to the theater where you can get incredible results if you play in the heavily improvised style of the "comedia de l'arte" because you are in the same room as the audience and can feel their reactions and react to that. In the movies it can easily lead to the audience being put into a position of having to watch other people having fun. That's not what the audience has come for. They want to have fun.

As a first movie - if you really have the feeling that you have funny bones - go for a comedy if you think you have a good script and good actors. But beware of scripts that are incredibly, incredibly funny. If you open the script and ten clowns jump on your desk - throw it away. Tons of good jokes make not a working comedy-script. A solid dramatic structure told in a funny way - that makes a really good comedy. I dare say: Read a bit Shakespeare first, read a bit Moliere. And then read Billy Wilder-Scripts. And remember what sign he had over his desk: "How would Lubitsch have done it?".

And then you watch the original version of "To be or not to be" by Lubitsch and the screenwriter Meyer (and you do NOT watch the Mel Brookes version ever!). This is - all though style-wise a bit old fashioned, yes - screwball comedy in perfection.

Critics in 1942 saw it somewhat different though:

http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9500E7DE143CE33BBC4F53DFB5668389659EDE

But if you then think: I liked that film and maybe I can do that one day and I can survive getting ripped apart by the critics.... go for it. Nobody promised a comedian to have a fun life.... ;-)
 
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Judd Apatow (I think it's him I mean) uses improv in a very clever way I think, within a (primarily) scripted film. He'll lock a camera on, let's say for example Seth Rogen, for a reaction shot/line and let him do a whole bunch of improv-ed versions of it, then pick the funniest one later. Of course doing this, or any improv-based comedy *requires* genuinely funny improvisational comedian/actors to pull it off.

On a semi-related note, I just watched "It's Kind Of A Funny Story" on DVD. It most decidedly wasn't...what it was instead was a deeply boring, utterly crappy film. A bona-fide object lesson in what not to do as a filmmaker if I may say, particularly if the title states or even implies that it's "funny"...

In spite of a good cast including Zack Galafinakis (sp?), it cost $8M to make and grossed a little over $6M worldwide...

Ouch...
 
Well, assuming you have equal passion for the two scripts, I would say go for whichever one is the most original. Does one subvert genre tropes in an interesting way? Does it come up wit clever ways to hide it's low budget? If the answer is no to both, I would go with the thriller, a generic horror on a micro-budget won't get you anywhere, even if it's well made, a thriller might. If you look at the films made on a shoe-string budget that are doing really well recently (Monsters, Another Earth, Sound of My Voice, and the upcoming I love you sara Jane) they all use their genres as a jumping off point for a low budget character study, you might want to look into doing something like that.
 
Ted Spencer said:
.... let him do a whole bunch of improv-ed versions of it, then pick the funniest one later. Of course doing this, or any improv-based comedy *requires* genuinely funny improvisational comedian/actors to pull it off....
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One can give actors also some lee-way by fist shooting like scripted and then try another "version" - given one has the time to do so and they have truly funny bones. In my experience one more often stays with the scripted version but may introduce some "spikes" from the impro-version.

About actors and comedy - that'd be an interesting thread in itself. Had some experiences over the years but they may be very different to the ones one makes in the U.S. - different culture, different feel about what is funny or not. Tried at times to have a comedian in a dramatic part which I feel works better more often than the other way round....


Ted Spencer said:
..... "It's Kind Of A Funny Story" ....
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Wow. Great title. Reminds me of the movies "Maybe A Somewhat Interesting Thriller - Or Not", "This Could Have Been A Love Story", "Adventures Of People While Snoring" and the Oscar-favourite "We Could Have Gone To The Cinema But Stayed Home Instead"...... terrible title, really. Reminds me of a car salesman who pins a sign on the things he wants to sell that reads "Kind Of A Car".

Don't know if it ever reached our shores....
 
tipota said:
Don't know if it ever reached our shores....
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I should mention that it "It's Kind of A Funny Story" got very good tomatometer numbers, like 67%. Go figure... It appears to be partially due to earlier films by the same directorial duo that were extremely well received. The only one I saw of those was "Sugar" which I loved the first 2/3rds of but *hated* the last 1/3...

But hey...that's just me...

I hated the first 3/4 of "Funny Story" and the last 1/4 they sort of 'got away with' with a lot of energetic narration/montage...
 
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