Editing

My Dinner with Andre Royo, Part I: Prologue

My Dinner with Andre Royo is a film that was completely constructed in the editing room. In a sense, a majority of the footage can be considered “found footage,” since it was shot for a different film and an altogether different purpose. The fact that My Dinner with Andre Royo exists is completely due to its conception and creation in post-production.

In December 2006, actress Isabel Acosta hired me to edit and help produce of a documentary that was going to be called Be Seen & Be Heard, a film about minority filmmakers struggling against the Hollywood machine. While a lot of the 30+ hours of interview footage was pretty uninteresting, a number of subjects gave heartfelt and passionate interviews that really stood out. Notable among these were Terry George (director of Hotel Rwanda), actors Taye Diggs (Rent, How Stella Got Her Groove Back), Andre Royo (HBO’s hit show The Wire), and Maximiliano Hernandez (a very talented actor who will be seen in the upcoming film Pride and Glory with Edward Norton and Colin Farrell), and New York based independent filmmaker Phil Roc (Rhyme Animal).

At the heart of these interviews was the contention that Hollywood is concerned solely with money, and that the racism and sexism evident in many mainstream films is the result of a single-minded pursuit of profit–to the point of producing movies that are dumb, cliched, status quo oriented, or at the worst, completely divorced from social reality. Black actors (and Terry George who is white and originally from Ireland), for example, repeatedly brought up the point that only two black actors are considered viable by Hollywood’s financial standards and chosen to open major blockbuster films: Will Smith and Denzel Washington. If you’re not one of these two, you’ll have a tough time being cast as a lead in a mainstream film and an even tougher time raising a respectable budget (read: over $20 million) for your film.

Understandably, Isabel and I were excited by the subject matter and inspired to craft a narrative that would explore these issues and bring to the fore minority voices that are rarely heard. We worked rigorously for four months to distill the footage down and organize it by theme. At the end of this period of time, however, we had to reckon with the depressing fact that aside from an hour of talking heads interviews, there was little in the way of a story that could sustain this film–very little B-roll, no visual storyline, no follow-up interviews with the participants, no dramatic changes, no main character to follow. This was a case where the filmmakers who began the project simply picked up a camera and, without really thinking through or considering possible storylines, went out and began interviewing people–and got lucky along the way by running into and getting good interviews from Taye Diggs, Terry George, and Andre Royo. But good interviews by themselves don’t make a good documentary; that requires a compelling subject explored in an interesting, thought provoking way where the audience is shown the evidence rather than barraged by non-stop talking heads. Our choice at this point was either to figure out a possible storyline and spend the next year shooting that story or abandon the project altogether. Isabel was opposed to the first option because she had already spent far too much money and over a year of her life on the project before we began editing. The thought of spending another year and several thousand dollars more was overwhelming. It looked like we would have to abandon the film.

Somewhere during the early stage of editing while watching footage, I was impressed by Andre Royo’s three and half hour interview. Here was an up-and-coming actor, already acclaimed for his role as the junkie “Bubbles” on The Wire, opening up in a very honest, forthcoming and humorous interview about his life as an actor and his struggles not only with the film business but also with himself, with his own fears and insecurities. In this day and age, where the polished actor managed by handlers and publicists is seen promoting every film, where pre-packaged personas are delivered to the world in lieu of flesh-and-blood human beings who are driven to perform in order to explore the deeper facets of the human psyche, Andre Royo came across as genuine, sincere, charismatic, and above all, human. He could at once observe himself and, rather than turn away from his own flaws and failures, own up to them. At some point I jokingly remarked that we should make a short about Andre entitled “My Dinner with Andre Royo”–a tongue-in-cheek reference to Louis Malle’s cult classic My Dinner with Andre. At the brink of abandoning Be Seen & Be Heard, and feeling depressed because we had nothing to show for four months of editing, we began taking seriously the idea of making My Dinner with Andre Royo. After all, if we weren’t able to get a feature out of the material we had, why not try to make a good short film?

Next: Part II: “Beginner’s Mind”

© 2008 TIMECODE.