How Did We Get Here?

Editor’s note: It was a small domestic drama with no major stars and no special effects. Then “You Can Count on Me” wowed audiences and critics at Sundance, Toronto and other festivals, and the film was on its way to becoming one of the year’s art house sensations. The saga brings him to the Academy Awards tonight, when the film is up for two Oscars: best actress (Laura Linney) and best original screenplay (Kenneth Lonergan). We asked Lonergan, who is also the film’s director, to write about his Oscar experience.

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We shot “You Can Count on Me” over 28 days in New York’s Catskill Mountains during June-July of 1999. I was very nervous going into the first day. I had never directed a film before; I had done my pre-production work as conscientiously as I could, cast the film as well as I could and prepared for the first day of shooting as well as I could. But I was very apprehensive in a rather unpleasant way. I had never dreamed of being a movie director, so there was no sense of being in the middle of a dream come true.

That first day, we shot two scenes at a cemetery on top of a hill before lunch, and then after lunch we shot a scene in which Mark Ruffalo’s character, Terry, teaches his young nephew (Rory Culkin) how to hammer nails. The cemetery scenes consisted of the following: an early scene in which Laura Linney’s character, Sammy, puts flowers on her parents’ grave, prays briefly, then stands up, looks out over the countryside and goes down the hill; and a late scene in which Terry--Sammy’s brother--walks up the hill, looks at the graves, falls to his knees and puts his hand on his mother’s tombstone, turns around to sit with his back resting on his father’s tombstone, lights a cigarette, smokes, looks out at the scenery and shakes his head a number of times.

If I remember correctly, Laura’s scene required two angles, or setups: first, a shot of distant hills, pulling back to reveal the cemetery with Laura at the graves, after which she goes through the entire action of the scene to the end; second, a reverse close-up of Laura as she looks over the countryside (which was not actually used in the film, although it appears in some publicity stills).

I believe Mark’s scene required six setups: two different Steadicam shots of him walking up the hill, one from ahead and one from the side; a shot of his feet walking along in the grass, a shot of him from behind the graves as he ascends the hilltop and goes through the rest of the action in the scene; a close-up of him as he smokes, looks at the scenery and shakes his head; and a longer shot of him sitting there, framed between the trunk of a tree and a large tombstone.

I thought of the shot starting on the distant mountains and pulling back to reveal Laura in the cemetery, and I thought of the shot of Mark’s feet and the shot leading him up the hill with the tombstones entering the frame from behind as we move backward through them. Steve Kazmierski, our cinematographer, thought of the longer shot of Mark framed between the tree trunk and the tombstone, the sideways Steadicam shot, and generally determined the framing of all the shots--with my input and consultation.

Then he had the crew build, off-camera, a large white canopy to soften the sunlight, and some leafy boughs to break up the light even more and cast leafy shadows on the patch of ground occupied by the tombstones. The shadows of leaves you see on Mark and Laura when they’re at the graves come from boughs being held in place by some clamps off-camera.

The location was found by my location manager, Jon Zeidman--I loved it. I never dreamed we would find a cemetery on top of a hill with a view of a succession of green mountains, just like I wrote in the script. This one had a big road down at the bottom of it that I didn’t want to show, but all we had to do was frame the shot so the road was out of the picture. Our tombstones were designed by Mike Shaw, the production designer (with some input from me) and carved by a local tombstone manufacturer. After the movie, we gave them back, and the surfaces were re-sanded so they could be sold again. Mike and Steve and I picked the spot on the hill for the tombstones.

What does any of this have to do with the Oscars? I have no idea. It doesn’t feel like it has anything to do with the Oscars, and yet here we are about to go to the Oscars partly because of what happened that day.

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We weren’t thinking about the Oscars that day, or any other day on the set that I can recall. The time pressure on a small movie is very intense and completely dominates the atmosphere on the shoot. We had less than a month to shoot more than 200 scenes--some short and some long. Most scenes have to be covered from a variety of angles.

Every time you move the camera around, it takes about an hour or more to relight everything. Every time you move from one location to another, it takes two or three hours. The days can only be so long because of the speed of the Earth’s rotation, and various complicated union rules and schedules for how long you can work a cast and crew, and how much overtime you have to pay them with the money you don’t have.

So under the weight of that pressure, and the weight of not wanting to appear too far out of my element on my first day, we were not thinking of the movie’s future, the Academy Awards, or even the Sundance Film Festival. We were thinking about how tight Laura’s close-up should be, and whether she looked too beautiful to be believable as a normal person, and whether she should run down the hill or just walk. Laura wanted to know whether she should actually bow her head in prayer or just kneel there for a moment.

We were thinking about how to get Mark to walk in front of the Steadicam operator without going too fast, because the Steadicam operator had to walk backward up the hill while carrying an enormously heavy piece of equipment. So we kept telling Mark to slow down so he wouldn’t get too close to the camera--and meanwhile he was trying to walk at a natural pace.

I was also thinking about how to execute my big visual idea for the scene, which was to start the scene with the shot of his feet walking on the grass, then show him walking toward us through a grassy field, then slowly back up until tombstones start coming into frame and we realize where he is.

Unfortunately, there was only a small angle of the field we could move through before showing either the tombstones behind us or the highway behind him, and I didn’t want to show the highway at all. Our solution was to shoot him walking through the grass on a neighboring field--from which the highway was well hidden and then cut to him at the edge of the cemetery field, as if it was the same field. But when we got to the location, we found that the grass in the cemetery had been mowed, and the grass in the neighboring field hadn’t been, so the grass didn’t match.

Later, after much back and forth, my editor, Anne McCabe, and I decided to ditch the whole idea of slowly revealing the cemetery because it didn’t cut together that well, and because the second unit had taken some beautiful long shots of the cemetery that I really wanted to use.

So as it turned out, in the finished film the whole scene starts with a long shot of the cemetery, clearly establishing it. Then we cut to Mark as we lead him up the hill, the first tombstone coming into frame almost immediately. As with many accidents that end up in a movie, I think it’s a lot better than my initial idea.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m very happy I’m going to the Oscars, and I wouldn’t miss it for anything. And while I try not to put too much emphasis on this kind of thing, it’s a common show-biz fantasy. I certainly like it when people like my work; I’m getting a free tuxedo and shoes; everybody says congratulations; and it’s a wild side of life to see close up.

The whole thing has been a big thrill, frankly. But while I don’t wish to appear ungrateful, after months of pre-Oscar jockeying, I have to say it’s a bit like being inside a television set, and by any half-normal standard, the whole thing is deeply bizarre. How we got from the first day’s shoot with a Steadicam backing up a hill to walking the long, strange red carpet tonight is beyond me.

I’d like to think my movie has been noticed because it’s a good movie. I love all my actors, and I think they are as good as any actors anywhere. But it’s obviously more complicated than that. How much money is spent on Oscar campaigns? Do your distributors think you have a chance in the first place? Have there been a lot of movies like yours lately? What else is out there? What does the ad in the paper look like? How were the reviews? Is it your first outing or your second, or your 10th? So, partly it’s merit, and partly it’s the luck of the draw, timing--a lot of things.

Nevertheless, it’s a rare and wonderful thing to be able to spend your adult life working out problems like where to put the tombstones on the hill so you can see the mountains but not the highway. It’s a rare and wild thing to be going to the Academy Awards as a nominee for a movie that you are proud of. But I’m not entirely sure what, if anything, they have to do with each other, and perhaps it’s best to keep it that way. *

Kenneth Lonergan’s screenplay for “You Can Count on Me” has won numerous awards, including the Writers Guild of America award for best original film screenplay. Lonergan is also a playwright whose works include “Lobby Hero,” which just opened in New York, and “This Is Our Youth.”