Filmmaker blog by writer / producer Georgia Menides

6/03/08 - Keep On Casting Some More

Sean – Noah Segan

We originally had our sights set on Lou Taylor Pucci for the role of Sean.

One Monday in the summer of 2004, with my script still unfinished, Doug and I had taken time off from work to drive 8 hours up to Waterville, Maine where Trevor was filming reshoots for his upcoming movie, Empire Falls. This was about 3 months after talking to Trevor about Still Green at World Cinema Naples. We were making this trek to give Trevor a copy of Still Green, the book to keep the project fresh in his mind while I finished the script. We were also really excited to party on a real film set, something we’d never experienced before.

The “party on a real film set” ended up being me, Doug, and a bunch of teenagers drinking in a hotel room until 5 in the morning, hardly the glamour I’d had in mind,  but at any rate, this is how we ended up meeting Lou.  Lou played the role of John Voss, the neglected crazy kid in Empire Falls. After hearing about his character in Empire Falls, we started to think about the possibility of his playing Sean. Trevor was also pitching him pretty hard. And he warned us not to let Lou’s chill humble attitude fool us. This kid was up and coming.

At the time, Lou still lived in New Jersey with his parents. This was months before the Sundance double feature of The Chumscrubber  and Thumbsucker would launch Lou into indie stardom. At the time, Jon had never heard of Lou Taylor Pucci and was not on the same page we were when it came to the urgency of sending Lou a script as soon as possible. So honestly we dropped the ball a little.

In our defense we were trying to raise money which was infinitely more important.  In Doug’s defense (who had been keeping an eye on the progress of Lou’s career) he was always reminding both Jon and me that trying to attach Lou should be an immediate action item on par with raising money, as any day this kid would be unreachable.  In Jon’s defense, he’d had far too many experiences exciting actors about a project, only to have to tell them the movie couldn’t get any money. As our ability to raise enough money for Still Green was still very much up in the air, Jon wanted to attach as few actors as possible so no one’s credibility was shot in the event we failed.

It wasn't until January 2005 that Trevor actually convinced Jon that attaching Lou to Still Green would help our fundraising ten fold and that we needed to go after this actor ASAP.   Jon agreed to move on this, and we asked Trevor to pitch the project.  Lou humbly told Trevor that yes, he was definitely interested, but that he was going “out of town to somewhere fucking cold” for a few weeks. He suggested we send the script to his house in New Jersey, where he was planning on returning to after his trip. We sent the script to his house.

But Lou did not end up returning his parents house in New Jersey. What Lou did not mention about this little trip, was that it was to Sundance. He did not mention that he had leading roles in not one but two films premiering that year.  In one week at Sundance Lou went from relative obscurity to indie star status. Doug and I got to a point where even opening a magazine became stressful because there were pictures of Lou everywhere. There was a full page spread in Rolling Stone, and his face was taunting us from Variety's list of Top Talent to Watch saying, “You guys should have sent me that script six months ago.”

We were too late. Perhaps this was a lesson for the future, that if everyone says an actor is up and coming, it means move fast. It means get your head out of the sand and nab them as soon as you can. Or perhaps it is just another destiny thing, because another incredible up and coming actor ended up playing the role of Sean, and we did nab him just in time.

I am not trying to blow sunshine up my script’s ass, or up Jon’s.  But the reality was that a few of the managers at Anonymous Content were under the impression that both the script and Jon’s directing were pretty good, and this was opening plenty of doors for the production.

The newest door was opened about a week before we started filming. By now, our leading lady, Ryan Kelley, and Douglas Spain were officially locked down. We were thrilled to have three Hollywood actors attached to the project. We were also financially tapped out. Every Hollywood actor we attached meant a salary, per diem, signing bonus, and all kinds of costly extra perks. Also each SAG actor had to have their own bedroom and bathroom. As it was every time another SAG actor signed on someone in our crew got bumped from having their own bed to having their own couch, and then to having a mattress on the floor. And we were simply out of bathrooms. Any more Hollywood actors meant we would have to rent yet another house to fit them all, and we just didn’t have the money. 

There were two roles left to cast, and we were having trouble with both. One was the role of Sean. This was a tough role. Played wrong he could come across as a cheesy stereotypical “disturbed artist”, and there were some tough emotional moments an actor really had to sell. Jon said he would like to work with Anonymous to find an experienced actor to handle this difficult role. I said “No more Hollywood actors and that is final.”

There was an actor from Florida who Jon had originally cast but after our initial read through, we realized this actor wasn’t quite right. There was a kid from Seattle whose audition tape was so good he’d made it all the way to the final round, despite being from Seattle, and I wanted to call him. But Jon shied away from the idea of flying an inexperienced actor in from Seattle, because in the event he wasn’t right, we were wasting all kinds of money and time.

The morning after we officially made the offer to Ryan Kelley, his manager called and asked to speak to Jon. I told her Jon was in a meeting. She said to get him out of the meeting right away. Another manager from Anonymous needed to speak to Jon immediately. This manager, Eric, told Jon that he had a client, Noah Segan, who wanted to be in our movie. Noah had spent the past year back to back filming five Indies in a row, and they were all coming out in either 05 or 06. The big one was called Brick, which had won the special Jury Prize at Sundance and was getting national distribution through Focus Features. Noah seemed like he was another Lou Taylor Pucci, except that this time, we were getting to him right before he blew up. Even better, he was coming to us. All we had to do was say yes.

Jon asked Eric for the names and numbers of the last three directors who had worked with Noah. He said he would talk to them and have an answer for Eric by the end of the day.

We checked Noah Segan out on imdb. He looked pale and haunted, which is exactly what we were looking for. His eyes seemed like they belonged in someone a lot older, another plus. Jon talked to the directors of Noah’s three most recent films. They all said he was a pleasure to work with and exceptionally talented.  Jon was satisfied and wanted to move forward. Andrea and Doug were pretty sure they wanted to move forward. I didn’t. All things together, the attachment of Noah would tack thousands of dollars on to our budget, and at that point, we were still financially a long ways away from what we needed to complete the film in the first place.

The only person in our above the line crew with good credit was Andrea. Like most of the small percentage of indie filmmakers who actually have good credit, Andrea had a history of maxing out her credit card every time she had a film in production. Still Green would be no exception. I was willing to try to squeeze these actors into the house we already had. Andrea said that would be a nightmare.  An extra house meant the actors were taken care of, and with the exception of a little shuffling, everyone in our primary crew could sleep in a bed, which is a nice thing to offer your crew when they are working umpteen hour days and 6 day weeks for no pay for you in the middle of August in Florida.  In about two hours, she had found a cute and relatively cheap 3 bedroom 3 bath house and grabbed it.

That still didn’t change the fact that we couldn’t afford Noah Segan. As always when we were divided about things, Jon called us all into a meeting. This is something I love about Jon. With a background as a teacher as well as a director, he is excellent at running “meetings” where he leads a huge hashing out session. Every time problems get worked out in an orderly fashion, people get re-inspired, and in the end, a solution is reached. Somehow every time we would all walk out feeling great, as if we might actually make it though production after all. This was one of at least 50 of these meetings we would end up having in Florida as we were hit with obstacle after obstacle every day.

We went over all the investment leads we had out there, brainstormed new leads, and finally decided that with Noah attached, we would somehow, somewhere find the money.

You know the feeling that you have when you are driving; you look down at your gas gage and realize that it’s on empty? Then you look around and realize you are on a deserted highway late at night, and you aren’t sure when the next exit is, and if when it comes, it will lead to a gas station that’s even open? The feeling you have driving in an all out panic, making deals with the devil to please, please find your way to a gas station before you run out of gas is exactly how I felt through all of production. We were constantly making decisions before we had the money to back them up and the fear that we would run out of money was eating me alive. But we decided to cast Noah.

George – Mike Strynkowsky

Although this role was more of a “minor main character” he was every bit as crucial to the dynamic of this group of friends. Finding an actor who was able to play a funny drunk stoner yet still be real and not be that typical “funny drunk stoner” you see in every teen movie ended up being really challenging.

But in all honestly, I can’t say we were really looking. As far as Doug, Paul, and I were concerned, we already had a George. There were a few other actors we’d lined up to audition for this role, but we had our hearts set on the Jaime, the actor Vice President Santos was backing. Sure there were other actors, but none of them came equipped with the 30 million Pesos toward marketing in Latin America, the promise of pre-selection into festivals, or the entire Colombian press team behind them. Jaime showed up at the audition with an entourage of friends and scantily clad hot girls, and although he was very sweet, you could tell that in his mind, he already had the role. I was fine with this.

But there was a major problem. Jaime was just learning English. Regardless of how incredible an actor he may have been in Columbia, when it came to the lines in Still Green, he could barely read them, much less understand them, much less understand their subtext, and much less give them any type of inflection or personality. He sounded the way I am sure I would have sounded if someone put a letter written in Spanish in front of me and said, “Here read this.”

Nevertheless, I was still blinded by the potential perks that came attached to Jaime and my hopes were not daunted. I had an incredible amount of faith in Jon as a director, and figured if anyone could make this work he could.

Fortunately, I am not the director of Still Green. And after watching Jamie’s audition, the director of Still Green made it crystal clear that this situation was not going to fly. I begged. I pleaded. I asked Jon to please try to see this as a challenge, I raved about Jon’s unique ability to get the desired performance out of any actor. I used the words “Cannes Film Festival” a few hundred times.  I got nowhere.

As Jon pointed out, the most important thing was to suck the audience into the world of this group of friends, to send them back to the days of their own high school crew, to have them invested in the dynamics that form between a group of friends together for the last time before they all go their separate ways. It wasn’t believable that Jaime would be in this group of friends. He would stick out like a sore thumb, constantly reminding the audience that they were watching a movie, and killing all their emotional investment into the story.  Maybe we would get into Cannes, but we wouldn’t have a good movie.   

The day after the audition, the Columbian press secretary, Maria called me to see how the audition went. I bit my tongue and said it went very well. She asked me to please get on with casting Jamie as quickly as possible as Vice President Santos was getting aggravated that this was taking so long, and she was afraid he was going to fire her. A few days later Vice President Santos called me. He wanted to know why Jaime had not been cast yet. 

I decided to throw Jon under the bus. I explained that although as a producer I could see the perks of casting Jaime, Jon was the director, and at the end of the day it was his decision.

The Veep did make one call to Jon on Jaime’s behalf, but after that, we never heard from him again. Would there be some sort of backlash from this situation? I guess we’ll have to wait and see.

The more immediate problem was that we still had no George. We found another local actor but by our first read through, it was clear that he wasn’t right. Between Hollywood actors, money, turtle time, and every thing else going on around us, the casting of this role kept getting pushed onto the back burner until finally, Andrea said we needed to stop everything and focus all our energies on finding our George.

By now, our lead actress was in town. While we were flipping through trash bags of headshots and watching Jon's DVD trying to find our George, the actress asked if she could watch some of the “no” auditions which were still on Evil’s computer. She said it was fun to watch bad auditions. We said fine, whatever, and went back to our work. About twenty minutes later, she came into the living room to tell us she had found us the perfect actor for George.

Mike Strynkowski was an actor from Orlando who I had scheduled to audition for the role of Alan, as another back up for Trevor.  He had been very nice on the phone and up until the audition; I had had a great feeling about him.

But he was one of those actors I was complaining about in my last blog. He looked nothing like his headshot. In fact, he was on the more dramatic end of the spectrum, one of the ones I almost didn’t recognize when I went into the waiting room to find him, even though I had his headshot I my hand.  I was annoyed, as I always was when this happened, and wrote him off in my head before he even auditioned. I hadn’t remembered much about his audition from the tape either.

It wasn’t that he was a bad actor; he was actually really good, just not right for the role of Alan.  We all watched his audition again, this time thinking about how he would work for George. We were all getting a good feeling about this.

I called Mike and explained the situation. He was thrilled. After not hearing back from us for almost three weeks, he had written Still Green off with much disappointment. He would drive to Naples and read for the role the next morning. We called one more actor in, but really, we could tell the role was going to Mike. The only monkey in the wrench was that Mike lived in Orlando, which was about 5 hours away from Naples.  He clearly wouldn’t be able to commute and did not have a place to stay in Naples. We had made a strict rule that we weren’t going to offer housing to local actors, thus the “Do you live within a reasonable commuting distance from Naples?” question on our audition sheet.  We were crammed as it was. Nonetheless, this was a crisis. I told Mike that if we cast him, he was welcome to crash with us.

It seemed like our original leading actress was brought into our lives solely to influence our casting of Sarah Jones and our casting Mike Strynkowski…things happen for a reason.

The truth is every actor’s path to Still Green had a story. Gricel Castinera who plays the role of Lisa was cast after the original actress had to drop out, two days before Lisa’s first appearance on camera. Her mother had gotten very sick and she needed to attend to her in the hospital. We had to find an actress who could not only audition in a day, but could start filming two days later. This casting crisis was going on at the same time as the Kerri casting crisis was going on and we were pulling our hair out. But clearly, Gricel was meant to have this experience. Doug Spain was cast in a hot tub during the Marco Island Film Festival when he said something that sounded so much like something Bill would say that casting bells started going off in our heads. We had all but guaranteed the role of Amanda to another actress in Massachusetts, and then Nicole Komendat auditioned and totally stole the role away. Nicole ended up meeting her next serious boyfriend on the set and after filming, moved to Miami with him, so clearly she was cast for a reason.

At any rate, despite all these stops and starts and turnarounds and crises, we ended up with the perfect cast.