Hi, I'm Daniel Brothers.
I did some edit work on Starting From Scratch and advised him a few different ways.
I'm a filmmaker here in LA.
I don't remember what I was doing.
I was sitting around one night and Todd called me and said, hey man, I got this guy, he's
got this rough cut of this film and he needs, you know, I'm going to go watch the rough cut
and give him editing notes.
So I met Todd over at James' house and watched a film and I think I was sitting on the couch
and James said something like, what do you think?
What are your thoughts?
I have this horrible thing where I just can't, when it comes to cutting, like express myself
in words.
And so I was like, you know, why don't I just come over and show you what I would do?
And so then I came over and I think we spent three or four days, I don't remember going
through the cut.
I did what I do when I'm cutting, which is brutal.
And I ripped an entire character out of the film, I rearranged almost everything.
I cut beautiful scenes out, beautiful characters in service of the story.
And when it was done, James had this pained expression on his face and then I left and
I think he watched it again and he was like, there's the movie.
Like that's these other things that we love.
We loved all of them.
I loved all of them.
I didn't cut them out because I hated them.
I didn't cut them out because they were not in service of the very specific story that
we were trying to tell.
I think the most important thing about making films is having a passion for it.
You become the well-rounded filmmaker out of necessity, not because you say, I'm going
to learn.
I didn't set out to learn all the jobs I can do at all.
I set out to direct movies and as I was directing, I was like, well, shit, I either got to find
some money to pay this guy or I got to do it myself.
There can be films where there's 100 jobs going on, you got to feed everybody and everything
like that.
Then there's the other side, which is guys, this is like way more simple than you think.
You shoot a beautiful photograph with good actors in it, telling some kind of story of
conflict, whether that's personal conflict, whether that's a fight scene, it doesn't matter.
You can make it a really complicated thing and do a lot of things and if you want to
get into visual effects and do green screen and all that stuff, it's going to be expensive
and you're going to learn a lot and it's really cool and it's totally doable.
But if you want to make a film, like I want to make films and like James wanted to make
a film and Libby wanted to make a film, you don't need that much stuff and you need to
understand that you take a shot and you put it next to another shot and it makes a new
synthesis out of that.
You have all these films out there these days where nobody smiles ever.
You got the Twilight guys and they're like, and you got all of these movies and you got
the Batman and no one ever cracks his smile and it's a great film but it's like so serious
and it's huge and it's epic and then you've got like The Hangover which is now taking
comedy and making it epic and huge.
This is like, hey, we're a little movie about this shit that happens to people and it's
really real and what we have on our hands with this film is a community coming together
doing something they're really excited about that we're all really excited about that one
person conceived but also needed all this help to do and then also recognize the rigor
necessary to tell a true story.
That's what we have here is a true story that's totally fictional but it's true.
Everyone has at least a couple of lines in it that resonate with them on a visceral level
where they go, oh god, yeah, I know what he's talking about.
Even people that married their high school sweetheart and never had like a total earth
shattering breakup can watch it and get something from the parts where it's like, god, I felt
like that before, you know, that's the takeaway for me from the audience and where we as human
beings identify with things is in the performance.
I think those are the performances that are able to expand viewers' horizons and able
to create a common unity among people and that's what's so important about what we do
in storytelling.
The long tradition of the Bard in storytelling is to bring people together and bring understanding
and bridge those cultures and bridge those gaps and celebrate the differences in humanity
instead of creating a homogene or something like that.
And so for me, the pinnacle of filmmaking, the pinnacle of why indie is so important
and why making your own films is so important is because you take your own unique view and
you find something honest and then you can share it with the world.
Oh, this was the other reason I worked on starting from scratch is I was coming off
of a nasty break-up and like all the stuff that Allie was saying in the film was stuff
that my ex had said to me like word for word and I was like, well, shit, I know how to
make this better because I already went through it.
