Get ready for Trouble

Filmmaker goes from horror to dramatic narrative with The Trouble with the Truth.

 John Shea and Lea Thompson play a divorced couple dealing with old feelings.
John Shea and Lea Thompson play a divorced couple dealing with old feelings.

Filmmaker Jim Hemphill’s first feature-length film was a horror film. Bad Reputation, a film about a high school girl who gets revenge on the popular clique who branded her a slut. A film the 40-year-old Chicago-born-but-Los-Angeles-living director and screenwriter has described as “I spit on John Hughes.”

Bad Reputation was truly an independent film. Shot on digital video for $20,000. But the 2005 film was distributed through Warner Bros. and Twentieth-Century Fox. And it won the audience award for Best Film at the 2005 Chicago Horror Film Festival.

A few years later, Hemphill, who also writes for American Cinematographer magazine and moderates question-and-answer sessions at the American Cinematheque in Los Angeles, was scratching around for money for another film. It was a little more ambitious, and Hemphill was having a hard time raising funds. So he stopped. Sat down. And wrote his second film, The Trouble with the Truth.

The Trouble with the Truth is not a horror film. Not even close. What the 96-minute film is, is a dialogue-driven film about a middle-aged, divorced couple who dine out following news that their daughter is engaged. Robert (John Shea) is a hotel-bar-playing jazz musician. He likes the “low overhead” of his starving-artist life in Los Angeles. He dates, including the bartender of the hotel bar where he plays; nothing serious. Commitment? A bad idea. Emily (Lea Thompson) is a successful writer in a disappointing second marriage. The couple drink, dine, argue, reminisce, hurt each other, flirt and realize their relationship isn’t over. Feelings are still there.

Think My Dinner with Andre, the 1981 film by French director Louis Malle. Or the more conversational moments of Before Sunset, the 2004 film by Richard Linklater. The Trouble with the Truth is streamlined. Only a few set changes. It was shot in 12 days in Los Angeles. But it’s engaging. And emotional. A little beauty of a film.

Hemphill is showing his The Trouble with the Truth as part of the Little Rock Film Festival in the Golden Rock Narrative Competition. Last week via telephone from Los Angeles, Hemphill talked about the film and the nature of the independent-filmmaking experience.

On going from a horror film to The Trouble with the Truth
“After I did Bad Reputation I thought I was going to do more horror movies. ... I ended up writing The Trouble with the Truth kind of out of frustration of not being able to get this other horror movie going. I decided that I really wanted to make another movie, so I decided to write something I knew I could make without a lot of resources. Something with no special effects and with limited locations and no action. I wrote it from a very pragmatic, practical point of view, which was thinking I’m going to write something that is logistically simple and cheap, and also something that is very actor driven, so theoretically I could get good actors who would want to do it, even though it was just a low-budget, independent movie.

“I like all kinds of movies. When I set out to become a filmmaker I never said that I just want to make horror movies, or be that kind of filmmaker or this kind of filmmaker. I just wanted to make movies. I mean, I love everything. I love European art house movies, and I love American Pie. I’m all over the place. To me, it doesn’t necessarily feel like the two movies are coming from that different of a place, but I realize it looks pretty strange to go from a teen, rape-revenge movie to a Dinner with Andre-esque drama.”

On writing The Trouble with the Truth
“I wrote it faster than I usually do. I can take forever. I’m terrible about completing scripts unless I have a deadline. For this one I had a hard deadline set for myself. I wrote a rough draft in about six weeks. I rewrote off and on for a while, but I would say it took a few months to write the script.

“The whole time frame is I wrote the script in the fall of 2009, and we were shooting in the fall of 2010, so by the time ... I’m through with the film festivals it’ll probably be about a three-year process, which seems like forever to me but in the world of independent filmmaking is actually pretty fast.”

On the inspiration of The Trouble with the Truth
“Some of it does come from my own life. I am divorced. And even though I am younger than the characters in the movie, I guess I’ve screwed up enough things in my personal life for somebody much older than myself. But the character Robert — a lot of that inspiration for him came from my grandfather who, like the character in the movie, was a jazz musician who never quite really made it but did it his whole life. A lot of that character also grew out of my own fears, and my own crazy desire to make a living as a starving artist. Ironically, out of those fears I made a movie, which means I don’t have to be afraid because I did actually make something. It was kind of a strange paradox.

“I’ve jokingly said that both of the movies I’ve made are one-third from my own life, one-third made up and one-third ripped off from other movies.”

On getting Lea Thompson for The Trouble with the Truth
“A lot of it was luck in terms of timing. We caught her right before she started doing a bunch of other stuff. And I had met her about a year earlier because one of the things I do is moderate Q-and-A’s at a movie theater here that shows classic films. They showed a Back to the Future marathon, and I moderated the Q-and-A with Lea there. Basically we sent her the script, and she really liked it and had a few weeks open in her schedule. She just decided to take a leap and do the movie.”

On the 12-day shoot of The Trouble with the Truth
“In a way, not having a lot of time to shoot it benefited me as a writer because no one wanted to mess with the script too much because we didn’t have a lot of time. It was all anyone could do to remember what was on the page and get that done. But even though I don’t feel as though the dialogue was changed that much, there is this thing Lea and I like to call emotional improv. It’s saying the same dialogue in different takes, and it could have different meanings depending on how they were playing it. Sometimes they would be more serious. Sometimes more funny. In that way they kind of wrote the final draft of the film. We shot the movie with two cameras going the whole time — one on John and one on Lea — so they could change the way they played the scene, and the other person could bounce off of them without having to worry if it was going to match.”

On meeting co-star John Shea the first day of shooting
“Part of the craziness of independent filmmaking is like in the case of our movie where we had to start shooting by a certain day. ... It was definitely stressful when a few days before production we had Lea but not a male lead. I asked her who she liked. Either someone she had worked with or wanted to work with. I wanted someone who could come in with a ready-made chemistry and comfort level. She had worked with John. At first we didn’t think we were going to be able to get him, so we were three days away from shooting and still didn’t have anybody. Then we got a call that John Shea is available, and he can read the script tonight. He read the script and agreed to do it, but he lives on Nantucket Island, so we had to get him out to L.A. He didn’t get in till the night before we started shooting. I literally met him that morning, and it was like, ‘So, hi. How are you doing? Okay. Let’s go. Action.’”

On visiting different film festivals
“It is probably the best part of the whole process besides shooting and being on set. It’s great because with independent films, in some ways, it’s easier to get your film seen because of the Internet and digital distribution, but on the other hand there are so many independent films. There’s always a point when you’re editing a movie where you think no one is going to watch this and say, ‘I just made an extremely expensive home movie.’ So it’s great when you get to show it to an audience and actually get out there. “But I love the whole process of taking it to film festivals partly because I’m such a big movie fan myself, so I enjoy going and seeing all these movies and meeting these other filmmakers.”

On being a movie fanatic and how it influences his filmmaking
“The only thing I don’t like about making movies is it takes so much time away from watching movies. I’m not able to watch as much stuff as a fan if I’m making movies. Because I love movies so much as a fan, that obviously influences the kind of movies I make. For me it’s helpful having models to look at. In the case of The Trouble with the Truth, there were a number of other movies that influenced it. From Before Sunrise and Before Sunset to My Dinner with Andre. Some French movies and Japanese movies. Those were movies that gave me confidence to make The Trouble with the Truth the way I made it because I saw those movies, and knew I could make a movie about just two people talking for 90 minutes. It can work. It’s worked before.”

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