We sat at his house and outlined the list of constraints we had to work with. Knowing that making a feature would be ridiculously difficult, we wanted to do everything in the planning process to make it easier for ourselves. What we came up with was this:
1) All shot in a single location
2) Lots of dialog, it's easier and faster than action
3) A variety of actors all shooting for a single day in order to reduce time commitment and scheduling problems
Once we had our constraints, we were off to the races. A lot of ideas floated around, but ultimately we settled on the one we centered the movie around (no spoilers, I promise). We began writing vignettes and ultimately ended up cutting around 1/3 of them before settling on the final script.
When I breeze over it like that, it sounds really easy. I assure you, it wasn't. Schoen and I eventually grew apart on what the story should be, and there was a certain amount of creative tension for a while. We had a conversation about it, however, and I, narcissistic asshole that I am, decided to take the reins on this project while Schoen moved on to a different (better) script with another of our friends.
We continued to work together, with input from other people on the project, on revisions to Brickwalk Cafe up until the shooting day, but the script was basically done in February.
Advice to anyone trying to do this: Spend more time on your script than I did, but not forever. People have a tendency when working on a project for a long time to lose sight of what it is that compelled them to take it on in the first place. If it was compelling to you in the beginning, there's probably still something valid about that, and you owe it to yourself and your potential audience to see it through without changing it in millions of revisions into something unwatchable or perpetually unfinished.
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