> Has had a 30-year career as an executive producer / director, crafting such series as The Wonder Years, Justified, Silo, Sneaky Pete, Masters of Sex, Early Edition, Chicago Hope, Sons of Anarchy, and Mayans M.C., among many others. Created and showran Philip K. Kick’s Electric Dreams, and co-created and co-showran Justified: City Primeval.
> Won an Emmy for Outstanding Directing (Comedy) for The Wonder Years in 1990. Was nominated for the same in 1989, for Outstanding Comedy Series in 1990 and 1991, and for Outstanding Drama Series for Chicago Hope in 1995 and 1996. Won Peabody Awards for The Wonder Years in 1990 and Justified in 2011.
> His 1983 AFI film, Miss Lonelyhearts, won the Special Jury Prize in the Directors’ Fortnight at the Cannes Film Festival. His 1985 studio directorial debut, Heaven Help Us, opened the Deauville Film Festival.
> Recorded two albums as a solo artist for Fantasy Records, collaborating with Glenn Frey (The Eagles), Linda Ronstadt, Jackson Browne, and Emmylou Harris, and was a songwriter for MCA.
I grew up a child of the 60s, when there was an explosion of American cinema made by renegade filmmakers. Movies like Midnight Cowboy, Five Easy Pieces, and Bonnie & Clyde. My friend Larry and I used to take the bus to a couple theaters in Denver that played those types of films. That really influenced me.
When I was 17, I wanted to be Keith Richards because at that age it was all about girls. Either you could play quarterback, or you could play electric guitar. And I wasn’t big enough to play quarterback.
My freshman year of college I came out to LA for two weeks. I had a big set of balls. I marched into record labels and took meetings. I sold three songs and thought, “Oh, maybe I can do this for a living.” So I quit college, moved to LA, and spent the next six years there as a musician.
I signed a deal with a record label. I cut my first album and got into a fight with them. We were going into litigation, so I said, “The hell with it,” and I reapplied to college. Orientation week, my manager calls me. “The record company wants you back. They want this to work out.” So I quit school again. I made a second album and went on the road. About a year-and-a-half after that, it all blew up a second time. I said, “I’m done,” and went back to school. You could say I was on the 10-year plan.
I don’t know if I was afraid of failure or afraid of success, but I ran away from the circus.
The Eagles. Linda Ronstadt, Jackson Browne. I knew all those guys. Some of them I played with, they played on tracks of mine. It was kind of the heyday of LA sound.
Those years were formative because I was going into a recording studio at the age of 19 or 20. I had to learn very quickly how to become a professional, how to get a performance from other musicians, and how to collaborate. That’s a similar mindset to what I’ve done for most of my life in the film business.
I try to direct like I’m writing a pop song, where you’ve got verses, choruses, and bridges. It’s about rhythm. You’ve got to earn the right to be fast. You’ve got to earn the right to be slow, to be tight, to be wide. That contrast is what gives a sense of scope.
Later, I was living in New York, and I went to a double feature of Badlands and Mean Streets. I was blown away. I thought, “Who are these guys? Where did they come from?”
Terrence Malick had gone to the American Film Institute (AFI). And people don’t really know this, but Neil Young directed a feature for Warner Brothers after he was already a big music star. I thought, “Well, that’s interesting if he came out of the music business and wanted to do this…”
At AFI, I was adapting Nathaniel West’s novella Miss Lonelyhearts into a film. But my lead actor, Eric Roberts, was in a terrible car accident before we finished shooting. I owed a lot of money to the film’s creditors and got word that AFI was going to padlock my editing room unless I paid off my debt. So, the night before they locked it up, my editor and I broke in and stuffed all the film into his ’68 Buick.
We drove around all night drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes. As the sun came up, from a payphone on the PCH, I called the only person I thought could help -- a person I didn’t even know: Robert Altman. His secretary answered and I told her that I stole all my film from AFI and didn’t know where to go and-- “Hold on a minute,” she said.
Twenty seconds later, Robert Altman got on the phone, laughing. “You did what?!” He gave me his editing room and equipment. And I figured out how to finish the damn thing. I paid off my debts. And the film was accepted to Cannes Film Festival’s New Director Series.
God and Robert Altman were watching over me.
I sat in steerage on the flight to Cannes. Martin Scorsese and his entourage – people from this new studio called Tri-Star - were up front. They heard the whole story about this broke American with his film cans and a film at the Director’s Fortnight, and they sent me back drinks the whole flight.
There were some cosmic forces that made this all happen. I was thinking, “Who’s going to come see this thing?” I didn’t have a publicity person. There was no studio, no producers involved. But the medical students in France had this big protest in front of the main theater and it shut down the festival that night. So everybody went to the Old Palais, where the New Director Series was, and they all saw my film.
It screened three times at the festival. Each time, it was standing room only, and I ended up receiving a special jury directing award.
There were a lot of studio people at Cannes. My film started getting attention, and the studio people would take me out to dinner because I didn’t have a nickel. They’d say, “What do you want to do next?” Well, I had a script with me that I was developing with some producers. So I said, “I want to do this.” That became Heaven Help Us.
I was going from a nothing-budget movie to one that was probably seven million dollars. Suddenly, I’m doing this legitimately. I had a day in prep where I was sitting in my office in New York and freaking out. I had this fantastic line producer who was kind of the king of producers in New York. His name was Kenny Utt. He had produced Midnight Cowboy, The French Connection, and so on. He walked into my office, and I looked ashen. He said, “You should go home for the weekend.” I went home and holed up in my place. I said, “What am I doing? They’re making a terrible mistake.” Then after that weekend of being home, I said, “Well, I know this project better than anybody else, it might as well be me directing.” I got back on the plane to New York, and it was all fine.
I had a difficult time casting the role of this girl. We had cast somebody that one of the producers had suggested. I was always skeptical, but I didn’t want to be too big for my britches. A day into rehearsal, I knew it wasn’t going to work. So here I am, my first studio picture. What am I going to do? I talked to Kenny, who was like my uncle in this whole process, and he said, “You got to do what you got to do.” So, I called the studio and said, “It’s not going to work. You have to eat the money and I have to recast.” That was tough. I had to fire her.
Then on a Friday I went to the casting director’s office. The door opened and there was this young actress in the waiting room, Mary Stuart Masterson. And I’m telling you, the moment I saw her, I knew she was the one.
We shot a film test with her and the studio hated her. So, we tested her again, and they still hated her. I called up the studio and said, “Look, I’m a young director, I know I don’t have a leg to stand on. But she’s the one. If you don’t like her, you can fire us both. Let me cast her.” So we did, and she was brilliant.
I got this call one day from the people at The Wonder Years saying, “Would you direct an episode?” I probably was thinking, “God, I hope nobody knows I'm doing this TV stuff.” I went in as a visitor not knowing anything about TV.
Two months later I got a 4:30am phone call from the studio. “Congratulations.” I said, “For what?” “Well, you’ve been nominated.” And I kid you not, I said, “Nominated for what?” “Well, for an Emmy.” And all I could think at that moment was, “This TV stuff is pretty good, man.”
I sat there at the Emmys, I didn't really prepare a speech, and all I kept thinking was, “Don't call me, don't call me, don't call me.” Then I got really mad when they didn’t.
The next season, when they did call my name, that was pretty great.
We got to do a story about growing up. I used to say that we got to exorcise the ghost of our past. I would get calls from people I hadn't talked to in 15 years, that I went to high school with, saying, “I saw the show last night. It’s really about that time we snuck into the drive-in movie and did XYZ, isn’t it?” And I’d go, “Yeah, absolutely.” It wasn't, but it was to them. Because it was part of our collective consciousness. It was powerful doing that show. I really loved it.
There's a problem with TV where, if you’re on a show for a long time and you're not careful, you can get bored. But because Fred Savage’s character was changing from year to year, constantly growing, the stories had to grow up with him.
I loved working with Tim Olyphant and Walton Goggins on Justified. Margo Martindale is a treasure. We were shooting the 2nd season finale, and we had this young girl, Kaitlyn Dever, who hadn’t really done anything before. There was this tough, emotional scene where she holds Margo at gunpoint and is going to kill her. I didn’t want Kaitlyn to emotionally ring herself out, so I set the scene up in such a way that this monologue she had would be covered in one shot. We shot the first take, and I looked over at the camera operator, and he was crying. I looked over to Margo, and she put her hands up and shrugged. So I shrugged too, and we were done.
Sometimes to get a great performance you just need to get out of the way.
I admire directors with an unshakeable point of view. Years ago, someone asked me, “What are your favorite movies of the year?” I said, “Babe and Heat. And they seem like similar directors to me.” The person looked at me like I was nuts. To me, both directors had a singular point of view. Heat is the same from the first frame to the last frame. It’s Michael Mann’s uncompromised vision. And in Babe, the pig turns to the camera eleven seconds in and says, “I miss my mom.” And the director never flinched.
I don’t think there’s a difference between TV and movies. If someone should be tiny in the frame, he should be tiny in the frame. I just think about how you best tell the story.
Hopefully you get lucky and there's something about each project that's powerful to you. Hopefully you learn something about yourself or the people around you, and the dance that you do with your dance partners.
You stick with it. You can’t learn unless you keep moving ahead, and hopefully you're not moving so fast that you don't have time to take in what the lessons are.
You don’t know what life is going to bring you. Don’t say, “This is the only thing I could possibly do.” You’ve got to make opportunity, grab whatever you can, and hope you learn a lot along the way.
I’m a dog guy. What can I say?
