The Sundance Kids
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BOB GARFIELD: We are back with On the Media. I'm Bob Garfield.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And I'm Brooke Gladstone. With the Oscars just around the corner, we thought we'd take an inside look at the pre-eminent event in independent film, the Sundance Film Festival. For ten days every January, filmmakers of a certain stripe gather in Park City, Utah to pitch scripts, make deals and -- oh, yeah --show movies. This year one of them was a race-car docu-fantasy called Quattro Noza. Derek Cianfrance had worked on Quattro Noza and he took Cami Delavigne along for the ride to help pitch a script for a film they wrote together -- a love story called Blue Valentine. We gave Cami a tape recorder and she let us listen in.
CAMI DELAVIGNE: Everyone has a movie to pitch, and there's no better place to pitch it than Sundance. I shared a car with Kid Albert Hernandez, the co-writer of Quattro Noza, a film about tough Hispanic kids and illegal street racers. He improvised this beat to Sundance 2003. [RAP BEAT UP AND UNDER] Filmmaker Derek Cianfrance and I were heading out to Park City with a script in our back pocket and a mission -- to get a movie deal. We had about ten dollars between the two of us, slept on floors and couches, had no tickets or invitations to parties -- but what we did have was an in. Derek was the cinematographer of the hot buzz film of the festival, Quattro Noza. [SOUND OF RACING CARS] At 3 a.m., just hours before Quattro Noza kicked off Sundance 2003, director Joey Curtis and his posse of street racers roared into Park City. [RACING CARS SPEEDING BY] These racers ranged from urban teenagers to financial advisor adults. They came out on their own dime -- some with their moms and some with their wives, packed in 15 to a condo, the lead actor Robert Beaumont entertained us with filmmaking war stories.
ROBERT BEAUMONT: I guess I really hit him. I mean he really tackled me in the tub. We really tore up Dave's bathroom.
CAMI DELAVIGNE: These weren't the usual war stories of maxed-out credit cards.
ROBERT BEAUMONT: Lots of sleeping in cars, and screwed up back for a whole summer.
CAMI DELAVIGNE: I was caught up in the spirit of independent filmmaking.
ROBERT BEAUMONT: Being cold the whole time; wearing a tee shirt on - you know - 40 degree desert with windows open, going 60 miles an hour all night.
CAMI DELAVIGNE: Falling asleep at 4 o'clock in the morning, I thought about the war stories of our script, Blue Valentine, a 5 year process for the filmmaker, Derek; 32 re-writes, dozens of all-nighters; no money yet. [ALARM BEEPING]
JOEY CURTIS: All right, [y'all].
CAMI DELAVIGNE: 8 o'clock in the morning, and director Joey Curtis got us going.
JOEY CURTIS: Quattro Noza time -- we're late again.
CAMI DELAVIGNE: 9 a.m. and 30 of us raced in vans and souped-up Audis to the world premiere screening of the movie. While driving in the car, Joey --always the director -- instructed one of the racers to make this grand entrance into the festival.
JOEY CURTIS: Hey, Leone, the main objective right now is I want you guys just hanging out in front of that theater, revving them cars up, okay, for everybody coming into the theater-- I mean I'd like to have, have the cars out there after the screening too, cause I - the whole point of this is to get the distributors freaked out.
CAMI DELAVIGNE: Inside the packed auditorium I saw what an eagerly-awaited film Quattro Noza was. Tilda Swinton, Steve Buscemi, Forrest Whitaker and a sea of Hollywood deal makers piled into the last remaining seats. Moments before the screening, emotions ran high. I checked in with director Joey Curtis.
JOEY CURTIS: Well don't make me cry right now. [LAUGHS] I gotta go up there. [LAUGHS] Geoff Gilmore, the festival director, [APPLAUSE, CHEERS] introduced the film.
GEOFF GILMORE: There's a lot of talk in festival about digital filmmaking, but there's not a lot of people who have the guts and the skill to actually really do something very cool, very interesting, and I think very bold. And a filmmaker who's really done it is Joey Curtis, [APPLAUSE, CHEERS] [...?...].
CAMI DELAVIGNE: Joey stepped up to the podium. [APPLAUSE, CHEERS]
JOEY CURTIS: I just want to thank the Sundance Film Festival for giving us this great forum - the greatest in the world - to present the world premiere of Quattro Noza, and I'd like to dedicate this first world premiere screening to my mother in heaven. Thank you. [APPLAUSE]
CAMI DELAVIGNE: The lights dimmed, and 3 and a half years of work, 300 hours of footage and a measurable ambition boiled down to the next 117 minutes. [REBECCA DELIVER RIO SINGING UP & FADES] When the lights came back up, the film was well received but the audience had to bolt to the next of 10 screenings for the day. Meanwhile Joey and the cast jumped from interview to interview. I got derailed from the purpose of pitching my script as I followed the action.
WOMAN: Now I want to ask, did you actually drive that car?
QUATTRO NOZA ACTOR: Oh, yeah.
WOMAN: Did you really drive that fast?
QUATTRO NOZA ACTOR: Oh, yeah! We really drove that fast.
JOEY CURTIS: We went out in a really documentary approach and some of the scenes that happened like the fight between Leone and Swineball, that wasn't scripted -- that just happened and we were there.
CAMI DELAVIGNE: I lost the cast and crew as they hurried to a whirlwind of photo shoots. Standing outside the theater in the cold Utah air, I spied my co-writer, Derek, grabbing the first opportunity to pitch our script to a big-time lawyer and producer.
DEREK CIANFRANCE: Well I have a, you know, I have a film that Fountainhead is producing called Blue Valentine.
PRODUCER: Is that right?
DEREK CIANFRANCE: Yeah, which I, which I wrote with Cami here and-- I'll be shooting and directing--
PRODUCER: Hey, Cami.
CAMI DELAVIGNE: Hi, John.
DEREK CIANFRANCE: Yeah, so that's, that's next on ours--
CAMI DELAVIGNE: As the festival progressed, Derek was getting attention as Quattro Noza's cinematographer, and using this attention to get us where we wanted to be -- the parties. [PARTY AMBIENCE UNDER] Elbowing past thick-necked bouncers, Derek and I crashed party after party. We believe that every conversation could turn into a business meeting -- every handshake could mean a deal. Everywhere we went there were more celebrities than the Chateau Marmont on Oscar Weekend! Dustin Hoffman, John Leguizamo, Al Pacino, Harvey Weinstein -- how did I fit in? I needed more introductions and Red Bull. I started to see everyone that I wasn't talking to as the one person that I should be talking to. As I was having this existential crisis, Derek was in the corner calmly talking up our script.
DEREK CIANFRANCE: I've kind of made up a decision, and that decision is get Blue Valentine made. I've been trying for 5 years, and it's remained a dream. We got the script; the script is there. We're ready.
CAMI DELAVIGNE: This talk worked. It snagged Derek an agent, and we had a momentous meeting with development guru Jack Lechner.
JACK LECHNER: The history of movies is that the less money you have, the more you actually have to use your own imagination [LAUGHS] and creativity to get yourself out of a jam--
DEREK CIANFRANCE: I agree.
JACK LECHNER: -- and you end up with things that you weren't shooting for that end up better than what you were hoping for. It is because I have faith in you as a filmmaker that you'll make it work.
CAMI DELAVIGNE: As the end of the festival loomed, the big deals hadn't happened yet. Not for Blue Valentine; not for Quattro Noza. Of the 196 feature films at the festival this year, only 12 walked away with deals. Would the rest flash across the screen in an instant and be forgotten? We all started to remind ourselves that there was a world beyond Sundance. [PARTY AMBIENCE UP AND UNDER] At another party, Derek expounds on the lessons of Sundance.
DEREK CIANFRANCE: I'm basically just like watching and learning and I'm understanding what this game is more and more. The trick is to get in the game and maintain the purity of the vision.
CAMI DELAVIGNE: I sneaked in to the closing night awards ceremony where over 400 exhausted filmmakers crammed into a gymnasium. [BACKGROUND: PRESENTATION OF AWARD] Most of the tension going into the festival had dissolved, because most of the Hollywood big wigs had left to deal with the Oscars. I sat next to Derek and the Quattro Noza team. The big awards came and went, and no wins for the film. Then-- Forrest Whitaker came to the stage to present the cinematography award.
FORREST WHITAKER: The 2003 Best Cinematography Award goes to--Quattro Noza. [APPLAUSE, CHEERS] A win for Quattro. Derek took snapshots of the audience as part of his acceptance speech. I asked Derek what this meant for Blue Valentine?
DEREK CIANFRANCE: The time is now. How's that for a quote? That's a good one, right?
CAMI DELAVIGNE: The festival was over, and Park City emptied like a ghost town. In a quiet coffee shop, I met up one last time with director Joey Curtis. I asked him if winning an award changed Quattro Noza's deal-making status.
JOEY CURTIS: In the next few months that follow a lot of these films probably will get picked up; I mean seven distributors are talking to us right now, and I think like, you know, next week we're probably going to, you know, have a deal.
CAMI DELAVIGNE: Everyone left except Derek and me. He booked our flight wrong, so we had about 36 hours to kill with now about 5 dollars between us. We used Derek's award status to sneak into movies and get seconds on popcorn. Before we left, Derek called his mom on the phone.
DEREK CIANFRANCE: Yeah, I'm flat broke. I won the award, and then I'm flat broke. That's why I'm signing with a agent now, mom. He's thrilled. Jack thinks it's just what we needed to, you know, jump star Blue Valentine, and I said okay, well I just want to know if, if Radical is going to put Blue Valentine on the front burner now, and he says yes. What did he say, Cam--?
CAMI DELAVIGNE: He said Yes.
DEREK CIANFRANCE: He said yes.
CAMI DELAVIGNE: The big movie deal didn't happen for us at Park City, but it didn't mean it was never going to happen. On the bus ride to the airport, Derek said--
DEREK CIANFRANCE: This is the dream, so I'm going to go and live it.
CAMI DELAVIGNE: We knew that we were going back to New York playing a whole new ball game.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Cami Delavigne is the co-writer of Blue Valentine, a movie currently in development.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And I'm Brooke Gladstone. With the Oscars just around the corner, we thought we'd take an inside look at the pre-eminent event in independent film, the Sundance Film Festival. For ten days every January, filmmakers of a certain stripe gather in Park City, Utah to pitch scripts, make deals and -- oh, yeah --show movies. This year one of them was a race-car docu-fantasy called Quattro Noza. Derek Cianfrance had worked on Quattro Noza and he took Cami Delavigne along for the ride to help pitch a script for a film they wrote together -- a love story called Blue Valentine. We gave Cami a tape recorder and she let us listen in.
CAMI DELAVIGNE: Everyone has a movie to pitch, and there's no better place to pitch it than Sundance. I shared a car with Kid Albert Hernandez, the co-writer of Quattro Noza, a film about tough Hispanic kids and illegal street racers. He improvised this beat to Sundance 2003. [RAP BEAT UP AND UNDER] Filmmaker Derek Cianfrance and I were heading out to Park City with a script in our back pocket and a mission -- to get a movie deal. We had about ten dollars between the two of us, slept on floors and couches, had no tickets or invitations to parties -- but what we did have was an in. Derek was the cinematographer of the hot buzz film of the festival, Quattro Noza. [SOUND OF RACING CARS] At 3 a.m., just hours before Quattro Noza kicked off Sundance 2003, director Joey Curtis and his posse of street racers roared into Park City. [RACING CARS SPEEDING BY] These racers ranged from urban teenagers to financial advisor adults. They came out on their own dime -- some with their moms and some with their wives, packed in 15 to a condo, the lead actor Robert Beaumont entertained us with filmmaking war stories.
ROBERT BEAUMONT: I guess I really hit him. I mean he really tackled me in the tub. We really tore up Dave's bathroom.
CAMI DELAVIGNE: These weren't the usual war stories of maxed-out credit cards.
ROBERT BEAUMONT: Lots of sleeping in cars, and screwed up back for a whole summer.
CAMI DELAVIGNE: I was caught up in the spirit of independent filmmaking.
ROBERT BEAUMONT: Being cold the whole time; wearing a tee shirt on - you know - 40 degree desert with windows open, going 60 miles an hour all night.
CAMI DELAVIGNE: Falling asleep at 4 o'clock in the morning, I thought about the war stories of our script, Blue Valentine, a 5 year process for the filmmaker, Derek; 32 re-writes, dozens of all-nighters; no money yet. [ALARM BEEPING]
JOEY CURTIS: All right, [y'all].
CAMI DELAVIGNE: 8 o'clock in the morning, and director Joey Curtis got us going.
JOEY CURTIS: Quattro Noza time -- we're late again.
CAMI DELAVIGNE: 9 a.m. and 30 of us raced in vans and souped-up Audis to the world premiere screening of the movie. While driving in the car, Joey --always the director -- instructed one of the racers to make this grand entrance into the festival.
JOEY CURTIS: Hey, Leone, the main objective right now is I want you guys just hanging out in front of that theater, revving them cars up, okay, for everybody coming into the theater-- I mean I'd like to have, have the cars out there after the screening too, cause I - the whole point of this is to get the distributors freaked out.
CAMI DELAVIGNE: Inside the packed auditorium I saw what an eagerly-awaited film Quattro Noza was. Tilda Swinton, Steve Buscemi, Forrest Whitaker and a sea of Hollywood deal makers piled into the last remaining seats. Moments before the screening, emotions ran high. I checked in with director Joey Curtis.
JOEY CURTIS: Well don't make me cry right now. [LAUGHS] I gotta go up there. [LAUGHS] Geoff Gilmore, the festival director, [APPLAUSE, CHEERS] introduced the film.
GEOFF GILMORE: There's a lot of talk in festival about digital filmmaking, but there's not a lot of people who have the guts and the skill to actually really do something very cool, very interesting, and I think very bold. And a filmmaker who's really done it is Joey Curtis, [APPLAUSE, CHEERS] [...?...].
CAMI DELAVIGNE: Joey stepped up to the podium. [APPLAUSE, CHEERS]
JOEY CURTIS: I just want to thank the Sundance Film Festival for giving us this great forum - the greatest in the world - to present the world premiere of Quattro Noza, and I'd like to dedicate this first world premiere screening to my mother in heaven. Thank you. [APPLAUSE]
CAMI DELAVIGNE: The lights dimmed, and 3 and a half years of work, 300 hours of footage and a measurable ambition boiled down to the next 117 minutes. [REBECCA DELIVER RIO SINGING UP & FADES] When the lights came back up, the film was well received but the audience had to bolt to the next of 10 screenings for the day. Meanwhile Joey and the cast jumped from interview to interview. I got derailed from the purpose of pitching my script as I followed the action.
WOMAN: Now I want to ask, did you actually drive that car?
QUATTRO NOZA ACTOR: Oh, yeah.
WOMAN: Did you really drive that fast?
QUATTRO NOZA ACTOR: Oh, yeah! We really drove that fast.
JOEY CURTIS: We went out in a really documentary approach and some of the scenes that happened like the fight between Leone and Swineball, that wasn't scripted -- that just happened and we were there.
CAMI DELAVIGNE: I lost the cast and crew as they hurried to a whirlwind of photo shoots. Standing outside the theater in the cold Utah air, I spied my co-writer, Derek, grabbing the first opportunity to pitch our script to a big-time lawyer and producer.
DEREK CIANFRANCE: Well I have a, you know, I have a film that Fountainhead is producing called Blue Valentine.
PRODUCER: Is that right?
DEREK CIANFRANCE: Yeah, which I, which I wrote with Cami here and-- I'll be shooting and directing--
PRODUCER: Hey, Cami.
CAMI DELAVIGNE: Hi, John.
DEREK CIANFRANCE: Yeah, so that's, that's next on ours--
CAMI DELAVIGNE: As the festival progressed, Derek was getting attention as Quattro Noza's cinematographer, and using this attention to get us where we wanted to be -- the parties. [PARTY AMBIENCE UNDER] Elbowing past thick-necked bouncers, Derek and I crashed party after party. We believe that every conversation could turn into a business meeting -- every handshake could mean a deal. Everywhere we went there were more celebrities than the Chateau Marmont on Oscar Weekend! Dustin Hoffman, John Leguizamo, Al Pacino, Harvey Weinstein -- how did I fit in? I needed more introductions and Red Bull. I started to see everyone that I wasn't talking to as the one person that I should be talking to. As I was having this existential crisis, Derek was in the corner calmly talking up our script.
DEREK CIANFRANCE: I've kind of made up a decision, and that decision is get Blue Valentine made. I've been trying for 5 years, and it's remained a dream. We got the script; the script is there. We're ready.
CAMI DELAVIGNE: This talk worked. It snagged Derek an agent, and we had a momentous meeting with development guru Jack Lechner.
JACK LECHNER: The history of movies is that the less money you have, the more you actually have to use your own imagination [LAUGHS] and creativity to get yourself out of a jam--
DEREK CIANFRANCE: I agree.
JACK LECHNER: -- and you end up with things that you weren't shooting for that end up better than what you were hoping for. It is because I have faith in you as a filmmaker that you'll make it work.
CAMI DELAVIGNE: As the end of the festival loomed, the big deals hadn't happened yet. Not for Blue Valentine; not for Quattro Noza. Of the 196 feature films at the festival this year, only 12 walked away with deals. Would the rest flash across the screen in an instant and be forgotten? We all started to remind ourselves that there was a world beyond Sundance. [PARTY AMBIENCE UP AND UNDER] At another party, Derek expounds on the lessons of Sundance.
DEREK CIANFRANCE: I'm basically just like watching and learning and I'm understanding what this game is more and more. The trick is to get in the game and maintain the purity of the vision.
CAMI DELAVIGNE: I sneaked in to the closing night awards ceremony where over 400 exhausted filmmakers crammed into a gymnasium. [BACKGROUND: PRESENTATION OF AWARD] Most of the tension going into the festival had dissolved, because most of the Hollywood big wigs had left to deal with the Oscars. I sat next to Derek and the Quattro Noza team. The big awards came and went, and no wins for the film. Then-- Forrest Whitaker came to the stage to present the cinematography award.
FORREST WHITAKER: The 2003 Best Cinematography Award goes to--Quattro Noza. [APPLAUSE, CHEERS] A win for Quattro. Derek took snapshots of the audience as part of his acceptance speech. I asked Derek what this meant for Blue Valentine?
DEREK CIANFRANCE: The time is now. How's that for a quote? That's a good one, right?
CAMI DELAVIGNE: The festival was over, and Park City emptied like a ghost town. In a quiet coffee shop, I met up one last time with director Joey Curtis. I asked him if winning an award changed Quattro Noza's deal-making status.
JOEY CURTIS: In the next few months that follow a lot of these films probably will get picked up; I mean seven distributors are talking to us right now, and I think like, you know, next week we're probably going to, you know, have a deal.
CAMI DELAVIGNE: Everyone left except Derek and me. He booked our flight wrong, so we had about 36 hours to kill with now about 5 dollars between us. We used Derek's award status to sneak into movies and get seconds on popcorn. Before we left, Derek called his mom on the phone.
DEREK CIANFRANCE: Yeah, I'm flat broke. I won the award, and then I'm flat broke. That's why I'm signing with a agent now, mom. He's thrilled. Jack thinks it's just what we needed to, you know, jump star Blue Valentine, and I said okay, well I just want to know if, if Radical is going to put Blue Valentine on the front burner now, and he says yes. What did he say, Cam--?
CAMI DELAVIGNE: He said Yes.
DEREK CIANFRANCE: He said yes.
CAMI DELAVIGNE: The big movie deal didn't happen for us at Park City, but it didn't mean it was never going to happen. On the bus ride to the airport, Derek said--
DEREK CIANFRANCE: This is the dream, so I'm going to go and live it.
CAMI DELAVIGNE: We knew that we were going back to New York playing a whole new ball game.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Cami Delavigne is the co-writer of Blue Valentine, a movie currently in development.
Produced by WNYC Studios