For a director's hotel room, I was a little disappointed. There were no papers strewn across the floor, no posse, no cocaine buffet, no passed-out hooker. There was, I guess, no Hollywood.
As I sat in his suite at the Four Seasons in downtown Boston, I got the feeling that, to Richard Shepard, it hadn't all sunk in - and maybe he likes it that way.
"Can you tell the front desk to stop calling up here?" he modestly asks a publicist, not his own. "They keep telling me I have to check out."
Before his new film, "The Matador," in which Pierce Brosnan plays a slimy hit man who befriends an out-of-luck business associate played by Greg Kinnear, Shepard had a long but unremarkable resume (including 1999's "Oxygen" and "Mercy" from 1996). You've never seen his movies, and you've never heard of them. Trust me.
Maybe that's what creates the unmistakable enthusiasm in Shepard's eye: he's not a kid who's in way over his head; he's a professional who is finally figuring out the game.
BM: What was it like filming in Mexico City?
RS: Well, you know the whole movie was filmed in Mexico. Denver was filmed there, Budapest, and Manila; it's the magic of the movies. I would say that it was really great on every level. First, it's just a beautiful, interesting, crazy city and that energy sort of invaded our film set.
You talk about a combo of studio and indie [film styles]...It's an accessible movie, but maybe it's interesting and a little more different than your average crappy studio movie... But the city kind of brought out our indie side; it was a little run-and-gun.
Sometimes, you know, there's so much traffic that you can't shoot where you think you're going to shoot, because you can't even get there, so you have to kind of improvise and everyone was up for it; it was never a case of "Where's my trailer? My trailer's not big enough!"
It was more like, "Okay, well there's a marching band and a parade, and we can't shoot this scene, so let's shoot another scene and we'll figure it out..."
BM: Getting back to the characters, it seems as though Greg's character wants a bit of Pierce's character, and vice versa. Did you direct them to experience this tension, or did it come naturally for them?
RS: When I cast Greg, who's such a great comic actor but also has a good dramatic side as well, I knew I was getting as good as I would possibly get for that part, and I knew that there would be tension between them. And they're both smart enough actors to sort of use what was happening between them for the movie.
My job as a director is [that] you don't really direct good actors, specifically, like you direct a child, a first-time actor, or a dog. But when you're dealing with movie stars, you kind of just set the scene for them. You make sure that the set is right, that the costumes are right, that props are right, that their co-stars are right, that the dialogue is right, and then you sort of just let them go, and you steer them a little bit.
But you're not sitting them down and getting the performance out of them. If you're doing that, you're in deep s--t; you don't have enough time to do that.
BM: Will you be going back to the indie genre?
RS: To me, even though this is a $10 million movie and it has big movie stars and it looks like a big movie, it still was indie in spirit because the script that I wrote is the script that I filmed; the film that I finished cutting is the film that is being released.
It wasn't changed because some audience member couldn't handle that Pierce was sexually ambiguous [or that] someone at the test screening was like, "I don't like that he's mean to children," and suddenly the studio is like, "He's mean to children; we must cut it out, we must make him likable." No, this is what it was. So it is indie in spirit. But if your question is whether I will go back to a lower-budget movie, the answer is yes, because if there's a movie I want to make and no one will give me real money for it, I'll go and make it for nothing, because I just love making movies.
I think a lot of times people get to the point where's it's like, "Well, we can't raise the $10 million; we can't make this movie." And my feeling is like, "Well, then make it for $250,000 if you care that much about it..."
If "[The] Blair Witch Project" had been... if someone had given them $25 million and suddenly there's some kid from "Dawson's Creek" and whatever in that movie, it wouldn't have been nearly as good, because that movie needed to be real.
I was ready to make "The Matador" for $250,000. I'm a big believer that you should make your own opportunity.
BM: And finally, are you a writer or a director?
RS: I am a writer who writes his material so that I can direct. But I'm a filmmaker and a storyteller, I think.
And I feel like I am just finally really getting good at writing. I've written for a long time, I've had movies made, I've done things, but I'm finally in a groove and finding my voice, maybe. And some people find it at a much younger age, and some people don't ever find it. I mean, I just feel like I'm finding it now.
"The Matador" was an amazing experience for me; it opened a lot of doors for me [and] I learned a lot on it. I love to write, but I also love to actually get on the set and make the movie, because that's where actual accidents happen and excitement happens and stuff happens, in a good way.
