SXSW 2012 Interview: Mike Birbiglia
I had the pleasure of sitting in on a roundtable interview with Mike Birbiglia to discuss his new film, Sleepwalk With Me. Sleepwalk is the latest, and perhaps final, version of a story Mike has been telling for years. You may have seen his one man show, or heard it in his stand up act, or heard it on This American Life, or maybe you read his book.
It’s a testament to his storytelling ability that it has managed to survive all these iterations and continues to garner interest.
The film is surprisingly sure footed for a first time director and the power of the tale has not diminished in the retelling. Mike’s unique voice shines through despite the more collaborative nature of film.
The interview is shown in full below. The questions have been paraphrased.
How did you decide that you wanted to make this a film, and how did you decide to direct:
No one else was available for the amount of money we had. For any of the positions. For all the positions. I took as many positions as I could. As much as that’s a joke, it’s also very true.
There’s a lot of questions in that.
How did we decide to make it a film? I guess that’s the first question. I’ve wanted to make a film since I was 18 years old. I directed shorts in college but I found it to be prohibitively expensive. It’s a money pit, making films. We have stacks of master tapes in our closets and our parents’ basement of films that aren’t done, shorts that aren’t done, and will never be done. That’s discouraging. I veered towards standup comedy around that time because there’s no overhead. I was able to perform my writing and I was able over time to sculpt my writing from something that was kind of short and joke based into something that had more of an arc to it. Just on stage with no cost, really. Film is so expensive, and its really because I’ve built up enough of an audience over the years that someone was willing to take a chance on financing my vision for a film. It’s the very rare company that’s willing to do that.
How has the story evolved over the re-tellings and does this feel like the final stamp on it:
No, I think this is the final stamp. Unless we make Sleepwalk 2. 2 Sleepy. 2 Sleepy 2 Furious. Or Sleepwalk 3D, of course. And the video game, obviously. And the line of pizzas. Pizzas and pizza pillows are of course on the way.
No, I think it’s the final one. It was definitely the hardest. Writing a book is hard, making a movie is unimaginable.
Does the line between reality and story get blurred the more you tell the story:
My life doesn’t have cinematography that good. The color palette in my real life isn’t that interesting. The clothes are better in the movie. I’m not nearly so fashionable.
No, that’s a really interesting question. Everytime I see it, and I watched it last night again, I shudder during the jumping through the window scene. It really makes me cringe, and fortunately the audience as well. There’s a little bit of blurring, but at the same time there’s so many decisions that go into every frame of the film that you just know so well how you got there. I feel like that actually kind of solidifies it. One of the things that struck me when I watched it last night was that we shot it so recently. We shot the movie in August, we wrapped in September, we edited it in October, November, and December. We got into Sundance with a cut of it and now we’re here. So it’s really recent, to the point that I remember the takes. I remember the takes that are on the screen. I don’t think a lot of filmmakers have that. I thinks is all kind of a blur because it was so long ago and they went through so many things. That final scene where I’m talking to the camera and I say I went to visit Abby and she said I didn’t want to hurt you, I remember that take. I remember the parking problems we had. When I pulled in we had to keep going around the block and in that take, I remember driving and remember seeing that there was an intern that had an orange cone and he was running away so I was trying to slow down so he wouldn’t be in the frame. So I’m directing and acting in my head all at the same time. I remember that like it was yesterday and I’m watching it on screen and thinking ‘This is forever’. This memory that I have is as real as going to CVS and picking up a toothbrush. It’s immortalized and that’s such a weird feeling.
Comedy these days is more personal, is your film part of that tradition:
I’ve been doing it for a while. It’s really just an extension of what I’ve been doing. I love Larry David and Louis CK’s work. I think what they’re doing is great. I’d like to think that we’re part of a comedy movement right now that’s moving away from observational comedy into something more personal and real. It’s just one person’s opinion, but it’s what I prefer because I feel it has more heart to it. It has more teeth. I feel like it’s a response to what was the Seinfeldian era or comedy, which was observational to a point of brilliance. Seinfeld did it so well and there were so many mimeographs of that style. At a certain point those mimeographs became so boring. Not only do you see it in stand up comedy, you see it in TV commercials. That’s kind of the ultimate way that you know when something is done. If it’s in a TV commercial, it’s over. I feel like observational comedy is a little bit over right now.
I interviewed Marc Maron on his podcast, and I asked him a question John Mulaney and I had come up with together. ‘What is edgy in an era where nothing is edgy anymore? In an era when everything seems to have been done or said?’ And Marc said being honest. It’s always hard to do. It’s always hard to be honest with an audience, because you’re taking a risk. You’re taking a risk of the audience not liking you. He said, and it’s not paraphrasing, people think it’s edgy to get up and say ‘cunt’ or ‘I fucked your cousin’ or whatever thing that raises peoples tether that are over 60 and are uncomfortable with words. But it’s actually more difficult to just get up and tell your story, and tell it honestly, and admit that you’re kind of wrong about things in a way that’s entertaining. And chances are those first few drafts of that are not entertaining.
And of course this period of comedy will also become watered down and mimeographed and it will become a Doritos commercial and it will be over. We’ll have to figure out some other form of comedy, but for now I think there’s a lot of really great examples like Doug Stanhope and Louis CK.
How did you find your voice as a director, there are some tracking shots that are impressive for a first time director (Mike Birbiglia requested we add this preface – This is a boring answer unless you already love the movie. If you love the movie, this is your question. If not, then don’t read further into this self-indulgent bullshit):
That was actually a funny day when we shot that, because our cinematographer just goes ‘We’re not shooting that’. We had scouted it and we had photo storyboarded the whole film. Our cinematographer was this brilliant guy, Adam Beckman, who had shot This American Life the TV series. Very meticulous, really brilliant. Understanding of light and color. Very meticulous. We had scouted that shot, came up with that shot and we were psyched when we came up with it. The more we thought about it we were like ‘This is going to be awesome’ because it’s going to get across the fact that he’s going to be on the second floor without telling the audience he’s on the second floor.
It’s interesting because it’s telling the story that he’s exhausted, he’s getting pressure from his parents, and he’s on the second floor. So when you come out of the dream your kind of know that in the back of your mind. So we thought it was a really interesting device and we were really excited about it. But then when it came to shooting on the day, the logistics of that shot were so hard. This was a low budget film. We didn’t have the time or resources to shoot that shot.
There’s a moment in that that we actually came up with on the day which is, on the elevator, the guy who is in the towel was a PA on the film. We got on the elevator and realized nothing happens on the elevator. I’m just on the phone. Elevators are boring. We hadn’t accounted for that. So it was me and Jacob and Seth going, ‘Well, what can happen on the elevator?’ I think it was Jacob who said ‘What if there is a guy going to the pool?” So I just said to James ‘Just keep talking to me, just keep trying to talk to me and I’ll blow you off and in ADR we’ll figure out how to choreograph the phone conversation with whatever we improvise.’ So in post we had Carol Kane come in and we did this really involved… basically the other side of that scene, audio wise. It was really time intensive to figure out the choreography of the phone call and that walk at the same time.
That was a really boring answer that is only for people who just love the movie. If you don’t love the movie don’t read this answer. You need a preface to that question. If you love this movie then this is your question, if not, do not read any further into this self indulgent bullshit.
When did you know you had a story worth telling:
The first time I told the actual sleepwalking and jumping out of the window story was at the Just For Laughs festival in Montreal, Canada. I had told it on the road, I was on this Comedy Central Live tour and I had come out with an album called Two Drink Mike and I found that for the first time in my career I showed up to places and people knew my jokes. So I couldn’t tell those jokes anymore. Comedy is not like music, once you’ve heard it you’ve heard it. You’re done. So people were kind of like ‘Alright, what else?’
I had been developing this one man show, Sleepwalk With Me, so I just started telling the stories from the show. I had written them never imagining that they’d be in standup. That was good but I had never done it in front of my peers in the industry at a festival. That’s a whole different thing. At The Just For Laughs festival is this show called Confessing It where you just tell a story you’ve never told in front of people. I told this story and it just killed in this way that was getting monstrous laughs and also was really connecting with the audience. It felt emotional. It felt like an emotional connection with the audience. I came offstage and Doug Stanhope said to me ‘Do you tell that story on stage?’ and I said ‘Yeah, I’m trying to.’ He was like ‘Yeah, that’s your thing. You should tell that. That’s great standup.’ That was a big summer for me. That was the moment I felt I was on to something.
There are four credited screenwriters, how did you keep it in your voice:
That’s because those guys didn’t do anything. You heard it here.
No, I appreciate that. Truthfully, there are four credited screenwriters but I have the document on my computer. I have the master document. I’m making sure that every contribution is fitting into a singular voice. That’s always the case when I’m working with collaborators. I’m always taking their suggestions and ideas and joke pitches and filtering them through what I was writing. It was weird. There’s all these weird WGA rules where we couldn’t write Written and Directed by Mike Birbiglia because there were other writers on it and because it was based on a play. I thought it was weird because I always thought it would say Written and Directed by and then Screenplay by these people. That was kind of disappointing.
It also wasn’t a formal four person collaboration. It was like, I would work with Joe for a day, then I’d work with Seth for a day, then I’d work for a day with Seth and Joe, then I’d work for a day with Seth and Ira or with Joe and Ira. So it was very fluid and the crediting was weird. We didn’t know how to credit it, honestly. We had to talk to the WGA people and be like ‘How does this work?’ I was like ‘Here’s what happened.’
