Initially generating a lot of buzz online, Kirt Gunn’s Lovely By Surprise is definitely one of the sleeper hits of the 2007 film festival circuit. Winning the North American Cinema Special Jury Prize at the Seattle International Film Festival and the New Filmmakers Forum Award recently in St. Louis, this wonderfully written film follows a new writer as she fumbles her way through the challenges of finishing her debut novel. Featuring a cast, which delivers strong performances, a story that overlaps the seams of past/present & fantasy/reality, an eclectic soundtrack and revealing art direction, we’re definitely hoping to see this film break out of the circuit and onto the big screen. At the Edinburgh film festival we were delighted to catch up with Kirt where he spoke to us about jumping on rare opportunities, keeping “risky” scenes and creating a world, within a world, within a world.

Tell us about your background. How did you get started with filmmaking?

There is a short answer to that and a long one. The short one is: This film is my start in filmmaking. I hadn’t even directed a short before this. I have written and directed plays before. My day job is in advertising, and I write and direct many of our unconventional projects, but this was my first film narrative.

As for the long version – I have always been interested in storytelling, and I have always wanted to make a film. I grew up in Memphis Tennessee surrounded by family and friends who were artists and musicians. I think it was probably predestined that I would end up being an artist of some type, but I fought it for a long time. I finally found that theater and music were the areas where I felt most at home. I played harmonica mostly because it was portable, and through the magic of inebriation, I ended up playing with a lot of great musicians like BB King, Buddy Guy and RL Burnside. I didn’t realize what a charmed existence it was at the time, but I would just show up somewhere and get asked to play with musicians of that caliber on a regular basis. Things like that are possible in Memphis. I was also briefly in a drag punk blues band called the Delta Queens. Things like that are also possible there.

I had a real passion for the theater, and spent some summers at The Williamstown Theater Festival as an actor, and that was where I learned that I did not want to be an actor, but did want to write and direct. I briefly ran a Shakespeare Festival in Memphis, and finally moved to New York to be a playwright. I realized that [even with] a really successful year as a playwright in New York, I still wasn’t going to pay New York rent… So I got into advertising. But as I said – since I was a kid – I’ve always wanted to make a film. And someone finally gave me that chance.

Do you still play harmonica?

I play a little bit. You know not as much, just because life has become so busy, but it’s another thing that lives in the back of my brain. I’m sure it’ll get some attention again at some point.

So the film was based on a couple of short films you had done for the web?

Actually the two short films online were just teasers for the feature. That was our deal with the devil, a sponsor paid for us to make a film, and we let them show some of it online before we released it. I have a small company (Kirt Gunn & Associates), we make story driven projects for advertisers, and we had made a couple for Ford. One of them was called Meet the Lucky Ones, which was a web narrative online that was done mostly through voice over, and narration and visual images. It was very interesting, and drew a huge audience online – in the millions. [It] was something for Mercury that was really successful as a way for them to attract a new young audience.

After Meet The Lucky Ones, Ford said, “Wow, that was great. What would you like to do next? How do we top this?” and I said, “Well, I’ve always wanted to make a feature film. Why don’t we go shoot a feature film and you put a little of your money in, we’ll put a little of our money in, and we’ll let you guys show a trailer or snippets of it online before it comes out.” I never thought they would say yes, but they did. So we did that, and the website was very successful. It had a huge online audience and fan base. While that was going on, we were cutting the feature. At that point, there was a buzz about things. Then we started to submit to film festivals and really didn’t know what the reaction would be. We have been really lucky, or blessed or something… its had a great festival life.

So you threw out the idea of doing a feature just to see if they’d go for it?

Yeah. When someone opens the door for something like this you better run through it, because it’s a really rare opportunity... Our client was a really smart woman named Linda Perry-Lube and her boss, who was the head of Lincoln Mercury marketing at the time, was a man named Darryl Hazel. Each of them had real vision. They trusted us, and really wanted to support something bigger. Interestingly enough, right after we shot this, both of them moved to different jobs within Ford. Suddenly we had brand new clients who suddenly were looking at this wacky weird feature film they did not authorize. So they looked at it and said, “What do we do with this thing!” I think in retrospect, it was a blessing in disguise, because they were less interested in it as a vehicle for them, which meant that we could spend more time on making the feature. But it still had a phenomenal following on the web. Hundreds of thousands of people saw it – we had some passionate fans.

Let’s talk about the cast of Lovely by Surprise. They delivered some great performances! How did you find them?

The casting director was Will Cantler at Bernard Telsey Casting Associates. We chose them because they had a strong theater background; they were connected to the theater community and connected to what I believe are some of the really great New York actors. They’re really respected as a place that understands what it means to be a trained actor, and not just a talking model. I would say, in my mind they are the best in New York at knowing that community of artists. They know authenticity, and individuality. That is a special skill. I think casting this film must have been torture for Will because he kept putting great people in front of me, and I kept saying no. But we solved it together. He kept listening to find out what I was after, and I owe him a great deal for that commitment. We had to find the right people. I wanted them to be New York actors, and I was stuck on finding the right ones.

When the scripts went out, we had a few actors who were “known” and their agents said, “My client wants to do this,” and we’d say, “Well, great. Can they come in and read for us?” The answer was usually, no. It was essential that we saw people read together… saw the relationships. So maybe that makes the film less marketable, but it makes it a better film. The film is what it is because of the actors. You see the texture of the people that are in the story and they’re really real… Reg Rogers plays a man with a broken heart because he feels like he is a man with a broken heart and there’s really a substance and texture to him because he has lived a rich life – and a rich life doesn’t mean a perfect life, it means a real life – one with hard moments… decisions, sacrifices. I think he gives an amazing performance in this film. Michael Chernus as Humpkin is really great. This role was almost impossible to cast, but Michael delivers an innocence and vulnerability that is clean, and honest. That is one of the hardest things to do as an actor – to just be open to the moment. Austin Pendleton you know has been in (I don’t know) over a hundred films – Catch-22, What’s Up Doc?, The Muppet Movie – He’s an actor, a director, a playwright. I don’t think enough people understand his contribution to theater and film. He just wrote a wonderful play about the life of Orson Welles. He was actually one of my first mentors and a director who cast me in my first professional role – when I was an actor. So having him come back and be a part of our family was really important to me, and of course he is great in the film. Kate Burton who’s on Grey’s Anatomy – is another ambassador of the new York acting community. They call her the mayor of New York theater because she’s so loved among the theatrical community and just a real gracious wonderful person. She is only in the film for a few minutes, but everyone loves and remembers her performance.

Pretty much everybody in this film at some point… stopped in the audition and said, “Before I go, I want to tell you that I want this role,” and that’s something you just don’t normally do in an audition. These are people that had just blown me away in the audition and they stopped and said, “I love this script and I want to be a part of this.” So we really went down there with a family environment and a real passion and I think that comes across in what they give on film.

Carrie was awesome too. She gets that “quirky creative person whose really into her idea” thing across really well.

It’s probably the hardest role in the film because her character is constantly walking a line between making the right choice and making the wrong choice. She’s on a journey to heal and rectify herself against her past. She’s doing a lot of things, but it’s a role where the action is going on in her mind more than it’s going on in life. So it’s less of a kinetic thing – it’s very hard to play and she really does an amazing job with that. Carrie is a brilliant woman. So, before we even began, she would point out how hard the material was. But she didn’t back away from it, or ask for changes. I think she just wanted me to recognize the risk she was taking.

One of the great scenes for Reg Rogers was when he was in the car with Mimi and trying to talk with her. He’s trying really hard to be upbeat but it’s obvious that something happened to them. And then with Carrie, when she’s in her bedroom on the phone talking to her Dad and she breaks down – all in one shot.

Well you bring up two scenes that when I wrote the script – I had two friends who are Hollywood screenwriters who said, “Look, here are the two scenes, that have to go.” One of the scenes is the one when the father drops off his (six year old) daughter and tells her walk home on your own. My friend said, “look the audience will never forgive this character and they’ll never follow him again once he let’s go of his daughter like that. That's unforgivable…” But I said this is the core of the film, when someone has a broken heart – well that is specific. They call it broken for a reason. The term is not partially functioning heart- it’s broken and he’s broken – he doesn’t know how to communicate, what to communicate about, how to connect or which actions are appropriate. It’s not that he doesn’t love his daughter, it’s not that he doesn’t want to connect with her, it’s that he doesn’t know how. If we cut out that scene, we cut out the heart of the movie.

Then the second scene was the scene where Marion (Carrie’s character) is on the phone with her (dead) father and one of my screenwriter friends said, “Wow, she’s lost it there. If we think she’s crazy, maybe we can’t accept her truth as truth at all”. But of course that was just the intention, to question what is real. My friend also said “ you’re letting the character walk so close to insanity that you might tune them (the audience) out.” But the testament to what Carrie does is that she walks that line. When she’s (Carrie) losing it, she gets so close to that line of going so crazy that you don’t know how to connect with her, but I think the audience does stay with her, but she is committed to the scene as a real moment, and not a “crazy” moment. I think we shot only three takes of that because you have to play a lot of different levels in that scene- and get it all in one shot. So we did it three times. At the end of those three – I knew we had gotten it. To be fair I knew we had it on the second take – but made a typical director mistake and said, “that was amazing. Let’s do another one.”… she was so emotionally exhausted she wasn’t capable of another one. Its funny, I knew the second take was the one, but there is a part of you that just wants to watch it in person one more time because its so fleeting.

That’s got to be a showcase scene for Carrie.

Yeah absolutely. It’s important to note that either of these scenes could have gone the other way. Both scenes were risky for the actors. So much right now in filmmaking, the business part of it, is about removing the risks to protect everyone. To protect the actor’s image, the investors money, the director’s career; and that makes for a very unexciting film. If you plug in a proven formula and are use the proven formula actors, you’re going to get something that’s very predictable. Very often things are what they are because of what they’re not. So we made a decision about what this film was not going to be. We wanted to take those risks and we wanted to do those things that people said don’t do because that makes this identifiable as it’s own thing. That makes it defined as something different. I know that this art form has to be balanced against some business realities in order for a film to get seen, but I still think it’s a fight worth having.

Were those scenes the most challenging aspects of the film for you? Or was there something else in production that was more challenging?

The thing I thought was hard going in, was getting these two characters on a boat in the middle of a field – they’re in a fictional world, they’re not real, they’re not completely written – so they are not supposed to be completely formed as fictional characters. This was sort of an impossible thing to ask to actors to do. It was a feat for me too, I think – making people ok with investing their reality and who they are when that reality is so strange – a couple guys in their underwear, on a boat in the middle of a field – It was a huge hurdle. To me that was a ten in degree of difficulty (to make it)… and to ask an audience to follow it. You’re asking people to believe in something that’s not real just by going to a film, then you ask them to put another layer on that and then there’s another unreal thing on top of the unreal thing! It gets hard.

And then definitely those two scenes we talked about: where people have to walk a line where their struggling against an unseen conflict, struggling against insanity, struggling against a broken heart, struggling to keep themselves together while they pursue what they’re pursuing. Those are always the most dangerous scenes because the easy thing for the actor to do is to pity themselves, or to cry, or to break up, or to be self-indulgent. Both of these actors really take a different tack, which is they struggle through it and you see the temptation, you see them almost falling into that place where they fall apart, but they – like human beings do – go through it and keep going. I think those were two of the most difficult scenes to pull off.

Obviously there are other things that were technically difficult. You know like some of the stunts, people drowning in pools and leaping off of things and flying through the air, crashing and flipping trucks, things like that… but it’s a lot harder to get a difficult acting moment then it is to flip a truck.

Was there anything about the writing process that was a bit difficult for you, despite your background in theater?

This was very difficult to write because there were three stories, and each of them is constantly attached to each other. So if something happens in this reality… it is attached by a string to the other two realities – and vice versa. They all have to move and affect each other. There’d be times where I would be just absolutely stuck – which is interesting because it’s a story about someone being stuck in their writing process – and I would have to tell myself that I have to get out of the room. I had to get out of my writing environment, and go walk until my brain could solve it. Sometimes I would walk for ten minutes. Then there were a couple of times where I walked for four or five hours. I was writing in New York, so walking for four hours in the winter was its own challenge… but sometimes you just have to get out of the writing problem by leaving the physical situation you’re in long enough that your subconscious kicks in and starts to solve it for you. That’s when the best stuff comes – when you let down your guard and the subconscious mind comes in and rescues the story.

How did fundraising go for you?

We were backed by our advertising client, and then we put in money of our own. Really outside of that – outside of their money and our money, we really didn’t go out and seek other financing. There was some in kind financing and sweat equity, but we didn’t really have to chase money. So it was sort of the ultimate situation in that, we had complete creative control to do the right thing. Instead of looking at this as a marketing vehicle and saying what star equals what marketing success. We could just say, “Who’s the best for the role?” That was a great freedom to have.

The music was really great in the film. Have you worked with Shelby Bryant before?

I’ve known Shelby for awhile, but this is the first time I had worked with him. He’s a Memphis musician and composer who now lives in South Korea. He did an album a few years back called Cloud-Wow Music, which is a really wonderful album. Lots of the Humpkin and Mopekey world, the fictional world, is scored with Shelby Bryant’s stuff. None of the pieces were composed for this film, but he had over a hundred songs that we could go through and look at to see what fits. A lot of his music sounds like children playing – it’s a bouncy, strange, ethereal kids world, which fit with what the fictional world is supposed to be.

Then for the relationship between Marian and Jackson, I wanted it to be more sophisticated. So there’s a jazz composer named Rob Wagner – a New Orleans guy who I think is probably one of the best sax players out there, and just an amazing composer who really has an innovative streak. He has very interesting ideas about melody and structure- some competing time signatures. There is usually some melodic hook in his songs, but also some tension. We used a lot of his stuff for the Marian and Jackson scenes, and it works because their relationship has the same tension between harmony and discord.

Stephin Merritt has also been a great friend to our projects. We used a lot of his music in places where the worlds (fictional, past and present) started to touch each other. It became this sort of this mood music – connective tissue – between scenes. His stuff is very funny while also being very somber and sad which kind of fits the over-all theme of the film.

Then another friend of mine Kelly Demartino, a couple of her songs are in here as well. They sort of fit into the areas that are a little more about heartbreak, or a little bit more about romantic change or moments of loss. The music is very eclectic but… it seems to be the thing that a lot of people stop and say, “Wow, I’ve never heard any of that music anywhere else but this film, but I love it and I want all of it. How do I get that music!”

So there’s going to be a soundtrack!

Yeah exactly! The soundtrack may sell before the film.

What kinds of things influence you as a filmmaker or even just as a creative person?

While I was writing, I tried to create a working environment that made me feel connected to the writing. This way I could get back into the writing just by entering the work environment. I really believe in music, mood and environment. I am easily distracted. So I need to create a workspace that is jut about work. A lot of the time that I was working on this – I was listening to music that we ended up using in the film. I built a musical catalog for the things that I wanted to listen to while I was writing certain things. So I listened to music to drive those things.

People keep trying to pin down my influences, and they seem to gravitate toward certain filmmakers, but I think this film comes more from influences outside of film. I am a very big fan of Shakespeare, Chekhov, and Sam Shepard all for very different reasons. Oddly there is some Chekhov in this film – people who say one thing and do another, or say one thing, and do nothing… And my friends say that there is Shepard in this film. I don’t what specific area of the film they are talking about, but I am sure its true. I love Sam Shepard’s ability to build a surrealistic world that is made to affect your perception of reality. [He] gets you emotionally attached to something by making an image or an idea seem familiar, and then he distorts that reality into something not familiar at all. You go along for a dangerous ride, because it was safe at the beginning.

In film, I really like a different types of films for different reasons. My favorite film is Godard’s Contempt. But again, I like different filmmakers for different reasons Godard for breaking rules, Cassavettes for emotional truth, Orson Welles, David Lynch, Woody Allen, Bergman – I guess its hard to find a pattern there, but those are probably [my] favorites.

Did you use those influences when you began working with your set designer? There were some really great sets!

The production designer, Timothy Whidbee, really did some good work on the film. I think he is more of a student of the script than anyone else involved. He really knew the material backwards and forwards and could justify every choice he made. We interviewed a lot of other production designers and… There was also something that influenced me that I didn’t mention before which is, being from Memphis, I have some real affinity for (William) Eggleston’s photography. He creates some really lonely, sparse images – even if it’s a picture of a radiator or a car or some other object – or whatever it is – he can say so much emotionally- with such simple subjects… there’s an emotional desperation in his photos. I wanted to capture that somehow in the film – with simple objects properly placed, people left alone on the road, trees without leaves.

So when I was talking to production designers, I had different ones look through the script and when Timothy came in he brought in two William Eggelston books and he said, “I think this film should look like these photographs.” So he and I immediately hit it off.

Timothy obviously did an amazing job with making the worlds touch each other in a delicate but meaningful way. There’s a little boat in Mimi’s room that she sits in as her witness stand, there are tinker toys on the wall that are also on the wall in the boat, a lamp from the boat shows up in the house, and things like that… People who have seen the film five and six times literally have an epiphany and say, “Wait – that’s the lamp from the boat.” Since the fiction is in her mind, it’s reasonable for her fiction to include some real artifacts from her past. Again – it may only work subliminally, but it has an affect nonetheless.

Then Steve Yedlin, who’s the cinematographer – he also shot Brick and Conversations with Other Women – [he’s] a real phenomenal cinematographer and he and I immediately developed a shorthand language together. He came into the project very late, and we had to solve many problems very quickly. The first-time we talked, we knew exactly what we wanted to make and we storyboarded this in a couple of days. I think my relationship with Steve is one of the most important artistic relationships I have made in a long time. We just understand how to get something done together using very few words. That is really rare.

What kind of advice would you give to any new filmmakers out there?

A couple of different things. One is if you have a belief that you’ll do something and you have the will to do it, you’ll ultimately do it. For me it happened later in life than I thought it was going to happen, but it’s never letting go of that kernel or the belief that you’re going to do this thing, no matter what. For me that meant changing careers, being in different cities, facing all kinds of challenges – until the door opened… So you have to wait for the door to open, you have to know that it’s going to open, and you have to be ready to run through it when it opens.

The other thing is that I think it’s important to know the discipline of storytelling and know the rules – so you know which rules you want to break. I mean, I think it’s very rare that somebody just instinctively knows how to create structure and how to be a great writer. At the beginning of my life I was very resistant to learning the classics, learning structure and understanding rhythms, language and dialogue… It’s been great to have spent a lot of time watching the great filmmakers, getting to work with great playwrights and great directors, seeing them work and learning those things so that I could decide which of those things I did not want to do, and which of those things I did want to do.

Just don’t let go of what you want to do and who you are. Don’t sell that. A lot of people work just to work, they chase the opportunities because they are there, but don’t hang on to themselves. I think it’s important to keep the core of who you are as you go through these things. There are lots of places in this film where people told me the list of things I couldn’t do in the film. I knew which of those things I wanted to do and it didn’t matter if someone told me… that’s not how you do this. It was ok, because I knew why I wanted to do it, and I accepted the risk. When you own the choices you make, and own the risk, then its really your work.