PART 2 OF 3
What do you think of
writing versus directing? Is directing more challenging?
Elizabeth Schroeder
Covington, Kentucky
TIM McCANLIES:
Well, it is. Well, they're both challenges in their own way. And of course writing was the challenge whose rules I had learned over the years. Directing, because I was a new guy, there was so many new challenges. It's pretty scary and yet at the same time I had I kind of done many of these things in one or another [way]. I had worked as an actor, I had been on a lot of sets. So I had kind of done a lot of the pieces in way. Putting it all together for the first time was pretty interesting, plus the hours are so demanding.Probably the toughest thing, I guess, is that you're the only and final authority for pretty much everything that matters. I was not only the writer and director but I was the resident Texas authority with costumes and all that kind of stuff. Just having to answer so many questions a day -- that's kind of the cliché of what being a director is, but it's really true. You really have to know what you want or your just going to be buried by questions.
Were there any other
directors that you were influenced by?
Noah White
Myrtle Beach, South Carolina
TIM McCANLIES:
Oh, sure. From going back to people like John Ford and Frank Capra and Preston Sturges, Ernst Lubitsch on up through... there's a lot of people today.There's also writers that have influenced me. You know, from Mark Twain to Dickens to people like Garrison Keillor today. Garrison Keillor is really one of my heroes these days as far as the kind of things he does that are so about people and about problems that are just on a human scale. You know, so many movies that are being made now are about having to defuse a nuclear bomb in Manhattan kind of thing. That's not something I can personally identify with.
That's why I enjoy the smaller, more human scale kind of dramas that are really about people. And not Jerry Springer concepts either. There's so many TV movies that are about adultery and one thing or another. In my life, little things loom large. And that seems very human to me and I haven't seen those movies before. Ultimately I think what I want to do is write and direct movies I haven't seen before. And of course sometimes doing that, you're trying to swim upstream in Hollywood. But so be it.
Would you ever direct a
movie you didn't write?
Gabby Guthrie
Uttica, New York
TIM McCANLIES:
I don't know. I have sort of a peculiar point of view and if a script came along that felt like it was my kind of thing, that would be great. I don't expect to happen, I could be wrong. I mean there are certain authors, again like Garrison Keillor and Ann Tyler people like that, who I think have similar sensibilities. So it's possible. Right now I'm pretty low in the director food chain in Hollywood and all the good scripts get snapped up long before they would make their way down to me. I think I would have to write my own, at least for the time being.
How much of the
Dancer, Texas story is drawn from personal
experiences?
Mariah Astley
Ann Arbor, Michigan
TIM McCANLIES:
Somewhat. I mean, I went to high school in Bryan, Texas which wasn't as small as 81 people but it sure felt small going to school there. And I was always the one who wanted to go out to the bright lights, big city. And kind of always pushing that on to friends and wanted to come to. It seemed like I was always ended up leaving alone. That was sort of my story not only in high school but in college.
INTERVIEWER:
Was one of the characters created in your
image?
TIM McCANLIES:
Yeah, Keller is sort of close to me. He's the kind of short, funny, sort of center of everything kind of kid.
INTERVIEWER:
So do you want to get out of Texas now?
TIM McCANLIES:
No, actually... It's sort of funny, it's such a young man's decision, in a way, to go out of the small town and into the big city. And now that I'm in my forties, I should say, you tend to look at things differently. I moved back to Texas about 8-10 years ago looking for the quiet. I had been to the noisy city. I had lived out in L.A. for ten years and so suddenly Texas and small towns seemed pretty good.And now I live in a town that's not even as big as Dancer, Texas. I live in a town that's hardly on a map. Pretty much out in the country, about 40 miles outside of Austin. There's a lot of reasons for that. One, I'm a writer and mostly I can live here and work in Hollywood, which is great. And it's great to be able to go off and live in the woods and write.
I think it's sort of an old man's/young man's thing. I think that's a pretty much universal human thing. At a certain age you start looking back to your youth and you start wanting... The things that were appealing to you as a kid in your teens, when you're in your 30s and 40s, after you've experienced them, maybe you want to go back to someplace that's quiet.