Q: "WAKE" DEFINITELY HAS A LITERARY FEELING, A FEELING OF A WELL-CRAFTED PLAY. YOU MENTION PLAYWRIGHTS THAT HAVE INFLUENCED YOU OVER THE YEARS: SHEPARD, ALBEE, O’NEILL, WHO ARE SIMILAR IN THE THEMES AND TONE IN WHICH THEY WRITE. WHY DOES THEIR WORK RESONATE WITH YOU?

Henry LeRoy Finch ("Roy"): I think they were dealing with themes that have always interested me, the way families interact, how people are bound by common memories, even when each person in the family remembers things differently. Playwrights like these know that a family member can push your buttons with just one phrase. These writers don’t base everything on exposition; even if an event or a trauma is referred to, it isn’t spelled out. The audience has to figure out what they are referring to and what it means to the characters.

Susan Landau Finch (“Susie”): Both Roy and I come from literary families. Roy’s dad was a professor of philosophy, his mother is a poet, and my parents, of course, were very involved in theater. I fell in love with theater at around thirteen when my family moved to London and there was so much great theatre. I met Roy working on a Beckett play on the East Coast. When Roy was writing “WAKE,” we talked about how you would write a screenplay that felt like a play that was performance-driven.

Roy: Speaking of my dad, he had the most amazing library, well, in fact the books were literally all over the house as we had floor-to-ceiling bookcases in every room. So I grew up surrounded by about fifteen to twenty-thousand books, including rare books, first editions…there would be whole sections on Beckett and so on.


Q: FAMILY DRAMAS INDEED PROVIDE PLENTY OF RAW MATERIAL FOR STORIES. WHAT LED YOU TO CREATE A FAMILY OF FOUR BROTHERS?

Susie: (laughing) Well, Roy has four sisters…

Roy: Right, I didn’t have any brothers. But my mother and father each have all brothers, so I did grow up with lots of uncles. Some of my mom’s brothers were very colorful, sort of creative, eccentric types and some of “WAKE” is very loosely based on what I imagine they might have been like in their younger days. I do have friends from being in bands for many years, and in the music business, who really are like brothers to me – and so I have my observations on the way "brothers" interact from those relationships.

Another reason I wanted to write about brothers was that I’m very interested in families; I’ve written three related screenplays: "Sleepwalking", which will star Martin Landau and which focuses primarily on a father and son, another called "The Drowning Room", about two sisters, and then "WAKE" which explores brotherly interactions. They’re not necessarily interconnected character-wise, but each examines family from a different vantage-point. I think of the three screenplays as a loose trilogy.


Q: HOW DID YOU APPROACH PRESENTING THE WAY MEN IN A FAMILY COMMUNICATE WITH EACH OTHER? CERTAINLY DIFFERENT FROM THE WAY WOMEN AND MEN COMMUNICATE, OR FROM THE WAY WOMEN COMMUNICATE WITH EACH OTHER…

Roy: Absolutely. It takes almost the entire movie for Kyle to look Ray in the eye and say, "I was proud of you…" when he [Ray] stood up for them against the father. And brothers – men, generally – tend to talk around their deeper feelings or to act out in strange ways instead of confronting the emotional reality of what’s happening. So of course these guys have to raise hell and start drinking under the same roof where their mother is dying.

Naturally, I wrote and developed the characters with this in mind. As for my approach as a writer to the brothers’ interactions, though, I really just like to put the characters in a room and watch them interact. The director is really more of a facilitator.


Q: YOU ORIGINALLY THOUGHT TO SET "WAKE" IN MEXICO. WHAT PROMPTED YOU TO CHANGE THE SETTING TO MAINE?

Roy: A combination of factors, really. Actually, it was more the concept of basing a story around a particular house and the memories it might contain. Susie and I had been on vacation in a house down in Baja, sort of this giant party house, with decaying ‘60s-era décor, and I just had this idea to center a screenplay around the place, with the house almost as one of the characters. Much later, we were in Maine, where I’d spent summers growing up, and were struck by this rustic, historic home, built in 1745. It seemed to lend itself even more to this idea of a place itself leading to the story, and we shifted the project to Maine.
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Q: IS THE STORY PARTICULAR TO THE ERA? ARE THESE BROTHERS PARTICULARLY ROOTED IN THE PLACE WHERE THEY COME FROM?

Roy: Actually, I was conscious of not making it too tied to a particular time or place. I wanted to create an "American family". It could be almost anywhere, any time post-World War II. I wanted the story to be more universal.


Q: HOW ABOUT THE CASTING PROCESS – ALWAYS AN INTERESTING JOURNEY FROM DESCRIPTIONS ON PAPER TO THE REAL-LIFE ENSEMBLE.

Susie: It was a mix of actors we were familiar with, as well as, seeing a lot of people in both L.A. and Maine. Roy wrote Kyle for Gale. We knew he would shine in the intense character arc that the role demands. Dusty and Rainer were perfect counterpoints as one is more savvy, the other more wide-eyed. John Philbrick was amazing, a real find who the Maine casting consultant brought in originally for another role. Dihlon had done a reading for us on another script and I knew his work from the San Francisco theatre. We met Blake through Dihlon and we asked him to read Raymond for a reading. He was perfect, as if it was written for him. It’s liberating to be free from the strictures of a studio when you’re casting, for instance when we knew in the audition that we wanted a particular actor and didn’t have to ask anyone except ourselves.


Q: WHAT ABOUT CASTING MARTIN LANDAU? OF COURSE, HE IS YOUR FATHER-IN-LAW, BUT DID YOU SEE HIM IN A DIFFERENT LIGHT WHILE WORKING TOGETHER?

Roy: That transpired in a roundabout way. He had committed to doing my other script, "Sleepwalking, and came to the reading of “WAKE” to observe and to support us. At the end of the reading, our executive producer Michael Donaldson asked Martin to play the role.

It is unbelievable to watch him work. Every fiber of his being is so focused; there’s such a transformation that happens as he becomes the character. He gives these very subtle variations in his performance; he doesn’t need a lot from a director, which made my job very easy.


Q: SUSIE, YOU HAVE WORKED WITH YOUR FATHER JUST ONCE BEFORE. WHAT DID YOU LEARN ABOUT HIM ON "WAKE"?

Susie: He’s just so present, he’s learned to truly "be" in each moment. He stayed and watched the other actors, watched Roy direct. I worried at first that some of the actors might be intimidated, but he was a very supportive presence. They all enjoyed talking with him.


Q: WHY DID YOU TAKE THE DIGITAL ROUTE?

Roy: It was initially a financial choice and control choice: not only is shooting in digital cheaper, it’s streamlined as you don’t have to wait for dailies, and you can edit on Final Cut Pro right out of the camera. Digital affords filmmakers an access or an on-set vibe that 35 MM doesn’t. Since we had selected a location - the house - that offered a limited area in which to shoot, it was helpful to not have huge equipment around. The digital format also allows you to be more intimate, more "lean and mean" in your shooting style with the actors. But you have to realize that we still had a lot of set-ups, particularly with lighting. [Director of photography] Patrick Kelly and I came up with different palettes for the main action of the film, with the brothers in the living room – a burnished, "whisky and nicotine" palette – contrasted with the ice-blue of the mother’s room, where life is ebbing away.

Susie: I was also thinking about the looming actors’ strike (that never happened – knock wood), and knew that digital would allow us to shoot more quickly. But basically, I trusted Roy as the filmmaker on this because he understands the medium, its limitations, and therefore the freedom it offers. It’s much easier to follow the choreography of certain scenes with a smaller camera, like the scene where you get into Kyle’s head. Roy had said he wanted to get intense with the camera as if it were another character right there alongside the actors. As a producer, I have it to admit it was freeing to not be dealing with lots of trucks every day.


Q: IT’S A REAL COUP TO HAVE SOMEONE LIKE [NPR/KCRW-MUSICAL DIRECTOR] NIC HARCOURT AS MUSIC SUPERVISOR. HOW DID HE GET INVOLVED?

Susie: We’ve known Nic around four years, since he began hosting “Morning Becomes Eclectic” on KCRW (in Los Angeles). We met through Jamie Finegan, a musician friend of Roy’s. Nic ventured into music supervision and had agreed to do "Sleepwalking". We showed him “WAKE,” and he brought us Ramsay Midwood, an artist he’s credited with "breaking" on radio.


Q: THE MUSIC IS A KIND OF SAMPLING OF AMERICANA, FROM BLUES TO ROCK TO FUNK AND SOME MORE COUNTRY IN FEEL. IS THAT BY DESIGN?

Roy: Yes, that’s exactly the flavor we had hoped for, and that’s why Ramsay is a perfect fit for the project. His music is an interesting amalgam of different sources: folk, country, blues, and very American overall. Then we’ve also got my co-composer Chris Anderson, who was a real godsend. He’s been working a lot in Hollywood and is keenly sensitive to the emotion or subtext in a scene.


Q: CAN YOU ELABORATE ON MEMORY AND PERCEPTION IN THE FILM?

Roy: The nature of storytelling is in itself somehow artificial. What we experience is different from what we remember, what we perceive. You and I can experience the same thing, but our recollections are very different. This is a kind of through-line in the film.

The trauma the brothers were subjected to, or that they subjected each other to. It’s a familiar pattern; in families where the father is abusive and alcoholic, he tends to pass this on to his sons.


Q: ACTOR BLAKE GIBBONS, WHO PLAYS RAYMOND, HAD MENTIONED IT WOULD BE HELPFUL TO KNOW WHAT IT WAS LIKE TO SPEND A NIGHT IN PRISON AS BACKGROUND FOR HIS CHARACTER. THEN AS A "PRACTICAL JOKE" YOU ACTUALLY HAD HIM KIDNAPPED AND LOCKED UP? WHOSE IDEA WAS THAT?

Roy: (laughing) Well, Blake said he wanted something to draw on, so we…provided that. Our security chief, Shane McKenna, arranged everything, down to full, SWAT team dress, bullet proof vests and black masks for the guys that "kidnapped" Blake. They ambushed him at his cottage and took him to this old building that had been converted into a gym and threw him in a room with a mattress on the floor and nothing but an army blanket to keep warm. It was very intense, to say the least. But later, Blake actually thanked me for the opportunity of working on his character – that’s just the kind of actor he is, and the kind of person he is.


Q: DID YOU USE IMPROVISATIONAL TECHINQUES WITH YOUR ACTORS IN DEVELOPING THE CHARACTERS AND STORY?

Roy: We did, but again, more as background for their characters. We also did two long, unscripted scenes where the brothers re-enacted their past. We were striving for some element of chaos at times, like in the shack scenes, so there is a more subjective mood to them.

Susie: Roy also took acting classes while he was preparing, something my mother, Barbara Bain, and others had suggested, so he could understand where the actors were coming from. I really felt like that showed an even deeper commitment to them, and he was able to access his own emotionality. Although he was a first time director, I was really struck by Roy’s ability to get raw, whole performances from the cast. They trusted him.


Q: WHAT WERE SOME OF THE CHALLENGES IN WORKING IN THIS TIME FRAME ON SUCH A PERFORMANCE-DRIVEN PIECE?

Susie: I would say we were most influenced by Francis Coppola, whom we worked for at American Zoetrope: "Make the most of what you’ve got!" It goes back to that ethic from seventies movie-making or even the theater, where you realize you don’t need what you don’t have. Roy figured out how to create something with very little, and was more of an advocate for taking the risk, for going forward. I was more cautious, but followed his lead. We honored my mentor, producer Fred Roos’ philosophy on casting, how elemental it is – that if you cast the right people, the rest will follow suit.

Roy: Also, it’s one thing to inspire a group of people to go off to the countryside and make a movie together, on limited resources, but hey, they like the script and the characters, and we’ve got this amazing chef doing the catering, kind of like a working vacation. But post [-production] is another matter; it’s a lot harder, more grueling, and less glamorous. Each of us – a four-person team, really – was doing five or six jobs each.


Q: IT MUST BE A CHALLENGE WORKING ON A FILM AS DIRECTOR AND PRODUCER, BUT ALSO BEING HUSBAND AND WIFE…

Roy: It was surprisingly relaxed. Of course, we were working along different avenues, director and producer, so we weren’t constantly together every second. Susie complements my efforts, I see her as making the film stronger by what she does.

Susie: Roy has this unique ability that I sensed, even in pre-production, of being open to contributions from the cast and crew, but simultaneously maintaining his own vision throughout. He’s very open.

I think also that literally being family – Roy, me, my father, Margaret (Roy’s mother), - and knowing some of the cast before instilled a mood of trust. Maine is a place that Roy has always gone back to explore and to create, but this time he was inviting everyone along with him to collaborate. Yes, Roy and I are husband and wife, but beyond that, we all, cast and crew, became extended family.