Dare: A Conversation with David Brind and Adam Salky
Nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival, Dare thankfully is the anti-High School Musical. Well-written and respectful towards its teenage characters’ inner lives, the film stars Emily Rossum (Phantom of the Opera), Ashley Springer (Teeth), and Zach Gilford (Friday Night Lights) as a trio of prep school teens who upon the verge of graduation, become intertwined both emotionally and sexually via a triptych of mini-stories, one focused on each main character so as to explore the world through their individual perspectives. IFQ spoke with the film’s screenwriter/producer David Brind and director Adam Salky about the film, which originally began as a short film the pair worked on in college.
IFQ: One thing I noticed early on is the film’s structure in terms of how it is segmented via the individual characters and examines them carefully despite interplay between all of them in each act. How did you come upon that specific structure story-wise & how was it handled in terms of the shoot, especially since each section has a very specific look?
David Brind: Part of the goal in the screenplay was to show these archetypal teenage high school characters that we’re familiar with from other movies you know, i.e. Alexa (Emily Rossum) the good girl, Ben (Ashley Springer) the outsider, Johnny (Zach Gilford) the bad boy, start them off really familiarly and then slowly unmask them and psychologically strip them down. One of the ways I wanted to do that was to follow each of the characters in their own world so that we see how they perceive this prep school world and one another in their own acts and then how they are perceived by the other two main characters in the other acts. So it was definitely a challenge in writing it, because a traditional screenplay has three acts, a beginning, middle, and end. But in this case I had to approach it both as one entire entity, which I tried really hard to do, and yet create three separate mini-stories that each had their own beginning, middle, and end. The most interesting part about it was we see Alexa first, played by Emmy Rossum, in her world and get a real sense of who she is; but yet how she appears in Johnny’s world at the end through his eyes is very different. It doesn’t mean that she has suddenly become a different person; it’s that we are now looking at her through someone else’s eyes. I don’t think we are ever who think we are, how we want to be perceived or how we think we are coming off versus how other people perceive us. I think that is an important lesson in coming of age and one that continues into adulthood.
Adam Salky: I had never seen a screenplay that was structured the way in which David wrote Dare; I thought it was very exciting and a unique opportunity to show a broad range of adolescent experience. We have one character that is straight, one who is gay, and one character whose sexuality is fluid. And because the film is told in a triptych style, we basically get to experience the world through each of the characters’ eyes. That was exciting to me and provided an opportunity to touch a lot of different people with the story. As far as visually, to me the story was in so many ways about these characters’ maturing, taking their first big risk in life, and figuring out whom they are and who they are not. Along the way they learn about themselves and start that process of transitioning into adulthood. So with the visual style I started to seek out and look for a style that would also adhere to this idea of maturity. The beginning of the film starts in a very bright world, in some ways innocent and reminiscent of a Hollywood high school film in the way in which it’s shot and the type of camera used. But by the time we get to the end of the film, the images have gotten considerably darker and much more ‘real’. I think the end of the film is much closer to realism and as such is shot in a documentary style. So the idea was to transition, to visually progress from that young, innocent world to something that was much more realistic.
IFQ: The film takes a nuanced look at sexuality that feels well-balanced in that it takes into account the psychological urge in addition to the purely physical and how both can easily be confused with one another, especially at that age as you’re trying to sort out some sense of identity. I’m curious to know what the writing process was like in trying to add all those layers to come to a portrait that’s honest without being kitschy or exploitive.
DB: That was definitely also my intention, I wanted to portray sexuality in the screenplay in a very straightforward way; so that the sexual exploits and drives of the characters come in their dramatic and emotional arcs and not presented as an issue to be hit over the head for the intention of being provocative. I wanted to approach each of their sexualities in a different way. I don’t necessarily think Alexa is ready for these sexual exploits that she undertakes emotionally. I think that she is extraordinarily ambitious and calculated so that when Alan Cumming’s character (as a sort of semi-famous actor who comes back as an alum of her school to give her some advice) tells her to go after something and do something she’s afraid of, she takes the advice a little too literally and pursues it with a vengeance. I don’t think she’s ready for sex; she gets very caught up in the power that she feels. As she’s having sex with Johnny, she sees him all of a sudden washed out and deluded by sex and he is powerless which is flooring to her but she’s not ready for it. And it certainly doesn’t happen organically because she really wants to have sex with this guy, she feels like that’s what she has to do to get what she wants and be what she wants.
Whereas for Ben, it comes in a more natural way; he has been fighting his sexuality for a long time, fighting his own desires and drives and when he sees his friend suddenly jump from zero to sixty in terms of her own sexuality and experiences, he is both angry about it and inspired to take a chance himself. I think for Ben, sex is the most about sex; he really does want Johnny sexually, he desires him, he may have feelings that are romantic but in the end his drive is a sexual one. Not because he’s gay but because he’s ready to explore at that point in his life. I really didn’t want Ben, the gay character, to be separated out; I wanted him to be shown in tandem with these other two journeys, the emotions behind what they do, sexually and not, are the same even though their journeys are different. And for Johnny, I think it’s the least about sex. Johnny wants so much to be wanted and feel connected, to feel a part of something and find a self-created family that he’s willing to make sex apart of that. He thinks that since he’s getting what he needs from Ben and Alexa that this is what they need in return, so he’s willing to give it to them but he’s not driven by it. I certainly don’t mean to define his sexuality in the film because I don’t think it’s about that for him, it’s more about a desire for connection and to be loved because he’s never felt that way before.
IFQ: That’s hinted at early on in Alexa’s story where when she finally throws herself at him, he asks her if she even likes him; foreshadowing his greater desire is more emotional in nature rather that just physical.
DB: It was definitely intended as a hint and foreshadowing what goes on in his head.
IFQ: Another great detail that clues you into Johnny’s head is his insistence to hang out with Ben’s parents and watch television with them, which Alexa and Ben can’t seemingly figure out why he would want to do so.
AS: Well with Alexa and Ben they come from families with parents that are much more present and at that moment in time they don’t understand what Johnny wants.
IFQ: In addition, the sex scenes themselves, while not very explicit in terms of skin, are raw and can be jarring to watch, I’m curious as to how you and the actors worked out those scenes in terms of blocking and being able to overcome any natural hesitation on their part to go for broke in those instances?
AS: Well, I think one of the things that I’ve learned over the course of making this film and others is that the audition process with actors is a very scary one for them. They’re basically called into this room and you’re very quickly trying to suss out whether or not they’re right for the role, but once you cast an actor I find that the tables are turned and they’re actually auditioning you. I think that I basically strive to be as prepared as I possibly can be and as collaborative as I can be so when that time comes, the actors feel that they are with someone who is taking the story very serious and is taking serious what they are being asked to do. I was actually very fortunate that we all had a great collaboration because they (the sex scenes) were going to be very involved. In fact, the sex scene between Emmy and Zach was 20 shots and an entire day of shooting. And I remember the 1st assistant director came up to me and said “Adam, you’re shooting this scene like an action scene” and I thought that was very funny; but there was a specific blocking to it and some very specific visual things I wanted done and it was just going to take that amount of time.
It was going to be very challenging and I was very fortunate in that Emmy, Zach, and Ashley came up to me and said “Look, we trust you and we want these scenes to be as honest and truthful as possible. So if you see something on that monitor or through that lens that doesn’t look right to you, please tell us and we will go the extra mile to make sure it looks real.” So really it was a testament to their commitment to the project and to the working relationship that we had together, which was very strong, that they were willing to be very trusting. Because I don’t think you could shoot those scenes if there isn’t a certain level of trust between the director and the actors. It wasn’t really about showing skin at all, but I have to say that watching those scenes with an audience is some of the most fun as a director because you can tell audiences are challenged by them and there’s a feeling in the theater of a nervous anxiety going on which is exciting and fun to watch.
IFQ: Originally, the film started off as a short and then grew from there, could you share what the original short focused on, the decision to expand it into a feature, and then the process of going about reworking the material?
AS: The short film was an end of the first year project at Columbia’s graduate film program, where David and I met. We made the short film together with the same relationship, me directing and David writing and producing; we had a great collaboration together and the short left you with this feeling of what happens next? Those two things were really driving factors and David also had some pieces of the story that he wanted to further develop. I think those three things were what really led to it becoming a feature. But the short film is essentially the pool scene. In it, there is a pool scene between Ben and Johnny where Ben takes his dare to try and connect with Johnny. Basically that pool scene with a slightly different beginning and ending was the short film.
DB: And in expanding it, I definitely didn’t want to retread the ground we had walked on in the short because we really loved the short and a certain audience really loved it and felt kind of thrilled and titillated by it. Certainly in a short you’re not really able to get too deep into a character’s head; you get touches of it, enough where people are intrigued and can fill in the gaps on their own but I was particularly interested in the psychological complexity of these characters, about what made them tick. So the pool scene in the short, it’s funny, is almost exactly the same as it is in the feature. But I had an interview recently with a gay journalist from a gay outlet who asked me why I had changed the two scenes in the writing of them which was interesting to me because I hadn’t for the most part. I wanted to stay faithful to what inspired this film and yet reframe it, recontextualize it, and build around it so that in the end, the same words can create a different meaning and context, obviously with different cast and all that. But the drive to make this film was to make a film about high school kids (and not only for them but they’re certainly apart of the audience we’re aiming for) that treated their characters as living, breathing, psychologically complex individuals who are figuring out who they are, have drives beyond just wanting to do their homework, fighting against mom, or going out and being cool. They have deeper emotional drives and reasons for why they are the way they are and I wanted to depict these characters in an honest way and not pander.
AS: Actually, I just wanted to say that one of the things that’s been interesting as we’ve been getting closer to the film coming out is we have a twitter account called @darethemovie, and every Friday we’ve been saying the tagline of the film which is “Do something you’re afraid of” on there. With our fans, it seems like that has really struck a chord with them as they have been writing back to us all these things like “I’m secretly in love with my best friend and I’m afraid to tell him but I’m going to” or “I’m going to walk out of my job today unless I get my raise”. I think it’s just something that our audience is connecting with.
IFQ: Finally, now that the film is being released and entering the big, wide world after you two have worked on it, from one incarnation to the next for a while now, how has it been letting it go and what are you both working on next or what kinds of projects would you like to pursue going forward?
DB: Well, it’s very full of mixed emotions; I think there’s a great release in letting go of it finally because it has been a really long journey obviously since the short. But even with the feature, I started writing it in the fall of 2004 and we shot it in the spring of 2008; we premiered it at Sundance this past January and have been traveling with it, promoting it and trying to share it with the world since then so there is a relief of moving on from it. But it’s also bittersweet because this has been our lives. We care so deeply about it, and you only have one first feature film and I think letting go of it is certainly difficult but I am most excited about sharing it with an audience at large, because that’s why you make film and why I wrote it; to have an emotional impact and affect people and let them feel something, whatever it is, that makes them feel real in general.
And as far as next, Adam and I, I think, would love to work together again and are looking for something to work on together. Obviously this has been so much of our lives so we haven’t had tons of time to create other material, but I’m working on a couple things. I’m working on a TV show for teens that plays with these types again of the jock, the bad girl, the loser, and has them coming together to shake things up in the social order in high school. I would love to adapt a book, especially a young adult book for film. I’d love to work on everything from a really small indie to a big studio film, in which I can still bring my own point of view and have it be commercial at the same time. So I’m very open and looking forward to both self-generated projects and ones that people will hopefully bring to me.
AS: I think I can say much more than David that the film coming out is filled with many mixed emotions and you know, Dare has been our baby and we’ve been incredibly fortunate experience both making it, getting to meet all of our wonderful cast and going to Sundance, we’ve just been so fortunate and had so much fun, we’re really excited for it to come out into the world and we hope that everyone will do something they’re afraid of and come see it on November 13th. As far as the next thing, I’m actually about to have my first experience pitching on a large movie that would be a studio movie and I’m also looking for something to do with David and writing a screenplay to direct now, a thriller based on a true family story and those are the things right now.
To learn more about the film, check out www.darethemovie.com
To reach the filmmakers via Twitter, go to www.twitter.com/darethemovie
*Photo Credits – Image Entertainment