INTERVIEW – D.B. SWEENEY

D.B. Sweeney has been around. With a prolific career that spans 25 years of movies and television, D.B. is a true fan favorite. He is probably most well known for his roles as the hockey player turned figure skater Doug Dorsey in 1992’s The Cutting Edge, and as Travis Walton in the true story Fire in the Sky, about a group of loggers who had an encounter with a UFO. Sweeney also played the nefarious multifaceted villain role of John Goetz in the cancelled but critically acclaimed and fan-loved television series, Jericho.

So now, after a quarter century of acting, D.B. Sweeney is releasing a new film on DVD September 14 called Two Tickets to Paradise, which he financed, co-wrote, produced, directed and starred in. Why so many hats? It seems there are some things you just have to do yourself if you want them done right. Or done at all. We talked to D.B. to get some backstory on the film, his career, and his future.

Bill Howard: You made Two Tickets in 2006, what was the delay in getting it released and was it strange revisiting it now?

DB Sweeney: You know it’s never really gone away because I financed the movie myself. So even while I was being screwed over by a distributor who failed to get it to the marketplace, this is before Paramount, Paramount’s my white knight but, this other distributor, First Look, sort of took the movie and dumped it on Blockbuster and didn’t release it anywhere else, so I sued them and eventually got the rights back and eventually Paramount came to the rescue. So the movie never really went away for me because every month I gotta make the loan payments to the bank, I’ve been dealing with these lawsuits, and litigations. Anybody trying to make their own independent film, it really has the potential to completely consume every waking moment. So I feel like I am coming to the light at the end of the tunnel here. You know you’d like to make a lot of money and have awards or whatever, but the most important thing ultimately is that you want everybody to see what you tried to do. When you go to a screening and you hear people laughing at certain parts of the movie, that’s such a payday. So this is the good time for me knowing that people are about to experience it.

I have always thought that a lot of filmmakers have lost sight that it is all about storytelling, so that is good to hear that that is important to you.

I hope I get the chance to do it again. I learned a lot of lessons on this movie, and I really think I can do a good job as a director, so I’m hoping people will bet on me.

You wore so many hats on this film, is directing something you want to pursue more and why at this point in your career?

Well, the best job in the business is acting if you have a good part and are in a good production. The stuff that George Clooney is in now, where all the best directors and all the best scripts come his way and you know, he’s bankable. And there’s other guys too, whether it be Brad Pitt or Russell Crowe. You know there’s not that many good scripts out there for actors to begin with, and the movie studios want to make movies with movie stars. If you can break through and get one of those great scripts and become a “movie star”, there’s no better situation in the world to be in. But once you get past that list of those 7 or 8 or at the most 15 guys, there’s really nobody that wants to make a movie that costs more than 3 or 4 million dollars anymore with anybody else. I don’t know where I am on the pecking order, I’m sure they have lists everywhere at every studio, but I know I’m not in the top 20, I’m not in the top 30, so by the time a script gets to me, that means 25 or 30 people have looked at it and there is something wrong with it, that’s why its not getting made. So I can either decide to sign on and try to fix it, which sometimes people resist because they don’t agree with your assessment of what’s wrong with it, or I can go out and try to make my own movie. TV actually has a lot more good writing than movies right now because that’s just the way the business has evolved over the last 10 or 15 years. I’d love to do a CSI-type show or something like that where I can stub out my cigarette, kick the body, and jot down some notes. (laughs) That’s a good way to make a living. In terms of movies, I know that my breakthrough movie, the movie that could put me where a studio might bet 50 million bucks on me, that movie is going to have to come out of my typewriter. I’m just trying to get myself every possible opportunity to find a good role and if being a director makes that happen, great, but there’s nothing I would rather do than go to the set. I’m working on a TV show right now called The Event, and the last episode we did, John Badham directed it, and he directed Saturday Night Fever and Blue Thunder and War Games, he’s one of the great directors. I just thought, this is as good as it gets working with this guy. If I could work with guys like that on good material, I would be an actor for the rest of my days.

In Two Tickets, you have some impressive character actors, from John C McGinley to arguably one of the best actors in the business, Ed Harris and your reunion with Moira Kelly from The Cutting Edge. How important was it to get these people in your film, especially being your debut as director?

It was really important. In the case of McGinley, I went to college with him and I’ve known him from before I was a professional actor, we go way back. I know his family, he knows my family. I thought it was really important in this story to believe that these three guys have known each other since they were 8 years old. They have to be able to finish each other’s sentences and they know each other’s issues inside and out. That way when you write the dialogue, you can allude to things that evoke responses that, even though the responses are not explained, you know it is based on something that happened 16 years ago he’s still holding a grudge. For the third role of Jason, I wanted to have a guy that was also from the east coast who I knew for a long time, and Paul Hipp I met back when he was a New York actor, he was the original Buddy Holly on Broadway and I thought he was great. He came out to Hollywood after a Tony nomination and nothing really happened for him. But I knew this guy and thought he was terrific, so I thought, I want that guy in there. We all have the east coast thing and we all have history together, and both of those guys are highly skilled actors, so I thought they would be my safety net as a director. And then Ed Harris, I actually asked Ed to direct the movie, and he had just finished doing Pollack, and he didn’t have such a good experience on it. It was a great movie, but he was not up for getting back on the horse right away, or at least that’s what he told me, maybe he was just being polite. So I asked him if he’d like to be in the movie and he said yeah I’d love to work with you again. So having Ed there, and I got Moira in at the last minute, that was huge thing. I’ve been lucky to have made a lot of great movies, but the one I get called out on the most is The Cutting Edge, so to have Moira back there, I knew it would be good for the movie, and selfishly, I knew she would be better than any other actress to play my wife.

I really see Two Tickets as being a coming of age movie about guys who are way past coming of age.

That’s what we were going for, thank you for saying that. These guys are locked in the 80’s, and it was a very conscious decision to have no computers or cell phones in the movie, because when these guys were 18 or 19, these things didn’t exist in the world, and they are resisting the present. They don’t want to admit that its 2010. They are not celebrities or stars in their hometown in 2010, they’re has-beens. They really needed to put away the past and become adults at the age of 40, 20 years overdue.

You seem to have a unique ability to make your audience identify with you as a blue-collar everyman. Why do you think that is?

My dad is a PhD, so he wasn’t blue collar, you know fixing engines or anything like that, but I grew up in a very small town and I was around a lot of people who had those kinds of jobs, and I’ve always respected them. I see a sort of nobility in people who are not book educated. Some of those roles came my way, and I think I am attracted to them.

Is comedy a preferred genre for you in directing, or are there other genres you would like to work in?

You know what, I really want to direct kids. I’ve had really good experiences on the movies where I had kids. Peter Yates is such a genius, he directed Roommates, and what Peter said to me very early in the movie was “DB, when I have any direction for the kids, I want to tell you and you tell them, because I want them to respond to you like you are their dad. If they are getting instruction from me, they won’t have that connection with you.” I thought that was so simple and smart. That taught me something about child actors. They are very trusting, and they really want to do well, really want to succeed, and they really can’t make a false move. As adults we have to learn how not be self-conscious, how to be uninhibited. I just think that if you gave me a good script and I could cast some good kids, I think I could make a really great film. Other than that, I don’t think we have enough good comedies. I think any comedies the studios put out seem to work because the audience is so starved for it, but I don’t think there are that many that are great. If you think back to some of those great Bill Murray comedies, like Stripes, they have a great structural integrity and they’re really thought out, and nowadays, some of these Owen Wilson/Ben Stiller films, they are just churning out these formulaic comedies which don’t have a lot of heart and don’t have much narrative interest. It’s a bunch of gags really. Sometimes Will Ferrell makes some funny movies, but they tend to peter out before they’re over because they’re gag based. I liked 40-Year-Old Virgin, but they were honest with it, they didn’t just play it for the gags, they were like, what if this guy really was in this situation, so I thought that was a pretty good one.

You have been married for 10 years and you have one child. What has being a husband and especially a father taught you that make you better at your job, whether that be as an actor, director or writer?

Actually two kids! I’m blessed to have a beautiful daughter along with my son. What the family has done for me at work is made me want to make it count even more. Every take, every shot. I mean, time away from them is valuable. If I’m going to be on a set in the middle of the night somewhere, I’m gonna get my money’s worth. Because maybe I just missed a hockey game or a bedtime to be there. My wife has a lot of patience and strength. I had her in the front of my mind when working with Janet Gretzky (who plays McGinley’s wife in the movie). I have such a debt of gratitude to the whole Gretzky family for their enormous contribution to the film. Wayne actually stood with us in the parking lot of Qualcomm Stadium and helped us collect extras on their way to SDSU/UCLA game for our tailgates scenes. He must’ve posed for two hundred pictures. And the scene has a larger scale because of those people hanging around him.

One of my favourites of your roles was that of John Goetz in the television show Jericho. How was that experience overall and why do you think the show didn’t get the credit it deserved?

Thank you for that, Jericho was one of the best roles I’ve had in recent years and actually, I am playing a role on The Event, a new NBC show, that could be a genetic relative of Goetz. With Jericho and TV shows in particular, it’s so hard to know why they don’t work when they are obviously good. I was talking to an ad guy once, and he told me that they have what they call the up-fronts in May, where the networks take all the TV pilots to the advertisers and say okay, these are the shows we are going with, and here is when they are on. The network says “this Tuesday night show we are going to get you a 6 share in 18-49 and we are going to charge you $90 000 for a 30 second commercial. If that show gets a five share, it’s cancelled. A six share gets the back nine, a seven share gets it renewed and maybe another year, if it gets a ten share, it gets a 2-year deal. The great irony is some ad sales guy had to peg a ratings number to the show before it was ever on the air in order to sell ads for it. It’s such a dumb system, but they’re trying to get the advertisers to commit to so much money up front that they can pay for all their seasons and make them, and also make some profits and pay their shareholders. So it’s so random, that’s one reason. I sure hope The Event makes it, because the pilot is great and the scripts I have been getting are so strong, it would be great if that worked out.

Who are your influences or role models as a director?

I got to work with some great ones early: Francis Coppola, John Sayles, Peter Yates…they all shared a tremendous empathy for actors and a respect for what they bring to the process. I reminded myself to listen carefully to what they (my actors) were saying, even when my first reaction was that they were off base on a choice or idea. (which was not often) Not to sound like a film-douche, but two films I had very much in mind writing and directing this thing were Going Places and Get Out Your Handkerchiefs…two by Bertrand Blier. The tone, the flavor. Definitely an influence

Did making Two Tickets the way you did, self financing, writing, directing etc, teach you any lessons about making movies that you might not have learned had you not done it that way?

I feel like I have a PhD in movie making now. So many things were driven by the modest budget, none more than staffing. I had no budget for a production designer, casting director, full time postproduction supervisor, or postproduction producer. As a result, in those cases I had to learn to do the job. I would much rather have had a professional to do those things so I would have been freed up to focus on actors and script. I had enormous help from a guy named James Scura all the way through, but he had to do other things to make a living as they came along. Sometimes the lower budget forced good cuts, like losing the makeup trailer. That’s the place on most sets where the actors go to slag the director, so I figured if I 86′d it they’d have to be more careful with their gossip out in the open air. Plus makeup wastes more time than any other single thing on movie sets (except maybe ‘hair’). Come on, the girl’s already pretty or she wouldn’t have been hired as your leading lady and if the guy wants more than 20 minutes of it, he’s probably a pain in the ass in 17 other ways, too. Make-up ‘artist’. Gimme a break. It’s not a fashion show.

You mentioned you would like to try your hand at more comedies, saying that there is a special kind of comedy that they just don’t seem to make anymore. What are some of the films that you consider classic comedy, and what do you think is missing from today’s comedies?

Sullivan’s Travels, Some Like It Hot, The Man Who Came to Dinner are a couple. More recently Midnight Run, Diner and even Trading Places. What’s most crucially missing nowadays is the patience to set it up through character and then allow the narrative to pay it off. These films all have gags, but they are not gag-driven. You look at how long they take to let you taste Ackroyd’s rich guy world in Trading Places before the collision with Eddie Murphy’s world. Most of the comedies these days seem to be on a timer. “We haven’t had a laugh in over five minutes!! Quick: have the cat flush the toilet! Somebody fart! Anything!”

When you do play a villain, you play them very well. Do you have any interest in doing darker material, like thrillers or action films?

Thanks bud, that’s a nice thing to say. I grew up on Steve McQueen, probably the most underrated actor of all time. Bullitt, Getaway, Sand Pebbles, Magnificent Seven…you can’t top those. I’m not as interested in movies like Spiderman where they put a skinny kid on a harness in front of a green screen and ask you to believe he’s a hero. Prince of Persia…Gyllenhall runs up walls on wires but doesn’t throw a believable punch the whole movie. Since most of the A-list leading men these days are pussies (except maybe Russell Crowe and uh…Russell Crowe), the only good action sequences tend to be in the so-called B movies. Jason Statham, John Cena. Over the Pacific there’s a bunch…obviously Jet Li and Chow Yun Fat among them. Playing villains is fun because there’s usually such a clarity of intent: You try to trip up the pretty boy. Steal his girl or his lunch. The writers have to make you clever or dangerous (or both) so the lead looks cool foiling you. You have something to DO.

Two Tickets was a buddy/road movie comedy, generally speaking, but had many serious undertones and issues that the characters were dealing with, such as personal responsibility and dealing with life’s disappointments. What was the genesis of the story of Two Tickets and what made you want to include the more serious elements instead of just making a belly laugh road movie? (By the way, I think you made the right choice, Two Tickets ended up having a real heart instead of being just another cookie cutter comedy.)

Well I thought the belly laughs were important and we tried to provide a few of those. But I knew that to hold the audience for 80 or 90 minutes (and hopefully get them to watch it a second time to see the subtle stuff they missed…) you have to get them invested in the characters more deeply than just setup/punchline. Something I’ve observed in my life is that most people settle down pretty close to the place they grew up and went to high school. Sports are such a huge part of American life and especially in small towns. I kept reminding myself that there’s 30,000 high schools in America, 30,000 Friday night heroes but only 30 quarterback jobs in the NFL (what? 90 with backups…) What happens to the rest of these guys awash in the adulation and praise at age 17? The sad truth for many is that’s the high water mark. Same thing in Canada if you switch it to hockey. In Two Tickets, I wanted the three main guys to be people everybody KNEW from high school. Archetypes. If you didn’t know them personally, than you remember them as a visible guy across the lunchroom. It’s very gratifying when people come up to me and tell me we totally captured their big brother or their high school boyfriend. Scary how many women have said that about one of the three guys.

Thanks very much DB, it has been a real pleasure speaking with you. I really enjoyed Two Tickets to Paradise and I am looking forward to whatever comes next for you in acting and in directing. And we will be tuned into The Event on NBC on September 20 as well.

Thanks so much for helping get the word out. If I can do some sales maybe somebody will let me direct another one. I’d love to shoot in Canada. A lot of friends up North.