18 1/2 director Dan Mirvish takes a comic look at Nixon, intrigue & Wonder Bread
March has been a big month for Dan Mirvish and his film 18 1/2. The thriller comedy screened at the Oxford Film Festival and Mirvish won Best Director at the Manchester Film Festival in the UK. Set in 1974, 18 1/2 follows a White House transcriber who stumbles on the only recording of the infamous 18 1/2 minute gap in Nixon’s tapes. A director, writer, and author, Mirvish is also co-founder of Slamdance Film Festival. He chatted with Justina Walford about 18 1/2, casting Bruce Campbell as Nixon, and what bread has to do with it all.
1. When did you and Daniel Moya think of this story, and how does it coincide with Trump?
I finished shooting my last film, BERNARD AND HUEY (OFF, 2018), in November 2016 in New York, the day after the presidential election. The next day, I went to show dailies to our writer, the legendary cartoonist and screenwriter Jules Feiffer, at his place on the eastern tip of Long Island. Naturally, the discussion turned to Trump and inevitable comparisons to Nixon, whom Feiffer had written countless cartoons about during Watergate.
That night, I stayed at my buddy Terry Keefe’s motel, The Silver Sands Motel & Cottages, nearby. Terry had inherited the place from his grandparents who built it in the 50s, 60s, and 70s and it still looks frozen in time in about 1974. There have been a lot of high-end fashion still photo shoots there, but no one had shot a feature there. Terry said the motel’s closed in the winter, so that’d be a perfect time to shoot and all the cast and crew could stay there. Hmm, I still had Nixon on the brain, and then this amazing location – so the ideas for 18½ started percolating then.
I brought in a writing partner, Daniel Moya, who coincidentally had an aunt who worked at a period-looking diner just down the street from the Silver Sands. “That’s two locations! THAT’s a movie!” I said! That said, we didn’t want it to be too on the nose about it being an allegory for Trump. We didn’t know how long it would take to make or when people would see it in the future. But that’s the nice thing about doing a period piece like this. It will always resonate with different people in different ways, no matter where or when they see it. In the States, people may reflect on Trump, but in Brazil, audiences saw parallels to Bolsonaro, and in Spain, to Franco.
2. Casting. I want to hear about Willa Fitzgerald and John Magaro who have the perfect chemistry. But I REALLY want to hear about Bruce Campbell as Nixon and Ted Raimi as Gen Haig. Follow-up question: Lloyd Kaufman.
Willa was the first person Daniel and I met with very early in the process. She was pitched by her agent, and I knew she’d worked with Lucky McKee who recommended her. John Magaro had just done First Cow, and Kelly Reichardt said he was great to work with. We didn’t have any real rehearsal time on the film, but Willa and John spent a lot of time together in the 3-hour ride from New York. And we all stayed at the Silver Sands Motel together, so that gave us all a chance to hang out a lot even when we weren’t shooting. That definitely helped with the chemistry and tone of the film. But most importantly, Willa and John are just both phenomenal actors and amazing people.
Bruce was someone that I’d wanted to work with for a while, but it had never quite worked out. Turns out he’s also a big Watergate buff, who watched all the hearings when he was a teenager. He and Ted Raimi have even done some comedy bits together with Ted as Nixon and Bruce as Haldeman. So this was a lot of fun for both of them to work on. Bruce also did such a great job as Reagan in an episode of Fargo, and got a lot of acclaim for that role. So Nixon seemed the next logical president to play. I also liked Bruce’s take on Nixon – we weren’t going for just mimicking Nixon, but rather wanted to bring Bruce’s innate sense of gravitas and humor to the role, and I think he delivered incredibly.
Lloyd is just someone I’ve known for years, and since we were filming near New York, it made sense to cast him as Jeffries. Our cinematographer, Elle Schneider, has been a family friend of Lloyd’s for years, so that was another nice connection.
3. 18 1/2 is a chaotic thriller but also very romantic. How did you stay cognizant of these character arcs and relationships while wrapping it up in this technicolor, quirky world?
Thanks! In working on script, Daniel and I always focused on the relationships above all else. And in directing, editing, post-production, music, we always chose to focus on this being Connie’s story, and making her relationship with Paul heartfelt and plausible. But we also wanted to show the very real love story between the older couple, played by Vondie Curtis Hall and Catherine Curtin. They were representative of the WW2 generation and we wanted to explore how those relationships evolved into the 1970s.
4. You have one of the most eccentric “talking politics at the dinner table” scenes I’ve ever witnessed. Any scenes from past movies that inspired you toward and away from creating this moment? How much was improvised?
In general, when we were first talking about the film, we said “it’s like Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf meets Three Days of the Condor, but a little funnier than either one.” So, the dinner table scene (and the scene right after) were inspired by Virginia Woolf. But the challenge was how to make such a long scene dynamic, visually and with the actors. So, we broke it up into sections and used different filming and editing techniques to hopefully keep it interesting. I learned from Robert Altman about his use of overlapping dialogue, so even though the scene is very tightly scripted, the actors give it a lived-in feel that feels improvised.
5. How did the writing of the script for 18 1/2 happen with you and Daniel Moya? What was your process? And help me with a bet: how much does a director generally rewrite a script, before shooting and as they shoot?
When we first came up with the general story and found these incredible locations, I was still very busy working on postproduction and then festivals and distribution for Bernard and Huey (and coming to places like Oxford). So I really handed things off to Daniel to hone in on the characters and story beats. He was in New York and I was in LA, so we’d send PDF drafts back and forth with lots of red annotations.
Then when he was in LA, we spent a week in my kitchen really coming together on much of the script. Along the way, we got notes from a few trusted friends and workshopped the script with students and faculty at the University of North Texas when I was guest lecturing there. That was our version of a Sundance lab!
And what they say is true: You write a script three times: In the screenplay, on set, and in editing. But in this case, 90% was in the screenplay. Daniel as a producer, was on set, so we were always tweaking here and there while shooting, and working closely with the actors to refine and rewrite some scenes. And then we had the unique experience of taking a 6 month “healthy hiatus” between our first 11 days of shooting (in March 2020…what could possibly go wrong?) and our last 4 days (in September 2020 once SAG and DGA Covid protocols had been established). So we used that time to edit 80% of the film and then hone and rewrite the final scenes to fit better what we already had.
6. Please talk about bread. Help me understand Wonder Bread. It’s a theme in 18 1/2. It’s not just a throwaway. I know it means so much!!
Ha! Well, while being careful not to besmirch the Wonder Bread brand specifically, we did find it a funny historical accuracy that ITT owned Wonder Bread in the early 1970s, at around the same time ITT was in the news for various scandals around Nixon (until Watergate dominated the Nixon scandal headlines). I’m not sure anyone else had picked up on the Wonder Bread connection at the time, but it seemed ripe for some of our characters to notice.
Yes, bread is definitely a theme – showing the contrasts between the American dependence on processed bread (listen carefully to the tape of the OMB meeting!), compared to the more authentic (and yes, phallic-shaped) French bread. Savvy viewers will also notice a slight Alice in Wonderland (or is it Alice in Wonder Bread?) analogy that things really start getting weird for Connie once she takes a bite of the Wonder Bread in the opening scene. Sullivan Jones has a great little side monologue – really the only completely improvised scene in the film – where Barry is explaining his theory of bread to Paul. Sully and I talked a lot about how we use “bread” as slang for “money” and then he just riffed on that brilliantly.
I’ve always been something of a baker, and when we went on our pandemic pause and I was editing the film at my house in LA, I also came up with a good sourdough starter and baked bread every day. When we shot the final four days, I smuggled my starter back to New York and baked sourdough rolls and cinnamon buns for the cast and crew.
Even though all the bread references were already in the script, the pandemic sourdough craze really drove home the impactfulness that a loaf of homemade bread can have on a family or a community at large. All through post-production, I baked sourdough as barter for many of our post team who live near me. If you stay for the end credits, you’ll hear the song our composer Luis Guerra and I wrote called “Wonder Bread” (sung by Brazilian singer Caro Pierotto) which really tells the whole story of the film with that bread theme. The final song in the end credits, “Baked and Toasted” (sung by Luis’ daughter, Natalia) goes into those themes even deeper.
7. How has being on the other side of film festivals changed you as a filmmaker?
I appreciate the film festival journey much more, I think. A lot of filmmakers see festivals merely as a means to an end, as a way to just find a distributor or get their next deal. But I fundamentally see it as part of the film’s journey of engagement between the filmmaker and their audience. I think especially in troubled times, we have a responsibility to bring our films wherever we can, and share them with willing and eager audiences, irrespective of if they’re in Oxford or New York or Park City or Cannes.
8. You’re legendary as a self-promoting filmmaker. How much of that do you factor into a project before even developing it.
Aw, thanks, you flatter. I just know that when I start a project I know that I’m going to be living with it far beyond the couple of weeks of shooting, or years of fundraising or post-production. No one will ever work harder than me to promote the film, and I’m going to live with it for 20 or 30 more years. So, I’d better be happy with every decision around the film and willing to support it for years to come.
9. What advice would you give 15 year old you?
Wear a hat.
10. Popcorn or candy?
Oxford Film Fest alumnus Paul Osborne – with whom I just stayed in London where he lives – introduced me to a crazy idea. Put candy IN your popcorn!! If the popcorn’s hot, it’ll melt the candy!! It’s madness!!!
