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Going Again: Laura Klein Interviewed by Scott Macaulay
Filmmaker’s goal has always been to include articles written by film workers as often as possible. We’ve had many directors write pieces or conduct interviews, and we’ve had articles written by below-the-line crew, too—DPs, production designers, editors, script supervisors, even dolly grips. The only reason that there aren’t more of these pieces in every issue is that the best technicians who have the most to impart are usually busy. They work all the time.
Laura Klein is one of New York’s top independent film first assistant directors. Among her recent credits are Lucky Lu, Rebuilding, Friendship, Between the Temples and Janet Planet. I’ve always enjoyed bumping into Laura, and once I pitched her on distilling her AD philosophy into a Filmmaker article. She was receptive, and I made a note to follow up, which I did every three or six months or so for several years. She’d always graciously reply that she was too busy from whatever set she was on. When I contacted Laura for this final issue, she was, of course, working, only wrapping her latest production a few days before our deadline. So, I suggested an interview instead, and the day before Thanksgiving we got on Zoom and talked about her background, how she got into assistant directing and the approach to her job that has made her a favorite of so many of the best independent filmmakers today. — Scott Macaulay
Filmmaker: What made you want to be an assistant director?
Klein: I wanted to be a writer-director, then I realized that’s not who I am. It takes a very specific person to actually get their movies made, and I realized that I am good at facilitating those voices. But I had no idea what the [assistant director] job was, no idea that it even existed and that I could make money doing it.
Filmmaker: So, what did you do? Come up through the ranks? Did you second?
Klein: I never seconded, never second-seconded. I’m not proud of that. I tell my crew that I’ve never done their jobs. I know a lot of their jobs, but I’ve never actually done them. I worked in the nonprofit theater world for five years. I didn’t know anything about film, then I started watching movies. It was the early 2000s, and my roommate worked at a video store in Greenpoint. He would bring movies home, and we’d do retrospectives, like watching every Conrad Hall movie, and I would start to understand what a great cinematographer brings to a movie. When I was 27, I went to film school. I learned a lot in my first year, but then [my education] plateaued because you just need to start working. My first feature was Stephen Cone’s The Wise Kids in 2010. Stephen needed a producer/AD. He let me read the script, which was amazing. I had never done a feature, never produced or ADed, and I didn’t even have MovieMagic—I was doing [the scheduling] on Excel. I worked so hard on that movie. We broke a lot of laws, but we couldn’t have made it any other way. We made it on the Canon 5D for $60,000 and lived five people to a room at Stephen’s parents’ house in Charleston, South Carolina. We shot six-day weeks, a 24-day shoot, and would go into nights every Saturday. But man, I’m proud of that movie, and I learned a lot. I learned that if you hire the right crew, the right team, you’re all going to figure it out together, and you are not alone in that.
Filmmaker: At what point did ADing become a more professional pursuit?
Klein: I worked for Stephen for a while and was teaching film school undergraduates, then I heard Josephine Decker was making a movie in Kentucky. I emailed her out of the blue: “Do you need help?” She was like, “Oh my god, yes.” So, I produced and AD’d Thou Wast Mild and Lovely. Then, Josephine got me hooked up with Obvious Child, and after Obvious Child, I had a bit of street cred and started working my way up in budget levels.
Filmmaker: Tell me about your philosophy of the job itself.
Klein: I’ve been lucky to be able to pick the projects and people I want to work with. The job is so hard that I don’t think I could do it if I didn’t care about the script. The script is where everything comes from. I really try to know the script backwards and forwards and understand the priorities of the director. Sometimes, we don’t put enough time into everybody getting on the same page. I did a made-for-TV movie, and the director said during prep, “We’ve never gone through the script together as a group.” So, we sat in a room and did a department head page turn. Because I never had a mentor, he was the one who taught me that. It’s a thing directors love: everybody sitting in a room, asking questions, talking about the intent of a scene. It’s such an important part of the process to do it as a group.
A director said to me that he has a numerical system of priorities. He takes his scenes and gives them a number from one to 10, 10 being the most important scenes in the movie. That’s such a great way of thinking about it holistically for everybody. I don’t want to have a schedule that has five or 10 scenes on a day with a “one” scene.
Filmmaker: What are some other things you picked up along the way?
Klein: Do a safety meeting at the beginning of the day. It seems like a no-brainer, but it can be hard to make happen sometimes. The departments don’t want to do it—they want to start working—so I’ve been calling it a “morning meeting,” not a “safety meeting.”
Filmmaker: There’s the production meeting before you start shooting.
Klein: It’s too late at that point. If you get that page turn time in the beginning, before the production meeting, it informs so many things moving forward. Sometimes, you get thrown into prep and [everybody thinks], “OK, we’ve all done this before, we’ve made many movies.” But there’s no one way to make a movie. I try to avoid language like “what we normally do” because you’re working with a different group of people on a different project, so the rules are going to be different—not the union rules, obviously.
Filmmaker: What elements other than the script make you want to do or not do the film? And how are you able to suss out, particularly, a first-time director to understand whether they understand the scope of their own film?
Klein: It’s hard. Sometimes, it’s just, “Do we get along? Do we jive?” I’m not going to be for everybody. Some people want the AD who has years of experience as the second, the second second, and is more like a drill sergeant. I’m not that person. I’m a certain kind of AD and a certain kind of collaborator, and if you don’t want that, you don’t hire me.
Filmmaker: Could you unpack that a bit more?
Klein: I care more about the story than making the day because we will make the day, and if we don’t make the day, we’ll figure out how to make the day on a different day. I don’t get sad if we don’t make the day; I get sad if we get the scene and it’s not the way we wanted it to be. A producer might not want to hear that from their AD, but that’s how I have to approach it because, honestly, that [attitude] is what fuels you to get the day made.
I have no fear that we won’t get the film made. My priority is making the film the way the director wants to make it, and my priority in prep is to set us up to make the film the way the director wants to make it. Sometimes, you have to fight for that. People [think] prep is the easier time, but it’s stressful for the producer, production designer, locations. These people are doing all the actual work in this time, so I’m like, “How do we make sure we’re all making the same movie, working towards the same goal and setting us up for success?”
There will be a day on the schedule that looks crazy. I can’t just go, “Oh, it’ll be fine.”’ We have to talk about it, break it down and figure out a better way to do it, because what I have found out in my years of doing this is if it doesn’t work on paper, if you can’t imagine it working, it’s not going to work.
Filmmaker: What are director red flags for you?
Klein: I am looking to get inspired. If a director is talking about making their days, I’m not inspired. Leave it up to me. We’re going to figure that part out. I want to hear about your vision and what you care about. My director on Friendship is an amazing director, and I remember he was like, “I want to make a comedy, but I want to make it like The Master.” I was like, “Yes, sign me up.”
Filmmaker: In my experience, one of the first director asks is shooting in order.
Klein: Look, I want to shoot in order, too. Actors want to shoot in order. But everybody knows it’s some weird ideal that nobody’s going to actually do. But, my first pass [at the schedule] is [an attempt at] preserving the flow of the film. You also don’t want to leave the final most important scene until the end because who knows what could happen, right?
Filmmaker: As someone who has both produced and AD’d, what are the unrealistic expectations you are seeing producers and directors enter projects with?
Klein: It really comes down to what’s important. I did this movie recently, Lucky Lu, with [director Lloyd Lee Choi]. We had $3 million, which is not a lot to make a union DGA movie in New York City, and [Lloyd] was like, “I want as many locations as I can get.” We had 50 locations, and everybody was like, “We need to cut down these locations,” but he was very adamant: “I want to shoot as much of Chinatown as I can. I want to get into the nooks and crannies. I want to go to places that haven’t been filmed.” We figured out how to do that. We had an amazing locations department; they fit it into the budget, and I fit it into the schedule.
Filmmaker: So, fewer shots in each location, obviously.
Klein: I was like, “We have an hour and a half in this location,” and he was like, “No problem.” The thing that frustrates me the most is when I don’t understand what’s important. I worked on something where a wonderful DP started asking for all this stuff, and [the producers] were saying yes to everything. I think people should ask for things, but this was a tiny independent movie. I thought we had no money, then I look around and we have an 11-person grip and electric [crew] and dollies and jibs and all this stuff. I was like, “Don’t you understand that all this stuff makes things go slower?” When I feel people are not transparent, and I don’t really understand the choices being made, that’s when I get nervous.
Filmmaker: Are you an “over-schedule the first day” or “under-schedule” person?
Klein: Depends on the movie. I worked on a movie where the director wanted to shoot everything in order, and that meant the first day was this crazy scene with the whole family meeting for the first time with kids and dogs and babies. I was like, “Don’t you want to ease into it?” But it was really wonderful. What can happen then is that you have a great first day and then a bad second day.
Filmmaker: What about shotlisting? Do most of your directors shotlist much in advance, or do some figure it out on set?
Klein: Really depends on the director. I’ve worked with some where we go and block on location weeks in advance with hired stand-ins, and I’ve worked with people who don’t shotlist at all. Sometimes, when they don’t shotlist I feel like I’m going into a test where I haven’t studied, but I’m OK with that if that’s the way they want to do it. It just means we’re not as prepared for what they want. Even with directors I’ve worked with before, I’ve had to force my way into the shotlisting process. They’re like, “No, we don’t want the AD around.” And I’m like, “Guys, I’m good to have around. I won’t talk about logistics in the shotlist meeting, but if you decide you want to change the location or time of day, I’m there and you don’t have to remember to tell me.”
Filmmaker: Most films I did starting out were 24 days or so. Now, a lot of independents are being shot for 18 days. What have you seen over the arc of your career regarding schedules and resources?
Klein: You would think that the more money you have, the more time you would have, and that’s just not the case. I think [schedules] haven’t changed, and that’s a problem. The unions are fighting for better hours, but we haven’t seen the difference in the [number of] days like they do in Europe, where it’s 10-hour workdays but 35 or 40 days of shooting. I’m still fighting for days and getting them taken away at the last minute because that’s the easiest way to save a good chunk of money. I’m seeing a $3 million movie with the same amount of shooting days that a $6 million movie has.
Filmmaker: What would you end on here?
Klein: What I say at the start of every day and at production meetings: I know it’s a job, and people have to make money, but we are making movies, and that’s a gift.
