Is Dan Minahan’s Series 7 a rude "Survivor" parody or a prescient depiction of our media-drenched lives? Actor, writer and director Tim Blake Nelson finds out.

Glenn Fitzgerald as Jeff, Brooke Smith as Dawn in Series 7

Long before the first contestant’s foot hit the beach on "Survivor," Dan Minahan was hard at work on Series 7, his parody of reality-based television. The film’s title refers to the seventh season of a fictionalized television game show, "The Contenders," whose unwilling contestants are picked at random, given a gun and a film crew and then sent out to exterminate all the other contestants in order to survive. Needless to say this is a game that few choose to play, and one which offers little consolation to the runner up. Series 7 is, of course, fiction, but in the last year the cut-throat competition of "Survivor" and "Big Brother," and the voyeuristic profitability of "Real World" marathons, have pushed Minahan’s story from fantasy to prophecy.

Minahan, who had early on carved out a career producing reality-based TV had always intended the film to serve as a critique of the media’s manipulative techniques. Of course, feature films satirizing television are nothing new. Broad parodies like Soap Dish or Broadcast News, more earnest dramas like Network and A Face in the Crowd, fantasies like Running Man and Stay Tuned, and art films like Bertrand Tavernier’s Death Watch, all routinely set up television as the source of cultural demise and delusion – and not accidentally reserve for the medium of film the mantle of legitimate culture.

But more often than not such satires operate in bad faith, serving up as much pulp as the television shows they claim to critique. And in a way Series 7 also wants in both ways. However, its dichotomy moves in a different direction. Presented solely as a television show, the film Series 7 provides no behind-the-scenes narrative in which the true natures of its characters are revealed. All we know of them is what the narrative techniques deployed by reality TV can provide. As such, the show produces that same eerie, unreliable intimacy that viewers feel towards the folks on "The Real World" or "Survivor."

In Series 7, the main character, Dawn (Brooke Smith), is the ruthless reigning champion and is eight months pregnant. The show takes Dawn back to her (and director Minahan’s) hometown of Newbury, Connecticut. There she is set up against Connie (Marylouise Burke), a sweet-tempered nurse ready to inject her way to victory; Tony (Michael Kaycheck), a doting father who tries to barter his way out of the game with his own child; Franklin (Richard Venture), the senior citizen of the bunch; and Lindsay (Merritt Wever), a teenage girl who’d rather be necking than killing but doesn’t want to disappoint her parents. The final contestant, Jeff (Glenn Fitzgerald), is the show’s wild card. Terminally ill with testicular cancer, Jeff also happens to have been Dawn’s high-school sweetheart.

Series 7 presents "The Contenders" in a three-episode "marathon format," including flashy promos talking up the action that is about to occur in the next show. As such, the film delivers a tour de force exposition on how to construct narrative in reality TV. Each tool and trick – the hand-held digital video camera, the slow mo and stop-frame dramatics, the sentimental music, the chyroned factual information, the re-dramatizations – are woven together to produce a world remarkably real and utterly suspenseful. As a social satire, the artful forgery properly deconstructs the format, but it also delivers a strangely real and moving drama – one, like any fiction, whose characters are known to be fictional but to us, are all too real.

Since Minahan developed the film at the 1996 Sundance Directors Lab, we invited fellow alumni Tim Blake Nelson – who acts in the Coen Brother’s comedy, O Brother, Where Art Thou?, while his own second feature, O, a setting of Shakespeare’s Othello in a contemporary American high school, awaits release by Miramax – to speak with him about the project then and now.

Director Dan Minahan. Photo by Robert Zash.

TIM BLAKE NELSON: I first read the script for Series 7 when we were at the Sundance Lab, and that was before all the reality-based TV shows started to infect the airwaves. At that point, the idea felt utterly original. Now, I think that people are going to think that the movie is a reaction to these shows.

DAN MINAHAN: We were shooting this a year ago when someone faxed us a clipping about this show where contestants battled it out on an island and tried to vote each other off. It was a weird coincidence. But when you read the script, it was a movie with a TV show within it. We were constantly "pulling off the mask" – showing the behind-the-scenes. But somewhere along the line, much later actually, I just made it into a straight TV show, without ever stepping outside the fiction. "Reality TV" was still quite new then. There was "COPS," "Rescue 911" and "America’s Most Wanted." I don’t think people really recognized how truly sci-fi and Orwellian those shows were at that point.

NELSON: What was unique about your script at the Lab was that there was a relationship between the script and how it was shot. People say there should always be a healthy relationship between the way you shoot and what you are shooting. But in your film, it’s always been an essential aesthetic or core point of your storytelling.

MINAHAN: Everybody knows they’re on camera, and the actors don’t have to pretend that they are not. I think that came from my own experience of producing TV.

NELSON: That’s your background?

MINAHAN: Yeah, I went to film school, but I kind of turned my back on it and went into commercial TV. I produced news magazine shows and segments for BBC and for MTV and for Fox. That’s originally how I met Mary Harron [the director and co-writer of I Shot Andy Warhol, which Minahan co-wrote] – I was working for Channel 4 in England. So my interest in making the film was very much about the production apparatus of those shows, the artifice of cameramen forcing participants into these situations. When we pulled the narrative construct of the film away and just made it a TV show, it was to point out the hypocrisy and the exploitative nature of those shows. And now, luckily, it’s on everybody’s mind.

NELSON: The shooting style, the way the sappy music works – all these telegraphic elements work on two levels. Watching your film, I experienced its satire, but I also noted how even the most cliché devices you used still worked on an emotional level.

MINAHAN: We tried to play it very straight. I really wanted to try to have it both ways. If we did [reality TV] in a really broad way, like a "Saturday Night Live" skit, it wouldn’t have had the same effect, or it wouldn’t hold up as a feature. You wouldn’t want to stick around for an hour and a half to see what happens.

NELSON: The acting style of your movie is truly unlike any other I’ve seen because the actors felt like real people who you know.

MINAHAN: We worked on that a lot with Brooke and Glenn. I had them watch a lot of those shows. I knew I wanted to get them into that zone. But how to get them there wasn’t clear to me at first. So we tried improvisation, but it felt like improvisation, and it looked like improvisation too. Then I used my interviewer background. I’d have a little video camera, and I started interviewing them in character. We kind of came to it through that. And then this really big, seemingly obvious revelation came one night when Brooke Smith called me to say "These people are just acting the way they think they should act on TV."

NELSON: She was probably watching "The Real World."

MINAHAN: That was a big moment for me because then I realized that I shouldn’t tell them not to act. Instead I would say, "There’s a camera in the room all the time, and the cameraman’s a character, so just be aware of that." Then they had to deal with the camera – either by defiantly ignoring it, pushing it out of the way, or by talking to it as a way to empower themselves.

NELSON: Every character ends up having a different strategy.

Glenn Fitzgerald in Series 7

MINAHAN: There’s Jack who is supposedly the pacifist and tries to ignore the camera. There’s Dawn who uses the camera to humiliate her mother and get even with her sister. There’s the teenage girl who’s really narcissistic, like people on "The Real World," and she just kind of flirts with the camera and is flattered by the attention of the cameraman. There’s the nurse who justifies all her actions to the camera, confesses to the camera.

NELSON: And then there’s [Jeff’s] wife, Doria – she feels like the one who is watching more of the show than anybody.

MINAHAN: It’s true, because she is kind of like the witness to it all. But she is really passive aggressive. When Angelina Phillips came in to read for me, I thought I was watching a Shelley Duvall or a Sissy Spacek or a Karen Black – one of those Altman actresses. She’s one of those really actor-actors. We got a lot of people like that.

NELSON: You managed to cast some of what I like to call the trench warfare Off-Broadway actors of New York City. These are actors who stay here in New York to do theater, and who don’t make much money at it, but who are as talented as any actors I know.

MINAHAN: The funny thing is that it took theater actors to deliver a performance of real people on TV. I worked with [casting director] Susan Shopmaker on it, and I told her the types of performances that I was looking for. Between her bringing in all these real heavy-hitter theater people and these kind of non-actor types that she had files on, we were able to put that cast together. But I think it took really intense theatrical technique and training to get the performances across.

NELSON: Angie’s performance is incredibly simple, but it’s also very sophisticated. Her relationship with the camera was probably what I found to be the most jarringly realistic in terms of those shows.

MINAHAN: I was worried about trying to bring all the cast into the same zone, into the same kind of place. And an interesting thing was just by the nature of who they were and the characters they were playing, they each had a distinctive style. When you watch TV, the people on "The Jerry Springer Show" act differently than the people on "Trauma: Life in the ER." One of my favorite performances [in the film] is by that little girl who runs up to Brooke when she steals her sister’s SUV. As she drives away, the little girl [says], "I saw you on TV. I love you." And every take we did, that little girl looked right into the camera. I never asked her to do it; she just somehow knew to do it. It was hilarious but it was also really scary and truthful. I love accidents like that.

NELSON: But the film is not about the "accident"; you’ve constructed [the film] to force the viewer to root for Smith’s character.

MINAHAN: That’s the difference between the film and say, "Survivor," where supposedly everyone is on equal footing. Just like they would on a show like this one, I weighted it towards [Brooke] because she has the most to lose; she’s pregnant. So even that choice I feel like is true to the form.

NELSON: You say it’s a cinematic conceit in that it’s weighted towards the main character, but aren’t those shows written after the fact, so that the narrative justifies the conclusion? In that way cinema and reality TV are very similar in their narrative constructions.

MINAHAN: That was the thing that originally attracted me to those shows; they are so cinematic and constructed, especially with their dramatic recreations.

NELSON: What made you decide to include the interstitial material, the ads for coming episodes? Were those always in the script or did you put those in later?

MINAHAN: The original script had the promos. But when we watched them, we discovered that not only did they remind you that you were watching a TV show rather than some vérité documentary, they provided exposition and created a sense of suspense. You knew that so and so is going to shoot so and so, but how do they get there? Did you like the promos?

NELSON: Oh, I loved them, yes. I thought they were very effective, and they gave a rhythm to the film that added another dimension.

MINAHAN: We got a real promo producer in to produce them, this guy who actually does them for HBO, Cinemax, and "COPS." He really helped us to package the show. It was very interesting working with him because it’s obviously totally against anything you learn in film school. But they are kind of titillating; they’re really like poetry.

NELSON: And even while they were titillating, you as an audience member don’t really notice them that way. You experience a sort of guilty pleasure.

MINAHAN: The teasers also operate to keep a television tempo in a feature film. Obviously there is a 90-minute to two-hour format for film, and a half-hour format for most television shows. So the teasers keep the units of Series 7’s narration within a television tempo. That’s why we [structured the film] as a marathon. And actually, when I did the final rewrite of the script before we shot it, I thought of it as three half hours because most of those reality shows are half hours. Basically, this idea that there’s a three-act structure to a feature – we kind of mushed it all together and made it into a marathon.

NELSON: Are you excited to go back to Sundance and show the film there?

MINAHAN: I’m just worried that I won’t be able to see any other movies while I’m there.

NELSON: For Eye of God, I was [at Sundance] for ten days. I was there with my producers, and we were trying to sell the movie at the festival. I had meetings every day. But you’re in a different position because your movie not only has a distributor, but you know when it’s opening. That was the only negative, worrying if it was going to sell. One morning that year my wife and I decided we were going to see The Marriage of Maria Braun, which was part of a Fassbinder retrospective. We were on our way to the screening when we ran into an executive from one of the companies that was considering buying Eye of God, and when I told her that we were going to see Fassbinder’s The Marriage of Maria Braun, she asked us if anyone had bought it yet.