Friday
Oct172008
Friday, October 17, 2008 at 3:37PM The Big Picture Interview with 'Sex Drive' Director Sean Anders
A few years back, Sean Anders made a local film here in Phoenix called Never Been Thawed. That movie helped get him noticed in Los Angeles, where he worked on a few scripts before being hired to adapt a book called All the Way. Anders and his writing partner, John Morris, had their own ideas for the adaptation, and when negotiation to write the screenplay, Anders was also handed the keys.
Yep, three years from local filmmaker to his first Hollywood movie. That movie is, of course, Sex Drive, which opens in theaters today. Anders recently sat down with The Big Picture in an old coffee shop to talk about getting there from here.
I'll try to tell the whole story. The movie got us the agents and the managers and whatnot, and we had written another script that was more story-driven and that got people to say, "Oh, OK, these guys can write." We spent a year, couldn't get arrested, hearing from people, "Yeah, the script is funny, but it's not the kind of thing we're doing right now."
So we wrote another script called She's Out of My League and we sold it to DreamWorks. That was our first big sale. And it's crazy: Overnight, you go from a class-A numbnut in Hollywood to all of a sudden - "Oh...who are you guys?" The script got on something called The Black List, which I didn't even know existed, which is a list of about 100 scripts and everybody in the industry reads these scripts.
That led to this book called All the Way that this movie is loosely based on. I read it and liked the characters but the book isn't really the sort of thing we do, so we went to (the producers) and they said, "What would you do with it?" We told them what we were thinking and they said, "Yeah, we like that. Do that."
So you're a first-time "Hollywood" director and you're working with a very young cast, so that had to present a few more problems on its own.
By far, it was an advantage. I'm sure there were problems, although I can't think of any. The best thing is, you know, they're not big movie stars that have lists of demands. They're not jaded. They're young people who are super excited to be in this movie. And they'd literally come hang out on set on days they weren't working. They would just come to see what funny things their friend would do. So it had almost a college vibe to the environment.
