Short Break: Duncan Birmingham's 'Excuse Me'

It's Tuesday, which means it's time for a SHORT BREAK! Check back on the second day of every week for another great short film and a quick chat with its director.

One of the funnest things about working at a film festival is actually meeting all the filmmakers. I think this is especially true for shorts, because the filmmakers tend to represent a broader range of backgrounds and personalities. Maybe this is because making a short is a less consuming enterprise than completing a feature, but it also just might be that the shorts peeps are glorious weirdos. I hope it's the latter.

Duncan Birmingham is not a weirdo, but his resume is varied enough to serve as an excellent example of what I'm trying to say. When not writing screenplays or scripts for TV, or killing on Twitter, he's also the twisted genius behind petswhowanttokillthemselves.com, which has grown from blog to book and, from what I understand, often threatens to take over his life.

Somehow, amidst all this productivity, Birmingham found time to write and direct "Excuse Me," which premiered at Sundance this year. A note-perfect peek into a pivotal moment in one couple's life, the film packs a heavy comedic punch despite its short running time.

By the time you finish it, I'm sure Birmingham will have embarked on some new project for us to enjoy - or at least I hope so.

Watch "Excuse Me" and then check out my email Q&A with Birmingham:

Duncan Birmingham: As a screenwriter I'd worked with a lot of talented people on a lot of amazing projects, but sadly other than cracking open my brain there was no way to actually see most of those films or tv pilots. Everything I'd written up to that point seemed to be lingering on some producer's shelf or stuck in various forms of development hell. So the inspiration for the short really came out of a desire to see something I'd written come to fruition and play on a big screen.

The finished little film has the exact tone I was aiming for with performances that were better than anything I could have imagined. This was a no-budget labor-of-love short and we've been thrilled by people's reactions to it. Festival audiences really seem to identify [with it] and I've had a lot of people approach me after the screenings with their own stories on similar late-night arguments.

DB: I'd been reading books, talking with director friends and listening to the commentary tracks on my favorite low-budget films all in preparation; but at the end of the day I had two great actors who responded to the script and instantly understood the tone so most of my work was done for me. We did two nights of rehearsals with the actors playing around and me taking notes, then we shot it over the course of one night. We shot a couple takes straight through, we shot some takes very close to the script and others that had some improvisation; we tried doing it broadly comic as well as in a more dramatic key. Thankfully I had a great editor, Clay Tweel, who was able to look for the takes that were the most authentic and idiosyncratic and stitch it all together.

DB: Excellent guess, Jon. The best way to see the story you've written come to fruition the way you intended is to be directing also (or work in TV). Directing is the best insurance for protecting what you've written.

That said, the most important thing I learned making this short was not to be overly-protective of my words. Coming from a writing background with my directing experience limited to a handful of Internet shorts, I initially thought my best tact was to stick religiously to my script because that's where my strengths lay. I figured if I had a great short script, then my short film would have to be great. It's a trap I think a lot writers fall into when they first direct.

Luckily before we shot, I heard the writer-director Billy Ray speak and he used the phrase "beating the page" the basic idea of which is that no matter how great the script, a good director shows up that morning with the goal of shooting something better than what's on the page. Maybe the director transcends the page by getting input from the cast or crew or having the actors engage in some improv; whatever the methodology the point is the director's engaging the other artists, making the set collaborative, creating a fresh, original element that will hopefully come across as vitality on screen.

It's an idea that's echoed in great books on directing like John Badham's 'I'll Be In My Trailer' and Judith Weston's 'Directing Actors' and it's what makes directing a nice break from laboring alone on a script for weeks on end in your room.