From Faber & Faber's Projections: Tod Lippy's interview with Stacy Cochran

Tod Lippy: Can you talk about the "different way" you produced it [Drop Back Ten]?

Stacy Cochran: Initially, I thought I had two choices. The budget was so tiny - it was a quarter the size of My New Gun - that the film could only be made by either not paying anybody, which I wouldn't do - I can't work that way - or shooting on DV or something. And I decided that I wasn't going to do either one. I hired Spencer Newman to shoot it - his first movie, but he has a beautiful eye. And we thought we would just try and be smart about it. Any problem that we had in terms of time and resources, we were just going to think of a way to outsmart the problem somehow, and just force ourselves to have a good idea. So I had to make decisions like, "We will never use a dolly. Ever." Of course, on set, everyone would say, "We've got this little doorway dolly, it's nothing, it's in the truck, it's just like a platform on wheels. It's not a real dolly track." And I was like, you know what, if we start that, then it's going to mean reconceiving everything, and it's going to change the way we approach the day too much. Let's just say that we can pan and tilt, but the film is going to be a series of snapshots that sort of move and sort of don't move. And it's going to be about the rhythm of the snapshots in a way.

Okay, we did use one dolly when we were shooting the movie-within-the-movie, the scene where Pamela, the director, is shooting a football game. We thought that would be fun - Pamela gets a dolly shot, but we don't. I don't think people sit there and go, "Why are there no dolly shots in this movie?" But there's a sort of smallness that a decision like that gives the movie that is at least a consistent smallness, better than cutting corners randomly.

Projections 11
New York Film-Makers on Film-making
edited by Tod Lippy
faber and faber
© copyright Tod Lippy, 2000