According to director Lynn Shelton, the trick as a director is that you have to give direction without making people feel self-conscious. “The moment you start watching yourself, the moment you start feeling judged, it’s all over; the performance gets worse and worse so you have to try to give just the right direction to make these people laugh and trust their own instinct.”

Fay Gartenberg interviewed the Seattle native, for The Mount Holyoke News who directed MTV’s web series, $5 Cover: Seattle. Shelton, who is known most recently for her highly acclaimed mumblecore film, Humpday, which premiered at the 2009 Sundance Film Festival. She has also directed three previous feature-length films, My Effortless Brilliance, What the Funny and We Go Way Back. During their chat, Lynn offered plentiful thoughts on the filming process, her vision and goals for the series, the origins of some of the funny storylines that are featured, and the city’s unique musical community.

The trailer for MTV’s web exclusive $5 Cover: Seattle

Mount Holyoke News: I guess the first thing to start with is the birth of this series. How did $5 Cover: Seattle come about?

Lynn Shelton: The story of how it came about was that I was at Sundance Film Festival for my film Humpday which got a lot of attention once it was screened. All of a sudden, people wanted to by the film and this particular producer from MTV Films, David Gale, wanted to meet me to talk about a project. He looked for me everywhere! He finally tracked me down and he pitched $5 Cover: Seattle to me. He felt I would be perfect for the job of directing the web series, which had just finished with its first season in Memphis directed by Craig Brewer [director of Hustle & Flow]. MTV had wanted to do a portrait of one city’s music scene and Craig grew up in Memphis and was well connected with its music scene so it was a good fit for him. Interestingly, Craig shot $5 Cover: Memphis similarly to the way I shot Humpday, in that he used a documentary, cinéma vérité shooting style and he used two cameras like I did. He also approached the acting by outlining the scenes and having the actors kind of improvise the lines within that one outline. This way, the performer becomes more invested in the project and the character and, especially in this case, it can be used more successfully with actors and non-actors alike. So David wanted me to start this project right away, but at first I was apprehensive because I wasn’t sure about the prospect of working with MTV and I wasn’t sure whether I really wanted to do a web series. I had made a couple of music videos, but I kept telling him that I could point him in the direction of other people and friends who could do the job. I just wasn’t sure whether I was even the right person to do it. Of course, at the same time, I didn’t want to put David off completely because I thought it would be great for Seattle and great for the indie music scene. It was a bigger production than I was used to so it took David a lot of convincing to get me to really sign on to the project. It turns out, luckily, that David has really good taste in music and he’s extremely nurturing and he really allowed me to own my work and my process, which is the only way I would do it in the first place.

MHN: One of the many intriguing aspects of this series is the presence of real people playing themselves, especially in the case of the actual musicians. What was it like to direct primarily non-actors? What was the general process of shooting like for you?

Lynn Shelton: This was a major learning process, having to work mainly with non-actors. I found myself giving commands like, “Try saying this. Try doing that.” Sometimes I would have to veer towards being more forceful than I normally am because I was directing non-actors. In this case, it proved to be better overall to have everyone work off of an outline rather than memorizing lines which is hard to begin with! And, what’s even harder is trying to get the participants to perform their genuine selves. This was an extremely important part of the shooting process for me. As I was developing this project, it felt a little like I was developing a documentary, but for this venture, I was required to fit the shooting in somewhat of a particular format. It needed to be a piece of entertainment that was pre-written and it needed to have a little more narrative so the series consists of narrative threads that kind of get pieced together.

MHN: What was your approach to choosing bands and additional performers for the series? Did you go about it with a particular vision in mind?

Lynn Shelton: I had created my own set of requirements to check off when casting these bands and number one on my list was that I really wanted to show a sense of community that I witness in real life in Seattle’s music scene, that I can go and see my friends play at a club and that there are other musicians there who are either the opening band or just sitting in the audience and who are genuinely caring for and supporting each other and are genuine fans of each other. I think it is so cool and unique that the music scene in Seattle doesn’t have this cutthroat competitiveness, but rather a genuine sense of mutual support and passion for what’s going on and where it’s going on instead of everybody just hunkering down and being involved in their own little world. I remember talking to Zana Geddes [Dita Vox], the lead singer of Thee Emergency, who said to me that I could just follow her on a Friday night and she will run into 50 people that she knows who are all musicians and who are wandering around from club to club saying, “Let’s hang out here before the next show starts,” and then they run into more people and you really see this sense of community among them all. This scene, this warm communal vibe, is my main inspiration because it is so illustrative of my goal for this series. I really wanted to capture Zana’s experience and I got really excited and I wanted to initially film just a single night, but then I realized that it would be too limiting to do so.

MHN: How did you generate these scenes and stories for the series? I heard that you spent a lot of time speaking to the bands individually.

Lynn Shelton: I did a lot of that. [The script] was built off of the interviews I had with these musicians. Some of these were stories that were likely to happen in their lives, but hadn’t actually occurred in real life and others really did occur. One of the bigger stories in the series involves Jason Dodson, lead singer for The Maldives, and Kevin Murphy, lead singer for The Moondoggies, who are actually close friends in real life, and it’s really interesting because this story occurred just around the time I was getting to know the two of them better. At that time, I already had The Maldives and The Moondoggies on my radar along with an additional list of potentials for the show. Once I signed on to direct this series, I was looking for bands and I got some inspiration from my longtime buddies, a band called The Lights who are also featured in the show. The Lights were mentors to The Moondoggies who they discovered when they were in their twenties and The Moondoggies were in their teens. They met The Moondoggies in Everett, Washington and invited them to open their show down in Seattle which gave The Moondoggies their first break and they continue to be big fans of The Lights. So, because of this, I had wanted to check out The Moondoggies. I knew about The Maldives too at the time, but I had no idea that there was any connection between the two bands. It turns out that they were planning to go on tour together and that Jason Dodson and Kevin Murphy are super good friends and hang out together all the time so I thought this was another perfect example of the Seattle music community and I marked them both down on my list of potential bands. What happened soon after was very funny. About a year ago, I sat down with Kevin Murphy for coffee for a couple hours in the afternoon and that very night, he went out with Jason Dodson and they had this crazy night together which ended at about six in the morning and so, on the following Sunday, I met with Jason and, mind you, I’m just meeting him for the first time and he tells me this crazy story of what had happened two nights before, between me meeting Kevin and then meeting Jason, and it was such an amazing and hilarious story that I felt it had to be recreated in the show.

MHN: You mentioned earlier that this was quite a big step for you in terms of the scale of production. Could you explain further how that felt for you?

Lynn Shelton: This really was quite a large production for me, that’s right. There were about 60 cast members in total and not all of them were acting. Some of them were just showing up because they were in the band and needed to be there during the days we were shooting concerts or rehearsals. It was hard to get used to directing non-actors, despite the fact that I pride myself on creating an extremely actor-friendly set in which I maintain a chill vibe. Everybody who’s on my crew knows that I like to get all the lighting and rigging done before shooting so that we can just go in and work on the acting and nothing else. I was also particularly strict about having extraneous people on the set and if they really wanted to watch what was going on, they had to be wallpaper. They had to completely blend into the background. But I really did shut everybody else out and I made them all go away. Usually on a movie set, there’s a lot of people hanging around, watching the actors do their work, but I didn’t let that happen this time. I had to make this comfortable for the actors. Sometimes, especially in a larger space, extra people would begin to edge in, but for the most part, they were respectful about it and understood that it was essential to create a really relaxed environment so the performers didn’t feel awkward and so they could better achieve being themselves rather than trying to “act” themselves. But even having cameras there makes it incredibly weird to perform, especially if you’re not an actor. This awkwardness actually made it really fun and challenging to be a director. I loved working and trying to get the best performance out of people. Every actor has a different way of accessing things. Everyone has a different combination to their lock. With non-actors though, they don’t have any idea what that is and you end up working that out together and what is also fun is that some people have this natural connection to acting and the camera and one of my musicians who is this way is Jason Dodson. He’s an amazingly natural performer. He’s so funny and he’s able to immediately tap into himself with ease in front of the camera. He even inspired other people like Kevin Murphy who is, on the other hand, extremely shy. Kevin also happens to be in most of the scenes. He’s in a story line where his tour van breaks down, the one with Jason and the drunk woman, one in which a band mate almost cheats on his wife. Kevin shows up more than anyone else.

MHN: How do you fix that as a director?

Lynn Shelton: The trick as a director is that you have to give direction without making people feel self-conscious. This is very important. The moment you start watching yourself, the moment you start feeling judged, it’s all over; the performance gets worse and worse so you have to try to give just the right direction to make these people laugh and trust their own instinct.

MHN: Authenticity and creativity seem to be a major theme for you, not only in this particular series, but throughout all of your films and artistic ventures.

Lynn Shelton: Yes. In this series, for example, I wanted to reveal the creative and collaborative musical processes occurring in the city. My overarching question was how do these amazingly talented musicians make these beautiful and intricate songs? How do they piece it together? I’m not a musician. I sing a little and I played violin when I was a child, but I’m by no means a composer. I can’t create music from scratch. What moves me so much are the people that can do this and who answer my curiosity about how it happens. During the development process, I got to attend rehearsals and I got to actually watch these people compose and work things out musically and there were several times in which I saw people recreating or composing a completely new song or fine-tuning and negotiating the performance of a song. I was so impressed by the musicians’ ability to recreate these events during filming even though it was kind of a fake; even though there was a camera fixed on them.

MHN: Did you get some inspiration from the previous season, $5 Cover: Memphis?

Lynn Shelton: Well, Craig and I have very different aesthetics when it comes to how we filmed each series. His is more different than my version, but in some little ways it’s similar. The thing is that he’s got a lot of girls in their underwear all over the place. In fact, the whole show opens with a girl in her underwear for no reason, hanging out in her room, practicing her music which was kind of funny and I said, “I don’t want to have a lot of girls in their underwear” and MTV was like, “Yeah, sure, we totally understand.” So I sort of replace the girls in their underwear with guys in their boxers. Just kidding! Actually, even though there are a lot of scenes with guys in their boxers in my series, I didn’t mean for that to happen. I actually replaced the girls in their underwear with a lot of low-key character based humor that was authentically funny and I wanted to make the viewer fall in love with these characters, these people.

My main concern was that even though this is not a documentary, I wanted it to be as authentic as possible. I want the viewer to get a true glimpse into the way these people live their lives, the people they hang out with, the places they perform in, the way they rehearse and creatively collaborate, their day jobs. I wanted it to be a snapshot that is true to the musicians’ lives and to the city of Seattle. If you watch $5 Cover: Memphis, Craig was really inspired by the people’s individual lives. There’s a woman, Amy Lavere, who has a band and who has a reputation for being romantically involved with a string of drummer boyfriends who are always bad news and these relationships always end badly. Craig was inspired by this and so he put that into the storyline. There’s so much in his series that is completely fictional. For example, the central place where they record the music is all fictional. Craig also has a lot of actors performing within highly melodramatic and romantic stories.

MHN: Did that history affect your casting process at all?

Lynn Shelton: At first, it kind of did. What happened to me was that a couple of the bands that I spoke with about the vision for the show had watched $5 Cover: Memphis and they freaked out and didn’t want to participate and I had to persuade them that it wasn’t going to be like that and I gave them copies of my movies and told them how I was going to portray them exactly as they are. I worked extra hard to have a lack of contrivance in my series. There are a couple of make out scenes, but there’s generally a very different vibe to it. It’s really true to life and to its people. One of the things on my own checklist was that all the people I hired had to be organically connected to another band that I had cast like, roommates, ex-roommates, friends, genuine fans, boyfriends, girlfriends or partners in a side project. They had to have a real life connection to another band, if not more than one, often it was more than one though. And another thing was that I didn’t want to duplicate genres so I needed there to be a diversity of music genre, of gender, of sexual orientation, etc. There’s actually a gay punk rocker who is closeted and he comes out in the show which was one of the first ideas I came up with and it’s initially very melodramatic, but I diffuse it so that the next morning, when his band mates have a little powwow and he discloses it, they don’t see it as a big deal. The boy was so scared, but it turns out that everyone knew and didn’t think twice about it and even were wondering why he hadn’t said so sooner. This was a kind of play on the drama one might usually see in these types of shows. I just try to do the unexpected. Another important point on my checklist was that I didn’t want to work with people who felt like they were in it for anything other than a passion for making of art. The people who are in it purely for the art are the people I really respond to and they hopefully responded to me for the same reason. I was looking for people to film and to hang out with who were really real and passionate about what they do and I think that’s why they all said yes and really threw themselves in because I was able to convince them that I wasn’t going to screw them over, that I wasn’t going to portray them in an unflattering light or in a weird way, a way that wouldn’t really reflect who they are as people.

MHN: You’ve made it clear that this has been one of the biggest production endeavors you’ve worked on, but, since this isn’t a feature-length film, do you consider this series a side-project. Has being involved in this inspired any ideas that you’d like to take into the future?

Lynn Shelton: As I’ve said before, I always learn from my projects. That’s the thing that’s so great. I always learn from every project whether it’s something about method, technique, something that I want to improve on for the next time or something that I’ve learned how to do and that I now have confidence in doing. My first feature film that I made in 2005 [We Go Way Back] was the first time I really had ever worked or been on a film set. I had always worked in post-production as an editor and I had made movies, but they were all these little hand-crafted experimental films that I put together basically by myself as a solo artist. I also went to photography school, not film school. This first film I made was a real genuine film in terms of there being a big set and it was kind of on par with the production required for $5 Cover. At the time of my first film, I was just trying to soak up so much. I felt a little bit overwhelmed. It was the first time I had ever dealt with any actual production. The next two films I made, What the Funny and My Effortless Brilliance, were not made in a Hollywood model at all. They were these tiny little films that I put together that had crews of about six people and they were very small scale. It felt more like summer camp where we would shoot for seven days for one film and ten days for the other one, on shoestring budgets that were largely donated and that were shot in one main location.

MHN: What happened when you got attention for Humpday?

Lynn Shelton: Once Humpday got all this attention at Sundance Festival, a slew of agents and managers were clamoring to know all about it. I never really envisioned myself intersecting with Hollywood, nor had I ever had the ambition to do so and I didn’t think I’d ever have the opportunity to do it and then all of a sudden I’m getting these offers from producers saying, “Will you do this script?” I was thinking, “It would be kind of stupid not to do this.” Why not take a shot at it? If it’s a project that I really feel a kinship with and that I really believe in and that I feel will support me as an artist, you know, OK sure, I’ll give it a shot. But as I was developing those projects and I was having issues with producers who were talking about doing budgets in the millions of dollars, I was hearing a little voice in the back of my head that was going, “I don’t really know how to make a movie.” I’ve done it once, but my previous films were really on my own terms and were so small scale that maybe I’ll just get on a big set and really freak out so the thing that was so reassuring about $5 Cover was that it was by far the biggest production I had ever done. We had a really big group and we had this giant mobile production office following us everywhere. We had a huge grip truck and a big camera van and we had to be on the go because we had three to five locations, often two locations a day. We shot in twenty five days, five weeks of shooting, and I was able to keep the same set culture that I had on my little tiny movies and it was so great to know that I can scale up and still be myself. I also didn’t feel stressed out by the scale of it. It was really nice and I was like, “Oh, I can do this. I can be a real film director. I can do work on a bigger scale and with a bigger budget and it’s fine. It’s not a problem.” As a director, you have to learn how to keep that positive actor-centered set even with a big scale production and that was the most vital thing for me and because I was producing a web series and not a full-feature movie, there was a little less pressure as well.

MHN: And MTV really backed-off of this project for you?

Lynn Shelton: Oh yeah! David Gale made it completely possible for this to be a local production. He really kept MTV’s hands off the project and he didn’t breathe down my neck. You see, MTV had produced [The Real World: Seattle] back in 1998 and the show left a very bad taste in the mouths of Seattleites and so David expressed his anxiety about being accepted by the Seattle community and wanting to make a good impression. MTV wanted to downplay its role in my shooting process and really highlight the fact that this was a Seattle production and my own creative vision. You know, even though I was working with a big corporate producer, they were exceptionally open-minded. They just got out of my way. It wasn’t like making a picture for Universal Pictures where the studio executives are looking at you daily and they’re freaking out and they’re hovering and needing you to hold their hand. I didn’t have to deal with that kind of stuff at all. It was like getting to work with a studio, but on such an easier level. It was perfect! It was kind of like this little intermediary step for me and in some ways, yes, this was kind of a side project, but most importantly, I’m really proud of it!

MHN: Do you feel you fulfilled all your goals?

Lynn Shelton: I think I really fulfilled my goals and, I hope, MTV’s goals as well. It’s interesting, you mentioned that MTV has definitely turned away from pure music programming in the past couple of years, but what David Gale said to me initially was that MTV is trying to return to the music, but instead of just showing a lot of music videos, they want to find new ways to be more music oriented again and back to their roots and they really want to show a better and broader sense of music in new and interesting ways and so this show is definitely on the forefront of this whole idea. They’re going to take the series to Austin, New Orleans, Atlanta, New York, Tokyo, London, even Iceland. I mean, they’re talking about going all over the world with this model and David has said to me that the way I approached $5 Cover: Seattle as being based on the genuine people and portraying them as they are is more easily translatable. It should be about the music because the music is everything. I’m happy to be a part of that statement because, not that I have huge stakes in what MTV does or doesn’t do, but I think it’s such a cool way to do music programming. I was traveling a lot this year doing press for Humpday and whether I was in Chicago or Spain, people would hear that I was from Seattle and they would say, “I’ve never been to Seattle, but I know that there’s a lot of coffee and Nirvana” or “Starbucks and grunge,” and their idea of the Seattle music scene is stuck in a past era. The fact of the matter is that the stuff that’s going on in Seattle is so awesome and so beyond that era. It’s funny because some people think, “It [Seattle] must be filled with all these Pearl Jam cover bands,” and this is not true! There’s so much music happening here and in such unique ways as well and I want the world to know about it. I’m hoping that at least a handful of people will be exposed to it through $5 Cover: Seattle.

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