After working on films like Star Wars and Basic Instinct, Eric Jewett put Hollywood in his rear view mirror.
Eric teaches at the University of Colorado Denver and develops micro budget films with his students.
Listen to Eric share stories from onset and how you can improve your micro budget film.
Show Links
Key Points:
1:27 – How He Got Into the Industry
Skip to: 2:57 Working on Star Wars6:34 – Going from Film to Television
9:37 – Second Unit Directing
10:51 – Second Unit Directing for TV
12:54 – Moving to Colorado
16:48 – Mistakes in Producing a Micro Budget Film
18:35 – How to Improve Micro Budget Films
20:21 – Transitioning to Teaching
23:30 – What Do You Miss From the 80’s & 90’s Filmmaking
25:16 – What Positives Do You See with Streaming Services
31:16 – Working with George Lucas
34:36 – Favorite Project
36:11 – Current Project
Full Transcript:
Eric Jewitt: Suddenly, I hear this guy. Basically, he’s going, “This bloody thing.” And he kicks R2-D2, literally throws him off the truck. And I’m like, “Whoa, that’s R2-D2. You can’t do that. You can’t treat him like that.” Soon I discovered why.
Tanya Musgrave: Welcome to the Practical Filmmaker, an educational podcast brought to you by the Filmmaker Institute and Sunscreen Film Festival, where industry professionals talk nuts and bolts and the steps they took to find their success today. Find the full transcript and more at [00:00:30] thepracticalfilmmaker.com.
I’m your host, Tanya Musgrave, and today we have Eric Jewitt, first AD and second unit director for television series, such as Code Black, True Detective and Dexter and films such as 300, Rise of an Empire. You also cannot ignore the giants of the eighties on a second AD roster, including Star Wars: Return of the Jedi, Cobra, National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, and more. Welcome to the show.
Eric Jewitt: Thank you very much. I’m glad to be here.
Tanya Musgrave: All Right. A little backstory for the listeners. My alma mater does a micro budget feature [00:01:00] every four years, so students can experience working on a feature. We were looking for a producer who also had a passion for working with students and I reached out to a previous podcast guest, Jason Roberts for suggestions. And even though your scheduled didn’t lineup, lucky us, lucky for me, we got introduced and lo and behold, you actually do teach in Colorado. So this sounds like multiple interesting turning points. So let’s start with how you got into the industry.
Eric Jewitt: I studied film in [00:01:30] college. At the end of that, I lived in Massachusetts and there was a guy in my hometown who had won an Academy Award for a documentary. So I thought, “He’ll hire me. Of course.” So I knocked on his door and I played soccer with his son.
Tanya Musgrave: Okay. I’m just like, what, you just went and knocked on his door?
Eric Jewitt: Just about, he’d never met me. And he said, “I don’t have a job.” He said, “If I were your age, I’d go to Hollywood.” So I got in my car, I drove to Hollywood. I had half [00:02:00] a tank of gas and 50 bucks, and I started knocking on doors. I sent out 100 letters, and I got a call from one, just one. That’s the only response I got. And the assistant said, “His other assistant just quit. He needs help. Will you come in and meet him?” And that was Paul Schrader, and he was prepping American Gigolo, which at the time was with John Travolta, but it ended up being Richard Gere.
So I worked as Paul’s assistant for a year and a half and learned [00:02:30] everything. It was like getting paid to go to graduate school. He was great. I was on the film, on set every day, all through editing, everything. And that launched me. I met a bunch of people on that and those people then took me onto next films.
Tanya Musgrave: So. Okay. All right. So I got to know, because your IMDb, it shows you’re a part of a couple of smaller films, as second AD and that kind of stuff. And then bam, all of a sudden, Star Wars. They’d already had their two successful films. So obviously you knew what were going to be a part of. [00:03:00] Tell me about the conversations that got you onto Star Wars.
Eric Jewitt: I was actually working on another film. It was called the May West Story or something to that effect. Ann Jillian was playing May West, and I was working with the assistant directors from American Gigolo. I’d been working as an assistant director on small films or a PA on big films. I would go back and forth. So I knew a lot. One day the DP, Jim Glennon says, “Eric, come over here.” I said, “What?” He says, “I’ve been watching you. [00:03:30] You seem to know what you’re doing. What are you doing after this show?” I’m like, “I don’t know. I’m probably unemployed like everybody else. Why, what do you know?” And he says to me, “My friend, Bob Brown has got this show going in Northern California. Do you want to go?” I was like, “Yeah, I’d love to go to Northern California.” And he said, “All right, give me your phone number.”
Literally, that’s all I knew about it. And I got a phone call from Bob Brown. He doesn’t really tell me what the picture is. He just says, “It’s a big show and it’s in Northern California.” I was like, “Great. I’m in.” [00:04:00] So I went in there really knowing nothing.
Tanya Musgrave: Oh my gosh.
Eric Jewitt: They didn’t give me a script. Nobody got a script. They gave me the broad strokes of what was up. A lot of action sequences in the Redwood trees. I was like, “I love being in nature, bring it on.” And I show up and there’s Harrison Ford, and they’re all there.
Tanya Musgrave: Shock of a lifetime.
Eric Jewitt: Yes. My second night on the job, I’m at [00:04:30] a dinner with all the stars and the producers, and I’m thinking, “What am I doing here?” And this is how little I knew. I had never been on a show where they gave out per diem. So they handed me this handful of cash when I showed up. And we’re in the middle of nowhere. There’s nowhere to spend it. But I knew so little that I was so excited to be at dinner, I bought dinner for everybody. I picked up the tab for the whole table.
Tanya Musgrave: They’re like, ” [00:05:00] You’re hired. Come back, come back again.”
Eric Jewitt: Yeah.
Tanya Musgrave: I cannot imagine walking on to set that first day, especially if you had no idea. Okay. Because I still remember when somebody brought me on. It was like my first ever. I got a call doing sound design, working for the school’s feature. That was a thing. And at that point you’re a sophomore in college and you just can’t breathe when you get an email like that. But if you didn’t even know [00:05:30] that that was where you were headed, I would’ve gone ketonic right there on set.
Eric Jewitt: Right. I was pretty excited, let me tell you. And within five minutes of being onset, I’m by the trucks or unloading, just as you do in the morning. Everybody’s getting ready. And suddenly, I hear this guy. If I could do a Cockney accent, I would do it for you. But basically he’s going, “This bloody thing.” And he kicks R2-D2, literally [00:06:00] throws him off the truck. And I’m like, “Whoa, that’s R2-D2. You can’t do that. You treat him like that.” Soon I discovered why. Those sort of mechanical, it was all practical. There were five of them and they all did different things and none of them worked like they were supposed to. The guy was a genius at fixing them and making them do little things, but it was a lot of stress for him.
Tanya Musgrave: Well, that’s R2. You can’t, you can’t.
Eric Jewitt: Yeah. No. He’s a star. Where’s his trailer?
Tanya Musgrave: [00:06:30] Okay. So big movies and all that fun stuff, I had heard that a good reason for transition that some people went from films to television is just the regularity of things. You get into a good groove. And so you went from that to television and second unit directing. What was it for you that made you pivot from films to television?
Eric Jewitt: It was accidental, really. I finished a job and I had a little bit of time [00:07:00] off. It was in the fall and I had nothing before the year started. [inaudible 00:07:04], who had been my second AD on a couple of movies, she calls me and said, “I’m doing this TV show. And the first AD just quit to do the show in Hawaii, and they need somebody to finish the season out.” There are six episodes left. And I’d filled in exactly when I thought I’d be done. First a year, I’d be done with it. I said, “Great, sure, whatever.” So I went in, they were great. I started the show. It was called Party of Five. It was the first [00:07:30] season. And cut to six years later, I’m still working on the show. It was a great gig. They treated me really well. I directed a lot of episodes of that show. It was a wonderful experience. The writing was good. The actors were good, and it was just lovely.
And it happened, that was right when the golden age of television was starting and features to me were less interesting. The kind of films that were being made were no longer [00:08:00] the great auteur films that were in the seventies in Hollywood. They were becoming meaningless big pictures as far as I was concerned. And I really liked the show. So there I was, and suddenly I’m doing TV. And TV people like me, now I’m in the groove of that. I just rode the wave of golden TV right in.
Tanya Musgrave: Some of the biggest differences for you going from film to television, would that be just that groove or what learning [00:08:30] curve was there for you? Or was a pretty natural of just being like, “Okay, actually…” Because cause I remember you voiced the same stuff with Corey, I think.
Eric Jewitt: Yeah. He was my second AD on that show for a little bit.
Tanya Musgrave: What do you know? I still remember him saying he would stay super late and all this stuff until finally a guy was just like, “Hey dude, this is going to be the easiest thing you’ve ever done. You don’t need to kill yourself.” So were there some kind of learning curves for you as well?
Eric Jewitt: [00:09:00] It was much the same. The work was the same. The difference was we had to do way more pages per day. I was used to doing a show where you’d do two pages a day, and now we had to do six to eight pages a day and change locations and change stages and change scenes and change actors. So the pace of it was much faster.
Tanya Musgrave: Gotcha.
Eric Jewitt: But I liked that. I liked staying busy and I was very excited, like “Go, go, go, come on.” I’d get coffeed up and [00:09:30] away we go.
Tanya Musgrave: As does everybody.
Eric Jewitt: That’s right.
Tanya Musgrave: So you started to do some second unit directing as well, correct?
Eric Jewitt: Yes, I did. There were little bits and pieces of things. I would do… Even on Return of the Jedi, we were really overwhelmed and they said, “Okay, we need a shot of two stormtroopers falling down. Take the C camera and go over and shoot that.” It’s not technically second unit directing, but it was the sort of thing that I was good at and people would [00:10:00] trust me to do. I did the same thing with Cobra, take those 15 some guys because on the first unit of Cobra, we did the wide shot of Stallone, the medium shot is Stallone, the closeup of Stallone, the extreme closeup of Stallone, and then move on to a different location. And they say, “Eric, keep these three cameras on those 40 stuntmen and just have all the stuntmen get shot and fall down.”
Tanya Musgrave: And that works. There you go.
Eric Jewitt: Yes. Right. So that’s led me into having [00:10:30] just some sense of what to do with the camera and what to do with the actors. And then in Party of Five, because all the actors knew me really well, they were very comfortable with me being the actual director of the episode. So it wasn’t second unit directing, it was actual directing, which was nice. That was where I really cut my teeth on working with actors.
Tanya Musgrave: With the second unit directing for films versus second unit directing for television, what is that necessarily? [00:11:00] Because some of the other stuff is not necessarily as stunt heavy, I guess, as some of the films where you have the stormtroopers, you have the stuntmen and all that stuff. But for television, what does that look like for a second unit?
Eric Jewitt: I would say there isn’t really such a thing as second unit directing and television. There is, but you just don’t do it as often. They don’t have the budgets to say, “All right, take another whole second crew and go out and shoot stuff.”
Tanya Musgrave: Yeah. [00:11:30] It didn’t seem like it was necessarily a common thing. Okay. All right.
Eric Jewitt: No, but I would say it’s similar. And I really have to set the record straight. I wasn’t officially a second unit director on those other movies. There was an actual either stuntman or stunt coordinator, a second unit director. They were doing the real big stuff. I was just doing a shot here and a shot there. And that happens with television too. We think, I was on a show. Dexter. Dexter always, they [00:12:00] wrote that big. That was always a big show to do. And we were always fighting to get all the shots. And the producer said, “Well, why don’t I just take the B camera and go out and shoot a double for Michael driving the car down the street or whatever?” “Great. Please take that off my plate. You guys deal with that.”
So they started doing that and it became almost one day an episode shooting those kind of shots. And we referred to it as the Bowfinger crew. This rag [00:12:30] tag group would just go out and shoot a couple of shots for every episode.
Tanya Musgrave: That’s amazing.
Eric Jewitt: They actually make t-shirts, the Bowfinger Dexter crew. So that’s what it looks like in TV. It’s small, it’s fast and the scope of the shots are not as big.
Tanya Musgrave: Yeah. So from all of that to Colorado. Give voice to the internal conversation that led in that direction.
Eric Jewitt: So my son wants to CU Boulder [00:13:00] because he wanted to go snowboarding for four years while he went to college. He liked Boulder so much, he stayed there. So my wife and I would go back and visit. And every time we went, I said, “This is beautiful. I love it here. We should just move here,” and she’d roll her eyes at me and say, “Yeah, right. What are you going to do?” Cut to, we come back from Boulder one time and she picks up the mail and she says, “Did you see your DGA magazine yet?” She shows me. And there’s a full page ad in the DGA magazine that says, CU [00:13:30] Denver is looking for a professor to teach filmmaking. I thought, “What do I have to lose?” I sent them a resume and three weeks later they offered me the job. I was so not prepared for that. I was like, “What?”
Tanya Musgrave: Let’s talk about that learning curve again.
Eric Jewitt: Yes, exactly. Exactly. And the next you know, thing I’m living in Boulder and working in Denver, teaching.
Tanya Musgrave: Wow. So, okay. When we chatted [00:14:00] before, you mentioned that you were actually doing something similar to my alma mater, producing a micro-budget project so that students have the opportunity to function in onset roles. So you’ve worked big budget shows, obviously, and now micro-budget indies. Besides some of the obvious stuff like talent and crew, what is an unexpected place that you found to minimize budget and that kind of thing on the producing side?
Eric Jewitt: Well, the obvious [00:14:30] thing is that the school owns all the gear. So all the gear is free. So there’s no cost, and then we’re shooting digitally. It’s crazy. When I went to college and made short films, it was super expensive. And now they just hand you the gear and maybe you spend 40 bucks on an SD card, but that’s about it, right? And you edit it on your computer. So that’s pretty wonderful to be able to do that.
[00:15:00] And then schools are amazing, a wealth of locations. I can’t describe how it happens, but just yesterday, we’re looking for this penthouse apartment, and I imagined 20 stories up in a glass and steel kind of tower. She says to me, “Let’s go look at the Tivoli building. And it’s an old brewery that’s in the center of the campus, that’s now the student union. And all of that is on the first floor. And [00:15:30] that’s the only place I’ve ever been. She says, “Let’s go up this elevator.” And we go up to the fourth floor and it’s a conference room or that’s what they use it for. But it has 20 foot arched windows that looks out onto the city.
Tanya Musgrave: Oh, windows.
Eric Jewitt: It’s got this messed up, cracked plaster over brick. So it looks like this funky loft like what’s-her-name had in Flashdance, and it’s 2,000 square feet. I’m thinking, [00:16:00] this is awesome. This is totally a guy’s apartment. And it’s picturesque and it’s free.
Tanya Musgrave: The best part.
Eric Jewitt: Right. And seriously, my students have been scouting out these penthouse locations for months now and we weren’t coming up with anything. And suddenly, bing, there it is. So it’s that kind of stuff that with the students’ enthusiasm, things just miraculously appear.
Tanya Musgrave: And it’s so true because [00:16:30] it’s essentially a little ecosystem right there on campus.
Eric Jewitt: I also scouted last week. We share the campus with another college, and they have a hospitality school and they have a restaurant, an actual working restaurant, and they’re going to let us shoot there.
Tanya Musgrave: Wow. That’s amazing. All right. So we were at Sundance before, maybe a couple of years ago and they’ve essentially had school productions that have won the Grand Jury prize. So for indie [00:17:00] filmmakers and now educators listening, what do you feel is a fatal mistake in stunting the commercial success of a micro-budget film?
Eric Jewitt: You know what, I honestly feel it’s the same fatal mistake that affects every film and every TV show, bad writing and bad acting, seriously. That to me is why everyone goes to watch a movie or a TV show is they want the writing to be great, they want the dialogue to be scintillating [00:17:30] and real, and they want to look at real people on screen. If it’s bad actors saying bad dialogue, click, you’ve moved on. I think that’s the ultimate challenge always for every filmmaker, is to have good writing and good acting.
Obviously, there’s a lot of technical stuff too, but I also think there’s plenty of movies that are not that well made technically, just because they didn’t have money or they had [00:18:00] too small a crew or difficult weather, you name it. And it didn’t matter because the filmmaking was so great. Chloé Zhao’s first picture, The Rider, which I thought was just amazing, technically it’s okay, but it’s great writing and great directing and the actor’s amazing, you’re just gripped by it.
The reverse of that is the fatal mistake that people make. They think, “Oh, he’s my friend. So he can be the star of the movie,” or, “We went to high [00:18:30] school and so we’re a really good writing team.”
Tanya Musgrave: Yeah, yeah, yeah. How would you advise people to accomplish that on a micro budget?
Eric Jewitt: First of all, writing doesn’t take any budget at all.
Tanya Musgrave: There you go.
Eric Jewitt: Other than paying the rent and eating while you’re doing it. But writing is rewriting, and I’m stunned by how many people think that when they type the end, that they’re done, and they’re not. So I think [00:19:00] just sheer laziness there is the first bit with that. Casting is, hey, that’s the age old question. Where do you find good actors? I have to say that I’ve been in Denver for a few years and it’s a very thin pool here, very shallow pool of actors. There’s some good actors, but they’re not many. You bump into great actors in Hollywood all the time, because that’s where they all go.
Having said that, I’m teaching acting now at CU Denver [00:19:30] and this class I have, I was surprised. I was very nervous going into this. I’m thinking, “Who do I know in Hollywood that I’m going to get to come out and be in this film? Where am I going to find the cast?” I ended up having two or three choices for each role in the film that I’m making now, and I was surprised. Two or three choices that I would have been very happy with any one of them. I lucked out. It’s a good cast, which is wonderful.
I think there’s a lot of filmmakers that don’t know good acting too. [00:20:00] I think that’s the problem is, like I said, they think if they’re cute or they’re wearing the right costume, then they think they’re good actors.
Tanya Musgrave: Yeah. “We’ll make it look pretty.”
Eric Jewitt: Yes. Right. Right. That’s sort of it. They go for that.
Tanya Musgrave: How’s that transition been for you by the way, the filmmaking to teaching transition?
Eric Jewitt: The good news is I’m not on my feet and I’m not so tired as I used to be. The bad news is I went from being an expert [00:20:30] in Hollywood to being a rank beginner at teaching. I have no clue what I’m doing teaching. So I’m just flailing along and hopefully they’ll like me.
Tanya Musgrave: I love, I have a passion for teaching. And there is something so unique about it that I will get chills. When I’m trying to help somebody reach a concept, I’ll get chills, literally bumps on my arm. I’m just like, “Oh man.” I’ve never gotten that like when [00:21:00] I have gotten a really good shot that I like, or something along those lines. And so there are sometimes passions that overlap creatively from being the creative to teaching creative. Have you found any kind of overlap for you?
Eric Jewitt: Totally. Totally. I underestimated teaching when I started it, and I kept hearing teachers say, “There’s no better way to learn a subject than to teach it.” [00:21:30] And when I first heard it, I thought, “Oh, that’s stupid.” But once I started teaching these classes, I realized I was really thinking about what I was doing. I wasn’t just working on my instincts like I had been doing before. I was really thinking about why do we do this? And what does it mean to do that? And the more I thought about it, the deeper it became for me and the better I was able to articulate it to my students. I feel sorry for [00:22:00] the students I had four years ago when I first started.
Tanya Musgrave: My mom started teaching and I remember somebody saying that you are drowning for the first three years, and then after that, you’re just like, “All right. All right. I got the hang of it.” What are some of the resources that you have that help you stay current within the context of where you are now?
Eric Jewitt: I feel that academia is not really paying attention to current filmmaking. They have other things [00:22:30] in mind, other priorities in mind, which is a challenge. But on the other hand, it’s COVID, I have Netflix. I’m learning a lot from watching a lot. And I truly miss, the only thing I really miss about Los Angeles, I miss Los Angeles because I used to go to the Directors Guild screenings all the time and talk to other directors and watch films. And that was always a great experience. [00:23:00] They’re not doing that now, of course, even they’re not going to the theater, but that was always a wonderful thing to do. And yes, I have other teachers here, but I’ve learned more about teaching from them, but less about film and filmmaking.
Tanya Musgrave: Craft, yeah. Speaking of missing things, you’ve been able to see the ebbing and flowing of film, obviously with technology advancing so much recently and film becoming a lot more accessible. Is [00:23:30] there any function of the film culture of the eighties and nineties and stuff that you miss that you wish they would keep today?
Eric Jewitt: I want to pivot just slightly on that because I have gone from working on really big pictures with top professional crews, with all the best gear, all the newest toys. And now, I’m literally in the middle of shooting this film and just getting a Dolly move with the most [00:24:00] basic crude gear. For me, the most derisive term I could come up with a bad crew was, “Ugh, what a bunch of amateurs.” And now I’m literally working with amateurs. I have to adjust my expectations. I actually don’t mean that as an insult to the students because they are amateurs and it’s just where they are and their level of filmmaking. They offset that by their wild enthusiasm, and their really interesting and unusual and creative [00:24:30] ideas that they come with, which they’re not afraid to express to me at any moment. That’s the great thing about 20 year olds. I had one the other day telling me how I should be directing, like really, dude? But he had a good idea and I stole it.
Tanya Musgrave: There you go. You steal like an artist. Come on. I mean, everybody.
Eric Jewitt: Exactly. I think that the idea of having to really think about the basics of what you need and what you don’t need, [00:25:00] technology doesn’t get in the way anymore. You’re just making film with actors. You whittle it down to that.
Tanya Musgrave: Nice. So along those lines, like what you were saying about their enthusiasm and stuff, what positive aspect of this present film culture do you see? Not necessarily of new filmmakers, but in this new style of filmmaking that you’re seeing with Netflix and streaming and the absolute explosion of [00:25:30] content that you’re seeing?
Eric Jewitt: Wow, there’s so much great TV being made. Well, content, I guess. I don’t even know what to call it anymore. If I saw the features on Netflix, that’s… Whatever. There’s so much great stuff, and I feel that the artists that are making film now come from all different walks of life and all different cultures. And I love that. We’re seeing different perspectives now that we didn’t see before. That to me, makes film much more interesting. I think [00:26:00] that we’re becoming more open to it. The audiences are more open to it too. Other audiences are hungry for it, they just weren’t getting it before.
And now because there’s Amazon, there’s Hulu, there’s Netflix, there’s HBO, there’s the actual studios and actual broadcast television, there’s so much to be seen and so much time to be filled that it’s opening up opportunities for lots of people. And I love that.
Tanya Musgrave: So now we’re going to ask about some tools of your trade. What gear or gadget or even software, [00:26:30] what are your favorite old reliables?
Eric Jewitt: The Mac laptop that I’m talking to you on right now is the old reliable. My iPhone, I’m addicted to it, I confess. I get really anxious if it’s not with me, really anxious. But I record people’s conversations to use in dialogue later, I take pictures everywhere I go of… It gives me ideas [00:27:00] of how I want to shoot something, and it’s a great communication tool that I can hold it up to my DP and say, this is the shot I had in mind. Those are the old reliables. Honestly, everything else is changing so fast that to me, it’s not even worth mentioning cameras because six months from now, there’ll be a new one and it’ll be better.
Tanya Musgrave: This is true. Well, I’m still going to ask. I’m still going to ask, what is [00:27:30] your favorite new gadget that revolutionizes how you work?
Eric Jewitt: The webcam that I’m using in my acting class. And I don’t love it. I’m teaching an acting class with people that are in their own bedrooms and using the webcam and the cams on their computers, and it’s almost like cutting between closeups, back and forth between actors who are in different places and they’re working remotely. That is not something I ever [00:28:00] expected to do. It’s not something I expected to like and embrace, and it really is not something I thought would work at all.
I started this last August and I thought, “There’s no way this is going to work.” It’s turned out to work really well, and there’s something about these kids that are just becoming actors. They’re still nervous when there’s an audience or a crew around. So we’re doing this and there isn’t a crew around. They’re just by themselves, talking to their [00:28:30] screens, which is something that they do day in and day out in their normal life anyway. So they’re comfortable with it. And I think it’s helped them become comfortable with acting on the camera. I hope that’s not too disappointing an answer.
Tanya Musgrave: No, no, no. Not at all. This is really a chance for people to just talk shop of things that they like, apps that they’ve used. I will ask if you are out there with your phone, is there a specific app that you use?
Eric Jewitt: Absolutely. There’s [00:29:00] two apps that I use a lot. One is Artemis, which is a viewfinder. And it enables me to put in the lenses that are in the box that we have and just go wider, wider, wider, or longer, longer, longer. This is the lens I want. I can take a picture of that and say specifically to the DP, “We’re going to be here with a 75 millimeter,” and that’s hugely helpful.
Another one, which I use for scouting, I never scouted without the last 10 years, it’s called Sunseeker. [00:29:30] It’ll tell you what time the sun is coming up, what time it’s setting. It’ll tell you that information for a date in the future. It has two views, you can hold it flat and there’ll be sort of like a sundial thing. This is where the sun rises, this is where the sun sets. This will be at a high noon. Or there’s another view where you hold it up like a camera, and there’s a yellow line, which is the path of the sun. And you can just [00:30:00] move it and say, “Okay, the sun is going to be right behind that tree at noon.” For example, if you want to say, “When is the shade from that tree going to be here?” Because that’s going to be the best time to shoot. And you can say, “That tree will put shade in this spot between 4:15 and 5:20.”
Tanya Musgrave: Whoa. Whoa. Whoa. Whoa. Length of shadows? That’s part of it?
Eric Jewitt: Yes.
Tanya Musgrave: Whoa. I didn’t realize… Okay. because I’ve heard of those apps that will, hey, the sun’s going to be right here. But I did not [00:30:30] think about the length of shadows. Wow.
Eric Jewitt: Yes. And because it will show you the actual path of the sun, you could back up and say, “Okay, well at 5:15, the sun will be here, or it could be two steps closer to the tree and it won’t be sunny here till 5:30,” something like that. So you can really be specific about what’s going to be sunny, what’s going to be shady.
Tanya Musgrave: Yeah. Wow. That’s amazing.
Eric Jewitt: It’s a great tool. Sunseeker and it’s [00:31:00] three bucks or something.
Tanya Musgrave: Yeah. Nice. So we have a couple listener questions from our Instagram. Our Instagram handle is @practicalfilmmaker. So somebody must’ve seen… well, we did put it up there, that you had worked on Star Wars. Any fun stories about working with George Lucas or did you actually work with him?
Eric Jewitt: I didn’t work with him extensively. He was mostly down in Marin doing prep work, but he showed up a few times and I thought it was really interesting [00:31:30] because we had these storyboards. It was like a book of storyboards. I wish I had that book today. They made us all turn them in afterwards.
Tanya Musgrave: Of course.
Eric Jewitt: I wish I had it. To be honest with you, not even as a souvenir, but as a learning tool, I would really like to look and see, remember, what did we do? But anyway, the shot, I don’t know if you remember, the team is walking along through the forest in Endor And suddenly [00:32:00] they go, and they’re caught in a net, hanging from the net and then R2-D2 saws it and they all fall down. So that little scene, there was a storyboard involved and we shot that scene. Three days later, George shows up on the set and he hands us, the ADs the page. And he said, “This is what the page looks like. You guys didn’t shoot that.” I can’t remember exactly, but we were a little too far away or not [00:32:30] down low enough or, it wasn’t how he envisioned it.
I looked at the page more carefully and I was like, “You know what, he’s right. What we made is not as dynamic a shot as what he envisioned.” We redid it. And there was no question he was right and he has a really good eye and he knows how to do this stuff. And that was literally my only experience with him.
Tanya Musgrave: Well, they say too, that directors too, especially when they have [00:33:00] such a specific vision, I can understand, I guess. I can understand if a director has something very specific in mind and it’s not there on the screen, but wow. When you’re involving a crew and the amount of resources that it would take to reshoot that-
Eric Jewitt: Honestly, it wasn’t that hard a shot to reshoot it.
Tanya Musgrave: Okay. That’s good, that’s good.
Eric Jewitt: But yes, it definitely took another two or three hours out of our day that we had to spend doing it. That’s [00:33:30] what separates the good directors from the great directors, is those that are specific. I also did the second unit, Basic Instinct, and Paul Verhoeven, he actually drew me, pulled out a piece of paper and drew something on a piece of paper and said, “Here, I want you to shoot this shot.” And I looked at it, it was like, that is a very interesting perspective on this piece of action. And it was way more interesting than the standard shot that one would make of a car driving by.
Tanya Musgrave: [00:34:00] Yeah. Oh, you got to love visual people because when they give you a picture of that, you’re like, “Okay, that I can do. That I can do. If you’re trying to describe it to me, I have no clue, none whatsoever.”
Eric Jewitt: Ernest Dickerson is a director I ADed for several times on several different shows. He is an amazing artist and he draws storyboards that are really beautiful.
Tanya Musgrave: Wow. If he would have done that with me, I would have totally taken that as a souvenir. I know that you said [00:34:30] it’s just for educational… No, I would have framed that. One more question from the listeners. What is a project that you’re most proud of?
Eric Jewitt: That’s a tough question because there’s so many. Star Wars, of course. Team America was all puppets. The entire world of that film, we created. We didn’t go to some location and say, “Okay, this is a beautiful hillside, now we’ll put beautiful people on [00:35:00] it.” We created the hillside. We built our own version of the Taj Mahal, and then burned it down. We built our own version of Paris, the production designer, Jim Dultz put cobblestone streets and the cobblestones were made out of croissants. And then we burned down the Champs-Elysées and the Eiffel tower, and blew them up.
Tanya Musgrave: That sounds like a fun day.
Eric Jewitt: [00:35:30] It was a really fun day.
Tanya Musgrave: It sounds like a blast. Well, ha-ha. Blast.
Eric Jewitt: We had an airplane fly into the opening mouth of Mount Rushmore because that was their secret land. It was a spoof on action movies. And Trey, those guys are so much fun and we just hung out. They made me laugh every day. And every day they came up with some new, crazy idea. All of us would like, “What? We have to do that now?” [00:36:00] And then we’d say, “That’s a really good idea. Let’s do it.”
Tanya Musgrave: And what a job to go to every morning. You look forward to laughing and you look forward to an adventure there.
Eric Jewitt: The perfect day of filmmaking.
Tanya Musgrave: And what current projects are you excited about?
Eric Jewitt: Well, I’m excited about the film I’m making now. That’s for sure. I try to live in the present and I’m doing it. It’s a neo noir about a young woman whose suddenly successful boyfriend abandons her, and she enlists a security [00:36:30] specialist to wreak her revenge. And I love noir films, the whole style and the tone of those. But there’s an extra element to it. I’m doing it as part of a teaching thing. There’s one scene where they have a date in the cafe, in which I’m going to purposefully cross the line with the camera. Few filmmakers do that and it always gives you that kind of uncomfortable feeling. So I’m doing it on purpose for that reason.
After [00:37:00] the credits, I’m doing a film within the film, but it’s going to be for schools to explain what it means to cross the line. What is the 180 degree line? What does it mean to cross it when you don’t mean to, and what does it mean to cross it when you do mean to?
Tanya Musgrave: That sounds awesome.
Eric Jewitt: Literally, every semester I try to explain crossing the line to students. It’s a long and complicated explanation. Their eyes start to glaze over. I still don’t feel like I’ve got the explanation down. [00:37:30] I always have to say, “All right, you sit there. You sit there. You two look at each other. Now I’m the camera. Now, what if I go over there. Now you see she’s looking left where she used to be looking right.” And it starts to make more sense when you see all the pieces and then pull back and see it. I’m hoping that now I don’t have to bore them with my explanation. I’m going to just say, “Here, watch this.”
Tanya Musgrave: How do people find you or follow your work?
Eric Jewitt: IMDb me would be good. I will have to up my game on Instagram. It’s pretty weak right now, [00:38:00] but I intend to make it better. So that would be probably the spot right there.
Tanya Musgrave: Okay. And the question that I ask everybody, what question should I have asked you?
Eric Jewitt: How did I last so long in Hollywood?
Tanya Musgrave: Well, consider the question asked.
Eric Jewitt: I love making films, it’s so much fun. It just excites me all the time. There’s nothing I would rather do than be in production, even though it exhausts me and aggravates me, it [00:38:30] thrills me and it fills me with creativity, and I wake up literally in the middle of the night with new ideas. Little light bulbs go off in my head, like “Oh, I could do this.” Filmmaking is just… I love it.
Tanya Musgrave: You’re where you need to be then.
Eric Jewitt: Yes.
Tanya Musgrave: Thank you so much.
Eric Jewitt: Thank you.
Tanya Musgrave: Thanks for joining us. Be well and God bless. We’ll see you next time on the Practical Filmmaker.