For two guys long out of their twenties, Scott McGehee and David
Siegel sure have a good handle on what it’s like to be young in New York
in 2009. The writing and directing duo (The Deep End, “We wrote the script in a very structured screenplay form, but we
didn’t write the dialogue -- we wrote a description of what would be
said in the scenes, and then we worked on the script for about a month
with Joe and Lynn, to get their voices into the characters,” McGehee
explains. The film’s improvised dialogue ends up just this side of
mumblecore, in a good way -- there’s a sense of immediacy, as if the
audience is making decisions right along with the characters. (Or not
making decisions, as the case may be -- Collins’s character is 11 weeks
pregnant and they haven’t decided what to do, a fact that hangs over
their heads and ours throughout both halves of the film.)
Gordon-Levitt and Collins’s chemistry doesn’t hurt, either. “When we
started, we thought we would rehearse relatively straightforwardly,”
Siegel says, “but what started happening was we started doing more and
more rehearsals of scenes from their past -- the shared history that
they would have. And that became a really rich experience for all four
of us, especially because we were doing it on location a lot: in trains,
in restaurants, on the bridges.”
Location plays a heavy role in Uncertainty -- at times, New
York feels like another character. Siegel explains that the two scouted
the film with a combination of bicycles and wiliness: “We would go into
Chinatown on our bikes, and we would occasionally find open doors and
sneak up to rooftops, so that we could get a better vantage point... And
it was one on of those little excursions that we came upon the roofs
that were connected, and that’s where the idea of doing the chase over
the rooftops came from.”
The scene in question is one of Uncertainty’s tensest, most
fun moments: Gordon-Levitt’s character darts from roof to roof in a
chase sequence that feels more like a Spider-Man clip than
anything that could be achieved on an indie budget. The pair adds that
the logistics of securing permissions to use all the rooftops drove
their location liaison, Eric Lau, into hiding: “He didn’t want to
negotiate, because he said the landlords were rivals, or involved with
rival groups … the whole time we were on the rooftops, he looked like he
sort of feared for his life,” McGehee says with a laugh.
“That was one of those, ‘Wow, could we really possibly do this?’
moments,” Siegel says. “And that was fun.” It's evident from the team's
production blog that
there was a lot of that kind of impromptu fun on-set -- we don't want to
spoil anything, but let’s just say there might be a video of JGL leading
the cast and crew in a rousing rendition of "La Bamba." Swoon.
Above: Lynn Collins as Kate Montero and Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Bobby Thompson in Uncertainty
Uncertainty is out in New York and on IFC On Demand.
This story was published on November 24, 2009.
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