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She showed up for an audition, but it was a massive massive
search in New Orleans,
and in South Louisiana over the course of 9 months.
We were just in every elementary school. We had all these teams
going around the state, flyering in schools and churches.
When we actually found our location, we went to every single door
and handed out a flyer.
You know brought in the parents and kids,
and everybody came in to audition for the film and that's both how we.
found the character's and how we kind of got to know the community.
People come in and they don't end up acting in the film,
but they end up being
your boat driver or the cook on the film.
You know pushing a dolly, whatever it is they want to do.
The whole thing is this whole grassroots mentality
towards making a film.
I would show up at the bakery at night and work with Dwight
We go back and forth about our lives and just try to learn everything
there was to know, and then kind of attaching
you know moments in the script, to different events in his life,
and characters to different people in his life.
You do that for every character, and you sort of end up re-writing
the character...
kind of motivations, and story elements, and decisions
that the characters are making to sort of fit in with
what he felt was a relflection of his experience,
even though the character's not...
him. Wink is nothing like Dwight, but there's some sort of
energy that informed it, so it's both allowing the character's lives
to breathe into the movie, and also every line you say
put this into your own words, allowing them to kind of
re-write things so that the dialogue feels like its coming
from them and not me.
But you try to pick people that you can have faith in.
There's no reason to think I could direct a film, or that our producers
could produce one, or that our cinematographer could shoot one.
There's no evidence that any of us would be able to pull this off
so, you don't want to apply different standard to your actors, that you do
to anybody else. You're looking for people who
you feel like have the courage and have the drive,and you just know
this person isn't going to give up. They're going to fight
till they get it, and that's how you have confidence. You just try to
try to only bring people into the film who have that quality
that are just sort of
bull-headed and resilient and aren't going to let you down.