Director Jill Sprecher and her sister and co-writer Karen made a modest mark with their first film, the black office comedy “Clockwatchers,” in 1997, but it’s taken them half a decade to bring their sophomore feature to the screen. “Thirteen Conversations About One Thing,” an ensemble piece integrating several storylines to investigate the roles of optimism and pessimism in the search for happiness, features an exceptional cast, including Matthew McConaughey, John Turturro, Clea DuVall, Amy Irving and Alan Arkin. But it was a struggle to find financing for the picture, as Jill explained during a recent Dallas interview, especially after ostensibly similar projects like Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Magnolia” and Todd Solondz’s “Happiness” had been green-lighted first.
“Conversations” was actually written before “Clockwatchers” premiered, inspired by an head injury that Jill had suffered during a mugging in the early nineties and a later episode on the subway when a man literally slapped her in the head. As she fumed, she noticed another passenger simply smiling at her, and felt her anger evaporate. That scene reappears in the film as a moment of redemption for the character played by DuVall, a young woman who, like Sprecher, suffers a serious injury and finds her natural ebullience crushed: “Clea’s character is really an extension of me and some things that happened to me,” Sprecher explained. It was that moment from which the sisters constructed an intricate examination of chance, acceptance of circumstance and the possibility of finding joy in life through plots involving five connected New Yorkers–an examination expressed in the form of the thirteen conversations of the title.
“We were warned by people, don’t ever put a number in the title, because people will start counting, going ‘Oh, no, we’re only up to ten?'” Sprecher said, laughing. “But I was hit on the head and had brain surgery on the thirteenth of he month, so it’s very personal to me, and it’s the number that in our culture is considered unlucky but in other cultures is considered lucky. So we thought that was kind of appropriate, since we were dealing with optimism and pessimism, whether something is viewed as a positive or negative experience. We did end up writing thirteen conversations that touched on the idea of happiness. A lot of them got shorter, but there are still thirteen. There are thirteen little chapters.”
The shortening of the conversations came as the cast began working with their parts and actual shooting commenced. “There’s the movie that you write, and the movie that sort of happens while you’re shooting it,” Sprecher said. “And we experienced that on a daily basis. A script is like a blueprint for something, and [the actors and crew] all bring great ideas to the project. We play with it on the set a little bit. These actors obviously made it a lot better than anything we could cook up. Why use words when you have actions and gestures and facial expressions?”
Even after financing had been set for a short shoot, the actual making of the picture proved a chancy thing. The actors worked on a staggered schedule: McConaughey’s scenes, for example, were shot in a couple of spurts when he came in from other projects; Arkin was doing his television series “100 Centre Street,” at the same time as the film (“He’s such a professional–he said, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll work seven days a week, I’ll work for your movie on weekends if I have to,’ Specher recalled); and Turturro had to film all his scenes over one six-day stretch. “If we even got off by one day,” Sprecher noted, “the whole thing would fall apart. It’s really a miracle- -the sort of synchronicity in [the actors’] schedules” that allowed the individual elements to be shot almost like the separate pieces of a puzzle, even when the financial backing briefly dried up and the shooting had to be shortened by a week. “You just keep rolling with it–it’s unbelievable,” Sprecher added.
The fact that “Thirteen Conversations About One Thing” was finished despite the challenges, and then picked up for distribution by Sony Classics after its screening at the Toronto Film Festival without a demand for a single change or edit, was all part of the fortuitous circumstances that surrounded the project once it reached the production stage, Sprecher said. She noted that in a way, the realization of the movie mirrored its own theme. “Luck was on our side, definitely, when we did it,” the writer-director smiled. “Things kind of fell into place.” Just as they do for some of the characters she and her sister created.