Jim Cummings on The Wolf of Snow Hollow (2020)

Don’t mind me, just journaling advice from a live The Wolf of Snow Hollow Q&A with Jim Cummings…

• “You have to be the ultimate diplomat. So instead of like being a good craftsman and like also a nice person on set, practicing Buddhist, hard-working dude, Jackie Chan, ya’know Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, you also have to be Barack Obama, and like if someone says ‘this needs to go into the movie’, you have to go ‘I love it. Let’s do it’, and you know it’s going to make the movie worse, and there was a moment when I was editing the film… I did the first pass of it and it was decent, and they were like ‘you need to make all of these notes’, and I said ‘you’re gonna have to hire another editor’, and they said ‘we don’t have the budget for it’, and I said ‘if you’re going to make me do these terrible additions you have to hire another editor because I’m going to walk out into the parking lot and slam my hand on a car door and I’m not going to be able to do those changes’, and they hired two more editors.”
• “I think that there is a really right way to tell a joke and a thousand really bad ones. David Fincher has a much larger of an asshole line than I do: he says ‘there are two great ways to shoot a scene and one of them is wrong’, but… it’s very David, but I think really it’s true, and when you give freedom to actors sometimes to do whatever they want it’d be the equivalent of like giving a member of the choir complete freedom to sing however they want. It’s like the whole thing has to be cohesive, and that’s why I do everything as a podcast beforehand where I play every part. We don’t always have time to rehearse. We have no money and no schedule to be able to rehearse. So I’ll play all of the parts, and I’ll put in the music of the sound design, and I send it to every member of cast and crew beforehand so at least they get to hear the song before we have to perform it live, and then when we’re on set sometimes and they’re not doing it right, I kind of have to walk over to the piano and be like ‘no this is the key that we’re doing’, and that’s basically all directing is for me. And then, it’s so forensic the way you make a movie… anybody who’s on a film set that’s any good like the person has to be exactly in the right place and the right time and be looking at exactly the right spot in order to make this cut work, so really all the actors that I work with completely get it; it’s like this forensic style comedy drama horror, and you have to be in line with it.”

“The Wolf of Snow Hollow” is now available to stream on Amazon Prime.