Interview with 'Off the Black' writer/director James Ponsoldt

COMMUNICATION SKILLS
A film that shows men how to talk to one another

By Jennifer Merin

Off the Black
Written & directed by James Ponsoldt

When discussing Off the Black, filmmaker James Ponsoldt speaks a lot about baseball. The game’s not the subject of his first feature, but it’s the foundation for the friendship that’s the heart of this relationship-driven, coming-of-age, buddy adventure.

Ray Cook (Nick Nolte), an emotionally bereft high school baseball umpire, traps the local team’s pitcher, a misguided and alienated Dave Tibbel (Trevor Morgan), into a strangely uncomfortable yet compelling friendship that ultimately helps each of the them heal some of their wounds. The story’s more allegorical than autobiographical, but it’s based on some of Ponsoldt’s experiences and hits home in many ways.

“I played baseball from first grade through high school. Coaches and umpires were surrogate parents who took care of me in one way or another,” explains Ponsoldt. “My friends’ fathers were coaches and umpires—they loved the game, so they moonlighted at it from regular jobs attending gas stations or mowing lawns.”

“In high school, my best friend dropped out of school because he was doing drugs, but his dad continued to ump. I graduated high school and went off to Yale. When I went home for Christmas break freshman year, I ran into his father and we talked for 20 minutes. He’s a man I’d known since when I was in first grade, maybe. He asked me enthusiastically how I was doing at Harvard, or whatever, and was saying it was so great I’d made it and was living my dream. He was so generally enthused for me—more enthused for me than, probably, I’ve ever seen my parents. But nowhere during this conversation did he bring up—or did I—that his son was a crack addict, living on the streets and nobody had heard from him for over a year. Neither of us mentioned this important bit of reality. More importantly, he knew that I knew that he knew I knew about it. So, why didn’t either of us bring it up?

“I think I was afraid to engage him on that level—to see a grown man cry. Beneath the genuine enthusiasm we felt about seeing each other, there was this huge volume of silence. I walked away from him feeling cowardly and dishonest. And what killed me was that he was still the high school baseball ump—always dealing with other peoples’ kids, wearing a mask on the field and unseen by people who were just there to just watch their kids play. Nobody had any idea that this guy’s got an entire life off the field, with love and pain. That stuck with me. I never forgot it, and that, in part, is what got me writing this script.”

MERIN: That explains Off the Black’s genesis, but how did you develop the plot’s rather unexpected twists and denouement?

PONSOLDT: After the initial conception, I spent six months or so mulling over the idea, shaping it into a story and talking about it to people to see whether it kept their interest. The easiest—and probably worst—thing for a writer is to sit in a little room and write and write and write and forget that writing is about real people and that real people are going to inhabit these roles. So, the thing that I always do—well, not always, since this is my first feature—but, what I did with this script, which I hadn’t done with my scripts I’d written before, was tell people about it. When I had dinner with friends, I’d tell them the story—sometimes I’d say I was writing a script or I’d lie and say it was about my uncle, my Uncle Ray. I’d sit across the table from people and tell them the story, and they’d say, “You know that reminds me of …” and there’d be genuine interest from them. Other times it’d be, “Say, can I get another glass of …” and I’d know the story wasn’t working. That’s the way I slowly got a story that held people’s attention and that I liked telling.

Are there great storytellers who influenced you?


I like Eric Bogosian a lot and that influenced how I developed characters. I got into writing very long monologues for them. For every character in the movie—even most smaller parts—there’re 10-page monologues. So, basically I knew everything about them: how they’d react if you spilled hot coffee on them or if someone cut them off. Eventually there was a chorus of voices hollering at me in my skull. When a sort of a confluence of those voices started to annoy me, I knew it was time to write. And, when it was finally time to write, the first draft came in 10 days. I was in a cabin down in South Carolina, and I started writing, and it just came out.

You seem to have little difficulty communicating. Why is the inability to do so such a huge concern?

Maybe it comes from my inability to communicate with my father and both my grandfathers. Not that I hated them for it. I see this as a sort of baby boomer thing—and for generations before that—when the idea was that it’s weak for men to express emotion, that you have to be strong for your family. Especially for men who came back from the wars—World War II and the Vietnam War—that you have to repress what you’ve seen and done. For me, not being able to talk about it is the most terrifying thing on earth. I feel that’s so painful.

The one rule you have to obey as a storyteller is to respect every character and imbue them with dignity. So, this film’s a love story. It’s not about a man and woman falling in love, but about friendship between two people who desperately need to talk and let someone else know they’re alive and, for a little while, being able to do that with each other.

SOURCE: New York Press
http://www.nypress.com/19/50/film/jennifermerin.cfm