Interview With ’18 ½’ (2021) Director, Dan Mirvish

The Rolling Tape had the opportunity to speak with Dan Mirvish, director of 18 1/2, a film that circulated the film festival circuit in 2021. 18 1/2 follows a White House transcriber that is thrust into the Watergate scandal when she obtains the only copy of the infamous 18-and-a-half-minute gap in Nixon’s tapes. You can find the film online here and listen to the interview on all podcast platforms.

One of the things was that tonally was what I really told everyone in every department, from the screenplay to post-production, everything in between, was we were only going to use creative techniques that could have been used in 1974. So, the most obvious thing is there’s no Steadicam, because that was 1976. There are no drone shots, there’s no gimbals. We were using vintage lenses. The camera was digital, but the lenses were vintage. But I was also doing a lot of post-production zooming and panning and scanning, because that was something that was done in the 70s, optical zooms. 

Dan Mirvish

Danny Jarabek: Hello. This is Danny Jarabek, host of The Rolling Tape podcast, and I am here today with Dan Mirvish, director of 18 1/2, the film we’ll be talking about today. He is also a filmmaker, author, and co-founder of Slamdance Film Festival. Dan, I’m so happy to be speaking with you today. Thanks for joining me.

Dan Mirvish: Thank you, Danny. Happy to be here.

DJ: So, what we are going to be talking about today is your recent film, 18 ½ and I just want to start off this conversation by getting your insight on what drew you to making this film. What is it about the Watergate scandal and all the speculative fiction that this film surrounds that interested you, maybe it’s something in your background that drew you to making a film about this topic.

DM: Yeah, so like most people, I grew up in Nebraska, and maybe not you, but other people that went to school in St. Louis and I wound up majoring in history and political science and, one of my professors was Thomas Eagleton, who was McGovern’s original running mate in ‘72 and then was kind of undone, possibly by Nixon’s dirty tricks, which is still another mystery. Anyway, and then I worked in Washington for a couple of years I was a speechwriter for Senator Tom Harkin from Iowa, who was part of the 1974 Watergate class. So, having lived in Washington and met people kind of tangentially involved with Watergate or certainly were around at that time, it was always something that fascinated me, and it’s something I’ve written about in other contexts and other projects over the years, but I always kind of wanted to do something with it. And then when I was finishing up my last film, Bernard and Huey, here’s the mug for that one, the last day of shooting that was in New York on the day after the election, presidential election, of 2016. Trump had just been elected. And then that next day, I went out to kind of the tip of Long Island to Shelter Island and to see to meet with Jules Feiffer, who had written the script for Bernard and Huey and I was showing him dailies. But Feiffer, some people may know him or remember him, he was a Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist as well as being a screenwriter. He wrote Carnal Knowledgefor Mike Nichols. But he won the Pulitzer Prize for political cartooning for The Village Voice, largely about his Nixon and Watergate cartoons from the early 70s. So, Trump gets elected, I’m meeting Feiffer, we’re talking about Nixon, Watergate, Trump. How bad could he be? How many impeachments could we possibly have? And then I was there with my friend Terry Keefe, who’s an indie film producer, but he owned at the time anyway this motel called the Silver Sands Motel that was just across the ferry from where Feiffer lived. And so, Terry took me on the ferry, and we stayed at the Silver Sands and he’s showing me around and this was this amazing location that his grandparents had built mainly in 50’s and 60’s but kind of had stopped updating it in around 1974. Terry is a savvy guy he kept it really vintage looking, they’d done a ton of fashion shoots for, like, Vogue and Harpers, that kind of thing. Some music videos, some commercials, but no one had ever shot a feature. And he said, hey, Dan, if you think of a feature we can do here, you know, we’re closed in the winter the cast and crew can stay here. And I was like, well, we both kind of have Watergate on the mind. And I was like, well, this looks like 1974 so, yeah, let’s shoot a Watergate movie here. Because certainly for indie film, there’s always like, oh, my gosh, this fear of doing period films. But on Bernard and Huey, I had done about 10% of that movie was kind of period 1988 and I came up with all kinds of interesting, clever ways to do that without breaking the budget and the most essential thing is if you have a location that is period, then that does 90% of your heavy lifting for you. And then I teamed up with a writing partner, Daniel Moya, who’d worked a little bit on Bernard and Huey with me. And coincidentally, he’s from Long Island. His aunt and uncle owned this diner that was just down the street from the Silver Sands Motel, the Front Street Station Diner. And so, we’re like, oh, my gosh and it looks period, too, like a different period, but it’s old is old. So, we’re like, well, that’s two locations now we have to make a movie that’s the rules, I think. So, then it was a question then in doing the research that Daniel and I did, we figured out that during the Nixon administration, they had this voice activated taping system, but it wasn’t just in the Oval Office it was in about four or five other offices in the White House complex, including the old Executive office building. And there really are tapes of Nixon listening to other tapes in a room where then, and he’s fumbling with the buttons because he can’t quite get it, and so once I realized that plausibly you could have a tape of a tape of someone could be listening and deleting and doing all kinds of nefarious things in one room and then that would be picked up by another tape then that kind of gave us a plausible in for this historical fiction. Because I think that’s what you need with historical fiction. Like, you need something that is just plausible enough to get you into the story. So then that allowed us to kind of take this character, Connie, who’s a transcriber in the White House, and then she wants to leak the tape to a reporter and they meet at the seaside, first the diner and then the motel and part of it was just wrapping our heads around, oh, it doesn’t actually have to be in New York because that didn’t really make any sense. Like, we can transpose everything to the Chesapeake in Maryland and that lined up perfectly. We later we found out there’s an exact an identical version of that diner in in St. Michael’s, Maryland, because it was there were about 40 of them made in in the 1930s. But anyway, so yeah, and then we just figured, well, let’s just add hippie swingers.

DJ: Of course, naturally, as one would do.

DM: Yeah, because it’s such a rich time. We were trying to be very hyper specific, like January 1974, because it’s sort of before disco, but it’s kind of after the tail end of the hippie movement. It’s the tail end of Vietnam, but there’s still lots of influences there. And then you still have this World War II generation that are still in their prime, they’re still middle age, and so what are they going through culturally, politically and other ways? Those are kind of the cultural cross currents we wanted to play with.

DJ: That’s incredible. And so obviously this film surrounds the Watergate scandal and all of the historical, it takes the historical elements of it, but also puts it through a fictitious lens, speculative lens. As you mentioned, it follows the White House transcriber and her conversations and ensuing scenarios with this reporter. So, at the core of that is of course these two characters that need to be played by a pairing that has a really interesting dynamic. And so, you have Willa Fitzgerald and John Magaro. So, I want to get your insight on what was the casting process with them and what made them the perfect fit for the story.

DM: Well, they said, yes, that’s the most important, of course. But no, Willa was actually someone who’s was the very first person we considered, and we had met with, like, six months earlier. Her agent had recommended her, but also, she’d worked sorry, she’d done a film with Lucky McKee. And Lucky is an old friend from USC. He works a lot with Rian Johnson, but he’s directed a bunch of his own great films. And so Lucky said, oh, yeah, Willa is great to work with, and to me, that’s one of the most important things. And then Kelly Reichardt recommended John Magaro, she was just on First Cow with him. And if Kelly Reichardt recommends someone, you say, yes. 

DJ: Absolutely.

DM: So, they came on board. I mean, Willa, I think we only really confirmed about a week before shooting, though, because there’s all kinds of other people we were considering and I mean, these things are very determined by schedule more than more than anything on all sides. So, yeah, we started shooting March 3, 2020. What could possibly go wrong? But it was also the height of pilot season, so you have to get actors that aren’t like doing shooting pilots in LA, so we kind of focused more on New York based actors and then our two other big leads in the film, Cathy Curtin and Vondie Curtis-Hall. We only cast them about three days before they started shooting. That was really last minute.

DJ: That’s tight.

DM: Cathy, I think only 36 hours before. Wow, that was very tight. But we worked with that. You know, we didn’t have time for rehearsal, so the reactions of Willa and John, their characters, to this other couple are very true to what was really going on, because we’ve been shooting for about a week with just Willa and John and getting their rhythm and their chemistry, which is great. And then all of a sudden, we have these brand new actors and brand new characters that they had to deal with, and they had a lot of fun with that, you know, with the fact that we didn’t have time to prepare. But it led to some great surprises in the performances.

DJ: Yeah, that’s awesome to hear that a lot of that surprise and the way that that second couple brings so much energy to the story was really true to the shooting schedule as well.

DM: It really was. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

DJ: And, you know, speaking of that shooting schedule, I know that you mentioned that shooting started in March 2020, so what was that like? Because I do believe you had to shut down in the middle of your shooting, so what was that process like? And how did you ultimately resume? How did you overcome those obstacles?

DM: Right, so, yeah, the pandemic was just gearing up in March of 2020. And while we were shooting, we kept hearing these apocryphal stories. Oh, my God. South by [SXSW] shut down, Broadway shut down, all these Hollywood productions were shutting down. And then actually, the DGA sent a rep out to visit us on our 10th day, and she’s like, oh, congratulations you guys are doing great. You’re in this bubble, you’re social distancing. I’m like, social distancing? I’ve never even heard that phrase before. What does that even mean? Because we were pretty isolated. We were two and a half, 3 hours outside of New York City. We were a 20 minute walk from the closest town. So, we were about as bubble as you could be before that was even a term. But she said, oh, yeah, we think you’re the last film shooting in North America. I was like, what? Wow. We don’t want to be the last one. After day 11, the next day, we shut down and we had four days left to go which was heartbreaking for a lot of the cast and crew, were like, we’re so close. But we were like, everything’s shutting down. We don’t know what’s going on with New York City, because New York City was really the epicenter of the pandemic when it first hit the US. And Terry very kindly said to the crew, hey, if anyone wants to just stay here, because we were all staying there anyway. So, about a third of our crew, mostly the kind of single Brooklyn hipsters who didn’t have families to get back to, they stayed there for about two months, for about ten weeks. And, our cinematographer, Elle Schneider, she stayed for six months. She just never left. A third of the crew wound up staying there for a couple of months. Our cinematographer stayed for six months. I grabbed the hard drive and took the last flight out and went back to LA. I was like almost the only person from LA. But I had a wife and three kids that I needed to start baking sourdough for, so I started editing the film and then a couple of months into editing because we had about 80% of the film in the can. 75, 80%. So definitely whole scenes, whole sequences. But then the plan had always been to record the Nixon tape with Bruce Campbell, Jon Cryer, and Ted Raimi. Originally, it was just going to be in post-production at some later date when they’re all in LA at a studio together, and then we’re like, in May or June, hardcore lockdown. And we realized everyone’s got Zoom now, and why don’t we just do it over Zoom? And it was great because the quality of the tape didn’t have to be pristine. They didn’t have to have the exact same mics so we could make it work. So, Bruce was in Oregon, Ted was in Canada, Jon was in LA. Daniel, my writing partner, was in New York, and I was in LA. So, we were able to do it essentially over Zoom and do this, like, mini 18-and-a-half-minute radio play at a time when creatively everything is shut down. Actors couldn’t act, directors couldn’t direct. So, it was a real sort of boost to everyone’s morale that like, hey, we’re still making this movie, and this thing is moving forward one way or another. And that was encouraging. And then meanwhile, my composer, Luis Guerra, who lives close to me in LA. He could keep working on the music. Again, normally you do most of the music in post-production, but partly because we had already incorporated the song Brasília Bella into the dancing scene, we knew that was going to be like Connie’s main theme. Luis and I had already been working on a lot of the tunes, even in pre-production. But then this kind of gave us a time to say, okay, even though picture is not completely locked, certainly we can time out some of these sequences. So, he started working with musicians in Brazil and in Mexico City and in LA. All working remotely because, again, musicians were sitting at home not doing anything, so it was a perfect time to us to really kind of dive headlong into the soundtrack. And we actually wrote a couple of additional songs then, and meanwhile, Daniel and I were tweaking the script and adding scenes, taking out scenes for what we would do in those last four days. So, six months later, almost to the day, Screen Actors Guild and Directors Guild had come up with the COVID safe protocols. By this point, we became one of the first films that were back in production in September of 2020. And I had to quarantine for two weeks because I was coming from LA, but everyone else was from New York at that point, so I brought my sourdough starter, smuggled it into New York and started baking sourdough for the cast and crew and then we shot those four days. And we were lucky because we had already done the fighting scenes, the kissing scenes, the dancing scenes, anything that would not have been allowed normally in September 2020. We were just very lucky we had done all those. So, we were able to do it without really changing anything for COVID shooting wise. Like a couple of scenes, we moved outside instead of inside, but for the most part, we were able to pull off what we needed to.

DJ: Yes, that’s pretty incredible that you were able to mostly sounds like stick to the script, even through these unexpected challenges, of course, that nobody could have anticipated. But from there, once you complete the film, you went on a pretty sizable festival run. So what was it like just taking the film through festivals from there?

DM: Well, yeah, exactly 2020 into beginning part of 2021, like the whole first year of the pandemic, all festivals went virtual around the world and everyone made the most of it, but it still was not that fun. And everyone thought, oh, by fall of ‘21, festivals are going to be live again. And then Delta happened, the Delta surge variant happened and then realized, oh, hang on a second with this, we’re not out of the woods yet. But then there was this nice trough in fall of ‘21 between Delta and Omicron, where for about two and a half months, festivals could be live or at least hybrid or do drive ins and things like that. And so, we hit the festival circuit hard and played ten festivals in that two-and-a-half-month period we premiered at Woodstock Film Festival. Our international premiere was at the Sao Paulo International Festival. Luis went to that. I went to our European premiere in Gijón, which is like the second or third biggest festival in Spain. And we started winning prizes, awards, and then Omicron happens, everything went shut down again, was virtual. And then in the spring there was this gap between Omicron and the BA2 or World War Three, depending on which calendar you were looking at. And we did another 10 or 15 festivals in that spring that were live, and I won the best director prize at the Manchester Film Festival, which was great. While we were doing that, we were striking distribution deals that ultimately led to a 60-city theatrical release that lasted about seven months. It just, you know, it started last summer and just kept on going until December and then we actually did an airline deal. So, it’s been playing on JetBlue, Virgin, Atlantic, Singapore, Air New Zealand, Emirates and Qatar, and then just starting this month, started playing on Starz in the US. So, we’ve had a fun run with it.

DJ: That’s fantastic. And so, one thing about the movie in particular that really struck me and was one thing that I really loved was the tonal balances that you’re playing with in this movie because there’s certainly a comedy nature to it, there’s a thriller nature to it. You’re also working in the lens of speculative fiction and history. And so, you’re working and kind of operating in a lot of different tones and one moment or at least one sequence in particular that I’d love to hear about how you started to build this is the sort of extended sequence in the middle with the dinner between our transcriber, reporter, and the other couple. The sequence really just struck me because there’s the tension of, they’re just trying to get to the player the whole time and there’s all this distraction happening. So, I’d love to hear about just how you built that scene and what it was like on set with all of those characters together.

DM: Yeah, so it’s a long scene. I mean, it’s 25 minutes. And we did in the script and then in editing, we did break it up by going to the beach at one point to see the hippies. So that kind of physically broke it up, but also or sequentially broke it up, but also then when we got on location at the Silver Sands, we realized, okay, we could do part of it in one room, we could do part of it in another room, so that would kind of break things up. But then, also, editing wise, I knew I would try different things within that to kind of keep it alive and keep it moving. And then cinematography wise, we had circular dolly track for some parts, but other parts, more zooming stuff. And part of it was also because, as I mentioned, that the actors had just come on board. They didn’t really have time to memorize long monologues and things like that. So, I was like, okay, that’s fine, and do some different editing things for parts of that that will make it easier. If you have a long monologue, you don’t have to do the same thing every take and that’s something that I’ve learned about directing other films, is you can make your editing and directing style change depending on the kinds of actors and the combinations of actors and the circumstances around those actors that you have. So, for example, some of the really long oners that we had in the film, the long-extended takes were with Willa and John because they had more time to prep for those and so that worked out great for them. But like I said, when Cathy showed up with 36 hours’ notice and had a two-page monologue, I was like, don’t worry about it, there’s another way we’re going to shoot that, and that will allow you to do that. One of the things was that tonally was what I really told everyone in every department, from the screenplay to post-production, everything in between, was we were only going to use creative techniques that could have been used in 1974. So, the most obvious thing is there’s no Steadicam, because that was 1976. There are no drone shots, there’s no gimbals. We were using vintage lenses. The camera was digital, but the lenses were vintage. But I was also doing a lot of post-production zooming and panning and scanning, because that was something that was done in the 70s, optical zooms. But likewise, the music was all vintage. I mean, it was all original music, but Luis is a musical genius and was able to and working with these musicians around the world, we were able to get the 60’s-70’s Bossanova sound and then Tropicalia sound for some of the other scenes. Really just for other filmmakers out there, the music is the one thing that is the most important determinant in tone, because if you get that wrong or get it right, that can make a big difference. And the nice thing about Bossanova is kind of the underlying theme for everything is you can, and Luis explained this to me like, you can use that comedically. You can use it in terms of a thriller. You can use it for dramatic scenes and still play with those Bossanova rhythms and melodies. And I think that helps us a lot, too, just in navigating the tonal shifts there.

DJ: Yeah, that’s really cool to hear about and just a final couple of questions for you here. One, I know that this is obviously speculative fiction and history, but there are some nuggets of truth embedded in there, too, especially with the Wonder Bread through line. I’ve heard the Watergate scandal is, of course, well before my time, but I’d love to hear just some insight on just how you chose certain nuggets of truth and how you started to bend that into the story that you wanted to tell.

DM: Yeah, with Daniel, I mean, working on the script, we did a lot of research, and basically, we wanted all the historical things to be as accurate as possible. The nice thing about the 18-and-a-half-minute gap itself is that literally, to this day, nobody knows who deleted it and nobody knows what was on it. We know they were talking about Watergate, Nixon, and one of his aides, but we don’t know anything else. And so, there’s been a lot of speculation on what could they have been talking about. We kind of chose from among those real possibilities, so we talk about Howard Hughes a lot, we talk about Wonder Bread. I’ll get to the Wonder Bread in a second. And that is one absolutely plausible possibility, because there really were scandals involving Howard Hughes and Nixon that had to do with Nixon or it had to do with Watergate. They didn’t come out like they’re not mentioned in All the President’s Men, so people forget about them. But if you talk to people that were actually on the committee and we did it later, they’re like, oh, yeah, no, we were looking into that. There were hearings about this, and that the big thing that the hippies talk about is, of course, Wonder Bread and the connection to Nixon, which is just we kind of stumbled into that. But it is all weirdly true. So, there was a big scandal with ITT, which is this big international conglomerate and Nixon that was on the front pages of the Washington Post and New York Times, like, literally the day Watergate broke, that would have been the big scandal that would have defined Nixon if Watergate hadn’t been the bigger scandal. And then the funny thing we discovered, just kind of stumbled into it, is that during a short period in the 70s, ITT really owned Wonder Bread, you know, and we were like, oh, my God if nobody did a conspiracy theory about that at the time, we’re going to, you know, and but it is actually based on real, all real facts. So that was kind of where the whole Wonder Bread thing comes from. And it’s kind of a fun, absurd thing to play with and lends itself to fun songs and whole emphasis on baking. I mean, I baked homemade bagels today, so stay away from the Wonder Bread. And yeah, so that was a lot of fun. And the actors, Sullivan Jones especially, played Barry. He really got into it and did his own research and had fun with it.

DJ: Awesome. And then final question, do you think there’s any impact of this film and how it’s resonating with potentially different contexts of political climates around the world? Maybe when you travel to different film festivals, different reactions were coming out of that based on different locations and political contexts?

DM: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that was kind of the one interesting thing that was kind of a nice surprise to us was how people did take it differently. So, in the US people were like, oh, this is Nixon-Trump comparisons because we were going through impeachment after impeachment. But when we took it to Sao Paulo, everyone was like, oh, this is really about Bolsonaro. And then when we went to the UK, when we screened it at Manchester, and then when we had the theatrical release there, everyone was like, oh, this is just like the Boris Johnson scandal. It starts with something goofy and then it turns into the cover up is worse than the crime. And then eventually he got kicked out of office literally the week that our film came out there and it was like, wow, this is really on the nose. And then the January 6 committee hearings, particularly with Cassidy Hutchinson, when that happened, we were like, wow, this is almost exactly what the plot of our movie is in the sense that it’s a young 25 year old woman working in the White House, low level employee, but she has the power and the courage to speak truth to power publicly and potentially bring down a presidency and that was really thematically what our movie is really about. It isn’t about left right politics. It’s about the power and this comes from my own experience working as a 24 year old in Washington in the halls of power, like having way more access to information and power than I probably should have had. But that is the nature of Washington. Like, 25-year-olds are empowered with all kinds of information that you wouldn’t necessarily give them in any other business. That made it resonant for a lot of people was the Cassidy Hutchinson and she looked like Willa Fitzgerald. We put their profiles next to each other and I was like, wow, how did we predict that? But yeah, because these are recurring themes in Washington. It happens with every scandal.

DJ: Yeah, it’s definitely cool to see how films can sometimes unintentionally sync up with current events like that. But I want to thank you so much for your time, just final sendoff here. What’s up next for you if you can talk about anything that you have on deck?

DM: Well, I’m still working on the DVD featurette, so we are going to release this on DVD or Blu-ray. And the featurette, by the way, is close to 2 hours long. It’s a lot longer than the movie itself because all these stories to tell. And then actually just yesterday I got an email, it looks like we’re going to do a play version of the movie for a theater company. So, we’re going to start to work on that next. But otherwise, I don’t know what’s next on the horizon for me. So, I’m definitely open to anything else. I mean, it was fun working on a period film because the nice thing is thematically, you can put stuff in period films that are going to resonate later, and they don’t have to be hyper specific to the time that you’re in, so that’s definitely other things I’m exploring as well. But thanks for having me on. Danny.

DJ: Cool, yeah. Thank you so much for your time. And go check out 18 ½ on Starz or wherever you can find it online to support Dan and this incredible film.

DM: Thanks so much. All right.