Tiffany D’Emidio: Why don’t you tell us the premise of the film.

Jill Sprecher: Thirteen Conversations is a story about different people in New York City that kind of bump up against each other and affect each other in ways that are both known and unknown to each of them.

TD: When writing the script, was any of it based on your own experiences?

JS: All of it. Actually, there’s a lot of autobiographical material in here, both my sister and myself. Clea DuVall’s storyline parallels an episode that happened to me in New York. The details are slightly different but emotionally the journey for her is similar. I moved to New York from Wisconsin and really loved the city and something happened that sort of dampened my enthusiasm for New York and I kind of had to find my way back. So the very end scene in the film is also based on the experience that happened to me on the subway and I was crying and I noticed a guy look at me and smile right at a time when I thought people were callus. There are characters in it like people we grew up with like the happy guy for example we were inspired by a neighbor in our hometown.

TD: Which leads me to my next question. Was Bill Wise really that happy off camera?

JS: Oh yes. He’s great. We had a hard time casting that role, we were already shooting and we still hadn’t found the person we thought would be perfect. I was on the set with my sister and I remember that night she came back and said, “I found the guy. I FOUND HIM. He is the guy.�? Before she met him he was saying you know I am this person. He said, “People either think I’m stupid…I’m so happy people think I’m either stupid or crazy.�? People loved him. There’s some footage in the film that we used when he was just suppose to be in the background making everyone happy in the office and he was really there telling jokes and he kept cracking these people up. We used that footage in the film.

TD: Did you have any specific actors in mind when you were writing the script?

JS: We try not to put a face to the characters. We kind of write emotionally and psychologically and not write too much physical description of characters. And then well, one reason is we don’t want to get our hearts broken when this character is written for one person and now they’re not available or they don’t like it. But then when you get to the casting part of it and it looked like we were making the film we had a wish list of people and we went to them. Every time one of these actors would say yes they would do it we were stunned.

We had the same thing happen on “Clockwatchers�?. Karen and I knew we had to have Toni Colette in the film and Parker Posey. At the time our producer would say well you better have back up in mind for Toni Colette because she’s really busy right now. We couldn’t envision anyone else. It’s stupid. It’s blind optimism. We got incredibly lucky. We got incredibly lucky.

My sister, who’s a social worker, she’s really good at…she has a really great sense about people and who will bring something to a part and just who will be a good person. And all of these actors in addition to being really talented they’re all very nice really sweet people. I think we sort of gravitate towards actors that like to take chances. I mean that’s why we like them on screen because they do things that are unpredictable in their performances. That translates over into being able, willing to take a chance on a very small, weird indie film. Lucky for us.

TD: What do you think some of the key components were in the film?

JS: Cinematography. We got a great cinematographer from London, Dick Pope. He shoots a lot of Mike Lee’s films. The looks within Mike Lee’s body of work you know you have “Topsy-Turvy�? which is really fanciful and then you have “Naked�? which is this raw…and then “Secrets and Lies�?. But the common element in Dick’s work is that he’s great at lighting faces. We knew these faces would be important in telling the story. We have great faces in this movie and great close ups.

We had a great art team, Mark Ricker, who’s this young designer from New York, came up with, in conjunction to the costume designer, they all kind of worked together to achieve a really beautiful look for the film. Then our editor’s a good friend of ours, Stephen Mirrione, he worked on “Clockwatchers�?, and he’s the best editor in the film business. We’re lucky he’s a friend of ours. He is actually, I would say, the biggest creative force for us collaborator-wise in terms of he’s the first person we sent our first draft of the script to. He gave us notes on every draft. It’s good because by the time we got to the cutting room he knew everything that was important. Some things we didn’t get to shoot exactly the way we wanted to because our financing fell through but having Stephen involved from the very beginning four years earlier made our editing much easier. He’s a great editor.

TD: It seemed like certain colors would coincide with the characters. Was that a conscious design issue?

JS: Yes. We wanted to stay away from the color white because I don’t find it that interesting. But we did have little elements of white linking the stories. We were trying to achieve one story even though there were multiple storylines what could be a visual element to reinforce that certain things happening in one characters life have a parallel in another characters life. We used props to reinforce that unity. That’s the challenge of multiple storyline pieces. You want to have a whole. People are used to seeing a movie that’s a complete movie not a bunch of separate movies. But by the same token, have each character individually express their unique storyline. So we used colors to achieve both of those things.

I know with Clea DuVall we gravitated toward golden colors for her because she’s a very warm kind of spiritual person and then she undergoes something and her palette shifts. They start to overlap a little bit.

TD: Why film in Manhattan?

JS: My sister and I lived there for a long-time and we were there obviously while we were writing the story, undergoing things that these characters went through. There’s something about a big city that speeds up this whole idea of karma. You’re very anonymous in a big city even though you’re surrounded by people. It’s weird. But then it seems like you always run into that one person you’re trying to avoid in a big city. I don’t know. I just think it’s a city that you are surrounded by other people but you start to become where you are living in a bubble and you’re surrounded by your own problems.

We did send a script to Dick Pope in London and he felt this was like London. We wanted to shoot it in New York. On a budget like this though we weren’t sure we would be able to shoot it there. There was some talk about having to shoot it in Toronto and my sister and I thought if had to do that we’re not going to pretend it’s in New York City. We were lucky we were able to do it in New York.
I think in addition to that, New York is an older city with a sense of history and place and when you go into some of these faces, courtrooms and diners and stuff, you get the feeling that these characters are just one of many who have gone through something.

TD: Do you think fate had a hand in the making of the film?

JS: It sure did. I mean first of all, we were lucky to get all of these actors, to have them line up their schedules so perfectly. Because most of them were working on other projects so to be able to fit them all into the same film and have their schedules so perfectly lined up that was luck.

I think getting this group of people at this time was lucky. We also had to shoot this move at a time when I’ve never seen production so busy in New York City. It’s because there was a fear of a strike. Our financing fell through the day before we started shooting but we started shooting anyway thinking it’s a moving train. Money will come in somehow at the end of the week. It went like that on a daily basis. We didn’t know from one day to the next if we would be shooting.

So the fact that a lot of these people, once they had committed, they could have at any moment left and gone onto a movie shooting right down the street. And they went for weeks without getting paid. It was good fortune that they stayed with the project and believed in the movie and made it through to the end even though we lost money and got a week cut off of our schedule. I think fate is everybody started and got on this ride together and we were destined to make it through together, in spite of a lot of obstacles.

[A longer version of this interview originally appeared on Eclipse Magazine]