For Monuments writer-director Jack C. Newell, it was sticking to the script and dialogue exactly as it was written for his film, leaving zero room for improv, which proved to be a challenge.
"To make a movie like Monuments, because it's both creatively and production-wise ambitious, you have to plan for it. It was 100 percent scripted. One of my parameters for this film was: Can I write a movie that will stick to the script and dialogue? One of the challenges for me, therefore, was writing a movie that you end up shooting, which isn’t a challenge for most but it is for me," he laughs.
The film is about a college professor, Ted (David Sullivan), whose world is crushed when his wife Laura (Marguerite Moreau) suddenly passes away. His journey takes him on a road trip from Colorado to Chicago where he hopes to scatter her ashes at the Field Museum. Newell was inspired by his own experience with grief, having lost both his brother and mother at a young age, and from a short story written by his mother-in-law about a newly married couple. In the story, the wife passes away and the husband scatters her ashes in a museum.
"I was struck by it. I thought, there’s a movie there."
The movie is part "Odyssey" ("Every road trip is pretty much 'The Odyssey'," he says), part adventure-comedy, and part drama. Newell says he wanted to play in the space to talk about grief and loss in a way that hadn't been told before onscreen.
"I wanted to talk about grief in a way that we don’t normally talk about it. In cinema, I find that a lot of stories are simplistic when it comes to grief. There’s a lot of absurdity and beauty in grief, as well as sadness, and I wanted to explore that weird space. I made the movie to express an experience that I couldn’t express with words."
Which is why Newell says he was pretty particular about the relationship between Ted and Laura.
"Ted and Laura only have two-and-a-half scenes when she’s alive and they’re both in a low-grade fight. I wanted the audience to like the characters, but I also wanted them to be realistic. Typically, whenever you’re dealing with a dead wife, you're dealing with the 'manic dream girl' who is perfect in every way — that’s often depicted in film. I didn’t want to do that. That’s completely uninteresting to me.”
It was also important for Newell to showcase what a real relationship looks like despite a tragic outcome. "A lot of the times we have regrets is because things weren’t perfect. We didn’t show up perfectly. Life is always messy. All of a sudden when something like a death happens, we wish we had said or done things differently, and that’s what the movie is about."
The script came out fast for Newell, taking about a week and a half to finish a 70-page script. After a couple of months away from it, he went back to do rewrites and started sharing it with people for feedback, including holding table reads to get the dialogue just right.
"I think this art form is really based on writing more. Screenwriting makes up three components: structure, the scenarios, like the scenes, and then there is dialogue. Not all people are really great at all of those things. Most of the time, people are great at one of them. I often see at Second City that writers are great at dialogue and characters, but their scenes and structure aren’t as strong. It's key knowing what your strengths are or aren’t. I like table reads to help with dialogue. But knowing your blind spots is easier said than done."
Next up for Newell, who's the director of digital entertainment at The Harold Ramis Film School at The Second City in Chicago, is shopping around his documentary How (not) to Build a School in Haiti and finishing his next project, "a psychological sexual thriller."
When asked how he came to a filmmaking career, Newell says, "I just liked movies. I figured out how to take something inside of me and turn it into art."
Monuments is now available digitally and on VOD.