Film Courage: How much do you obsess over the first 10 minutes of your own movies?
Rory Karpf, Filmmaker: It’s a really good question. I think the first 10 minutes are the most important part. Steve Sabol who created NFL Films was my mentor when I worked in NFL Films was my first job out of school. He said You want a really strong open, a really strong close, and keep everything in between really short. I think you want the first 10 minutes you really have to grab people. Really the first one minute now because people’s attention spans. Sometimes they’re watching on their phone or if they’re not interested they’re just clicking. I know myself now with streaming on Netflix, my wife will get mad at me because I’m like Let’s turn this off. She’s like It’s three minutes in? and I’m like I don’t like it. I’m not into it, even my patience has worn thin. It’s something I knew I wanted to do with my scripted feature. It’s funny, in the script it worked fine, but when I watched it opens up with driving, maybe the most boring thing you can open a movie with is two people in a car driving. We really filmed them driving, it wasn’t green screen or anything but driving’s boring. Everybody does driving, to me it’s not the most dynamic way to start something. What we did is we actually opened the film with a really dramatic moment and then put Four Days Earlier because I just wanted to show people…(Watch the video interview on Youtube here).
BIO:
Rory Karpf is a 4-time Emmy and Peabody Award winning filmmaker who has collaborated with notable talents such as Tom Cruise, Kevin Costner, Snoop Dogg, Shaquille O’Neal, Paul Newman, Vin Diesel, Peyton Manning, Rob Lowe and Dana White. His documentary work includes the ESPN 30 for 30 films “I Hate Christian Laettner,” “Nature Boy,” “The Book of Manning,” the Netflix series “Coach Snoop,” and the AMC series “The Secret History of Comics.” “Grace Point” is Rory’s first scripted feature as a writer and director.
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