Isabel Mehta, Class of 2024: Film Production

This summer, I held a part-time position as an intern with Mad Rogue Films. It was a wonderful experience that taught me, more than anything else, the ways that stories work, and the ways that they don’t. Mad Rogue Films is a short-film management start-up that wants to redefine the way in which big studios decide what projects to greenlight. Instead of using scripts as a proof-of-concept for feature films, we use short films. That is, the short determines the viability of the feature. Since Mad Rogue is still in its pre-seed stage, what I primarily did was more learning. I thought of it as a film studies class.

We started by watching films. Some of the first ones were Robert Rodriguez’s films—El Mariachi, Desperado—which we broke down into dozens of film categories to understand the connections between these films, and his short film, Bedhead. Sean, my mentor at Mad Rogue Films, finds this to be a better overall method than script coverage. What this entailed was paying attention to the films with respect to a number of filmmaking categories: story, character, camera technique, writing, pacing, etc. If the film seemed good, why, and in what category? If it wasn’t, why? More broadly, this was a theoretical exercise in discerning what makes a movie “good.” If the dialogue was bad, but it was entertaining, then does that make it good? And is good the same as profitable? We talked about all of this and produced 10-15-page reports detailing this analysis for each short and feature combination. Another set of short and feature was Wes Anderson’s Bottle Rocket, and Shiva Baby, and District 9.

It is important to emphasize I knew nothing about filmmaking going into this. I lacked the vocabulary to describe camera shots or movements. My only understanding of film came from writing. All my favorite films are my favorites because of the writing (Juno, Silver Linings Playbook, Little Miss Sunshine), but my internship pushed me to consider how other aspects of a film can contribute to its overall viability. I learned, surprisingly, that a film with mediocre dialogue can still be good. I also learned that films are, above all, visual stories. The camera is the eye with which the viewers are immersed in a world. And so the concept of immaculate reality, a concept popularized by George Lucas, is so important. Is the world of the film believable? Are the characters’ actions and the way they move about the world believable?

Many skills I’ve acquired in English class translated well to this mode of analysis, the main one being close reading. The ability to sit with a piece of art and analyze how its minute attributes are reflective of the whole was critical to my work this summer. For example, take the scene in Bottle Rocket when Owen Wilson stands in his yellow jumpsuit, and that shade of yellow matches the dumpster in the background. This shot, aside from foreshadowing Anderson’s later trademark color palette technique, captures Owen Wilson’s (Dignan’s) youthful earnestness, which drives much of the action in the film.

In turn, the skills I learned at Mad Rogue will enhance my work in traditional English classes. I spent the latter half of my summer compiling what Sean called a “Writer Bible”: a one-stop-shop for screenwriters. The interns last summer created outlines for six or seven of the most prominent screenwriting books, and the Writer Bible synthesizes them into a concise 25-pages for future artists-in-residence at Mad Rogue. This summer, I was tasked with the question of how to organize this work. What is the difference between the premise of a story and its genre, between concept and narrative? Organizing the topics in the “Writer Bible” was an abstract exercise in thinking about the components of a film and how they function. Now, in my English classes, I’m quicker to discern the elements of a written text—tone, pace, thematic elements, rhetoric—and how they work within it. My work at Mad Rogue has reminded me that literature is more than just words. Texts are machines that beg to be taken apart, screw by screw.

Lastly, working at Mad Rogue was wonderful because I learned, anecdotally through our weekly meetings, about the way the filmmaking industry works. I learned about how corrupt it is: how getting business done relies more on connections and financing than on the quality of a given project. But this experience didn’t leave me jaded. I know that I want to write, and I recognize that the industry is changing. An Indian girl who wants to make movies isn’t such a novel idea anymore. I feel more prepared to tackle my ambition—and my English classes—after this summer. Thank you, English Department and Literary Careers!