By Antony Teofilo
Scott Mosier should have been a spy.
I once spoke with Kevin Smith about him. While sitting on the set of JERSEY GIRL, I told Kevin that when I had finally tracked him down, Scott Mosier had surprised me by being thoughtful, colorful, and candid. In other words, he was the ideal interview subject. I walked away feeling slightly smug in my journalistic powers. After all, I had tracked down a guy who by all accounts is shy, hard to reach, and doesn't like to talk to the press.
One very long moment later, I came to the realization that as I had been shooting off my trap, Mosier had been sitting there, right next to me, the entire time.
Sure, I was red-faced. But you can't blame me. Scott Mosier is hard to spot, no matter where he is, and one gets the impression that's the way he likes it. The antithesis of everything you'd expect a Hollywood producer to be, he's quiet, reserved, unassuming, and hard-working. He blends into the scenery as if he were wearing some sort of movie set camouflage made of gaffer's tape and director's chairs.
I attempted to "observe Mosier work" for the purpose of this article, and let me tell you, it's not an easy thing to do. He sketches calmly on plain white paper, talks quietly on a cell-phone, or does a crossword puzzle. Look away, or blink, and the wind blows, and he's gone. Based on appearances, it's difficult to believe this guy is the organizational epicenter of the flurried activity that surrounds you on JERSEY GIRL's set.
One gets the impression Mosier values his privacy and his profession in equal measure. He has no need for recognition. He prefers to be...
The Silent Partner
An Interview With Scott Mosier
AntonyTeofilo: Creative friendships don't tend to last in the movie industry because of the demanding nature of the work. Yet, your friendship with Kevin Smith has lasted almost ten years. Has there ever been a serious challenge to your friendship in all this time?
Scott Mosier: Not really. When you work together, there are always moments you butt heads. Some of it just has to do with the fact that you're shooting nights, or you're exhausted, or there are three hundred extras. We don't do the exact same thing, so he's under a lot of pressure one moment, and I'm under a lot of pressure another. When the shooting stops, you're still really close friends outside of it. You can just take a moment and calm down and everything's fine.
Being good friends outside of it, just going out, hanging out...that makes it easier to deal with the work. And when you're on set, and there is a lot of sitting around and waiting, so you can sit around and not talk about work.
Q: What are your major responsibilities as Jersey Girl's Executive Producer?
SM: I keep the movie on-schedule, and on-budget. With [JERSEY GIRL], on top of everything else, we're trying to deal with security. When you have actors [like Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez], and people actually want to bowl over barricades to meet them, you have to be sensitive to that. Basically for me, it's all budget and schedule, and balancing that with making sure that we get what we need while we try to make the movie.
Q: In matters of budget, as a Producer, do you handle negotiations with the studio?
SM: Yeah. I work with my line producer Laura [Greenlee], and we come up with a figure by going over a production outline of how many days we'll have to shoot, and Laura does all the fringe needs and union rates, and we punch that all in. We have conversations with Kevin about what he'll need, and we come up with a full proposal, and we hand it in to Miramax and say, 'This is what we want to do.'
Then, it's a negotiation process. You explain your reasons, and negotiate things in and out. As you get closer to production, usually, you start to add things as people start to come on board. When we hired Vilmos Zsigmond, he had certain things he wanted to bring to the project. Then you talk about the things you all want, and expand, and pull in new things. At the end, I basically have it out with the studio...but at this point, after so many films with Miramax, they know we're not screwing around.
Q: It's been said that big name movie stars will work for less money when Kevin's making a film. Is that true?
SM: In the past, yes. On DOGMA, we were making a movie that was harder to make. For the studio, it wasn't the most commercial movie in the world to make, so everybody understands. The bigger the risk, the more everyone pitches in by keeping the budget down. A film with Ben and Jennifer, and all of these different elements...people get paid on a scale that's based on the risk involved, and how much people predict the return will be. On DOGMA, there was a worry about the size of the audience, and how much the controversy would take control of it, so you keep the costs down.
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But now, if you look at Ben's track record over the last year, and look at Jennifer's track record, they have audiences. Their names mean something when movies open. So, they have a salary based on the fact that their names will bring in a certain amount of box office. In the same way, Kevin and I can get a certain amount of money to make a movie because we also have a built-in audience. JAY AND SILENT BOB STRIKE BACK was a budget that was geared toward the size of the audience those characters could bring in.
Q: Ten years ago, would you ever have pictured your partnership with Kevin Smith as successful as it has become?
SM: I guess so. Probably more so back then than when it actually starts happening. In film school, I think everyone has lofty ideas about where they're headed. Once we made CLERKS, to me, the career became a lot smaller, in a good way. It gets comfortable. It's just great to be making movies. But before you get in there, there aren't any real parameters for you. Your mind goes as wide or as big as you want it to. This movie is the most expensive movie we've ever made, but it's still, all things considered, reasonable, based on the people who are participating. But we still have our parameters. We don't want to spend sixty million or seventy-five million. We still want to keep it at a reasonable level.
Q: Kevin has said that the best way to learn about movies is to make one. Do you think that's good advice?
SM: You learn so much faster and you learn so much more actually doing it than you do going to school. That's true about a lot of things. You could go to journalism school, but until you're actually out in an unsafe environment, not a closed environment where you're interviewing your friends, when you're in an environment where you're in the midst of the real thing, then you have to learn everything and you have to learn fast. Being in the environment to soak things up is so much different. To me, the safety of school always takes away from your ability to really learn how things go, because at a certain point you've got to translate what you've learned in school into how it really works.
For me, film school was good enough to get us through making CLERKS. After that, what you learn in school doesn't mean anything once you start to get a budget, and work with unions. At that point, what you have to learn is how to think on your feet. When you're in the middle of the day and things aren't going well, how do you deal with that? You can't learn any of that in school. You can't learn situations. How people deal with situations is the difference [between success and failure].
Q: So it's better to pick up the skills one needs to be a film professional in the field, as opposed to going to school...
SM: For you, your ability to get an interview is as meaningful as it is to conduct and create a good piece. Your ability to get in there and get the interview, and make the person feel comfortable, and make them talk, those are all processes you learn. I'm sure you may read the first interview you ever did and say to yourself, 'I wish I could go back and re-do it,' because you were nervous or whatever. Today, when you do an interview, you're not just excited to be there.
It's the same with making movies. You get past that moment where you're just happy to have the opportunity to do it. You want more out of it. You want to develop it more. Now it's all about how good a movie can we make, not just, 'Wow, we've got a chance to make a movie.'
Q: So with each film, it's essential to push yourself, and the stories you tell, into unexplored territory...
SM: You get a chance to ask yourself, 'What is it that we don't know that we need to learn?' On DOGMA, there were action sequences, and effects, and CGI. You make mistakes. Then on JAY AND SILENT BOB, we had four hundred effects shots. DOGMA was a great precursor to that experience.
On JERSEY GIRL, what's great about it, is that for the most part, this is just us using our experience. We're not doing anything that's completely out of the unknown. It's all about Kevin just getting the performances.
