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Calling the shots: director Dan Minahan gets
the message across
to Brooke Smith
One thing Daniel Minahan is adamant about: his movie, Series 7: The Contenders, was conceived, set up and in front of the cameras by the time American TV hit Survivor came along last summer. Minahan needs to make this point because his film is also about a TV show in which six contestants have to eliminate one another in order to win a huge prize. Except that, here, the elimination is for real. As in: they have to kill each other.
Nor was it meant to be a satire - not just, anyway. Minahan had already touted a version of Series 7 round the TV networks as a ‘real’ gameshow. The networks were intrigued, but wanted it ‘more sexy and less violent’. “Can you make it more like Ally McBeal?” asked one exec, at which point Minahan gave up and decided to make Series 7 as a movie.
“We actually found out about Survivor when we were on location,” says Minahan, who served his apprenticeship producing segments of tabloid TV shows and first worked with Series 7’s producer, Christine Vachon, on I Shot Andy Warhol (he was co-writer and second-unit director). “We were like, ‘Oh, nothing will ever happen with that!’ Then we heard about it again and were like, ‘Wow, this is really cool!’ When we finally saw it - Christine called me when it was on and said, ‘This is just like the film. It’s as if they saw the script.’ Which I think just shows that we did it the right way.”
Actually, Minahan is pleased he didn’t know about Survivor until it was too late. “I’m glad we went into production before we had seen any of it,” he says. “Otherwise, it would have felt like an Airplane! send-up. We would have felt we had to respond to it somehow. Whereas when we made this, we were just inventing our own form - it as if The Contenders is its own TV show, rather than a Survivor knock-off.”
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in Series 7: The Contenders, the players only get through by killing one another. Dick Niro reports on a disturbingly funny new movie
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Shot entirely as a TV show, with three half-hour episodes making up the three ‘acts’ of the movie, Series 7: The Contenders focuses on the climactic series of a fictitious but very convincing ‘reality’ show. Anything we know about the characters’ backstories is told through the kind of on-screen captions that such shows themselves use, or else in those dramatised ‘re-constructions’ beloved of reality TV. And we know what the contenders are thinking because there are segments accompanied by subjective voice-overs.
That is because Minahan and producer Jason Kliot decided that, in order to make the film work, they would have to remove the supposedly ‘real’ brackets round the show. “Originally, it was a TV-show-within-a-movie,” says the director. “But how would I show the difference between reality and the TV show when the whole movie was shot on video? The answer was to turn it into a TV show - and show it as a movie.
“That strengthened it a lot. I completely committed to telling the whole story only using television conventions: interviews, voice-over, B-roll shots [a technical term for footage that you cut away to], graphics, dramatic re-creation. I used all of those things to move the story forward, just as you would on a TV show.”
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